City Boy

by Edmund White

  Jan said to me, “If you think the book intrigued you, imagine the effect it had on me!”

  But truthfully I couldn’t imagine its having a greater influence on Jan than on me. It opened up a path that I never felt tempted to take but that burned its way right through my imagination. The “pre-op” Danish painter Wegener had never felt tempted by homosexuality, no more than Jan claimed to have been. Yet recently I heard someone, an ignorant young gay man, refer to her as “gay.”

  David and I were back to our old New York routine of diet dinners at Duff’s and long evenings of reading. Our latest project was to read all of Dante, passage by passage, starting in Italian and then in English. We had all the books about Dante at our side and tried delving into every stylistic, exegetical, and historical complexity.

  But the book never came to life for me. It felt terribly underwritten. Nor could I imagine Dante actually writing it—his account of its semidivine origins was all too convincing. It didn’t seem like an act of brooding and hatching, of becoming. No, it was pure being, or rather it existed in an ungrateful, granitic state of having long already been. I might have said that it was too classical for my tastes, though it had thrilled me as a high school student to work my way through the first four books of The Aeneid in Latin. Virgil’s account of Dido’s death had made me weep in a way that Francesca’s sorry fate in The Divine Comedy never would. I could enjoy the chaste beauty of Virgil’s language, but Dante gave me no way in. When I voiced some of these doubts, David said, “Dante is not being judged.”

  I knew that. It was an error of judgment on my part, but I wasn’t interested in being a critic, just a novelist. I didn’t have to hand out grades to the classics; my only job was to filch what I needed from any available literary nest. In any event, The Divine Comedy seemed too confident, with no wound in its side, no crack in the bell, nothing vulnerable or hesitant, no stuttering. It interested me no more than a big full-dress late-medieval painting of the pietà, highly glazed and full of angels and donors, complete with all three Marys and a skinny, bleeding Christ. To be sure, in Dante Christ had several wounds in his side, but not one of them seemed to bleed my blood, no more than Dante’s harsh judgment of his old teacher Brunetto Latini for having been homosexual seemed humane or feeling to me. I could see nothing in Dante but cold self-confidence and abstract rapture and an unimaginative application of the rules to desires, like stays pressing into bulging flesh.

  My own confidence, of course, was worn down to the nub and I trusted none of my opinions. I felt foolish with my part-time job, my failed West Coast adventure, my roach-trap apartment, my minuscule salary, my frayed wardrobe. The government audited me, perhaps because I’d suddenly gone from earning a lot to earning so little and the IRS thought this hardly credible. I remember those two big auditors in their carefully pressed suits and big, polished lace-up shoes sitting on my dirty little mattress on the floor and near the overflowing garbage sack and smelling the roach spray as they opened their briefcases and worked through my records. Quickly convinced that I was concealing nothing, they turned green and hurried away. At that time a highly successful TV producer from England I knew intimidated me into inviting him upstairs to my place, where he forced himself upon me and virtually raped me. Later he told a mutual friend he’d never seen such poverty. On reflection, I thought my poverty was a good partner to my obvious passivity.

  And yet I had princely pleasures…

  I met Elizabeth Bishop through David at a party for the magazine of poetry criticism Parnassus. Bishop looked almost exactly like my mother, with the same big eyes and heart-shaped face, but unlike my mother she was dry, precise, slightly fearful, and depressed, a ditherer. The only thing the two women shared was the face and a penchant for heavy drinking. All I remember of that first introduction to Bishop was that I referred to Nabokov’s Transparent Things by mistake as Silken Things and Bishop snapped, “Why not Silk Things?” She volunteered that she also didn’t like the word wooden. “Wood, it should be wood.”

  She was almost forbiddingly middle-class in the way she dressed and behaved, yet I knew from David that she was a famous drunk, that she’d drunk half her life away.

  Not long afterward David and I were visiting Billy Abrahams, the beloved editor at Dutton, and his friend, Peter Stansky; together they had written The Unknown Orwell. They had a house in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and there we spent a night before going with them for lunch at a house in Wellfleet on the Cape that Elizabeth had rented with her girlfriend, Alice Methfessel. Elizabeth had a Brazilian friend with her, Linda, who started to throw the live lobsters into tepid water. Alice called out, “No! Surely no means ‘no’ even in your language!”

  Elizabeth seemed fussed by the potential conflict between her Brazilian past and her New England present (Elizabeth and Alice both worked at Harvard). The table was covered with old copies of the New York Review of Books, the “cloth” that could be swept up later with the shells in it, but Peter Stansky was lost to us for the rest of the afternoon since he was hunched over, reading the tablecloth and making donnish exclamations that David whispered to me sounded like “Woof-woof.”

  As in so many situations in those days, I was the youngest and least well-known person at the table, not silent but certainly mostly a listener. I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought. For me, I suppose, fame was a club one yearned to join, obsessing over it night and day until the moment one was admitted, and after that never thought about again. But with one difference: literary fame, unlike club membership, was something you could lose as quickly as you gained. Now, in my nearly half century of being “on the scene,” I’ve witnessed so many reputations come and go. Who in America remembers William Goyen (though his House of Breath is still popular in France)? Or By Love Possessed, the former “literary bestseller” by James Gould Cozzens? Don Marquis and his beloved Archy and Mehitabel? Of course, as Marcus Aurelius asks, who wants posthumous literary fame anyway? It will mean nothing to the dead author—and besides, as Aurelius points out snobbishly, the fools who will decide these things in the future will be no better than the fools deciding them now.

  From the Cape, David and I went to Stonington, Connecticut, to spend the weekend with James Merrill. Merrill was in the midst of composing his answer to Dante, his epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover. I reviewed one book of it, Mirabell, for the American Poetry Review, and David read to me every scrap of the ongoing post-Mirabell project he could get his hands on.

  Whereas Dante wrote mostly about historical figures, Merrill lent a mythical dimension to his own friends, many of them otherwise unknown. This strategy of elevating one’s own experience had become more and more common since the collapse of a widely shared general culture (Proust is the star example of this new manner). Whereas Dante claimed he’d actually traveled into the afterlife and observed everything firsthand, Merrill communicated with his dead through the Ouija board, which all felt to me amateurish and “fun,” the Delphic oracle reduced to a parlor game. Jimmy and his longtime lover, David Jackson, were doing endless sessions at a handmade board. I saw the letters and a few extras (yes and no, for instance) spelled out on a flat paper cutout. Some people (including Alison Lurie, in her memoir of her friendship with Merrill, called Familiar Spirits) later claimed that David had been losing his hold over Jimmy until he came up with his idea of the Ouija sessions—much as Mrs. Yeats, Georgie Hyde-Lees, recaptured the attention of William Butler Yeats through spiritualism. To be fair, Merrill himself versified these very doubts. A psychiatrist appears as a character in The Book of Ephraim to suggest that the whole thing may just be an example of folie à deux.

  David Jackson had, apparently, once been a handsome military officer and a promising writer who’d published stories in the Partisan Review. But now he was a big mess. He smoked constantly, got drunk every night, teased everyone heavily but with the ostensible affectionate bonhomie of a diner waitress: “Hey, hon, looks like y
ou’ve been putting on the pounds. Unhappy in love or just greedy? Or is it genetic? Well, you’re still cute as a button. A very big button.” His once wide-faced, strong-jawed American good looks, almost those of the young William Holden in Picnic, were now lost in the wasteland of drink and chain-smoking chatter. His mouth was often open as he tried, but failed, to follow the conversation. Yet this idiot was more savant than anyone suspected, since he could often suddenly join the general talk with a truly original and stinging zinger.

  Jimmy just rolled his eyes with merry exasperation. He would lead us off to some other more amusing person or activity—a walk through the town, where many of the houses were pedantically and pretentiously labeled (The house of a rich rope maker ca. 1800). The houses were small and pristine Greek Revival temples in wood painted white with small, perfect lawns. From Jimmy’s top balcony we could look with binoculars down into the walled garden belonging to a famous literary agent, Candida Donadio, where Jimmy had once seen limping along the tall, tragic, solitary figure of her client Thomas Pynchon, the most elusive novelist in America—who eventually married Candida’s assistant.

  Jimmy’s favorite books were E. F. Benson’s Lucia series because Benson’s English town (based on Rye, Sussex) he thought so resembled Stonington with its feuds, its petty rivalries, and its eccentric “characters.” In Benson there was a lesbian named Quaint Irene. In Stonington, there was the photographer Rollie McKenna, a kindly soul who’d been around so long she had done portraits of Jimmy in the fifties and the eighties, of Richard Wilbur then and now, of Truman Capote then and now, of Dylan Thomas then. Eventually Rollie was virtually kidnapped and held hostage by a hostile, violent lesbian who beat her up physically and bilked her of her money, then left her to die penniless in a New England nursing home. From the start, Rollie’s friends had suspected no good would come of the relationship and tried early on to intervene, though already she was creepily under the spell of her tormentor—a woman who’d fleeced two previous elderly ladies.

  The town was crowded with Cheever characters, hard-drinking readers and writers with old patrician names and big houses along the coast and genteel jobs in the law or publishing. Jimmy, whose ugly Victorian was the highest in town, stood on his topmost terrace looking out and imagining all those lives below him. Stonington was his “two inches of ivory,” as Jane Austen put it: on her birthday in 1816 Austen wrote her literary nephew, “What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of Variety and Glow?—How could I join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labor?” Merrill started with his own two humble inches, but abandoning immediately the brush and using the knife of his keen wit soon turned them into a vast scrimshaw carving of the past and the present. He may have been a social satirist, but in Jimmy’s hands satire was transformed into epic—and malice was changed to bliss.

  One of the guests that weekend was Alfred Corn, an erudite and handsome poet I’d known since the sixties—Forgetting Elena was dedicated to him and his wife at the time, Ann Jones, who, much later, after their divorce, became a brilliant Renaissance scholar. Al had brought along a copy of John Ashbery’s newest poem, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” a long poem that was the best thing of John’s any of us had ever read.

  Alfred was three years younger than I, and he and I shared a fascination with Jimmy Merrill and David Kalstone as well as Richard Howard. We could both be ill at ease at a social event hosted by any of these guys. Al and I were probably the youngest people at the joint fortieth birthday party in 1969 for Richard and John Hollander, another poet who seemed to have read everything. John and his then wife, Anne, lived in an immense West Side apartment, and despite its many rooms it was crowded with guests. Not knowing anyone, Alfred and I stepped back and were content to watch things as they unfolded. We witnessed the, to many, historic moment when John Ashbery was introduced to the critic Harold Bloom. John was John and was so drunk that when he stumbled out at the end of the evening, Bloom said in his best orphic manner, “I revere the poet but I deplore the man.”

  Merrill was the patron not only of writers but also of performers who matched his taste for refined and sometimes absurd entertainment. I can remember one afternoon attending with David a performance by the Little Players, a finger-puppet troupe Jimmy subsidized. Five puppets were putting on plays or operas in which they impersonated classic characters from Chekhov, Maeterlinck, Wilde, and Shakespeare. Though they had no legs, they once danced the entire Giselle. Two shy older men, William Murdock and Francis Peschka, hand-fashioned the puppets and did the sets and lighting entirely themselves, often writing their own adaptations. The afternoon we went, we sat in a well-appointed but small living room on the Upper West Side for Racine’s Phèdre.

  Jimmy had met an Egyptian from Alexandria named Bernard de Zogheb, who wrote texts in a hilarious macaroni language consisting of morsels of French and Italian. He’d already done Le Sorelle Brontë with the Little Players. Now Zogheb, who’d been a tourist guide in Egypt and mixed up all his languages, asked Merrill to tell him the story of Phèdre. Jimmy said, “I can find you a copy in a day,” but Zogheb countered, “Oh, no, I don’t want to read it. Just tell me the gist of it.”

  Once Jimmy had summarized the plot for him, Zogheb wrote out his ballad opera—that is, new words to familiar pop tunes. Thus to the tune of “Honey,” Phaedra (played by the Lady Bracknell–like puppet personage Isabelle) sings:

  Ah, Zeus, come son pesanti

  Tutti le quel ornamenti

  Which is a very funny translation of “How these vain ornaments, these veils burden me,” I’ll admit.

  I guess the whole matinee, as was widely intoned, could be called “a delight.” But a smoldering little Marxist inside me resented all of these well-heeled cultural figures in the audience cooing over the Players’ wit and charm. Phaedra’s maid, Oenone, was played by Isabelle’s puppet maid Elsie Lump. I thought humor about maids was on a par with tasteless New Yorker cartoons about bums.

  After the “opera,” a select inner group filed over to the nearby Central Park West apartment of the duo pianists Arthur Gold and Bobby Fizdale, where caterers (quietly paid by Merrill) served twenty guests a light supper. David Kalstone was a little in love with Bobby Fizdale. Bobby and Arthur had been lovers years before, but now they were more close companions and artistic partners. In the old days the two had spent a lot of time in Europe with titled people and composers, performing concertos for two pianos by Poulenc, Virgil Thomson, John Cage, and Paul Bowles. One of Jimmy’s favorite pieces of music was Fauré’s Dolly Suite played by “the boys,” Gold and Fizdale, a lemony, edgy, sometimes sad, sometimes frothy duet written for Debussy’s stepdaughter.

  I remember those mornings in Stonington when the high-ceilinged rooms were full of sunlight, we were drinking our morning coffee, Jimmy had just come down from his workroom with a draft of a poem to his newborn goddaughter Urania living just downstairs, and the naïve sophistication of Dolly Suite was playing tag with our caffeine highs. David and I had both loved “Urania” but asked Jimmy (heart in mouth, for who were we to correct the master?), “Isn’t it just a bit … cold?” Jimmy slapped his forehead and said, “Oh, God, I left out the human feeling!” He then dashed back upstairs and descended half an hour later with a version that made us weep. Dolly Suite was the theme music to those glorious, preposterous days.

  By the time I knew the “boys,” Arthur’s hands were acting up and Gold and Fizdale were turning to writing cookbooks and biography, producing a much-acclaimed life of Misia Sert—one of the principal patrons of the Ballets Russes and a Polish beauty painted by Renoir. Sert was also a friend of Cocteau and Picasso, and Mallarmé had written verses on her fan. Wits and women who organize salons are the hardest subjects for biographies since they say clever, quickly forgotten things and facilitate everything and create nothing. They’re crucial cultural figures whose fame and utility vanish when they
die.

  Misia was a perfect topic for the boys, however, since they were as worldly as she in their way. They were great hosts who cooked so well they had their own TV show. They had known musicians on every continent and were close friends of both Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, not to mention the dancer Tanaquil Le Clercq, who had been Balanchine’s wife and star until she contracted polio and eventually he dropped her. The boys were so social that their list of tony acknowledgments was like a page from the Almanach de Gotha; so reluctant were they to leave out even the dead, if they were sufficiently titled, that they flagged the names of deceased aristocrats with a cross, and more crosses were lined up in their remerciements than at the Omaha Beach cemetery.

  They knew everyone. Bobby said to us, “It seems we’re staying with the Contessa Grimaldi in June, and then it seems we’re invited to the house of the Della Corte di Montis.”