City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [93]
My heart sank, I who still scribbled with a ballpoint in student notebooks. I rewrote but quickly, only once; it was the least demanding part of composition and by far the most pleasant. Much of my rewriting was cutting. What was hard for me was composing, writing. I had so little confidence or stamina that a single paragraph could send me into a paroxysm of self-doubt. Sometimes I felt I was blasting my way through a sheer wall of granite, forcing a small path through vast, thick ramparts of low self-esteem. At other times I felt I was racing through the woods but that the trail had given out, was overgrown—or had broken into two paths or three. I had no idea where to go, no momentum, no sense of direction.
Harold appeared to have none of these doubts. He sometimes spoke of writing in a way that reminded me of the methods discussed by French writers. A French author might say that he’d worked the whole book out in his mind, done his research, constructed the whole intrigue—and now all he had to do was the “redaction,” by which he would mean the actual writing, as if that were a detail, the way some composers refer to the orchestration. I was never shown any segment of the manuscript in all its voluminousness, but I would get vague, haggard battle reports about how the organization was going.
I think you could have called Harold a phenomenologist. He once said to me (apropos of some of my own writing), “When someone writes, ‘She went down on him,’ it’s always a lie.” His idea was that shorthand expressions (going down on someone) were smug and false because the real experience (of sucking or being sucked) is so profound, so unrepeatable, so thick with emotions and half thoughts and fears and tremblings that the only expression adequate to it is minute, precise, original, and exhaustive. In print Harold wrote, “I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts.”
I learned something from him—perhaps because it suited my own artistic temperament to “defamiliarize” the world and to render it in the freshest, most Martian way possible. Where I disagreed with him was that I thought not everything could be treated so thoroughly. There had to be background and foreground, and what was in the background necessarily should be sketched in—not with clichés but with some familiar shorthand, even facility.
If that was the most sensible and useful part of Harold’s advice, he was also capable of strange little obsessions. In reading a description of mine of a skylight above a library (installed in a nineteenth-century opera house), Harold insisted that I describe the overhead windows as an eye. I didn’t think it made much difference in a book of 220 pages whether I used that metaphor or not, but I quickly acceded to his demand to humor him and to show him that I was flattered that he had had a concrete suggestion of any sort. Presumably he had read the rest of the book (A Boy’s Own Story) but he made no comment on the other 219 pages.
When my book was in the proof stages, he called my editor, Bill Whitehead, and said, “Stop the presses! White has stolen my style.” Bill, who could be firm, said, “That’s nonsense—he wouldn’t want your style and anyway a style can’t be patented,” and hung up on him. Harold kept calling back, threatening legal action, but he seldom contacted me and Bill never again took his calls. Harold also accused John Updike of stealing his personality. “I am the Devil in The Witches of Eastwick,” Harold announced.
The years went by and Harold threatened to publish his book. Sometimes it was said to be two thousand pages long and sometimes it was said he’d written between three thousand and six thousand pages. The most famous fashion photographer in the world, Richard Avedon, told me that he was collaborating with Harold since Avedon was convinced he was America’s greatest author. Harold wrote the introduction to a book of Avedon’s photos taken between 1947 and