City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [82]
The music of Stravinsky, though he’d recently died, was being played every week during the New York City Ballet season. The three great geniuses of the twentieth century, Stravinsky, Nabokov, and Balanchine, had all started off in imperial Russia, passed through France, and known a second (or third) creative flowering in America. Whereas later New Yorkers, and Americans in general, would turn their backs on Europe, in the 1970s we were all still reading Lacan, Deleuze, Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, and Lévi-Strauss. And many distinguished foreigners would live in rough, grimy, stimulating New York for long periods. Many French and Italian artists had studios in Manhattan; the French sculptor Alain Kirili and his photographer wife Ariane Lopez-Huici began to spend longer and longer sojourns in New York in the seventies, Kirili becoming a major collaborator with American jazz musicians.
The American literary avant-garde was very much in business, including such New Yorkers as Donald Barthelme. They were often published in the New American Review, and all made frequent appearances at the 92nd Street Y in New York, events that were well attended. A magazine such as Esquire in 1963 was able to generate sales by mapping out the “red-hot center” of American literary life—and locating it in New York and among mostly white men. Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote, like Hollywood stars, all appeared on national TV, and Mailer’s movements or Philip Roth’s were carefully charted by their fellow New Yorkers. David’s boss Richard Poirier had written a book in the Modern Masters series about Mailer and Vidal and their contrasting chat styles on television (Vidal’s was better suited to the medium, Poirier argued, since it consisted of sound bites rather than complex, sustained arguments). This was the backdrop of Woody Allen films featuring Jewish psychiatrists, of blue blazers worn over faded jeans, of Saul Steinberg cartoons. I remember seeing Steinberg at a party in the Hamptons in the late sixties, when he would glide up from behind a tree and try to spook my date, a girl from work. We thought it was glamorous to be a writer; a highly visible whiskey ad of the time showed a writer pounding his chic little Olivetti and asking his girlfriend, “While you’re up, would you get me a Grant’s?” We didn’t pay much attention to television personalities (there were only three channels in those days); our celebrities were all writers and painters.
Of the various institutions that aided these encounters, this sense of community, almost all of them have subsequently disappeared. Susan Sontag once remarked that maybe “we” wouldn’t have staged such vigorous assaults on cultural institutions if we’d known how fragile they were, how easily they could be swept aside. The New York City Ballet, as David Kalstone observed, appealed to intellectuals because only such a noble and nonverbal vision of a communal utopia as proposed by Balanchine’s choreography (or by Jerome Robbins in pieces such as Dances at a Gathering) could have attracted and united so many contentious, wordy New Yorkers. The three intermissions each evening meant plenty of time for spontaneous conversations (and drinks) in the lobby. Many New York thinkers and artists—Edward Gorey, Bob Gottlieb, Susan Sontag, Richard Poirier, and the best dance critic, Edwin Denby (by then a nearly catatonic ghost)—attended every night. You could always spot the tall Gorey with his white beard, black jeans, and white sneakers. Denby always arrived in a surrounding cloud of handsome young men; they were full of opinions though he said nothing. These fans recognized the rare privilege of being able to watch Balanchine unveil one masterpiece premiere after another. His famous 1972 eight-day festival