by Edmund White
Some of the old-timers had been kept on at the Saturday Review and were darting about angrily like late-autumn bees since they’d been promised that nothing would change and they’d still be in charge of their old hives, and now obviously everything had changed. Critics with triple-barreled names and old tweeds were ignored as ambitious youngsters who knew nothing shoved past them. I was one of the barbarians. I wrote a “Letter from the Publisher” in which I made two crucial mistakes. I confused Walker Percy’s name and called him Percy Walker. And I dimly remembered Marilyn once telling me that T. E. Hulme had said that Romanticism is nothing but “spilt religion,” but I’d misinterpreted his words. As a result, dozens of letters to the editor ridiculed poor Charney for being an illiterate fool—and it was all my fault. I was the fool. I was illiterate. Today an essayist would google his sources, but back then fact-checking could take up a whole day, and I was working long hours without assistants.
For some reason the new owners attributed all the malice of the letter writers to East Coast elitism and didn’t chuck me. They were counseled by Peter Drucker, a celebrated business guru, who told them they should turn the weekly magazine (whose typical reader was a middle-aged Midwestern librarian) into four flashy monthly supplements: the Saturday Review of the Arts, the Saturday Review of Society, the Saturday Review of the Sciences, and the Saturday Review of Education. They wanted me to be an editor in charge of the arts, but since I wasn’t experienced enough to run a magazine, they thought I should have a boss. I could interview my own boss and give him my approval or not. The person they chose was a chipper, bright-eyed, well-groomed West Coaster of about forty named John Poppy, who had been an editor of Look and was a surprisingly buttoned-up disciple of George Leonard, an Esalen West Coast touchy-feely leader of the “human actualization” movement. Mr. Poppy didn’t look or act as if he’d ever been in a hot tub or been “rebirthed,” but he did have a permanent smile on his face and a robin’s way of cocking his head to one side, of beaming very deliberate alpha waves over his much more natural and native jitteriness.
None of us liked him, although he was extremely likable—polite, receptive, kind. I didn’t like him because I had an allergy to all authority figures and didn’t want a boss. I said I disliked him because he didn’t know as much as I did, but in fact he was clever, and even if he’d been a genius, I would have wanted to undermine him. At Time-Life Books our supervising editors had been so much older than us and so remote and established that I suppose it never occurred to us as trainees to defy or question them. We complained about them, but as privates complain about generals while obeying them unquestioningly. Now I said yes, they should hire Poppy, but only because he seemed pleasant and inoffensive and also because I could tell that Charney and Veronis wanted him.
The magazine moved out to San Francisco and I went along for the ride. I hired some old friends of mine. Stan, my first lover, became the production director and stage-managed the difficult transition from East to West Coast and from one magazine to four. The printers we contracted in California had never done a big job beyond the telephone book. The idea of producing a weekly magazine with four-color illustrations staggered them. In those days before computers everything still had to be set in type and the photos had to be carefully inserted into the copy. Color correction, proofreading, binding, stapling—every process took hours upon hours and we would work late into the night.
Although I’d written book reviews for magazines, I’d never been on the staff of a weekly. I loved it because it was exciting and relentless. An idea, good or bad, was realized in just a few days. No expense was spared. In a year we spent sixteen million dollars, a fortune back then.
I lived in a charming little house behind a house on Russian Hill with Stan. By that point he’d fallen for a willful ex-marine drug addict back in New York who was obsessed with him. Jerry and Stan were on the phone every day, and Stan was always planning his frequent rendezvous with Jerry back in New York or Los Angeles or some other city.
Our house was ravishing with its little garden full of fuchsia and its Japanese interior and vast panoramic views of the bay, San Quentin prison, and Mount Tamalpais in the distance. In the mornings the bay would be cold and fogbound, but by noon the mists had burned off and the city was suddenly warm. But every neighborhood, it seemed, had its own microclimate. The hills were so steep that cars had to be parked with their wheels turned into the curb lest they start rolling away. The trolley cables were always humming hollowly under the street, like thick metallic arteries pumping and singing in a body on life support.
At the time, San Francisco was almost bucolic. The beatnik era was over, though the City Lights bookstore was still flourishing. Italian immigrants were everywhere. My watch repairman was Italian and I’d speak to him in his language. Pastry shops offered big cannoli covered with red and green sprinkles. On Telegraph Hill an old Italian restaurant had booths for ladies with doors that closed, a holdover from the period just after the earthquake. Hundreds of vagrants were in the Tenderloin, attracted by the good weather and the liberal public-welfare laws in California. San Francisco was not then a rich city, not as it would become after the start-up of the high-tech industry. Rents were cheap but salaries were correspondingly low. Educated young people with Ph.D.’s in art history were willing to work for two dollars an hour as checkout clerks at the supermarket. Of course rich retired people had moved in from all over the West because it was a beautiful and cultured metropolis with Victorian houses. It was also the financial center of the West. There was a harbor but it had missed out on the recent containerization revolution and lost business to other ports such as Seattle.
To us New Yorkers, San Francisco seemed eerily quiet, the streets empty, the lights doused after ten o’clock, the restaurants full of health food and skinny, blond hippie waiters on tranquilizers. The air seemed thin, as if we were high up instead of at sea level. The light was as delicate as a blonde’s eyelids—and just as defenseless. We would wander through the Golden Gate Park and look at all the plants we couldn’t name, the splendid exotic flowers that seemed too tropical for this chilly climate. We were heavy-smoking, grimy, soiled, fast-talking, and abrupt, and everyone out here seemed weirdly characterless and “nice,” as if they were newly hatched. Climbing a hill would leave us winded.
The famous gay life was just starting up in the Castro, but most of it was still centered, as it had long been, around tacky Polk Street. Except it wasn’t visibly “centered” anywhere but rather went on behind closed doors, in gated patios or in small, scattered neighborhood bars pulsing sadly like scattered pods promising eventual life.
We were worried that we were missing out on something by not being back in our own dirty, impossible, exciting city. As editors we complained that all the good stories originated in New York and that all the good journalists lived there. Although we tried to honor the notion of reorienting the magazine to the West Coast, we couldn’t find much to write about in San Francisco. David Bourdon, our art critic, did one story (my suggestion) on Richard Diebenkorn, a genuine San Francisco artist and one respected in New York. Bourdon also wrote about the quirky, humorous ceramist Robert Arneson, who was recognized by the international art market. If we had to do something on weaving, it shouldn’t be about local looms but rather about the great fiber-artist innovators, Lenore Tawney and Claire Zeisler. But the idea that we could single-handedly elevate San Francisco novelists (well, there was Herbert Gold…) or composers or painters (there’d been the Bay Region figurative painters of the 1950s, but who since?)—all that seemed impossible. Of course some poets of importance were in Bolinas, but our bosses weren’t too keen on devoting much space to them.
We worried about our own careers. What would happen to us if and when the magazine folded, as seemed inevitable? Would we just be forgotten? Were we in danger of falling off the edge of the world? We noticed with anxiety that even natives in San Francisco referred to their city as being “out here.” I’d struggled
to get to New York from Illinois and Michigan and now it seemed as if I were going backward. My novel Forgetting Elena was about to come out, but of course I wouldn’t be in New York to “promote” it, whatever that consisted of. The cover art arrived in the mail for my “approval.” I disapproved of it—a color drawing of a seashell weeping a single tacky tear—but that made no difference. If I’d been in New York, would they have paid more attention to me? Probably not.
One night we walked to the foot of Russian Hill and attended a midnight performance of gender-fucking bearded drag queens, the Cockettes. The audience was in makeup and glitter and bits of finery as well. Everyone was high on LSD except us, who were sullen and drunk. They were all weeping and laughing uncontrollably and singing along and responding to tiny, nearly invisible gestures, or to inaudible words as if they were listening to the bizarrely eloquent but perfectly banal peepings of Kafka’s mouse-diva, Josephine. The public devoured with delight the terrible silent-movie overacting. At certain points various actors straggled purposelessly across the stage in dirty organdy skirts and torn stockings, their eyes more mascaraed than a Kabuki actor’s. The unpatterned traffic jam of personnel onstage no longer suggested coherent pictures for the audience. As at the Kabuki, a cult of personality surrounded several transvestites, in this case long-legged, terminally skinny black or white speed freaks. “Oh, Marsha!” someone would cry from the audience. “Betty, girl, we love you!” We were totally puzzled. We weren’t on acid. We didn’t know these people. “Amateur hour,” someone in our cynical group muttered. I suppose we felt vindicated when the Cockettes bombed in New York soon afterward, though the New York critics’ agreement with us, a New York audience, was merely tautological. If the Cockettes had truly been Japanese dancers and we’d had to wear interpreter’s headphones and read a monograph on them, they might have had better luck and might have been just as foreign to our Broadway-trained sensibilities.
Also, it seemed to us as if everyone in San Francisco were doing yoga and reading Krishnamurti, gardening and obsessing about the presentation of his or her macrobiotic diet on an artfully misshapen, partially glazed Korean kiln-fired plate. They were turned inward, dedicated to self-cultivation, and we were turned outward in vigorous competition with other people. We didn’t care what we ate or how our chakras were lining up. We were hungry for fame. We wanted to be noticed. We wanted to have high-flying careers. Out in San Francisco people spent their afternoon installing wind chimes in their trees or stretching. We didn’t stretch, though we lifted weights at the gym to make a more formidable impression on potential sex partners. Nor did we integrate sex into a larger, holistic pattern. We were abysmally genital and wholly localized. Californians were squeamish about eating meat, some of them not only vegetarians but raw vegetarians. We thought that they were so overwhelmed by their lives and so inept at living them that they believed everything might work out if they could control what went into their mouths. We knew what we wanted in our mouths: steak and cock.
I think we were mostly antipathetic to the locals. For one thing our rhythms were out of sync with theirs. We wanted to score right away; we liked the idea of the one-night stand or bend-over. They were in no rush. Of course they had quick pickups, but nothing was allowed to seem rushed.
I had hired various boyfriends and part-time boyfriends of mine, which would have sounded perfectly normal to another gay man in the 1970s, but today is sufficiently strange to merit a comment. Back then we had no notion of “gay marriage,” partly because so many of us were equally opposed to marriage for straight people. Among the heterosexual artists and bohemians and intellectuals I knew, few got married. Gays were more markedly and deliberately promiscuous, though we didn’t like that word, which is always negative. Were we erotic adventurers because, as the Freudians said, we were too immature to maintain a committed relationship? Or was it, as the Christians said, that we were licentious and vicious and so unnatural that we submitted to no decent limitations to our lust? Or was it, as I thought, that we’d been so deprived sexually in the fifties and sixties (because we’d had so few places to meet each other and were so fearful that we had become almost invisible, even to one another) that now we were glorying in all those previously missed opportunities to couple (and triple, quadruple)? We thought that sexual freedom was the same thing as freedom. We were willing to contemplate the possibility of “gay politics” or “gay culture,” but only if we’d first secured total gay sexual liberty.
Of course at that time sodomy was still illegal in most states, and in a few it was still subject to capital punishment. In New York and San Francisco gay couples walked around hand in hand, but in most other American cities (including nearby outlying districts such as the Bronx and Oakland) they would have been beat up. We ourselves still thought it was pretty strange being gay, and half the time that we were claiming our gay rights we were really whistling in the dark, trying to convince ourselves we weren’t really public menaces or monsters either pitiable or frightening.
As the decade wore on, we became more and more convinced that monogamy—and even the concept of the couple—was outdated. We wanted to hook up with one another in giant molecules of adhesiveness and love and friendship, all distinctions leveled, all possibilities open. Friends of our friends became our lovers. Lovers of our lovers became our fuck buddies. In the bigger and bigger gay discos that were being constructed, we’d get high and show up at two or three in the morning and dance till late the following afternoon in a bright hot wash of tribalism. Soon after arriving, before my drugs kicked in, I’d be appalled by the touch of an unknown sweaty body; by the end of fifteen hours on the dance floor, no one was alien to me and I loved everyone. How could monogamy—mom and pop, the suburban quarter acre, and the isolated agony of long evenings in front of the television or in the basement crafts shop—possibly compete with the radiance pouring forth from all of these worked-out, tanning-booth bodies and intelligent, ironic, and seductive faces leaning in and smiling?
While I was still at Saturday Review in San Francisco, Nabokov’s Transparent Things was about to be published. He was my favorite living writer along with Christopher Isherwood. Different as Nabokov and Isherwood were from each other, both inspired me with a respect bordering on reverence and an excited anticipation for each new title. Nabokov was funny and wicked, baroque and heterosexual; Isherwood was sober and good and classical and gay.
I thought that Nabokov’s new novel would be a good occasion for devoting a cover story to him. Although John Poppy would have preferred something on redwood furniture or local dancers, he thought it might be wise to throw a sop to those few “literary” subscribers to the Saturday Review of Literature still hanging on. And I think he could see how thrilled I was at the prospect, and … well, he was a kind man.
I approached a number of writers—William Gass, Joyce Carol Oates, Joseph McElroy (Women and Men)—and asked them to write short essays about Nabokov’s oeuvre. I intended to contribute something myself, especially after Mr. Poppy generously urged me to do so. He could see that I longed to write about my idol.
Who would take Nabokov’s photos? People around the office suggested a true artist such as Cartier-Bresson, but I insisted (yet in truth knowing nothing) that Nabokov was more a social than artistic snob and would respond more favorably to Lord Snowdon, Princess Margaret’s husband, the former Antony Armstrong-Jones. My hunch turned out to be right. Nabokov spent a week clowning around with Snowdon, chasing butterflies, of course, but even posing as Borges with a serape over his head. No matter that they weren’t terribly good photos; more important for our needs, they were intimate and funny and highly original.
Of course I wanted something from Nabokov’s own pen. After the relative failure of his preceding book, Ada, something he’d worked on for years and that recycled more autobiographical elements than any preceding book except possibly his much earlier The Gift, I thought he’d be open to the full treatment we were offering him. He told me over the phone (
I had to get up early to reach him in Switzerland at the cocktail hour) that he’d write me a short piece on inspiration. He was genial over the phone and at that moment was having a drink with Alfred Appel Jr., the editor and commentator of The Annotated Lolita. Nabokov had a strong Russian accent, stronger than I’d anticipated; his voice was a high baritone. His a’s were long and English, his r’s rolled and Russian, his accent more French than anything else, at least to my untrained ears. He had an odd way of punching certain syllables, like an old-fashioned orator.
When his excellent piece came in, I decided to illustrate it with the charming and kitsch painting of Pygmalion and Galatea by the pompier French artist Gérôme. In the painting the white marble statue of the beautiful young woman is just beginning to turn to delicious pink flesh, shoulders first, the sculptor stepping back in delighted alarm. Nabokov wrote later that he loved the whole presentation, especially the painting.
But I had a problem. Nabokov’s mini-essay had minor mistakes in punctuation and even in diction. How did one edit Nabokov? My solution was to have the essay set exactly as he’d written it, mistakes and all, then to reset it in my corrected version. I messengered both versions to him with a short but polite letter explaining what I’d done. He wired back your version perfect.
When the essays by various writers came in, they were mostly a bit bored with Nabokov, as if everyone had praised him long enough and now it was more interesting to be critical. Of course as an idolator I was scandalized by the measured tone of my contributors, and so my own page became all the more dithyrambic. I compared Norman Mailer unfavorably to Nabokov, which would today be so obvious as to seem comical, absurd, but which at that time was still a highly debatable gambit. It was as though I had preferred European dandyism to the raw nerve of America, an Old World beauty to a New World ugly. Even then still, the United States was divided between cultural elitists (supposedly located on the East Coast) and the great unwashed. Richard Howard wrote me that he and James Merrill had just been at a conference in Minnesota where the audience hissed at them for their elitist opinions. As they left the stage, Merrill said loudly, “See what happens when the Great Plains meet the Great Fancies?”
