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By Root 1207 0

and homosexuals joined through friendship—and the conviction that certain heterosexual women had in those days that gay people were freer than they were, that we were less possessive, more adventurous, and more devoted to our friends than they were, and that friendship provided the true through-line of our lives. As Marilyn told an ex who said he wanted just to be friends, “Practically anyone can be my lover, but it’s very difficult to be my friend.” I wanted to suggest that these “advanced” ideas might serve a gay man but not a straight woman. Not that traditional marriage was much better, I wanted to argue, just not disastrously worse. In the spirit of Elizabeth Bowen, I wanted to show a modern tragedy in which there were two choices and both were bad.

I was terribly insecure about my writing. More than ever. I was waiting for the first reviews of Forgetting Elena, and when they came in, they seemed genuinely uncomprehending. I was so afraid of being silenced again, of not being allowed to go on writing for publication. No one is sincerely interested in writing a journal that will never be published—or if he or she is, it’s a sort of self-sufficiency or modesty I don’t understand. If a writer has the desire to communicate by writing and be heard, then he necessarily cares about seeing his work into print. I suppose it’s the difference between masturbation and making love—the real writer wants to touch another person. Reading the written word is participating in a dialogue in which one person is doing all the talking but in which the listening is also creative.

Yes, I wanted to reach readers but I also worried for professional reasons—I wanted to live by my pen. I wanted to be among those five hundred people in America who earn a living, even a meager one, by writing serious literature. If, as Schiller said, literature shows us what humanity would be like if it existed in a state of freedom (the author, not the characters), then I wanted to belong to that tiny minority that is genuinely free. Each time I give a reason, nevertheless, it ends up sounding too exalted; I wasn’t interested so much in making money or enjoying freedom, I wanted to survive. For me, writing was essential to survival. Again, not because I had such beautiful or intense sentiments or because my ideas were so pressing and elevated (I didn’t even have many ideas except during the five minutes every day when I took a shower), but because it was the label, writer, that mattered to me most in some primitive, essential way. To be sure, writers were far more important in the culture at large fifty years ago than they are now. Back then they were considered seers or the antennae of the race, in touch with the deep conflicts underlying our society. But even without that religion of art I still was frantic to be—and to remain—a writer. Yet I wanted to be one on my own terms. I wasn’t willing to write TV scripts or bodice rippers or go on forever doing Time-Life potted versions of science or music or history (though I continued for several years to write just such books or parts of books to feed myself). No, I wanted to write a speculative work of fiction—yes, that was it: fiction was a form of speculation, a pure experiment in As If. Of course if you’re interested in “immortality,” then you’d better be a serious novelist. Look at the bestsellers of 1920 and you won’t recognize a single title or the name of a single author.

In switching back to realism I’d somehow lost my ability to write. Or rather I’d lost my confidence. I’d turned away from the pure experience of writing Forgetting Elena (which, as Richard Howard said of Roland Barthes, was “intimate without being personal”) to the no less highbrow but somehow compromised genre of the “problem” novel (How Do We Live Now, We Who Are Androgynous?). I was no longer inhabiting the center of my sensibility; I could no longer hear a hum when I was writing well. I’d gone back to writing scenes with dialogue and action, scenes in which the point was verisimilitude; I’d stopped being Beckett and become Updike (those