City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [101]
After we’d finished our first interview, Johns told me a couple of funny anecdotes. He said that when he was young, he’d gone out in a truck with a dealer to Utopia Parkway in Queens to help pick up some boxes made by Joseph Cornell, the American surrealist, for a new exhibit. Cornell was apparently quite fussed and ran out to the truck to say, “You didn’t tell me what you wanted—a few masterpieces and the rest minor works or what—so I just did all masterpieces.” Johns also told me about a trip to Buffalo where he did the sets for Merce Cunningham. Duchamp came along and insisted everyone go to see Niagara Falls. Duchamp worked out their itinerary down to the last detail, but when the time came for them to leave, Duchamp refused to join them. “But I haven’t the least interest in Niagara Falls,” he said. I was sure that Johns remembered these stories because Cornell’s simple, almost simpleminded, vanity was the exact contrary to his own complicated diffidence, whereas Duchamp’s elegant désinvolture was obviously an ideal, a beacon, for Johns.
The nicest moment of the afternoon came when Johns showed me Picasso’s 1971 series of etchings to illustrate La Celestina, a sixteenth-century Spanish play about a procuress. I was so drunk I don’t remember what Johns said about the process, but I remember Picasso had used sugar—and indeed the lines were granular and “crumbling.” I can still picture the old procuress with her thin lips and big nose and the pure, spotless virgin she was selling—a girl whose firm young breasts were kept constantly on display. Johns pointed out dozens of small details in the etchings—it felt like a rare privilege to be shown by Johns this superb book by Picasso.
Now when I chance upon a Johns in a museum collection, I’m always struck by how sober his work looks, how dark and dignified. It’s hard to imagine that it ever looked flashy or shocking. Now it’s become cerebral and aloof—almost invisible in a crowded room in which other brighter, easier works are competing for attention.
Chapter 16
I got my job teaching at Johns Hopkins through Stephen Orgel, David’s first lover, the same man who had lent me his house in the Berkeley Hills. He had moved from California to Baltimore and recommended me. I had an interview with John Barth, the well-known novelist, then at the height of his fame, having published in 1960 a long, serious eighteenth-century pastiche, The Sot-Weed Factor, and more recently metafictional short stories in the collection Lost in the Funhouse. I guess I passed muster; he told Stephen that I was the first homosexual he’d ever knowingly met and that, strangely enough, he liked me. Stephen merely smiled and made a clicking noise and closed his eyes. He had a quietly insolent and wildly appealing way of shutting his eyes for a second and then reopening them, as if he couldn’t quite trust them, and then chuckling steadily. He acted as if the victim of his subtle satire should share in his delight.
Stephen never lied. I overheard John Irwin, the head of the department, ask Stephen if he’d read his book on Faulkner, in which he proved that Faulkner, after the death of Alabama, his nine-day-old daughter, developed an incestuous relationship to his fiction. It was called Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner. Stephen’s eyes got very round and closed, then switched back on. He stared at Irwin for a moment, then said, “I don’t see why I would have read your book since I’ve never read Faulkner.”
I taught one literature course for writers and one fiction workshop. In the literature course we read One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Tin Drum, Blood Oranges, The Sound of the Mountain, and Gravity’s Rainbow, among others. I doubt if I would ever have read the García Márquez, the Grass, or the Pynchon if I hadn’t assigned them, but I learned something by analyzing them. Since it was a course for writers, the main emphasis was on technique, not symbolism, influences, or sociological import, the usual stuff of English Department