City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [118]
As did the food. Cole was a martyr cook. Since he never left the apartment except to swoop down on homeless black men in Central Park across the street for sex, he had the rest of his time to write, and to construct elaborate dinners that sometimes took three days to prepare. Cole would greet us at the door with dark circles under his eyes and exhaustion pinching his lips. Tammy was our “hostess,” or at least that’s how Cole conceived of his wienie dog. She was old and lame and an intelligent, seemingly normal dachshund, but Cole was enraptured with her and ascribed to her a whole bewildering range of gracious and malefic emotions. He would hurt her physically when she’d been “bad” (or he drunk and crazy), though she slept every night between Bert and Cole and had a wardrobe of diamonds and tiaras and furs that were contributed to a museum after her death. The writer Walter Abish, author of How German Is It?, made a terrible gaffe when in a note to Cole about matters literary he wrote, “P.S. Sorry to hear the dog died.” Steam came issuing out of all of Cole’s orifices. He trembled with rage when he said to me, “I hope his wife, Cecile, dies soon so I can write, ‘P.S. Sorry to hear the woman died.’ When I think how many times Tammy graciously received the Abishes here as their hostess!” Cole once told me that all his pleasant female characters had been based on Tammy. The unpleasant ones were based on Susan Sontag, whom he didn’t know, though he was convinced that she had personally blocked every positive review he’d failed to receive and had engineered every rejection by every publisher. He knew she was plotting against him day and night because he’d written an attack on her in his novel Mrs. October Was Here, though he’d been careful to set it in “Tasmania, Ohio.” Of course in real life Susan Sontag, Argus-eyed as she was, had never seen a mention of Coleman Dowell. But Cole needed an enemy, and it helped if he or she was Jewish, as were Sontag, Abish, and Bert, Cole’s lover. Cole was wildly and self-defeatingly anti-Semitic, since he was kept by a sweet, patient Jew and all his literary friends were either Jewish or quite conventionally politically correct—and New York had the second-largest concentration of Jews in the world after Israel (two million versus five million). And of course the whole cultural life of New York in which Cole aspired, everything from music to literature to scholarship, was markedly influenced by Jews. Nor was Cole’s anti-Semitism actually based on anything other than a desire to shock and to be “interesting,” and I suppose it was meant to figure as a declaration of independence from his endlessly indulgent lover.
Most literary writers in the second half of the twentieth century felt wronged, neglected, conspired against, but Cole was one of the few who railed without cease against his Job-like fate. Maybe because his mental literary map starred Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, he imagined that he, too, should be on the cover of Time. Maybe because he’d been on television in his twenties as a performer and was used to big audiences and street-recognition fame, he found sales figures of his books in the hundreds instead of the hundreds of thousands cruel and lamentable. Lament he did, all the time.
When I first met Coleman in 1974, I was still drinking heavily and as a consequence was constantly feeling guilty. I couldn’t remember what I’d said or done or shouted the night