City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (25 page)

Chapter 13

In 1978 I met William Burroughs, who’d lived abroad (in Morocco, mostly) so long that he seemed more a myth from the past than a living writer. His pulseless, saurian persona as a smack addict—and in his work his Sade-like mechanical repetition of erotic hangings for everyone, of shiny faces for lesbians made out of penis transplants, of his predatory insectlike characters coolly sipping spinal fluid through straws—all enhanced his status as someone already dead, too cold and totemic to be alive.

I was invited to a dinner at the apartment of Ted Morgan on the East Side. Later, in 1982, I would write a positive review of his biography of Somerset Maugham, in which he gave a horrifying portrait of the aging writer as having lost his mind to Alzheimer’s though he was pumped full of youth-enhancing monkey glands. Virile and hyperactive but incapable of thinking, the once witty and ironic author would greet guests at the gates of his Riviera compound by presenting them with a welcoming handful of his own shit. Ted Morgan had known Burroughs in Tangier and eventually wrote his biography in 1988. Morgan was a tall, loping, edgy man, famous for his travels through Africa, who had once been French and known as comte Charles de Gramont. His father, people said, had married once for position, once for money, and once for love. Ted was the son of the love marriage with a beautiful
Italian woman. Sanche had disliked his name and title so much that he’d changed his nationality, thoroughly expunged his French accent, and redubbed himself Ted Morgan (an anagram of “de Gramont”).

That first evening over dinner Burroughs spoke little except to say that he was able to manipulate his mood as a writer through obvious techniques. “For instance,” he said, “if I want to write about sex, I don’t jerk off for several days, then I’m sure to be horny and ready to describe it in lots of detail and a state of excitation.” We were all fascinated by every word the sphinx pronounced. Burroughs had a way of muttering that, as the evening wore on and joints were brought out, became completely incomprehensible. He produced none of the usual little social smiles or encouraging nods. He seemed remote and indifferent though cordial in a ghostly way. He had on the worn suit and thin, uninteresting tie that comprised his uniform—the look of an unsuccessful Kansas undertaker.

Burroughs had a new minder, James Grauerholz, a tall, sexy, slightly spooky youngster from Kansas. The story was that Grauerholz had written fan letters to Allen Ginsberg and Burroughs at the same time in 1972. When shortly afterwards Grauerholz met Ginsberg, Ginsberg told him that Burroughs needed a secretary.

James immediately became Burroughs’s manager. He decided to present Burroughs eventually (in 1978) at the Mudd Club, a punk redoubt, where his mixture of literary violence, drugginess, and avant-garde credibility joined up with his look of a “clean old man” to make him famous to a whole new generation.

Grauerholz (with the help of agent Andrew Wylie) renegotiated Burroughs’s contracts and set up something called William Burroughs Enterprises, which brought his backlist into paperback reprint and engineered some media coups. Suddenly this half-dead but brilliant man was fully alive again in the public imagination. Grauerholz also edited all of Burroughs’s last books. Whereas
Balanchine as an old man had lived through the young Suzanne Farrell, the young Grauerholz realized himself through this venerable, hollowed-out figure.

Usually I felt some connection with another gay man. Not necessarily a vital link, but a real one, such as one might feel with another American in Berlin, say, neither more nor less. With Burroughs, however, there was no conspiratorial wink and his sexuality seemed like something that might take place only once every hundred years, like the midnight blooming of a century plant. What amazed me was that so many young straight guys revered Ginsberg and Burroughs despite their homosexuality. I guess for those young guys Ginsberg was primarily a hippie guru and Buddhist chanter and wild poet freak, and Burroughs was a reactivated drugged-out zombie, both cool in their ways. Legendary. I knew a young straight guy who put out for Ginsberg and bragged about it. When I asked him how he could do that, he said, “Man, he was Allen Ginsberg, man…”

William Burroughs eventually went off to live near Grauerholz in Lawrence, Kansas, where he dabbled in art by shooting at cans full of paint that spattered blank canvases. These were the “shotgun” paintings—just thirty-six canvases among the fifteen hundred he eventually did.

The Joy of Gay Sex
had come out and was something of a success, selling all over the country as a mainstream book in ordinary bookstores with a minimum of fuss. Since Mitchell Beazley had contracted the book and Charles Silverstein and I were hired guns, our contract was a good deal less favorable than it would have been had we originated the project. No matter. People thought I was making money and I didn’t disabuse them. I discovered that making money is what publishing really cares about and that once again I was bankable.

I was able to sell to Michael Denneny, the first and foremost openly gay editor, a new novel,
Nocturnes for the King of Naples
. Michael, who had a strong Rhode Island accent and who’d studied under Hannah Arendt at the University of Chicago, had a deeply curious and skeptical mind, with equal emphasis on both adjectives. He wanted to know about everything (an invaluable characteristic for an editor), but was quick to contest anything that struck him as dubious or factitious. He refused to rush in an industry that demanded speed, and this leisureliness would eventually be his downfall. That, and that he embraced and launched gay fiction in a way no one else before him and few after him dared to do. When gay lit didn’t make big bucks, he was fired. But in the meantime Michael had a run of many years in the offices of St. Martin’s Press. In that time he was able at least partially to fulfill his dream of putting gay content into all the genres—gay romantic novels, gay cowboy novels, gay gangster books, etc. He would bring out just a few thousand copies of any title and let it sink or swim on its own. There was a moment, before the market became saturated, when an ordinary straight first literary novel could be expected to sell five thousand copies—and a gay literary title would sell seven thousand. For a long while gay readers had a greater hunger for books than did the ten-times-larger straight public for heterosexual literature.

In the seventies some fifty gay bookstores opened all across the country. This was the era before the big chains such as Barnes & Noble. Suddenly, in the bars in every small town lots of small, free gay publications were being handed out that would reprint syndicated book reviews. It was all pretty tacky, but it was undeniably grassroots. Some publications, such as
Christopher Street
and later the
James White Review
and the
Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review
, gave a dignified and intelligent forum to gay art and thought.

Nocturnes for the King of Naples
was once again a book that I’d written for myself alone. Not that I didn’t have a reader in
mind, but that reader was much like myself—as demanding, as romantic, as besotted with poetic language. Buried into the book were many bits of poetry written out as prose. Jimmy Merrill was the only reader who ever detected on his own those buried poems. Early on, in a scene that described an evening at Peggy’s without any recognizable details or anecdotes, I composed a sestina, just to keep myself awake. Later there was a sonnet, an imitation of a French poem, “Aux yeux de Madame de Beaufort.” In the last chapter I buried some couplets. This story of lost gay love and a Gothic childhood alluded throughout to saints and Sufis and to St. Gregory of Nyssa and to Solomon’s Song of Songs. I suppose I had learned from Nabokov to make literary allusions unobtrusive so that they might delight the initiated and not disturb anyone else. I subscribed to the baroque confusion between the spiritual and the sensual, though I believed in the spirit only as a word, just as Melville caressed (and didn’t believe in) the word
mystic
and Henry James spoke reverentially when he used the word
moral
, though one scarcely knew what he meant by it.

Readers (my few readers!) had spoken of
Forgetting Elena
as a “baroque” novel, although I now realize that it’s quite unornamented and syntactically modest.
Baroque
, I guess, was just a vogue word of that period for anything offbeat (and gay?). I took the description seriously, however, and wrote
Nocturnes
according to a genuine baroque aesthetic that stresses movement, above all, that proceeds through constant metamorphoses, that employs unusually rich materials and is designed to produce a single overwhelming theatrical effect—and expresses religious feelings through the erotic (Bernini’s St. Michael stabbing a writhing St. Theresa in the side, for example) or vice versa (all those old poems comparing the beloved to the Madonna or God).

Under all this elaborate theatrical machinery (one chapter had my characters actually living onstage), I was reenacting my thwarted
passion for Keith McDermott and my intense, prolonged suffering over him. In the true baroque style of transformation, everything was converted into other terms. In real life I had spent a memorable night having sex with Keith, one of the half-dozen times that that occurred. Ever the formalist aesthete, he’d set everything up as a ritual by candlelight. I metamorphosed that experience into my chapter in the theater where the lover, me, was dressed as Bottom and the beloved, Keith, as Titania. Nor was it just any theater. It was a baroque theater, full of the machinery of the past, all of which I carefully researched.

I had decided that exposition “bored” me and looked for a form that would skip it—the letter! Yes, in letters people don’t spell out to the beloved the key moments of their affair but rather allude to them in shorthand. My novel would be addressed to a mysterious “you,” who might by turns seem to be Frank O’Hara or God—in any event, someone dead. Whereas countless gay poets had used the “you strategy” to avoid designating the sex of the beloved (it only works in English and Chinese, where adjectives have no gender), I would be quite clear that I was addressing a man. The “I” in my book, however, wasn’t me but rather Keith McDermott many years from now when he would mourn his lost lover—who resembled me, in a few ways. This was a sort of “Cry me a river/’cuz I cried a river over you” novel. Now that thirty years have gone by, Keith and I are best friends and all this spleen has withered away.

Nocturnes for the King of Naples
came out in 1978, the same year as several other gay novels: Andrew Holleran’s lyrical Fire Island book,
Dancer from the Dance
; Larry Kramer’s clumsy, pleasure-phobic
Faggots
; and Armistead Maupin’s
Tales of the City
. My book was the least noticed of the lot, though a certain kind of romantic lad still reads it from time to time. For some people it’s much of a muchness. I remember in the mid-1980s Italo Calvino’s wife, Chichita, read it in French and said to me dismissively, “It’s
sentimental, Edmund, and you’re not.” My novel did have some nice blurbs from Gore Vidal and Cynthia Ozick, and it received few reviews but positive ones—except in the
New York Times Book Review
, where the critic said that I had been talented when I was still in the closet but that I’d lost my gift by coming out.

A tall, blond biologist named Doug Gruenau, four years younger than I but like me a graduate from the University of Michigan, was living with the novelist Harold Brodkey on West Eighty-eighth Street. Harold had—which sounds like a contradiction in terms—an immense underground reputation. Everyone in New York was curious about him, but few people outside the city had ever heard of him. Long ago, in 1958, he’d published
First Love and Other Sorrows
, a book of stories that had been well reviewed, but they weren’t what all the buzz was about. Now he’d bring out a story occasionally in the
New Yorker
or
New American Review
or even
Esquire
. The one in
New American Review
(a quarterly, edited by Ted Solotaroff) was highly sexual but not dirty—a fifty-page chapter, published in 1973, about a Radcliffe girl’s first orgasm. The prose in “Innocence” could be strained if striking: “To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die.” It seemed the longest sex scene in history, rivaled only by the gay sex scene in David Plante’s
Catholic
—and reminiscent of the sex scene “The Time of Her Time” in Norman Mailer’s
Advertisements for Myself
(except that one had been anal!).

Then there had been troubled, labyrinthine stories about Brodkey’s mother in the
New Yorker
of a length and complexity no one else would have been allowed to get away with. This was obviously a writer, we thought, who must, above all, be extremely convincing. The mother stories nagged and tore at their subject with a Lawrentian exasperation, a relentless drive to get it right, repeatedly correcting the small assertions just made in previous lines. Everyone was used to confessional writing of some sort
(though the heyday for that would come later), and everyone knew all about the family drama, but no one had ever gone this far with sex, with mother, and with childhood. We were stunned with a new sort of realism that made slides of every millimeter of the past and put them under the writer’s microscope. In
Esquire
in 1975 a short, extremely lyrical story, “His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft,” appeared, about a baby boy being carried in his father’s arms. Mother might get the niggling, Freudian treatment, but Daddy deserved only light-drenched, William Blake–like mysticism.

All these “stories,” apparently, were only furtive glimpses of the massive novel that Brodkey had been working on for years and that would be the American answer to Marcel Proust. Brodkey’s fans (and there were many of them) photocopied and stapled into little booklets every story he’d published so far in recent years and circulated them among their friends, a sort of New York samizdat press. His supporters made wide fervent claims for him. Harold was our Mann, our James Joyce. That no one outside New York knew who he was only vouchsafed his seriousness, his cult stature, too serious for the unwashed (or rather the washed, a more appropriate synecdoche for Midwesterners).