City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (15 page)

By the end of the 1970s I had figured that out, but that was very late in the day to come to such a realization. I had to read Nadezhda Mandelstam’s
Hope Against Hope
, with its dry, undramatic recital of the agonies she and her husband suffered all because her husband wrote one short satirical poem about Stalin (though Mandelstam might just as easily have been subjected to even worse punishment for doing nothing “wrong” at all).

In his pioneering gay-inspired biography of Gogol, Simon had struck out against the Orthodox Church and its treatment of Gogol’s homosexuality. Church fathers had taken advantage of Gogol’s self-hatred and guilt by subjecting him to endless and cruel penances. What the priests didn’t do, the doctors did—Gogol, already weakened toward the end, was repeatedly bled. Leeches were attached to his already infected nose. He was encouraged to turn the second part of
Dead Souls
, his funny social satire, into a serious religious drama. He worked on this impossible task for years and finally destroyed it just before he died.

For a distinguished Russian academic, Simon was daring in his political positions. He wrote a whirlwind gay history of Russian literature for a popular gay publication. With Michael Henry Heim he annotated Chekhov’s letters and made of Chekhov an ecologist
avant la lettre
. In his biography of Gogol, Simon boldly demonstrated that the affection for another man revealed in
Gogol’s letters surpassed the ardor of Romantic friendship. Simon marched. Simon signed manifestos. Simon taught gay courses.

He was lonely until one day he answered a personal ad in the
Berkeley Barb
in which a much younger man said he was looking for an “interesting older partner.” Simon’s was one of dozens of responses. Peter met with them all but was most taken by Simon. Peter was considerably younger and well-to-do and interested both in psychology and conceptual art. Simon’s huge international culture and saturnine looks obviously fascinated him. Now they’ve been together some forty years.

From the very beginning he and Peter fussed over each other’s health. They were hypochondriacs out of a nineteenth-century novel, endlessly worried about something too spicy or a draft or wet feet or tiredness, and they could be quite grumpy if they weren’t sufficiently comfortable. They could also be irritated by other people’s arrangements. I gave them a party in New York once and Simon literally threw up his hands when he realized that not only did he not know my guests, but that
they
didn’t know each other (unforgivable). Of course my guests were just ill-assorted recent tricks for the most part—not really the stuff out of which successful parties are made.

When
Forgetting Elena
came out, it was reviewed in the
New York Times Book Review
, which still counted for something in those days. The critic apparently thought he’d given me a glowing review since forty years later he tried to call in the debt and asked me for a blurb or a recommendation or a review (I forget which). Actually the review was pretty confused and lukewarm, though some phrases here and there could have been used in an ad had there been one. The review treated the novel as a mystery and it was often shelved in bookstores and libraries under Mysteries.

The novel had taken so many years to be published that I was well into another one, called variously
Like People in History
and
Woman Reading Pascal
, a much more realistic novel than
Forgetting Elena
. In the long years before
Elena
was accepted, I’d thought I’d gone too far toward the difficult and that I should write something about real people leading their lives. Since Richard Howard was by far the most original and colorful person I knew, I decided I should base a character on him and put him into a three-way friendship with “Maria” (based on Marilyn Schaefer) and a young heterosexual woman based on Sigrid, my friend from Time-Life. In fact I made Sigrid the main character from whose point of view everything would be written.

I must have had Henry James’s
Portrait of a Lady
in mind, because I wanted to write about an heiress who falls into the claws of a fortune hunter. Today, in the era of prenuptial agreements and especially of divorce, an unwise marriage no longer has the same lasting, tragic consequences. Nevertheless, my basic plot idea was that a striking, rich young woman comes to New York from Baltimore (I’d spent a weekend there among the fox hunting set, friends from school). In New York she becomes best friends with a gay man and a lesbian and lives their exciting but (for her) unfulfilling New York gay life. At last, at the advanced age of thirty, she realizes that she wants a husband and children. Seemingly by chance she runs into someone who used to attend the debutante parties in Baltimore, one of those “extra men” so badly needed to keep cutting in during the dances. In American high society, I’d discovered, anxious rich parents do not sufficiently guard against two figures—the extra man and, especially, the riding instructor. If one of them is well mannered and good-looking, he can seduce the seventeen-year-old daughter of the family, and sometimes the mother, even though he hasn’t a penny and his blood is red, not blue. For members of the “horsey set,” the riding instructor is the real Trojan horse, capable of penetrating even the best-defended walls.

In my novel (just as in Eliot’s and James’s), my fortune hunter, Jimmy, is initially charming and accommodating. He once dated my Sigrid character years ago and now they take up where they left off. He weans her away from her friends—and destroys her life.

If truth be told, I’d been a little bit in love with Sigrid and we’d spent some time together, but ultimately I’d confessed to her that I was gay. I remember sitting with her on a Friday night at the Riviera Café in Sheridan Square. Armies of young gay men were marching past, loud and excited, and I wanted to join them—or make them go away. Sigrid said she would not have suspected I was gay and that it didn’t make any difference anyway. The perfect answer. Of course I knew it did make a difference. I told myself that I couldn’t afford children. And then I’d had not one but many cases of gonorrhea over the years. And then I felt claustrophobic if I spent too many evenings in a row with a woman.

I backed out of her life and she married Desmond, whom I didn’t meet till some time later. Together they had a beautiful and talented daughter who resembles tall, blond Sigrid. In my novel the marriage is a disaster, and she discovers too late that he wants only her money. In real life Sigrid might have been a German Baltic baroness, but she had no money and her marriage seems much like another and survives to this day.

The interest of the book, if there was any, was in its presentation of heterosexuals and homosexuals joined through friendship—and the conviction that certain heterosexual women had in those days that gay people were freer than they were, that we were less possessive, more adventurous, and more devoted to our friends than they were, and that friendship provided the true through-line of our lives. As Marilyn told an ex who said he wanted just to be friends, “Practically anyone can be my lover, but it’s very difficult to be my friend.” I wanted to suggest that these “advanced” ideas might serve a gay man but not a straight woman. Not that traditional marriage
was much better, I wanted to argue, just not disastrously worse. In the spirit of Elizabeth Bowen, I wanted to show a modern tragedy in which there were two choices and both were bad.

I was terribly insecure about my writing. More than ever. I was waiting for the first reviews of
Forgetting Elena
, and when they came in, they seemed genuinely uncomprehending. I was so afraid of being silenced again, of not being allowed to go on writing for publication. No one is sincerely interested in writing a journal that will never be published—or if he or she is, it’s a sort of self-sufficiency or modesty I don’t understand. If a writer has the desire to communicate by writing and be heard, then he necessarily cares about seeing his work into print. I suppose it’s the difference between masturbation and making love—the real writer wants to touch another person. Reading the written word is participating in a dialogue in which one person is doing all the talking but in which the listening is also creative.

Yes, I wanted to reach readers but I also worried for professional reasons—I wanted to live by my pen. I wanted to be among those five hundred people in America who earn a living, even a meager one, by writing serious literature. If, as Schiller said, literature shows us what humanity would be like if it existed in a state of freedom (the author, not the characters), then I wanted to belong to that tiny minority that is genuinely free. Each time I give a reason, nevertheless, it ends up sounding too exalted; I wasn’t interested so much in making money or enjoying freedom, I wanted to survive. For me, writing was essential to survival. Again, not because I had such beautiful or intense sentiments or because my ideas were so pressing and elevated (I didn’t even have many ideas except during the five minutes every day when I took a shower), but because it was the label,
writer
, that mattered to me most in some primitive, essential way. To be sure, writers were far more important in the culture at large fifty years ago than they are now. Back then they
were considered seers or the antennae of the race, in touch with the deep conflicts underlying our society. But even without that religion of art I still was frantic to be—and to remain—a writer. Yet I wanted to be one on my own terms. I wasn’t willing to write TV scripts or bodice rippers or go on forever doing Time-Life potted versions of science or music or history (though I continued for several years to write just such books or parts of books to feed myself). No, I wanted to write a speculative work of fiction—yes, that was it: fiction was a form of speculation, a pure experiment in As If. Of course if you’re interested in “immortality,” then you’d better be a serious novelist. Look at the bestsellers of 1920 and you won’t recognize a single title or the name of a single author.

In switching back to realism I’d somehow lost my ability to write. Or rather I’d lost my confidence. I’d turned away from the pure experience of writing
Forgetting Elena
(which, as Richard Howard said of Roland Barthes, was “intimate without being personal”) to the no less highbrow but somehow compromised genre of the “problem” novel (
How Do We Live Now, We Who Are Androgynous?
). I was no longer inhabiting the center of my sensibility; I could no longer hear a hum when I was writing well. I’d gone back to writing scenes with dialogue and action, scenes in which the point was verisimilitude; I’d stopped being Beckett and become Updike (those would be the glorified comparisons).

David Kalstone, who’d just done an interview of James Merrill for the
Saturday Review
, came out to visit me in San Francisco, and the first thing I did was to read him a thirty-page chapter of
Like People in History
. He told me it was good—and I was so grateful to him, though he and I both knew it wasn’t true. I was riddled with horrible, nearly paralyzing doubt. Sometimes I blamed my years of psychotherapy for this disease of self-questioning. In therapy, I’d learned to look at myself looking at myself and constantly
interrogate my motives. So much subjectivity and second-guessing and constant scrutiny had made me inauthentic. Doubting my feelings had destroyed my inner orientation device—the only thing a writer has. Moreover, all those years of writing unproduced plays and unpublished novels had not been good for my confidence, either.

Later, in 1977, I wrote freelance for Time-Life Records a forty-page life of Anton Bruckner to go with some LPs. Bruckner was supposed to be one of the few musical geniuses in history so unsure of himself he could be talked into writing and rewriting his symphonies two and three times, constantly modifying them, sometimes for the worse. I knew I’d never be in his category, not even in terms of abjection, but I could see the resemblances. Like Bruckner I had started relatively late, received little encouragement, not emerged from the right artistic milieu. Other composers were also late bloomers, such as Janaček, but few were so indecisive, few could be talked into endless rewrites.

David’s endorsement was kind and constructive and necessary. He gave me the permission I needed to finish the book and to go on as a writer, no matter how battered I might be. Even so, once my novel was finished, it made the rounds just as
Forgetting Elena
had done, but this new novel was never published. I had worked on it for five years. Anne Freedgood, the first person to whom we submitted it, did accept it, but made a mingy offer. Since I was convinced it was a “mainstream” novel that was worth real money, I petulantly withdrew it and told my agent to submit it to other publishers (once again discovering belatedly that she was sending out an earlier, unrevised version). When after two years no one had taken it, I went limping back to Anne, who decided she didn’t want it after all. She argued that it was difficult, even impossible, to write a good novel about such a deeply passive character (what about Camus’s
The Stranger
, I wondered, or all of those masterpieces by
Kafka with victims as protagonists?). Perhaps she was punishing me for having initially rejected her. Or perhaps like the other editors she was secretly alarmed by my middle-class gay characters. Low-life gays, as in the novels of John Rechy or Jean Genet or Hubert Selby, were easier to stomach since they seemed so exotic. What was hard to take was someone gay who might be in the next office or in the apartment across the hall. Although gay liberation had begun, it didn’t penetrate the literary market for nearly ten years. Later I would meet editors who’d turned down
Like People in History
who were themselves gay and closeted but were afraid to speak up for my book. One of the most fearfully closeted gay editors, Peter Kameny, became so neurotic that he started hiding in the toilet at work. Even though he’d been among the most promising literature students his year at Harvard, the publishers finally fired him and he threw himself in front of a subway.