Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

by Christopher Bram

  All this time, Merrill and Jackson had been amusing themselves with an old-fashioned toy popular with children and more recently with hippies: the Ouija board. A square of wood or cardboard printed with twenty-six letters of the alphabet, ten numerals and Yes and No commands, Ouija boards had existed since 1899. Two or more participants lightly set their fingers on a sliding pointer called a planchette and let it glide over the board, seemingly on its own, moving to this or that letter, spelling out words spoken by spirits. Merrill and Jackson played with the board off and on since 1955, using a willowware teacup as their planchette, writing down their elaborate conversations with the other side. Merrill tried working the material into a novel, but he lost the manuscript. Around 1974 he decided it might work better as poetry. Other writers turned to hallucinogens or India for their metaphysical liberations. Merrill turned to old-fashioned spiritualism. The result was a long, brilliant, narrative poem, “The Book of Ephraim.”

  The Book of a Thousand and One Evenings Spent

  With David Jackson at the Ouija Board

  In Touch with Ephraim Our Familiar Spirit.

  Ephraim was a Greek Jew in the court of Tiberias on Capri; he was murdered for loving Caligula. He comes to Merrill and Jackson to teach them about the unseen world, the stages of the afterlife, and the rules for reincarnation. It’s not as flaky as it sounds, not yet anyway. The invented mythology suggests a more intelligent version of something like Scientology, but it’s kept safely in the background. In the foreground is a dense weave of earthly life made magical by glorious writing. The poem is full of formal devices, acrostics, rhymes and half rhymes. Verse is used as fluidly as the best prose. For example, Merrill and Jackson cannot see Ephraim but he can see them in mirrors.

  (Any reflecting surface worked for him.

  Noons D and I might row to a sandbar

  Far enough from town for swimming naked

  Then pacing the glass treadmill hardly wet

  That healed itself perpetually of us

  Unobserved, unheard we thought, until

  The night he praised our bodies and our wit,

  Our blushes in a twinkling overcome.)

  Merrill tells the story as if it were a joke, a stunt, a lark. The reader plays along, enjoying the game without needing to take it literally. I, for one, do not believe in either spirits or reincarnation. Halfway through the poem, however, when Merrill’s father dies and Ephraim reports that he’s been reborn in England and Merrill and Jackson want to find the reincarnated broker/baby, I can’t help laughing and wishing it were true.

  This ninety-page poem is also a full-scale portrait of a gay marriage, perhaps the first, complete with domestic routines, friends, living expenses, and in-laws. Merrill can talk about his and Jackson’s families with Ephraim, especially dead parents and newborn nieces and nephews. And the poem provides a flattering myth for gay love: Ephraim needs the two men to be together in order to give his message to the world. “LONG B4 THE FORTUNATE CONJUNCTION,” he says in his metaphysical text-speak, “ALLOWED ME TO GET THRU/MAY I SAY WEVE HAD OUR EYES ON U.” It’s a pretty fairy tale to think the spirits want you to be a couple.

  This marriage plot is openly acknowledged when Merrill visits a psychiatrist and worriedly tells him about Ephraim.

  “There’s a phrase

  You may have heard—what you and David do

  We call folie a deux

  Harmless; but can you find no simpler ways

  To sound each other’s depths of spirit[?”]

  The psychiatrist goes on to suggest that these ghostly beings are Merrill and Jackson’s substitute for children.

  It’s a mad work of art, a giddy fantasy about life after death, a comedy of reincarnation. But eventually every reader has to ask: How serious was Merrill about his conversations with spirits? What exactly was happening here?

  The séances actually took place. Merrill’s archives contain transcription notebooks and pages of raw dictate. Merrill and Jackson’s friend Alison Lurie was present for a couple of sessions. She reports how Merrill set his left hand on the teacup while he used his right hand to write it all down. Jackson had his right hand on the cup—Lurie suspects that it was Jackson who drove the cup from letter to letter. She speculates in her fascinating book, Familiar Spirits, that Jackson, or his unconscious, provided the raw material of the séances, which Merrill then mined and shaped for his poetry. Jackson had given up writing novels after his failure to publish; he now directed his creativity elsewhere. Just as Isherwood and Bachardy created screenplays together, Merrill and Jackson created a spirit world. Theirs was a more unconscious collaboration, but not without precedent. William Butler Yeats married late in his life a younger woman, Georgie Hyde-Lees. Afraid the famous poet was getting bored with her, Georgie “discovered” a gift for automatic writing. Soon spirits began to dictate to her images and ideas that her spouse reworked for various poems and for his fat, comprehensive tome, A Vision. Biographers are still trying to figure out how deliberate Mrs. Yeats’s contribution was.

  “The Book of Ephraim” was published with several shorter poems in 1976 as Divine Comedies—the title cleverly married Dante and camp. In the years ahead, Merrill would expand his spirit world, populating the ether with more spirits and friends, including Auden, who had died in 1973. He and Jackson spent even more hours together at the Ouija board, in part to compensate for the time they spent with outside boyfriends—Merrill’s infatuations were more serious than Jackson’s. Merrill wrote two full additional volumes: Mirabell: Books of Number, with a new spirit, a batlike fallen angel who becomes a peacock; and Scripts for the Pageant, with two angels of light, Michael and Gabriel, sharing their message. The three books were published together in 1982 with a coda as The Changing Light at Sandover. There are pleasures in the larger work, but many dead stretches, too many didactic lectures by metaphysical spirits and not enough life on earth. And the long-term couple at the center of the tale, the best part of the fantasy, is lost.

  Divine Comedies was highly praised when it appeared and won a Pulitzer Prize. Yet we can’t pretend it was widely read by gay men, except other poets. There was no equivalent among men of the lesbian feminist following that Adrienne Rich developed at this time. It was not only her poems but her essays that attracted attention, beginning with “It Is the Lesbian in Us,” a speech she gave to the 1976 Modern Language Association convention: “It is the lesbian in every woman who is compelled by female energy, who gravitates toward strong women, who seeks a literature that will express that energy and strength…. It is the lesbian in us who is creative.” Rich would expand on these ideas in her 1980 essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” with its account of what she called “the lesbian continuum,” which treated female homosexuality as varying by degree rather than kind among all women. (Male sexuality is usually pictured as a set of quantum leaps—a man is either straight or gay—yet men too shift and slide along a line that can include emotional as well as sexual intimacy.) Her ideas drew more readers to her poems until her public readings began to resemble lesbian gospel meetings. “Twenty-one Love Poems” in The Dream of a Common Language (“The more I live the more I think/two people together is a miracle”) became a touchstone for women in a way nothing by Ginsberg or O’Hara or Merrill ever was for men. The men’s poetry was having its effect, poem by poem, reader by reader. But the breakthrough medium for gay men would be elsewhere: the novel.

  13. Annus Mirabilis

  Edmund White came to New York in 1962, intending to be a playwright, not a novelist. He was twenty-two and fresh from the University of Michigan. A play he wrote his senior year, The Blue Boy in Black, won a prize and got him an agent at William Morris. But he had another reason for coming to New York: he was pursuing a fellow student, a beautiful actor named Stanley Redfern. White was in love, but his love was only intermittently requited, even after the two moved in together. His emotions fully engaged with Redfern, White frequently turned to strangers for
sex. It was a pattern he would repeat in later years when he fell in unrequited love with yet another actor, Keith McDermott.

  White was a bit of an actor himself. He was outgoing, charming, flirtatious, and extremely adaptable. He liked to be liked. A natural courtier, he seemed to know everyone and go everywhere. We have already seen him at the Stonewall riots and in the company of Mart Crowley and James Merrill.

  If the central figure for the first half of this book is Gore Vidal, an intersection where many roads meet, then the central figure for the second half could be said to be Edmund White. The two writers are quite different yet have much in common. They are both highly literary and well-read, write excellent prose, and are fiercely productive. Both lived for many years in Europe; both are fond of hustlers. Yet while Vidal writes best about power, politics, and history, White’s strengths are sex, art, and—sometimes—love. Each tends to stumble when he enters the other’s domain.

  Edmund White was born in 1940 in Cincinnati, Ohio. After his parents’ divorce when he was seven, he spent summers in Cincinnati with his Texas-born, businessman father, and the school year in Chicago with his Texas-born, psychologist mother. He came out early to his mother, who promptly sent him to a shrink. He saw psychiatrists regularly for the first half of his life, learning through them how to talk about his emotions easily, even glibly. In college he studied, of all things, Chinese. He later said he was drawn to Asia by the selflessness of Buddhism. There are frequent mentions of Buddhism in his writing, yet they always feel slightly incongruous. We don’t think of White as a particularly spiritual writer.

  A year after he came to New York, his play was actually produced off-Broadway. The Blue Boy in Black is a satiric comedy about a black servant, Joan, who works for a white writer of potboilers, becoming his amanuensis before going on to be a successful writer herself. Joan was played by Cicely Tyson, the former fashion model who was already making a name for herself on stage and in television. Howard Taubman in the Times praised her performance and praised the play, too, with reservations (in particular for the “generous helping of foolish jokes about homosexuality”). He thought it worked best as “a lampoon with an undercurrent of bitterness” about the place of “a shrewd Negro in white society…. At the end it achieves intensity of emotion.”

  In his different memoirs, White speaks of Blue Boy dismissively or not at all. But it must have been exhilarating for a twenty-three-year-old to see his first play get a full-scale New York production. He must’ve felt he had arrived. (There was even a small part for Redfern.) But Blue Boy never found an audience, and it closed after twenty-three performances. The only evidence that the experience may have stung more than White later admitted is that he does not remember exactly what year it happened.

  During his first months in New York, he found work as a writer at Time-Life Books, in offices on the thirty-second floor of a skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan. He stayed there for the next seven years. He tried one new therapist, then another (both wanted him to give up men), but he continued to cruise the streets for sex (bars and baths were few and often raided). White in the 1960s and early ’70s was a handsome fellow of medium height with dark hair and melancholy brown eyes. A man who met him at this time still remembers his charismatic bad-boy persona. “He made you think that having sex with him would be the greatest experience in the world.” When he began to put on weight, he joined a gym, one of the first gay men to do so—Mart Crowley fondly described his pecs years later. He grew a mustache soon after the macho clone look came in, then shaved it off when everyone else shaved theirs. A younger writer, David Leavitt, would later say he envied White for having “such a representative life.” And it’s true: the zeitgeist blew through White more easily than it did through most people.

  He spent much of his free time looking for sex, but he also continued with his own writing, not just plays but stories and novels. He was a sexual compulsive, but he was also a literary compulsive, with a strong need to string words together. In time he would become a brilliant prose stylist, yet writing did not come easily to him. Good prose is solitary work, and White disliked being alone. He eventually found a way around his difficulty: he wrote in longhand in bed in the morning before his inner critic awoke; after he amassed enough pages for a first draft, he met with a typist and dictated from his draft, revising as he went along. It was sociable yet productive.

  One of his first typists was Patrick Merla. Originally a waiter at a small restaurant in the West Village, a long-haired boy from Brooklyn who had shown White his poetry, Merla was an expert typist. He later said, “I am probably his only typist who never had sex with Ed.” He worked with him off and on for the next thirty-five years on a variety of books. The process often involved much give and take, with Merla asking questions and White clarifying phrases. Once when White was dictating one of his longer, more elaborate metaphors, Merla stopped typing and just sat there. White asked why he wasn’t typing. Merla replied, “The metaphor stops here.” When White took a job at the newly restructured Saturday Review magazine, he got Merla hired there as an editor.

  Using this method of longhand and dictation, White was able to produce novels, plays, book reviews, and essays. He later used it to produce textbooks when he needed money, but he saved Merla for more literary projects. (Merla went on to become a writer himself, penning a book of fairy tales, as well as being the editor of several gay publications and putting together the important collection Boys Like Us: Gay Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories.)

  The end of the 1960s and first half of the 1970s was a strange time for fiction. There was much talk that the novel was dead (even more so than now). Most serious writers were too intellectually self-conscious to simply tell a story. Many novelists were so desperate to “make it new,” in Ezra Pound’s words, that they only made it strange. The novels from those years that are still read include Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon and Sula by Toni Morrison, but it’s chiefly more old-fashioned titles like Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow, Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, and early Ann Tyler that remain popular. Most of the experimental books are forgotten. (To name a few: Speedboat by Renata Adler, Sheeper by Irving Rosenthal, The Blood Oranges by John Hawkes, The Public Burning by Robert Coover. Susan Sontag’s novels—The Benefactor and Death Kit—are remembered only because they were written by a famous essayist.)

  White explored different approaches. He began a realistic novel about his love affair with an unpredictable blond named Jim Ruddy. A chapter was later excerpted in Seymour Kleinberg’s 1977 gay and lesbian anthology, The Other Persuasion, under the title, “The Beautiful Room Is Empty”—a line from Kafka that White would use as the title for an entirely different novel. The excerpt tells the story of two gay friends visiting Puerto Rico before one marries a woman. They pretend to be there only for sex, but the protagonist reveals that he’s in love with his marrying friend. It’s a strong piece of writing, clear and real. But White knew he couldn’t publish such a book at the time and he put it aside.

  He next tried something mysterious and experimental, a novel narrated by a man suffering from amnesia. The protagonist of Forgetting Elena wakes up in a house on the ocean and does not know who he is or where or what the rules are:

  I wonder what sort of an impression I might make if I should go to the bathroom now? Perhaps no one would notice or care that I was the first to use it; perhaps people here are “natural” about bodily functions and find them humorous or, alternately, too trivial to mention. On the other hand, a carefully regulated procedure may govern the whole matter, and the men of the house may take turns in the order of their height, popularity or seniority.

  White sustains this deadpan semi-comic tone for almost two hundred pages, creating a French nouveau roman fairy tale out of what is probably just a weekend on Fire Island. We never learn for sure—White never drops the mask. But his make-it-strange strategy enables him to describe a gay world of parties and dances without writing a gay novel. The prose has a
stiff, English-as-a-second-language oddness that’s perfect for the brain-damaged narrator; there are no metaphors. The book is a genuine curiosity, but it works in its own strange terms. It’s not too long and it has a strong ending, reached with the help of suggestions from Merla and others. It’s a fable, yet one can’t help feeling a nervous autobiographical note in the young protagonist who doesn’t know who he is or what he wants, who anxiously fakes his way through life while hoping nobody sees through his act.

  White was befriended at this time by the poet and French translator, Richard Howard, an energetic, generous man fond of flamboyant gestures—he gave poetry readings wearing old-fashioned pince-nez glasses. Howard was well-connected, and he helped White sell Elena. It was published in 1973 and received good reviews, but was too strange to attract many readers, gay or straight. (The book achieved some delayed fame when Vladimir Nabokov praised it in an interview. White learned Nabokov’s wife, Vera, had read Elena first and recommended it to her husband. When White later said his ideal reader was “a cultivated heterosexual woman in her sixties who knows English perfectly but is not an American,” he was thinking of Mrs. Nabokov.)

  For his next project, White returned to realistic fiction with what he thought would be a commercial novel. He called it first Like People in History, then Woman Reading Pascal. The most commercial thing about it was that the chief gay character was only secondary. The protagonist was a woman like a modern Isabel Archer from Portrait of a Lady. White finished the novel, but nobody liked it much and he was unable to sell it.

  His big break came with a different kind of book, a nonfiction title that actually was commercial, surprisingly so: The Joy of Gay Sex. Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex had been a huge best seller in 1972. A book packager decided he could have similar success by doing two follow-up titles, one for gay men and one for lesbians. Psychiatrist Charles Silverstein was chosen as one of two writers for the men’s book. Silverstein had been a leader in the campaign to get homosexuality removed as a disorder from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association in 1973. He was also White’s therapist, the first to tell him his problem wasn’t that he was queer but elsewhere; his attempts to “cure” his homosexuality were only distracting him from his real problems. Silverstein dropped White as a patient when they became collaborators.