City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [56]
“Why do you ask?”
“Well, you can tell she’s a woman who really knows who she is!”
I would see Jan occasionally over the years and she always seemed fearless, hyperproductive, and a bit solitary. Once in Australia a bunch of us writers at the Adelaide Festival were ferried off to the beach, but Jan stayed behind with the bus driver to chat. Later I asked her why she’d hung back with him and she said, “He’s sort of my type.” Once in New York I asked her if she jogged to keep her figure, and she modestly touched her full breasts and said, “It’s rather hard for us older women to jog.” Usually she spoke of her latest writing project; she had a well-organized, well-stocked mind, a capacious curiosity, excellent and penetrating powers of analysis, an eye for the vivid, life-giving detail, and an easy and generous flow of words.
When I first met her at Horizon, I told her that one day at the Gotham Book Mart I’d started reading a thick old book published in the 1930s about the first sex change in history, Man into Woman. It had so hypnotized me that I’d slumped to the floor and read straight through, never going back to my office at Time-Life as lunch hour became the cocktail hour. This was the book that also inspired David Ebershoff decades later when he wrote his brilliant novel The Danish Girl. The haunting 1930s book had black-and-white snapshots of the book’s subject, the painter Lili Elbe (née Einar Wegener), before and after. In the after pictures she looked sickly and bony and nearly transparent in her cloche hat as she staggered around a garden held up by a matronly nurse. It also showed samples of her handwriting before and after, slanted letters versus round ones, and even of her painting (strong oils versus pretty pastels). She’d been so determined to become a real woman that she’d had a final operation in order to bear children—and this surgery killed her (I always wondered what the procedure could possibly have been). Her diary has heartbreaking entries of deep fear and superficial optimism. The doctor has vanished. She feels weaker and weaker, and her husband (an old family friend) attends her faithfully. Now an infection has set in…
Jan said to me, “If you think the book intrigued you, imagine the effect it had on me!”
But truthfully I couldn’t imagine its having a greater influence on Jan than on me. It opened up a path that I never felt tempted to take but that burned its way right through my imagination. The “pre-op” Danish painter Wegener had never felt tempted by homosexuality, no more than Jan claimed to have been. Yet recently I heard someone, an ignorant young gay man, refer to her as “gay.”
David and I were back to our old New York routine of diet dinners at Duff’s and long evenings of reading. Our latest project was to read all of Dante, passage by passage, starting in Italian and then in English. We had all the books about Dante at our side and tried delving into every stylistic, exegetical, and historical complexity.
But the book never came to life for me. It felt terribly underwritten. Nor could I imagine Dante actually writing it—his account of its semidivine origins was all too convincing. It didn’t seem like an act of brooding and hatching, of becoming. No, it was pure being, or rather it existed in an ungrateful, granitic state of having long already been. I might have said that it was too classical for my tastes, though it had thrilled me as a high school student to work my way through the first four books of The Aeneid in Latin. Virgil’s account of Dido’s death had made me weep in a way that Francesca