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By Root 1229 0

first session, they panic and can think of no way of filling up all the hours and hours during the coming weeks. Of course in creative writing the classes are small enough and the students eager enough that soon general discussion takes off. Once the students’ stories start coming in, they can be analyzed and argued about: “What do you think of Marjorie’s story, Helen?” Most creative writing courses soon enough become classes in applied morality or situational ethics. Although purists laugh at the idea of treating characters as if they were real people responsible for their actions, everyone does in fact respond to fiction in exactly that way. Stories generate interest precisely to the degree they manipulate readers’ sympathies. Chekhov’s stories, for instance, are endlessly rewarding because it’s so hard to figure out who’s bad and who’s good in them. This ambiguity doesn’t lead the reader to abandon his or her judgmental instincts but to refine them and to broaden his or her sympathies. Expecting readers to put aside their good-guy/ bad-guy criteria is absurd. As David Hume says, the mind of man when confronted with anything “immediately feels the sentiment of approbation or blame; nor are there any emotions more essential to its frame and constitution.”

I was afraid that I looked so young the students would laugh at me when I announced I was their teacher. Charles Silverstein, to whom I confided this fear, said, “Usually you’re complaining that you’re aging too quickly. Now you’re afraid you look too young.” In truth I had a highly unstable “body image.” I didn’t know what I looked like. If I managed to pick up one man (or seven of them) in an evening, then I was certain I was handsome, though I did worry why the eighth one had turned me down. Most of the time, when I was less successful, my confidence in my looks plunged. People don’t usually pay each other compliments—maybe lovers do, but I chose lovers who rejected me. I can remember that once Brandy Alexander, a famous drag queen, said to me at a party, “Ed White, everyone wants you, you’re the universal ball.” I hugged those chance words to my chest. I was twenty-four and I still remember them. I can also recall the one time a bartender sent me a free drink. I can remember a mad Southern seamster—is that the male version of seamstress?—who wrote a whole novel about me, which I was too bored to read. Years later, after my looks had faded and I’d become paunchy, a few men and women told me how attractive I’d been and how much they’d desired me. Harry Mathews got angry and said once in Key West, “Why don’t you lose all that weight? You used to be so cute!”

Later, when I began to teach at Johns Hopkins as an assistant professor (twelve thousand dollars a year), I spent two days a week in Baltimore. There no one ever looked at me and I felt gray and invisible. I commuted on the Metroliner and the moment I stepped off the train in New York the swiveling eyes were all around me again, reassuringly. New York was the only place in America where everyone—young and old, straight and gay—cruised. People in big cities cruise; it’s no accident that in French the word cruise (draguer) is applied to straights and gays alike, since both groups do it. To put the make on someone (mater, literally “to subdue”) is also polysexual in French. In New York people check each other out to find out who they are, whereas in other cities there’s no reason to bother since no one is ever anyone. As Stan used to say, “Half the people in New York if they were anywhere else would be either interviewed or arrested.”

In the 1970s New York was so shoddy, so dangerous, so black and Puerto Rican, that the rest of white America pulled up its skirts and ran off in the opposite direction. Tourism was way down, and guests on talk shows would quite regularly laugh when New York was mentioned, as if that querulous, bankrupt cesspool should be pushed out to sea and sunk. My Texas relatives would call me and wonder how I dared to live there; my cousin Dorothy Jean, a militant Baptist, located and contacted