Waiting for the Barbarians

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  But with A Boy’s Own Story, although an evocative prettiness remains (“just as each shell held to the ears roars with a different ocean timbre, each of these bodies spoke to me with a different music”), the contours of White’s incipient project came into focus—which is to say that “life” overtook “art” as his primary concern. He began to devote himself to the sometimes almost dogged recording of the quality, nature, and substance of gay life and experience that has been at the center of most of his output ever since, in fiction and essay, in biography and memoir. You feel it in the several thinly disguised autobiographical novels (The Married Man, for instance, with its minute re-creation of an illness and death from AIDS) as well as à clef portrayals—not always flattering—of famous friends such as Susan Sontag (as in his roman à clef Caracole). But it is perhaps most plain in this author’s commitment to gay biography (Proust, Rimbaud, Genet) and, of course, undisguised autobiography: first My Lives (2005), with its detailed descriptions of S&M episodes and unapologetic recollections of rent boys, and, now, City Boy.

  The virtues and flaws of the latest of White’s autobiographies—the talented gossip’s eye for the good story, dragged down by a tendency to dish out payback; a passionate chauvinism on behalf of gay writers and their writing, hobbled by unsound and approximate judgments about a larger literary world; a carelessness about the privacy of other people for the sake of a good anecdote—reflect, in the end, the strengths and limitations of the relentlessly personal perspective that White advocates.

  City Boy is interesting not least because it is a reminiscence about the period when the gay way of life White sees as so distinctive from straight life had its brief, dazzling floruit: the heady, hedonistic stretch of time between the Stonewall riots (the event that marked the beginning of the contemporary gay movement and coincided with a marked, if uneven, increase in the visibility of gay people and gay issues in American culture) and the advent, not even fifteen years later, of AIDS, which would cast a dark shadow on the culture of unrestrained sexual play. That this short period coincided with White’s literary advent—the tentative and often unsuccessful beginnings of which he narrates with an amusing lack of vanity—only overdetermines the connection he likes to make between life and art. His literary rise precisely followed the rise of modern gay culture.

  There’s a point in City Boy when White—who, in addition to being a well-known writer, is a well-known teacher who has, admirably, always made time to put himself at the service of the younger generation (most recently, at Princeton)—offers some professorial thoughts about the qualities of good fiction, which, he says, “depends on telling details and an exact and lifelike sequencing of emotions, and on representative if not slavishly mimetic dialogue, and on convincing actions.” The best passages in the new memoir (whose arc reminds you at times of Lost Illusions, a novel that White mentions) have those qualities. Predictably, White is at his best when reminiscing about the gay sexual culture of the 1960s and 1970s in New York City, with its elaborate codes of conduct and erotic ceremonials as rigid as the Japanese court protocols that first fascinated him years ago, as Forgetting Elena made clear. Here he is on the preparations for a typical night out during his Greenwich Village days:

  I’d clean my apartment carefully, change the sheets and towels, put a hand towel under the pillow (the “trick towel” for mopping up the come) along with the tube of lubricant (usually water-soluble K-Y). You might even “douche out”—sometimes, if you were a real “senior girl,” with a stainless-steel insertable nozzle attached to the shower. You’d buy eggs and bacon and jam and bread for toast, if you wanted to prove the next morning that you were “marriage material.” You’d place an ashtray, cigarettes, and a lighter on the bedside table. You’d lower the lights and stack the record player with suitable mood music (Peggy Lee, not the Stones) before you headed out on the prowl. All this to prove you were “civilized,” not just one more voracious two-bit whore. Once you’d landed a man, there was no way to know what he liked to do in bed.

  What makes the passage work so well is the deliberately sharp and unexpected contrast that snaps into place with the last sentence, between the meticulous, even maniacal preparations, which attempt to foresee every contingency from raw sex to an affectionate sleepover to “marriage,” and the elusive unknowability of the trick himself.

  White can be as shrewdly observant of others as he is of his younger self. Many readers of City Boy are likely to cherish the louche anecdotes and tales out of school about the famous writer friends whom White acquired (and not infrequently lost) on his way up the literary ladder—Sontag, of course, but also Ashbery (“a hapless, amusing presence”), James Merrill, and his early mentor Richard Howard, one of the many more established figures to whom the young White attached himself and who tried to give him advice and help. In keeping with his own stated interests, White prefers to dilate on the quirky detail, the mannerism of speech or gesture or appearance. (He goes on about Howard’s shiny bald pate, not nearly as common in the 1960s as now.) It must be said that the occasional detours into discussions of these writers’ work, as opposed to their private lives, feel obligatory and none too profound—they have the vacant chirpiness of blurbs. (“A long, sustained look at the self, at what it might and might not be in these godless days”: so White on Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.)

  Significantly, White gossips best about those he knows—or who matter to him—least. One of the most entertaining stretches of City Boy occurs during a reminsicence of a trip to Italy, in which White reincarnates his wide-eyed younger self on a visit to the Cipriani pool, ogling the decadent, unhappy, much-married jet-setters—a bit of dishing that sparkles with fun precisely because it has the lightness of touch, the clarity, and the disinvoltura that characterize a really good gossip. No one knows this better than White, who clearly sees himself as something of a connoisseur of gossip. In The Married Man, the White character, a gay American expat long resident in Paris, returns home and sniffs at the locals’ inability to gossip with any savoir faire. “They didn’t know how to serve it up. They got bogged down in detail, they introduced too many names, and they never told the end.”

  And yet he himself commits these very errors when he’s overly invested in the people he’s gossiping about. When he writes about other writers who were more acclaimed or recognized in those days—he has a long memory for people who, like the playwright Mart Crowley (The Boys in the Band) didn’t understand his work, or who, like the editor Robert Gottlieb, rejected it—the retributive barbs can seem petty and the anecdotes often feel gratuitous: he includes unflattering stories not only about Sontag herself (with whom White had a violent break after Caracole came out in 1985) but about her son, David Rieff. When, contemplating his failed friendship with Sontag, he blithely notes that he “never got to the bottom of my impulse toward treachery, especially toward people who’d helped me and befriended me,” what strikes you is not so much the unpleasant admission but the blitheness with which he makes it—and, even more, his unwillingness to use the memoir to explore this trait, to get to the bottom of things instead of skimming the surface. This is what a memoir ought to do.

  These personal impulses, and other personal preoccupations, often get in the way of the specificity and attention to detail that White himself advocates as crucial ingredients of good writing. When he describes Greenwich Village streets in the 1970s as being “crowded with kids with long hair and burgundy velvet jeans and mirrored vests and filmy shirts with puffy pirates sleeves,” or when he recalls, of a brief stint on the West Coast, that “it seemed to us that everyone in San Francisco were doing yoga and reading Krishnamurti,” you don’t doubt that it’s true, but there’s something suspiciously generic about these characterizations—they feel cribbed, and don’t have the complex textures of real experience. (Recalling New York City’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s, White writes that Gerald Ford “told New York to drop dead”; but of course Ford never said that—White is quoti
ng the famous Daily News headline.)

  A comparable laziness informs White’s larger social or political assessments. Do you really need to be told that midcentury suburban Americans were “sealed off in their offices or cars or houses, no one saw anyone outside his or her circle or had any contact with strangers. Suburbia, television, and the automobile had isolated everyone”? Good memoirs should penetrate beyond such clichés, not repackage them. The book itself is carelessly written, and even more carelessly edited: some characters are introduced twice, and a number of descriptions (of New York City, of his own books, of The New York Times, against whom he seems to have a particular animus) are repeated verbatim. And sentences like “Yale and Harvard had been a bit sniffy about anything so louche in which mere writers without degrees were allowed to shape young minds” are likely to inspire a bit of anxiety on behalf of undergraduate writing students at Princeton.

  I suspect that White, who can be so precise, allows himself to be this lazy because he is, as it were, preaching to the converted—he’s a gay writer writing for a sympathetic, if not wholly gay, audience, and after all “we all know what it was like.” The kind of cozy parochialisms to which this kind of assumption leads make for some embarrassing moments in City Boy—and, worse, suggest the intellectual and aesthetic limitations imposed by the gay-niche writing and thinking White had championed in his conversation with Poirier. He doesn’t like E. M. Forster because of his “closetedness”; he finds nothing “human or feeling” in Dante (“terribly underwritten … nothing vulnerable or hesitant”) because the Florentine poet placed his homosexual master, Ser Brunetto, in Hell. Here, White’s rose-colored glasses have not so much colored his vision as blinded him: to dismiss the Inferno, as he does, as “an unimaginative application of the rules to desires” because it isn’t somehow “gay-friendly” is intellectually grotesque—and, anyway, an incorrect reading of the text. It would be hard to find a more poignant passage than the one in which the poet meets his doomed, beloved teacher in Hell.

  This reflexive tendency to reduce everything to the dimensions of his preexisting interests and predilections can become wearying in City Boy; indeed, it was already wearying to some of White’s friends in the years to which this book is devoted. After reporting to Richard Howard that he’d spent much of his first trip to Rome visiting gyms and cruising spots, Howard exclaimed in dismay: “Here you are in the central city of Western culture and you’ve managed to turn it into some sort of kicky version of Scranton.” White’s honesty in relating the episode is to his credit; the episode is not. In the best memoirs, a single, minutely recorded life can lead to large insight about the world; City Boy, by contrast, makes the world feel small.

  Howard’s remark, and with it thoughts about the size of our lives in relation the size of the world itself, bring you back to Poirier’s worries, those many years ago, about the reductive implications of a literature by and for gay people. On the one hand, no one would want a biography of a gay (or Jewish, or black) writer that elided his sexuality (or religion, or race); such a work would and should be dismissed as insufficient. On the other hand, a biography (or, for that matter, a novel or a literary essay) that lost sight of the fact that sex and sexuality (or religion, or race) are, finally, a part but not the whole of our lives—there are other influences, other forces at work that help shape the creative mind, indeed any mind—risks devolving into a pat chauvinism, a kind of cultural boosterism. (At the beginning of his Proust biography, White catalogs writers who have been affected by À la recherche in one way or another; after briefly listing Joyce, Beckett, Woolf, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Genet, and Thomas Mann, he dilates upon Proust’s effect on Andrew Holleran, the author of a 1978 novel about gay alienation—a juxtaposition that, while meant to elevate Holleran’s standing, does him no favors.) White’s bad habits—the lopsided parochialism, the cattiness, the knowing winks that too often substitute for genuine insight—are the defects into which niche-thinking and niche-writing can lead us. Whatever its authentic achievements (those early novels, a number of penetrating meditations on the impact of AIDS on the gay creative community), too much of White’s work can be personal in the wrong way.

  And yet whatever the later impulse to turn Rome into Scranton, White, like so many writers, started out by dreaming big dreams of the great world. Again and again in City Boy he recalls his youthful yearning to be “famous among the top echelons of the cultural elite,” to have a “lasting reputation” and “literary celebrity”—a yearning to be known that was so great that for him

  writing was essential to survival. Again, not because I had such beautiful or intense sentiments or because my ideas were so pressing and elevated (I didn’t even have many ideas except during the five minutes every day when I took a shower), but because it was the label, writer, that mattered to me most in some primitive, essential way.

  This kind of self-exposure becomes all the more moving when, in a startling moment of genuine and unusually acute self-reflection (as opposed to mere self-exposure), White worries that the movement that became the vehicle for his literary renown may have been wrongheaded after all. “I sometimes regret the invention of the category ‘gay,’ ” he startlingly writes at the end of City Boy, as he looks back on the history of gay-niche publishing:

  Now all these years later, when “gay literature” has come and gone as a commercial fad and a serious movement, I can see [Poirier’s] point. It’s true that as a movement it did isolate us—to our advantage initially, though ultimately to our disadvantage. At first it drew the attention of critics and editors to our writing, but in the end (after our books didn’t sell) it served to quarantine us into a small, confined space. Before the category of “gay writing” was invented, books with gay content (Vidal’s City and the Pillar, Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Isherwood’s A Single Man) were widely reviewed and often became bestsellers. After a label was applied to them they were dismissed as being of special interest only to gay people. They could only preach to the converted.

  This is a far cry from the attitude of the young White who had once resentfully criticized Poirier and other gay writers he knew when he was starting out—even the ones who were unabashedly out of the closet, like Merrill and Ashbery—for wanting to assimilate aesthetically, as he saw it: to write for the larger world instead of—well, preaching to the converted, to that small “community [that] we want[ed] to celebrate in novels that would create our identity while also exploring it.” Hence although City Boy, like many a bildungsroman, ostensibly culminates in a happy attainment of maturity—the young White’s successful quest to be a published gay writer—there is another, deeper education that plays out in these pages: the one that culminates in the author’s poignant, late-life admission that real literature is, in fact, “universal,” that it seeks to dissolve rather than create intellectual and artistic ghettos.

  Still, you suspect that White, unabashedly a product of the era he recalls in the new memoir, would be the first to admit that what he has been writing all these years—the ongoing, earnest transcription of gay life and gay lives, of which City Boy is but the latest installment—has aimed to fill a niche instead of a universe. What he wanted, after all, was to become celebrated, to have a reputation, to be known as a writer, whatever the sentiments and the ideas might be. This he has certainly done. Who would begrudge him the satisfaction that he got what he wanted?

  —The New York Review of Books, September 30, 2010

  THE COLLECTOR

  IT IS SOMEHOW appropriate that the voice of deep and anguished ambivalence that speaks at the beginning of Reborn, the new volume of Susan Sontag’s early journals and notebooks, does not belong to Susan Sontag. Self-doubt was not a quality you generally associated with her. From the moment she burst onto the literary scene nearly fifty years ago, with the publication of the essays subsequently collected as Against Interpretation—a cultural-critical Athena, armored with a vast erudition, bristling with epigrams—Sontag exhibited a pret
ernatural self-assurance in matters of art and culture, an unwavering belief in her own judgments and tastes that, as these early private papers now make clear, she possessed already in her early teens. (The first of a projected three volumes of Sontag’s journals, this one takes her to the age of thirty; fully one third of it is a record of her teenage years.)

  The embarrassment with which Reborn begins belongs, rather, to her son, the writer David Rieff, who edited his mother’s journals. In a preface, Rieff describes how he uneasily consented to publish this “raw” and “unvarnished” sampling of Sontag’s adolescent effusions about life and her early perceptions about art; he shows a marked queasiness about “the literary dangers and moral hazards of such an enterprise.” The anxiety stems from two sources. The first was ethical and, so to speak, generic: although his mother, in one of her final illnesses, was anxious for him to know where the journals were kept, there was no indication that Sontag would have wanted the contents of these papers to be made public. “The diaries,” Rieff notes, “were written solely for herself.… She had never permitted a line from them to be published, nor, unlike some diarists, did she read from them to friends.”

  Rieff’s second scruple, more personal and more revealing, suggests the reason for the first:

  To say that these diaries are self-revelatory is a drastic understatement.… One of the principal dilemmas in all this has been that, at least in her later life, my mother was not in any way a self-revealing person. In particular, she avoided to the extent that she could, without denying it, any discussion of her own homosexuality or any acknowledgment of her own ambition.

  Sexuality and ambition are, of course, the reason that many people read the private journals of public figures; in Sontag’s case, the inevitable interest in the raw passions corresponding to “homosexuality” and “ambition” is bound to be particularly strong, because her highly polished public and literary persona seemed designed to quash interest in precisely those two things. On the one hand, there was the famous reticence about her lesbianism, despite the fact that it was, as she awkwardly admitted late in life, an “open secret.” On the other, there was the cool Artemis-like glamour (that silver streak), the sense she projected of being the high priestess of High Culture. (A sense heightened by her penchant for gnomic utterances: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art”; “New York: all sensuality is converted to sexuality.”) All of this conferred upon her an aura of intellectual invulnerability, of an authority that, rather than having been earned or having evolved, she somehow had always possessed complete.