City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [129]
I realized from my own experience that buying the meal, visiting the bookshop, offering the “life-changing” books—all of those rituals had originated with Richard Howard. Susan must have learned to do all those things from him. Like Richard, Susan was a nonacademic intellectual, given to pronouncements, alternately tender and imperious, wildly generous. (True academics never buy meals for each other but split every bill down to the last centime.) Like Richard, Susan knew everything about everything, though neither of them owned a television. She, however, true to her adopted French heritage, knew a lot about the movies (French people are always surprised by how shallow my own “film culture” is, not to mention my nearly nonexistent jazz culture). Susan had first made her reputation by talking about movies seriously, and by directing movies. But she never wrote about the Beatles or The Beverly Hillbillies. Her taste was more inclined toward Godard and Syberberg. Despite her early notoriety as an iconoclast, she was serious, even reverential, in her respect for high culture.
Although Susan had dedicated Against Interpretation to Richard Howard, she seldom saw him during the years that she and I were friends. She seemed to have no old friends. Like all famous people she constantly attracted new people, and she didn’t have to cultivate old friendships, resolve disputes, soothe ruffled feathers. She could just move on.
She was a terrible snob. Once I had her to dinner with a beautiful and charming young couple who each eventually went on to write successful novels but who were unknown at the time. Susan said in an embarrassingly loud stage whisper, “Why did you invite them?” I was so vexed that I lied and said, “They’re terribly rich.” Susan nodded sagely, as if that answered all her doubts. In fact, they weren’t rich at all, but later split up and each of them married extremely “well.” Oddly enough, when I invited Susan to dinner in Paris in 1981 with Michel Foucault, he whispered, when she left the room for a moment, “Why did you invite her?” I didn’t realize that he didn’t like to socialize with women, though he was generous and amicable with his female colleagues at work. Foucault and Arlette Farge, for instance, were great friends and did an anthology together of eighteenth-century letters from the Bastille.
Susan was especially close to Elizabeth Hardwick and Barbara Epstein, both from the New York Review of Books, and to Peter Hujar, the photographer. She wrote an introduction to a book of his pictures just as later she prefaced a collection of Mapplethorpe’s photographs. Old friends were around but they didn’t divert her, they didn’t promise renewal. Susan was above all a connoisseur, a collector, a sampler. Her son, David, served to bring many new trends and bits of trivia to her attention. Later, after I stopped knowing them, he became an important political critic and thinker, but when we were friends, he had a dandified distaste for politics. In 1981 he wrote a book with Susan’s friend Sharon Delano about Texas boots, whereas fifteen years later he’d be writing books on Bosnia.
Sometimes Susan would fight with David. In any event they would go through periods of not speaking to each other. Exactly what was going on between them wasn’t spelled out. Here again they seemed a bit like royalty—a dispute was registered throughout the court without anyone knowing the precise terms of estrangement.
Susan was also like a queen in the sense that she had a full life, largely ceremonious. She gave lots of talks and traveled far and wide. Suddenly she’d be directing a Pirandello play in Italy starring her ex-girlfriend Adriana Asti (who’d appeared in Pasolini’s Accattone, Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers, and Before the Revolution, by Bertolucci, who’d been Asti’s husband). Then she and James Merrill and I along with D. M. Thomas, the author of The White Hotel, would be giving a colloquium