City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [41]
Years later, when I mentioned that fatal evening to Merrill, he said, “I was drunk that night. I barely knew who you were, much less what you’d just read.” Since Merrill had in the intervening years joined AA and stopped drinking (but some people said it was only to keep a new boyfriend company), I believed him. Then after Merrill died, his literary executor (and one of my closest friends), J. D. McClatchy, said, “But he didn’t like Forgetting Elena. He didn’t get it.”
Through David I met many other poets and writers. John Ashbery gave Forgetting Elena a blurb that delighted me, just as he personally fascinated me. John lived across the street from David Kalstone in a 1960s white brick building. He would get so drunk that he’d fall down. Yet he was hilariously funny in a deadpan way that camouflaged, nearly, his perfect recall and edgy intelligence. He adored obscure “serious” music and had the most esoteric tastes.
What was distinctive about New York in the 1970s was its uncompromising high culture masquerading as slouching, grinning gee-whiz—Wallace Stevens in sneakers. John Ashbery had lived in Paris for years, where he’d been the art critic for the Herald Tribune, and now wrote art reviews for Newsweek. When he gave a reading in the austere and large auditorium at the bottom of the Guggenheim Museum, it was packed with young people in black and older, art-world people. There were German women in full-length black leather coats and hennaed hair and men in faded blue work shirts, insect-eye glasses, white stubble, and oversize porkpie hats. Ashbery was always surrounded by art-world people, which brought a whiff of money and internationalism to the usual seedy gatherings of poor poets. Like Warhol he gave the impression of never trying. His drinking seemed clear proof of his social indifference. Not that he wasn’t charming and solicitous with friends. Once I was with him at one of his readings in SoHo, just when SoHo was becoming a gallery center. After the reading a young woman who was a total stranger invited us all back to her nearby loft. There we stood around drinking jug wine while she scuttled about in an adjoining room, dragging into place what turned out to be canvases and snapping on lights. Finally she led Ashbery, who was about to pass out, into her studio. In her mind, no doubt, he was supposed to discover her and arrange overnight for a one-woman show. All he did was look at the work through swimming eyes and say in his high, slurred voice, “Those are some paintings.” The poor girl broke into tears. Actually, it wasn’t such a put-down coming from the author of Some Trees.
David Kalstone liked that first book, Some Trees, which had been selected by W. H. Auden as the winner of the Yale Younger Poet series. Both Ashbery and Merrill revered Auden—and there all resemblance between the two junior poets ended. David dismissed Ashbery’s next collection, The Tennis Court Oath, though David’s approval soared again with The Double Dream of Spring and even the all-prose Three Poems (published in 1972), which had somehow been inspired by Ashbery’s psychoanalytic sessions. But the crowning glory of not only Ashbery’s growing oeuvre but of American poetry in the 1970s was Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. The title poem was a long, sustained look at the self, at what it might and might not be in these godless days. About the soul, the poet asks, “But how far can it swim out through the eyes. / And still return safely to its nest?” The questions become more tendentious, taking a sharper, more pessimistic tone:
But there is in that gaze a combination
Of tenderness, amusement and regret, so powerful
In its restraint that one cannot look for long.
The secret is too plain. The pity of it smarts,
Makes hot tears spurt: that the soul is not a soul,
Has no secret, is small, and it fits
Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.
With this one poem Ashbery, intimate but impersonal,