City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [81]
Writing was torture for David. Maybe he’d been handicapped by being made a full professor and tenured at a young age. His boss at Rutgers, Richard Poirier, was a devoted friend from Harvard days and looked after him. I once attended one of David’s classes, a session on The Tempest, and I was impressed with his way of provoking discussion while always keeping it on target and eventually leading it back to conclusions that only David’s subtle mind could have worked out. He’d written a book on Sir Philip Sidney and one on contemporary poets (Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and James Merrill) called Five Temperaments (an allusion to Balanchine’s and Hindemith’s Four Temperaments). He’d fiddle with the phrasing of a paragraph for days on end—and accordingly, his final drafts were always both efficient and felicitous. Nevertheless, given the choice, David would always have preferred going out with friends to writing, especially if he had a chance to go out with my agent, his close friend Maxine Groffsky, to the ballet.
Maxine was a striking redhead who’d served as the model for Brenda Potemkin in Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, the title novella included in Roth’s first published book. She’d been extremely close to several of the leading painters of the day (including Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg) and had the canvases on the wall to prove it. For years, as the Paris editor of the Paris Review, she’d lived in France with Harry Mathews and raised the children he had had with the artist Niki de Saint Phalle. She took dance lessons and carried her tall, slim body with the élan of a ballerina. Maxine was fun and flirtatious and could talk as dirty as Marilyn Monroe but ultimately was mysterious. No one knew much about her private life, and she’d never granted interviews or used her connections to serve anyone, least of all herself.
She and David loved the New York City Ballet, attending several times a week together. In those years, throughout the 1970s, the lobby of the New York State Theater, home to the company, was the drawing room of America. Whereas intellectuals and artists seldom attended symphonic or orchestral events, back then the ballet attracted the best minds in the city. Maxine eventually married the president of the ballet board, Winthrop Knowlton, but for a decade David was her constant companion there. Like rock fans they spoke of the dancers (whom they didn’t know) in terms of familiarity: “Karen’s put on a few pounds, I’d say,” or, “God, Patricia seems more and more neurotic—I think she may be on her way to having a total breakdown one of these days.” “Suzanne was sublime tonight in Jerry’s boring old Ravel piano concerto.”
I, too, had been attending the ballet weekly since the midsixties, when it was still in the old Fifty-fifth Street theater with its terrible sight lines. In those days a ticket in the top balcony cost just ninety-nine cents, and Stan and I would count out our pennies on the kitchen table and rush uptown just before curtain time. Cheap seats were still to be had now, but even the least expensive had to be budgeted for in advance. Unlike David and Maxine I never took much interest in particular dancers. I disliked stage gossip and didn’t want to compare one dancer to another—all too close to acrobatics for my taste. But of course one can swoon with admiration before the choreography of Concerto Barocco just so many times. Finally, to stay interested, one has to notice that close call Peter had when he nearly fell coming out of that second spin in Jewels.
New York was still obsessed with the hierarchy of the arts and the idea of the Pure.