City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [4]
The Gotham was one of the great bookstores of my life. At the very rear of the store was a huge fiction department, where I would dip into dozens of books. It was there that I bought Robert Stone’s Hall of Mirrors and Joyce Carol Oates’s them and Pynchon’s V., though of all my Gotham finds my favorite was Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era. The store was an oasis from the philistine world all around it. To be sure, there were other great bookstores in those days, especially the Eighth Street down in the Village, with its many floors and its sullen, unhelpful clerks. By the end of the 1970s there was the Three Lives bookstore, then on Sheridan Square.
I remember one afternoon as I browsed at the back of the Gotham hearing Andy Brown talking on the phone with someone I figured out must be a rather desperate Jack Kerouac, who wanted to sell an old manuscript to finance his move to Florida with his mother (Kerouac died in 1969 in St. Petersburg). I didn’t really hear what sort of deal they struck, if any, but I suppose what was most exciting was the idea that literature was still alive, that it was going on all around me, and that some of the legendary figures I’d read about (and even read) were still alive and struggling. Kerouac, for instance, was a sad drunk, which a later biography corroborated but which Andy’s patient tone already half suggested, talking to Kerouac as if he were a child incapable of understanding.
This idea that literature was somewhere nearby made it only more tantalizingly distant. I remember thinking how strange it was that all the writers of the past seemed to know each other but that “we” didn’t. I supposed that the writers of the future were already living and working in New York, but where to find them?
I felt professionally isolated—worse, becalmed. Nothing is more tedious than working in a big corporation. We had such a narrow range of activity and our tasks were so silly and infantile that we felt degraded.
Part of my isolation, no doubt, was due to my being attracted only to men my own age or younger. I wasn’t meeting older people who were accomplishing things. At Time-Life Books there was only one exception, an editor, Ezra Bowen, a tough guy with rolled-up sleeves, a wiry frame, and a punched-in nose who kept a photo on the wall of a father lion licking his cubs. Ezra was the son of Catherine Drinker Bowen, the celebrated biographer (Tchaikovsky, John Adams, Ben Franklin), and he had literary—well, not ambitions but rather manners. He’d been married to a novelist, Joan Williams, who before that had been one of Faulkner’s personal favorites, his protégée. When they’d met, Faulkner was in his fifties and already a Nobel Prize winner and Joan Williams was just a redheaded college girl from Memphis. They were briefly lovers and even collaborated on a play, but she’d ended their affair because he wasn’t free to marry her (he already had a wife) and he was thirty-some years older. By the time she married Ezra Bowen in the early fifties, Faulkner was in love with the even younger (and more receptive) Jean Stein, but he remained friendly with Joan Williams and wrote her hundreds of letters. She and Ezra had two sons and divorced in 1970. She fictionalized her relationship with Faulkner in a novel