by Edmund White
I kept hearing nutty reports about Harold. He’d accepted a job teaching a semester occasionally at Cornell. Alison Lurie, who taught there, told me that Harold had accused a sweet elderly novelist, James McConkey, of climbing across several roofs and slipping like a cat burglar into Harold’s room in Ithaca in order to copy out long passages of Harold’s novel and to publish them as his own. This tremendous row would in a more sensible century have ended in a simplifying duel instead of the mess that went on for years.
Susan Sontag told me about her evening with Harold. He had said to her, “You and I, Susan, are the greatest writers of the twentieth century.” She had replied, “Oh, really, Harold? Aren’t there a few others? What about Nabokov, for instance?”
“Oh, he’s nothing,” Harold said, “but at least he had the decency to acknowledge his debt to me.”
“Really, Harold? Where did he do that?”
As though slowing down and simplifying things for a child, Harold took a breath and smiled and said, “You remember that at the beginning of Lolita that Lolita has a father who’s already died?”
“Yes…”
“And do you remember his first name?”
“Yes, his name is Harold.”
Harold shrugged—case closed. Harold seemed seriously to believe that his stories in First Love and Other Sorrows had inspired Nabokov—another instance of his style being stolen.
The writer Sheila Kohler told me that when she had dinner with Harold, she told him that she was happy to meet him since Gordon Lish had said he was the greatest living writer. “Why, he compares you to Shakespeare,” she told Harold.
Harold looked at her balefully and said, “I bet he wouldn’t put Shakespeare on hold.” Harold suggested that for this grievous insult he was considering changing publishers yet again.
C. K. Williams, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, the sweetest and one of the most talented men of Harold’s generation, was introduced to him by Avedon, but rather quickly Harold fought with him. Harold accused him of pilfering some of his pages to put into a poem—though later Harold realized that Williams could never have seen those pages since they hadn’t yet been published. For once in his life Harold apologized.
And then The Runaway Soul came out and it was a terrible flop. James Wood, even though he was defending it, called it “microscopically narcissistic.” Pages we’d once admired in the New Yorker were now so bent out of shape through rewriting as to be incomprehensible. No one could follow the action. Hundreds of pages went by and we were still mired in earliest childhood—and Harold’s insights and observations seemed utterly implausible. No one had that kind of detailed recall about what had happened when he was two or three. Piaget had demonstrated that even if we were given complete access to our infant memories, they would make no sense to us since they were inscribed in a different, earlier language than the one we think in now. And, anyway, who cared? It was all the fault, I thought, of that infernal computer and Harold’s infinitely expanded opportunities to rewrite. The book was no longer a performance but a smudged palimpsest.
Once his masterpiece went belly-up in such a conspicuous and unresounding way, Harold filled his days more usefully by writing bits and pieces for “The Talk of the Town.” He was a good journalist, good at getting the story and willing to curb his eccentric style enough to communicate with the average educated reader. Reputedly he wrote TV pilots for money as well.
Then one day Harold wrote a short piece in the New Yorker announcing he had AIDS and was dying. Apparently—or so Harold claimed—he’d been infected in the 1960s, since that was the last time he’d fooled around with a man. I wondered how Doug reacted to this denial of all their many years together. I thought, only Harold could write a page and a half about his imminent death from AIDS and manage to irritate the reader.
He published a strangely homophobic book about his AIDS, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death. He claimed that the book was born of a decision to be honest, not to lie, but he obscured many facts. He never mentioned Doug Gruenau or his countless tricks. He acted as if his major contact with Charlie Yordy was based on their both being orphans (Harold’s parents died when he was very young). He claimed that his affair with Charlie (which in the book sounds like his only gay relationship) was a way of reliving the childhood trauma of being sexually abused by his stepfather. As an adult, he said, he had “experimented with homosexuality to break my pride, to open myself to the story” of being abused as a child. This experience may have helped Harold to come to terms with being repeatedly raped, but, Harold suggests, “I think he was the one who gave it to me,” i.e., AIDS. In the gay community it had been decided early on that it wasn’t kosher to try to pinpoint the one who’d infected us. Hurling accusations of that sort was a waste of breath—especially since Harold, like the rest of us, had had not one but hundreds of male partners.
When Harold died, it felt anticlimactic. He was obviously a brilliant if underemployed and meddling man. He had great natural gifts and more than a touch of madness. His wife Ellen had written a novel (the ironically titled How He Saved Her) in which Harold appeared as the devil, destroying everyone around him. He died nearly the same day as the more famous Russian poet Joseph Brodsky and had the misfortune of being confused with him in many people’s minds. Now he’s practically been forgotten—and the loss of this large, ambitious talent seems tragic. We all wanted him to be a success. It’s more fun to have a genius in our midst.
Chapter 14
J. D. McClatchy (“Sandy” to his friends) arranged my first teaching gig, in the mid-seventies. I wasn’t working and supported myself badly with occasional freelance magazine pieces. In those days Yale did not have creative writing as part of its regular English Department curriculum. Princeton had had a distinguished creative writing program since 1939, when it was started by R. P. Blackmur (Allen Tate had taught there and so had Elizabeth Bowen and Kingsley Amis and Philip Roth), but Yale and Harvard had been a bit sniffy about anything so louche in which mere writers without degrees were allowed to shape young minds. When Nabokov wanted a job teaching Russian literature at Harvard, the man who turned him down said, “Would you ask an elephant to teach a course in elephant science?” To which Nabokov replied, “Yes, if he were a highly articulate elephant.”
The most Yale could do by way of creative writing courses was to have house seminars. Each dormitory or college offered some electives to students. I was hired at Jonathan Edwards College. Once a week I took a train up to New Haven (a two-and-a-half-hour trip each way) to teach my twelve undergrads. I kept imagining that the students would be much better educated than I and would unmask me as a sham; after all, I thought, I’ve never read The Faerie Queene!
Of course few nineteen-year-olds, even at an Ivy League university, have read widely and deeply. They simply haven’t had enough time, especially when the admissions departments at such schools insist they be “well-rounded.” In high school they have to do some sort of community outreach, sing in the glee club, play lacrosse, work as a volunteer for their state senator in the summer, hold down a part-time job to learn the value of a dollar—and study with a tutor the rudiments of Mandarin Chinese twice a week after school. When would they find time to read Spenser or Flannery O’Connor?
Europeans often ask what is actually taught in a creative writing class. Funny, I think, they don’t ask the same question of drawing or musical composition instructors. Literature is at once more banal and more sacralized than the other arts—or, better, since everyone can write a letter or a theme paper, it’s assumed that what separates great “authors” from mere writers is some magical and unteachable talent.
The really popular creative writing teachers (I’m not one of them) talk a lot about “creativity” and “awakening the imagination” and “loosening up” the writer from his inner “inhibitions” and letting him express himself. They have exercises for doing all that and for putting the student in touch with his or her “unconscious.”
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nbsp; That approach would make me feel like an impostor, since I’ve never subjected myself to such exercises and have never once discussed “creativity” with a real writer. Writing as therapy was something I had done in my teens and twenties, but after thirty, as I began to get control of my problems, I had to find a more professional reason to write. I’d always been interested in technique and devoured all the Paris Review interviews of established writers, especially for their hints on how to write. Elizabeth Bowen once wrote nine or ten useful pages on technique, but it’s amazing how few writers have anything to say on that subject. Perhaps they’re afraid to bore the general reader with “shoptalk.”
At Yale every week I gave a minilecture on something technical, such as when to use dialogue, how to establish character, the care and feeding of figurative language, creating suspense—and setting up constant dynamic tension, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. I discovered an invaluable little text by the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, an analysis of Bunin’s story “Gentle Breath.” In The Psychology of Art, Vygotsky speaks of the disconnect in every successful literary work between the figurative language and the direction of the plot. He discovered that the greatness of a novel requires an antagonism between the style and the story. Bunin, for instance, tells a dreary tale in “Gentle Breath,” but the final effect of the story is exhilarating. Why? Because all the similes and metaphors, all the descriptions, even the rhythm of the paragraphs, are excited, light, uplifting. This dynamic tension is the real secret of prose, Vygotsky argued—the opposite of what every aesthetician from Aristotle on down through history has averred. Whereas they all believed in redoubling their effects, in reinforcing the general impression of the “anecdote,” in truth the great playwrights and novelists undermine the drift of the plot through the “ornaments” of their prose. The melancholy of Don Quixote’s plot is undercut by the buffoonery of the writing.
New, insecure teachers usually say all they know in their first class and are afraid to call on the students. As teachers leave the classroom after the first session, they panic and can think of no way of filling up all the hours and hours during the coming weeks. Of course in creative writing the classes are small enough and the students eager enough that soon general discussion takes off. Once the students’ stories start coming in, they can be analyzed and argued about: “What do you think of Marjorie’s story, Helen?” Most creative writing courses soon enough become classes in applied morality or situational ethics. Although purists laugh at the idea of treating characters as if they were real people responsible for their actions, everyone does in fact respond to fiction in exactly that way. Stories generate interest precisely to the degree they manipulate readers’ sympathies. Chekhov’s stories, for instance, are endlessly rewarding because it’s so hard to figure out who’s bad and who’s good in them. This ambiguity doesn’t lead the reader to abandon his or her judgmental instincts but to refine them and to broaden his or her sympathies. Expecting readers to put aside their good-guy/ bad-guy criteria is absurd. As David Hume says, the mind of man when confronted with anything “immediately feels the sentiment of approbation or blame; nor are there any emotions more essential to its frame and constitution.”
I was afraid that I looked so young the students would laugh at me when I announced I was their teacher. Charles Silverstein, to whom I confided this fear, said, “Usually you’re complaining that you’re aging too quickly. Now you’re afraid you look too young.” In truth I had a highly unstable “body image.” I didn’t know what I looked like. If I managed to pick up one man (or seven of them) in an evening, then I was certain I was handsome, though I did worry why the eighth one had turned me down. Most of the time, when I was less successful, my confidence in my looks plunged. People don’t usually pay each other compliments—maybe lovers do, but I chose lovers who rejected me. I can remember that once Brandy Alexander, a famous drag queen, said to me at a party, “Ed White, everyone wants you, you’re the universal ball.” I hugged those chance words to my chest. I was twenty-four and I still remember them. I can also recall the one time a bartender sent me a free drink. I can remember a mad Southern seamster—is that the male version of seamstress?—who wrote a whole novel about me, which I was too bored to read. Years later, after my looks had faded and I’d become paunchy, a few men and women told me how attractive I’d been and how much they’d desired me. Harry Mathews got angry and said once in Key West, “Why don’t you lose all that weight? You used to be so cute!”
Later, when I began to teach at Johns Hopkins as an assistant professor (twelve thousand dollars a year), I spent two days a week in Baltimore. There no one ever looked at me and I felt gray and invisible. I commuted on the Metroliner and the moment I stepped off the train in New York the swiveling eyes were all around me again, reassuringly. New York was the only place in America where everyone—young and old, straight and gay—cruised. People in big cities cruise; it’s no accident that in French the word cruise (draguer) is applied to straights and gays alike, since both groups do it. To put the make on someone (mater, literally “to subdue”) is also polysexual in French. In New York people check each other out to find out who they are, whereas in other cities there’s no reason to bother since no one is ever anyone. As Stan used to say, “Half the people in New York if they were anywhere else would be either interviewed or arrested.”
In the 1970s New York was so shoddy, so dangerous, so black and Puerto Rican, that the rest of white America pulled up its skirts and ran off in the opposite direction. Tourism was way down, and guests on talk shows would quite regularly laugh when New York was mentioned, as if that querulous, bankrupt cesspool should be pushed out to sea and sunk. My Texas relatives would call me and wonder how I dared to live there; my cousin Dorothy Jean, a militant Baptist, located and contacted the Baptist minister nearest me, then called me to say he was waiting for my visit. “The Big Apple” campaign and the slogan “I Love New York” (with the icon of a heart standing in for the word love) were invented to take the curse off the city. The opposite was true. No one loved New York except us, the gay and artsy misfits from the Midwest. Native New Yorkers hated their own city and were saving up to move to California. Corporate officers who were transferred to New York demanded hardship allowances and barricaded themselves in expensive suburbs such as Greenwich, Connecticut, and forbade their children to go into the city. Sometimes at the chemical company I met pink-collar workers from Staten Island who took the subway and the ferry back and forth to work. They were extruded from the subway directly into the building and had never dared to wander the Manhattan streets around them. Columbia students were advised never to walk south of 110th Street, and of course never above 125th into Harlem. Schoolchildren from the other boroughs were brought in virtually under guard in buses to the Metropolitan Museum, quickly herded through the vast collections, then driven straight back home to the Five Towns on Long Island. Darryl Pinckney, the great black novelist and critic, describes how when he walked down the street, in order to reassure a lone white woman just ahead of him that he wasn’t going to rape or rob her, he would brandish his copy of Heidegger, but to no avail. She still looked back, panicked, and almost ran.
Perversely, we were proud to be New Yorkers, but not Americans. Nevertheless, we expected disaster. Our sleep was filled with doom scenarios. Shots rang out in the neighborhood somewhere. Traffic lights blinked out of sync with each other. Old people on chromium walkers were mugged. Jules Feiffer started a play with a New Yorker undoing six locks to get into her apartment; when she comes onstage, her grocery bag is leaking milk everywhere, riddled by bullets. I wrote a play about a hermaphrodite living in an apartment building where everyone in it was tragic and messed up; it was my vision of New York. Just a block away from me was Central Park, but even I was afraid to go into the Rambles to cruise, ever since a body had been found at the foot of the Gothic weather station behind the stage where Shakespeare in the Park was performed. Audiences watched these great, gory, elo
quent plays as if they were battle reports: “That Lady Macbeth? Isn’t she that wigged-out chick in 9B? The one who killed her sleepover and then started getting funny and ate him and had to have her ass hauled off to Bellevue?”
We knew nothing about the boroughs or the dense population on the closer half of Long Island—which is 118 miles long. To us they were these Jews and Poles and Ukrainians and Italians and Irish who had humorous substandard accents and who chewed gum and sprayed their hair and wore ankle bracelets. The movie Saturday Night Fever symbolized the immense distance between Brooklyn and Manhattan. Now every other apartment on Manhattan is inhabited by a corporate lawyer or private banker, and many of them are young and gay and date our friends, but back then we didn’t know any people from Wall Street nor did we want to. New York, the New York we knew south of Fourteenth Street, was loud and leaking—the manholes were leaking steam, the fire hydrants were illegally spraying water in which naked neighborhood kids were dancing, the ambulance and fire-wagon sirens were shrieking around the clock, people’s bodies were leaking blood and sperm and the emergency rooms and backrooms were packed, the apartment windows were thrown open to expel the excessive hot air generated by uncontrollable central heating—and the city was hemorrhaging money. And people’s milk cartons had been shot through and were leaking.