City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [131]
Susan and Richard Howard both came down on me hard in September 1982 when I wrote a prominent review in the New York Times Book Review of Roland Barthes’s book about Japan, Empire of Signs, and A Barthes Reader (which Susan had edited and introduced). Richard was mad because I’d referred only parenthetically to him as Barthes’s “expert translator.” Deeply aggrieved, over the phone he said to me, “Everyone goes on and on about Barthes’s beautiful, original style, but I’m the one who invented that style for English-language readers and I never get any credit, not even from you, my dear! When people praise Barthes’s style, they’re really praising mine.”
Susan was even angrier because I had not quoted from her essay sufficiently or praised it enough, though I’d tried to do both of those things, only not “enough.” Instead I’d quoted Gérard Genette, whose take on Barthes she found “dated” and “irrelevant.” I had been so dutiful in getting in laudatory mentions of my two friends (without seeming toadying, I hoped) that I was surprised by their rancor against me. Suddenly I realized how important the New York Times Book Review was to both of them, how much each of them treasured every “mention” that might heighten their fame—and how correspondingly beleaguered and undervalued they must have felt, they who seemed to me at the pinnacle of literary celebrity.
What their attacks on the phone revealed was the extent to which they assumed I was their puppet in the Bunraku theater of their careers. They were supposed to do all the talking, as in Bunraku, while I was busy gesticulating and bowing and striking their enemies with a sword.
I attended a few sessions of a class Susan taught at the New School on Nietzsche. She did no preparation, didn’t speak from notes, and seemed incapable of serious or trenchant or original reflection. I suppose she felt a certain contempt for the class, which was full of “nobodies” whose opinion didn’t count. I had no doubt that if she wrote an essay on Nietzsche it would be the best imaginable. She once said to me, “Have you ever wondered why my essays are so much more intelligent than I am? That’s because I rewrite them five times and each time I ratchet them up a bit higher. I surpass my own limitations.”
I appreciated her frankness in discussing in a simple way her limitations and amazing strengths. I also admired her acuity in knowing what constituted an improvement.
I once attended a lecture she gave in Paris. I was amazed by how fluent she was in French. She explained to me that she had never studied or practiced French, that she listened to it for years, then suddenly, one day, she opened her mouth and could speak it. Whether true or not—and she was gifted enough in all sorts of ways for it to be a true story—this fable—for to me that’s what it seems like—represents the world according to Susan.
During that lecture I was seated next to a friend of Susan’s, with whom I started chatting. She had a similar tale of language learning. She was Italian but spoke idiomatic American English. When I asked her where she’d learned her English, she said, “In Katherine Dunham’s attic in East St. Louis.” It seemed she’d fallen in love with the great African-American dancer during a performance in Naples. She was just a teen but was completely smitten and followed the Dunham company to Rome. Every night she stood outside the stage door until finally Dunham took pity on her. The girl traveled with them throughout Europe and eventually returned with them to East St. Louis, where Dunham had established a dance center for “ghetto artists” and taught at the nearby University of Southern Illinois in Carbondale. During the summer of 1968, blacks began to riot in a resurgence of an uprising that had started the year before. The Italian girl hid in the attic for weeks with Dunham’s white husband, the set designer John Pratt. Both of them were in danger, she said, because of the color of their skin. In that confined space she mastered her perfect