City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [119]
Now if I dislike a book I’m asked to review, I send it back to the newspaper or magazine, but back then I was so thrilled to be asked by anyone to review something that I hesitated to reject the golden offering. None of us was natural in the face of power, of absolute literary power; we were all cringing courtiers, I less than most writers.
But my cowardice that led to overpraising a confused and irritating novel saddled me with a long and painful friendship. Cole would get very drunk late at night (me, too) and he’d bring up the reservations I’d expressed in my review—what’s wrong with saying “ennuyante of stature”?—and he’d speak with real venom. There was always a trace of anger and resentment against me—and that kept me so intimidated that I was always eager to prove to him my devotion. Chris Cox and I even agreed to be his agents representing his novel White on Black on White. Cole was furious with New Directions for not having sufficiently promoted his earlier works and quit James Laughlin, who was truly devoted to Cole’s writing, to search out a new editor. Of course he didn’t understand that Laughlin, mentally unstable himself, was that rarest of things, a loyal and disinterested literary editor. Nor did Cole know how to go about finding a new publisher. Since Chris was by now working in publishing and I had a few contacts, we sent his book around everywhere, with no success. I thought it would be a natural for publication since it dealt with race and sex, the two great American obsessions. But no one wanted it—again the Chinese-box problem and the lack of charm. Finally another friend enlisted the help of the Countryman Press, a tiny house with a minuscule list. The book garnered far less attention than it would have if New Directions had done it—and far less than it deserved.
Dowell jumped to his death on August 3, 1985. We’d all seen it coming. Cole talked about it endlessly, and when Bert visited me in Paris a few weeks before it happened, I asked him if he was prepared for such a gruesome eventuality. We were all horrified and frightened—it seemed something we could all be tempted to do. We wondered if he had AIDS and was too embarrassed to admit it or afraid of the long, slow, painful death. Or we heard that he’d “dropped a dime” on a black prison lover on parole—planted drugs on him and tipped off the police that a man on parole was “holding,” as revenge for the guy’s infidelity. Or maybe, as he said, he was afraid of aging and losing his “beauty.”
If many of the people I knew in New York in the seventies were twisted or paranoid or even evil, we all agreed one was a saint: Joe Brainard. Joe was a writer and visual artist from Oklahoma who stuttered and spelled erratically and was so timid that he danced in place, looking down, if he thought anyone was paying attention to him. Someone had once complimented him on his chest so he always wore his shirt open to the waist, even in subarctic winter weather.
I had a few dates with him and he’d always bring a notepad to dinner. He was too shy to converse normally so he’d write something down and pass the pad and wait for a written answer. It was a bit like being someone who couldn’t sign and dining with a deaf person who couldn’t read lips. Sometimes he’d look directly at me with a warm regard, but a moment later he’d be looking up at the ceiling, like a bad actor miming innocence and whistling.
He’d grown up middle-class but poor, and when he got to New York, he’d lived in the East Village and eaten out of garbage cans. Kenward Elmslie, the