City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [15]
“Really?”
“Really,” I said. Stan was nodding on the couch. Later he would claim that I hadn’t warned him Marilyn was bringing her cat along.
A few days later Marilyn arrived with a single suitcase, her 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and her black cat, Booboo. We were all three very happy, three Midwesterners in the Big City. Of course Stan was moody and suffered over his acting, his future, his strange family, his insecurities. He would take an hour getting dressed to walk to the corner. He’d try on one outfit after another. “Does this blue sweater make my ass look too big?” “Should I roll up these sleeves—or are my arms too hairless?” “Is this pimple on my nose grotesque—should I stay home today?” Marilyn still cried a lot over Megan. But she found a job at the Encyclopedia Americana and an apartment on the Upper West Side. After two or three months with us she moved out and was living on her own. Stan and I spent all our holidays with her and many weekends. She and I would sit up late over a bottle of wine and argue about politics. She was coldly dismissive of America’s achievements and invariably enthusiastic about what the Soviet Union had accomplished. The motto “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” made perfect sense to her (and to me). A redistribution of property and an equalization of income seemed only fair to us. If I vaunted American civil liberties, Marilyn insisted that so-called freedoms that were not backed up by economic equality were empty. And anyway, how could we be sure what was going on within Russia? Our only source of news was the hysterical American press, blind with its prejudices and fear.
Our longest and most recurring discussions were about the role of the arts in an ideal socialist state. If I criticized the well-known censorship practiced in the Soviet Union, Marilyn would say that if she could save a single human life by destroying the Mona Lisa, she would do so. Although she was a painter, art meant little to Marilyn. She saw it as some sort of bourgeois religion, a milder but no less absurd substitute for the deadlier original forms of piety. She admitted that she was inordinately fond of art herself, but at the same time considered her interest to be something like a regrettable hobby—certainly nothing that mattered to the people. She remembered that when she was working with the socialist newspaper in Iowa, they had tried to introduce sketches instead of photographs as illustrations, and that the few genuine workers who actually read the paper hated the drawings. She admitted with a laugh that she was in the uncomfortable position of being an abstract expressionist who knew that her ideal public, the proletariat, disliked her chosen form of art. She felt that until the revolution came along, she could continue to doodle with oils on canvas, but knew that her paintings were of no lasting significance. Not to History. Not to the People.
This austere self-abnegation appealed to me. Her beliefs in no way served her personal goals. During those Cold War years we seriously believed that one side might triumph over the other, and we felt communism had a fighting chance of winning. Of course we were for communism because it was fair. I suppose that if we’d been in France or Italy, where the Communist Party was strong and where people lived in constant dread of a Soviet invasion, we would have had to face up to the consequences of our beliefs. But in America what was called the Left was so weak and so centrist that a revolution seemed both totally unreal and theoretically possible. We were free to build our communes in the sky. The American Communist Party had been all but hounded out of existence.
Marilyn found the putative equality of men and women in the Soviet Union especially appealing. She would draw my attention to the number of women engineers and doctors and scientists in Russia, just as she would refer to the prevalence of free love in the early days after the Bolshevik Revolution. If I mentioned