City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [31]
It was always evening in Howard’s mind, but in the midst of these lengthening shadows ran his jaunty humor, which really was adorable and improbable as a puppy, a golden retriever, say. He was an addict of the wisecrack, an aficionado of the parting shot. No matter how sad his creased face might look, he could always, at some unexpected moment, wedge it open with a little smile. Or more often his eyes would become the crudest of stars (one horizontal line and one vertical), and he’d avert his gaze, turn his mouth down in a circumflex, nurse his invisible prop cigarette, then laugh at his own expense. I remember he told of a French television team that called him and said they’d been impressed with his short book on Proust and wanted to film him for a French literary program. “Sure,” Howard said, “you bet. But I don’t speak French.” “Oh, you’re too modest! A great scholar like you? We’ll be over at three.” “Sure, but I don’t speak French.” When the whole team had set up the lights and the sound equipment and the camera and Howard had been made up and powdered, the interviewer posed the first question—in French. Howard looked blank and said, “But I don’t speak French.” The interviewer laughed and started over again. Once more a blank. Within seconds the whole team had cleared out, left the premises, muttering resentfully.
One day, four years before Forgetting Elena was published, Howard said to me, “I’m terribly embarrassed, but I’ve never read any of your books. Where should I start?”
I said, “But that’s because I’ve written several but not one of them has ever been published.”
He looked at me with compassion and said, “That must be terribly painful for you.”
I felt wonderfully understood and I nodded.
He’d understood how brave I was going out into the world and meeting Richard Howard’s writer friends even though I wasn’t armed with a single publication. Yes, it was great meeting all these literati who might someday blurb me or review me or just pass along the word that I was bright and funny and attractive (in those days, especially given the low standards of pulchritude in the literary world, I was considered handsome). But it was a trial explaining that even though I’d reached the great age of twenty-nine and even though I’d already been writing for fifteen of those years, I had nothing in print beyond a story and a few articles. My problem was especially acute because it seems to me that people published younger in those days, just as they married and had children and careers much younger. Of course, I could have added to all these solicitous writer-friends that Richard Howard had taken me under his wing. That remark would no doubt have set off a storm of exchanged looks since it would have been assumed I was his latest catamite.
I turned thirty on January 13, 1970, and at the same time decided to move to Rome. I was sick of killing time at the office, of feeling stale and trapped, of waiting for my life to begin. I knew my destiny lay with New York, but I welcomed a chance to wipe the slate clean. I’d only visited Rome once for a week two years earlier with Stan. The dollar was still strong in those days and we’d stayed in a hotel on the Corso that had once been the palace of the Queen of Sweden (Garbo!). On the same trip we’d stayed in the Casa Annalena pensione in Florence for four dollars a night, breakfast and one other meal included, and the Palazzo Gritti in Venice in what was known as “the Elizabeth Taylor suite,” since she and Richard Burton had stayed there not long before. The room looked down on the Grand Canal and across to the Salute. Though