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as to be incomprehensible. No one could follow the action. Hundreds of pages went by and we were still mired in earliest childhood—and Harold’s insights and observations seemed utterly implausible. No one had that kind of detailed recall about what had happened when he was two or three. Piaget had demonstrated that even if we were given complete access to our infant memories, they would make no sense to us since they were inscribed in a different, earlier language than the one we think in now. And, anyway, who cared? It was all the fault, I thought, of that infernal computer and Harold’s infinitely expanded opportunities to rewrite. The book was no longer a performance but a smudged palimpsest.

Once his masterpiece went belly-up in such a conspicuous and unresounding way, Harold filled his days more usefully by writing bits and pieces for “The Talk of the Town.” He was a good journalist, good at getting the story and willing to curb his eccentric style enough to communicate with the average educated reader. Reputedly he wrote TV pilots for money as well.

Then one day Harold wrote a short piece in the New Yorker announcing he had AIDS and was dying. Apparently—or so Harold claimed—he’d been infected in the 1960s, since that was the last time he’d fooled around with a man. I wondered how Doug reacted to this denial of all their many years together. I thought, only Harold could write a page and a half about his imminent death from AIDS and manage to irritate the reader.

He published a strangely homophobic book about his AIDS, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death. He claimed that the book was born of a decision to be honest, not to lie, but he obscured many facts. He never mentioned Doug Gruenau or his countless tricks. He acted as if his major contact with Charlie Yordy was based on their both being orphans (Harold’s parents died when he was very young). He claimed that his affair with Charlie (which in the book sounds like his only gay relationship) was a way of reliving the childhood trauma of being sexually abused by his stepfather. As an adult, he said, he had “experimented with homosexuality to break my pride, to open myself to the story” of being abused as a child. This experience may have helped Harold to come to terms with being repeatedly raped, but, Harold suggests, “I think he was the one who gave it to me,” i.e., AIDS. In the gay community it had been decided early on that it wasn’t kosher to try to pinpoint the one who’d infected us. Hurling accusations of that sort was a waste of breath—especially since Harold, like the rest of us, had had not one but hundreds of male partners.

When Harold died, it felt anticlimactic. He was obviously a brilliant if underemployed and meddling man. He had great natural gifts and more than a touch of madness. His wife Ellen had written a novel (the ironically titled How He Saved Her) in which Harold appeared as the devil, destroying everyone around him. He died nearly the same day as the more famous Russian poet Joseph Brodsky and had the misfortune of being confused with him in many people’s minds. Now he’s practically been forgotten—and the loss of this large, ambitious talent seems tragic. We all wanted him to be a success. It’s more fun to have a genius in our midst.

Chapter 14

J. D. McClatchy (“Sandy” to his friends) arranged my first teaching gig, in the mid-seventies. I wasn’t working and supported myself badly with occasional freelance magazine pieces. In those days Yale did not have creative writing as part of its regular English Department curriculum. Princeton had had a distinguished creative writing program since 1939, when it was started by R. P. Blackmur (Allen Tate had taught there and so had Elizabeth Bowen and Kingsley Amis and Philip Roth), but Yale and Harvard had been a bit sniffy about anything so louche in which mere writers without degrees were allowed to shape young minds. When Nabokov wanted a job teaching Russian literature at Harvard, the man who turned him down said, “Would you ask an elephant to teach a course in elephant science?”