City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [102]
I had become friendly in New York with Manuel Puig, the Argentine author of Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976). I’d suggested he be put on the cover of Christopher Street, not long after the gay literary magazine had started up. I’d had lunch with Puig, who’d won me over with his strange mixture of seriousness and campiness. “I spent the whole day yesterday at the baths, Edmund, looking for a husband.” Long, sad look. “I didn’t find one.”
I invited him down for the day to Johns Hopkins, where he’d be lunching with John Barth, addressing Barth’s grad students, then giving a reading. As we were walking around campus, Barth said to Puig, “Tell me, Manuel, when you turned to the epistolary novel, were you trying to return to the very roots of fiction, as I am doing in my epistolary novel Letters?”
To Barth’s astonishment, Puig said in his Latin-queen cantileña, “Oh, no, you see I was living in America and France so long I forget my Spanish, so I thought I have them write letters and if they make mistakes in Spanish, it’s their fault.”
No matter how bleak I felt on campus, I cheered up the minute I arrived at Stephen’s house. I knew I was in for a long, delicious evening of far-ranging talk and good food, though it began with an English sort of anchovy paste called Gentleman’s Relish. We had wonderful evenings with the poet Cynthia Macdonald and various young beaux Stephen was trying out—one nearly hysterical concert pianist was all big white hands and wasp waist who went on to write a biography of Horowitz edited by Jackie Kennedy. Young Elizabethan scholars were always around—but Stephen’s interests were broad. He was a major and discerning and greedy collector of rare editions, especially anything related to Shakespeare and his spiritual descendants. He was already embarked on reading all of Trollope and Wharton, whose best books he would introduce in new editions. I first read Mavis Gallant in his spare room. She became one of my favorite writers and eventually a friend when I lived in Paris. Stephen kept a journal in which all our lives were recorded moment by moment—he will end up being the Pepys of our generation. He liked to think of himself as the country mouse and David as the city mouse, but of course he recorded all of David’s gossip, too. Like David he had an unparalleled gift for friendship, domesticity, and loyalty. Stephen was always tender and sustaining to his “dear hearts” and coldly arrogant to the hordes of people who didn’t interest him.
Anne Freedgood, my old editor at Random House, had published John Gardner and launched his career by bringing out The Sunlight Dialogues in January, when no new books of importance are published. The novel was favorably reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, which then had the power to make or break a book. Other hefty tomes by Gardner were subsequently published (Nickel Mountain and the only good one, Grendel, Gardner’s retelling of Beowulf, which had come out the year before The Sunlight Dialogues but drawn little attention initially). Yet nothing created such a furor as his attack on all his contemporaries, On Moral Fiction (1978). His polemic was obviously indebted to Tolstoy’s What Is Art? and took other writers to task for anything opaque or experimental. Gardner wanted the style of a book to be totally transparent so that the action could unfold behind it like a constantly moving, panoramic dream.
A strange man in his forties, Gardner had long, straight