City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [57]
I knew that. It was an error of judgment on my part, but I wasn’t interested in being a critic, just a novelist. I didn’t have to hand out grades to the classics; my only job was to filch what I needed from any available literary nest. In any event, The Divine Comedy seemed too confident, with no wound in its side, no crack in the bell, nothing vulnerable or hesitant, no stuttering. It interested me no more than a big full-dress late-medieval painting of the pietà, highly glazed and full of angels and donors, complete with all three Marys and a skinny, bleeding Christ. To be sure, in Dante Christ had several wounds in his side, but not one of them seemed to bleed my blood, no more than Dante’s harsh judgment of his old teacher Brunetto Latini for having been homosexual seemed humane or feeling to me. I could see nothing in Dante but cold self-confidence and abstract rapture and an unimaginative application of the rules to desires, like stays pressing into bulging flesh.
My own confidence, of course, was worn down to the nub and I trusted none of my opinions. I felt foolish with my part-time job, my failed West Coast adventure, my roach-trap apartment, my minuscule salary, my frayed wardrobe. The government audited me, perhaps because I’d suddenly gone from earning a lot to earning so little and the IRS thought this hardly credible. I remember those two big auditors in their carefully pressed suits and big, polished lace-up shoes sitting on my dirty little mattress on the floor and near the overflowing garbage sack and smelling the roach spray as they opened their briefcases and worked through my records. Quickly convinced that I was concealing nothing, they turned green and hurried away. At that time a highly successful TV producer from England I knew intimidated me into inviting him upstairs to my place, where he forced himself upon me and virtually raped me. Later he told a mutual friend he’d never seen such poverty. On reflection, I thought my poverty was a good partner to my obvious passivity.
And yet I had princely pleasures…
I met Elizabeth Bishop through David at a party for the magazine of poetry criticism Parnassus. Bishop looked almost exactly like my mother, with the same big eyes and heart-shaped face, but unlike my mother she was dry, precise, slightly fearful, and depressed, a ditherer. The only thing the two women shared was the face and a penchant for heavy drinking. All I remember of that first introduction to Bishop was that I referred to Nabokov’s Transparent Things by mistake as Silken Things and Bishop snapped, “Why not Silk Things?” She volunteered that she also didn’t like the word wooden. “Wood, it should be wood.”
She was almost forbiddingly middle-class in the way she dressed and behaved, yet I knew from David that she was a famous drunk, that she’d drunk half her life away.
Not long afterward David and I were visiting Billy Abrahams, the beloved editor at Dutton, and his friend, Peter Stansky; together they had written The Unknown Orwell. They had a house in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and there we spent a night before going with them for lunch at a house in Wellfleet on the Cape that Elizabeth had rented with her girlfriend, Alice Methfessel. Elizabeth had a Brazilian friend with her, Linda, who started to throw the live lobsters into tepid water. Alice called out, “No! Surely no means ‘no’ even in your language!”
Elizabeth seemed fussed by the potential conflict between her Brazilian past and her New England present (Elizabeth and Alice both worked at Harvard). The table was covered with old copies of the New York Review of Books, the “cloth” that could be swept up later with the shells in it, but Peter Stansky was lost to us for the rest of the afternoon since he was hunched over, reading the tablecloth and making donnish exclamations that David whispered to me sounded like “Woof-woof.