City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [71]
Those first two summers David lived on a rio between the Salute and the Guggenheim Museum across from the Da Cici pensione. Twice we saw Ezra Pound just before he died in 1972 with the violinist Olga Rudge walking slowly along. Pound no longer chose to speak, though he could. He was small and frail and carefully dressed and had a white beard and a cane. This is the man, I thought, who’d described his virulent anti-Semitism during the war years to Allen Ginsberg in the 1960s as “that suburban vice.” This was the man who’d invented Chinese poetry for our time and culture. Who’d been locked in a cage by the American army and been befriended by a black soldier and written about it in The Pisan Cantos. Who’d translated Egyptian poetry and troubadour poetry and parts of the Confucian Analects, launched vorticism in the plastic arts and imagism in poetry, drastically cut and rearranged The Waste Land for T. S. Eliot, written an opera (both words and music), written the ABC of Reading, and had made such an impression on me since my adolescence, and whose poetry struck me as faultless if daunting. Accompanying Richard Howard to Princeton once for a class he was teaching, I’d heard him say to his students that the two poets in English with the best “ear” were Herbert and Pound.
David, from the early 1970s up until 1985 (the year before his death), mounted a campaign to conquer Venetian society. As a goal for any other person, he would have laughed at that idea—since he was the first to recognize how vapid Venice could be. He often said, “Venice is as intellectually distinguished as Akron, Ohio.” But if it was small and closed, that made it all the more interesting to the novelist in David. For he had always wanted to write a novel and now began one that opened with a Harvard-educated professor at last getting a job back at his alma mater. He bends down and kisses the ground in Cambridge—or did he put lipstick on so that he could leave the imprint of a kiss on a window? I forget which, but the kiss seems a safe bet.
Though David lived in New York and worshipped the New York City Ballet, I think the city otherwise failed to stimulate his imagination. Manhattan was too big, too kicked-out—historical, yes, but all the evidence of its past worn down and built over and nearly erased. In Venice, by contrast, people bore historic names and lived in historic family palaces that in their way were in perfect repair. Behind the water gates of a palace could be seen the old wooden hood (the felze) of a gondola, an intricately carved fitting that protected the family from prying eyes or, in the winter, from icy winds. In the grand salotto were the ceilings by Tiepolo, and there, sitting around in gilded chairs in the dim light, were descendants of the very people pictured in the nineteenth-century watercolors in the hallway—ancestors at receptions in these rooms that were the same then as now. Here the pink marble floors were cracked and tilting, the plaster putti slightly grayed and missing a wing or a finger, but the same luminous and elevated luxury everywhere.
Most of David’s conquests were effected at the Cipriani pool. One would get into a boat just next to Harry’s Bar and a few moments later have been sped past San Giorgio and deposited at the hotel, then helped out by the uniformed arm of a young, golden-haired demigod. Led by one of the bagnini to a chaise longue by the pool, one would then enter the changing rooms and put on a swimsuit. This was the realm of wens and warts, of bellies and sagging tits—all outfitted in bathing costumes by Hermès or Valentino, and all cosseted on wonderfully upholstered deck lounge chairs with crisp white piping, and supplied with abundant white towels the size of bedsheets. At the shallow end was Patricia Curtis, standing in the water but resting her hands, heavy with family diamonds, on the poolside. Her family had been living in the Palazzo Barbaro for a hundred