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By Root 1237 0

All three cities are ports; Venice is many islands, and Manhattan, Long Island, and Staten Island are also islands. Venice, however, is married to the sea, whereas Manhattan turns its back on its rivers and the ocean. Venice and San Francisco glory in their quite different pasts. San Francisco’s past is only a hundred years old, whereas Venice’s is more than a thousand. New York is a nineteenth-century (and even eighteenth-century) city, but no one notices. Few people are even aware of its history.

I suppose that finally New York is a Broadway theater where one play after another, decade after decade, occupies the stage and the dressing rooms—then clears out. Each play is the biggest possible deal (sets, publicity, opening-night celebrations, stars’ names on the marquee), then it vanishes. With every new play the theater itself is just a bit more dilapidated, the walls scarred, the velvet rubbed bald, the gilt tarnished. Because they are plays and not movies, no one remembers them precisely. The actors are forgotten, the plays are just battered scripts showing coffee stains and missing pages. Nothing lasts in New York. The life that is lived there, however, is as intense as it gets.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Nick Trautwein for his expert editing—he’s a man with a keen eye and a receptive ear, not to mention impeccable judgment. Michael Fishwick has enthusiastically been behind this book from the beginning and has cheered me along to the finish line. He has proven to be a friend to me and my writing.

Michael Carroll, my partner, did a careful word edit of City Boy before I dared to show it to anyone.

I am grateful to my fellow writer David McConnell for reading the manuscript before anyone else and giving me copious notes. Tom Beller, the wonderful writer and editor of Open City, has been an enthusiast from the beginning, as has my friend the architect Sam Roche.

Beatrice von Rezzori welcomed me graciously to her writers’ retreat in Tuscany, Santa Maddalena. She is also a warm and fascinating friend.

John Logan at Princeton has helped me innumerable times to track down essays and articles I wanted to consult.

My agent, Amanda Urban, has advised me at every point, for which I am deeply grateful.

Q&A with Edmund White

Q: You’ve written four autobiographical novels and one real autobiography (My Lives). Why another autobiography? Haven’t you already covered all this material?

A: Oddly enough I haven’t. I’ve had an unusually full life, perhaps because I was a journalist for years and an aspiring novelist and I’m a very social person who’s lived in big cities—New York, Rome, San Francisco, Paris…

Q: So what’s new about this book?

A: My Lives is organized by topic (“My Blonds,” “My Shrinks,” “My Mother,” etc.) whereas City Boy is chronological. It’s really about my first long stay in New York, from 1962 to 1982.

Q: What is so interesting about those years?

A: From my point of view New York was the birthplace in those years of the modern lesbian and gay liberation movement. After all, the Stonewall uprising, which initiated this movement, occurred in 1968 in Greenwich Village. New York was also in that period alive with cultural and creative activity. I was lucky enough to meet novelists, poets, painters, theater innovators, actors; and to see the New York City Ballet when it was the center of everyone’s attention.

Q: What made the ballet so important?

A: We used to say that in a city as contentious and argumentative as New York only a wordless art form could appeal to everyone. What we saw on the stage was a vision of a utopian community of love and common purpose, perhaps best symbolized by the title of Jerome Robbins’s ballet, Dances at a Gathering. The real genius of the seventies—not just in New York but throughout the Western world—was Balanchine. He was our link to imperial Russia and to the Ballets Russes and the Europe of the 1920s with its great composers (Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Hindemith) and its painters (Picasso, Rouault).

Q: Was the ballet also a social scene?

A: Definitely.