City Boy

by Edmund White

  I took fiction so seriously (which I thought of as art) that I wanted my prose to be un-American, not of any era, unidentifiable because it was original. Of course I didn’t do much to realize these preposterous ambitions. I was too busy writing unproduceable plays and meeting new people and killing time at work.

  Joe Chaikin had a lover, the playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie, but apparently Joe and I had a brief affair. At least in the early 1990s, when I was writing a biography of Jean Genet and asked the librarian at Kent State for copies of Jean Genet’s letters, the librarian wrote back, “Perhaps you’d also like copies of your own love letters to Joe Chaikin.” I couldn’t recall ever having been in love with Joe. I can picture only one hot summer night with him in his little apartment, his body covered with curly hairs, his face and back lightly filmed in sweat. There was something unhealthy about him, I thought—and soon enough he had to have open-heart surgery, which left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak normally. He incorporated that disability into his work; earlier for no apparent personal reasons he had learned sign language and worked with the deaf on the stage. He had a great sweetness and intelligence about him—an intelligence of the senses and of the instincts.

  I thought he should stage my play Mrs. Morrigan, but he was far more attracted to plays he and his company would piece together during months and months of improvisation, though the final text might be set down and polished and shaped by van Itallie. America Hurrah, a trilogy of plays produced in 1966, was a watershed anti–Vietnam War protest, one with expressionist elements (puppets designed by Robert Wilson) and dialogue that sometimes sounded like Beckett and sometimes like Ionesco. Chaikin directed only one of the three plays. Another play that van Itallie developed with Chaikin was The Serpent, performed in 1969, which toured all over the world in the following years.

  Chaikin had worked out a kind of theater that would suddenly lurch without transition into enactments of repressed feelings. A man picking up his dry cleaning would suddenly click into a slow-motion rapturous embrace with the woman working in the shop.

  One of the participants in the Open Theater, as the troupe was called, was an actor who in those days had a caveman virility and a brooding, almost scary presence—Gerome Ragni. He had been a member of the Open Theater since its founding in 1962 and starred in its production of Megan Terry’s 1966 play, Viet Rock, perhaps the first theater event to protest the war in Vietnam. Ragni then went on to write the words and lyrics for Hair, which also used Chaikin’s stage techniques. Later, after the success of Hair, Ragni lost his manly good looks and became a sort of clown, with a white man’s Afro and gaudy, flowing tie-dyed clothes. He was always stoned and talking and baring his teeth. His script for his next musical, the short-lived Dude, was originally two thousand pages long. His apartment had a narrow, plush birth canal as its entryway. Everyone laughed at him.

  Joe, too, was swept up in the Vietnam protest movement. He told me that he’d never do anything ever again in the theater that wasn’t in opposition to the war. I didn’t care about the war. During my army physical I’d checked the box saying I had homosexual tendencies, which got me out of having to serve. Some people frowned on me, as if I were deliberately avoiding my patriotic duty, but I argued that to have lied in answering the questionnaire would have been illegal. I was being honest—and honesty in this case saved my life. Of course most of the men I knew personally never went to Vietnam; they stayed in grad school for years and years getting academic deferments. Or they fled the country to Canada. Or they checked the box.

  Not that concepts like “patriotism” meant anything to me. As a gay man I didn’t think that I was American or that I belonged to a society worth defending. Of course I wouldn’t have said such a thing out loud; I didn’t want to sound disgruntled. But truthfully I felt powerless to affect national policy, and I also knew that any policy that might be devised by any government present or future would contain a clause condemning me as a homosexual. There was no “gay pride” back then—there was only gay fear and gay isolation and gay distrust and gay self-hatred.

  I didn’t even feel part of “homosexual society”—we didn’t think like that back then. The term would have made us laugh: “Homosexual society? My dear, I’m not even a queer deb.” I didn’t follow politics nor did I ever vote in elections. Kennedy’s death saddened me but less so than Marilyn Monroe’s. Stan went to Washington and marched with Martin Luther King, but I didn’t. I can still picture Stan in his short-sleeved white shirt, carefully pressed, and his pegged black pants as he headed off for Washington in a bus. I never gave a penny to any political cause—or wrote a word on behalf of any movement.

  If I’d thought about it, I might have said I was too “radical” to vote or that “revolutionaries” like me saw no need to reinforce the “system” by participating in it. I’d learned to talk that way at the University of Michigan, where my friends and classmates Tom Hayden (later married to Jane Fonda) and Carl Oglesby had written the Port Huron Statement and had been among the first members of the Students for a Democratic Society. This was the beginning of the New Left. In the Port Huron Statement, which was completed on June 15, 1962, the Vietnam War was still so minor that it rated only a brief mention. The rights of Negroes were the primary concern. No thought was given to women. “Man” and his future were endlessly discussed. Nevertheless, it was a sensible and inspirational document, though of course from the perspective of the early twenty-first century it appears naïve. For instance, it calls for the United States to help third-world countries to industrialize; ecological worries are never voiced. Competition in the economy must be replaced by cooperation. The Cold War must give way to nuclear disarmament; the Bomb weighed on everyone’s mind.

  Though I knew how to talk the Leftist talk, those high-flown demurrals would have been dishonest. I wasn’t a dissenter; no, I was disaffected. When I was fourteen, a plainclothes cop had entrapped me at the urinal of a movie theater and threatened to arrest me. At last he’d let me go, but I had grasped the lesson—gay desire was illegal. The most fundamental thing about me—my desire to sleep with other males—was loathsome to society, even to other gay men, as much as pedophilia would be today. Many of the gay men I picked up made it clear that what we were doing was dangerous. If I could have stopped my “acting out,” as my various psychiatrists called it, I would have.

  I was an individualist in the sense that I responded in no way to the appeal of clannishness. I didn’t belong to a clan. I didn’t know any published novelists except one friend at my office, George Constable, who brought out three novels in the sixties. I had a few college friends in New York, but we’d gone to the University of Michigan, a huge state school that didn’t instill the same pride or command the same loyalty as Harvard or Yale or Princeton. I was a Midwesterner living in New York, but even in Ohio and Illinois my parents had been displaced Texans. My mother made spicy Tex-Mex food that was distasteful to the few kids from school I invited home. I had no regional allegiances. I had friends now at work but all but one of them were straight and would have felt intensely ill at ease or even repulsed had I discussed with them my sexuality. My one gay friend at work was in the closet. Two or three of the girls at Time-Life might have guessed I was gay, but that recognition was never articulated and would have called for no possible response beyond melancholy compassion for my “sad” affliction.

  Perhaps if I’d gone to Harvard or Princeton (I’d been accepted to both) I’d have benefited from those connections after graduation. As it was, I had no contacts with the rich or even the prosperous or the influential in New York. I’d obtained my job with no help from anyone. My parents, now that I’d graduated, never gave me a penny. I loved New York, but not because it had showered its favors on me. The people I worked with were all Ivy Leaguers, but I seldom hung out with them after work.

  I didn’t feel an affiliation with anyone. I had a few friends but I don’t think at that age I’d yet learned what friendship was, what it
would eventually come to mean to me. I knew how to be interested in the people around me and how to say warm things that would attach them to me, and I was so grateful to anyone who seemed to like me that I would pursue him or her tirelessly. But that was exactly the problem. I hadn’t stopped to wonder what was in it for me. Perhaps my self-esteem was so low that I was mainly eager to placate people, to amass allies in what I perceived to be a hostile world. I had a character that anticipated disaster, and with that eventuality in mind I was accumulating friends. For me friendship was nothing but an entente cordiale; I didn’t know how to confide. I never shared my doubts with anyone. I’d mastered a fetching way of confessing shocking, colorful details of my life to the initiated, but I never mentioned to anyone any of my serious doubts or fears or hopes. Nor any of my ideas, which I knew would bore them; as a result, those ideas remained half-formed because never articulated. Maybe because I spent my forties and fifties in Paris, I later came to embrace the importance of the “milieu.” I could see that our American brand of Romantic individualism didn’t really amount to much; one was only as good as one’s circle, and a superior, stimulating milieu could raise the general level of conversation, of sophistication, even of moral discrimination and esthetic refinement, certainly of ambition and accomplishment.

  In my twenties and thirties, before I left New York for Paris, I might have confided in friends if I’d have thought that would make them like me more, but I was so cynical that I assumed everyone around me was entirely self-absorbed. I’d deflect a question with a question of my own. Like a girl who’s been to a Southern charm school, I knew that one could always count on the other person’s inexhaustible egotism and that no one had any possible motive for unmasking a flatterer. One of my favorite writers of the time was the eighteenth-century cynic Lord Chesterfield, who in his letters to his illegitimate son taught him the amoral arts of the courtier (how to curry favor, how to coerce others to yield up their secrets while remaining discreet oneself, how to make oneself amusing and indispensable to the powerful). I remember one particularly repulsive passage in which Chesterfield’s poor witless illegitimate son is counseled to endear himself to a French hostess by stamping his foot prettily and insisting that some onerous task is his duty and his alone and that he refuses to share it with any of her other cavaliers servants. Chesterfield thought this kind of pretend petulance was particularly charming and attractive.

  I knew several girls at work and two from Ann Arbor who’d moved to New York at the same time. Stan knew two or three girls with whom he rehearsed for the Berghof scene-study classes. Otherwise after work we lived in an entirely male world. It wasn’t that we were misogynists, though we were probably a bit scared of women and felt some lingering, irrational guilt around them since we had silently, surreptitiously excluded ourselves from the ranks of their potential suitors. I didn’t think of women as horny but as needy. I attributed to all women the loneliness and desperation of my divorced mother. In college I’d dated two or three girls. They were there partly for therapeutic reasons, since I hoped to go straight (slowly) and to get married (eventually), but they were also in my life because they were good bohemian women, physically generous, cozy pot-smokers, artistic—and above all tolerant.

  The one woman who spanned all these years, from 1956 when I met her till now, more than half a century later, was Marilyn Schaefer, whom I’ve written about again and again (often under the name of Maria) from my first published story (“Goldfish and Olives” in 1962, published in New Campus Writing). She was six or seven years older than me, which now means nothing (she looks much younger than I do), but at the time was of some consequence. I’d met her when I was at Cranbrook, a boy’s boarding school outside Detroit, Michigan. She was a painting student next door at the art academy, one of the five schools that made up the Cranbrook complex at that time.

  She was so far from any of my received ideas about women that I found her to be at once disconcerting and reassuring. Unlike Marilyn, most women in the fifties devoted considerable energy and ingenuity to dramatizing gender differences. That was the era of crinolines puffing up skirts, of carefully coiffed hair, of subtle pink lipsticks and painted-on all-over Pan-Cake makeup, of tightly cinched-in waists and stupid poodle decals in felt blazoned across the front of a skirt. Women simpered and blushed and pouted; as in Orwell’s discussion of working-class penny dreadfuls, they went directly from being a Honeymooner (all curves and ditsy innocence) to being Mom (prettily outraged fists planted on ample hips under a tailored skirt below a perfectly pressed blouse). From soprano to contralto. The older version of womanhood was best enacted by Lucille Ball, the mindless, eye-batting redhead, always adorably confused by the world’s complexities and endlessly hatching another harebrained scheme.

  Marilyn had pretty, small features and was slim and nearly flat-chested. She had a tiny wen on the lower lid of her right eye, which gave her gaze an intriguing asymmetry, as if it were an artfully placed beauty patch. She never wore makeup at all and had a well-scrubbed look, a bit like the actress Nicole Stéphane, the sister in Cocteau’s (and Melville’s) Les Enfants Terribles. Marilyn’s parents were German-Americans who’d been born in the reclusive Iowa religious colony of Amana. They’d moved away from the colony when they were young soon after they were married, but they’d imparted to their children an idea of the possibility of being different from other people. Marilyn’s older brother Dick had studied philosophy in Vienna, become a communist and a West Coast longshoreman before ending up a conservative, pious Catholic. Marilyn’s next older brother, Carol (named after King Carol of Romania), ran the family construction business and became a gentle, cultured, kindly Midwestern businessman. Marilyn was, and remains, a militant atheist and has always been left-leaning, though eventually her activities as a feminist displaced her sympathies for the Soviet Union, Red China, and Castro’s Cuba. Her younger sister became a Catholic convert who worked an office job in New York but devoted most of her spare time to absorbing the wisdom of her intellectual guru. The youngest brother lived in Chicago and was in finance.

  All of the Schaefers, somewhat surprisingly, had a terrific sense of humor, dry and self-deflating. They were all devoted to their mother but had a more difficult rapport with their father, a big lovable man who’d tear up when he’d had a few schnapps, who still had a German accent though he had been born in Iowa—and who had an unfortunate habit of defending anything Germany did, including the election of Hitler as chancellor. He was what the French call a négationiste, someone who denies that the Holocaust took place (a crime in Europe that can result in prison time). Back in the religious colony he’d been trained as a youngster to be a carpenter. After joining “the world” he became a successful real estate developer and builder. At first a union man and progressive in politics, he soon drifted to the right.

  Marilyn loved her father but found his politics infuriating and his assumption of traditional gender roles even more maddening. Old Mr. Schaefer would, no doubt, have had no idea what she was talking about, though he had learned to cool it in public with his views on the Führer. She grudgingly admired his interest in history, though she regretted he was always deep into the latest worshipful biography of Bismarck or Hindenburg. When her family went to Europe, it was to head directly for the Fatherland; even a change of planes in France or England they thought of as sullying them.

  I learned (and remembered) all of this about her family because I idolized Marilyn, coaxing stories about Amana and its strange rites and regulations out of her. For instance, I knew that if a young Amana couple wanted to get married, it became a cause for regret, since the elders thought it was tragic to bring more children into the world. Accordingly, the betrothed pair were first separated for a long time to see if they would still want to persist in their folly.

  Marilyn had retained none of these beliefs, but her zeal in defending her brand of socialism (and later feminism) struck me as extreme. Now she’d say that I was exaggerating the violence of her op
inions of that period. Although Marilyn liked the “sophisticated” side of New York (the songs of Bobby Short and Mabel Mercer, the chic black singers at the Café Carlyle), she was less susceptible than I to the rush toward celebrity, the push to be famous in the arts that dominated New York life in that period. I was obsessed with being famous—not rich, which held no interest for me, but famous among the top echelons of the cultural elite. Marilyn found my ambition incomprehensible—and laughable. She was “down-to-earth,” to use a favorite American phrase that always puzzles my European friends. I have never stopped being influenced by her sensible, de-dramatizing way of looking at the world, though by nature I am overwrought and desperate for recognition.

  She was enamored of passionate Puccini arias, and she and I would listen over and over to Manon Lescaut. She was esepcially fond of the great passionate Swedish tenor Jussi Björling and, after seeing him at the Chicago Lyric, reported back that he was short and corseted and elderly—a real dumpling. She liked that his youthful heartrending voice didn’t go with his looks at all. She was also a big fan of the Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi. In those days everyone was either for Tebaldi or Maria Callas (as so often happens, the runner-up, Tebaldi, is less often mentioned now).