City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [6]
As I came home in my suit and tie, weaving my way through the motley throngs, skinny kids in fringed leather coats would growl at me, “Go back to the suburbs.” Which made me indignant, since I knew they were probably living with their parents in the suburbs and had to sneak out of the house with a paper bag full of their trendy new clothes. They’d change in the back of an unlit bus, leave behind their bourgeois togs in a bus station locker, and traipse down to the Village in their beads and bangles. They were the “plastic hippies,” not I!
Through Raymond Sokolov, one of my high school friends, I did some freelance reviewing for Newsweek, which would have landed me in trouble at Time-Life if anyone had noticed. I reviewed Malraux’s Anti-Memoirs (published in 1967 in America) and Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle (1968) and disliked them both. Malraux was obviously a fake, a bore, and a liar, though Americans were still impressed with his name and Man’s Fate was still considered a “classic,” much like that other Communist classic, Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don—which won its author the Nobel Prize in 1965 though most critics now believe it was largely plagiarized and written by a committee.
The First Circle, though a novel that protested Stalin’s regime, seemed to me proof of the sad consequences of Soviet censorship, since it could easily have been written in the nineteenth century. I told my editor at Newsweek that the publication of the book should serve as the pretext for a cover story on the samizdat press (clandestine self-published manuscripts that had been censored by the Soviet state), but my advice was ignored and every other publication in the States declared the book a masterpiece. One wonders how many people read either book today. I wasn’t given any more books since my reviews put me out of step with everyone else in the country.
I went on to review a few books for the New Republic, but those pieces, too, were mostly nasty—and in 1978 I wrote a negative if respectful review of Edward Said’s Orientalism, one of the most influential books of our day. I suppose I was so underpublished and resentful in those days that it was hard for me to write a positive review of anything by anyone. Said, unfortunately, remembered my bad review, and it took years for me to repair the damage, which I very much wanted to do because upon reflection I came to admire him so much. In the end, in the early 1990s we became friends and continued to be so until he died.
I suppose that just as art was still meant to be difficult at the beginning of the sixties and only gradually became just another form of mass entertainment through the high jinks of Pop Art, in the same way politics were austere and Marxist in 1960 but had become “fun” by 1970, turning into the psychodrama of the New Left.
In fact, everything in the America I knew after 1965 was warming up, becoming more subjective and democratic and amusing and accessible. Although in my own way I, too, was moving toward the personal through my writing, I was never entirely convinced it was the right way. I still idolized difficult modernist poets such as Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, and I listened with solemn but uncomprehending seriousness to the music of Schoenberg. Later I would learn to pick and choose my idiosyncratic way through the ranks of canonical writers, composers, artists, and filmmakers, but in my twenties I still had an unquestioning admiration for the Great—who were Great precisely because they were Great. Only later would I begin to see the selling of high art as just one more form of commercialism. In my twenties if even a tenth reading of Mallarm