City Boy

by Edmund White

  I had decided that exposition “bored” me and looked for a form that would skip it—the letter! Yes, in letters people don’t spell out to the beloved the key moments of their affair but rather allude to them in shorthand. My novel would be addressed to a mysterious “you,” who might by turns seem to be Frank O’Hara or God—in any event, someone dead. Whereas countless gay poets had used the “you strategy” to avoid designating the sex of the beloved (it only works in English and Chinese, where adjectives have no gender), I would be quite clear that I was addressing a man. The “I” in my book, however, wasn’t me but rather Keith McDermott many years from now when he would mourn his lost lover—who resembled me, in a few ways. This was a sort of “Cry me a river/’cuz I cried a river over you” novel. Now that thirty years have gone by, Keith and I are best friends and all this spleen has withered away.

  Nocturnes for the King of Naples came out in 1978, the same year as several other gay novels: Andrew Holleran’s lyrical Fire Island book, Dancer from the Dance; Larry Kramer’s clumsy, pleasure-phobic Faggots; and Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. My book was the least noticed of the lot, though a certain kind of romantic lad still reads it from time to time. For some people it’s much of a muchness. I remember in the mid-1980s Italo Calvino’s wife, Chichita, read it in French and said to me dismissively, “It’s sentimental, Edmund, and you’re not.” My novel did have some nice blurbs from Gore Vidal and Cynthia Ozick, and it received few reviews but positive ones—except in the New York Times Book Review, where the critic said that I had been talented when I was still in the closet but that I’d lost my gift by coming out.

  A tall, blond biologist named Doug Gruenau, four years younger than I but like me a graduate from the University of Michigan, was living with the novelist Harold Brodkey on West Eighty-eighth Street. Harold had—which sounds like a contradiction in terms—an immense underground reputation. Everyone in New York was curious about him, but few people outside the city had ever heard of him. Long ago, in 1958, he’d published First Love and Other Sorrows, a book of stories that had been well reviewed, but they weren’t what all the buzz was about. Now he’d bring out a story occasionally in the New Yorker or New American Review or even Esquire. The one in New American Review (a quarterly, edited by Ted Solotaroff) was highly sexual but not dirty—a fifty-page chapter, published in 1973, about a Radcliffe girl’s first orgasm. The prose in “Innocence” could be strained if striking: “To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die.” It seemed the longest sex scene in history, rivaled only by the gay sex scene in David Plante’s Catholic—and reminiscent of the sex scene “The Time of Her Time” in Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself (except that one had been anal!).

  Then there had been troubled, labyrinthine stories about Brodkey’s mother in the New Yorker of a length and complexity no one else would have been allowed to get away with. This was obviously a writer, we thought, who must, above all, be extremely convincing. The mother stories nagged and tore at their subject with a Lawrentian exasperation, a relentless drive to get it right, repeatedly correcting the small assertions just made in previous lines. Everyone was used to confessional writing of some sort (though the heyday for that would come later), and everyone knew all about the family drama, but no one had ever gone this far with sex, with mother, and with childhood. We were stunned with a new sort of realism that made slides of every millimeter of the past and put them under the writer’s microscope. In Esquire in 1975 a short, extremely lyrical story, “His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft,” appeared, about a baby boy being carried in his father’s arms. Mother might get the niggling, Freudian treatment, but Daddy deserved only light-drenched, William Blake–like mysticism.

  All these “stories,” apparently, were only furtive glimpses of the massive novel that Brodkey had been working on for years and that would be the American answer to Marcel Proust. Brodkey’s fans (and there were many of them) photocopied and stapled into little booklets every story he’d published so far in recent years and circulated them among their friends, a sort of New York samizdat press. His supporters made wide fervent claims for him. Harold was our Mann, our James Joyce. That no one outside New York knew who he was only vouchsafed his seriousness, his cult stature, too serious for the unwashed (or rather the washed, a more appropriate synecdoche for Midwesterners).

  He and Doug lived in a big, rambling West Side apartment with a third man, named Charlie Yordy, whom I met just once but who reeked of a hoofed and hairy-shanked sexuality. He was a friendly, smiling man but seemed burdened, as are all people possessed by a powerful sexuality.

  Harold was as bearded and hooded-eyed as Nebuchadrezzar but tall and slim and athletic as well. He must have been in his forties. His constant swimming and exercising at the Sixty-third Street Y (the one I’d lived in when I first came to New York) kept him as fit as a much younger man. His moods and thoughts were restless, rolling about like ship passengers in a storm. Sometimes he looked as if a migraine had just drawn its gray, heavy wing across his eyes. The next moment he’d be calculating something silently, feverishly to himself—then he’d say out loud, “Forget it.” Cryptic smiles flitted across his face. He seldom paid attention to what the people around him were saying because he was concocting his next outrage—for most of his remarks were outrageous, and he could not be cajoled out of them.

  Harold had lived with Doug for some eight or nine years. Doug was so polite and respectful that even when Harold would say something absurdly far-fetched, Doug would cock his head to one side and up a bit, as if he were a bird trying to make sense of a new, higher, quicker call. Doug was a big man with a bass laugh, but around Harold he didn’t take up much space. I think he’d decided that Harold was both cracked and a genius and that even his insults were, ultimately, harmless, but Doug taught biology in a private school and had endless hours of grading and preparation and counseling and teaching to do, whereas Harold appeared to have enough money to be idle—and to meddle. When I told David Kalstone about Harold, David sang, “Time on my hands…”

  I wasn’t quite sure what Charlie did, though I must have been told. (Americans are never reluctant to ask strangers what they do.) I think he was a math teacher and then he manufactured clothes in the Adirondacks. He wasn’t around often and seemed to be more Harold’s boyfriend than Doug’s, though I’m sure Harold told me they were all three lovers. The apartment was big enough to accommodate them all and even give each of them privacy. Harold was on the prowl. Not all the considerable time he spent at the Y was devoted to swimming. People who knew him said he was a tireless, overt cruiser.

  Harold seldom talked about his own work but loved to deliver pronouncements about literature and how to make it. He particularly enjoyed giving other writers—even older, more successful writers—advice. As the years went by, I kept hearing strange and then stranger stories about him. One of his great defenders was Gordon Lish, a top editor at Knopf and the man who had virtually invented minimalism. Gordon apparently walked into the office of his boss, Bob Gottlieb (who’d started his own career as the editor of Catch-22 and had even been the one to persuade Joseph Heller to change the title from Catch-18), and said something like “You’ve published a few good books, Bob, but nothing that will make people remember you after you’re gone. Now you have the chance to publish Proust—but you must write a check for a million dollars and not ask to see even a single page.”

  At that point Harold had been signed up with Farrar, Straus for years, but they’d paid him a considerably smaller sum—and they weren’t willing to give him the full attention he demanded. Harold needed not one editor but several to go over with him the thousands of pages he’d already written. As far as anyone could tell, he was years away from delivering. But Farrar, Straus’s reluctance to put the full resources of their staff at his disposal ate away at Harold. Responding to the challenge, Gottlieb wrote the check.

  In a slow groundswell of media attention leading up to publication, various magazine a
rticles appeared about Harold, all wildly laudatory. I remember one in Esquire in 1977 by the religious novelist D. Keith Mano (“Harold Brodkey: The First Rave”), who confessed he’d set out to debunk Harold and his myth but who’d stayed to be conquered. Mano even told Brodkey about some of his personal problems—a minor betrayal by a friend. The passage is worth quoting because it reveals one of Harold’s seduction techniques:

  In passing I mention a personal misfortune, a betrayal—none of your business what—that had shocked and demoralized me the day before. Harold listens, advises; he parses it out. I hang up feeling both presumptuous and stupid. What am I to Harold Brodkey, he to me, that I should lay my tsuris on him? Yet, one hour later, Harold calls back. My distress, a stranger’s distress, has alarmed him. We talk for thirty minutes on Harold’s long-distance dime. The man cares. I am moved: such concern is unlooked-for. Subsequently, we talk several times. In fact I became, well, jealous; his stamina, his integrity, his grasp of circumstances is better than mine and these, dammit, are my circumstances. After a while I’d prefer to forget; it’s human enough. But Harold won’t sanction that; his moral enthusiasm is dynamic; he knows I’m copping out. And I feel understood, seen through, swept into the rational and oceanic meter of his fiction. A Brodkey character. Me. Imagine.

  Denis Donoghue and Harold Bloom had both compared Harold to Proust. Bloom, after reading some of Harold’s new novel in manuscript, added that he was “unparalleled in American prose fiction since the death of William Faulkner.” Cynthia Ozick declared him to be a true artist. Harold concurred: “I’m not sure that I’m not a coward. If some of the people who talk to me are right, well, to be possibly not only the best living writer in English, but someone who could be the rough equivalent of a Wordsworth or a Milton, is not a role that a halfway educated Jew from St. Louis with two sets of parents and a junkman father is prepared to play.” The press response (always by straight men) was so extreme that I developed a theory about what was behind it. I figured that gay men were not competitive in the way straights were; it was no accident that gays played individual not group sports. Nor were gay men awed and half in love with their fathers. Most gays I knew had rejected their fathers and despised them. Finally, gays were thoroughly disabused and especially suspicious of flattery—more likely to hand it out than to take it in. As a result, Harold’s methods didn’t work on them (on me), but they instantly seduced straights. Harold would suddenly announce to a straight admirer (or adversary), “You know, Tom, you could be the greatest writer of your generation. There’s no doubt about it. And by the way I’m not the only one to think that.” Long pause. “But you won’t be—wanna know why?” Strong eye contact. “Because you’re too damn lazy. And too damn modest. You don’t work hard enough or aim high enough.”

  His interlocutor, after having his rank raised as high as it was in his most secret dreams, suddenly saw his hopes dashed, unless … unless…

  He suddenly needed Harold to help him, to inspire him, finally to judge him. Harold was his father/coach, while the challenger was the son/rookie. With any luck he might yet emerge as the world-class genius he dreamed of being.

  Bitchy and disagreeable as gays are sometimes thought to be, they don’t usually play lethal games like these. They don’t try to mold behavior—perhaps they (we) aren’t confident enough to challenge another man in his heart of hearts, the private interior place where he lives. We gays don’t want to belong, we don’t want to play ball—we’re not team players, so how could we bow before someone evaluating us? We’d rather lose, quit the playing field—be a quitter. How can our father or father’s brother bully us when we’re all too ready to cry uncle? That sort of ducking out is our way of winning.

  Of course it probably helped that Harold went to almost every literary party and spent hours on the phone every day with Don DeLillo, Harold Bloom, Denis Donoghue. DeLillo told him the way to stop worrying about death was to watch a lot of television.

  The funny thing is that no one ever mentioned that Harold lived with not one but two men and that he was notorious in the YMCA steam room. Harold was not known to be gay—and he was far from a cool, impersonal writer. His whole life’s work was based on his childhood and adolescent experiences. He had turned himself into a tall, complicated, handsome, athletic, brilliant Jewish lad, and that’s how everyone who didn’t know him personally perceived him.

  Harold had raised expectations so high—after all, he wasn’t just trying to “get a second book out,” he was writing the great American novel—that of course he had to introduce roadblocks in his path. He bought a computer. But this was still the era when a computer filled a whole room, when only industries and spies owned them, when one had to master a whole new method of writing, of programming. Harold invited me to see the machines humming and buzzing in one room, which someone from IBM was teaching him, day after day, week after week, how to operate. The entire long, sprawling manuscript would have to be transferred to the computer. Only then could it be properly analyzed for content, repetitions, inner consistency, and flow.

  My heart sank, I who still scribbled with a ballpoint in student notebooks. I rewrote but quickly, only once; it was the least demanding part of composition and by far the most pleasant. Much of my rewriting was cutting. What was hard for me was composing, writing. I had so little confidence or stamina that a single paragraph could send me into a paroxysm of self-doubt. Sometimes I felt I was blasting my way through a sheer wall of granite, forcing a small path through vast, thick ramparts of low self-esteem. At other times I felt I was racing through the woods but that the trail had given out, was overgrown—or had broken into two paths or three. I had no idea where to go, no momentum, no sense of direction.

  Harold appeared to have none of these doubts. He sometimes spoke of writing in a way that reminded me of the methods discussed by French writers. A French author might say that he’d worked the whole book out in his mind, done his research, constructed the whole intrigue—and now all he had to do was the “redaction,” by which he would mean the actual writing, as if that were a detail, the way some composers refer to the orchestration. I was never shown any segment of the manuscript in all its voluminousness, but I would get vague, haggard battle reports about how the organization was going.

  I think you could have called Harold a phenomenologist. He once said to me (apropos of some of my own writing), “When someone writes, ‘She went down on him,’ it’s always a lie.” His idea was that shorthand expressions (going down on someone) were smug and false because the real experience (of sucking or being sucked) is so profound, so unrepeatable, so thick with emotions and half thoughts and fears and tremblings that the only expression adequate to it is minute, precise, original, and exhaustive. In print Harold wrote, “I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts.”

  I learned something from him—perhaps because it suited my own artistic temperament to “defamiliarize” the world and to render it in the freshest, most Martian way possible. Where I disagreed with him was that I thought not everything could be treated so thoroughly. There had to be background and foreground, and what was in the background necessarily should be sketched in—not with clichés but with some familiar shorthand, even facility.

  If that was the most sensible and useful part of Harold’s advice, he was also capable of strange little obsessions. In reading a description of mine of a skylight above a library (installed in a nineteenth-century opera house), Harold insisted that I describe the overhead windows as an eye. I didn’t think it made much difference in a book of 220 pages whether I used that metaphor or not, but I quickly acceded to his demand to humor him and to show him that I was flattered that he had had a concrete suggestion of any sort. Presumably he had read the rest of the book (A Boy’s Own Story) but he made no comment on the other 219 pages.

  When my book was in the proof stages, he called my editor, Bill Whitehead, and said, “Stop the presses! W
hite has stolen my style.” Bill, who could be firm, said, “That’s nonsense—he wouldn’t want your style and anyway a style can’t be patented,” and hung up on him. Harold kept calling back, threatening legal action, but he seldom contacted me and Bill never again took his calls. Harold also accused John Updike of stealing his personality. “I am the Devil in The Witches of Eastwick,” Harold announced.

  The years went by and Harold threatened to publish his book. Sometimes it was said to be two thousand pages long and sometimes it was said he’d written between three thousand and six thousand pages. The most famous fashion photographer in the world, Richard Avedon, told me that he was collaborating with Harold since Avedon was convinced he was America’s greatest author. Harold wrote the introduction to a book of Avedon’s photos taken between 1947 and 1977, an essay that had the distinction of being both laborious and stylish. The title of his novel changed from Party of Animals to The Runaway Soul, i.e., from a striking title to a forgettable one. It was reported he’d gone from Knopf back to Farrar, Straus. As the new high priest of heterosexuality and the female orgasm, he had no need of the embarrassing evidence to the contrary that Doug Gruenau and Charlie represented. Charlie had already moved out with a new lover in 1975, and Doug left the apartment in 1980. Harold moved a woman in—Ellen Schwamm, a writer he’d met jogging in the park. (There are other versions of how they’d met. In one, Ellen asked Gordon Lish who was the greatest living writer, and when she found out it was Harold, she set her cap for him. In another they met at a bookstore, the then fashionable Books & Co. next to the Whitney.) Ellen and Harold cut their hair so that they would resemble each other, like the couple in Hemingway’s posthumous and thrillingly good The Garden of Eden. She had left her rich husband for Harold. Charlie was an early victim of AIDS and died. Doug found a new lover and remained friendly with Harold and Ellen, though he must never be mentioned in the press. I tried to date Doug but he was too sweet, too genuine for me—and besides he didn’t smoke, took long hikes in the desert to photograph bison, and got up every morning at six to go jogging around the Reservoir. With any luck I was just rolling into bed at that hour, putting out my seventy-second cigarette of the day. I felt sooty and superficial next to Doug—and soon he found a serious lover he’s still with after these many years.