City Boy

by Edmund White

  At the same time that he was writing these admiring if edgy essays, he was constructing his own poems. When I first met him, he was working on Untitled Subjects, a collection of dramatic monologues à la Browning about Victorians. The best one was “said” by Mrs. William Morris as in old age she went through a box of memorabilia: “These are mine. Save them. / I have nothing save them” were the solemnly beautiful last lines. He would recite these poems at full volume and with great hamminess to Marilyn and Stanley and me. He overarticulated, spun on his heel to stare at us, banged on a table, sank into a long dramatic pause, tilted his head back and closed his eyes and whispered something prophetic before expiring on the chair behind him. The three of us, sitting in my little living room in my new, chic apartment on West Thirteenth Street, were terrified we’d surrender to torrents of weeping laughter, though I’m sure Richard would have interpreted our fou rire as exactly the response he’d been angling for. Richard confided that Sandy, his lover, had carefully rehearsed him and taught him his reading style. Privately we wondered if Sandy’s wasn’t a poisoned gift.

  Of course I was terribly proud to be Richard’s friend, not only because he was celebrated and knew so many distinguished people, but also because he was so lively and amusing, such tremendous great fun. He was an electrifying presence.

  As Midwesterners, Marilyn, Stan, and I were embarrassed by his theatrics, especially at such close quarters, yet we all admired the poems and his chutzpah. And anyway, Richard was a Midwesterner, too—from Cleveland, just like Hart Crane, as he always mentioned. He’d just returned from a reading in Cleveland where an ancient aunt of his, a former Ziegfeld Follies girl, came up to him afterward. Richard was proud of his bald head, which he polished, and he was equally proud of his fearlessness in displaying it. But all his old aunt could mutter as she moved up to him in the reception line was “Get a rug.”

  He won the Pulitzer Prize for the poems and seemed delighted by the recognition. He had something about him of the bar mitzvah boy who thinks it’s perfectly natural that a roomful of adults should be beaming at him with affection and pride. Since he was no fool, he knew all about envy and cattiness, but his wariness of others was an acquired response. His first instinct was to think everyone liked him and was happy for him.

  Like me he’d gone to progressive schools—he in Cleveland, I in Evanston, Illinois—and these schools had discouraged competition. He even wrote a poem, “From Beyoğlu,” for an old classmate, Anne Hollander (who would go on to write Seeing Through Clothes and other fascinating works about costume and how it makes us look at the body). Richard’s poem referred to “the year we were Vikings” and related how in progressive public grade school, in accordance with Dewey’s principles, the children would explore other cultures (that of the Norse in this case) by dressing up and impersonating them in a safe, grade-free, noncompetitive environment. As a result, both Richard and I expected our friends to share in our successes. In our world there was no rivalry.

  He was indefatigable, and wonderfully faithful. In the course of a day he might visit a friend in the hospital, sit in on another friend’s rehearsal, see his shrink, have lunch with Jackson Pollock’s widow, Lee Krasner, read two first books of poems and blurb them both, teach a class at Columbia, attend a board meeting of the Society of Poets, then have dinner with his lover. The lover was Sanford Friedman, the author of Totempole, an early gay novel that involved the love affair between an American soldier and a young Korean man. Sandy and Richard lived together in a spacious apartment in the West Village, where Richard and I would have to tiptoe through the darkened room in which Sanford was prostrate on the couch, afflicted with depression or migraine, I never knew which. We’d head back for Richard’s cozy, brilliantly lit study, packed from floor to ceiling with books, everything brass and green glass and red upholstery. We’d close the door and try to keep our voices down. When Sandy’s father died, I wrote him a complicated, overly literary, neurotic condolence letter, which Sandy responded to by writing back, “I appreciate the gesture if not the sentiment.”

  Richard loved literature with a magnanimous, all-encompassing, energetic love. Whereas many established poets or novelists read only the talismanic texts that had impressed and shaped them in their youths over and over or, with a mixture of disdain, curiosity, and distrust, skimmed the latest books by friends and rivals, Richard had nothing but friends and no rivals and he liked everything. He had translated more than 150 books from the French, and if the authors were alive, he usually knew them—Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Roland Barthes, the pessimistic Romanian aphorist E. M. Cioran. Later in the seventies Richard would introduce the poet James Merrill and the critic David Kalstone to Cioran in Paris, and they were astonished that the invariably gloomy writer did nothing all evening but crack jokes, drink wine, and consume hundreds of periwinkles, fishing them with a straight pin out of their tiny black shells.

  Richard had even translated Charles de Gaulle and had a story about being invited to an official lunch at the Élysée Palace. Academicians, admirals, and actresses were at the lunch, and de Gaulle posed a question to each. When de Gaulle got to Richard, he asked where he’d learned such good French. Richard replied, “In a car between Ohio and Florida, mon général.” When Richard was a child, an uncle had started teaching him French while they were driving down to Miami. After the lunch de Gaulle took Richard aside and asked him what had been his model for his style while translating the de Gaulle memoirs. Richard said, “Tacitus.” Which was just the right response.

  Richard was only ten years older than I but he treated me as if I were a child—an intelligent, well-mannered child who was eminently sortable, but a child nonetheless. He’d call me up and say, “I have a little surprise for you. Meet me in half an hour at the Riv on Sheridan Square.”

  I’d drop whatever I was doing and rush to join him. He’d take me off to meet one of his eminent friends. Through Richard I met Howard Moss, the poetry editor of the New Yorker, who had a dry sense of humor and looked like Mr. Magoo, the nearsighted cartoon character with poached eyes and folds in his face. Howard lived on Tenth Street off Fifth Avenue in an apartment in a brownstone with a bright red door. He said he was “allergic” to cigarettes. In fact, he probably just didn’t like the smell of smoke, but in those days the smoker had such unquestioned rights that people who objected had to invent a medical excuse. Howard had stopped smoking two years earlier but still sucked a plastic cigarette all the time, a sort of pacifier. I, who smoked three packs a day, would become so desperate that I’d have to lean out his window—and pull the guillotine-style sash down to my knees, so that no smoke would leak back into his rooms. Even on freezing nights at midnight I’d be hanging out his window; now smokers would have to go down to the street.

  Howard was a New Yorker born and bred and seemed a holdover from the 1950s. I never saw him out of a coat and tie, but not the sumptuous Italian suits men wear now. No, he always had on those pinched, buttoned-up, pin-striped Brooks Brothers “sack suits” writers and profs wore in the fifties with the skinny rep ties. He had a creased, unhappy face with a crooked smile on his lips and a little baritone, muted chuckle. He’d say something funny and despairing and chuckle and pull a long face. He had the famous New York humor that someone once defined as mordant Jewish wit strained through a martini. He was a Jew but never mentioned that. Howard actually drank martinis, which had largely been replaced by white wine by the time I came along. They didn’t seem to affect him any more than a glass of water would affect me.

  He was always a bit unhappy and joked a lot about it in his dry way. He was unhappy that his poetry wasn’t more widely recognized; he blamed this on his position as the poetry editor of the New Yorker, which made him the most powerful arbiter of poetry in the country. Howard thought that all those people he’d rejected hated him, and that the ones he’d accepted didn’t want to appear to their fellow poets as if they were paying him back or currying his favor. So no one wrote reviews of his boo
ks, he said, and few editors solicited his poems. He complained so much that I wrote a glowing review of his poems in Poetry magazine. I was happy to acknowledge that he’d written one of the great comic poems of our day, “Ménage à trois,” which ends with the unforgettable line “It’s old, inadequate and flourishing.”

  He also wrote verse plays, one based on King Midas and another that borrowed Giacometti’s title—for a sculpture that belonged to the Museum of Modern Art—The Palace at 4 A.M.

  At the New Yorker he worked regularly with James Merrill and Elizabeth Bishop, not to mention dozens of others of the most celebrated poets in English. He was especially close to the great Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen, who’d lived and taught briefly at Princeton in the 1950s. I’d been reading her since college days, and once I gave up my determination to be “experimental,” her influence became palpable in my work. Probably no one would notice the connection (people seem almost blind to quite obvious influences), but her technique of making neat, short moral observations about her characters was something I started shoplifting in my autobiographical novels from A Boy’s Own Story on. What E. M. Forster was for most writers of my generation, Bowen was for me; I never took to Forster’s combination of closetedness, snobbishness, and blending of fable and Edwardian morality, whereas Bowen’s quiet passion and sense of the tragic appealed to me. For me she was genuinely tragic in the sense that in The Death of the Heart or The House in Paris, her best books, the protagonists face a dilemma and either choice they might make is bad—very bad. She didn’t have an affected prose style like Virginia Woolf nor did she overestimate the importance of “moments of being.” She had no religious preconceptions like Graham Greene (though Greene I’d rank as a novelist right after her). Her ethics were all subtle and situational. I heard Ian McEwan say recently that modernists such as Joyce and Woolf have cornered so much critical attention that they’ve eclipsed all of the (superior, to his mind) realists such as Bowen and Rosamond Lehman. I should mention here that my lifelong love has been Henry Green and that his novel Nothing is the only book I’ve read ten times. His stylishness and his ear for dialogue are celebrated, but one should also include his appreciation for the sensuality of women, the comedy of adultery, the absurdities of class. I think of Henry Green as my opposite—my blessed, enriching opposite.

  Howard kept wanting me to fix him up with someone, though one day a sexy Puerto Rican was hanging around and later Howard said he’d been “seeing” that man for years and years. But I guess he wasn’t enough somehow, maybe not blond or educated or presentable enough.

  Howard was being psychoanalyzed by a Freudian shrink. He’d been going to this man for years, and Howard spoke of Freudianism as if it were a perfectly ordinary and respectable branch of medicine, like orthopedic surgery. In the true Freudian style Howard lay down on a couch and duly reported his dreams. The shrink, he said, seldom spoke, or rather, seldom “made interpretations.” Also in the Freudian tradition, Howard knew nothing about him except that he treated several other writers—that was his “specialty.” Howard talked about childhood and sexual fantasies and realities—and about his “transference” (in this case, of his feelings toward the doctor). The net effect, I thought, was to make him even gloomier, even more fatalistic.

  It was always evening in Howard’s mind, but in the midst of these lengthening shadows ran his jaunty humor, which really was adorable and improbable as a puppy, a golden retriever, say. He was an addict of the wisecrack, an aficionado of the parting shot. No matter how sad his creased face might look, he could always, at some unexpected moment, wedge it open with a little smile. Or more often his eyes would become the crudest of stars (one horizontal line and one vertical), and he’d avert his gaze, turn his mouth down in a circumflex, nurse his invisible prop cigarette, then laugh at his own expense. I remember he told of a French television team that called him and said they’d been impressed with his short book on Proust and wanted to film him for a French literary program. “Sure,” Howard said, “you bet. But I don’t speak French.” “Oh, you’re too modest! A great scholar like you? We’ll be over at three.” “Sure, but I don’t speak French.” When the whole team had set up the lights and the sound equipment and the camera and Howard had been made up and powdered, the interviewer posed the first question—in French. Howard looked blank and said, “But I don’t speak French.” The interviewer laughed and started over again. Once more a blank. Within seconds the whole team had cleared out, left the premises, muttering resentfully.

  One day, four years before Forgetting Elena was published, Howard said to me, “I’m terribly embarrassed, but I’ve never read any of your books. Where should I start?”

  I said, “But that’s because I’ve written several but not one of them has ever been published.”

  He looked at me with compassion and said, “That must be terribly painful for you.”

  I felt wonderfully understood and I nodded.

  He’d understood how brave I was going out into the world and meeting Richard Howard’s writer friends even though I wasn’t armed with a single publication. Yes, it was great meeting all these literati who might someday blurb me or review me or just pass along the word that I was bright and funny and attractive (in those days, especially given the low standards of pulchritude in the literary world, I was considered handsome). But it was a trial explaining that even though I’d reached the great age of twenty-nine and even though I’d already been writing for fifteen of those years, I had nothing in print beyond a story and a few articles. My problem was especially acute because it seems to me that people published younger in those days, just as they married and had children and careers much younger. Of course, I could have added to all these solicitous writer-friends that Richard Howard had taken me under his wing. That remark would no doubt have set off a storm of exchanged looks since it would have been assumed I was his latest catamite.

  I turned thirty on January 13, 1970, and at the same time decided to move to Rome. I was sick of killing time at the office, of feeling stale and trapped, of waiting for my life to begin. I knew my destiny lay with New York, but I welcomed a chance to wipe the slate clean. I’d only visited Rome once for a week two years earlier with Stan. The dollar was still strong in those days and we’d stayed in a hotel on the Corso that had once been the palace of the Queen of Sweden (Garbo!). On the same trip we’d stayed in the Casa Annalena pensione in Florence for four dollars a night, breakfast and one other meal included, and the Palazzo Gritti in Venice in what was known as “the Elizabeth Taylor suite,” since she and Richard Burton had stayed there not long before. The room looked down on the Grand Canal and across to the Salute. Though we could never have afforded a dinner at the Plaza Hotel, say, back in New York, the exchange rate made it possible for us to stay in the most luxurious places in Europe. We’d liked Italy, and like many happy tourists we’d dreamed of living there. I might have preferred Paris, but it intimidated me.

  So at the beginning of the new decade I took Italian lessons in New York for a month and I quit my job—the only real office job I’d ever had and that I’d obtained only after two months of interviews. Maitland Edey, the same New England mandarin who’d asked Sigrid and me about feminism, now said to me that I was foolish to give up my job with Time-Life Books with all its benefits and job security and four- and even five- and six-week vacations thanks to our union, the Writers Guild. But I was determined, if frightened. I withdrew my seven thousand dollars in profit sharing and converted it to traveler’s checks, which the bank officer thought was also rash.

  Just before I left, Richard introduced me to a person in New York who would become my best friend: David Kalstone. He was living not far from Howard Moss in a sublet. He was a professor (he’d written a book on Sir Philip Sidney) at Rutgers, but I gathered he was in a state of change—wintering in New York City, summering in Venice, being outfitted with contact lenses and more up-to-date clothes, even writing about contemporary poets such as Bishop and James M
errill.

  None of that struck me at the time. What impressed me right away was how subtle and gentle and observant he was, though he was almost legally blind. He had a sweet, wise smile, eyes that blinked into the indistinct void around him, hands that made wonderful rounded gestures. Richard Howard treated him a bit as if he were a distinguished but dim cousin, but I felt right away that he could be a … playmate. Although Richard liked all of us to sit up straight and present to the world our best face and to say right off our cleverest remarks and to speak of our serious reading or our life-transforming experiences (the ballet, Angkor Wat, the Sistine Chapel), David would never jump through that hoop. He was completely obliging, but a slightly goofy sense of humor played over everything he touched. He didn’t write as much as his friends expected, or so I gathered, but I guessed that was partly because he spent a lot of time at friendship. He was a generous, amused man and he liked me a lot, I could see, maybe because in a sense we were both newcomers. Although he was ten years older than I, he’d devoted less time than I had to being a New Yorker, which in those days was something like a religious vocation, full of obvious penances and rarefied rewards.

  My time in Rome is not part of this story. I stayed from January to June and ran through all of my savings inviting Italian and American acquaintances out to dinner. We’d sit at long trestle tables in the Piazza Navona and look out at the spotlit lavishness of Bernini’s fountain of the continents (Is that a camel there? A palm tree? A Negro?). We’d eat plates of spaghetti and clams and drink liter after liter of sour white wine poured from those official transparent receptacles that had the exact liter level legally scratched into the glass—which made no sense since the wine could always be watered to bring it up to the right level. I took an Italian lesson nearly every day in a modern brick apartment block near the Vatican. My original apartment building in Trastevere was gutted by a fire after I’d been there for one unhappy month. The English girl Lulu, the agent who’d rented me the apartment, had been sacked for other reasons but we’d stayed friends. Now she told me of Phillip, an acquaintance who needed a roommate and who lived on the Largo Argentina.