City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [50]
I tuned out. Obviously poor Simon was brainwashed by his White Russian refugee parents. He was a right-winger, like Nabokov himself, who’d outraged his admirers by supporting the Vietnam War. And if gays had to suffer to promote the welfare of the masses, so what? One shouldn’t just endlessly promote one’s selfish interests. And anyway, we did believe that communists were wrong in thinking that homosexuality was a form of “bourgeois decadence,” since it seemed to be spread throughout the social classes.
Only many years later did I understand that Simon was entirely right. That communism had been the worst scourge in history. That Mao and Stalin had slaughtered millions of their own people with a horrifying recklessness. That the abrogation of intellectuals’ rights and kulaks’ rights and gays’ rights and the mass incarceration of inconvenient minorities wasn’t due to the regrettable bigotry of an individual leader but rather was endemic to the whole system. These sickening excesses couldn’t be chalked up as necessary sacrifices for the benefit of the whole but were deeply wrong and were preludes to even worse and more general illegalities affecting nearly everyone. No regime in history had been as destructive or as cruel or as irrational as the Soviet Union, unless it was Red China.
By the end of the 1970s I had figured that out, but that was very late in the day to come to such a realization. I had to read Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope, with its dry, undramatic recital of the agonies she and her husband suffered all because her husband wrote one short satirical poem about Stalin (though Mandelstam might just as easily have been subjected to even worse punishment for doing nothing “wrong” at all).
In his pioneering gay-inspired biography of Gogol, Simon had struck out against the Orthodox Church and its treatment of Gogol’s homosexuality. Church fathers had taken advantage of Gogol’s self-hatred and guilt by subjecting him to endless and cruel penances. What the priests didn’t do, the doctors did—Gogol, already weakened toward the end, was repeatedly bled. Leeches were attached to his already infected nose. He was encouraged to turn the second part of Dead Souls, his funny social satire, into a serious religious drama. He worked on this impossible task for years and finally destroyed it just before he died.
For a distinguished Russian academic, Simon was daring in his political positions. He wrote a whirlwind gay history of Russian literature for a popular gay publication. With Michael Henry Heim he annotated Chekhov’s letters and made of Chekhov an ecologist avant la lettre. In his biography of Gogol, Simon boldly demonstrated that the affection for another man revealed in Gogol’s letters surpassed the ardor of Romantic friendship. Simon marched. Simon signed manifestos. Simon taught gay courses.
He was lonely until one day he answered a personal ad in the Berkeley Barb in which a much younger man said he was looking for an “interesting older partner.” Simon’s was one of dozens of responses. Peter met with them all but was most taken by Simon. Peter was considerably younger and well-to-do and interested both in psychology and conceptual art. Simon’s huge international culture and saturnine looks obviously fascinated him. Now they’ve been together some forty years.
From the very beginning he and Peter fussed over each other’s health. They were hypochondriacs out of a nineteenth-century novel, endlessly worried about something too spicy or a draft or wet feet or tiredness, and they could be quite grumpy if they weren’t sufficiently comfortable. They could also be irritated by other people’s arrangements. I gave them a party in New York once and Simon literally threw up his hands when he realized that not only did he not know my guests, but that they didn’t know each other (unforgivable). Of course my guests were just ill-assorted recent tricks for the most part—not really the stuff out of which successful parties are made.
When Forgetting Elena came out, it was reviewed in the