City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [139]
Q: Does New York still have the same magic for you?
A: It’s still a fascinating international city, but Manhattan—especially lower Manhattan below 14th Street—is no longer a place where young, unestablished artistic people can afford to live and where chance encounters can set off sparks. Now young artists are scattered over various boroughs and usually have to arrange to meet. New York has become a city for rich people, just like Paris.
Q: Sometimes you seem to be a bit bitchy in your sections on Susan Sontag or Harold Brodkey. How do you feel about slandering the dead?
A: Voltaire said that the only thing you owe the dead is the truth. I think of all the people who’ve weighed in on Sontag, I’m the least condemning. She wounded a lot of feelings while she was alive, including mine, and we had a long dispute. But I always admired her and I wanted to set the record straight. Sigrid Nunez is the only other writer who’s treated her fairly in my opinion—but Sigrid lived with Susan and her son, who was her boyfriend.
Q: Speaking of truth, how do you feel about adding novelistic details to a memoir?
A: I totally disapprove, unless the “memoir” is light and humorous like David Sedaris’s books. He is obviously trying mainly to entertain and he succeeds at it wonderfully. Perhaps because I write novels I have a different goal when I write nonfiction—to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. I think that’s the contract that the writer has with the reader in a memoir, and readers justifiably feel vexed when they discover that a memoirist has transposed the sequence of two events to make them more colorful or dramatic. Of course everyone can misremember events, but deliberately to distort the truth to make a better story is cheating in a work that presents itself as the unvarnished truth.
Q: Do you keep a journal?
A: No, I’ve never kept notes and some friends have sent me e-mails correcting my version of things. If they’ve found errors of fact rather than just interpretation I’ve corrected my mistakes. I rely on the selective assistance of forgetting; if we remembered everything we’d never be able to re-create the past coherently. Borges, the South American writer, has a great story about the torments of a perfect memory called “Funes the Memorious.”
Q: Don’t you ever feel like an egomaniac writing so much about yourself?
A: Actually I have to remind myself to write about myself sufficiently to provide a through-line to my memoirs. I’m so interested in other people—and I gave dozens of quick sketches of other people in City Boy—that it’s easy for me to forget to put in information about my own ambitions or loves, for instance.
Q: Do you have any other memoirs up your sleeve?
A: Yes, I’d like to write about Paris in the eighties since that was a great period of prosperity and artistic effervescence—and for me it was a wonderful time when I felt I was becoming another, more mature person. I’d also like to write someday about my sister and my nephew, two key people in my life whom I’ve barely touched on in my writing up till now.
Q: What other literary projects do you have?
A: I’m working on a novel now about a straight man and a gay man who are best friends in the sixties and seventies. It’s to be called Jack Holmes and His Friend. I’d also like to write a short biography of Baudelaire to fill out the project I’ve undertaken with my biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud. For me, Baudelaire is the fourth great figure of French literature.
Praise for City Boy
‘[An] energetic evocation of Manhattan in the Sixties and Seventies … an absorbing insight into the life