City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [136]
It was only in the eighties that publishers were swallowed one after another by corporations, that the Barnes & Noble superstores pushed out the small neighborhood bookstores, that the multiplex movie theaters chased away the small art-house cinemas. Every time I would come back to New York from Paris in the eighties and nineties, I was shocked by how sleek it had become, how expensive ice cream boutiques had replaced the corner shoe repair shops, how the city neighborhoods were being gentrified as more and more rich young workers in finance moved into town and drove out the older, poorer ethnic minorities. And the bohemians. New York was no longer a dangerous, run-down ghetto; it had become a chromium, spotlit, palm-festooned singles bar.
AIDS killed off most of my circle. Every time I would come back to New York, more and more of my friends would be dying or dead. Chris Cox found a lover, a young curator at the New Museum, and Chris first buried him, then died himself. Chris had become a successful editor at Bantam Books; the last time I visited him (I was right off the plane from France), his hospital room was full of socially inept straight guys, his authors, guys who wrote murder mysteries and were used to hanging out in a sort of collegiate way. I certainly couldn’t ask them to leave and Chris was too polite as a good Southern boy to get rid of them. Maybe he preferred their company to mine, their feeble jokes and half-professional deference rather than my seriousness. I’ve found that people in the terminal ward never want to talk about death.
During the 1970s I moved away from seeing myself as a socialist and even a fellow traveler to recognizing communism for the sustained international nightmare it was and myself as an anarchist (not the bomb-throwing sort but an extreme individualist). I became suspicious of most collective behavior—and of all politics as invariably a form of lying. If novelists attempt to keep all the nuances in, politicians hammer them into extinction under the blows of a deadening rhetoric. Novelists are precise and create scenes; politicians generalize and wallow in warnings and bromides.
As I was slowly moving away from communism, I also stepped back from the avant-garde. My first two novels to be published had been experimental, but by the time I got to A Boy’s Own Story I’d acknowledged that life had handed me a brand-new subject and that my job was to present it in the clearest, least wavering light. A straight writer, condemned to show nothing but marriage, divorce, and childbirth, might need a new formal approach or an exotic use of language. But a gay writer, free to record for the first time so many vivid and previously uncharted experiences, needed no tricks. Gay writing in the seventies gave a greater depth to autobiographical fiction than had ever before been achieved, a profundity that other writers, straight writers, could benefit from.
In the 1970s, through my agent Maxine Groffsky, I met Marie-Claude de Brunhoff, who almost instantly started writing me from Paris on her sky-blue stationery with her capricious spelling and almost nonexistent punctuation. She would send me French novels to read hot off the press, though I scarcely knew what to do with them at the time. It would be another decade before I could read French easily. In Paris, Marie-Claude became my best friend—as she would remain well into the new century until her death.
She came to fill the void left by David Kalstone’s death. He and she were my ideal friends and shared