City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [30]
He was always a bit unhappy and joked a lot about it in his dry way. He was unhappy that his poetry wasn’t more widely recognized; he blamed this on his position as the poetry editor of the New Yorker, which made him the most powerful arbiter of poetry in the country. Howard thought that all those people he’d rejected hated him, and that the ones he’d accepted didn’t want to appear to their fellow poets as if they were paying him back or currying his favor. So no one wrote reviews of his books, he said, and few editors solicited his poems. He complained so much that I wrote a glowing review of his poems in Poetry magazine. I was happy to acknowledge that he’d written one of the great comic poems of our day, “Ménage à trois,” which ends with the unforgettable line “It’s old, inadequate and flourishing.”
He also wrote verse plays, one based on King Midas and another that borrowed Giacometti’s title—for a sculpture that belonged to the Museum of Modern Art—The Palace at 4 A.M.
At the New Yorker he worked regularly with James Merrill and Elizabeth Bishop, not to mention dozens of others of the most celebrated poets in English. He was especially close to the great Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen, who’d lived and taught briefly at Princeton in the 1950s. I’d been reading her since college days, and once I gave up my determination to be “experimental,” her influence became palpable in my work. Probably no one would notice the connection (people seem almost blind to quite obvious influences), but her technique of making neat, short moral observations about her characters was something I started shoplifting in my autobiographical novels from A Boy’s Own Story on. What E. M. Forster was for most writers of my generation, Bowen was for me; I never took to Forster’s combination of closetedness, snobbishness, and blending of fable and Edwardian morality, whereas Bowen’s quiet passion and sense of the tragic appealed to me. For me she was genuinely tragic in the sense that in The Death of the Heart or The House in Paris, her best books, the protagonists face a dilemma and either choice they might make is bad—very bad. She didn’t have an affected prose style like Virginia Woolf nor did she overestimate the importance of “moments of being.” She had no religious preconceptions like Graham Greene (though Greene I’d rank as a novelist right after her). Her ethics were all subtle and situational. I heard Ian McEwan say recently that modernists such as Joyce and Woolf have cornered so much critical attention that they’ve eclipsed all of the (superior, to his mind) realists such as Bowen and Rosamond Lehman. I should mention here that my lifelong love has been Henry Green and that his novel Nothing is the only book I’ve read ten times. His stylishness and his ear for dialogue are celebrated, but one should also include his appreciation for the sensuality of women, the comedy of adultery, the absurdities of class. I think of Henry Green as my opposite—my blessed, enriching opposite.
Howard kept wanting me to fix him up with someone, though one day a sexy Puerto Rican was hanging around and later Howard said he’d been “seeing” that man for years and years. But I guess he wasn’t enough somehow, maybe not blond or educated or presentable enough.
Howard was being psychoanalyzed by a Freudian shrink. He’d been going to this man for years, and Howard spoke of Freudianism as if it were a perfectly ordinary and respectable branch of medicine, like orthopedic surgery. In the true Freudian style Howard lay down on a couch