City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s Read Online Free Page B
Author: Edmund White
little jokes about his funny looks, wrote cabaret comedies until he was whisked away by the producer Carlo Ponti to Rome, where he wrote the one-page idea for Mortadella , a vehicle for Sophia Loren. In the movie Loren tries to smuggle a huge Italian sausage through American customs.
In 1970, when I met Carlo Ponti, who was Loren’s husband, he pushed my hundred-page film script aside and asked why I couldn’t be brief and to the point like the great Melfi. He didn’t like my scenario because it satirized Italian men. Americans like me were so used to self-satire in the style of Mort Sahl and Elaine May and Mike Nichols that it astonished me when smaller, prouder nations didn’t welcome satire at all, especially if written by foreigners. A comedy was fine, such as Divorce, Italian Style , but a satire about Italy by an American was most unwelcome.
Chapter 4
I admired a theater director called Joe Chaikin and would attend the rehearsals of his company, though not often. I did nothing often. As though I knew how compulsive I could be, I was almost afraid of developing habits. And as a writer I defended myself against—and this will sound even crazier—immersing myself in my own period.
I suppose my reasoning went something like this: A writer must be eternal and universal; if he falls prey to the fads and fancies of his own period, he’ll disappear when his epoch ends. Therefore he should discreetly sample it but make all the great writers and thinkers of the past and of every culture his true contemporaries. I belonged to no clubs and could not be labeled with any sticker except gay and WASP . Still, at that time gay was a secret designation and WASP was so general as to be meaningless. Only later did Jewish comedians make the idea of a WASP (and a Jew) funny.
I felt I had this admirable surfeit of negative capability precisely because I wasn’t a Harvard man or an aristocrat. I had no visible markings. I considered myself lucky to be invisible. I was a free agent. No one owned my soul. If anyone asked, I’d say that a Midwestern intellectual had nothing glib about him. It didn’t occur to him that he could social-climb through making references to Flaubert or Baudelaire. If an Ohioan read Flowers of Evil , I argued,he did so because he liked the poetry. No one back home would ever be impressed by his knowledge of any topic, especially not a cultural one—which he’d do well to conceal if he didn’t want to be considered a ridiculous egghead. Does anyone think this way now? In the age of the Internet, of fifteen-minute fame and above all such local fame (“I’m famous to the fifteen people who read my blog”), in a time when cultural space is so segmented and time so speeded up, does it still make sense to worry over how to construct a lasting reputation? Will any reputations last?
I took fiction so seriously (which I thought of as art) that I wanted my prose to be un-American, not of any era, unidentifiable because it was original. Of course I didn’t do much to realize these preposterous ambitions. I was too busy writing unproduceable plays and meeting new people and killing time at work.
Joe Chaikin had a lover, the playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie, but apparently Joe and I had a brief affair. At least in the early 1990s, when I was writing a biography of Jean Genet and asked the librarian at Kent State for copies of Jean Genet’s letters, the librarian wrote back, “Perhaps you’d also like copies of your own love letters to Joe Chaikin.” I couldn’t recall ever having been in love with Joe. I can picture only one hot summer night with him in his little apartment, his body covered with curly hairs, his face and back lightly filmed in sweat. There was something unhealthy about him, I thought—and soon enough he had to have open-heart surgery, which left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak normally. He incorporated that disability into his work; earlier for no apparent personal reasons
In 1970, when I met Carlo Ponti, who was Loren’s husband, he pushed my hundred-page film script aside and asked why I couldn’t be brief and to the point like the great Melfi. He didn’t like my scenario because it satirized Italian men. Americans like me were so used to self-satire in the style of Mort Sahl and Elaine May and Mike Nichols that it astonished me when smaller, prouder nations didn’t welcome satire at all, especially if written by foreigners. A comedy was fine, such as Divorce, Italian Style , but a satire about Italy by an American was most unwelcome.
Chapter 4
I admired a theater director called Joe Chaikin and would attend the rehearsals of his company, though not often. I did nothing often. As though I knew how compulsive I could be, I was almost afraid of developing habits. And as a writer I defended myself against—and this will sound even crazier—immersing myself in my own period.
I suppose my reasoning went something like this: A writer must be eternal and universal; if he falls prey to the fads and fancies of his own period, he’ll disappear when his epoch ends. Therefore he should discreetly sample it but make all the great writers and thinkers of the past and of every culture his true contemporaries. I belonged to no clubs and could not be labeled with any sticker except gay and WASP . Still, at that time gay was a secret designation and WASP was so general as to be meaningless. Only later did Jewish comedians make the idea of a WASP (and a Jew) funny.
I felt I had this admirable surfeit of negative capability precisely because I wasn’t a Harvard man or an aristocrat. I had no visible markings. I considered myself lucky to be invisible. I was a free agent. No one owned my soul. If anyone asked, I’d say that a Midwestern intellectual had nothing glib about him. It didn’t occur to him that he could social-climb through making references to Flaubert or Baudelaire. If an Ohioan read Flowers of Evil , I argued,he did so because he liked the poetry. No one back home would ever be impressed by his knowledge of any topic, especially not a cultural one—which he’d do well to conceal if he didn’t want to be considered a ridiculous egghead. Does anyone think this way now? In the age of the Internet, of fifteen-minute fame and above all such local fame (“I’m famous to the fifteen people who read my blog”), in a time when cultural space is so segmented and time so speeded up, does it still make sense to worry over how to construct a lasting reputation? Will any reputations last?
I took fiction so seriously (which I thought of as art) that I wanted my prose to be un-American, not of any era, unidentifiable because it was original. Of course I didn’t do much to realize these preposterous ambitions. I was too busy writing unproduceable plays and meeting new people and killing time at work.
Joe Chaikin had a lover, the playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie, but apparently Joe and I had a brief affair. At least in the early 1990s, when I was writing a biography of Jean Genet and asked the librarian at Kent State for copies of Jean Genet’s letters, the librarian wrote back, “Perhaps you’d also like copies of your own love letters to Joe Chaikin.” I couldn’t recall ever having been in love with Joe. I can picture only one hot summer night with him in his little apartment, his body covered with curly hairs, his face and back lightly filmed in sweat. There was something unhealthy about him, I thought—and soon enough he had to have open-heart surgery, which left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak normally. He incorporated that disability into his work; earlier for no apparent personal reasons
Readers choose
Avram Davidson
Rose Ann Bridges
Honey Palomino
Alanna Knight
Stephen Alter
Paul Mendelson
Bryan Batt
John McCallum
Michelle Stinson Ross
Wilette Youkey