In search of immortality

The 'cesspool' of New York in the 1960s and 1970s was the setting for Edmund White's quest for literary fame and friendship, writes GREG BAXTER

EDMUND WHITE'S memoir of his life in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s, City Boy, is a love song for the city – not the ultra-rich, patriotic, confident, safe tourist destination, but a "cesspool" that America didn't want: "grungy, dangerous, bankrupt".

New York in the 1970s was “loud and leaking – the manholes were leaking steam. . . ambulances and fire-wagon sirens were shrieking around the clock, people’s bodies were leaking blood and sperm.”

Out of this mayhem came sexual liberation, intellectual independence, and a sense of purpose and urgency in art.

White arrived in New York in July 1962 from the American Midwest. His defining obsession at the time was to become published, to be recognised as serious and original, and create a reputation for posterity, but he was “too busy writing unproduceable plays and meeting new people and killing time at work”.

Some 20 years later, in 1983, with an international reputation as a writer secured, he left New York for Paris: he wanted to continue to have “industrial quantities” of sex, and New York had become a morgue with the arrival of Aids.

City Boyis largely the story of how White went from unknown to well-known, and is populated by the literary immortals, somebodies and nobodies he met along the way. It contains unabashed name-dropping, gossip, and score-settling as well as courageous admissions of vulnerability and pettiness.

Fans of Edmund White will recognise that much of the book is a condensed, sometimes verbatim rehash of White's autobiographical novel, The Farewell Symphony. So, a lot of this love song for New York City was pre-recorded.

The Farewell Symphony, published in 1997, is also the story of White's life in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. It's a large, ambitious documentary on the unique fate of gays in America – no group went from oppression, to revolution, to liberation, then to annihilation so swiftly. It writhes in sex and unapologetically purple prose.

The subject of City Boyis no longer history and sex but White's insecurity as a writer. Sex seems to have lost some urgency for the ageing White, whose interests in City Boy reflect a shift from the physical to the cerebral, from battle to resignation.

But the atmosphere of volatility that sex provided White for so long must come from somewhere: in City Boy, it comes from a gossip-rich journey, as a late-blooming and unconfident author, through a landscape (or up a ladder) of artists, writers, geniuses, fools, madmen, snobs, and backstabbers – for whom he delivers about equal doses of fawning praise and juicy contempt. (White almost never lets a noun get away without an adjective).

The poets Richard Howard and James Merrill (with different names) are important characters in The Farewell Symphony, but in City Boythere are many more: Howard, Merrill, Nabokov, Balanchine, Michel Foucault, Fran Lebowitz, William Borroughs, Lillian Hellman, Jasper Johns, Christopher Isherwood, Jamaica Kincaid, John Barth, John Irving, Robert Mapplethorpe, Virgil Thomson, Harold Brodkey, Thom Gunn, his editors, collaborators, etcetera, and, towering over all the others, like a horrifying, thousand-foot-tall, infinitely smart goddess – Susan Sontag.

The anecdotes he tells provide interesting glimpses of the human beings behind the reputations. Sontag was a snob and a bore. The arrival of Aids made Thom Gunn a better writer (in fact, Aids would bring seriousness to the work of gay writers "that our work had never before possessed"). Mapplethorpe nurtured writers as friends so they would write favourable reviews of his work. Others were lunatics, like Brodkey, who, I learned in City Boy, was once considered the greatest American writer of the twentieth century – America's Proust: except the book that was supposed to prove this was a catastrophic flop. Some of these people are depicted as users and frauds, but White never wholly admonishes any of them. As much as the book is delicious gossip, it's also a narrative of understanding and friendship, a celebration of a destiny they all shared by being alive in a poor and decaying and free and lusty New York for two amazing decades.

Whatever weaknesses he scorns in others, he scorns them in himself as much or more. He castigates himself for an obsession with immortality and genius – he seems to accept, in City Boy, that genius is something that shall elude him and all living writers from now on. He scorns himself for the treachery he feels compelled to commit upon those who have helped him. He admits he wrote positive book reviews to garner favour from luminaries, and this ultimately made him feel, when both Sontag and Richard Howard accused him of not being "positive enough" about them in a review, like "their puppet in the Bunraku theatre of their careers".

He would, as a form of liberating himself from this sickening feeling, write a novel that parodied Sontag – whom he had idolised all his writing life. Sontag, whose recommendations and blurbs got him a Guggenheim fellowship and international stardom, never forgave him.

A peripheral but revealing question that pops up often in the book goes like this: has his legacy and literary importance suffered because he was a gay writer, as opposed to a writer who happened to be gay? It’s an interesting question to ask, coming from an author who has achieved such success. In an accusatory tone, he names the many “blue chip” authors whose status as immortals, he speculates, was a consequence of concealing, or making nothing of, their homosexuality. Even now, even as White’s lifelong monomaniacal lust for publication – this is his own admission – has been sated many times, he feels something is missing, and fears the darkness of being forgotten.

Greg Baxter is the editor of the online journal Some Blind Alleys. His memoir, A Preparation for Death, will be published by Penguin Ireland in July.