City Boy

by Edmund White

  We talked seriously about New York’s declaring its independence from the rest of the United States. If Americans didn’t want us, we didn’t want them. We’d sacrificed comfort, safety, and respectability to live here, and we wanted to condescend to our landlocked relatives and not permit them to look down on us. We didn’t see why our tax money had to support their wars. We wanted to raise the drawbridges and lower the portcullises isolating our island from the horrid mainland. Americans looked at a movie like Taxi Driver (1976) as a portrait of lawless New York, but we knew that aside from the ambulatory psychotics there were artists and lovers and beats, hippies and bohemians—in fact, La Bohème struck us as a greater likeness, and years later Rent, our own New York AIDS version of the opera, predictably became a hit musical. We were radicals politically, and radical causes packed our streets with demonstrators, whose hair was too long, whose tempers were too short, whose speeches were wild-eyed. The rest of America didn’t know whether to laugh in derision or channel-surf away from our images out of fear. From 1970 on, the Christopher Street parades, celebrating gay liberation, got longer and longer and more and more freakish, with drag queens and motorcycle lesbians (Dykes on Bikes) and leather boys leading the human tidal wave, which invariably stopped for a special anti-Catholic moment outside St. Patrick’s. When I look at old newsreels of those parades and many others, I am always surprised that these hordes of stoned, starved, shaggy kids with their long sideburns were marching in 1980 and not 1965. The sixties had cast a long shadow.

  Chapter 15

  In the fall of 1977 Jasper Johns had a retrospective show at the Whitney Museum and I was sent by Horizon one afternoon out to Stony Point, New York. The house had the sort of simplicity that only money can buy—a large living room with high windows looking out on woods and a narrow river. I was fascinated by Johns—and disconcerted. He had read my books or at least Forgetting Elena and he treated me with respect. But he had a Noh mask for a face and seldom smiled and spoke even less often. As Vivian Raynor had said in Artnews, “He has a remoteness that, while very amiable, makes all questions sound vaguely coarse and irrelevant.”

  I had my list of prepared questions and we worked through them. If the question was too invasive or stupid, his eyes would just bug and he’d say, “I’m not sure what to say,” and laugh his gallery-of-horrors laugh. He told me that his favorite television show was The Gong Show, and I could just imagine Johns laughing with that mad roar as the shamed contestants were hauled off the stage. Raynor had noted that Johns had laughed uproariously after he’d said, “The problem with influences is that the thing or person you say is an influence has to accept some of the blame for what you’ve done.” He was quick to see the absurdities and futilities of life, and even its minor moments of quirkiness could make him guffaw.

  We were drinking whiskey on the rocks and I felt like putting my head down on my desk (yes, it seemed like being in school) and napping. Or possibly on his lap—I found him sexy in a daunting way. I could get him to make only one remark about Robert Rauschenberg, who was said to have been his lover in the 1950s, and that remark was slighting. Or rather he was quick to distance himself from Rauschenberg and to say that he was happy that I detected no resemblance in their work. And in fact they no longer saw each other. Nor did Johns ever discuss being gay, if indeed he really was. Years later I spent a night at a new house he’d just bought and he went out late and picked up a woman; at the very least he was bisexual. I thought a bit resentfully that all these “blue-chip” artists—Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Susan Sontag, Robert Wilson—never came out. We openly gay artists had to deal with the dismissive or condescending judgments all around us—”Of course since I’m not gay myself your work seems so exotic to me”—while the Blue Chips sailed serenely on, universal and eternal. It paid to stay in the closet, obviously. Of course they’d all eventually be outed after their death, but that would only add to their posthumous reputations and generate another shelf of theses by suggesting a whole new set of affiliations. During their lives they were secure and would never be marginalized. Well, more power to them, I thought. They definitely knew how to shape their careers.

  I’d always admired Johns. Although the targets and numbers and flags were considered the seminal works behind Pop Art, they didn’t feel like Pop Art to me. First of all, they were too beautifully painted, even juicily painted, to make the flat, strong statement of the sort Warhol or Rosenquist or Tom Wesselmann was making. In fact Johns seemed to have chosen his flags, for instance, not because they were ironic (like Lichtenstein’s comic strips) or iconic (like Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans) but precisely because the flags were exhausted images, so banal (if beautiful) that no one could focus on them for long. Once when Johns was asked to list his favorite contemporary painters, all but one turned out to be an abstract expressionist (with de Kooning heading the list). It seemed no accident that though Johns was considered to have rebelled against abstract expressionism, he dismissed just such claims as mere “sociology.” And he prized the expressionists’ beautiful brushwork.

  To be sure, in keeping with his reserved, even guarded personality, he was not a splashy painter nor did his brushwork suggest speed and spontaneity. On the contrary—he’d executed the flags in encaustic (pigment suspended in hot wax), a slow, cumbersome technique that he liked precisely because it inhibited improvisation. Initially he’d painted the flags in enamel, but, as he said, “Although I wanted the strokes to remain separate, the enamel wouldn’t dry fast enough to allow this. But encaustic allowed me to keep my strokes separate but to paint over them very soon after.” Years later, during another interview assignment, he showed me the little electric appliance that heated up the encaustic.

  Johns has always recycled his imagery, as if invention were a rude intrusion—or an unwelcome demand on the imagination. Working was not something he did gladly. He remarked to Raynor that he’d “never taken any pleasure in compulsive work,” and “I do what I do without any strong sense of its importance.” He told me that he’d met Samuel Beckett in Paris and mentioned to him that he wanted to illustrate something new. “He looked horrified. ‘A new work?’ he asked me. ‘You mean you want me to write another book?’” This sort of dandified fastidiousness and stylized “laziness” was very much in Johns’s mode. He said that when he looked at a retrospective of his own work, he was distressed by how much work he’d already done. Targets, flags, numbers have reappeared again and again, along with beer cans and flashlights—always the objects that you can’t remember whether you just saw them or not. This repetitiveness, he claimed, also distressed him. “I’ve always thought my work was too much of a piece. One wants one’s mind to be agile and not overly repetitive, yet any painter has unavoidably formed unconscious habits.” He seemed proud of this.

  The first time I wrote about Johns I didn’t dare mention even a word about homosexuality. By the time I did an article about the 1996 MOMA retrospective, I thought I didn’t want to alienate Johns altogether by bringing up the subject of his sexuality, but at the same time I didn’t want to appear cowardly by not broaching it at all. I ended up by mentioning a very personal book about Johns and his homosexuality by his old friend Jill Johnston, Jasper Johns: Privileged Information, which was a memoir about their relationship and an effort to decode his work by seeing in it personal and sexual references. Another art critic, Jonathan D. Katz, has worked on the concealed gay content in Johns’s work, certainly against the explicit purpose of Johns. Johns once remarked to Vivian Raynor, who turned it into a title, “I Have Attempted to Develop My Thinking in Such a Way That the Work I’ve Done Is Not Me.” Even Katz admits that after the breakup, “It is as if, without one another, Johns and Rauschenberg have lost the ability to represent themselves.”

  After we’d finished our first interview, Johns told me a couple of funny anecdotes. He said that when he was young, he’d gone out in a truck with a dealer to Utopia Parkway in Queens to help pick up
some boxes made by Joseph Cornell, the American surrealist, for a new exhibit. Cornell was apparently quite fussed and ran out to the truck to say, “You didn’t tell me what you wanted—a few masterpieces and the rest minor works or what—so I just did all masterpieces.” Johns also told me about a trip to Buffalo where he did the sets for Merce Cunningham. Duchamp came along and insisted everyone go to see Niagara Falls. Duchamp worked out their itinerary down to the last detail, but when the time came for them to leave, Duchamp refused to join them. “But I haven’t the least interest in Niagara Falls,” he said. I was sure that Johns remembered these stories because Cornell’s simple, almost simpleminded, vanity was the exact contrary to his own complicated diffidence, whereas Duchamp’s elegant désinvolture was obviously an ideal, a beacon, for Johns.

  The nicest moment of the afternoon came when Johns showed me Picasso’s 1971 series of etchings to illustrate La Celestina, a sixteenth-century Spanish play about a procuress. I was so drunk I don’t remember what Johns said about the process, but I remember Picasso had used sugar—and indeed the lines were granular and “crumbling.” I can still picture the old procuress with her thin lips and big nose and the pure, spotless virgin she was selling—a girl whose firm young breasts were kept constantly on display. Johns pointed out dozens of small details in the etchings—it felt like a rare privilege to be shown by Johns this superb book by Picasso.

  Now when I chance upon a Johns in a museum collection, I’m always struck by how sober his work looks, how dark and dignified. It’s hard to imagine that it ever looked flashy or shocking. Now it’s become cerebral and aloof—almost invisible in a crowded room in which other brighter, easier works are competing for attention.

  Chapter 16

  I got my job teaching at Johns Hopkins through Stephen Orgel, David’s first lover, the same man who had lent me his house in the Berkeley Hills. He had moved from California to Baltimore and recommended me. I had an interview with John Barth, the well-known novelist, then at the height of his fame, having published in 1960 a long, serious eighteenth-century pastiche, The Sot-Weed Factor, and more recently metafictional short stories in the collection Lost in the Funhouse. I guess I passed muster; he told Stephen that I was the first homosexual he’d ever knowingly met and that, strangely enough, he liked me. Stephen merely smiled and made a clicking noise and closed his eyes. He had a quietly insolent and wildly appealing way of shutting his eyes for a second and then reopening them, as if he couldn’t quite trust them, and then chuckling steadily. He acted as if the victim of his subtle satire should share in his delight.

  Stephen never lied. I overheard John Irwin, the head of the department, ask Stephen if he’d read his book on Faulkner, in which he proved that Faulkner, after the death of Alabama, his nine-day-old daughter, developed an incestuous relationship to his fiction. It was called Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner. Stephen’s eyes got very round and closed, then switched back on. He stared at Irwin for a moment, then said, “I don’t see why I would have read your book since I’ve never read Faulkner.”

  I taught one literature course for writers and one fiction workshop. In the literature course we read One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Tin Drum, Blood Oranges, The Sound of the Mountain, and Gravity’s Rainbow, among others. I doubt if I would ever have read the García Márquez, the Grass, or the Pynchon if I hadn’t assigned them, but I learned something by analyzing them. Since it was a course for writers, the main emphasis was on technique, not symbolism, influences, or sociological import, the usual stuff of English Department contemporary-fiction courses. Louise Erdrich, who went on to become the author of The Beet Queen and many other bestselling literary books, studied with me. When I look back at my twenty-odd years of teaching, I have to admit I’ve had only five or six students who became known writers. Among the ones who spring to mind are Stephen McCauley, Mona Simpson, Louise Erdrich, Christopher Beha, and Andrew Sean Greer. Two or three brilliant students, from whom I expected great things, could never finish a book. Not one of them, with the possible exception of Greer, writes in any way similar to me.

  I had become friendly in New York with Manuel Puig, the Argentine author of Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976). I’d suggested he be put on the cover of Christopher Street, not long after the gay literary magazine had started up. I’d had lunch with Puig, who’d won me over with his strange mixture of seriousness and campiness. “I spent the whole day yesterday at the baths, Edmund, looking for a husband.” Long, sad look. “I didn’t find one.”

  I invited him down for the day to Johns Hopkins, where he’d be lunching with John Barth, addressing Barth’s grad students, then giving a reading. As we were walking around campus, Barth said to Puig, “Tell me, Manuel, when you turned to the epistolary novel, were you trying to return to the very roots of fiction, as I am doing in my epistolary novel Letters?”

  To Barth’s astonishment, Puig said in his Latin-queen cantileña, “Oh, no, you see I was living in America and France so long I forget my Spanish, so I thought I have them write letters and if they make mistakes in Spanish, it’s their fault.”

  No matter how bleak I felt on campus, I cheered up the minute I arrived at Stephen’s house. I knew I was in for a long, delicious evening of far-ranging talk and good food, though it began with an English sort of anchovy paste called Gentleman’s Relish. We had wonderful evenings with the poet Cynthia Macdonald and various young beaux Stephen was trying out—one nearly hysterical concert pianist was all big white hands and wasp waist who went on to write a biography of Horowitz edited by Jackie Kennedy. Young Elizabethan scholars were always around—but Stephen’s interests were broad. He was a major and discerning and greedy collector of rare editions, especially anything related to Shakespeare and his spiritual descendants. He was already embarked on reading all of Trollope and Wharton, whose best books he would introduce in new editions. I first read Mavis Gallant in his spare room. She became one of my favorite writers and eventually a friend when I lived in Paris. Stephen kept a journal in which all our lives were recorded moment by moment—he will end up being the Pepys of our generation. He liked to think of himself as the country mouse and David as the city mouse, but of course he recorded all of David’s gossip, too. Like David he had an unparalleled gift for friendship, domesticity, and loyalty. Stephen was always tender and sustaining to his “dear hearts” and coldly arrogant to the hordes of people who didn’t interest him.

  Anne Freedgood, my old editor at Random House, had published John Gardner and launched his career by bringing out The Sunlight Dialogues in January, when no new books of importance are published. The novel was favorably reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, which then had the power to make or break a book. Other hefty tomes by Gardner were subsequently published (Nickel Mountain and the only good one, Grendel, Gardner’s retelling of Beowulf, which had come out the year before The Sunlight Dialogues but drawn little attention initially). Yet nothing created such a furor as his attack on all his contemporaries, On Moral Fiction (1978). His polemic was obviously indebted to Tolstoy’s What Is Art? and took other writers to task for anything opaque or experimental. Gardner wanted the style of a book to be totally transparent so that the action could unfold behind it like a constantly moving, panoramic dream.

  A strange man in his forties, Gardner had long, straight hair on the sides but was going bald on top, reputedly had had a colostomy, drove a motorcycle. He had a girlfriend, Liz Rosenberg, who was a grad student in poetry at Johns Hopkins. Later she became a professor at Binghamton University. I think Gardner was jealous of John Barth’s influence over her. He’d attacked Barth’s writing in On Moral Fiction, which had just recently come out, after Gardner had been invited to speak at Johns Hopkins. Barth announced to his staff that he would not be host of the luncheon for Gardner (I had to do the honors), but that he would attend. Barth lay down only one rule—Gardner could not discuss Barth’s writing before Barth’s own students. Durin
g the lunch Gardner told me that my own writing was “immoral.” I assumed he meant because it was homosexual. Not at all, Gardner assured me. What was immoral is that the father in Nocturnes for the King of Naples is not angry when he discovers his son’s homosexuality but rather pleased, since that means more women for himself and no competition from a younger man. In the novel the father is represented as a total roué who shoots heroin, drinks to excess, stages orgies in a rented villa in Spain…

  Gardner: “You know your own father would never have reacted that way.”

  Me: “That’s true. In real life he was very upset. But the father in my book is a character—”

  Gardner: “Who never existed, who never would exist. No father would react that way. That’s why your book is immoral.”

  I was amazed that he’d bothered to read that far in my book (which was virtually unknown), and his objections to it were less impressive to me than the seriousness with which he took it. I did, however, point out that not all fathers were middle-class Americans and that my character was an invention, someone I’d imagined—

  But no, Gardner didn’t want to hear that. I was immoral, but I was of course in good company, along with most other American novelists of the day, especially the reprehensible Barth and Updike, though I hadn’t rated a mention in his version of Who’s Who in Hell. What was fascinating to me in later years was how this one book, On Moral Fiction, remained something serious people read long after they’d forgotten Gardner’s fiction. Despite its Puritanism and narrow, hectoring tone, it nevertheless took a firm stand and pursued its point. My theory is that readers, especially serious young students of literature, are so at a loss as to how to evaluate fiction that they will respond to any critic (F. R. Leavis, Harold Bloom, John Gardner) who tells them what to think, has a simple principle for determining quality, and uses often and forcefully the word great.