“And how’s your novel proceeding?” I asked, to yank the conversation away from teaching.
He shrugged. “Not as well as before I sold it. Selling it—that was the mistake. Because now there’s a deadline, and little threatening notes, and phone calls I have to return. In effect, I’ve been seduced into the position of a dependent, which is something that a writer must never become. What we really need”—he leaned closer—“is the establishment of a system whereby writers are paid an annual salary and given the freedom to do whatever they want. Imagine that, a paycheck every two weeks, health benefits, the whole package—just what they get to publish, only we’d get it to write! But of course (and I speak from experience) it would be impossible. How would you implement it? Also, they like having us in their clutches. They want us hungry, sniffing at the haunches of the marketplace, because that way they can turn a quicker profit.”
I thought of mentioning the fact that in his dual role as editor and writer, Flint stood on both sides of this divide, then decided against it. “Ah, it was better back in the age of disinterested patronage!” he went on. “Unfortunately, we’re living in an age of institutional patronage, and the problem with institutions is that in the end they’re always going to try to get you to do what’s best for them.”
“Yes, but if you have to work at a job all day to make money,” I averred, “how are you ever going to find the time to write?”
“Ah, now that is the sticking point, isn’t it? Literature—I’m sorry to say it—belongs to a far less democratic age than ours, when there were servants and the lower orders and only people of means even had time to think about writing. Today, it’s true, some of us can make a living at it. But look what you give up in exchange! You become a slave to a publishing house or a university, and once they know you’ve got mortgage payments to make, Bauman, you might as well hand over your balls on a plate right then and there.” He put an arm around my shoulder. “If you want to know what I think, the only people who really ought to be writing these days are these rich Park Avenue ladies with stockbroker husbands, not because they’re necessarily any more talented than the rest of us, but because they’re the only ones who can afford to take the time. For we’re long past the years when Leonard Woolf did the typesetting at the Hogarth Press. There are no more Hudsons at Hudson. Instead, I fear, we’ve entered into the corporate dark ages, with the conglomerate taking the role of the church. And frankly, I fear that literature might just not survive.”
“But it always has! Even during the Dark Ages!”
“Ah, so you think that art is immortal! It isn’t. Books, pianos, paintings—all can be burned. The spirit can be starved, yes, all the way to death. Nothing endures without some degree of sustenance. And what’s worse, once the state’s wiped out art, there are plenty around who will be perfectly willing to collaborate in the dissemination of that sort of substitute, fake art that to be perfectly frank most people prefer to the real thing ... I know, I know, you think I sound like an old man. And yet with the fatal sun, and poison in the air, and skin cancer”—he pointed to the small bandage on his cheek—“how can I keep saying that what one writes matters? That’s my dilemma. Even if they earn money, books won’t save my daughter from radiation.”
At this point the receptionist called his name. Flint stood. “Well, must run,” he said, smiling as casually as if we had just concluded a thirty-second discussion of the weather. “Be well, Bauman.”
“You too,” I echoed, my voice trailing off (I still didn’t know what to call him) as, picking up his cane, he made his way toward Dr. Spengler’s door.
This encounter, not surprisingly, had a profounder effect on me than Flint probably intended it to. Indeed, riding the subway back to Eli’s that morning, I couldn’t help but replay his pronouncements in my head. The death of literature, he’d said ... such a far cry, this doomsday paean, from my own modest experience of publishing, which so far had been both gentle and pleasant. For instance, I had in my shoulder bag (I had just that morning received them in the mail) the bound galleys of The Deviled-Egg Plate. Thumbing through the pages in the subway, I was stunned by how much more authority my words radiated, now that they were printed in beautiful Bodoni Book (a helpful note at the end of the galleys gave the typeface’s history) instead of the familiar Helvetica of my computer. Or was my enjoyment of this private pleasure, as Flint had suggested, merely evidence of the degree to which I had effectively renounced my integrity? I couldn’t be sure. Nor could I be sure whether to take at face value his outlandish assertion that only those who had independent means should become writers. After all, Eli had means, and rather than reveling in the freedom that his parents’ money had bought him, he lived in a chronic squall of anxiety, irritation, and impatience. To Eli exterior validation—not cash—was the longed-for thing, which meant that when, in my thoughtless excitement, I interrupted his writing to show him my bound galleys that afternoon, his insistent enthusiasm could not disguise the crisis of doubt into which I had just thrust him: no matter how loudly he kvelled, there was heartbreak and hopelessness in his voice.
Much better, I decided after that, to confine my excitement to my own apartment, to make from there the long phone calls to Liza during which she filled me in on all the latest publishing gossip, to field from there the many party invitations I was receiving. For somehow my name was now on what Manhattanites call the A-list, and I was getting invitations all the time. Usually my date was Liza, who was looking for a boyfriend, and hoped to find one at one of these parties. She didn’t, of course; under such circumstances you never do. Instead it is usually only when you have just happily settled into matrimony that someone alarmingly attractive suddenly takes an interest in you—as happened in my case when at one party Roy Beckett, who had previously refused to give me so much as the time of day, suddenly started flirting with me. Liza, on the other hand, could not seem to attract a man to save her life—a failure that, because she had always enjoyed such a superabundance of suitors, both depressed and appalled her. “You’ll never go wanting,” Eli had told her once, which was true. The dry spell through which I was escorting her was exceptional, and would last only until spring—none of which stopped her (self-confidence being that fragile) from dissolving into a heap of self-loathing and bewilderment at the end of each party, broken pieces out of which, in Eli’s absence (for the same reasons that he hated bookstores, he refused ever to go to publishing parties) I would attempt to reconstruct the old Liza, usually by suggesting that if she wasn’t succeeding with men, it might be because, in her heart of hearts, she didn’t want to. Liza, however, disagreed. She was no longer interested in being a lesbian, she said. She was over lesbianism.
Sometimes, in her company, I wondered what it was, this category, this idea of the lesbian, that Liza alternately fled and embraced with such avidity. In college the answer, like most answers, had seemed clearer: lesbians, I’d thought then, were either girls like Tammy Lake who lusted viscerally after other girls, or girls like Erica for whom lesbianism was mostly an offshoot of feminism, or fashionable girls like Schuyler who disdained heterosexuality as being simply too boring and conventional for them to bother with. Liza, on the other hand, had only the vaguest conception of feminism, while her attraction to men—though by no means commensurate with what she felt for girls—was nonetheless potent enough to keep the ball of her destiny suspended, as it were, in midair. Even the word “lesbian”—the utterance of which, at certain moments, sent a frisson of excitement down her spine—could at times make her bristle. And why this word? I would ask myself, so quaintly antiquated, with its musty smell of Victorian England, of Sappho, of Amazonian brutalities as imagined in the fusty depths of a Maida Vale bed-sit? Why not instead tribade, popular in continental Europe during the nineteenth century and derived from tribology, “the science of the mechanisms of friction, lubrication, and wear of interacting surfaces that are in relative motion”? Thus in Proust, Dr. Cottard warns the narrator not to toler
ate Albertine’s habit of dancing with her friend Andrée, because, as he observes with medical authority, “It’s not sufficiently known that women derive most excitement through their breasts. And theirs, as you see, are touching completely.” Certainly Liza spoke on occasion about the beauty of women’s breasts, especially Jessica’s. Yet she had also said to me once, at the height of her affair with Jessica, “I must say, I do miss the thrust,” in that glib tone of someone who is perfectly content to have made a superfluous sacrifice.
Perhaps it really was simpler for men, I sometimes reflected; a matter, as Liza had once joked, of which pictures one liked to jerk off to—except that neither Eli nor Ricky liked to jerk off to pictures at all, while Eli claimed to enjoy sex with women more. (This didn’t stop him from declaring himself, with genuine militancy, to be “gay,” and later “queer.”) No, in the end all I could conclude was that the fault lay with categorization itself, that crude and elementary tool the inadequacy of which becomes more evident the deeper one probes. For homosexuality is a discipline the advanced study of which necessitates, as it were, its own transcendence, which is why all its serious students finally dispense with terminology altogether, and focus their attentions solely on the particulars of human lives.
But to return to Liza: just as, in Eli's view, my own reluctance to engage in penetrative sex signaled a larger reluctance—a refusal to go gently into adulthood—so Liza, whose retreat from lesbianism, in the wake of Jessica’s departure, had been both panicked and swift, clearly placed this grown-up pleasure at a great remove from that cult of childhood she had taken such pains, both in her writing and her life, to foster. Only Jessica, it seemed, had ever been able to lure her away from Jeopardy! Eli, for all his disparagement, was a willing member of her cult, as was I. Those afternoons at Liza’s studio were for me a logical extension of the summer Sundays I had spent with Jim Sterling in his parents’ apartment. Nor did our habit of reverencing the gratifications of our youth prove an exception to the rule that all private indulgences have their equivalent in public life. For instance, at the literary parties to which Liza and I went together, we were able to discern that our habit of standing awkwardly by the hors d’oeuvres table, instead of drawing bemused and piteous glances as it once had, was now winning us admirers. Seasoned veterans like Billie and Henry Deane seemed to view our lack of refinement as a refreshing indication of vigor. Behaving almost like a couple, like a pair of adorable and clever child geniuses, we charmed them all, Liza with her wit, I with my fecklessness: even when we showed up in jeans and T-shirts at parties where everyone else was in black tie, no one seemed to mind, just as the cousin of Jacqueline Onassis next to whom I found myself seated, one evening, at a benefit dinner at the New York Public Library, did not seem to mind when—bereft of any education in table manners—I drank out of her water glass.
No doubt her tolerance, which hinted at larger movements in the fashion world, was part of the glorification of youthful achievement taking hold at the time, chiefly as a result of the fact that so many young people—to quote Kendall, who, we must remember, worked for House and Garden—were earning “scads of yummy Wall Street money to spend on upholstery fabrics.” My own gains, by comparison, were, like Liza’s, chiefly in prestige. All at once, for instance, we were being sought after as book reviewers, in which capacity we were asked to review not only first novels by our peers, but “big books” by writers whose very presence at a party, only a year earlier, would have been enough to start my heart racing. Even film people started taking an interest in us: that year Liza sold the rights to Midnight Snacks, while I found myself fielding, through Billie, a score of inquiries from producers, most of whom, she assured me, had not even read my stories (which had in any case not yet been published), only the early reviews that had appeared in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus. That some of these producers had managed as well to get hold of the just-completed (and not yet edited) manuscript of The Terrorist at first stunned me, until Billie explained that it was a common practice for editorial assistants—in exchange for much-needed cash—to supply Hollywood agents with photocopies of unfinished novels on the sly. No doubt while I’d been working at Hudson, Carey had been doing it; Sara had been doing it; they had all been doing it.
At the time, it rather went to my head. No city in the world is more provincial than New York, nor is any realm of the arts more provincial than that of literature, nor is any community more provincial than the one composed of writers who hobnob with editors, and are to some degree homosexual. And yet these were the only milieus in which anyone knew who I was. To the establishment, literary people and homosexuals are equally suspect if not interchangeable populations, to be regarded with ambivalence at best, contempt at worst. Yet from the parties to which we went the establishment could not have seemed more distant, just as to Kendall the housewife in Smyrna, Georgia, who buys a copy of House and Garden at the grocery store because she’s thinking of redoing her dining room, and upon whose dissatisfaction with her chairs a magazine like House and Garden depends in order to keep up its circulation—to Kendall she did not exist. Instead what existed, all that existed, was New York: decorators and fabric houses and the competition, above all, the competition, Architectural Digest, House Beautiful, Elle Decor. For New York has always been the “secondary city” of which George Steiner writes, in which puff pieces, analyses, interviews proliferate, nearly suffocating those primary works from which they leech sustenance. And not only secondary but tertiary: there were magazines (I read all of them) that existed solely to review books that existed themselves solely to critique other books; there was even a journal devoted exclusively to the review of reviews, so New York was in its way also a quaternary city. Nor were those of us who aspired to the writing of fiction unimplicated in this frenzy, for we all wrote reviews in addition to reading them (which would be a little like, in the music world, Martha Argerich reviewing a recital by Alfred Brendel), and were forever reporting to each other the “buzz,” or, as they called it in Hollywood, the “coverage” on new novels (especially those by our contemporaries), gossip picked up from the Amys about authors we’d never met and books we’d never read, though we'received free copies of them. In high school and college I’d dreamed of a day when I could afford to buy any hardback book I chose; now I got sent hardbacks by the dozen, and didn’t pay a dime. And though I professed—we all did—to write only for the sake of art, the truth is that like Billie at Sam Stallings’s party, I had my ear cocked to the Zeitgeist, inventing even as I sat at my computer the interviews and the reviews and the Publishers Weekly articles that I hoped my book of stories would occasion, as if these counterfeit documents might serve as a guide by which my imagination could find its way.
None of this was particularly fun: obsessions rarely are. Instead, standing together at those parties, Liza and Amy and I would profess how much we “absolutely hated” this sort of thing—a declaration to which any stranger would have sensibly responded, “Well, why did you come?” And our answer to this question, if only we’d had the wherewithal to formulate it, would have been that this squabbly, small-town society which for all its aspirations to worldliness finally resembled, more than anything else, one of those cottagy Devon villages of which E. F. Benson wrote, had taken us in. It had become home for us, a place we felt we belonged.
I remember standing alone at one of those parties—or perhaps I was not alone, perhaps I was flirting with Roy (and wondering if I’d made a mistake to fall in love with Eli), or listening to Kendall hold forth on the vulgarity of the host’s curtain pelmets, or chatting about his impending move to Madrid with Henry Deane, with whom I had become friendly ... in any case, I was standing at one of these parties when I noticed Liza, only a few feet away, huddled in anxious conference with a new friend of hers, the tulip-shaped, peroxide-blond Violet Partridge, several of whose stories Edith Atkinson had bought for the magazine. And though I could pick up only fragments of their dialogue—“hundred-thousand-dollar advance,�
� I heard, and “front-page review,” and “Shirley MacLaine wants to play the mother”—their very posture (hunched and scoliotic), Liza’s ear tugging, the anguished way she was pulling a tissue through her fist, like a rabbit out of a hat, were enough to tell me that the conversation had nothing to do with pleasure, and everything to do with that need to stay informed that compelled us both, every week, to hurry out and buy the New York Times Book Review, Time, Newsweek, Publishers Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, and New York Review of Books (not to mention the magazine) the minute these publications hit the stands, not so much to read them as to winnow from them (an operation we could perform in record time) those bits of innuendo by means of which we were able to sustain the illusion of being up to date. For hindsight was to us less frightening than foresight, and therefore we both breathed more easily when, as Liza put it, we felt that we were “on top of things”—a revealing phrase, suggestive of waves, the scrambling of the drowned, the terror of going under.
It may have been at this party too (tellingly, I cannot remember in whose honor it was being thrown) that, while talking with Liza, Billie, and my new editor, three women who seemed to gather around me a veritable cloak of maternal protection, I noticed Marge Preston, whom I hadn’t seen in a year, ascending the stairs with Baylor. According to Liza, Marge was in serious trouble at the moment, her efforts to revive Hudson’s fading glory (of which Stanley Flint’s hiring had been the most vivid example) having so far come to naught, at least from a financial perspective. Indeed, according to the sibilations of the buzz, the powers that be at Terrier and its amorphous parent company were now pressuring Marge to fire Flint or risk being fired herself; for though he had brought the company a certain prestige, he had also failed to generate the bestsellers she had promised.
Martin Bauman Page 33
