City Boy

by Edmund White

  I had first met Cole because the New York Times Book Review had asked me to review his Island People, probably his best book although it is so consumed with paranoia and spleen about real people (notably Carl Van Vechten, who’d had the ill luck to be Cole’s mentor) that it is hard to read to the end. It lacks that key, embarrassing literary quality no one knows how to discuss: charm. I was baffled by such a complicated book, so uneven that it could be called a corduroy road to perdition, but even so I gave it a positive review, while expressing reservations about such highfalutin expressions as “she was an ennuyante of stature.”

  No matter. My qualified praise got me invited to dinner at Cole and Bert’s Fifth Avenue apartment on the fifteenth floor looking down on Central Park and across to the Guggenheim Museum. Cole was a tall, nice-looking man wearing a big, fake-looking wig. Bert’s wig was darker and more modest but not on quite right. The main sitting room was large and spacious with mirrors on one end catching the light pouring in through the plate-glass windows. The style was Hollywood Classic with matching upholstered white couches, white rugs, stagily spotlit paintings, a legion of high-backed dining-room chairs flanking a skinny medieval refectory table. It was all a bit theatrical and delightfully comfortable—and so much more luxurious than anything else Chris and I had ever seen that it awed us.

  As did the food. Cole was a martyr cook. Since he never left the apartment except to swoop down on homeless black men in Central Park across the street for sex, he had the rest of his time to write, and to construct elaborate dinners that sometimes took three days to prepare. Cole would greet us at the door with dark circles under his eyes and exhaustion pinching his lips. Tammy was our “hostess,” or at least that’s how Cole conceived of his wienie dog. She was old and lame and an intelligent, seemingly normal dachshund, but Cole was enraptured with her and ascribed to her a whole bewildering range of gracious and malefic emotions. He would hurt her physically when she’d been “bad” (or he drunk and crazy), though she slept every night between Bert and Cole and had a wardrobe of diamonds and tiaras and furs that were contributed to a museum after her death. The writer Walter Abish, author of How German Is It?, made a terrible gaffe when in a note to Cole about matters literary he wrote, “P.S. Sorry to hear the dog died.” Steam came issuing out of all of Cole’s orifices. He trembled with rage when he said to me, “I hope his wife, Cecile, dies soon so I can write, ‘P.S. Sorry to hear the woman died.’ When I think how many times Tammy graciously received the Abishes here as their hostess!” Cole once told me that all his pleasant female characters had been based on Tammy. The unpleasant ones were based on Susan Sontag, whom he didn’t know, though he was convinced that she had personally blocked every positive review he’d failed to receive and had engineered every rejection by every publisher. He knew she was plotting against him day and night because he’d written an attack on her in his novel Mrs. October Was Here, though he’d been careful to set it in “Tasmania, Ohio.” Of course in real life Susan Sontag, Argus-eyed as she was, had never seen a mention of Coleman Dowell. But Cole needed an enemy, and it helped if he or she was Jewish, as were Sontag, Abish, and Bert, Cole’s lover. Cole was wildly and self-defeatingly anti-Semitic, since he was kept by a sweet, patient Jew and all his literary friends were either Jewish or quite conventionally politically correct—and New York had the second-largest concentration of Jews in the world after Israel (two million versus five million). And of course the whole cultural life of New York in which Cole aspired, everything from music to literature to scholarship, was markedly influenced by Jews. Nor was Cole’s anti-Semitism actually based on anything other than a desire to shock and to be “interesting,” and I suppose it was meant to figure as a declaration of independence from his endlessly indulgent lover.

  Most literary writers in the second half of the twentieth century felt wronged, neglected, conspired against, but Cole was one of the few who railed without cease against his Job-like fate. Maybe because his mental literary map starred Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, he imagined that he, too, should be on the cover of Time. Maybe because he’d been on television in his twenties as a performer and was used to big audiences and street-recognition fame, he found sales figures of his books in the hundreds instead of the hundreds of thousands cruel and lamentable. Lament he did, all the time.

  When I first met Coleman in 1974, I was still drinking heavily and as a consequence was constantly feeling guilty. I couldn’t remember what I’d said or done or shouted the night before—and this made me a receptive friend for Cole and an open ear for his complaints. Because I was timid, I’d written a mostly enthusiastic review of a book I didn’t like all that much but that I was afraid to condemn. Why hurt an author who was unknown? And what if it turned out to be an important book? A single review in the Sunday New York Times could make or break a reputation. I’d already suffered the consequences of bad reviews in it through low sales, pitying looks from friends, low advances on the next book.

  Now if I dislike a book I’m asked to review, I send it back to the newspaper or magazine, but back then I was so thrilled to be asked by anyone to review something that I hesitated to reject the golden offering. None of us was natural in the face of power, of absolute literary power; we were all cringing courtiers, I less than most writers.

  But my cowardice that led to overpraising a confused and irritating novel saddled me with a long and painful friendship. Cole would get very drunk late at night (me, too) and he’d bring up the reservations I’d expressed in my review—what’s wrong with saying “ennuyante of stature”?—and he’d speak with real venom. There was always a trace of anger and resentment against me—and that kept me so intimidated that I was always eager to prove to him my devotion. Chris Cox and I even agreed to be his agents representing his novel White on Black on White. Cole was furious with New Directions for not having sufficiently promoted his earlier works and quit James Laughlin, who was truly devoted to Cole’s writing, to search out a new editor. Of course he didn’t understand that Laughlin, mentally unstable himself, was that rarest of things, a loyal and disinterested literary editor. Nor did Cole know how to go about finding a new publisher. Since Chris was by now working in publishing and I had a few contacts, we sent his book around everywhere, with no success. I thought it would be a natural for publication since it dealt with race and sex, the two great American obsessions. But no one wanted it—again the Chinese-box problem and the lack of charm. Finally another friend enlisted the help of the Countryman Press, a tiny house with a minuscule list. The book garnered far less attention than it would have if New Directions had done it—and far less than it deserved.

  Dowell jumped to his death on August 3, 1985. We’d all seen it coming. Cole talked about it endlessly, and when Bert visited me in Paris a few weeks before it happened, I asked him if he was prepared for such a gruesome eventuality. We were all horrified and frightened—it seemed something we could all be tempted to do. We wondered if he had AIDS and was too embarrassed to admit it or afraid of the long, slow, painful death. Or we heard that he’d “dropped a dime” on a black prison lover on parole—planted drugs on him and tipped off the police that a man on parole was “holding,” as revenge for the guy’s infidelity. Or maybe, as he said, he was afraid of aging and losing his “beauty.”

  If many of the people I knew in New York in the seventies were twisted or paranoid or even evil, we all agreed one was a saint: Joe Brainard. Joe was a writer and visual artist from Oklahoma who stuttered and spelled erratically and was so timid that he danced in place, looking down, if he thought anyone was paying attention to him. Someone had once complimented him on his chest so he always wore his shirt open to the waist, even in subarctic winter weather.

  I had a few dates with him and he’d always bring a notepad to dinner. He was too shy to converse normally so he’d write something down and pass the pad and wait for a written answer. It was a bit like being someone who couldn’t sign and dining with a deaf person who couldn’t read
lips. Sometimes he’d look directly at me with a warm regard, but a moment later he’d be looking up at the ceiling, like a bad actor miming innocence and whistling.

  He’d grown up middle-class but poor, and when he got to New York, he’d lived in the East Village and eaten out of garbage cans. Kenward Elmslie, the poet and an heir to the Pulitzer fortune, took him up and they were lifelong lovers. More than once I’ve heard inexperienced people say that the days of being kept are over, that now no one is a Balzacian hero who comes to the capital and finds a protector, but in fact that scenario happens as often as it probably ever did. It’s just that only very rich people can afford to do that and one doesn’t encounter many of them. And today neither the kept boy nor the older man owns up easily to his role.

  No one could have been less on the make than Joe. With the stocks he’d been given he earned extremely large sums every quarter, but he converted everything into cash and put the money in a large drawer. He’d fish out a thousand dollars and ask seriously if that would be enough for dinner. He was usually stoned by dinnertime. He always paid.

  He lived in a big loft that was just two huge rooms on Greene Street. In the backroom were hundreds of boxes full of materials he might someday assemble into collages. The front room had a sitting area and a mattress on the floor and a radio tuned day and night to a country-and-western station. Joe worked his way through one mammoth Victorian novel after another. At two in the morning he’d finish Middlemarch and start The Way We Live Now. He seldom said much about them except that they were good or that he’d liked them. Or he’d say, “What about that Dorothea!” and smile his big goofy smile.

  In the late sixties and early seventies he’d been a speed freak, which had enabled him to do hundreds and hundreds of tiny collages. When I knew him, he still did book covers for his friends Ron Padgett and John Ashbery and Kenward Elmslie. He’d also over the years done lots of hilarious variations on the comic-strip character Nancy. Perhaps he was best known for his book I Remember, in which he just listed all the things he could remember—the ultimate dandy’s book since the method of a dandy is to level all hierarchies and replace all normal value systems with the arbitrariness of taste and personality.

  Typically, the book read:

  I remember fishnet.

  I remember board and brick bookshelves.

  I remember driving in cars and doing landscape paintings in my head (I still do that).

  Joe had long been a friend of Warhol’s and had even anticipated Pop Art in an early painting called 7-Up, abandoning that approach when he saw Andy’s work. He collaborated with Jasper Johns on a painting. His favorite work, however, was drawing. He would draw Kenward’s beautiful dog Whippoorwill or his own foot, or he would draw a boy’s legs in athletic socks or a sleeping nude man. His work was either cool and insouciant Americana or it was funny. He seldom painted, but when he did, the results were highly original and convincing. Once he did a parody of Wyeth’s painting by showing Whippoorwill dragging his long white body across the grass toward a house.

  Joe would spend every summer in Calais, Vermont, with Kenward. During the summer months we’d all receive letters from Joe in his big, bold script spelling out what he was reading (Great Expectations, Portrait of a Lady) and gossip about who’d come to stay.

  In the midst of this very regular life (reading, dinners out in fancy restaurants, very occasional tricks, constant country-and-western music, summers in Vermont), Joe fell violently in love with my old love Keith McDermott. Keith had moved back to New York after several years away in Los Angeles. I had slept with Joe a few times but it hadn’t really worked out in bed. Now Joe was overwhelmed by Keith’s looks. Whenever Keith would appear in a play, Joe would deluge him with roses. Joe was a romantic man in the most old-fashioned way, and Keith responded to the lavish treatment. Keith was also very attracted to Joe. Keith had always liked eccentrics and bohemians. With his Armani suits and vast resources of cash and his becalmed, unproductive days and nights after so many years of amphetamine-driven work, Joe appealed to Keith’s horror of the middle class and his yearning for the unusual.

  Perhaps their affair started because each was the other’s ideal. Keith was the small, hairless, perfectly knit young man with a gymnast’s body and regular features—someone who’d stepped right out of one of Joe’s drawings. Joe was warm and lovable and unlike anyone else.

  When the English TV series Brideshead Revisited was being shown, we friends took turns hosting for an episode, each cooking his best dish when it came time. Joe had no idea how to cook so he had the most expensive caviar and chocolates catered.

  Joe was certainly sweet and disinterested—we called him Prince Myshkin. Later, when he had to die of AIDS at a young age, he became bitter, understandably. I’m glad I didn’t have to witness that last phase of his life.

  Chapter 17

  I don’t remember how I met Richard Sennett, but dozens of roads led to the intellectual and social Rome that he represented. Dick was a professor of sociology at New York University and had written several remarkable books, including The Hidden Injuries of Class and The Fall of Public Man. He was a well-known professor and sought-after lecturer. He was also an odd combination of schoolboy nerd, flamboyant queen, and Mrs. Astor, in that he loved ideas and intellectuals and enjoyed prancing about in drag, though that was just a phase, and he entertained with charm and tirelessness in his little house on Washington Mews, a brick-paved lane just off Washington Square. The old New York Henry James gentry had lived in the big town houses on the square in the nineteenth century, and the stables and servants’ quarters had been lodged behind along the mews, except they’d been converted to artists’ studios since at least the early 1900s when cars had replaced carriages. Any sort of gracious, historic, private living space was so unusual in New York that even converted stables seemed to us the height of civilized luxury. Washington Mews and the matching MacDougal Alley across Fifth Avenue were the best addresses in Manhattan. In Philadelphia they would have been just two of dozens and dozens of quiet streets lined with brick town houses, gas lamps, and hundred-year-old trees. In London they would have been beneath notice.

  Dick had been married twice before I knew him—and he would later marry a third time, to the lighthearted but formidable Dutch-born economist Saskia Sassen. In the late 1970s and early eighties when we were first friends, however, he was trying to be gay, though without much success. Maybe he was a bit bisexual, but his swooning over beautiful boys seemed more dutiful than instinctual. Dick courted one tall, powerfully built young man with black, curling hair and red, curling lips and thick, muscular legs and huge black eyes, who seemed to love Dick in his anguished way, but I doubt whether their love was satisfying to either of them.

  Dick mainly liked to entertain, but not just anyone. At his house on the mews you could meet Isaiah Berlin or Michel Foucault or Susan Sontag or Jürgen Habermas or Alfred Brendel. Like most intellectuals, these men and the occasional woman didn’t want to make engagements far in advance—not in the usual busy-busy New York fashion. They never knew when inspiration might strike, and besides, socializing wasn’t part of their idea of themselves. They weren’t the sort of frivolous (or conventional) creatures who knew what they would be doing a week from Thursday. But since they were apt to get lonely like anyone else, especially after dark on a cold February night, they could always drift over to Dick’s house, where it was okay just to ring the bell. Whereas most New Yorkers were barricaded in their apartments and could be seen only by carefully arranged appointment like ministers of state, and then only after two cancellations and three postponements and a change of meeting place, Dick was always available. He was at home downstairs cooking in his modern, roomy kitchen or upstairs entertaining in his atelier-like living room with its skylights and vast airy ceilings and its grand piano. He might be scraping away at his cello while Brendel played the piano part. Or people of every sort, many of them Europeans, might be sitting on the big, deep couch and in the c
omfy armchairs chatting away. One of his favorites was Diana Trilling, who was already seventy-five then and a big, lively woman with her hair pulled up in a hennaed bun, her dresses full and plain but her opinions sharp and her interest in everyone around her even more acute.

  I can remember sitting beside Janet Hobhouse, the novelist, when Trilling looked up and said, “Who is this young man entering the room like a prince out of a Turgenev novel?” It was Vladimir de Marsano, my pal from Venice. “In fact he is a half-Serb, half-Italian aristocrat,” I said, “and he’s going to be in one of my novels.” Vladimir came over with his wonderful slightly crooked smile and unflinching but kind eyes and the slight asymmetry of his pugilist’s nose, as if the head of a classical statue had been copied in wax and then squeezed ever so slightly to one side. Mainly he was a high-spirited but impeccably well-mannered kid, and he did carry himself with the elegance and lightness of a Slavic prince. He had a way of standing close, as if he understood that with every quarter inch of increased proximity he was jacking up his magnetism exponentially. He knew everyone wanted to kiss him. He didn’t want to kiss people back, but he did like having that kind of power over us.

  He had a tougher, bigger blond man with him, a South African student. It seemed they were devoting most of their time to the disco of the moment, Studio 54. I’d never gone there but apparently the owner, Steve Rubell, let in both beautiful nobodies and celebrities of any sort. In New York Vladimir must have been a beautiful nobody, though to old Venetians such as David and me he was mythical. Vladimir jokingly complained that he and his blond beast of a friend were so inseparable that people imagined they must be lovers. He seemed genuinely proud of the imputation—and perhaps of the reality.