by Edmund White
I began to see David Kalstone all the time. He’d moved up to Twenty-second Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues, the block where I live now. He lived in a floor-through of a brownstone in a lovely disorder of half-filled teacups and freshly opened “little” magazines, of ballet programs and long telephone cords, of cast-aside Missoni sweater vests and extra pairs of reading glasses, of a big silver bowl full of freesias as fresh and unbent as spring onions still in the ground. He loved Maria Callas and I pretended I did, too (worshipping her was an article of faith among gay men in those days). To my ears, she sounded shrill and flat, though I was prepared to believe she’d been a great actress, never mind the screeching.
David never had much money because he was always saving up from his salary, and the extra income he earned as one of the several editors of the Norton anthology of English literature, for his extravagant summers in Venice, where he would rent a whole floor in a palazzo. Chelsea in those days was mostly Puerto Rican and the rents were low. Men in T-shirts sat on their stoops listening to Latin music and drinking beer. David took the subway everywhere in the city, never a cab except late at night, and commuted to his job at Rutgers University by bus rather than train because it was fractionally cheaper. Despite his budget, we’d go out to dinner, dutch—usually to Duff’s on Christopher Street, where we’d sit in a booth and eat our rare sirloin steaks and green beans and drink white wine and bid the waiter, “Take the bread away—we’re dieting!” After a few weeks we’d see the waiter, smiling a mild acknowledgment at us, turning away the busboy carrying the bread basket.
I adored David but he represented the adult, charming, sexless world for me. Though I was thirty I wasn’t quite ready to be a grown-up. I’d get restless as midnight approached. I longed to escape and to run out to the backroom bars or the trucks. I needed to leave the salon before my hands began to sprout hair and my teeth to sharpen.
David was extremely close to the poet James Merrill, and slightly in awe of him. Merrill’s father, Charles Merrill, had been one of the founders of the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch. James Merrill had written a vaguely autobiographical novel, The Seraglio, in which the young hero feels burdened by his wealth and wants to give it away, but it turns out that a legal divestiture of that magnitude is virtually impossible. In real life, Merrill started the Ingram Merrill Foundation (Ingram was the maiden name of Jimmy’s mother), which gave small grants of five or six thousand dollars to many needy writers. Cleverly, Merrill had figured out that if he wanted to spend time with other poets rather than bankers, he needed to share the wealth without making it look like handouts. If a friend put the touch on him, Jimmy could always say, “Apply to the foundation, but remember I’m just one of the board members.” Of course in reality Jimmy had the last say, but no one was supposed to know that (ostensibly he conferred with John Hollander and Irma Brandeis). If someone got money from the foundation, he or she didn’t have to feel beholden to Merrill himself. Nor was it a loan that had to be paid back—or that could potentially create bad blood if, as might have been more likely, it wasn’t paid back.
David arranged for me to meet Merrill over after-dinner drinks. Merrill was a bit lined from excessive dieting but from a distance he had a boyish look and manner. He was partial to purples and heathers and earth tones, to the colors that fall leaves assume on the ground after the first rain. He wore serapes and embroidered jackets and creased linen trousers and sandals, the antidote to the three-piece suits and bluchers his father must have donned. He was clearly a bohemian. Later when I visited his apartment in the fishing village of Stonington, Connecticut (“Jimmy lives in the only ugly building in Stonington,” as catty friends said), I realized that the top two floors he occupied in the old Victorian house above a store and the floor between were crammed with objects he’d described in his poems: the mirror and bat-motif wallpaper and the red bohemian crystal chandelier above a round table for Ouija messages in the bay window and the widow’s walk above, graced with a Roman bust. They were all magical in the eyes of the aficionado, but they didn’t necessarily go together. His friends, of course, nodded sagely when they read:
Backdrop. The dining room at Stonington.
Walls of ready-mixed matte “flame” (a witty
Shade, now watermelon, now sunburn).
Overhead, a turn of the century dome
Expressing white tin wreathes and fleurs-de-lys
In palpable relief to candlelight…
The room breathed sheer white curtains out. In blew
Elm- and chimney-blotted shimmerings, so
Slight the tongue of land, so high the point of view.
Something about Merrill made you want to please him and fear you couldn’t. He alternated between a silken, silly giggle, but one that was boyish and never girlish, and an earnest unsmiling way of nodding agreement or encouragement. He could listen to an overly long explanation of one’s own (nervous, pompous) and raise his eyebrows and say, “Ah-h-h…” Was that an ah of recognition and agreement? Or was it merely a slightly weary way of marking the transition into the next, more amusing topic? He loved to make puns, usually good ones (like the “slight of tongue” in the last line above), then lower his eyes and sit forward or wrap his arms around his knees and lower his lids and purr. He never tried to sell his wit but would sit back and contemplate it with no more proprietorial sense than the newest comer. He was so afraid of protracting a point that he just sketched it in and then licked his dry lips with the sudden, darting flicker of the amphetamine dieter. He could look deeply sympathetic for a short minute, but that solemnity was built on mercury, not bedrock. A moment later his eyes were flashing humor and he was quoting something one wasn’t quite sure one had recognized. When he’d been a young man, as he revealed in his memoir about the 1950s, A Different Person, he’d feared he was superficial and he’d felt easier with people of his own class who knew to do no more than smile and shrug in most situations. The one area in which Jimmy had never been superficial or dismissive was writing. As he’d said, “I wrote, therefore I was.”
I suppose it’s always strange to know in the flesh someone who is destined to be “immortal,” or at least studied and analyzed long after his death. He was the American poet who possessed a grand Proustian sense of time and a Nabokovian love of language and sensuality. Comparing him to two of the best novelists of the twentieth century makes sense given that his poems always possessed a narrative sweep—and that he wrote that most readable and enduring epic poem, The Changing Light at Sandover. Having actually known such a person doesn’t give one a special purchase on the reality. In fact familiarity can lead to slightly idiotic complacencies. The French critic Sainte-Beuve wrote that he couldn’t see why everyone made such a fuss over “Beyle” (Stendhal), since good ol’ Beyle would surely have been the first to laugh at his exaggerated posthumous reputation. Even so, everyone wants to hear the story just because it “really” happened, and yet in truth its reality—fragile at best and now largely mythologized into a new shape—is scarcely telling.
But there’s another, more moving aspect of having really known someone destined for fame. It’s that they were once young, uncertain, had a roll of fat about the waistband, one nostril bigger than the other, a shifty look that gave way to a wise stare. They existed in the present, with all its contingencies, not in the safety of the past. They were breathing, digesting animals as vulnerable to injury as the next creature, at any moment liable to have been run over or to fall ill. Their careers, which in retrospect look so triumphant and inevitable, might just as easily have come to naught. Maxime Du Camp, Flaubert’s traveling companion, wrote that the great realist had an irritating way of repeating a feeble joke over and over until it became truly tiresome, and that the humor, scarcely detectable the first time around, never failed to amuse the Master each time he repeated it. He tells us how sadistic Flaubert was in the desert when a camel fell and broke their saddlebags and completely drained their water supply, how for the next three d
ays (until they reached an oasis) they were painfully thirsty and, just to be cruel, Flaubert kept talking about the marvelous cold lemon ices they used to get at Tortoni’s in Paris. This prematurely balding man with the light eyes who refused to exercise and took almost no interest in the Middle East until they arrived in Greece—could he be the same writer the next generation of novelists would memorize (Ford Madox Ford had most of Sentimental Education by heart)?
James Merrill could be led reluctantly back to serious topics. Then he would stroke his throat almost as if he were easing down the lumpy but necessary nourishment. He’d make his eyes round and would say, “Ahh…,” but with more a sagacious than an astonished intonation. His eyes would get so wide it wasn’t even certain he was still paying attention instead of miming it. If his interlocutor wasn’t careful, Merrill would soon slip free of the bridle pulling him toward solemnity and dart off toward the gay and frivolous wilds. He wanted to laugh, though not in some familiar, commonplace way, but rather at his own jokes, told in his own particular way. Listening to his sudden shifts in register was a way of learning how to read his poetry with its corrugated surfaces, its way of moving from the lightest tone of social gossip to the most Dantesque invocations—a tone he’d learned from Pushkin and from Nabokov, not to mention the Byron of Don Juan or the Pope of The Rape of the Lock, but one he’d made entirely his own.
Young people (especially the uninitiated) were always astonished at Merrill’s readings by how much was funny, how much everyone around them laughed. What interested me was how Jimmy made use of so much that came his way—and how deliberately reducing that flow from the indiscriminate flood of Manhattan to the mere trickle of Stonington or Key West or Athens (his three “villages”) had been a central creative act of his life. He thrived on anagrams (and belonged to an anagram club in Key West) and crosswords and, of course, the Ouija board, not to mention acrostics and all disciplined forms of poetry, the sestinas and rondeaux. Sometimes I’d be reading a long poem by Merrill with all the concentration I’d naturally bring to a cliff-hanger—and suddenly I’d notice the narrative was being relayed through a string of sonnets.
Merrill loved to tease and maybe couldn’t bear to do too much hand-holding, but in spite of this he was kind and sponsoring. He certainly nurtured me without ever being mindlessly affirmative. He could be harsh if the occasion required it. After reading my novel Caracole he voiced my worst fears, saying, “That first chapter, my dear!” and rolling his eyes.
His mother was from Georgia and his father from Florida, but Merrill had grown up on Long Island and had had foreign nannies and then had been sent off to Lawrenceville School. His accent was his own, drawled in a soft Southern way, but the vowels weren’t twangy or yearning or eager to open up into diphthongs. No one could say his voice was irritating or off-putting, and when he gave a reading, it was a beautiful orchestration out of which many different expressions, from the silly to the oracular, could be coaxed.
That first evening I found him polite but remote. He would so obviously have preferred a good informal talk with David alone and wasn’t interested in David’s protégé. I suppose, being a generation younger than either, I projected a certain raw sexiness. But as I found out later, Jimmy’s type was the tall, romantic youth, preferably straight and unavailable though longing to be a best friend and fellow poet; someone serious and talented who, even if much younger chronologically, would treat Jimmy as a sweet if devilish little brother. I wasn’t eligible for any of those roles—and as David’s beloved I was off-limits in any event.
David urged me to read Merrill the first chapter of Forgetting Elena. During the whole recital of fifteen terrifying minutes, Merrill’s face was illegible. Jimmy didn’t give a hint as to whether he was amused or struck or bored, and when it was all over, he didn’t say a word but merely nodded, giving the smallest possible indication that he was still alive. I gathered up my papers and hurried the fifteen blocks home. I was so distraught, I longed to throw myself in front of the first speeding car that came along. I felt that I’d failed in my first great test. My failure was especially painful because David was so enthusiastic about my work—and would he now have the independence of spirit to remain convinced of my book’s worth?
Eventually I found out that Jimmy liked Proust, sure, but he also liked to read the bestseller of the moment if it had any literary merit, just as he liked to follow fads about the interpretation of hand gestures. (“Oh, look!” he’d exclaim. “She’s palming!”)
Years later, when I mentioned that fatal evening to Merrill, he said, “I was drunk that night. I barely knew who you were, much less what you’d just read.” Since Merrill had in the intervening years joined AA and stopped drinking (but some people said it was only to keep a new boyfriend company), I believed him. Then after Merrill died, his literary executor (and one of my closest friends), J. D. McClatchy, said, “But he didn’t like Forgetting Elena. He didn’t get it.”
Through David I met many other poets and writers. John Ashbery gave Forgetting Elena a blurb that delighted me, just as he personally fascinated me. John lived across the street from David Kalstone in a 1960s white brick building. He would get so drunk that he’d fall down. Yet he was hilariously funny in a deadpan way that camouflaged, nearly, his perfect recall and edgy intelligence. He adored obscure “serious” music and had the most esoteric tastes.
What was distinctive about New York in the 1970s was its uncompromising high culture masquerading as slouching, grinning gee-whiz—Wallace Stevens in sneakers. John Ashbery had lived in Paris for years, where he’d been the art critic for the Herald Tribune, and now wrote art reviews for Newsweek. When he gave a reading in the austere and large auditorium at the bottom of the Guggenheim Museum, it was packed with young people in black and older, art-world people. There were German women in full-length black leather coats and hennaed hair and men in faded blue work shirts, insect-eye glasses, white stubble, and oversize porkpie hats. Ashbery was always surrounded by art-world people, which brought a whiff of money and internationalism to the usual seedy gatherings of poor poets. Like Warhol he gave the impression of never trying. His drinking seemed clear proof of his social indifference. Not that he wasn’t charming and solicitous with friends. Once I was with him at one of his readings in SoHo, just when SoHo was becoming a gallery center. After the reading a young woman who was a total stranger invited us all back to her nearby loft. There we stood around drinking jug wine while she scuttled about in an adjoining room, dragging into place what turned out to be canvases and snapping on lights. Finally she led Ashbery, who was about to pass out, into her studio. In her mind, no doubt, he was supposed to discover her and arrange overnight for a one-woman show. All he did was look at the work through swimming eyes and say in his high, slurred voice, “Those are some paintings.” The poor girl broke into tears. Actually, it wasn’t such a put-down coming from the author of Some Trees.
David Kalstone liked that first book, Some Trees, which had been selected by W. H. Auden as the winner of the Yale Younger Poet series. Both Ashbery and Merrill revered Auden—and there all resemblance between the two junior poets ended. David dismissed Ashbery’s next collection, The Tennis Court Oath, though David’s approval soared again with The Double Dream of Spring and even the all-prose Three Poems (published in 1972), which had somehow been inspired by Ashbery’s psychoanalytic sessions. But the crowning glory of not only Ashbery’s growing oeuvre but of American poetry in the 1970s was Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. The title poem was a long, sustained look at the self, at what it might and might not be in these godless days. About the soul, the poet asks, “But how far can it swim out through the eyes. / And still return safely to its nest?” The questions become more tendentious, taking a sharper, more pessimistic tone:
But there is in that gaze a combination
Of tenderness, amusement and regret, so powerful
In its restraint that one cannot look for long.
The secret is too plain. The pit
y of it smarts,
Makes hot tears spurt: that the soul is not a soul,
Has no secret, is small, and it fits
Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.
With this one poem Ashbery, intimate but impersonal, pinpointed the shifting uncertainty of the way we lived now. We saw him at parties (once I even went to bed with him and his boyfriend), and he was a hapless, amusing presence (“a combination / Of tenderness, amusement and regret”), but we knew that we were in the presence of genius. It was as if we were seeing Whitman on the Staten Island ferry or Emily Dickinson wrapping a cake and scribbling a poem on the paper.
Chapter 9
A science writer from Time-Life named Frank called me up in 1971 and asked me if I wanted a “gig.” He said that the two publishers, Charney and Veronis, who’d made a success out of Psychology Today had bought the dowdy old Saturday Review and didn’t seem to know anyone in the arts—and besides, they wanted to “democratize” the arts. Their idea was to have stories on quilting and Adirondack ceramics and furniture made out of driftwood. They were as hostile to East Coast snobbism as a Beltway politician speaking for effect. They were even considering moving the whole operation to the West Coast. We quipped that they were irritated because no one noticed them when they entered their box at the Metropolitan Opera, that they thought they’d be big fish in the small pond of San Francisco. Little did they realize that in San Francisco they’d be just as ignored.
