City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [27]
Anne liked the revised text when she finally received it a few days later, but she still insisted that the book couldn’t end so vaguely. I, who’d been so impressed by the abstract expressionist painters at Cranbrook, had wanted to create a verbal equivalent to those nonrepresentational paintings. Or rather, I knew that language (unlike strokes of paint) was symbolic and that nonsense syllables or strings of meaningless words à la Gertrude Stein would be tiresome to read. The trick, I thought, would be to write real sentences and to seem to be heading somewhere but to have the action keep canceling itself out—something I soon realized John Ashbery was doing in poetry. But Anne Freedgood said that in my novel I was entering into a contract with the reader; I was promising a mystery and I must deliver the payoff at the end. In the end, the book was widely reviewed as a mystery. How frustrating for true devotees of the genre!
But I’m getting ahead of my story. Before I went to Rome and before the book was accepted, Richard and I had become inseparable. He was always affected and pedantic and arrogant, but somehow these qualities, so tiresome in other people, were delightful and refreshing in him. He generated a kind of constant brio, as if he possessed many motors and they were all fed by the highest-octane fuel. Every moment with him had a sense of occasion. I felt that I was leading my usual backwater life when suddenly a pleasure boat would roar into view, its decks brilliant with guests in evening clothes. Except there was no way not to notice Richard. Richard wasn’t putting on the prevailing upper-class manner or the American version of a donnish style; he was inventing a whole new way of talking and moving and laughing. He spoke in a high, nasal voice with an elegant stutter, yet he was groping not for words but for rhetorical effect—for emphasis, surprise. He didn’t have an English accent, nor the “mid-Atlantic” one so popular in New York in those days, but rather something that seemed to correspond to his idea of how Henry James might have talked—with elaborate grammar, odd word choices, sudden boutades, and an eerie emphasis on ordinary, everydayish words. He had a stylized way of throwing his head back, of holding a hand frozen in the air like Jupiter hurling a thunderbolt. He could cock an eye to devastating effect and raise an eyebrow in lofty disdain. His laugh was warm and encouraging, but theatrically so. Then once in a great while he’d have a little, humble smile, as if he’d caught himself being such a camp.
He was a great source of information on the eccentricities of his friends and acquaintances (he had a well-stocked memory, and if it ever failed him, he would strike his forehead lightly with his fist, as if to startle the mechanism back into functioning). But whereas Henry James wanted to be a gentleman and worried about any irregularities in the lives of those around him, Richard gloried in the strange, both in himself and others. He wore a red cape and many of his clothes were flashy or funny. It wasn’t that he was unaware of the effect he was making—he just wanted to be making one.
Richard could be harshly impatient if one “failed” him in some way—if one hadn’t read George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways or if one said one didn’t “get” Gerard Manley Hopkins. He would roll his eyes, looking for help, possibly divine intervention. He’d whisper, “Oh, darling, how can you say such a thing?” For him the pantheon of great artists and writers and composers included almost everyone I’d ever heard of, past or present. No friend was allowed to have blind spots or preferences (though later he wrote a book of poems called Preferences). He was finishing in those days Alone with America, his thousand-page tribute to forty-one living American poets; I’d heard of only five or six of them (though later I came, through Richard’s good offices, to read and even meet many of them). He admired his forty-one “immortals” extravagantly, but he could treat them with a strangely sadistic edge. I remember when he