City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [135]
But Susan was so angry that she asked Roger Straus, her editor, to contact all my foreign publishers and request as a courtesy to her and to him that they remove her blurb from the next edition of A Boy’s Own Story in every language. That move was effective. (Years before, Susan had done something similar to the gay American writer Alfred Chester, who’d used her words of praise without her authorization.) Maybe the break was worse because I’d made no effort to stay in touch with her or David. When my editor, Bill Whitehead, gave me a big masked ball in New York, complete with a brass band, David tried to barge in with a bullwhip; I suppose he wanted to beat me as a “cad.” He who’d written about Beau Brummell was given to such posturing. Luckily he was turned away by the bodyguards at the door.
Soon after I arrived in Paris I had lunch with George Plimpton’s sister, the poet and painter Sarah Plimpton. I told her I was planning on staying just a year in Paris. She said that she’d told herself the same thing but that now she’d been in France for twenty-two years. “You’ll see, it’s like lotus land,” she said.
Indeed that’s what it turned out to be, especially in those prosperous Mitterrand years. I didn’t really escape from AIDS. Many of my French friends died, including Foucault and Barbedette, just as back in America Bill Whitehead died and so did Norm Rathweg and so did my dearest friend, David Kalstone. Gradually I became more and more somber and my Parisian life became as dark as my New York life. I sat by many bedsides and held many emaciated hands. I didn’t feel the famous survivor guilt only because I was positive myself and expected throughout the eighties to die within a few months.
Sixteen years later I moved back to New York, and one day I ran into Susan Sontag in a restaurant. I’d rushed over to her table without recognizing her because I’d spotted a Parisian friend, the Argentine film director Edgardo Cosarinsky. Suddenly I thought, “Oh, dear, this woman with the short white hair must be Susan Sontag after her chemo. And this other woman must be Annie Leibovitz, her girlfriend.” I hurriedly slunk back to my table.
But then, in a flash, there was Susan standing by my table. She said, “Ed, I hope you don’t think I was ignoring you because of our silly little feud.”
I stood and she embraced me. We agreed that we’d get together, that all was forgiven, that we’d patch it up.
But the next day when I saw her at Cosarinsky’s screening, she was distant. I realized too much time had gone by. That our reconciliation hadn’t really “taken.” That was all right. We’d both become different people.
When I look back at the seventies, I remember the decade primarily as one of professional struggle. I started the decade as an unpublished and no longer young writer, fairly driven but susceptible to terrible, almost suicidal despair. By 1983, when I moved to Paris, I was still hustling for money and I was never sure where next month’s rent would be coming from, but I was no longer entirely unrecognized and desperate.
What had made the seventies less harrowing than they might have been was that, at least among artists and intellectuals, a tradition of honorable poverty still remained. Writers and painters and composers did not talk all the time (as they do now) of agents, contracts, and movie deals. New York had not yet formed a tight alliance with Los Angeles; rather, New Yorkers defined themselves in contrast to the West Coast.
Recently I consulted a book about the same period, this one by Mikal Gilmore. It was all about rock music and the downtown scene, about drugs and crime—not unexpected since Mikal writes for Rolling Stone and is the brother of Gary