City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [114]
Once he died, I began to see him more as the misanthropic bore he was rather than the sadist I’d conjured up. He was certainly the dullest man who ever lived—and he seemed half-dead even while he was still living. Before his death I had terrible dreams in the late seventies in which I was trapped inside a series of mummiform coffins that perfectly resembled me but that were inert. I feared that like my father I was already dead to the world, alive but contained within a frame that perfectly resembled me but that was larger and lifeless.
Chris had been an actor and was still a photographer, but he wanted to be a writer. During our three months in Key West he wrote the first page of a novella 156 times and never got beyond it. He was always angry and frustrated, balling up each rejected page as soon as he ripped it out of the typewriter. His cat was always escaping and going under the house in the crawl space, and Chris was always down there shouting at it. But Key West being a writers’ colony, as soon as important people in the literary world came by, he was all smiles.
He earned his meager, meager living as the administrative assistant to Virgil Thomson, the composer. Born in 1896, Virgil was in his early eighties by then. He was dumpy and crabby and terribly deaf—a horrible sort of deafness for a composer that transposed some but not all notes a few intervals upward. People had to shout to get through to him, and a concert was torture for him. His usual solution to the babble and screech around him was to fall asleep. He’d doze off at the table unless addressed directly. Then he’d open his eyes and say mildly, “Yes, baby?” without missing a beat.
The formative influence in Virgil’s life and career had been Gertrude Stein, with whom he’d written two operas. He said that as soon as he and Stein first met in Paris, they got along like two Harvard men. I’d seen The Mother of Us All, which is about Susan B. Anthony, not once but twice, first at Hunter College and once years later at the New York City Opera. When I first met him, Virgil was still licking his wounds after the failure of his first new opera in forty years, Lord Byron, a big conspicuous flop in 1972 at the Juilliard School in New York directed by John Houseman. The Metropolitan Opera had commissioned the work but never put it on. The New York Times’ music critic had slammed it, calling it “cutesy” and complaining, “All those waltzes!” (Funny, no one ever made the same objection to Der Rosenkavalier or A Little Night Music.) The thumbs-down must have been particularly galling since Virgil himself had been the leading critic in New York for many years and had mastered the art of dismissing others, once calling Heifetz’s ultraromantic playing of the violin “silk pajama music.” Once I saw a staged production of another Stein text Virgil had set, Capitals, Capitals, in a small theater on the West Side, where it was teamed up with Erik Satie’s Socrate. In the Satie, the Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, the daughter of Rita Hayworth, sang with a sweet, small voice.
Chris Cox worshipped Virgil in a nice friendly Southern boy-to-man way. Chris could be deferential without being cringing and was well-informed about every detail of Virgil’s life, including the entire dramatis personae he’d accumulated over many years. Chris was anything but a silly chorus boy, but he did have the actor’s view of life as essentially glamorous, and for him Virgil was the height of sophistication, genius—even history! Chris was sometimes irritated with me because of my big mouth. Once I said in his and Virgil’s company, “Oh, God, that was the era before Balanchine found his way and they were still putting on terrible Americana things like Filling Station, this terrible ballet where—” Chris was violently kicking me under the table; Virgil had written the score, though luckily he was too deaf to have heard me. Another time Chris introduced me to Dominique Nabokov, soon after her husband, the composer Nicholas Nabokov (the writer’s cousin), had died. I was so impressed with the Nabokov