City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [66]
Shrink: You do what?
Ashbery: I get up—
Shrink: You must never, never get up. Okay, pee and make a cup of coffee, but then get back in bed if only for half an hour every day and write longhand in a notebook.
Ashbery: Why?
Shrink: That way your inhibitions will still be low and you’ll be closer to your dreams. That’s the surefire way out of writer’s block.
I followed the shrink’s advice. I didn’t have writer’s block, though all my failures with plays and fiction had left me feeling wounded. I would feel sick with fear every time I’d begin to write something made-up. I couldn’t afford to have writer’s block in any literal sense; I had to keep writing to survive (and support all these new people, now that I was a “family man”). I could, however, have kept on doing nothing but churning out articles and reviews and ghostwriting, as so many other people in New York did. A novel was a long-term project that no one would finance, at least not in my case. It took years out of one’s life, with no promise that it would ever be published. If it was published, there was no assurance it would earn any money or even be reviewed.
But my sense of personal identity required that I write fiction. If I thought that my only take on life would be the clever remarks or vague thoughts I might be able to cook up on the spot, then I wouldn’t be able to recognize myself.
I knew I had to keep on writing or else I’d let the ambient cultural noise drown out my thoughts, which weren’t paraphrasable wisecracks or wisdom but rather a way of looking at the world or the self. French people dismiss the cultural chatter and self-centered attitudinizing of Paris as parisianisme. A similar noise is generated by hip New Yorkers, though we don’t have a word for it and perhaps we haven’t isolated it yet as a reprehensible phenomenon. This “newyorkism” is so opinionated, so debilitating, so contagious with its knowingness, its instant formulas that replace any slow discoveries, that only people who are serious and ponderous can resist its blandishments, its quick substitutes for authenticity. No wonder the psychiatrist had said one should write first thing in the morning—before the tide of newyorkism swept over one, washing away actual honest thought and replacing it with trendy pronouncements.
But I don’t want to suggest that for me the value of real writing was as a shield against newyorkism, that it substituted private feelings for public catchphrases. What it really did was to set up an idealized construct of life as a rival to actual, formless life in all its messiness. Because fiction depended on telling details and an exact and lifelike sequencing of emotions, and on representative if not slavishly mimetic dialogue, and on convincing actions, it required heightened and calculating powers of observation. Living-as-a-writer was different from living tout court to the degree that for a writer even the dreariest, most featureless evening among dullards became a subject for satire, a source of “notes” on the new bourgeoisie, a challenge to one’s powers to discriminate among almost interchangeable shades of gray. Living-as-a-writer was not so different from living-as-an-analysand in that both novelist and psychoanalytic patient must remember their experiences, their aperçus, their ignoble hours and their petty minutes as well as their generous seconds in order to—well, to write it all down, or to report it to the shrink. Of course shrinks don’t encourage patients to prepare, and the dream report is just another form of resistance, one of the most boring as well. And I can’t say that I was ever a note-taker. My sister thinks I have a lousy or at least highly selective memory. Marilyn used to tease me for being so unobservant, saying that she could dye her hair blue and I wouldn’t notice. So perhaps finally living-as-a-writer is more a project than a set of strategies. Perhaps it’s only a good excuse for not buckling down at the chemical company.
Chapter 10
I was approached in 1975 by an English book packager called