City Boy

by Edmund White

  In everyday life she was an appalling person. She would pick a fight with other customers in a store. The New York State Theater had no central aisle, and to get to the best seats one had to slide past a line of seated people. One night, with David accompanying her, Hellman had deliberately aimed her high heel and stabbed the foot of a seated woman, a complete stranger, then cursed her out for howling in pain.

  I met her at David’s apartment, where she was extremely nice to me. Strangely enough, she shared one virtue with her greatest enemy, Mary McCarthy. Both women by habit were elaborately polite to the youngest, least known person in the room—me, in both cases. Lillian made a point of asking me questions about my writing and life and provenance; of course I was charmed. She had terrible emphysema and never stopped smoking. She was as lean as an old Indian brave and her face was deeply burined with lines.

  David had met her through a Venetian pal, Peter Feibleman, who would leave messages for her at the hotel in the name of “Rabbi Hellman.” Now David struck up the acquaintance again through one of her closest friends, Richard Poirier, who at about this same time was persuaded to invite me to lunch. He was then living just off lower Fifth Avenue, near Howard Moss. (Eventually he had to move because the house next door, at 18 West Eleventh Street, where James Merrill had been born, was accidentally blown up by a Weatherman woman while she was constructing a bomb.) At the start of the lunch, Poirier was cordial enough but soon began to tongue-lash me for the duration of the meal, furious because I’d said I thought there was such a thing as gay fiction, even gay poetry—worse, a gay sensibility!—and that at the very least works by gay people could be read in a special light, to illuminate them. Richard was enraged that I would even propose to isolate gay writers from the literary mainstream. He had a rough, gravelly voice, a strong, virile face, and one eye that wandered, and he relentlessly pursued his thought without ever smiling. I felt as unprovided with arguments as I had when I’d told Maitland Edey about feminism.

  Frankly, I couldn’t see what the big deal was with the idea of “gay literature.” I said, “Well, there’s no reason the same text can’t be read from several different perspectives. It’s just that for us gay writers now, it’s fun to—”

  “Gay writers!” Richard thundered. “I’ve never heard of anything so absurd. It’s obscene!”

  I wanted to concede the whole dispute just to end it, but I knew that David would be ashamed of me if I gave in too quickly. I knew how much he admired Richard’s “fierceness,” his “bearish strength.” In their world Richard was “famous” for his intransigence. Of course I didn’t have their training, having studied Chinese at Michigan and not humanities and English at Harvard. Nor had I ever taught literature. I’d only written a few unpopular book reviews, out of step with the critical opinion of the times.

  I couldn’t help noticing, at least to myself, that all these writers I was meeting who were gay—Ashbery, Howard Moss, David Kalstone, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Poirier—might be open about their sexuality in their private lives, but no one in the general public knew about it. Richard Howard and James Merrill were the only ones who were out in their poetry as well as in their lives.

  “But things do change,” I said confusedly. “There are always new movements in fiction, aren’t there? The word novelty is contained in the word novel. Why not have a gay school of fiction? Is there any harm in that? At least it’s exciting and new.”

  “Exciting! But it’s a betrayal of every humane idea of literature. Have you never heard of universalism?”

  Now, all these years later, when “gay literature” has come and gone as a commercial fad and a serious movement, I can see his point. It’s true that as a movement it did isolate us—to our advantage initially, though ultimately to our disadvantage. At first it drew the attention of critics and editors to our writing, but in the end (after our books didn’t sell) it served to quarantine us into a small, confined space. Before the category of “gay writing” was invented, books with gay content (Vidal’s City and the Pillar, Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Isherwood’s A Single Man) were widely reviewed and often became bestsellers. After a label was applied to them they were dismissed as being of special interest only to gay people. They could only preach to the converted. The truth, however, was that gay literature was every bit as interesting and varied as straight literature.

  Something similar happened to gay people themselves. Before they were “liberated” and given an “identity,” they were everywhere and nowhere. As long as the word homosexual was never pronounced, many boys and men slipped across the border of convention and had homosexual flings and then hurried guiltily back into heterosexuality under cover of obscurity and anonymity. The past saw many more casual experiments in same-sex love than later, when the category was finally clearly labeled and surrounded with the barbed wire of notoriety. It became easier in certain milieus to come out, but at the same time the stakes were higher (especially after the advent of AIDS in the early 1980s). In places like contemporary Greece fewer and fewer men and boys were willing to have sex with another male. Only the highly motivated made it across that barbed-wire fence. I sometimes regret the invention of the category “gay.”

  Yet I’m grateful for gay liberation and for gay literature. The depression and guilt that beset me in my teens and twenties subsided after Stonewall, just as the rejection as a writer I experienced in the 1960s slowly gave way to literary acceptance in the 1970s. I’d always wanted to write about being gay, even when I was fifteen and in prep school. My first novel, written just then, was called Dark Currents or alternately The Tower Window and was a coming-out story. I wrote this gay novel before ever reading one (except Death in Venice and Gide’s The Immoralist, and they were far from contemporary—or cheerful). I wrote about my sexual and romantic feelings because they plagued me. I sometimes thought I was desperately bailing water in a sinking boat, and that if I stopped writing, I’d drown. As a result, I felt that the new visibility of gays gave me a chance to be seen, or rather heard. Now I was allowed to publish, which made all the difference to me.

  Nevertheless, thirty-five years later, in 2009, I can see what Richard Poirier meant. I’d still say that even if he was right ultimately, we were very much living in the urgent short run. After centuries of oppression we had a sense of community we wanted to celebrate in novels that would create our identity while also exploring it. In the early days of gay liberation writers had an unprecedented importance (that quickly faded) in their own community; for a short while we were virtually the only visible or audible spokesmen for a whole movement, in those years before AIDS forced political leaders, actors, and athletes to come out.

  In the late 1970s I became friends with Michel Foucault, and he and I disagreed about gay identity as well. I never quite understood his position, which struck me as ambiguous. He’d given an early interview to the French gay magazine Gai Pied (which Foucault had named) without letting his name be cited in the article. He was fascinated by gay life, especially sadomasochistic scenes in San Francisco, and never was there a more self-conscious and highly organized subculture than that one. Yet Foucault was very much against identity politics and “the culture of avowal,” by which he meant a culture that thought every individual had a secret, that that secret was sexual, and that by confessing it one had come to terms with one’s essence. He traced the need to avow to the early Christian church, which had been obsessed by evil thoughts even more than evil deeds (the pagan world had worried only about the deeds). I could understand his objections to the Oprah-like emotionality and the revival-meeting “change of heart” so appealing to Americans, but it did seem to me undeniable that “coming out” was still a liberating moment, especially since most gays could “pass” as straight and still did, to their own harm. Yes, it might be wrong to consider one’s sexuality to be the key to one’s identity—and in the ultimate scheme of things perhaps gay identity politics have led to the easy packaging and commodification of our experience, a
trivialization of the bacchic rites (“Yeah, I’m a power bottom into domination but not pain, highly verbal, into role-playing of the coach-athlete sort but no scat or blood, please, though water sports are fine”). Nevertheless, what we desire is crucial to who we are. I agree with Nietzsche, who said, “For what does one at present believe in more firmly than one’s body?” To be fair, Foucault was combating all general ideas, all categories, and what he clung to as a good positivist were particular facts, tiny clusters of verifiable events. I wouldn’t dare to defend gay identity against such a convincing argument, but I would still say that people who are oppressed by an entire society can free themselves only by taking on that entire society and redefining the terms that were imposed on them, switching all the minuses to pluses.

  Chapter 13

  In 1978 I met William Burroughs, who’d lived abroad (in Morocco, mostly) so long that he seemed more a myth from the past than a living writer. His pulseless, saurian persona as a smack addict—and in his work his Sade-like mechanical repetition of erotic hangings for everyone, of shiny faces for lesbians made out of penis transplants, of his predatory insectlike characters coolly sipping spinal fluid through straws—all enhanced his status as someone already dead, too cold and totemic to be alive.

  I was invited to a dinner at the apartment of Ted Morgan on the East Side. Later, in 1982, I would write a positive review of his biography of Somerset Maugham, in which he gave a horrifying portrait of the aging writer as having lost his mind to Alzheimer’s though he was pumped full of youth-enhancing monkey glands. Virile and hyperactive but incapable of thinking, the once witty and ironic author would greet guests at the gates of his Riviera compound by presenting them with a welcoming handful of his own shit. Ted Morgan had known Burroughs in Tangier and eventually wrote his biography in 1988. Morgan was a tall, loping, edgy man, famous for his travels through Africa, who had once been French and known as comte Charles de Gramont. His father, people said, had married once for position, once for money, and once for love. Ted was the son of the love marriage with a beautiful Italian woman. Sanche had disliked his name and title so much that he’d changed his nationality, thoroughly expunged his French accent, and redubbed himself Ted Morgan (an anagram of “de Gramont”).

  That first evening over dinner Burroughs spoke little except to say that he was able to manipulate his mood as a writer through obvious techniques. “For instance,” he said, “if I want to write about sex, I don’t jerk off for several days, then I’m sure to be horny and ready to describe it in lots of detail and a state of excitation.” We were all fascinated by every word the sphinx pronounced. Burroughs had a way of muttering that, as the evening wore on and joints were brought out, became completely incomprehensible. He produced none of the usual little social smiles or encouraging nods. He seemed remote and indifferent though cordial in a ghostly way. He had on the worn suit and thin, uninteresting tie that comprised his uniform—the look of an unsuccessful Kansas undertaker.

  Burroughs had a new minder, James Grauerholz, a tall, sexy, slightly spooky youngster from Kansas. The story was that Grauerholz had written fan letters to Allen Ginsberg and Burroughs at the same time in 1972. When shortly afterwards Grauerholz met Ginsberg, Ginsberg told him that Burroughs needed a secretary.

  James immediately became Burroughs’s manager. He decided to present Burroughs eventually (in 1978) at the Mudd Club, a punk redoubt, where his mixture of literary violence, drugginess, and avant-garde credibility joined up with his look of a “clean old man” to make him famous to a whole new generation.

  Grauerholz (with the help of agent Andrew Wylie) renegotiated Burroughs’s contracts and set up something called William Burroughs Enterprises, which brought his backlist into paperback reprint and engineered some media coups. Suddenly this half-dead but brilliant man was fully alive again in the public imagination. Grauerholz also edited all of Burroughs’s last books. Whereas Balanchine as an old man had lived through the young Suzanne Farrell, the young Grauerholz realized himself through this venerable, hollowed-out figure.

  Usually I felt some connection with another gay man. Not necessarily a vital link, but a real one, such as one might feel with another American in Berlin, say, neither more nor less. With Burroughs, however, there was no conspiratorial wink and his sexuality seemed like something that might take place only once every hundred years, like the midnight blooming of a century plant. What amazed me was that so many young straight guys revered Ginsberg and Burroughs despite their homosexuality. I guess for those young guys Ginsberg was primarily a hippie guru and Buddhist chanter and wild poet freak, and Burroughs was a reactivated drugged-out zombie, both cool in their ways. Legendary. I knew a young straight guy who put out for Ginsberg and bragged about it. When I asked him how he could do that, he said, “Man, he was Allen Ginsberg, man…”

  William Burroughs eventually went off to live near Grauerholz in Lawrence, Kansas, where he dabbled in art by shooting at cans full of paint that spattered blank canvases. These were the “shotgun” paintings—just thirty-six canvases among the fifteen hundred he eventually did.

  The Joy of Gay Sex had come out and was something of a success, selling all over the country as a mainstream book in ordinary bookstores with a minimum of fuss. Since Mitchell Beazley had contracted the book and Charles Silverstein and I were hired guns, our contract was a good deal less favorable than it would have been had we originated the project. No matter. People thought I was making money and I didn’t disabuse them. I discovered that making money is what publishing really cares about and that once again I was bankable.

  I was able to sell to Michael Denneny, the first and foremost openly gay editor, a new novel, Nocturnes for the King of Naples. Michael, who had a strong Rhode Island accent and who’d studied under Hannah Arendt at the University of Chicago, had a deeply curious and skeptical mind, with equal emphasis on both adjectives. He wanted to know about everything (an invaluable characteristic for an editor), but was quick to contest anything that struck him as dubious or factitious. He refused to rush in an industry that demanded speed, and this leisureliness would eventually be his downfall. That, and that he embraced and launched gay fiction in a way no one else before him and few after him dared to do. When gay lit didn’t make big bucks, he was fired. But in the meantime Michael had a run of many years in the offices of St. Martin’s Press. In that time he was able at least partially to fulfill his dream of putting gay content into all the genres—gay romantic novels, gay cowboy novels, gay gangster books, etc. He would bring out just a few thousand copies of any title and let it sink or swim on its own. There was a moment, before the market became saturated, when an ordinary straight first literary novel could be expected to sell five thousand copies—and a gay literary title would sell seven thousand. For a long while gay readers had a greater hunger for books than did the ten-times-larger straight public for heterosexual literature.

  In the seventies some fifty gay bookstores opened all across the country. This was the era before the big chains such as Barnes & Noble. Suddenly, in the bars in every small town lots of small, free gay publications were being handed out that would reprint syndicated book reviews. It was all pretty tacky, but it was undeniably grassroots. Some publications, such as Christopher Street and later the James White Review and the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, gave a dignified and intelligent forum to gay art and thought.

  Nocturnes for the King of Naples was once again a book that I’d written for myself alone. Not that I didn’t have a reader in mind, but that reader was much like myself—as demanding, as romantic, as besotted with poetic language. Buried into the book were many bits of poetry written out as prose. Jimmy Merrill was the only reader who ever detected on his own those buried poems. Early on, in a scene that described an evening at Peggy’s without any recognizable details or anecdotes, I composed a sestina, just to keep myself awake. Later there was a sonnet, an imitation of a French poem, “Aux yeux de Madame de Beaufort.” In the last chapter I buried some
couplets. This story of lost gay love and a Gothic childhood alluded throughout to saints and Sufis and to St. Gregory of Nyssa and to Solomon’s Song of Songs. I suppose I had learned from Nabokov to make literary allusions unobtrusive so that they might delight the initiated and not disturb anyone else. I subscribed to the baroque confusion between the spiritual and the sensual, though I believed in the spirit only as a word, just as Melville caressed (and didn’t believe in) the word mystic and Henry James spoke reverentially when he used the word moral, though one scarcely knew what he meant by it.

  Readers (my few readers!) had spoken of Forgetting Elena as a “baroque” novel, although I now realize that it’s quite unornamented and syntactically modest. Baroque, I guess, was just a vogue word of that period for anything offbeat (and gay?). I took the description seriously, however, and wrote Nocturnes according to a genuine baroque aesthetic that stresses movement, above all, that proceeds through constant metamorphoses, that employs unusually rich materials and is designed to produce a single overwhelming theatrical effect—and expresses religious feelings through the erotic (Bernini’s St. Michael stabbing a writhing St. Theresa in the side, for example) or vice versa (all those old poems comparing the beloved to the Madonna or God).

  Under all this elaborate theatrical machinery (one chapter had my characters actually living onstage), I was reenacting my thwarted passion for Keith McDermott and my intense, prolonged suffering over him. In the true baroque style of transformation, everything was converted into other terms. In real life I had spent a memorable night having sex with Keith, one of the half-dozen times that that occurred. Ever the formalist aesthete, he’d set everything up as a ritual by candlelight. I metamorphosed that experience into my chapter in the theater where the lover, me, was dressed as Bottom and the beloved, Keith, as Titania. Nor was it just any theater. It was a baroque theater, full of the machinery of the past, all of which I carefully researched.