City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [121]
When the English TV series Brideshead Revisited was being shown, we friends took turns hosting for an episode, each cooking his best dish when it came time. Joe had no idea how to cook so he had the most expensive caviar and chocolates catered.
Joe was certainly sweet and disinterested—we called him Prince Myshkin. Later, when he had to die of AIDS at a young age, he became bitter, understandably. I’m glad I didn’t have to witness that last phase of his life.
Chapter 17
I don’t remember how I met Richard Sennett, but dozens of roads led to the intellectual and social Rome that he represented. Dick was a professor of sociology at New York University and had written several remarkable books, including The Hidden Injuries of Class and The Fall of Public Man. He was a well-known professor and sought-after lecturer. He was also an odd combination of schoolboy nerd, flamboyant queen, and Mrs. Astor, in that he loved ideas and intellectuals and enjoyed prancing about in drag, though that was just a phase, and he entertained with charm and tirelessness in his little house on Washington Mews, a brick-paved lane just off Washington Square. The old New York Henry James gentry had lived in the big town houses on the square in the nineteenth century, and the stables and servants’ quarters had been lodged behind along the mews, except they’d been converted to artists’ studios since at least the early 1900s when cars had replaced carriages. Any sort of gracious, historic, private living space was so unusual in New York that even converted stables seemed to us the height of civilized luxury. Washington Mews and the matching MacDougal Alley across Fifth Avenue were the best addresses in Manhattan. In Philadelphia they would have been just two of dozens and dozens of quiet streets lined with brick town houses, gas lamps, and hundred-year-old trees. In London they would have been beneath notice.
Dick had been married twice before I knew him—and he would later marry a third time, to the lighthearted but formidable Dutch-born economist Saskia Sassen. In the late 1970s and early eighties when we were first friends, however, he was trying to be gay, though without much success. Maybe he was a bit bisexual, but his swooning over beautiful boys seemed more dutiful than instinctual. Dick courted one tall, powerfully built young man with black, curling hair and red, curling lips and thick, muscular legs and huge black eyes, who seemed to love Dick in his anguished way, but I doubt whether their love was satisfying to either of them.
Dick mainly liked to entertain, but not just anyone. At his house on the mews you could meet Isaiah Berlin or Michel Foucault or Susan Sontag or Jürgen Habermas or Alfred Brendel. Like most intellectuals, these men and the occasional woman didn’t want to make engagements far in advance—not in the usual busy-busy New York fashion. They never knew when inspiration might strike, and besides, socializing wasn’t part of their idea of themselves. They weren’t the sort of frivolous (or conventional) creatures who knew what they would be doing a week from Thursday. But since they were apt to get lonely like anyone else, especially after dark on a cold February night, they could always drift over to Dick’s house, where it was okay just to ring the bell. Whereas most New Yorkers were barricaded in their apartments and could be seen only by carefully arranged appointment like ministers of state, and then only after two cancellations and three postponements and a change of meeting place, Dick was always available. He was at home downstairs cooking in his modern, roomy kitchen or upstairs entertaining in his atelier-like living room with its skylights and vast airy ceilings and its grand piano. He might be scraping away at his cello while Brendel played the piano part. Or people of every sort,