City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [11]
I was an individualist in the sense that I responded in no way to the appeal of clannishness. I didn’t belong to a clan. I didn’t know any published novelists except one friend at my office, George Constable, who brought out three novels in the sixties. I had a few college friends in New York, but we’d gone to the University of Michigan, a huge state school that didn’t instill the same pride or command the same loyalty as Harvard or Yale or Princeton. I was a Midwesterner living in New York, but even in Ohio and Illinois my parents had been displaced Texans. My mother made spicy Tex-Mex food that was distasteful to the few kids from school I invited home. I had no regional allegiances. I had friends now at work but all but one of them were straight and would have felt intensely ill at ease or even repulsed had I discussed with them my sexuality. My one gay friend at work was in the closet. Two or three of the girls at Time-Life might have guessed I was gay, but that recognition was never articulated and would have called for no possible response beyond melancholy compassion for my “sad” affliction.
Perhaps if I’d gone to Harvard or Princeton (I’d been accepted to both) I’d have benefited from those connections after graduation. As it was, I had no contacts with the rich or even the prosperous or the influential in New York. I’d obtained my job with no help from anyone. My parents, now that I’d graduated, never gave me a penny. I loved New York, but not because it had showered its favors on me. The people I worked with were all Ivy Leaguers, but I seldom hung out with them after work.
I didn’t feel an affiliation with anyone. I had a few friends but I don’t think at that age I’d yet learned what friendship was, what it would eventually come to mean to me. I knew how to be interested in the people around me and how to say warm things that would attach them to me, and I was so grateful to anyone who seemed to like me that I would pursue him or her tirelessly. But that was exactly the problem. I hadn’t stopped to wonder what was in it for me. Perhaps my self-esteem was so low that I was mainly eager to placate people, to amass allies in what I perceived to be a hostile world. I had a character that anticipated disaster, and with that eventuality in mind I was accumulating friends. For me friendship was nothing but an entente cordiale; I didn’t know how to confide. I never shared my doubts with anyone. I’d mastered a fetching way of confessing shocking, colorful details of my life to the initiated, but I never mentioned to anyone any of my serious doubts or fears or hopes. Nor any of my ideas, which I knew would bore them; as a result, those ideas remained half-formed because never articulated. Maybe because I spent my forties and fifties in Paris, I later came to embrace the importance of the “milieu.” I could see that our American brand of Romantic individualism didn’t really amount to much; one was only as good as one’s circle, and a superior, stimulating milieu could raise the general level of conversation, of sophistication, even of moral discrimination and esthetic refinement, certainly of ambition and accomplishment.
In my twenties and thirties, before I left New York for Paris, I might have confided in friends if I’d have thought that would make them like me more, but I was so cynical that I assumed everyone around me was entirely self-absorbed. I’d deflect a question with a question of my own. Like a girl who’s been to a Southern charm school, I knew that one could always count on the other person’s inexhaustible egotism and