City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [53]
David Kalstone, who’d just done an interview of James Merrill for the Saturday Review, came out to visit me in San Francisco, and the first thing I did was to read him a thirty-page chapter of Like People in History. He told me it was good—and I was so grateful to him, though he and I both knew it wasn’t true. I was riddled with horrible, nearly paralyzing doubt. Sometimes I blamed my years of psychotherapy for this disease of self-questioning. In therapy, I’d learned to look at myself looking at myself and constantly interrogate my motives. So much subjectivity and second-guessing and constant scrutiny had made me inauthentic. Doubting my feelings had destroyed my inner orientation device—the only thing a writer has. Moreover, all those years of writing unproduced plays and unpublished novels had not been good for my confidence, either.
Later, in 1977, I wrote freelance for Time-Life Records a forty-page life of Anton Bruckner to go with some LPs. Bruckner was supposed to be one of the few musical geniuses in history so unsure of himself he could be talked into writing and rewriting his symphonies two and three times, constantly modifying them, sometimes for the worse. I knew I’d never be in his category, not even in terms of abjection, but I could see the resemblances. Like Bruckner I had started relatively late, received little encouragement, not emerged from the right artistic milieu. Other composers were also late bloomers, such as Janaček, but few were so indecisive, few could be talked into endless rewrites.
David’s endorsement was kind and constructive and necessary. He gave me the permission I needed to finish the book and to go on as a writer, no matter how battered I might be. Even so, once my novel was finished, it made the rounds just as Forgetting Elena had done, but this new novel was never published. I had worked on it for five years. Anne Freedgood, the first person to whom we submitted it, did accept it, but made a mingy offer. Since I was convinced it was a “mainstream” novel that was worth real money, I petulantly withdrew it and told my agent to submit it to other publishers (once again discovering belatedly that she was sending out an earlier, unrevised version). When after two years no one had taken it, I went limping back to Anne, who decided she didn’t want it after all. She argued that it was difficult, even impossible, to write a good novel about such a deeply passive character (what about Camus’s The Stranger, I wondered, or all of those masterpieces by Kafka with victims as protagonists?). Perhaps she was punishing me for having initially rejected her. Or perhaps like the other editors she was secretly alarmed by my middle-class gay characters. Low-life gays, as in the novels of John Rechy or Jean Genet or Hubert Selby, were easier to stomach since they seemed so exotic. What was hard to take was someone gay who might be in the next office or in the apartment across the hall. Although gay liberation had begun, it didn’t penetrate the literary market for nearly ten years. Later I would meet editors who’d turned down Like People in History who were themselves gay and closeted but were afraid to speak up for my book. One of the most fearfully closeted gay editors, Peter Kameny, became so neurotic that he started hiding in the toilet at work. Even though he’d been among the most promising literature students his year at Harvard, the publishers finally fired him and he threw himself in front of a subway.
When eventually I realized that my novel wasn’t going to sell, I wasted another year rewriting it, but even in its newest version everyone was indifferent or allergic to it. The horror of having waited so long to be published and then achieving my goal, only to have my next book turned down flat, filled me with dread. I felt that in choosing literature as a career I’d placed all my money on a single number and it had lost.
When I made this melodramatic declaration to a friend, he said, “What else were you planning to do with your life? Be an accountant? Civil