by Edmund White
During the 1970s I moved away from seeing myself as a socialist and even a fellow traveler to recognizing communism for the sustained international nightmare it was and myself as an anarchist (not the bomb-throwing sort but an extreme individualist). I became suspicious of most collective behavior—and of all politics as invariably a form of lying. If novelists attempt to keep all the nuances in, politicians hammer them into extinction under the blows of a deadening rhetoric. Novelists are precise and create scenes; politicians generalize and wallow in warnings and bromides.
As I was slowly moving away from communism, I also stepped back from the avant-garde. My first two novels to be published had been experimental, but by the time I got to A Boy’s Own Story I’d acknowledged that life had handed me a brand-new subject and that my job was to present it in the clearest, least wavering light. A straight writer, condemned to show nothing but marriage, divorce, and childbirth, might need a new formal approach or an exotic use of language. But a gay writer, free to record for the first time so many vivid and previously uncharted experiences, needed no tricks. Gay writing in the seventies gave a greater depth to autobiographical fiction than had ever before been achieved, a profundity that other writers, straight writers, could benefit from.
In the 1970s, through my agent Maxine Groffsky, I met Marie-Claude de Brunhoff, who almost instantly started writing me from Paris on her sky-blue stationery with her capricious spelling and almost nonexistent punctuation. She would send me French novels to read hot off the press, though I scarcely knew what to do with them at the time. It would be another decade before I could read French easily. In Paris, Marie-Claude became my best friend—as she would remain well into the new century until her death.
She came to fill the void left by David Kalstone’s death. He and she were my ideal friends and shared a certain style—a deep pleasure in the delights of every day, a warmth that was never mièvre (French for “mawkish”), a fierce loyalty to the inner circle, never the slightest hint of disapproval toward me or other loved ones, though both of them were terrible snobs. Both of them liked to entertain and to go out, to hear the “latest,” to meet the current genius. David was always up on intellectual currents and Marie-Claude on literary ones. She was a professional reader who read three or four books a day; she read French books for Knopf and English-language books for Gallimard. David, who was half-blind, was a keen observer and had a novelist’s interest in how stories turned out. David was divinely silly—a dimension that Marie-Claude lacked and deeply regretted (she often referred to the much envied “English wit,” a phenomenon that exists vividly in the French imagination if not in French manners).
In my twenties I courted people, much as I’d learned to do in high school; only in my thirties and forties was the goal not to make friends but to enjoy them. In the 1970s gay New Yorkers had decided to separate out friendship, love, and sex. The friend, the lover, and the fuck buddy were three different people, not the same one, as they would become in the eighties. This division of labor in the seventies gave the starring role to friendship. We assumed that love affairs would be stormy and temporary and cause more pain than pleasure. We seldom knew or remembered the names of our sex partners; indeed, we were bewildered in the early days of AIDS by the surprising (and pointless) injunction “Know the names of your partners.” No, our friends were the ones we cherished and pursued and cultivated. We could say strategic things to lovers and seductive things to tricks, but a friend deserved the truth. With a friend we had to get things right.
At the end of the 1960s I was in despair over my writing. I was going nowhere quick. I had a drawer full of unproduced plays and unpublished novels. By the end of the 1970s I was on my way as a writer. It had taken longer and was less rewarding than I’d anticipated, but like a character in Balzac I’d always been a monomaniac—just one great obsession, to be published. Friends had helped me all along the way. Richard Howard had arranged for my first novel to be published. David Kalstone encouraged me at strategic moments. Marilyn and Stanley would listen over the phone to every word I wrote. Keith McDermott was a constant inspiration through his own unflinching dedication to a bohemian life of art. At times I wrote to amuse my nephew. My editor, Bill Whitehead, became a real friend, though he died young from AIDS. Susan Sontag arranged for me to win awards and gain recognition. The members of my writers’ club, the Violet Quill, encouraged one another to explore fearlessly this new gay subject matter.
The Romantic American myth is that the artist works in solitude and that he can create as well on a farm in Vermont as in New York. But I recognized that the artistic climate of a particular city and milieu was crucial to the development of a writer; after he found his way, perhaps he could go off to that barn outside Burlington. I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to young, penniless artists. That was the era of “coffee shops” as they were defined in New York—cheap restaurants open round the clock where you could eat for less than it would cost to cook at home. That was the era of ripped jeans and dirty T-shirts, when the kind of people who were impressed by material signs of success were not the people you wanted to know. The seventies saw the last gasp of the old bohemian Greenwich Village, but this time with more of a gay aspect.
I got to know New York better by spending long periods in San Francisco and Venice. In contrast with those more decorous cities I could see how consumed New York was with ambition, how little urbanism or planning of any sort prevailed in New York, how improvised and transient all of New York’s arrangements were. All three cities are ports; Venice is many islands, and Manhattan, Long Island, and Staten Island are also islands. Venice, however, is married to the sea, whereas Manhattan turns its back on its rivers and the ocean. Venice and San Francisco glory in their quite different pasts. San Francisco’s past is only a hundred years old, whereas Venice’s is more than a thousand. New York is a nineteenth-century (and even eighteenth-century) city, but no one notices. Few people are even aware of its history.
I suppose that finally New York is a Broadway theater where one play after another, decade after decade, occupies the stage and the dressing rooms—then clears out. Each play is the biggest possible deal (sets, publicity, opening-night celebrations, stars’ names on the marquee), then it vanishes. With every new play the theater itself is just a bit more dilapidated, the walls scarred, the velvet rubbed bald, the gilt tarnished. Because they are plays and not movies, no one remembers them precisely. The actors are forgotten, the plays are just battered scripts showing coffee stains and missing pages. Nothing lasts in New York. The life that is lived there, however, is as intense as it gets.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Nick Trautwein for his expert editing—he’s a man with a keen eye and a receptive ear, not to mention impeccable judgment. Michael Fishwick has enthusiastically been behind this book from the beginning and has cheered me along to the finish line. He has proven to be a friend to me and my writing.
Michael Carroll, my partner, did a careful word edit of City Boy before I dared to show it to anyone.
I am grateful to my fellow writer David McConnell for reading the manuscript before anyone else and giving me copious notes. Tom Beller, the wonderful writer and editor of Open City, has been an enthusiast from the beginning, as has my friend the architect Sam Roche.
Beatrice von Rezzori welcomed me graciously to her writers’ retreat in Tuscany, Santa Maddalena. She is also a warm and fascinating friend.
John Logan at Princeton has helped me innumerable times to track down essays and articles I wanted to consult.
My agent, Amanda Urban, has advised me at every point, for which I am deeply grateful.
Q&A with Edmund White
Q: You’ve written four autobiographical novels and one real autobiography (My Lives). Why another autobiography? Haven’t you already covered all this material?
A: Oddly enough I haven’t. I’ve had an unusually full life, perhaps because
I was a journalist for years and an aspiring novelist and I’m a very social person who’s lived in big cities—New York, Rome, San Francisco, Paris…
Q: So what’s new about this book?
A: My Lives is organized by topic (“My Blonds,” “My Shrinks,” “My Mother,” etc.) whereas City Boy is chronological. It’s really about my first long stay in New York, from 1962 to 1982.
Q: What is so interesting about those years?
A: From my point of view New York was the birthplace in those years of the modern lesbian and gay liberation movement. After all, the Stonewall uprising, which initiated this movement, occurred in 1968 in Greenwich Village. New York was also in that period alive with cultural and creative activity. I was lucky enough to meet novelists, poets, painters, theater innovators, actors; and to see the New York City Ballet when it was the center of everyone’s attention.
Q: What made the ballet so important?
A: We used to say that in a city as contentious and argumentative as New York only a wordless art form could appeal to everyone. What we saw on the stage was a vision of a utopian community of love and common purpose, perhaps best symbolized by the title of Jerome Robbins’s ballet, Dances at a Gathering. The real genius of the seventies—not just in New York but throughout the Western world—was Balanchine. He was our link to imperial Russia and to the Ballets Russes and the Europe of the 1920s with its great composers (Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Hindemith) and its painters (Picasso, Rouault).
Q: Was the ballet also a social scene?
A: Definitely. There were usually three rather long intermissions each evening and the audience had time to discuss what they’d just seen—and to have an acute sense of one another. I’d see Susan Sontag there all the time and Bob Gottlieb, the editor of Knopf and later the New Yorker. America’s best ballet critic, the legendary Edwin Denby, was there every night, as was Edward Gorey. The lobby of the State Theater was the drawing room of New York.
Q: Does New York still have the same magic for you?
A: It’s still a fascinating international city, but Manhattan—especially lower Manhattan below 14th Street—is no longer a place where young, unestablished artistic people can afford to live and where chance encounters can set off sparks. Now young artists are scattered over various boroughs and usually have to arrange to meet. New York has become a city for rich people, just like Paris.
Q: Sometimes you seem to be a bit bitchy in your sections on Susan Sontag or Harold Brodkey. How do you feel about slandering the dead?
A: Voltaire said that the only thing you owe the dead is the truth. I think of all the people who’ve weighed in on Sontag, I’m the least condemning. She wounded a lot of feelings while she was alive, including mine, and we had a long dispute. But I always admired her and I wanted to set the record straight. Sigrid Nunez is the only other writer who’s treated her fairly in my opinion—but Sigrid lived with Susan and her son, who was her boyfriend.
Q: Speaking of truth, how do you feel about adding novelistic details to a memoir?
A: I totally disapprove, unless the “memoir” is light and humorous like David Sedaris’s books. He is obviously trying mainly to entertain and he succeeds at it wonderfully. Perhaps because I write novels I have a different goal when I write nonfiction—to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. I think that’s the contract that the writer has with the reader in a memoir, and readers justifiably feel vexed when they discover that a memoirist has transposed the sequence of two events to make them more colorful or dramatic. Of course everyone can misremember events, but deliberately to distort the truth to make a better story is cheating in a work that presents itself as the unvarnished truth.
Q: Do you keep a journal?
A: No, I’ve never kept notes and some friends have sent me e-mails correcting my version of things. If they’ve found errors of fact rather than just interpretation I’ve corrected my mistakes. I rely on the selective assistance of forgetting; if we remembered everything we’d never be able to re-create the past coherently. Borges, the South American writer, has a great story about the torments of a perfect memory called “Funes the Memorious.”
Q: Don’t you ever feel like an egomaniac writing so much about yourself?
A: Actually I have to remind myself to write about myself sufficiently to provide a through-line to my memoirs. I’m so interested in other people—and I gave dozens of quick sketches of other people in City Boy—that it’s easy for me to forget to put in information about my own ambitions or loves, for instance.
Q: Do you have any other memoirs up your sleeve?
A: Yes, I’d like to write about Paris in the eighties since that was a great period of prosperity and artistic effervescence—and for me it was a wonderful time when I felt I was becoming another, more mature person. I’d also like to write someday about my sister and my nephew, two key people in my life whom I’ve barely touched on in my writing up till now.
Q: What other literary projects do you have?
A: I’m working on a novel now about a straight man and a gay man who are best friends in the sixties and seventies. It’s to be called Jack Holmes and His Friend. I’d also like to write a short biography of Baudelaire to fill out the project I’ve undertaken with my biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud. For me, Baudelaire is the fourth great figure of French literature.
Praise for City Boy
‘[An] energetic evocation of Manhattan in the Sixties and Seventies … an absorbing insight into the life alongside a constellation of greats of the American literary and gay scenes’ Harper’s Bazaar
‘Edmund White’s candid memoir of New York’s gay scene in the sixties and seventies is packed with frequently salacious anecdotes about the rich, the famous and the gifted. In the end, though, it is the city itself that steals the show: crime-ridden, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, all but impossible to live in, but vibrantly alive’ London Review of Books
‘City Boy is gossipy elegant and endlessly quotable, an intriguing obituary to a time and place that no longer exists’ Word Magazine
‘Edmund White has a wonderful chuckle, full of active mischief and helpless glee … a gifted, promiscuous, scholarly, sociable young gay writer … Beguiling’ Observer
‘New York is evoked with a cinematic immediacy, especially its “grungy, dangerous, bankrupt” character in the mid-1970s … City Boy is, in an important sense, a book about friendship, its proximity to and differences from romance, and its significance in the lives of gay men … His ability to reflect on his past with candour and wit remains exemplary’ Times Literary Supplement
‘City Boy, plain-spoken and knowing, is a survivor’s tale, a missive from one of those antlered boys of that era to the others who are gone: this is who we were, this is how it was, this was our city’ New York Times Books Review
‘White has an unerring eye for the symptoms of the authorial egotism and, because he freely admits to his own, serves it up as a pure comedy … Every page has a great joke or description’ Evening Standard
‘A rip-roaring, riotous hoot from start to finish … a stud-studded and gloriously gossipy catalogue of all his uber-cool arty pals and his own thrilling exploits in the heady underworld of pre-AIDS gaydom’ Dazed & Confused
‘As much as the book is delicious gossip, it’s also a narrative of understanding and friendship, a celebration of destiny they all shared by being alive in a poor and decaying and free and lusty New York for two amazing decades’ Irish Times
‘Edmund White, a master of the erotic confession, is our most accomplished triathlete of prose—a novelist, biographer, and memoirist. Truly, no other American writer of my generation manages to be all three with such personal passion and veracity.
The fiercely defiant A Boy’s Own Story remains the coming-of-age novel that has the deepest resonance for me—notwithstanding that it’s about a gay boy coming of age, and I’m straight. (No one who honestly remembers being a sensitive young man can fail to iden
tify with the universal longing, or the frustration and the anger, underlying this semiautobiographical novel.) And White’s recent biography of the mercurial and much misunderstood Rimbaud is fittingly devastating and succinct—’fittingly,’ because the outcast poet’s life was tragic and brief. Now comes a bold, penetrating companion to White’s My Lives—an earlier, bittersweet memoir.
In City Boy, the memoirist examines his life in New York in the 1960s and ’70s; not only were these vital years for White’s own gay liberation, but City Boy is also the story of White’s literary emergence—his struggles and ambitions as a writer. There is the bracing sexual candor and explicitness White is justly famous for; as he says, ‘What we desire is crucial to who we are.’ But what is most unforgettable are the piercing self-portraits of the young writer who describes himself as ‘desperate for recognition,’ and the overwhelming panoply of older, often legendary writers White meets along the way. (‘I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought.’)
This splendid book is at once fascinating social history and sublimely detailed gossip. Young gay readers who don’t know what it was like to be gay in New York in the ’60s and ’70s should devour it; those straight readers who are somehow still unfriendly to homosexuality must open their eyes and read every word of City Boy, too. As for those of us, gay and straight, who have long admired Edmund White, this memoir is a wise and humane treatise on the delicate differences between love and friendship—indeed, between lovers and friends. Most deservedly, White has had his share of both, and he writes about them with an irreproachable kindness and affection.’
—John Irving
First published in Great Britain 2009
Copyright © 2009 by Edmund White
This electronic edition published 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc