City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [28]
At the same time that he was writing these admiring if edgy essays, he was constructing his own poems. When I first met him, he was working on Untitled Subjects, a collection of dramatic monologues à la Browning about Victorians. The best one was “said” by Mrs. William Morris as in old age she went through a box of memorabilia: “These are mine. Save them. / I have nothing save them” were the solemnly beautiful last lines. He would recite these poems at full volume and with great hamminess to Marilyn and Stanley and me. He overarticulated, spun on his heel to stare at us, banged on a table, sank into a long dramatic pause, tilted his head back and closed his eyes and whispered something prophetic before expiring on the chair behind him. The three of us, sitting in my little living room in my new, chic apartment on West Thirteenth Street, were terrified we’d surrender to torrents of weeping laughter, though I’m sure Richard would have interpreted our fou rire as exactly the response he’d been angling for. Richard confided that Sandy, his lover, had carefully rehearsed him and taught him his reading style. Privately we wondered if Sandy’s wasn’t a poisoned gift.
Of course I was terribly proud to be Richard’s friend, not only because he was celebrated and knew so many distinguished people, but also because he was so lively and amusing, such tremendous great fun. He was an electrifying presence.
As Midwesterners, Marilyn, Stan, and I were embarrassed by his theatrics, especially at such close quarters, yet we all admired the poems and his chutzpah. And anyway, Richard was a Midwesterner, too—from Cleveland, just like Hart Crane, as he always mentioned. He’d just returned from a reading in Cleveland where an ancient aunt of his, a former Ziegfeld Follies girl, came up to him afterward. Richard was proud of his bald head, which he polished, and he was equally proud of his fearlessness in displaying it. But all his old aunt could mutter as she moved up to him in the reception line was “Get a rug.”
He won the Pulitzer Prize for the poems and seemed delighted by the recognition. He had something about him of the bar mitzvah boy who thinks it’s perfectly natural that a roomful of adults should be beaming at him with affection and pride. Since he was no fool, he knew all about envy and cattiness, but his wariness of others was an acquired response. His first instinct was to think everyone liked him and was happy for him.
Like me he’d gone to progressive schools—he in Cleveland, I in Evanston, Illinois—and these schools had discouraged competition. He even wrote a poem, “From Beyoğlu,” for an old classmate, Anne Hollander (who would go on to write Seeing Through Clothes and other fascinating works about costume and how it makes us look at the body). Richard’s poem referred to “the year we were Vikings” and related how in progressive public grade school, in accordance with Dewey’s principles, the children would explore other cultures (that of the Norse in this case) by dressing up and impersonating them in a safe, grade-free, noncompetitive environment. As a result, both Richard and I expected our friends to share in our successes. In our world there was no rivalry.
He was indefatigable, and wonderfully faithful. In the course of a day he might visit a friend in the hospital, sit in on another friend’s rehearsal, see his shrink, have lunch with Jackson Pollock’s widow, Lee Krasner, read two first books of poems and blurb them both, teach a class at Columbia, attend a board