City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (19 page)

My only consolation during this difficult period was the two Keiths, my nephew and the actor I was in love with. While living with me, my nephew reawakened to all the beauties of literature and began to write with great fluency and charm. At my suggestion he read Lord Chesterfield’s
Letters
and the Abbé Prévost’s
Manon Lescaut
and Stendhal’s
Charterhouse of Parma
. He worked hard at after-school jobs and got terrific grades at the private school around the corner where I sent him. But my greatest pleasure came from our long conversations about life and literature—which were of course held under the benign and refined supervision of Proust. My nephew loved music and became an accomplished composer and singer, but his greatest ardor was for literature, in which even as a teenager he was able to find the words he needed for his own life. Although he was just sixteen and his girlfriend fourteen, both of them were reading
Lolita
and
Manon
—which were versions of their own loves and passions and misadventures. Although since then I’ve taught creative writing and literature to hundreds of students over three decades, I never had such eager students as those first two. They were able to move quickly beyond the language of the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century or even the elegant ironies of Nabokov to find the unclouded mirror they were searching for. My nephew went on to write a haunting memoir about that time,
The Boy with the Thorn in His Side
, and
Original Youth
, a biographical study of my first sixteen years,
which was a factually correct version of the period covered by my semiautobiographical novel
A Boy’s Own Story
.

When I started work on a new novel, I’d put in little bits here and there just for him—allusions only Keith would get, funny turns of phrase and sexy descriptions of dark-skinned girls intended for his amusement.

Keith McDermott was less a reader then than my nephew, less hungry, but he nevertheless rode his own interests hard—his taste for the very first recordings of Steve Reich or for the plays of Robert Wilson or the dance inventions of Lucinda Child. More than my nephew and more than me, he wanted to be original and experimental—and this urgency and formalist absolutism he brought into our big, underfurnished apartment.

Before I started working at the chemical company I was trying to eke out a living writing managed textbooks. They were histories of the United States or introductory psychology texts designed for college freshmen or sophomores. Well-established academics outlined the content and photocopied numerous articles of the latest research and would present the whole bundle to me along with a cut-and-paste collation of the best passages in already existing competing textbooks. My job was to synthesize all this material into vivid, crystalline prose—for which I’d receive a flat fee of three hundred dollars a chapter. I had a secretary who’d show up every day to whom I’d dictate my synthesis—then, promptly at one, we’d have sex.

Although I remember nothing of the thousand-page psychology textbook, I wrote not one but two thousand-page histories of the United States. Both of them were lousy and never “took off” in the way that the editors had hoped—never becoming widely adopted, though the second one was a harbinger of “political correctness” and had far more information on African-Americans, Native Americans, Asian-Americans, and Spanish-Americans than was typical for the
time. Nevertheless, I learned a lot from them. When I wrote a review of one of Gore Vidal’s books of essays, for instance, I was able to criticize his assumption that all the founding fathers were greedy and acting out of self-interest. I had just read the most recent statistical analyses of what happened to the personal wealth of the founders—and in almost every case the Revolution diminished rather than augmented their fortunes. The founders had clearly been for the most part idealists. Years later when I came to write two historical novels,
Fanny: A Fiction
and
Hotel de Dream
, all that American history helped me orient myself into the intricacies of born-again fervor and utopianism and abolitionism in the 1820s (
Fanny
) or of urbanization and sensational journalism and “vice” in the 1890s (
Hotel
).

While writing U.S. history, I, of course, still wanted to write fiction. I was talking to John Ashbery, who had been to see a shrink who specialized in writer’s block. The conversation he reported:

Shrink: So tell me what your daily schedule is.

Ashbery: Well, I wake up and get up and—

Shrink: You do what?

Ashbery: I get up—

Shrink: You must never, never get up. Okay, pee and make a cup of coffee, but then get back in bed if only for half an hour every day and write longhand in a notebook.

Ashbery: Why?

Shrink: That way your inhibitions will still be low and you’ll be closer to your dreams. That’s the surefire way out of writer’s block.

I followed the shrink’s advice. I didn’t have writer’s block, though all my failures with plays and fiction had left me feeling wounded. I would feel sick with fear every time I’d begin to write something made-up. I couldn’t afford to have writer’s block in any
literal sense; I had to keep writing to survive (and support all these new people, now that I was a “family man”). I could, however, have kept on doing nothing but churning out articles and reviews and ghostwriting, as so many other people in New York did. A novel was a long-term project that no one would finance, at least not in my case. It took years out of one’s life, with no promise that it would ever be published. If it was published, there was no assurance it would earn any money or even be reviewed.

But my sense of personal identity required that I write fiction. If I thought that my only take on life would be the clever remarks or vague thoughts I might be able to cook up on the spot, then I wouldn’t be able to recognize myself.

I knew I had to keep on writing or else I’d let the ambient cultural noise drown out my thoughts, which weren’t paraphrasable wisecracks or wisdom but rather a way of looking at the world or the self. French people dismiss the cultural chatter and self-centered attitudinizing of Paris as
parisianisme
. A similar noise is generated by hip New Yorkers, though we don’t have a word for it and perhaps we haven’t isolated it yet as a reprehensible phenomenon. This “newyorkism” is so opinionated, so debilitating, so contagious with its knowingness, its instant formulas that replace any slow discoveries, that only people who are serious and ponderous can resist its blandishments, its quick substitutes for authenticity. No wonder the psychiatrist had said one should write first thing in the morning—before the tide of newyorkism swept over one, washing away actual honest thought and replacing it with trendy pronouncements.

But I don’t want to suggest that for me the value of real writing was as a shield against newyorkism, that it substituted private feelings for public catchphrases. What it really did was to set up an idealized construct of life as a rival to actual, formless life in all its messiness. Because fiction depended on telling details and an exact
and lifelike sequencing of emotions, and on representative if not slavishly mimetic dialogue, and on convincing actions, it required heightened and calculating powers of observation. Living-as-a-writer was different from living
tout court
to the degree that for a writer even the dreariest, most featureless evening among dullards became a subject for satire, a source of “notes” on the new bourgeoisie, a challenge to one’s powers to discriminate among almost interchangeable shades of gray. Living-as-a-writer was not so different from living-as-an-analysand in that both novelist and psychoanalytic patient must remember their experiences, their aperçus, their ignoble hours and their petty minutes as well as their generous seconds in order to—well, to write it all down, or to report it to the shrink. Of course shrinks don’t encourage patients to prepare, and the dream report is just another form of resistance, one of the most boring as well. And I can’t say that I was ever a note-taker. My sister thinks I have a lousy or at least highly selective memory. Marilyn used to tease me for being so unobservant, saying that she could dye her hair blue and I wouldn’t notice. So perhaps finally living-as-a-writer is more a project than a set of strategies. Perhaps it’s only a good excuse for not buckling down at the chemical company.

Chapter 10

I was approached in 1975 by an English book packager called Mitchell Beazley, who asked me to “audition” for
The Joy of Gay Sex
. Someone had suggested me but I didn’t find out who till later. They were planning to follow up their international success, Alex Comfort’s
The Joy of Sex
, with two new books,
The Joy of Gay Sex
and
The Joy of Lesbian Sex
. The look of each book, the format, the cover, everything would resemble the concept of Comfort’s book, which had been a huge bestseller in many languages. These new books would be widely and openly distributed, and this way of packaging them was already an act of defiance, I thought. With each of these two new ventures, however, the book packager would team a writer with a shrink. Mr. Mitchell and his American editor, Frank Taylor, got in touch with me.

Frank Taylor had been married and had four sons. He had been the editor in chief of McGraw-Hill, had accompanied Nixon to China, and had produced the Arthur Miller–scripted movie
The Misfits
—and only recently had he come out. He was in his sixties when he went into his first gay bar, Uncle Paul’s on Christopher Street. There he’d seen a young man he thought was attractive, but the whole idea of approaching the fellow terrified him. At last, on his way out, he handed his card to the guy, who said, “But I’ve been in love with you since I was nine.”

When he was a child, this young man’s parents had written mysteries under a pseudonym. They were Frank’s authors, and once during a visit with them at their home he’d met their little boy, who was visibly upset, frightened because he was about to be operated on for a bad heart. “You put me on your knee,” the young man told Frank in Uncle Paul’s, “and very calmly explained everything to me about my heart in scientific detail. And that’s when I fell in love with you.” The Frank I met in New York in the 1970s was already the happily-in-love Frank I’d later catch sight of in Key West in the 1980s accompanied by this same young man.

Now Frank asked me to write sample entries for
The Joy of Gay Sex
: on something hard (sadomasochism), something soft (kissing), something technical (cruising), and something psychological (coming out).

For me that kind of writing assignment felt like Method acting. I first had to establish who I was. In this case I thought someone kind but with an edge, someone worldly but patient, someone breezy most of the time but capable of being solemn. A slightly less clever but still amusing version of Cocteau, I thought. Someone who can whip off an epigram but is never a bitch, who thinks in paradoxes but doesn’t insist you admire his wit. Just as pianists talked about something mysterious to nonmusicians called attack, I had to scrunch around on my stool while stoking (today we’d say “programming”) my head with just the right elements of worldliness and compassion and reassuring didacticism. Then the writing went quite easily—as well it might, since I couldn’t take it too seriously at the risk of seeming preposterous in my own eyes. It was that rarest and most agreeable thing of all for a writer: an assignment.

But I did take the project seriously because I wanted to escape the living death of the chemical company. As a writer I enjoyed competing with other contenders, especially since I didn’t know
the names of any of my rivals for
The Joy of Gay Sex
. Part of me—most of me!—was frightened, however, of doing something so tacky, and to this day I wince when I’m introduced as a reader at an Ivy League university, say, and the presenter makes a meal out of this particular title. (“Tonight we have with us the only”—chuckle, chuckle—“actual sex symbol I’ve ever met,” har-har. “He is the coauthor of
The Joy of
”—heh-heh—“
Gay Sex
”.) Back then, with just
Forgetting Elena
to my credit, along with a growing list of Time-Life Books I’d written or partially written, such as an anthropological look at
Homo erectus
called
The First Men
(har-har), or one about the
Hindenburg
(
When Zeppelins Flew!
), not to mention my forty-page LP-accompanying bios of Mendelssohn, Bruckner, Handel, and other composers, I was afraid my fragile literary “career” would be derailed by a sex manual. When I saw the Random House editor Anne Freedgood at the ballet and told her about my new project, she laughed insultingly and patted me on the sleeve and said, “Good. That’s perfect for you.”

I was the writer selected for the project and I was able to quit my job. I didn’t have the nerve to tell my dragon-lady boss about the exact nature of my new assignment. I just said I had a big book contract and put in my notice. Bertha Harris, the literary half of
The Joy of Lesbian Sex
team, and I used to joke that if we were ever interviewed on television and asked why we wrote sex manuals, we’d say, “For the sake of our children,” since she had a teenage daughter to support and I had my nephew.

At first my boss was panicked because she thought she’d be overwhelmed by work, but she quickly became sly and suspicious and had me barred from my office before the two weeks’ notice period was up. She had not liked me ever since the CEO of the company had praised a brief, clear paraphrase I’d done of a sociological book he was supposed to read,
The Coming of Post-Industrial Society
. She’d become one of the only female officers of
the company by being cunning, not through intelligence. So many of the women who succeeded before the feminist era were truly loathsome. They knew they were tokens and were never given any real power, and they maintained their positions through the vilest sort of feminine wiles.