City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s
By Edmund White
3/5
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About this ebook
Edmund White
Edmund White was born in Cincinnati in 1940. His many novels include the autobiographical trilogy A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony; he has published biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud, as well as memoirs, short stories, and criticism; in 1977 he co-authored The Joy of Gay Sex. He is an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in New York City.
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Reviews for City Boy
18 ratings17 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Although I enjoyed this book, White's overuse of the regal "we" is a bit tiresome and he is definitely very New York centric, but after all it is about his life in New York City. For the person who would otherwise have zero knowledge of the pre-condom, pre-plague days this should be an eye opener. For those of us who lived through those times, it’s a fun romp into an almost forgotten past. Some juicy gossip and brutally honest post-mortems help provide a glimpse into the literary and artistic hub.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I received this book in November and tried to read it then but couldn't get through it. I picked it up twice more before finally finishing it, and after all that effort to read the book I'm a little disappointed. White spins an engaging story, mixing comic anecdotes with serious reflection on himself and his peers at a time of great change in their lives - but I just wasn't interested. An excessive amount of name dropping turned me off from the very beginning, and the rest of the book did little to change my impressions. I think White has a lot of interesting things to say, and overall is an insightful and talented writer - clearly, since he overcame the early writers' block he describes in the book to publish 23 books - but his prose here was clumsy, often repetitive and even gossipy in tone. I thought I would like that casual, 'have I got a story for you' feel - instead it made the book a difficult one for me to finish.I understand that White's life and writing have been vastly impacted by the time and place in which his adult life began - there were times, however, many times throughout the book, where entire paragraphs read like a roster of the literary and cultural icons of his time. Good for him, for meeting and observing all of those people. But was that all he had to write about?"
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I had to read "Boys Own Story" in college, and was surprised that there were such books in the world--I was a sheltered child of the 80's. I loved it and went looking for similar. I can't say that I have picked up a book by White since then--OK I have picked them up just not read them and NOT because I applied to study under him at Brown & wasn't accepted--something which White probably had nothing to do with.THAT has nothing to do with my review of this which is: I was a bit bored. There are a lot of famous people mentioned (some, I admit, I had to look up--though not in the index...since there isn't one) and there is some pretty prose...but I don't feel as if I was given more than a fleeting glimpse of life in New York in the 60's and 70's. I think this might have meant more to me had I lived through the 60's and 70's...And fans of his other books, especially his biographical books will probably like this much more than I did.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5As a great admirer of Edmund White's previous writings, I must say that I was sorely disappointed in this latest memoir. I've managed to get half-way through Chapter 4, and honestly can't bring myself to go on (though I did peruse a few later chapters in hopes that the writing got better). As another reviewer pointed out, the book reads like a laundry list of names and places with the barest of description, and no elaboration.There's a distinct lack of flow and cohesion, and I found myself wondering if the book might not be more palatable if heard rather than read. Might it have begun as a series of verbal reminiscences, later transcribed? It would certainly account for the disjointed, maundering prose and maddening overabundance of the simplest of simple sentences. And while wit is certainly in evidence here, it falls flat when set amidst such bare-bones, banal reportage.Also, while I'm very indulgent of name dropping (I generally find the name dropping in Ned Rorem's diaries charming, and a little vicariously thrilling), I find it largely without charm here. After coming across the name of a friend of a friend mentioned in less-than-flattering terms, I found myself flipping to the back of the book in search of an index so that I could look up the people I know and get the ordeal over with. No such luck. Instead, I found the brief acknowledgments page, which I suspect is the key to understanding the unfortunate quality of the book: here Mr. White doesn't thank those whose helpfulness he appreciated, but those whose appreciation he found helpful.This is one of those books that I will make a serious effort to forget so as not to mar my estimation of his earlier works.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Gay urban life in the 1970's is a subject I'm drawn to, and Edmund White is probably the greatest living gay man of letters. So, expectations for this book were very high.It is not as good as it could have been, but it is not a bad book either. Though not a memoir, I recommend Patrick Moore's 'Beyond Shame' as a better look at the same period and place.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5This book just did not hold my interest at all. I wouldn't have finished it but I received it through GoodReads First Reads program so I felt like I had to.City Boy is author Edmund White's account of his years in New York as a struggling author. I didn't feel any emotion coming out of him. It felt like he was just writing a laundry list account of his activities and so it was hard to connect with him. Also, he name dropped a lot and it was clear that I was supposed to be impressed but I only recognized a handful of names that were dropped. It was hard to keep everyone straight too - he mentioned dozens of people.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Edmund White's City Boy is a memoir of the author's growth as a writer during the 1970s, primarily in New York. It is full of anecdotes and stories about real people--of varying degrees of fame--like Robert Wilson, James Merrill, William Burroughs, and Harold Brodkey, among many, many others. All of the characterizations are fascinating, capturing the particular impact that this or that person had on the author. These passages are the kind that inspired me to track down some of the people that were new to me and thus discover something wonderful and unexpected; and on the other hand, to be reminded of old favorites now also seen in the new light of White's sensibility. The description of Jasper Johns in Chapter 15, whose "house had the sort of simplicity that only money could buy" (214) is especially powerful. His description of Johns starts on an intimate, personal level and then opens into a discussion (one of many) about the differences between artists of the time who were publicly out (like White) and those that were closeted (like Johns, Sontag, and many others). This chapter especially exemplifies White's charm, and the mixture of his thoughtfulness, his awe for the people who inspired him, and (not least) his vanity. Like he does in most of the book, in this chapter he balances the nostalgic voyeurism of his past with a thoughtful criticism of the attitudes of his younger self.The book is solidly interesting and rewarding--up until the last chapter, which seems rushed and awkward. White doesn't seem to know how to talk about Susan Sontag, and ends up shifting suddenly, through a discussion of the impact of AIDS on the 1970s New York scene, into a weaker, maudlin prose unlike anything that precedes it. The impulse to grieve rings true, but his writing is clearly more effective in remembering earlier, happier times than it is eulogizing the loss of them.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5In Alan Bennett's play The History Boys, when the dimmest of the students is asked to define history, he replies, "It's just one [expletive] thing after another." Funny perhaps, but true.And it's also the reason I tend to avoid non-fiction...memoirs particularly. At least when one is writing a biography (particularly about someone who is already dead) or writing about history, the author has enough distance to give the story some shape and ascribe it some sort of meaning. Autobiography is a bit stickier.I chose to read White's City Boy primarily because of its subtitle, "My Life in New York During the 1960's and 70's." As a music fan, that era in NYC history has always interested me. EVen though the seedy, filthy, dangerous New York of the 1970's has been all but forgotten, it was fertile ground for many of the most influential artists, writers and musicians of the latter part of the Twentieth Century. I figured if anyone could conjur that time period on the page, it would surely be a skillful and evocative writer like White. Unfortunately I found the book to be dull and almost completely formless. He flits from one episode to another, tepidly dishing the dirt on a lot of hotsy totsy (and mostly dead) literary luminaries, only about half of whom I've heard of. While he does spill a fair amount of ink on the squalid living conditions in pre-boom Manhattan, the descriptions are all fairly dry and cliche (garbage piling in the streets due to strikes, multiple locks on apartment doors) and lack any real flavour of the era. Surprisingly, the rampant sex of that time period is somewhat coyly presented and, in retrospect, primarily only as a set up for the sea change occasioned by the looming AIDS crisis that comes near the book's conclusion. The most fascinating aspect of the story dealt with the writing of his first novel, Forgetting Elena and his subsequent struggle to get it edited, published, reviewed and recognized. That novel has always been a favourite of mine and, as a writer, the story of how a debut novel goes from idea to publication, was edifying and fascinating. But that, in and of itself, is not enough for me to wholeheartedly recommend White's book.For a more lively, colourful version of this period in NY history (with a gay perspective), one should really read Wayne County's outrageous memoir, Man Enough to be a Woman.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5New York of the late 50’s, the 60’s and the 70’s was a romantic time of shabbiness and low rents. Outcasts were discovering who they really were and gay life was thriving. In a small corner of this gay mecca Edmund White was finding his way amidst a circle of artistic intelligencia – writers, book and magazine editors, choreographers , photographers, actors, and dancers.Ordinarily the anecdotes that Professor White presents should be fascinating, however the writing lacks vigor and virtuosity. Truman Capote observed once very astutely that Gore Vidal’s novels lacked a “voice”. Such is the case with the writing of Professor White. Unfortunately, dynamic narrative such as his feud with Susan Sontag reads like a book report.Still the book was a nostalgic tour through pre-AIDS New York and its name dropped illuminati. It was a stimulating visit.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5What to say of someone else’s personal history? There are a handful of moments where the prose moves smoothly – describing Hispanic lovers (pg46), his friend Marilyn (pages in the 30’s), Nabokov’s writing (104), the enthusiasm of a friend, etc. Those are the moments where you can see White’s love of his subjects and the vision is stunning. But the pearls of clear observation are deeply buried under what seems like an endless barrage of gay New York City name-dropping. And, perhaps that is appropriate of such a history. It is not strictly one moment of beauty after another – some of history is just “lived”. But, if I had to reduce my thoughts down to an answer to “would I recommend this book to another or not?” I would probably recommend Larry Kramer’s Faggots or Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance for flavor--with this history as a backup for summaries sake. On a purely “keep the reader engaged” level, I would have preferred the history in vignettes organized by person, year or social observation.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Having not read Edmund White and only knowing of his work by name, I was curious to read this book. I was, however, dissapointed. I realize there are some for whom this will be a good read, but not I. I was hoping for more about the author, but got much about the time and the persons with whom he dealt. It was more technical in areas in which I hoped for more personable touches. Perhaps I will try his novels and get a better reaction. As for as biographies go, I pass on this one.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I'll use White's own words: "gauche and self-serving" (p 248). Chapter 17 drops more names than the whole canon of Dominick Dunne's journalism pieces in VF. A big disappointment from an author I admire. True, the background of NYC during this time is fascinating, but it has been better served elsewhere, notably Larry Kramer's "Faggots."
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5What makes someone's life worth writing a book about? What makes someone's memoir worth reading? For me there are two possible answers-- either that person has done something worth knowing more about or that person knew people who did.Edmund White has done things worth knowing more about. He wrote one of the very first coming-out-novels, A Boy's Own Story, and has become a well-respected man of letters with multiple novels, biographies of Genet, Proust and Rimbaud, and a position teaching writing at Princeton. But before becoming a success, he spent two decades living in New York City where, when he wasn't looking for sex, he met just about everyone on the literary scene that there was to meet: Tennessee Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Susan Sontag, Gore Vidal, Jame Merrill, and many others.City Boy is more than a who's who of New York literati; it's a document of a time, a record of what it was like to live as a gay man when living as a gay man was a new idea. In the 1960's, when City Boy opens, being gay meant living alone, in fear, hiding one's true nature from employers, family, even from ones self if possible. All the gay men Mr. White knew, including himself, were in therapy trying to become straight. They all failed. No one thought they could find the right man and settle down; marriage or anything that resembled it were simply not on anyone's radar pre-Stonewall. In 1969, Mr. White participated in the Stonewall riots, a turning point in the gay rights movement and he survived the explosion of easily available sex and drugs that characterized gay life in the 1970's. He not only survived, he came away with many stories to tell.These stories make for interesting, sometimes shocking, often amusing reading. Mr. White stayed at Peggy Guggenheim's home in Venice for a time and tells the story of Ms. Guggenheim's response to a tourist who stood outside looking at her home and asked her "isn't Peggy Guggenheim dead?" Ms. Guggenheim responded "Yes." City Boy has plenty of dish on others including an interesting chapter on Harold Brodky who was supposed to be working on the greatest novel ever only to publish a mammoth text few people were able to read let alone praise and a long confession about how poorly he treated Susan Sontag who was largely responsible for his success as a novelist.A memoir can be a significant statement about a person or about a period of time. It can be as moving as a novel if it's able to come together as a such. The first half, perhaps the first two thirds of City Boy come very close to this. Mr. White's portrayal of his own life and the lives of those close to him do create a lively picture of New York when New York was down and out. But the last section of the book becomes a series of scenes, brief views of the famous people Mr. White knew, and City Boy becomes simply a collection of portraits and anecdotes with little sense of purpose to them. By the end there was little feeling of having reached a deeper understanding of the book's subjects. While City Boy falls short in the end, it succeeds as an entertaining, frank portrait of the author's life and of New York City in the 1960's and 1970's.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I must admit I was a little leery of reading this book as I had heard a good bit how detailed White was in writing about people in the art scene of New York of the 70's, and I worried that I wouldn't know who half the people he referenced were. However, I was really pleasantly surprised when I received a copy of this book and read it. Yes, White discusses people that I didn’t know, but he does a great job explaining who people were, why they were relevant, and makes his interaction with them (however unknown they may be to the reader) interesting. This book works on so many different levels, a memoir, a literary history, a culture study, and a travelogue. Edmund White has clearly led an amazing life as he has detailed in previous books, but reading about his early professional years working as a magazine writer and editor is truly fascinating. Who didn’t this man know or work with during the 70’s? In my opinion, a great strength of this book is the job White does capturing the spirit of New York in the 70’s, particularly the gay male culture. I found myself reading it and thinking about the recent documentary film “Gay Sex in the 70’s.” It was an incredible time, and it makes for a story in the life of an incredible writer.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5White's memoir begins when he he arrives in New York City from the Midwest where he followed his lover instead of going on to Harvard. He is is not a writer yet and these two decades are a formative time in his literary career. As a gay man, White was still hoping to be "cured" as he regularly (like many other gay men at the time) saw a therapist. In 1969, as the gay movement began with Stonewall, White began to embrace his own identity--and he had little choice when, in 1977, he famously co-authored "The Joy of Gay Sex." The reader is invited to hear White's tales of the famous artists and literary figures he surrounded himself with and his many lovers and experiences before and in the early days of AIDS. This book is gossip and at the same time revelation. This is a social history of New York at that time told by an insider.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Reading City Boy is a bit like sitting down with an old friend one has known for years and still - despite hearing similar stories from him each time you meet - feeling closer to him than ever and realizing how much his friendship means to you. White still has the ability to startle, to come out with some revelation about himself that leaves the reader wondering: "Why did he admit that?" We learn from Edmund White: learn to be more honest, more down-to-earth, more tolerant, and more understanding. In City Boy, White's focus changes from the interior to the exterior. Those who read and enjoyed My Lives may be disappointed in City Boy. My Lives was a breathtaking excursion into the life and mind of Edmund White. Each page had the ability to charm or alarm us. City Boy, on the other hand, is more about the world outside, the world of others, the world that White lived in and observed while simultaneously living the life that we all have come to know through his other books. City Boy is an authentic representation of the 60s and 70s and of gay culture during those years, in particular. But if a reader picks up this book hoping for sadly amusing pages about White being led around on a leash or fascinating insights into his real-world relationships with women, one will find City Boy lacking. For someone yearning to have lived through the 60s or 70s and having missed it by a decade or two or three, City Boy should supply a good picture of the times. If someone is seeking a little gossip or some smartly drawn vignettes of famous people, City Boy should please as well. White gives wry observations of James Merrill, Vladimir Nabokov, Jan Morris, John Hohnsbeen, Peggy Guggenheim, William Burroughs, Jasper Johns, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Susan Sontag among others. The author who always seems to us as though we've known him forever, this time around has taken the focus outside, writing about the decades he remembers well but through the lens of his movement around the cities: New York, San Francisco, and Paris. As always, White is a class act. At his simplest and least exciting he is always a gentleman, one who deserves the title of "our friend between the covers."
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5If there were a name index to this book, it would be a hundred pages long. The author is basically unknown, but he moved among a lot of famous and near-famous people. I read it in 5 hours looking for points where his life in New York and San Francisco intersected with my own. There were several. He remined me of that hideous male look of the 1970s where one's shoulders and waist were the same size. Also, the author is right on target when he describes New York and San Francisco as being so different from the rest of the country that they could have been entirerly different cultures located on distant continents.
Book preview
City Boy - Edmund White
City Boy
My Life in New York
During the 1960s and ’70s
Edmund White
To Claude and Ivan Nabokov
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Author
A Note About the Author
By the Same Author
Chapter 1
In the 1970s in New York everyone slept till noon.
It was a grungy, dangerous, bankrupt city without normal services most of the time. The garbage piled up and stank during long strikes of the sanitation workers. A major blackout led to days and days of looting. We gay guys wore whistles around our necks so we could summon help from other gay men when we were attacked on the streets by gangs living in the projects between Greenwich Village and the West Side leather bars.
The upside was that the city was inexpensive, and Manhattan, especially the part of it below Fourteenth Street, was full of young actors-singers-dancers-waiters who made enough money working their restaurant shifts three nights a week to pay for their acting lessons and their cheap rents. Unlike our hometowns back in the Midwest, where the sidewalk was rolled up at six P.M., the delis and coffee shops were open all night and the bars till four in the morning. That whole army of actor-waiters saw their restaurant jobs as just another opportunity for scene study
(Who am I tonight? An Austrian aristocrat who’s fallen on bad times? A runaway from an incestuous family in the Tennessee Hills? A Swedish gymnast?
). No matter how big their tips were, they managed to drink them away in a bar after the restaurants closed as they talked excitedly about their art and their loves. Everyone smoked all the time, and when you French-kissed someone, it was like rubbing one ashtray against another.
New York seemed either frightening or risible to the rest of the nation. To us, however, it represented the only free port on the entire continent. Only in New York could we walk hand in hand with a member of the same sex. Only in New York could we ignore a rat galloping across our path and head out for a midnight play reading. Artists on the Lower East Side were recycling the most primitive and worthless materials—junk, really.
But there was also a mandarin New York, a place where painters and choreographers and novelists and poets strove to produce serious art of the highest order. This was an elite group of people, scattered throughout the Village and the emerging neighborhood of Chelsea and the comfortable, kicked-out Upper West Side; in this mandarinate artists and intellectuals still felt connected to the supreme artists of the past, still thought that their work would be the latest installment in a quasi-divine legacy.
I had constant daydreams of meeting Susan Sontag and Paul Goodman. I don’t know why I focused on them—maybe because they were so often mentioned in the Village Voice and the Partisan Review but even by Time. He’d written Growing Up Absurd, the bible of the sixties, now largely forgotten (I never read it in any event). How could I have worshipped a man whose work I didn’t know? I guess because I’d heard that he was bisexual, that he was a brilliant therapist, and that he was somehow for the young and the liberated. I read his astonishing journal, Five Years, published in 1966, a groundbreaking book in which he openly discussed paying men for sex and enjoying anonymous sex in the meatpacking district. Today that would seem unremarkable, perhaps, but for a husband and a father back then to be so confiding, so shameless, was unprecedented, especially since the sex passages were mixed in with remarks on culture and poetry and a hundred other subjects.
Sontag was someone I read more faithfully, especially Against Interpretation and even individual essays as they were published.
New York, in short, in the seventies was a junkyard with serious artistic aspirations. I remember that one of our friends, the poet Brad Gooch, wanted to introduce us to his lover, who’d become an up-and-coming Hollywood director, but Brad begged him not to tell us that he worked as a director since Hollywood had such low prestige among us. That sort of reticence would be unthinkable today in a New York that has become enslaved by wealth and glitz, but back then people still embraced Ezra Pound’s motto, Beauty is difficult.
We kept asking in 1972 and 1973 when the seventies were going to begin . . .
Then again we had to admit the sixties hadn’t really begun until the Beatles came over to the States in 1964, but after that the decade took on a real, definite personality—protest movements, long hair, love, drugs, a euphoria that turned sour only toward the end of 1969. Of course for Leftists the decade began with the Brown v. Board of Education decision and ended with Nixon’s resignation in 1974.
I suppose people hadn’t really thought each decade should have its own character and be different from the others till the 1920s, although I remember in a nineteenth-century Russian novel someone remarked that a character was a typical man of the 1830s—progressive and an atheist. But at that time it seemed more a question of generations—one belonged to the generation of superfluous men,
for instance, or one was a frivolous, self-indulgent product of the Belle Époque. But certainly in the 1920s, as the idea of the modern became current, every amateur sociologist began to seek out the personality of the dawning decade.
In retrospect we could see that the 1950s had been a reactionary period in America of Eisenhower blandness, of virulent anticommunism, of the Feminine Mystique. I lived through the fifties in the Midwest when everything that was happening—the repression of homosexuality, for instance, the demonization of the Left, the giggly, soporific ordinariness of adolescence, the stone deafness to the social injustice all around us—seemed not only unobjectionable but also nonexistent. Somehow we’d all been led to think that the order of things in the fifties was natural,
eternal and unchanging. The cult books of that epoch were The Lonely Crowd and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.
The great triumph of the sixties was to dramatize just how arbitrary and constructed the seeming normality of the fifties had been. We rose up from our maple-wood twin beds and fell onto the great squishy, heated water bed of the sixties.
At the end of the 1970s I wrote, There was no style for the decade, no flair, no slogans. The mistake we made was that we were all looking for something as startling as the Beatles, acid, Pop Art, hippies and radical politics. What actually set in was a painful and unexpected working out of the terms the Sixties had so blithely tossed off.
Chapter 2
I had majored in Chinese at the University of Michigan and I’d been accepted at Harvard to do a Ph.D. in the language. But then I’d pursued a boy I was in love with, Stan, to New York instead. Stan was a junior but had been lured to New York with dreams of becoming an actor. I arrived on July 19, 1962.
I wasn’t really suited for any kind of work except journalism. I’d edited the campus literary magazine at the University of Michigan and thought that somehow I could turn that experience into a job. I had no connections in New York. I had no money beyond the two hundred dollars I’d earned during the month of June delivering eggs and fruit juice in Des Plaines, a desolate suburb of Chicago. On July 19, Stan’s birthday, I decided I had to fly to New York to join him. My sister and mother always later claimed that I’d flown to New York first-class, but that was just more family mythmaking.
I stayed at the Sixty-third Street YMCA, which in those days was pretty much a fairy palace, full of transient and permanent gay residents. It was (and is) a mock-Moorish fantasy of tile work and low ceilings, as well as a giant swimming pool where Tennessee Williams was often sighted. The residential floors were really like a giant sauna. Every time I’d emerge from my room to take a shower, even if it was at two A.M. on a stifling night, a grizzled, potbellied resident would come hobbling out and be standing within seconds under the adjoining spray, soaping himself up and staring at me fixedly, as if the secret to success in cruising were simply transmitting a strong enough signal, the more blatant the better.
Stan wasn’t especially happy to see me. The night I arrived, his birthday, I sat on his doorstep till dawn but he never came home. The next night he met me, but somewhat reluctantly. He was living with two other actors, one of them a hot older man of thirty named Paul Giovanni, who was playing The Boy in the original production of The Fantasticks, which became the longest-running musical in off-Broadway history. Stan was besotted with the cool, ironic Paul, but he did let me take him out to a gay restaurant. Of course I knew about gay bars, but the idea that gays might want to socialize and feed with one another—and in public!—seemed a fascinating new possibility. Gay liberation would not take off until 1969, but when it did, it seemed to be the final piece to a puzzle that we’d all been toying with for five or six years and slowly assembling. Maybe because visible gays were becoming more and more numerous, we were finally reaching a critical density.
Throngs of gay men were in the streets of the West Village (and a few women were visible at bars such as Kookie’s and later the Duchess on Sheridan Square). The unisex look of the sixties, though it didn’t represent a serious change in attitudes, nevertheless made it easier to sneak in a dangling bracelet on a man’s wrist or a big turquoise brooch on a striped red velvet vest (it wasn’t an era known for its good taste). During the fifties it had been illegal in many communities for a woman to wear more than two items of male clothing—jeans, sweatshirt, and a cowboy belt could get a woman arrested; now they could wear T-shirts or boots if they wanted. Though interracial marriage was still illegal in many states, the Village was full of mixed couples (mostly Negro
men, as we said then, and white chicks
). Even the idea of a hippie counterculture—of a counter-anything—gave us an exciting new model of contemporary dissonance.
Two months later, in September 1962, Stan agreed to live with me in the little, dingy apartment I’d rented on MacDougal Street, and we stayed together for the next five years. He’d overstayed his welcome with Paul, but he’d decided not to go back to Michigan for his senior year. He wanted to try his luck as an actor. In that era, before there was any degree of widespread gay self-acceptance, it was extremely rare to find a gay couple who lived together openly as lovers, who’d acknowledged their homosexuality to their parents and friends and colleagues, who had a sense that they constituted a real romantic pair capable of being faithful to one another or if not sexually exclusive at least committed in some sense for the long haul.
I knew just three gay couples, all former students from the University of Michigan who’d moved to the big city and were trying on for size the novel experiment of living as a gay pair. I didn’t know—or even know of—any older gay couples. Stan and I took our affair
so lightly that we had no idea of fidelity, though we didn’t discuss the rules of our relationship. We had no idea of growing old together. We never spoke to outsiders of our partner
(the term didn’t exist then). Another gay friend might ask, Are you and Stan lovers?
to which I’d respond, Sort of.
It was all pretty murky, even to us. We seldom had sex with each other—and often it happened in the middle of the night, one of us wordlessly awakening the other out of need. Because we were gay, we routinely referred to ourselves as sick,
which was only half a joke. We both saw shrinks, off and on.
Even our infidelities were comical. Tom Eyen, a young but already well-known playwright, picked me up one night (eventually Tom wrote Dreamgirls). After we had sex, he said, You have the same carry-on in bed as this other guy I fucked yesterday—Stan. His name was Stan.
I couldn’t wait to get home to tease Stanley, and I wondered privately what our shared carry-on
might consist of.
Of course we were still so young that our parents and fellow workers might think we were just roommates. Lots of people our age had roommates, in fact most of them, though it wasn’t that way elsewhere. (When I later moved to Rome in 1970, the only translation for roommate was il ragazzo con cui divido l’appartamento). Most of our gay friends were careful to maintain separate bedrooms, although Stan and I slept on a foldout couch that made into a double bed. We didn’t have many visitors, though Stan would sometimes rehearse in our tiny living room with other actors from his class. If anyone asked, he said he slept on the single bed in the spare room.
We eventually discovered that we weren’t really compatible sexually. But I truly loved Stan. At first because he was so beautiful and I was an idolator of beauty. I didn’t like the way I looked and I was proud to be seen with him. Nor was my admiration of his looks a subjective thing; his beauty was classic and famous,
or at least generally acknowledged. Two straight male friends of his fell for him; for both he was their only gay experiment. Once one of the best-known dress designers in America stopped Stan on the street and offered to take him to Egypt on a holiday. The man wanted to hand him a plane ticket on the spot. He and Stan hadn’t exchanged a word; for the designer it was impulse buying.
But I loved Stan not just as a trophy but because I really cared for him. He was studious and hardworking. At first when he wanted to be an actor, he took acting classes at the Herbert Berghof studio. Then he went back to school and got a master’s degree in English. He enrolled in a course in Henry James from the great James biographer Leon Edel. I paid the rent and I enjoyed having this slight hold over Stan. He needed me, at least for shelter. Of course he was also attached to me but was terribly moody and given to deep depressions.
I had found my first job at Time-Life Books on the thirty-second floor of the Time-Life Building on Sixth Avenue and Fiftieth Street. Every day I’d put on a coat and tie and head uptown from our Village apartment, usually in a taxi I could ill afford. Officially we worked from ten to six but I could never get in until eleven and I kept expecting to be reprimanded or even fired, but nothing ever happened. In fact we had little work, and a whole week’s worth could be dashed off during a panicky Friday afternoon. Our weekly assignment might be to write four picture captions of two lines each, a trivial workload that seemed momentous only because we had so much time to think about it. The editors above us always demanded rewrites since they, too, were underemployed.
I spent the whole day wasting time. A two-hour lunch. Endless coffee breaks with other writers and researchers. A weird man who came by to shine our shoes once told me that for two hundred dollars he could have anyone I wanted bumped off. At noon I’d pay a visit to an art gallery on Fifty-seventh Street or to the Museum of Modern Art around the corner. In those years I saw the first Pop Art works at the Sidney Janis Gallery—a ghostly life-size plaster man by George Segal standing on a ladder changing the letters on a movie marquee, or Roy Lichtenstein’s benday-dot comic-strip panels (Oh, Brad
). Or I’d go to the Gotham Book Mart down on Forty-seventh, where I’d slump to the floor and read the books that were too expensive for me to buy.
The Gotham was the ideal bookstore with dozens of literary magazines stacked on the counter up close to the front door beside the cash register and, halfway back on the right, a big table full of the newest books of poetry. On the walls were pictures of all the greats who’d read at the Gotham, including Marianne Moore and Cocteau and Dylan Thomas, some of them perched high up on a library ladder, posing above the elegant Frances Steloff (who died at 101 in 1989). Although she sold the shop,
as she called it, to Andreas Brown in 1967, she was always prowling around, sometimes urging customers to buy. She liked Oriental religions in a slightly creepy period
way that went along with table-tapping and ectoplasmic photos, and an extensive section on Krishnamurti and the Bhagavad Gita was in an alcove just beyond the poetry table. Steloff, from a poor family, was self-educated. On her own, she’d turned the Gotham into a major intellectual center. I’m sure plenty of famous writers were lurking about during the hours and hours I spent there, but I didn’t recognize them. Of course when you’re an uninitiated kid, you’re not likely to recognize literary celebrities on the hoof. You’re like the Yale undergrad who (according to an anecdote of the period) saw Auden aboard the club car of the train to New Haven and passed him a note via the waiter asking, Are you Robert Frost?
Auden wrote back, You’ve spoiled Mother’s day.
The Gotham was one of the great bookstores of my life. At the very rear of the store was a huge fiction department, where I would dip into dozens of books. It was there that I bought Robert Stone’s Hall of Mirrors and Joyce Carol Oates’s them and Pynchon’s V. , though of all my Gotham finds my favorite was Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era. The store was an oasis from the philistine world all around it. To be sure, there were other great bookstores in those days, especially the Eighth Street down in the Village, with its many floors and its sullen, unhelpful clerks. By the end of the 1970s there was the Three Lives bookstore, then on Sheridan Square.
I remember one afternoon as I browsed at the back of the Gotham hearing Andy Brown talking on the phone with someone I figured out must be a rather desperate Jack Kerouac, who wanted to sell an old manuscript to finance his move to Florida with his mother (Kerouac died in 1969 in St. Petersburg). I didn’t really hear what sort of deal they struck, if any, but I suppose what was most exciting was the idea that literature was still alive, that it was going on all around me, and that some of the legendary figures I’d read about (and even read) were still alive and struggling. Kerouac, for instance, was a sad drunk, which a later biography corroborated but which Andy’s patient tone already half suggested, talking to Kerouac as if he were a child incapable of understanding.
This idea that literature was somewhere nearby made it only more tantalizingly distant. I remember thinking how strange it was that all the writers of the past seemed to know each other but that we
didn’t. I supposed that the writers of the future were already living and working in New York, but where to find them?
I felt professionally isolated—worse, becalmed. Nothing is more tedious than working in a big corporation. We had such a narrow range of activity and our tasks were so silly and infantile that we felt degraded.
Part of my isolation, no doubt, was due to my being attracted only to men my own age or younger. I wasn’t meeting older people who were accomplishing things. At Time-Life Books there was only one exception, an editor, Ezra Bowen, a tough guy with rolled-up sleeves, a wiry frame, and a punched-in nose who kept a photo on the wall of a father lion licking his cubs. Ezra was the son of Catherine Drinker Bowen, the celebrated biographer (Tchaikovsky, John Adams, Ben Franklin), and he had literary—well, not ambitions but rather manners. He’d been married to a novelist, Joan Williams, who before that had been one of Faulkner’s personal favorites, his protégée. When they’d met, Faulkner was in his fifties and already a Nobel Prize winner and Joan Williams was just a redheaded college girl from Memphis. They were briefly lovers and even collaborated on a play, but she’d ended their affair because he wasn’t free to marry her (he already had a wife) and he was thirty-some years older. By the time she married Ezra Bowen in the early fifties, Faulkner was in love with the even younger (and more receptive) Jean Stein, but he remained friendly with Joan Williams and wrote her hundreds of letters. She and Ezra had two sons and divorced in 1970. She fictionalized her relationship with Faulkner in a novel called The Wintering. People around the office said that Ezra had taken a year off from Time-Life to write his own novel, but had wasted the time constructing a study for himself in a shed in the garden—and that Joan, saddled with the children, the housework, and a part-time job, had turned out a successful novel in the same period. She wrote five highly regarded novels in all, and Ezra only did a few Time-Life books on such things as skiing, Native Americans, the wheel.
I was afraid of ending up like Ezra. I forced myself to write plays and novels during the evenings after work—anything creative as a break from the torpor of an imagination-killing office job.
Chapter 3
I was making four hundred dollars a month. Stan’s and my apartment cost just a hundred. It was on MacDougal between Bleecker and Houston, in the heart of the old Greenwich Village, right around the corner from the Little Red School House, a bastion of progressive education, and directly across the street from Bob Dylan’s apartment, though I never once glimpsed him and didn’t quite see the fuss over a man whose singing sounded whiny to me. On the corner was the San Remo, which had until recently been a famous gay bar but was now straight. Here, in the men’s toilet, Terry Southern in his novel Candy had set an abortion scene. Frank O’Hara, the New York poet, had hung out there. I pictured thin gay men in Brooks Brothers suits, smoking, drinking martinis, their pale faces covered with light hangover sweat, their teeth brown from cigarettes, their bluish white hands shaking.
There was also a coffee shop across MacDougal called the Hip Bagel. Hip was for a while crossed out, then later reinstated, as the word itself was condemned for being square, then rescued through a second degree of irony. It had black walls and individual spotlights trained down on booths. In a back booth on the left I would sometimes drink espresso with an oversize girl who swore she was going to be a famous pop singer someday. I’d never heard of a fat singer off the grand opera stage, so I just nodded politely, though I was impressed to hear that she’d already appeared in The Music Man. A few years later she emerged as Mama Cass in the Mamas and the Papas, which meant little to me since except for the times it would provide the sound track for my romances I didn’t care for pop. By now I’ve loosened up a little more and have over the years learned, through repetition perhaps, to appreciate and even enjoy some of the popular music boyfriends have pressed upon me or played for me.
Another place where I’d sit and nurse a beer was the Bleecker Street Tavern, a barny old bar with many tables and few customers and a kindly waitress with a man’s face and dyed hair. Little did I know that this had been the first gay bar in New York, the Slide; in the nineteenth century all these tables had been crowded with transvestite prostitutes in crinolines and their top-hatted customers. In the basement were little rooms where the whores had taken their johns, and though the rooms are still there the place is now a heavy-metal hangout called Kenny’s Castaways.
The beatnik/hippie revolution was swirling all around me. After work I’d take the subway down and get off at the West Fourth Street stop and walk to our tiny, dirty, roach-trap apartment on MacDougal. On a warm evening my street was so crowded with kids with long hair and burgundy velvet jeans and mirrored vests and filmy shirts with puffy pirate sleeves that few cars would venture down it. It was still an old Italian neighborhood with little cheap pasta joints down two or three steps from street level (Monte’s was our favorite), cafés serving espresso such as the Caff!é Reggio, and funeral homes with alabaster urns lit from within by electric bulbs, the stained-glass windows shrouded by closed beige curtains that were never opened. Our neighbors were Italian and spoke to each other every morning in, I guess, a Neapolitan dialect. Out our scrap of back window we could see old Italian wives cranking laundry across the air shaft on pulley-operated lines. We were far from our Midwestern suburban roots. Over that bedrock of the Italian Village was scattered the more recent topsoil of stores offering hookahs and shabby finery and light boxes and paintings that one could make oneself by splashing acrylics on a revolving potter’s wheel—the centrifugal force threw the shiny colors out in crazed patterns. The smell of incense and patchouli filled the air.
As I came home in my suit and tie, weaving my way through the motley throngs, skinny kids in fringed leather coats would growl at me, Go back to the suburbs.
Which made me indignant, since I knew they were probably living with their parents in the suburbs and had to sneak out of the house with a paper bag full of their trendy new clothes. They’d change in the back of an unlit bus, leave behind their bourgeois togs in a bus station locker, and traipse down to the Village in their beads and bangles. They were the plastic hippies,
not I!
Through Raymond Sokolov, one of my high school friends, I did some freelance reviewing for Newsweek, which would have landed me in trouble at Time-Life if anyone had noticed. I reviewed Malraux’s Anti-Memoirs (published in 1967 in America) and Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle (1968) and disliked them both. Malraux was obviously a fake, a bore, and a liar, though Americans were still impressed with his name and Man’s Fate was still considered a classic,
much like that other Communist classic, Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don—which won its author the Nobel Prize in 1965 though most critics now believe it was largely plagiarized and written by a committee.
The First Circle, though a novel that protested Stalin’s regime, seemed to me proof of the sad consequences of Soviet censorship, since it could easily have been written in the nineteenth century. I told my editor at Newsweek that the publication of the book should serve as the pretext for a cover story on the samizdat press (clandestine self-published manuscripts that had been censored by the Soviet state), but my advice was ignored and every other publication in the States declared the book a masterpiece. One wonders how many people read either book today. I wasn’t given any more books since my reviews put me out of step with everyone else in the country.
I went on to review a few books for the New Republic, but those pieces, too, were mostly nasty—and in 1978 I wrote a negative if respectful review of Edward Said’s Orientalism, one of the most influential books of our day. I suppose I was so underpublished and resentful in those days that it was hard for me to write a positive review of anything by anyone. Said, unfortunately, remembered my bad review, and it took years for me to repair the damage, which I very much wanted to do because upon reflection I came to admire him so much. In the end, in the early 1990s we became friends and continued to be so until he died.
I suppose that just as art was still meant to be difficult at the beginning of the sixties and only gradually became just another form of mass entertainment through the high jinks of Pop Art, in the same way politics were austere and Marxist in 1960 but had become fun
by 1970, turning into the psychodrama of the New Left.
In fact, everything in the America I knew after 1965 was warming up, becoming more subjective and democratic and amusing and accessible. Although in my own way I, too, was moving toward the personal through my writing, I was never entirely convinced it was the right way. I still idolized difficult modernist poets such as Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, and I