City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [116]
Chris was cataloging half a century’s worth of saved letters, scores, program notes, reviews, photos, and memorabilia so that Virgil could sell the lot to Yale. The Beinecke Library there must doubly have valued Virgil’s papers since it already possessed Gertrude Stein’s archives—and even the armchair she mentions in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, the very piece of furniture that Ezra Pound broke while hectoring Stein and Toklas with his theories and opinions. The chair was especially dear to the ladies because Alice had done the petit-point upholstery following a design Picasso had drawn directly onto the fabric for her. Pound’s bad behavior led Stein to declare that he was a village explainer, which was all very well if one were a village but “if not, not.”
Virgil invited Chris and me to dinner with Christopher Isherwood and his lover, the artist Don Bachardy. We were all big drinkers in those days and we were soon screaming with merriment. Isherwood was extremely approachable and unpretentious. I stayed friends with him and Don for years (Don and I are still friends). Chris Isherwood didn’t like to receive letters since he had no time or inclination to answer them (he would have liked the e-mail era); he didn’t mind if I called him, however. In fact he always picked up the phone eagerly. He had no hesitation about laughing if one became a bit pompous. I remember once calling him from Key West, where I was reading (in English—I hadn’t yet learned French) Chateaubriand’s Mémoires. I read Chris the closing pages over the phone, all about grabbing the Holy Cross and slowly descending into the tomb. I had tears in my eyes at the grandeur of it all, and Chris burst into uncontrollable laughter. Later when I saw Keith McDermott in the stage adaptation of A Meeting by the River, Chris’s novel about holy men in Asia, the monks were also laughing all the time, falling about with rocking fous rires … Laughter was an essential part of Chris’s idea of sanctity. Back then I specially liked his exuberant irreverence because I had not yet become indifferent to religion. Now I shrug when the subject comes up, but then I still described myself as a “mystical atheist,” as if I were at least impressed by piety—as if I thought it had a place in the world if not in mine. Now I have a Voltairean contempt for it, though Voltaire it seems was actually a pantheist. Isherwood’s struggles to meditate and to embrace Vedanta were always amusingly credible. In the story “Paul” from Down There on a Visit he wrote in such a droll way about his efforts to sit in his Los Angeles apartment with a beautiful drug addict and meditate—neither of them could ever empty his mind of all thought. I flew out to Los Angeles several times to visit Chris and Don. Don drew me and years later had an intense session with my French lover, Hubert, who was already dying of AIDS. As Don drew Hubert’s eyes, Hubert burst into tears. When Don drew the nose, Hubert’s nose started running. When Don drew his mouth, Hubert vomited. To be sure, Hubert was already quite ill, but Don’s intense scrutiny was like a witch doctor’s way of exorcising devils.
Chris Cox and I invited Isherwood and Bachardy to my place for dinner the very next night after we met them that first time at Virgil’s. I spent the whole hungover day buying the twelve kinds of fish necessary for Julia Child’s recipe of marmite Dieppoise with its complex ivory sauce. It was a triumph and we all screamed with laughter till dawn. Now that I no longer drink, I wonder if I’m capable of such fierce, joyful abandon, such total immersion in the high tides of laughter and forgetting.
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Chris Cox became almost pathologically jealous of me. I felt that he was actually envious of my slowly burgeoning and belated “career” (which precisely