by Edmund White
The woman was jolly and voluble, and although I never saw her again and hadn’t caught her name, I was so riveted by her story that I remembered it in great detail. She was one of Susan’s lesbian friends.
Susan could be sweet and melancholy. She was often “out of it” in social settings, never getting the joke and needing everything to be spelled out. Her laugh was mirthless and heavy. She lacked spontaneity. Elle n’était pas bien dans sa peau, as the French would say. One of her girlfriends in the 1950s talks in a journal of the period about how maddening the young Susan could be, lecturing her on Hieronymus Bosch, manufacturing enthusiasms at the flea market, throwing her big, awkward body at her. Susan could be little-girlish and tender at times, though normally she was brusque, lordly, dissatisfied. Someone who might have been trying too hard would walk out of the room and Susan would wrinkle her nose and shake her head dismissively.
She should have been given the Nobel Prize. That would have made her nicer. She was friendly with lots of Nobelists, including Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, Derek Wolcott, Czesław Miłosz, all writers I met through her—not to mention her personal favorite to win, the Yugoslavian novelist Danilo Kiš, who wrote Garden, Ashes. Danilo should have won the prize and would indeed probably have if he hadn’t died rather young from lung cancer. (Susan would die too young as well.) Around all these people Susan was wonderfully natural, and they perceived her as their equal, even their superior.
She had terrible manners. She picked her teeth after dinner. She yawned and looked almost haggard with boredom when ordinary people bothered her with their defensive chatter. She wanted to be one of the big boys but I don’t think she really liked men. That had never occurred to me at the beginning but slowly I came to realize that she was the counterpart to an old-style gay man who didn’t feel comfortable with women. She once said late in life that she only liked young, beautiful men, who were unavailable to older women, but I suspect she was deluding herself. She would have preferred an ugly, gifted, aggressive woman to a pretty boy. She did befriend her Italian translator, who was younger than her son, not handsome but wonderfully winning. He was also, of course, very smart.
AIDS first started to be mentioned in 1981. No one had ever heard of it before then. Larry Kramer, a screenwriter and producer (Women in Love) and novelist (Faggots), convened a meeting of gay men in his Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Washington Square. We were addressed by Dr. Friedman Keene, who’d studied several cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare skin cancer that usually appeared in old men of Jewish or Mediterranean origin. Suddenly it was showing up in young gay men, as was an unusual and virulent form of pneumonia. Soon this new cluster of diseases was being called gay-related immunodeficiency or GRID.
Larry invited five or six other men, including me, to discuss forming an offensive against GRID (which a year later was renamed AIDS, since we quickly discovered that gays were only one of several “at-risk” groups). We decided to call our group the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. We wanted through the name to make it clear that this was not a lesbian condition, since we’d all had so many tussles with lesbians during the culture wars of the 1970s (though later in the 1980s, as many gay male activists were dying, lesbians came to play a larger leadership role in the movement thanks to their generous feelings of solidarity with gay men). We wanted to emphasize that it was a “crisis” and not a permanent condition, since gays were not eager to be equated with yet another medical diagnosis.
We were naïve, but there was no way to be sophisticated about an unprecedented plague. Nothing like this had ever happened to anyone before.
Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien said to us that he thought we should give up sex altogether until researchers understood a little more about how the disease was transmitted. We looked at him as if he were mad. Just as the Crash of 1929 ended the Roaring Twenties, so the AIDS epidemic of 1981 ended the sexy seventies. Sontag once said to me that in all of human history in only one brief period were people free to have sex when and how they wanted—between 1960, with the introduction of the first birth-control pills, and 1981, with the advent of AIDS. For those two decades all sexually transmitted diseases could be treated with antibiotics, unwanted pregnancies were eliminated through the pill and legalized abortion, and AIDS did not yet exist. Religion seemed to be on the wane and promiscuity appeared to be the wave of the future.
In 1981 all that came to an end. Gays of my generation were especially unprepared to accept the new reality since for us, as I’ve mentioned before, gay liberation had meant sexual liberation and gay culture still meant sexual access and abundance. Now we were being told to limit the number of our partners, to know our partners’ names, or to abstain from sex altogether. Later we were told to suck not fuck, but even so the definition of safe sex was highly unstable, and to this day, almost thirty years into AIDS, no one seems certain exactly which practices are safe or unsafe.
Sontag followed the developments carefully and soon began to see that the demonizing of the gay population because of AIDS was not unlike the previous blaming of patients with tuberculosis and syphilis in the nineteenth century or cancer in our own day. She thought that she might add an appendix about AIDS to Illness as Metaphor, her 1978 study. Charles Silverstein and I thought that our influential The Joy of Gay Sex should be revised to include warnings about AIDS, but with still so little information about it, no one knew how to frame that cautionary advice. The revision did not come out until several years later. My own 1980 States of Desire: Travels in Gay America read like a period piece just two years after it was published. The cheerful promiscuity and the civil rights struggles I’d described had all been discarded or eclipsed by the sudden, unexplained appearance of a virus.
I was the first president of GMHC, though I quickly retired in favor of Paul Popham, an attractive macho businessman who was far more competent. Almost from the beginning Larry Kramer was sharply critical of the other members, and by 1987 he had founded a much more militant group called ACT UP. Certainly we all made lots of mistakes. Instead of instantly enlisting the help of the federal government, we organized a disco fund-raiser. We thought small. We thought ghetto. We didn’t understand that we were watching the beginnings of an epidemic that would soon enough infect forty million people worldwide. To be fair, no one else had that sort of apocalyptic prescience any more than we did. Nor was Ronald Reagan even willing to mention the disease by name until years later.
Because we were moralistic Americans, we thought promiscuity was the enemy and fidelity the solution. We were incapable of understanding that it was safer to have safe sex with ten men at the baths than to be faithful to one lover—and to be unsafe with him.
New York didn’t change right away, but a feeling of dread was now in every embrace, the odor of death in every spurt of come. What had seemed innocent revels now felt like the maneuvers of a death squad. What had felt warm and sticky with life was now the cool syrup of mortality. Those gangs of tall men in leather jackets walking joyfully down the street, their engineer boots ringing sparks off the pavement, now broke up, dissipated into the night, melted into furtive individuals. Whereas in the late 1970s everyone wanted to be bisexual, the height of trendiness, now people were starting to deny they’d ever had experiences with members of the same sex. People who’d been fashionably skinny the year before now were beefing up to prove they weren’t besieged by a wasting disease.
I didn’t want the party to stop. A Boy’s Own Story came out, with Susan’s blurb, and was a success all over the world and was translated into many languages. Thanks to Susan’s recommendation, I’d won the Guggenheim Fellowship and I moved to Paris in the summer of 1983. David Rieff gave me some sartorial advice. He told me that every man in Paris wore a coat and tie and that I’d have to get rid of my dirty, torn jeans. David assumed I was leaving New York because I’d become too famous. “You’d never be allowed to write another book if you stayed here, right?” he asked. My concerns were more sybaritic than professional; in any event
he exaggerated my success. I wanted to go on having industrial quantities of sex—and I thought I could go on in Paris. New York was turning into a morgue.
Somebody at the New York Institute for the Humanities found me a furnished apartment on the Île St.-Louis. Soon enough I was taking language classes at the Alliance Française in Paris. I got a part-time job with American Vogue writing about cultural life in Paris. The dollar bought ten francs and life in France was cheap. My friend John Purcell had moved with me and was taking courses in interior design at the Paris branch of the Parsons School. I had several French friends—Michel Foucault, Gilles Barbedette (my translator), Ivan Nabokov (my editor), Marie-Claude de Brunhoff (who became my best friend).
I learned French by lying on a couch for two years and looking up every word in a dictionary, sometimes as many as five times before I learned it. After all, I was already forty-three. I shaved off my New York mustache, which no one liked in Paris. I bought lots of suits and coats and ties and overcoats and dress shoes. I met rich and titled ladies through my Vogue connections. I had sex after midnight in the little park at the foot of the Île St.-Louis. I started to wear cologne, which would have been anathema in New York. I learned how to kiss a lady’s hand. (Only at a private gathering, never on the street, and you don’t actually touch the hand with your lips.)
I wrote a novel, Caracole, that came out in 1985. Although it read like a fable taking place in Venice in the nineteenth century, it could be read as an attack on the institute and on Susan. In all my years of therapy I never got to the bottom of my impulse toward treachery, especially toward people who’d helped me and befriended me. A Boy’s Own Story ends with the boy (me) betraying his teacher, a man with whom he had sex. I doubt if Susan and her son would have recognized themselves or even have bothered to read the book if they hadn’t been warned by an indiscreet mutual friend.
Caracole was an accurate picture of Susan, but only to those who knew her. For outsiders there were no identifying signs—the character of Mathilda wasn’t a writer nor Jewish nor an intellectual, nor did she have a white streak in her hair. Yet she shared many of Susan’s psychological traits. A typical passage reads:
Mathilda always opposed the people she happened to be among. She would defend whatever was conservative to progressives and argue for liberty on curiously old-fashioned grounds to conservatives: her manner was to challenge, to question. When other people generated enthusiasm while discussing a subject they thought was bound to suit her, she grew restless, squirmed in her chair, looked about with baleful eyes. She picked at something imaginary in her teeth as though she needed this preliminary breach of good manners in order to warm herself up for the real attack she was about to launch. The speaker became nervous, recognizing she wasn’t responding to his words with the customary nods and smiles, that in fact she was grooming herself like a lioness; he broke into a verbal run, hurtling over points, scattering notions, hoping something might appeal to her. At last the lioness focused on him with implacable eyes. “What rubbish,” she said. “I can’t tolerate another word.”
Oddly enough, I felt she would appreciate the aptness of my portrait, that she would learn from my implied admonitions. Of course on another level I knew I was trashing her and that she’d be angry. When she really was angry, however, I was surprised. I suffered over our break and for years afterward I’d dream of a reconciliation. Just as I’d dreamed of meeting her before I actually knew her, now I fantasized about a full pardon and a renewed friendship. Because I was bitter and fearful and felt guilty about my “betrayal” (if that’s what it was), I joked and said, “The worst thing about a reconciliation would be that then I’d have to see Susan. Ugh!”
But Susan was so angry that she asked Roger Straus, her editor, to contact all my foreign publishers and request as a courtesy to her and to him that they remove her blurb from the next edition of A Boy’s Own Story in every language. That move was effective. (Years before, Susan had done something similar to the gay American writer Alfred Chester, who’d used her words of praise without her authorization.) Maybe the break was worse because I’d made no effort to stay in touch with her or David. When my editor, Bill Whitehead, gave me a big masked ball in New York, complete with a brass band, David tried to barge in with a bullwhip; I suppose he wanted to beat me as a “cad.” He who’d written about Beau Brummell was given to such posturing. Luckily he was turned away by the bodyguards at the door.
Soon after I arrived in Paris I had lunch with George Plimpton’s sister, the poet and painter Sarah Plimpton. I told her I was planning on staying just a year in Paris. She said that she’d told herself the same thing but that now she’d been in France for twenty-two years. “You’ll see, it’s like lotus land,” she said.
Indeed that’s what it turned out to be, especially in those prosperous Mitterrand years. I didn’t really escape from AIDS. Many of my French friends died, including Foucault and Barbedette, just as back in America Bill Whitehead died and so did Norm Rathweg and so did my dearest friend, David Kalstone. Gradually I became more and more somber and my Parisian life became as dark as my New York life. I sat by many bedsides and held many emaciated hands. I didn’t feel the famous survivor guilt only because I was positive myself and expected throughout the eighties to die within a few months.
Sixteen years later I moved back to New York, and one day I ran into Susan Sontag in a restaurant. I’d rushed over to her table without recognizing her because I’d spotted a Parisian friend, the Argentine film director Edgardo Cosarinsky. Suddenly I thought, “Oh, dear, this woman with the short white hair must be Susan Sontag after her chemo. And this other woman must be Annie Leibovitz, her girlfriend.” I hurriedly slunk back to my table.
But then, in a flash, there was Susan standing by my table. She said, “Ed, I hope you don’t think I was ignoring you because of our silly little feud.”
I stood and she embraced me. We agreed that we’d get together, that all was forgiven, that we’d patch it up.
But the next day when I saw her at Cosarinsky’s screening, she was distant. I realized too much time had gone by. That our reconciliation hadn’t really “taken.” That was all right. We’d both become different people.
When I look back at the seventies, I remember the decade primarily as one of professional struggle. I started the decade as an unpublished and no longer young writer, fairly driven but susceptible to terrible, almost suicidal despair. By 1983, when I moved to Paris, I was still hustling for money and I was never sure where next month’s rent would be coming from, but I was no longer entirely unrecognized and desperate.
What had made the seventies less harrowing than they might have been was that, at least among artists and intellectuals, a tradition of honorable poverty still remained. Writers and painters and composers did not talk all the time (as they do now) of agents, contracts, and movie deals. New York had not yet formed a tight alliance with Los Angeles; rather, New Yorkers defined themselves in contrast to the West Coast.
Recently I consulted a book about the same period, this one by Mikal Gilmore. It was all about rock music and the downtown scene, about drugs and crime—not unexpected since Mikal writes for Rolling Stone and is the brother of Gary Gilmore, the convicted murderer studied in such depth by Norman Mailer in his magisterial The Executioner’s Song. I realized that though we went to many of the same places and probably knew many people in common, our books were entirely different—opposites, really. Although in mine I acknowledge the poverty and violence of a bankrupt New York in the 1970s, I write little about crime and say nothing about punk or rock music. Later I met Patti Smith and came to respect her, but in the seventies I knew no one in her world except Mapplethorpe.
It was only in the eighties that publishers were swallowed one after another by corporations, that the Barnes & Noble superstores pushed out the small neighborhood bookstores, that the multiplex movie theaters chased away the small art-house cinemas. Every time I would come back to New York from Paris in the e
ighties and nineties, I was shocked by how sleek it had become, how expensive ice cream boutiques had replaced the corner shoe repair shops, how the city neighborhoods were being gentrified as more and more rich young workers in finance moved into town and drove out the older, poorer ethnic minorities. And the bohemians. New York was no longer a dangerous, run-down ghetto; it had become a chromium, spotlit, palm-festooned singles bar.
AIDS killed off most of my circle. Every time I would come back to New York, more and more of my friends would be dying or dead. Chris Cox found a lover, a young curator at the New Museum, and Chris first buried him, then died himself. Chris had become a successful editor at Bantam Books; the last time I visited him (I was right off the plane from France), his hospital room was full of socially inept straight guys, his authors, guys who wrote murder mysteries and were used to hanging out in a sort of collegiate way. I certainly couldn’t ask them to leave and Chris was too polite as a good Southern boy to get rid of them. Maybe he preferred their company to mine, their feeble jokes and half-professional deference rather than my seriousness. I’ve found that people in the terminal ward never want to talk about death.
