City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [9]
I suppose my reasoning went something like this: A writer must be eternal and universal; if he falls prey to the fads and fancies of his own period, he’ll disappear when his epoch ends. Therefore he should discreetly sample it but make all the great writers and thinkers of the past and of every culture his true contemporaries. I belonged to no clubs and could not be labeled with any sticker except gay and WASP. Still, at that time gay was a secret designation and WASP was so general as to be meaningless. Only later did Jewish comedians make the idea of a WASP (and a Jew) funny.
I felt I had this admirable surfeit of negative capability precisely because I wasn’t a Harvard man or an aristocrat. I had no visible markings. I considered myself lucky to be invisible. I was a free agent. No one owned my soul. If anyone asked, I’d say that a Midwestern intellectual had nothing glib about him. It didn’t occur to him that he could social-climb through making references to Flaubert or Baudelaire. If an Ohioan read Flowers of Evil, I argued, he did so because he liked the poetry. No one back home would ever be impressed by his knowledge of any topic, especially not a cultural one—which he’d do well to conceal if he didn’t want to be considered a ridiculous egghead. Does anyone think this way now? In the age of the Internet, of fifteen-minute fame and above all such local fame (“I’m famous to the fifteen people who read my blog”), in a time when cultural space is so segmented and time so speeded up, does it still make sense to worry over how to construct a lasting reputation? Will any reputations last?
I took fiction so seriously (which I thought of as art) that I wanted my prose to be un-American, not of any era, unidentifiable because it was original. Of course I didn’t do much to realize these preposterous ambitions. I was too busy writing unproduceable plays and meeting new people and killing time at work.
Joe Chaikin had a lover, the playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie, but apparently Joe and I had a brief affair. At least in the early 1990s, when I was writing a biography of Jean Genet and asked the librarian at Kent State for copies of Jean Genet’s letters, the librarian wrote back, “Perhaps you’d also like copies of your own love letters to Joe Chaikin.” I couldn’t recall ever having been in love with Joe. I can picture only one hot summer night with him in his little apartment, his body covered with curly hairs, his face and back lightly filmed in sweat. There was something unhealthy about him, I thought—and soon enough he had to have open-heart surgery, which left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak normally. He incorporated that disability into his work; earlier for no apparent personal reasons he had learned sign language and worked with the deaf on the stage. He had a great sweetness and intelligence about him—an intelligence of the senses and of the instincts.
I thought he should stage my play Mrs. Morrigan, but he was far more attracted to plays he and his company would piece together during months and months of improvisation, though the final text might be set down and polished and shaped by van Itallie. America Hurrah, a trilogy of plays produced in 1966, was a watershed anti–Vietnam War protest, one with expressionist elements (puppets designed by Robert Wilson) and dialogue that sometimes sounded like Beckett and sometimes like Ionesco. Chaikin directed only one of the three plays. Another play that van Itallie developed with Chaikin was The Serpent, performed in 1969, which toured all over the world in the following years.
Chaikin had worked out a kind of theater that would suddenly lurch without transition into enactments of repressed feelings. A man picking up his dry cleaning would suddenly click into a slow-motion rapturous embrace with the woman working in the shop.
One of the participants in the