City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (39 page)

John Logan at Princeton has helped me innumerable times to track down essays and articles I wanted to consult.

My agent, Amanda Urban, has advised me at every point, for which I am deeply grateful.

Q&A with Edmund White

Q: You’ve written four autobiographical novels and one real autobiography (
My Lives
). Why another autobiography? Haven’t you already covered all this material?

A: Oddly enough I haven’t. I’ve had an unusually full life, perhaps because I was a journalist for years and an aspiring novelist and I’m a very social person who’s lived in big cities—New York, Rome, San Francisco, Paris…

Q: So what’s new about this book?

A:
My Lives
is organized by topic (“My Blonds,” “My Shrinks,” “My Mother,” etc.) whereas
City Boy
is chronological. It’s really about my first long stay in New York, from 1962 to 1982.

Q: What is so interesting about those years?

A: From my point of view New York was the birthplace in those years of the modern lesbian and gay liberation movement. After all, the Stonewall uprising, which initiated this movement, occurred in 1968 in Greenwich Village. New York was also in that period alive with cultural and creative activity. I was lucky enough to meet novelists, poets, painters, theater innovators, actors; and to see the New York City Ballet when it was the center of everyone’s attention.

Q: What made the ballet so important?

A: We used to say that in a city as contentious and argumentative as New York only a wordless art form could appeal to everyone. What we saw on the stage was a vision of a utopian community of love and common purpose, perhaps best symbolized by the title of Jerome Robbins’s ballet,
Dances at a Gathering
. The real genius of the seventies—not just in New
York but throughout the Western world—was Balanchine. He was our link to imperial Russia and to the Ballets Russes and the Europe of the 1920s with its great composers (Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Hindemith) and its painters (Picasso, Rouault).

Q: Was the ballet also a social scene?

A: Definitely. There were usually three rather long intermissions each evening and the audience had time to discuss what they’d just seen—and to have an acute sense of one another. I’d see Susan Sontag there all the time and Bob Gottlieb, the editor of Knopf and later the
New Yorker
. America’s best ballet critic, the legendary Edwin Denby, was there every night, as was Edward Gorey. The lobby of the State Theater was the drawing room of New York.

Q: Does New York still have the same magic for you?

A: It’s still a fascinating international city, but Manhattan—especially lower Manhattan below 14th Street—is no longer a place where young, unestablished artistic people can afford to live and where chance encounters can set off sparks. Now young artists are scattered over various boroughs and usually have to arrange to meet. New York has become a city for rich people, just like Paris.

Q: Sometimes you seem to be a bit bitchy in your sections on Susan Sontag or Harold Brodkey. How do you feel about slandering the dead?

A: Voltaire said that the only thing you owe the dead is the truth. I think of all the people who’ve weighed in on Sontag, I’m the least condemning. She wounded a lot of feelings while she was alive, including mine, and we had a long dispute. But I always admired her and I wanted to set the record straight. Sigrid Nunez is the only other writer who’s treated her fairly in my opinion—but Sigrid lived with Susan and her son, who was her boyfriend.

Q: Speaking of truth, how do you feel about adding novelistic details to a memoir?

A: I totally disapprove, unless the “memoir” is light and humorous like David Sedaris’s books. He is obviously trying mainly to entertain and he succeeds at it wonderfully. Perhaps because I write novels I have a different goal when I write nonfiction—to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. I think that’s the contract that the writer has with the reader in a memoir, and readers justifiably feel vexed when they discover that a
memoirist has transposed the sequence of two events to make them more colorful or dramatic. Of course everyone can misremember events, but deliberately to distort the truth to make a better story is cheating in a work that presents itself as the unvarnished truth.

Q: Do you keep a journal?

A: No, I’ve never kept notes and some friends have sent me e-mails correcting my version of things. If they’ve found errors of fact rather than just interpretation I’ve corrected my mistakes. I rely on the selective assistance of forgetting; if we remembered everything we’d never be able to re-create the past coherently. Borges, the South American writer, has a great story about the torments of a perfect memory called “Funes the Memorious.”

Q: Don’t you ever feel like an egomaniac writing so much about yourself?

A: Actually I have to remind myself to write about myself sufficiently to provide a through-line to my memoirs. I’m so interested in other people—and I gave dozens of quick sketches of other people in
City Boy
—that it’s easy for me to forget to put in information about my own ambitions or loves, for instance.

Q: Do you have any other memoirs up your sleeve?

A: Yes, I’d like to write about Paris in the eighties since that was a great period of prosperity and artistic effervescence—and for me it was a wonderful time when I felt I was becoming another, more mature person. I’d also like to write someday about my sister and my nephew, two key people in my life whom I’ve barely touched on in my writing up till now.

Q: What other literary projects do you have?

A: I’m working on a novel now about a straight man and a gay man who are best friends in the sixties and seventies. It’s to be called
Jack Holmes and His Friend
. I’d also like to write a short biography of Baudelaire to fill out the project I’ve undertaken with my biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud. For me, Baudelaire is the fourth great figure of French literature.

Praise for
City Boy

‘[An] energetic evocation of Manhattan in the Sixties and Seventies … an absorbing insight into the life alongside a constellation of greats of the American literary and gay scenes’
Harper’s Bazaar

‘Edmund White’s candid memoir of New York’s gay scene in the sixties and seventies is packed with frequently salacious anecdotes about the rich, the famous and the gifted. In the end, though, it is the city itself that steals the show: crime-ridden, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, all but impossible to live in, but vibrantly alive’
London Review of Books

‘
City Boy
is gossipy elegant and endlessly quotable, an intriguing obituary to a time and place that no longer exists’
Word Magazine

‘Edmund White has a wonderful chuckle, full of active mischief and helpless glee … a gifted, promiscuous, scholarly, sociable young gay writer … Beguiling’
Observer

‘New York is evoked with a cinematic immediacy, especially its “grungy, dangerous, bankrupt” character in the mid-1970s …
City Boy
is, in an important sense, a book about friendship, its proximity to and differences from romance, and its significance in the lives of gay men … His ability to reflect on his past with candour and wit remains exemplary’
Times Literary Supplement

‘
City Boy
, plain-spoken and knowing, is a survivor’s tale, a missive from one of those antlered boys of that era to the others who are gone: this is who we were, this is how it was, this was our city’
New York Times Books Review

‘White has an unerring eye for the symptoms of the authorial egotism and, because he freely admits to his own, serves it up as a pure comedy … Every page has a great joke or description’
Evening Standard

‘A rip-roaring, riotous hoot from start to finish … a stud-studded and gloriously gossipy catalogue of all his uber-cool arty pals and his own thrilling exploits in the heady underworld of pre-AIDS gaydom’
Dazed & Confused

‘As much as the book is delicious gossip, it’s also a narrative of understanding and friendship, a celebration of destiny they all shared by being alive in a poor and decaying and free and lusty New York for two amazing decades’
Irish Times

‘Edmund White, a master of the erotic confession, is our most accomplished triathlete of prose—a novelist, biographer,
and
memoirist. Truly, no other American writer of my generation manages to be all three with such personal passion and veracity.

The fiercely defiant
A Boy’s Own Story
remains the coming-of-age novel that has the deepest resonance for me—notwithstanding that it’s about a gay boy coming of age, and I’m straight. (No one who honestly remembers being a sensitive young man can fail to identify with the universal longing, or the frustration and the anger, underlying this semiautobiographical novel.) And White’s recent biography of the mercurial and much misunderstood Rimbaud is fittingly devastating and succinct—’fittingly,’ because the outcast poet’s life was tragic and brief. Now comes a bold, penetrating companion to White’s
My Lives
—an earlier, bittersweet memoir.

In
City Boy
, the memoirist examines his life in New York in the 1960s and ’70s; not only were these vital years for White’s own gay liberation, but
City Boy
is also the story of White’s literary emergence—his struggles and ambitions as a writer. There is the bracing sexual candor and explicitness White is justly famous for; as he says, ‘What we desire is crucial to who we are.’ But what is most unforgettable are the piercing self-portraits of the young writer who describes himself as ‘desperate for recognition,’ and the overwhelming panoply of older, often legendary writers White meets along the way. (‘I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought.’)

This splendid book is at once fascinating social history and sublimely detailed gossip. Young gay readers who don’t know what it was like to be gay in New York in the ’60s and ’70s should devour it; those straight readers who are somehow still unfriendly to homosexuality must open their eyes and read every word of
City Boy
, too. As for those of us, gay and straight, who have long admired Edmund White, this memoir is a wise and humane treatise on the delicate differences between love and friendship—indeed, between lovers and friends. Most deservedly, White has had his share of both, and he writes about them with an irreproachable kindness and affection.’

—John Irving

First published in Great Britain 2009
Copyright © 2009 by Edmund White

This electronic edition published 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

“An East Window on Elizabeth Street,” from
Collected Poems
by James Schuyler. Copyright © 1993 by the Estate of James Schuyler. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

“The Book of Ephraim,” from
The Changing Light at Sandover
by James Merrill, copyright © 1980, 1982 by James Merrill. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

“Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” copyright © 1974 by John Ashbery, from
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
by John Ashbery. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. In the UK, used by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.

“In Trust” and “Saturday Night” from
Boss Cupid
by Thom Gunn. Copyright © 2000 by Thom Gunn. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. UK and BC rights (including Canada) by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

The right of Edmund White to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4088 1993 7

www.bloomsbury.com/edmundwhite

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