City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (12 page)

But there’s another, more moving aspect of having really known someone destined for fame. It’s that they were once young, uncertain, had a roll of fat about the waistband, one nostril bigger than the other, a shifty look that gave way to a wise stare. They existed in the present, with all its contingencies, not in the safety of the past. They were breathing, digesting animals as vulnerable to injury as the next creature, at any moment liable to have been run over or to fall ill. Their careers, which in retrospect look so triumphant and inevitable, might just as easily have come to naught. Maxime Du Camp, Flaubert’s traveling companion, wrote that the great realist had an irritating way of repeating a feeble joke over and over until it became truly tiresome, and that the humor, scarcely detectable the first time around, never failed to amuse the
Master each time he repeated it. He tells us how sadistic Flaubert was in the desert when a camel fell and broke their saddlebags and completely drained their water supply, how for the next three days (until they reached an oasis) they were painfully thirsty and, just to be cruel, Flaubert kept talking about the marvelous cold lemon ices they used to get at Tortoni’s in Paris. This prematurely balding man with the light eyes who refused to exercise and took almost no interest in the Middle East until they arrived in Greece—could he be the same writer the next generation of novelists would memorize (Ford Madox Ford had most of
Sentimental Education
by heart)?

James Merrill could be led reluctantly back to serious topics. Then he would stroke his throat almost as if he were easing down the lumpy but necessary nourishment. He’d make his eyes round and would say, “Ahh…,” but with more a sagacious than an astonished intonation. His eyes would get so wide it wasn’t even certain he was still paying attention instead of miming it. If his interlocutor wasn’t careful, Merrill would soon slip free of the bridle pulling him toward solemnity and dart off toward the gay and frivolous wilds. He wanted to laugh, though not in some familiar, commonplace way, but rather at his own jokes, told in his own particular way. Listening to his sudden shifts in register was a way of learning how to read his poetry with its corrugated surfaces, its way of moving from the lightest tone of social gossip to the most Dantesque invocations—a tone he’d learned from Pushkin and from Nabokov, not to mention the Byron of
Don Juan
or the Pope of
The Rape of the Lock
, but one he’d made entirely his own.

Young people (especially the uninitiated) were always astonished at Merrill’s readings by how much was funny, how much everyone around them laughed. What interested me was how Jimmy made use of so much that came his way—and how deliberately reducing that flow from the indiscriminate flood of Manhattan to the mere trickle of Stonington or Key West or Athens (his three “villages”)
had been a central creative act of his life. He thrived on anagrams (and belonged to an anagram club in Key West) and crosswords and, of course, the Ouija board, not to mention acrostics and all disciplined forms of poetry, the sestinas and rondeaux. Sometimes I’d be reading a long poem by Merrill with all the concentration I’d naturally bring to a cliff-hanger—and suddenly I’d notice the narrative was being relayed through a string of sonnets.

Merrill loved to tease and maybe couldn’t bear to do too much hand-holding, but in spite of this he was kind and sponsoring. He certainly nurtured me without ever being mindlessly affirmative. He could be harsh if the occasion required it. After reading my novel
Caracole
he voiced my worst fears, saying, “That first chapter, my dear!” and rolling his eyes.

His mother was from Georgia and his father from Florida, but Merrill had grown up on Long Island and had had foreign nannies and then had been sent off to Lawrenceville School. His accent was his own, drawled in a soft Southern way, but the vowels weren’t twangy or yearning or eager to open up into diphthongs. No one could say his voice was irritating or off-putting, and when he gave a reading, it was a beautiful orchestration out of which many different expressions, from the silly to the oracular, could be coaxed.

That first evening I found him polite but remote. He would so obviously have preferred a good informal talk with David alone and wasn’t interested in David’s protégé. I suppose, being a generation younger than either, I projected a certain raw sexiness. But as I found out later, Jimmy’s type was the tall, romantic youth, preferably straight and unavailable though longing to be a best friend and fellow poet; someone serious and talented who, even if much younger chronologically, would treat Jimmy as a sweet if devilish little brother. I wasn’t eligible for any of those roles—and as David’s beloved I was off-limits in any event.

David urged me to read Merrill the first chapter of
Forgetting Elena
. During the whole recital of fifteen terrifying minutes, Merrill’s face was illegible. Jimmy didn’t give a hint as to whether he was amused or struck or bored, and when it was all over, he didn’t say a word but merely nodded, giving the smallest possible indication that he was still alive. I gathered up my papers and hurried the fifteen blocks home. I was so distraught, I longed to throw myself in front of the first speeding car that came along. I felt that I’d failed in my first great test. My failure was especially painful because David was so enthusiastic about my work—and would he now have the independence of spirit to remain convinced of my book’s worth?

Eventually I found out that Jimmy liked Proust, sure, but he also liked to read the bestseller of the moment if it had any literary merit, just as he liked to follow fads about the interpretation of hand gestures. (“Oh, look!” he’d exclaim. “She’s palming!”)

Years later, when I mentioned that fatal evening to Merrill, he said, “I was drunk that night. I barely knew who you were, much less what you’d just read.” Since Merrill had in the intervening years joined AA and stopped drinking (but some people said it was only to keep a new boyfriend company), I believed him. Then after Merrill died, his literary executor (and one of my closest friends), J. D. McClatchy, said, “But he didn’t like
Forgetting Elena
. He didn’t get it.”

Through David I met many other poets and writers. John Ashbery gave
Forgetting Elena
a blurb that delighted me, just as he personally fascinated me. John lived across the street from David Kalstone in a 1960s white brick building. He would get so drunk that he’d fall down. Yet he was hilariously funny in a deadpan way that camouflaged, nearly, his perfect recall and edgy intelligence. He adored obscure “serious” music and had the most esoteric tastes.

What was distinctive about New York in the 1970s was its uncompromising high culture masquerading as slouching, grinning gee-whiz—Wallace Stevens in sneakers. John Ashbery had lived in Paris for years, where he’d been the art critic for the
Herald Tribune
, and now wrote art reviews for
Newsweek
. When he gave a reading in the austere and large auditorium at the bottom of the Guggenheim Museum, it was packed with young people in black and older, art-world people. There were German women in full-length black leather coats and hennaed hair and men in faded blue work shirts, insect-eye glasses, white stubble, and oversize porkpie hats. Ashbery was always surrounded by art-world people, which brought a whiff of money and internationalism to the usual seedy gatherings of poor poets. Like Warhol he gave the impression of never trying. His drinking seemed clear proof of his social indifference. Not that he wasn’t charming and solicitous with friends. Once I was with him at one of his readings in SoHo, just when SoHo was becoming a gallery center. After the reading a young woman who was a total stranger invited us all back to her nearby loft. There we stood around drinking jug wine while she scuttled about in an adjoining room, dragging into place what turned out to be canvases and snapping on lights. Finally she led Ashbery, who was about to pass out, into her studio. In her mind, no doubt, he was supposed to discover her and arrange overnight for a one-woman show. All he did was look at the work through swimming eyes and say in his high, slurred voice, “Those are some paintings.” The poor girl broke into tears. Actually, it wasn’t such a put-down coming from the author of
Some Trees
.

David Kalstone liked that first book,
Some Trees
, which had been selected by W. H. Auden as the winner of the Yale Younger Poet series. Both Ashbery and Merrill revered Auden—and there all resemblance between the two junior poets ended. David dismissed Ashbery’s next collection,
The Tennis Court Oath
, though
David’s approval soared again with
The Double Dream of Spring
and even the all-prose
Three Poems
(published in 1972), which had somehow been inspired by Ashbery’s psychoanalytic sessions. But the crowning glory of not only Ashbery’s growing oeuvre but of American poetry in the 1970s was
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
. The title poem was a long, sustained look at the self, at what it might and might not be in these godless days. About the soul, the poet asks, “But how far can it swim out through the eyes. / And still return safely to its nest?” The questions become more tendentious, taking a sharper, more pessimistic tone:

But there is in that gaze a combination

Of tenderness, amusement and regret, so powerful

In its restraint that one cannot look for long.

The secret is too plain. The pity of it smarts,

Makes hot tears spurt: that the soul is not a soul,

Has no secret, is small, and it fits

Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.

With this one poem Ashbery, intimate but impersonal, pinpointed the shifting uncertainty of the way we lived now. We saw him at parties (once I even went to bed with him and his boyfriend), and he was a hapless, amusing presence (“a combination / Of tenderness, amusement and regret”), but we knew that we were in the presence of genius. It was as if we were seeing Whitman on the Staten Island ferry or Emily Dickinson wrapping a cake and scribbling a poem on the paper.

Chapter 9

A science writer from Time-Life named Frank called me up in 1971 and asked me if I wanted a “gig.” He said that the two publishers, Charney and Veronis, who’d made a success out of
Psychology Today
had bought the dowdy old
Saturday Review
and didn’t seem to know anyone in the arts—and besides, they wanted to “democratize” the arts. Their idea was to have stories on quilting and Adirondack ceramics and furniture made out of driftwood. They were as hostile to East Coast snobbism as a Beltway politician speaking for effect. They were even considering moving the whole operation to the West Coast. We quipped that they were irritated because no one noticed them when they entered their box at the Metropolitan Opera, that they thought they’d be big fish in the small pond of San Francisco. Little did they realize that in San Francisco they’d be just as ignored.

Some of the old-timers had been kept on at the
Saturday Review
and were darting about angrily like late-autumn bees since they’d been promised that nothing would change and they’d still be in charge of their old hives, and now obviously everything had changed. Critics with triple-barreled names and old tweeds were ignored as ambitious youngsters who knew nothing shoved past them. I was one of the barbarians. I wrote a “Letter from the Publisher” in which I made two crucial mistakes. I confused
Walker Percy’s name and called him Percy Walker. And I dimly remembered Marilyn once telling me that T. E. Hulme had said that Romanticism is nothing but “spilt religion,” but I’d misinterpreted his words. As a result, dozens of letters to the editor ridiculed poor Charney for being an illiterate fool—and it was all my fault. I was the fool. I was illiterate. Today an essayist would google his sources, but back then fact-checking could take up a whole day, and I was working long hours without assistants.

For some reason the new owners attributed all the malice of the letter writers to East Coast elitism and didn’t chuck me. They were counseled by Peter Drucker, a celebrated business guru, who told them they should turn the weekly magazine (whose typical reader was a middle-aged Midwestern librarian) into four flashy monthly supplements: the
Saturday Review of the Arts
, the
Saturday Review of Society
, the
Saturday Review of the Sciences
, and the
Saturday Review of Education
. They wanted me to be an editor in charge of the arts, but since I wasn’t experienced enough to run a magazine, they thought I should have a boss. I could interview my own boss and give him my approval or not. The person they chose was a chipper, bright-eyed, well-groomed West Coaster of about forty named John Poppy, who had been an editor of
Look
and was a surprisingly buttoned-up disciple of George Leonard, an Esalen West Coast touchy-feely leader of the “human actualization” movement. Mr. Poppy didn’t look or act as if he’d ever been in a hot tub or been “rebirthed,” but he did have a permanent smile on his face and a robin’s way of cocking his head to one side, of beaming very deliberate alpha waves over his much more natural and native jitteriness.

None of us liked him, although he was extremely likable—polite, receptive, kind. I didn’t like him because I had an allergy to all authority figures and didn’t want a boss. I said I disliked him because he didn’t know as much as I did, but in fact he was clever, and even if he’d been a genius, I would have wanted to undermine
him. At Time-Life Books our supervising editors had been so much older than us and so remote and established that I suppose it never occurred to us as trainees to defy or question them. We complained about them, but as privates complain about generals while obeying them unquestioningly. Now I said yes, they should hire Poppy, but only because he seemed pleasant and inoffensive and also because I could tell that Charney and Veronis wanted him.