City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [25]
“Have you included your phone number on your manuscript?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s on the top page.”
“Now I have lots of things on my desk at the moment to clear up, but I can assure you I’ll have some sort of word for you about your work at the weekend.” Then he was off. A bit stupefied, I watched him rush uptown, my manuscript in his hand.
My novel was called Forgetting Elena and became my first published book, thanks to Richard (the only blurb on the back was written by Richard as well). It was (and is) mysterious, experimental, original. I’d become so frustrated writing plays and novels I thought would please other people that I’d finally decided to write something I would want to read. I thought, if I’m always going to be rejected, I might as well like my hated “child.” It was obvious, by perusing Forgetting Elena (which at that point was called Something Valentine), that I’d been reading Kafka and Beckett, though it wasn’t a pastiche of either of those great writers. I was fascinated by court ritual and had immersed myself in books by and about courtiers in Heian Japan—The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon in particular. I’d read and reread Ivan Morris’s World of the Shining Prince, about Genji. I was also fascinated by Versailles under Louis XIV, and I loved W. H. Lewis’s book about it, The Splendid Century.
My book, however, wasn’t a historical novel. I’d written several chapters of it while vacationing on Fire Island in the Pines. The rituals of gay men there—the afternoon swimsuit “tea dances” at the Botel next to the harbor, late dinners together at a cottage (the whole house propped up by stilts on the dunes) that a group of six or eight had rented together, the men’s return to the harbor at midnight for more stoned dancing till dawn—rhymed in my imagination with the rituals of medieval Japan or Versailles. In Japan sudden, sometimes brutal sexual encounters in the dark would erupt, just as on Fire Island the communal living would be punctuated by quick, thrilling fucks in the dunes at the “Meat Rack.” After the disco finally closed shop at dawn, beautiful, sweaty men would stagger off into the scrub brush between communities to have group sex. At Versailles no titles were used in conversation, though everyone was conscious of exact gradations in rank; in the same way on Fire Island penniless beauties and millionaire lawyers all laughed and made love together, all dressed in the same swim trunks or jeans and sandals. With no cars on Fire Island, everyone was reduced to hauling home his groceries in a kid’s red metal wagon over the raised, bumpy boardwalks.
As if this blend of court ritual and Fire Island communal living weren’t hard enough to grasp, I’d decided to have my first-person narrator be an amnesiac who’s afraid to admit he has no idea who he or anyone else is. Since he remembers nothing, the whole book is told in the present tense. The narrator is constantly building up and revising suppositions about what’s going on around him and where he fits in. I thought this was what we were all doing all the time: modeling our behavior on the expectations of those around us and the cues we were being fed. The self was a social self; at our core lay a reciprocity. Admittedly I was an extreme example of this adaptability. I was inspired by Erving Goffman’s idea that the self is defined through reciprocal role-playing—that life is theater.
Richard met with me a week later.