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By Root 1219 0

1977, an essay that had the distinction of being both laborious and stylish. The title of his novel changed from Party of Animals to The Runaway Soul, i.e., from a striking title to a forgettable one. It was reported he’d gone from Knopf back to Farrar, Straus. As the new high priest of heterosexuality and the female orgasm, he had no need of the embarrassing evidence to the contrary that Doug Gruenau and Charlie represented. Charlie had already moved out with a new lover in 1975, and Doug left the apartment in 1980. Harold moved a woman in—Ellen Schwamm, a writer he’d met jogging in the park. (There are other versions of how they’d met. In one, Ellen asked Gordon Lish who was the greatest living writer, and when she found out it was Harold, she set her cap for him. In another they met at a bookstore, the then fashionable Books & Co. next to the Whitney.) Ellen and Harold cut their hair so that they would resemble each other, like the couple in Hemingway’s posthumous and thrillingly good The Garden of Eden. She had left her rich husband for Harold. Charlie was an early victim of AIDS and died. Doug found a new lover and remained friendly with Harold and Ellen, though he must never be mentioned in the press. I tried to date Doug but he was too sweet, too genuine for me—and besides he didn’t smoke, took long hikes in the desert to photograph bison, and got up every morning at six to go jogging around the Reservoir. With any luck I was just rolling into bed at that hour, putting out my seventy-second cigarette of the day. I felt sooty and superficial next to Doug—and soon he found a serious lover he’s still with after these many years.

I kept hearing nutty reports about Harold. He’d accepted a job teaching a semester occasionally at Cornell. Alison Lurie, who taught there, told me that Harold had accused a sweet elderly novelist, James McConkey, of climbing across several roofs and slipping like a cat burglar into Harold’s room in Ithaca in order to copy out long passages of Harold’s novel and to publish them as his own. This tremendous row would in a more sensible century have ended in a simplifying duel instead of the mess that went on for years.

Susan Sontag told me about her evening with Harold. He had said to her, “You and I, Susan, are the greatest writers of the twentieth century.” She had replied, “Oh, really, Harold? Aren’t there a few others? What about Nabokov, for instance?”

“Oh, he’s nothing,” Harold said, “but at least he had the decency to acknowledge his debt to me.”

“Really, Harold? Where did he do that?”

As though slowing down and simplifying things for a child, Harold took a breath and smiled and said, “You remember that at the beginning of Lolita that Lolita has a father who’s already died?”

“Yes…”

“And do you remember his first name?”

“Yes, his name is Harold.”

Harold shrugged—case closed. Harold seemed seriously to believe that his stories in First Love and Other Sorrows had inspired Nabokov—another instance of his style being stolen.

The writer Sheila Kohler told me that when she had dinner with Harold, she told him that she was happy to meet him since Gordon Lish had said he was the greatest living writer. “Why, he compares you to Shakespeare,” she told Harold.

Harold looked at her balefully and said, “I bet he wouldn’t put Shakespeare on hold.” Harold suggested that for this grievous insult he was considering changing publishers yet again.

C. K. Williams, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, the sweetest and one of the most talented men of Harold’s generation, was introduced to him by Avedon, but rather quickly Harold fought with him. Harold accused him of pilfering some of his pages to put into a poem—though later Harold realized that Williams could never have seen those pages since they hadn’t yet been published. For once in his life Harold apologized.

And then The Runaway Soul came out and it was a terrible flop. James Wood, even though he was defending it, called it “microscopically narcissistic.” Pages we’d once admired in the New Yorker were now so bent out of shape through rewriting