City Boy

by Edmund White

  In college I got it into my head that I should marry Marilyn. I felt that she’d be understanding about my struggle against homosexuality. I told her I loved her and wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. She responded with long, passionate kisses. I was thrilled and frightened, as though I was about to spoil a wonderful friendship or get myself into water far deeper than I could navigate. But then again, I thought I’d been saved. I’d been so afraid of spending the rest of my life as that frightening hippogriff, a homosexual. Now I’d been transformed into an ordinary male, and yet with Marilyn nothing would be banal or conventional. We’d be normal, a happily married couple, but we’d be artists, enraptured by our Puccini.

  She drove us everywhere. I could drive, but not well—I preferred her behind the wheel. When she said she never wanted to marry, I took it with a whole box of salt; I knew about women, about their biological drive to marry and procreate. The urge was stronger than they were. Nothing could stop their need to nest and hatch. Though I must say we never spoke of children and I felt no need, not even the slightest passing twinge of desire, to have offspring, to see little Eddies and Marilyns looking up at us with trusting or resentful eyes.

  I could scarcely acknowledge to anyone, not even to myself, how relieved I was to be straight. I’d so feared spending my life as a freak, of watching myself become more and more effeminate under my mop of dyed blond curls stiff from a permanent, imprisoned behind a pair of frightened, frozen eyes under painted-brown eyebrows. I’d seen swishy men in their forties and fifties working as waiters in Chicago at little gay restaurants along Rush Street, alternating between icy efficiency and campy self-dramatization, their red-and-white-checked shirt collars turned up over a red silk knotted scarf, the raised collar lightly grazing their peroxided duck’s-ass hairdo.

  I was so proud of my escape from this fate that I even bragged to my father that I wanted to marry Marilyn. He didn’t know her, but when he discovered that she was seven years older than me, he advised me against such an unpromising union. “An older girl might look good to you now, Ed, but women don’t age well. If you don’t watch it, you’ll be stuck with an old bag. Better to marry someone seven years younger.” I was offended at his butcher’s way of sizing up a side of beef. But I was amazed that after worrying himself sick over the shameful reality of my homosexuality, he didn’t rejoice in any approximation of heterosexuality I might come up with. The bourgeoisie! I thought indignantly. They don’t really care about the happiness of their children, only about respectability in the eyes of others.

  Although Marilyn and I were planning to spend a summer together (after my junior year) in Chicago—she painting, I writing—I was so worried about the consequences of my declaration of love that I went inert. I played dead. I didn’t call her. I didn’t write her. She wrote me two or three letters to which I did not respond. I kept intending to write her a really long, ardent letter, but with every passing day I became more panicked and immobilized. At last she sent me a curt little note saying, “Yours is not like any love I ever heard of. Let’s just skip it and be friends. Anyway, I’ve decided I prefer girls. I’m spending the summer with Miranda.”

  I felt as if I’d somehow missed a crucial beat. Girls? Miranda? I remembered there’d been a beautiful, butchy Texan by that name at Cranbrook, a rich girl from Fort Worth who laughed at all of Marilyn’s jokes. But hadn’t there also been a bearded Jewish painter named Jay from Brooklyn?

  Three years went by, Stan and I had moved to New York, then one day I got a call from Marilyn, who was in tears. She’d just had her heart broken by a wild, fast-driving, heavy-drinking Southern girl named Megan who looked like Anthony Quinn. Marilyn was distraught—what could she do?

  “Move to New York,” I said. “Move in with us. We have a spare room with a little single bed.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” I said. Stan was nodding on the couch. Later he would claim that I hadn’t warned him Marilyn was bringing her cat along.

  A few days later Marilyn arrived with a single suitcase, her 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and her black cat, Booboo. We were all three very happy, three Midwesterners in the Big City. Of course Stan was moody and suffered over his acting, his future, his strange family, his insecurities. He would take an hour getting dressed to walk to the corner. He’d try on one outfit after another. “Does this blue sweater make my ass look too big?” “Should I roll up these sleeves—or are my arms too hairless?” “Is this pimple on my nose grotesque—should I stay home today?” Marilyn still cried a lot over Megan. But she found a job at the Encyclopedia Americana and an apartment on the Upper West Side. After two or three months with us she moved out and was living on her own. Stan and I spent all our holidays with her and many weekends. She and I would sit up late over a bottle of wine and argue about politics. She was coldly dismissive of America’s achievements and invariably enthusiastic about what the Soviet Union had accomplished. The motto “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” made perfect sense to her (and to me). A redistribution of property and an equalization of income seemed only fair to us. If I vaunted American civil liberties, Marilyn insisted that so-called freedoms that were not backed up by economic equality were empty. And anyway, how could we be sure what was going on within Russia? Our only source of news was the hysterical American press, blind with its prejudices and fear.

  Our longest and most recurring discussions were about the role of the arts in an ideal socialist state. If I criticized the well-known censorship practiced in the Soviet Union, Marilyn would say that if she could save a single human life by destroying the Mona Lisa, she would do so. Although she was a painter, art meant little to Marilyn. She saw it as some sort of bourgeois religion, a milder but no less absurd substitute for the deadlier original forms of piety. She admitted that she was inordinately fond of art herself, but at the same time considered her interest to be something like a regrettable hobby—certainly nothing that mattered to the people. She remembered that when she was working with the socialist newspaper in Iowa, they had tried to introduce sketches instead of photographs as illustrations, and that the few genuine workers who actually read the paper hated the drawings. She admitted with a laugh that she was in the uncomfortable position of being an abstract expressionist who knew that her ideal public, the proletariat, disliked her chosen form of art. She felt that until the revolution came along, she could continue to doodle with oils on canvas, but knew that her paintings were of no lasting significance. Not to History. Not to the People.

  This austere self-abnegation appealed to me. Her beliefs in no way served her personal goals. During those Cold War years we seriously believed that one side might triumph over the other, and we felt communism had a fighting chance of winning. Of course we were for communism because it was fair. I suppose that if we’d been in France or Italy, where the Communist Party was strong and where people lived in constant dread of a Soviet invasion, we would have had to face up to the consequences of our beliefs. But in America what was called the Left was so weak and so centrist that a revolution seemed both totally unreal and theoretically possible. We were free to build our communes in the sky. The American Communist Party had been all but hounded out of existence.

  Marilyn found the putative equality of men and women in the Soviet Union especially appealing. She would draw my attention to the number of women engineers and doctors and scientists in Russia, just as she would refer to the prevalence of free love in the early days after the Bolshevik Revolution. If I mentioned the show trials, the mass murders of kulaks, the anti-Semitism, she’d say that I’d merely fallen victim to CIA propaganda.

  I spent a lot of time thinking about the status of art, not just from a political point of view. In those days we still believed in the avant-garde—a belief that was in fact the opposite of the socialist realism promulgated by the Soviet Union. In the States in the late sixties and early seventies, the cutting edge in literature was metafiction
, the sort of storytelling that is hyperconscious of its status as an artifact and that constantly draws attention to its own devices. I proposed to Farrar, Straus and Giroux a book of essays and interviews devoted to the leading metafictionists—John Barth, Robert Coover, Rudolph Wurlitzer, and Donald Barthelme. Although I was crushed at the time, I’m now glad that the book was rejected. I’m still fond of individual works by these various authors today, but as a movement it no longer intrigues me, or anyone else.

  In the late sixties and early seventies, however, everyone who was “serious” about the arts believed that the avant-garde still existed and always would—and that the only problem was how to divine the direction in which art was moving at any moment. Today, by contrast, art is moving in dozens of directions and nothing seems inevitable or imperative.

  Back then we’d ask things such as “Is Pop Art just a temporary diversion or is it the next swing in the dialectic after abstract expressionism, a cool, ironic way of reintroducing the figurative without returning to realism?” There could only be one “advanced” trend, and it would necessarily point the way toward the next and the next development and the one after that. Was op art a way of raising the stakes of Pop—or was it a dead end? And what about conceptual art—was it a return to Duchamp’s mind games? Was Duchamp the true father of contemporary art (not Picasso, as we’d so long imagined)? Ironically, only in retrospect could anyone be sure what the true path had been.

  The evolution in fiction was less obvious, though it did seem that the novel was steadily moving away from realism and that the most vital new novels were inventing new forms, new language, new strategies. We were all bewitched by Donald Barthelme’s bejeweled word collages in which nothing was predictable, everything was surprising to the point of headiness.

  I was so convinced of these notions that in some of my first book reviews I haughtily dismissed any novel that struck me as old-fashioned—until I was asked to review a collection of stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. His way of narrating a story, his love of strange and telling details, his humanity (joined unexpectedly with a bracing lack of sentimentality), all bewitched me. This stuff wasn’t new formally, I conceded, but it was obviously good. I decided to put aside my art-historical preconceptions and to embrace what was inarguably great.

  Because of Singer I became interested (through an illogical and strictly private set of associations) in the Great Russians—Tolstoy and Chekhov, Turgenev and Gogol and, as best as I could make him out in translation, Pushkin. For two years I immersed myself during every free moment in these authors. I’d put behind the avant-garde tricksters I’d so recently admired, who now struck me as nothing but classy jugglers. Their cleverness shrank into insignificance next to the pathos and clear-eyed universalism of Tolstoy and Chekhov. I was in my late twenties and early thirties and at that point still had an excellent memory, an entirely involuntary and untrained gift, like good eyesight. My living guide to these writers was Nabokov, whose lectures on literature had not yet been published but whose interviews had been collected in Strong Opinions. Like Nabokov I dismissed Dostoyevsky, just as Nabokov convinced me to skip over Conrad and Faulkner in English. At about this time the great Russian scholar Simon Karlinsky published in TriQuarterly an essay called “The Other Tradition,” which rejected the “radical utilitarianism” prevalent in Russia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (all that social uplift, which anticipated socialist realism) in favor of a more purely artistic tradition: Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov and Nabokov. I read Chekhov’s letters to Gorky in which he instructed him not to try to be inventive in his descriptions of nature. He told him to stick to expressions such as “the sun set” or “the snow began to fall.” Simon Karlinsky’s and Michael Henry Heim’s annotations to Chekhov’s letters constituted the best biography of the short-story master that existed—and one of the most fascinating books about literature published at that time. My immersion in Russian literature was so total that when I met Karlinsky, he told me that I could easily pass the Ph.D. orals in Russian—except for the inconvenient fact that I knew not a word of the language.

  It is difficult to convey the intensity and confusion in our minds back then in the sixties and early seventies as we tried to reconcile two incompatible tendencies—a dandified belief in the avant-garde with a utopian New Left dedication to social justice, both of which in my case could be overruled by an admiration of the simple humanity of the Great Russians or Singer. Looking back now, I’d say that because we were Americans emerging from the stultifying 1950s, we were extraordinarily naïve about both politics and esthetics—humorless, unseasoned, dogmatic because untested. What was shared by these two doctrines—the continuing (and endless) avant-garde and radical politics—was an opposition to the society around us, which we judged to be both philistine and selfish. America had changed in seismic ways in the decades that preceded us, but we knew little or nothing about these forgotten changes. The twenties had seen mass migrations of African-Americans from the South to the industrial cities of the North. In the thirties much of the country had been unemployed, poor, and spoiling for a fight. The fight came unexpectedly in the forties in the form of a world war; domestically the war had meant women went to work in offices and factories as young men were killing and dying in the trenches. The fifties—the period of my adolescence—had put all these rebellious impulses to sleep; it had functioned as a soporific to the spirit. I’d belonged to the Eisenhower Club at the YMCA, and General MacArthur’s farewell tour (after he was fired by President Truman for his excessive martial zeal in Korea) was one of the significant events of my youth—he came to our town! I saw him! The arts were actually flourishing during the 1950s in America, but almost secretly. The museums were empty, the concert halls were dedicated to no one more adventurous than the three B’s— Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. People read and discussed the same ten “serious” novels every season. During the student shows at the Cranbrook Art Academy, the Detroit public came to scoff at the messy, scary abstract paintings—and the students stayed to scoff at the scoffers.

  Marilyn seldom applied her theoretical acumen to her own development as a painter. I can’t recall her ever discussing the art-historical underpinnings of her work—or the changes in her work. She admired Richard Diebenkorn, the California painter, because he’d returned to figurative art when everyone on the East Coast was still resolutely nonrepresentational. She liked the way he painted those California excesses of sunlight and their blue, accumulating shadows. She loved Bonnard, whom the New York critics could never quite place in the first rank. She was an improbable kind of Midwestern German sensualist. Not that she surrendered to the appeal of luxury or decadence, but rather she followed her nose and her eyes and her sense of touch and taste toward what intrigued her in some direct, unmediated way.

  Perhaps because I lived in a world made of words, I half envied Marilyn her wide-open senses. She was alert to the beauty of the everyday, even the banal. She’d go into raptures over something anyone else would have considered ugly, but not out of perversity or an inverse snobbery. She would suddenly be struck by some purely visual aspect of something—a wonderful passage of brickwork or a slice of Tiepolo-blue sky above a windowless wedge of black buildings or the weave of metal in a manhole cover, the dissolving steam exhaled by a subway grate, or a kitschy but carefully done memorial wall hanging of John F. Kennedy in a Puerto Rican beauty shop on Columbus Avenue.

  The New York School poets (John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler) were hymning the city in the same casual, shrugging, but secretly precise terms. In “An East Window on Elizabeth Street,” Schuyler writes, “I don’t know how/it can look so miraculous and alive/an organic skin for the stacked cubes of air.” Later he writes:

  Mutable, delicate, expendable, ugly, mysterious

  (seven stories of just bathroom windows)

  packed: a man asleep, a woman slicing garlic thinly into oil

  (what a stink, what a wonderful smell)

  burge
oning with stacks, pipes, ventilators, tensile antennae—

  that gristling gray bit is a part of a bridge,

  that mesh hangar on a roof is to play games under.

  But why should a metal ladder climb, straight

  and sky aspiring, five rungs above a stairway hood

  up into nothing?

  Marilyn had a two-room apartment on the West Side between Riverside and West End that she was endlessly decorating, then stripping and filling up again. Bits of savage finery, a blue feather on a bone, would hang on the burlap wall above a massive bedouin bracelet with its brass welts and multiple locks, like some horrible chastity device. She had a kneehole round table that her father had made her of good pale oak and, in another corner, a drawing board covered with pastels of “famous” lesbians. She liked lace curtains worthy of a concierge from the Pas-de-Calais and a strength-sapping sofa heavy with bolsters and pillows.

  I was surely a strange, edgy, difficult friend—excessively polite and docile, patient and indifferent, but then rebellious, on the lam, a master of the disappearing act. Chain-smoking and filling the air with my noxious clouds. Some of my primitive fears of women, based on my dread of my stifling mother, attached to Marilyn—except she was herself elusive, quick to cancel appointments, horrified by the idea of marriage. She made a cult of friendship but scorned the family, though she was wonderfully kind to her own mother and siblings. More than two evenings out in a row spent even in our unintimidating, undemanding society would give her a splitting headache. She loved solitude and needed it as a plant needs light. Marilyn certainly was as full of contradictions as I was—she was a sensualist who loved baths and delicious little meals, but at the same time she was virtually a Stalinist in her politics, as far as I could tell, though at other moments she alternated between a superrational, unforgiving Aristotelianism she’d acquired during years of study at the University of Chicago and a highly Romantic love of lush, swooning verismo operas.