City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [58]
As in so many situations in those days, I was the youngest and least well-known person at the table, not silent but certainly mostly a listener. I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought. For me, I suppose, fame was a club one yearned to join, obsessing over it night and day until the moment one was admitted, and after that never thought about again. But with one difference: literary fame, unlike club membership, was something you could lose as quickly as you gained. Now, in my nearly half century of being “on the scene,” I’ve witnessed so many reputations come and go. Who in America remembers William Goyen (though his House of Breath is still popular in France)? Or By Love Possessed, the former “literary bestseller” by James Gould Cozzens? Don Marquis and his beloved Archy and Mehitabel? Of course, as Marcus Aurelius asks, who wants posthumous literary fame anyway? It will mean nothing to the dead author—and besides, as Aurelius points out snobbishly, the fools who will decide these things in the future will be no better than the fools deciding them now.
From the Cape, David and I went to Stonington, Connecticut, to spend the weekend with James Merrill. Merrill was in the midst of composing his answer to Dante, his epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover. I reviewed one book of it, Mirabell, for the American Poetry Review, and David read to me every scrap of the ongoing post-Mirabell project he could get his hands on.
Whereas Dante wrote mostly about historical figures, Merrill lent a mythical dimension to his own friends, many of them otherwise unknown. This strategy of elevating one’s own experience had become more and more common since the collapse of a widely shared general culture (Proust is the star example of this new manner). Whereas Dante claimed he’d actually traveled into the afterlife and observed everything firsthand, Merrill communicated with his dead through the Ouija board, which all felt to me amateurish and “fun,” the Delphic oracle reduced to a parlor game. Jimmy and his longtime lover, David Jackson, were doing endless sessions at a handmade board. I saw the letters and a few extras (yes and no, for instance) spelled out on a flat paper cutout. Some people (including Alison Lurie, in her memoir of her friendship with Merrill, called Familiar Spirits) later claimed that David had been losing his hold over Jimmy until he came up with his idea of the Ouija sessions—much as Mrs. Yeats, Georgie Hyde-Lees, recaptured the attention of William Butler Yeats through spiritualism. To be fair, Merrill himself versified these very doubts. A psychiatrist appears as a character in The Book of Ephraim to suggest that the whole thing may just be an example of folie à deux.
David Jackson had, apparently, once been a handsome military officer and a promising writer who’d published stories in the Partisan Review. But now he was a big mess. He smoked constantly, got drunk every night, teased everyone heavily but with the ostensible affectionate bonhomie of a diner waitress: “Hey, hon, looks like you’ve been putting on the pounds. Unhappy in love or just greedy? Or is it genetic? Well, you’re still cute as a button. A very big button.” His once wide-faced, strong-jawed American good looks, almost those of the young William Holden in Picnic, were now lost in the wasteland of drink and chain-smoking chatter. His mouth was often open as he tried, but failed, to follow the conversation. Yet this idiot was more savant than anyone suspected, since he could often suddenly join the general talk with a truly original and stinging zinger.
Jimmy just rolled his eyes with merry exasperation. He would lead us off to some other more amusing person or activity—a walk through the town, where many of the houses were pedantically and pretentiously labeled (The house of a rich rope maker ca. 1800). The houses were small and pristine Greek Revival temples in wood painted white with small, perfect lawns. From Jimmy’s top balcony we could look with binoculars down into the walled garden