City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (24 page)

To watch a genius at work is the highest civilized pleasure, and Balanchine was our resident genius, at the peak of his powers. We saw not only his newest ballets but also the two great works preserved from the 1920s and the Diaghilev years of his past, Prokofiev’s
The Prodigal Son
(with sets and costumes by Rouault) and Stravinsky’s
Apollo
, not to mention Tchaikovsky’s
Serenade
from the 1930s, Balanchine’s first ballet composed for an American company. For us something about that ballet was touching as a fossil record of the first rocky rehearsals at Balanchine’s brand-new school up in White Plains. As he explained it, “It seemed to me that the best way to make students aware of stage technique was to give them something new to dance, something they had never seen before. I chose Tchaikovsky’s
Serenade
to work with. The class contained the first night seventeen girls and no boys. The problem was, how to arrange this odd number of girls so that they would look interesting. I placed them on diagonal lines and decided that the hands should move first to give the girls practice.

“That was how
Serenade
began. The next class contained only nine girls; the third six. I choreographed to the music with the pupils I happened to have at a particular time. Boys began to attend the class and they were worked into the pattern. One day, when all
the girls rushed off the floor area we were using as a stage, one of the girls fell and began to cry. I told the pianist to keep on playing and kept this bit in the dance. Another day, one of the girls was late for class, so I left that in too.”

Because Balanchine had studied music as well as ballet, he had an uncanny way of “seeing” the deep structure of the music he was setting and of rendering it visible. Whereas lesser choreographers might respond to the ornamentation of the score and set a trill, say, or a clash of cymbals, Balanchine ignored the surface irritation of the music and went right to its unfolding principles of development and contrast. That was the source of the exhilarating beauty of those evenings. On the one side there were the young, superb bodies of men and women entering and running and leaping through strong allées of lighting projected from the wings, all the rush and sparkle of the corps and the dignified, gravity-defying combinations of the soloists, those cantilevered arabesques on point and thrilling female flights into space facilitated by noble, self-effacing male partners. If that component was pulse-quickening, a perilous spectacle, on the other side was the abstract diagramming of great scores, an exploration of music itself, the spiritual alternative to language.

Balanchine knew how to program one “white” ballet and one sublimely simple pas de deux, then a “difficult” modern work and a bang-up Stars and Stripes high-kicking finale. I suppose he was teaching us (without meaning to) the concessions that even the most serious artist (visual or literary) had to make to “show business” and crowd-pleasing if he or she was going to survive and keep an audience’s attention. In a quite different way I suppose he was showing us how the supreme manifestations of the mind require sweat and muscles, how the spatial and temporal meditations of an old man can be realized only by willing young bodies with flushed cheeks and taut rumps and long necks and a good turnout. There was nothing charitable about his collaboration with the young; it
was a partnership essential to him and to them, especially since he often created a new ballet “on” particular dancers, tailor-made to their limitations and gifts.

And even the most high-minded balletomane such as me had to acknowledge one drama being played out before our very eyes: Balanchine’s unrequited love for Suzanne Farrell. She was quite literally his Dulcinea, for he had returned to the stage to mime the role of the besotted, aging Don Quixote in a full-evening ballet that had much more story than anything else we’d seen from Balanchine—his own story, of course. Suzanne, who was too good a Catholic girl to sleep with Balanchine, left the company in 1969 with her dancer husband and went off to Europe to join the company of the vulgar, talentless Maurice Béjart with his vast outdoor spectacles complete with dry-ice fog and wind machines worthy of the Third Reich. Béjart’s company was no place for the greatest ballerina of the day—or even for a woman. In his works the hunky men were stripped down to their loincloths and the women bundled away in burkas; everything was as tackily homoerotic as a bad Cocteau porn drawing.

Only six years later did Suzanne Farrell come back to the New York City Ballet. Her return, full of wisdom and tenderness but still sexless, crowned Balanchine’s last days with an unexpected but entirely deserved happiness. This love story, unrequited and, paradoxically, fertile, was a breathtaking drama unfolding for us, his greedy audience.

David had a new lady to squire about and to invite to the ballet—Lillian Hellman. She was then at the height of her fame, since decades after her most successful plays she had begun to write short, punchy memoirs in which she played
le beau rôle
of quiet heroism. After her death we would all discover that Mary McCarthy had been right—Lillian was a liar. She hadn’t taken money into Central Europe to save Jews in the late 1930s. The person who’d done that was a psychiatrist in Princeton. The two women hadn’t
known each other but they did have the same lawyer—who must have told Hellman the story of these brave exploits. Hellman had simply appropriated them. That story, joined to her well-known and well-publicized defiance of the House Un-American Activities Committee—”I will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions”—had elevated her to the dubious distinction of becoming the Pasionaria of the American Left, though in fact she was an old-fashioned Stalinist without scruples. Obeying Stalin’s party line, she had opposed the U.S. government’s granting of asylum to Trotsky. She admitted to being a Stalinist to her biographer Joan Mellen.

In everyday life she was an appalling person. She would pick a fight with other customers in a store. The New York State Theater had no central aisle, and to get to the best seats one had to slide past a line of seated people. One night, with David accompanying her, Hellman had deliberately aimed her high heel and stabbed the foot of a seated woman, a complete stranger, then cursed her out for howling in pain.

I met her at David’s apartment, where she was extremely nice to me. Strangely enough, she shared one virtue with her greatest enemy, Mary McCarthy. Both women by habit were elaborately polite to the youngest, least known person in the room—me, in both cases. Lillian made a point of asking me questions about my writing and life and provenance; of course I was charmed. She had terrible emphysema and never stopped smoking. She was as lean as an old Indian brave and her face was deeply burined with lines.

David had met her through a Venetian pal, Peter Feibleman, who would leave messages for her at the hotel in the name of “Rabbi Hellman.” Now David struck up the acquaintance again through one of her closest friends, Richard Poirier, who at about this same time was persuaded to invite me to lunch. He was then living just off lower Fifth Avenue, near Howard Moss. (Eventually he had to move because the house next door, at 18 West Eleventh
Street, where James Merrill had been born, was accidentally blown up by a Weatherman woman while she was constructing a bomb.) At the start of the lunch, Poirier was cordial enough but soon began to tongue-lash me for the duration of the meal, furious because I’d said I thought there was such a thing as gay fiction, even gay poetry—worse, a gay sensibility!—and that at the very least works by gay people could be read in a special light, to illuminate them. Richard was enraged that I would even propose to isolate gay writers from the literary mainstream. He had a rough, gravelly voice, a strong, virile face, and one eye that wandered, and he relentlessly pursued his thought without ever smiling. I felt as unprovided with arguments as I had when I’d told Maitland Edey about feminism.

Frankly, I couldn’t see what the big deal was with the idea of “gay literature.” I said, “Well, there’s no reason the same text can’t be read from several different perspectives. It’s just that for us gay writers now, it’s fun to—”

“Gay writers!” Richard thundered. “I’ve never heard of anything so absurd. It’s obscene!”

I wanted to concede the whole dispute just to end it, but I knew that David would be ashamed of me if I gave in too quickly. I knew how much he admired Richard’s “fierceness,” his “bearish strength.” In their world Richard was “famous” for his intransigence. Of course I didn’t have their training, having studied Chinese at Michigan and not humanities and English at Harvard. Nor had I ever taught literature. I’d only written a few unpopular book reviews, out of step with the critical opinion of the times.

I couldn’t help noticing, at least to myself, that all these writers I was meeting who were gay—Ashbery, Howard Moss, David Kalstone, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Poirier—might be open about their sexuality in their private lives, but no one in the general public knew about it. Richard Howard and James Merrill were the only ones who were out in their poetry as well as in their lives.

“But things do change,” I said confusedly. “There are always new movements in fiction, aren’t there? The word
novelty
is contained in the word
novel
. Why not have a gay school of fiction? Is there any harm in that? At least it’s exciting and new.”

“Exciting! But it’s a betrayal of every humane idea of literature. Have you never heard of universalism?”

Now, all these years later, when “gay literature” has come and gone as a commercial fad and a serious movement, I can see his point. It’s true that as a movement it did isolate us—to our advantage initially, though ultimately to our disadvantage. At first it drew the attention of critics and editors to our writing, but in the end (after our books didn’t sell) it served to quarantine us into a small, confined space. Before the category of “gay writing” was invented, books with gay content (Vidal’s
City and the Pillar
, Baldwin’s
Giovanni’s Room
, Isherwood’s
A Single Man
) were widely reviewed and often became bestsellers. After a label was applied to them they were dismissed as being of special interest only to gay people. They could only preach to the converted. The truth, however, was that gay literature was every bit as interesting and varied as straight literature.

Something similar happened to gay people themselves. Before they were “liberated” and given an “identity,” they were everywhere and nowhere. As long as the word
homosexual
was never pronounced, many boys and men slipped across the border of convention and had homosexual flings and then hurried guiltily back into heterosexuality under cover of obscurity and anonymity. The past saw many more casual experiments in same-sex love than later, when the category was finally clearly labeled and surrounded with the barbed wire of notoriety. It became easier in certain milieus to come out, but at the same time the stakes were higher (especially after the advent of AIDS in the early 1980s). In places like contemporary Greece fewer and fewer men and boys were willing to have sex with another male. Only the highly motivated made it
across that barbed-wire fence. I sometimes regret the invention of the category “gay.”

Yet I’m grateful for gay liberation and for gay literature. The depression and guilt that beset me in my teens and twenties subsided after Stonewall, just as the rejection as a writer I experienced in the 1960s slowly gave way to literary acceptance in the 1970s. I’d always wanted to write about being gay, even when I was fifteen and in prep school. My first novel, written just then, was called
Dark Currents
or alternately
The Tower Window
and was a coming-out story. I wrote this gay novel before ever reading one (except
Death in Venice
and Gide’s
The Immoralist
, and they were far from contemporary—or cheerful). I wrote about my sexual and romantic feelings because they plagued me. I sometimes thought I was desperately bailing water in a sinking boat, and that if I stopped writing, I’d drown. As a result, I felt that the new visibility of gays gave me a chance to be seen, or rather heard. Now I was allowed to publish, which made all the difference to me.

Nevertheless, thirty-five years later, in 2009, I can see what Richard Poirier meant. I’d still say that even if he was right ultimately, we were very much living in the urgent short run. After centuries of oppression we had a sense of community we wanted to celebrate in novels that would create our identity while also exploring it. In the early days of gay liberation writers had an unprecedented importance (that quickly faded) in their own community; for a short while we were virtually the only visible or audible spokesmen for a whole movement, in those years before AIDS forced political leaders, actors, and athletes to come out.

In the late 1970s I became friends with Michel Foucault, and he and I disagreed about gay identity as well. I never quite understood his position, which struck me as ambiguous. He’d given an early interview to the French gay magazine
Gai Pied
(which Foucault had named) without letting his name be cited in the article. He
was fascinated by gay life, especially sadomasochistic scenes in San Francisco, and never was there a more self-conscious and highly organized subculture than that one. Yet Foucault was very much against identity politics and “the culture of avowal,” by which he meant a culture that thought every individual had a secret, that that secret was sexual, and that by confessing it one had come to terms with one’s essence. He traced the need to avow to the early Christian church, which had been obsessed by evil thoughts even more than evil deeds (the pagan world had worried only about the deeds). I could understand his objections to the
Oprah
-like emotionality and the revival-meeting “change of heart” so appealing to Americans, but it did seem to me undeniable that “coming out” was still a liberating moment, especially since most gays could “pass” as straight and still did, to their own harm. Yes, it might be wrong to consider one’s sexuality to be the key to one’s identity—and in the ultimate scheme of things perhaps gay identity politics have led to the easy packaging and commodification of our experience, a trivialization of the bacchic rites (“Yeah, I’m a power bottom into domination but not pain, highly verbal, into role-playing of the coach-athlete sort but no scat or blood, please, though water sports are fine”). Nevertheless, what we desire is crucial to who we are. I agree with Nietzsche, who said, “For what does one at present believe in more firmly than one’s body?” To be fair, Foucault was combating all general ideas, all categories, and what he clung to as a good positivist were particular facts, tiny clusters of verifiable events. I wouldn’t dare to defend gay identity against such a convincing argument, but I would still say that people who are oppressed by an entire society can free themselves only by taking on that entire society and redefining the terms that were imposed on them, switching all the minuses to pluses.