City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [92]
Denis Donoghue and Harold Bloom had both compared Harold to Proust. Bloom, after reading some of Harold’s new novel in manuscript, added that he was “unparalleled in American prose fiction since the death of William Faulkner.” Cynthia Ozick declared him to be a true artist. Harold concurred: “I’m not sure that I’m not a coward. If some of the people who talk to me are right, well, to be possibly not only the best living writer in English, but someone who could be the rough equivalent of a Wordsworth or a Milton, is not a role that a halfway educated Jew from St. Louis with two sets of parents and a junkman father is prepared to play.” The press response (always by straight men) was so extreme that I developed a theory about what was behind it. I figured that gay men were not competitive in the way straights were; it was no accident that gays played individual not group sports. Nor were gay men awed and half in love with their fathers. Most gays I knew had rejected their fathers and despised them. Finally, gays were thoroughly disabused and especially suspicious of flattery—more likely to hand it out than to take it in. As a result, Harold’s methods didn’t work on them (on me), but they instantly seduced straights. Harold would suddenly announce to a straight admirer (or adversary), “You know, Tom, you could be the greatest writer of your generation. There’s no doubt about it. And by the way I’m not the only one to think that.” Long pause. “But you won’t be—wanna know why?” Strong eye contact. “Because you’re too damn lazy. And too damn modest. You don’t work hard enough or aim high enough.”
His interlocutor, after having his rank raised as high as it was in his most secret dreams, suddenly saw his hopes dashed, unless … unless…
He suddenly needed Harold to help him, to inspire him, finally to judge him. Harold was his father/coach, while the challenger was the son/rookie. With any luck he might yet emerge as the world-class genius he dreamed of being.
Bitchy and disagreeable as gays are sometimes thought to be, they don’t usually play lethal games like these. They don’t try to mold behavior—perhaps they (we) aren’t confident enough to challenge another man in his heart of hearts, the private interior place where he lives. We gays don’t want to belong, we don’t want to play ball—we’re not team players, so how could we bow before someone evaluating us? We’d rather lose, quit the playing field—be a quitter. How can our father or father’s brother bully us when we’re all too ready to cry uncle? That sort of ducking out is our way of winning.
Of course it probably helped that Harold went to almost every literary party and spent hours on the phone every day with Don DeLillo, Harold Bloom, Denis Donoghue. DeLillo told him the way to stop worrying about death was to watch a lot of television.
The funny thing is that no one ever mentioned that Harold lived with not one but two men and that he was notorious in the YMCA steam room. Harold was not known to be gay—and he was far from a cool, impersonal writer. His whole life’s work was based on his childhood and adolescent experiences. He had turned himself into a tall, complicated, handsome, athletic, brilliant Jewish lad, and that’s how everyone who didn’t know him personally perceived him.
Harold had raised expectations so high—after all, he wasn’t just trying to “get a second book out,” he was writing the great American novel—that of course he had to introduce roadblocks in his path. He bought a computer. But this was still the era when a computer filled a whole room, when only industries and spies owned them, when one had to master a whole new method of writing, of programming. Harold invited me to see the machines humming and buzzing in one room, which someone from IBM was teaching him, day after day, week after week, how to operate. The entire long, sprawling manuscript would have to be transferred to the computer. Only then