in some cases you have to back off and lie low. You’re weak. Death feels preferable to daily retreat.
Certainly people on the street who smile gently at me as I walk slowly or X-ray attendants calling me darling or lovey are aware of this last thing. A woman I know who died a few years back spoke of the inescapable sympathy for weakness. She hated it. I don’t want to talk about my dying to everyone, or over and over. Is my attitude only vanity—and more vanity—in the end? In a sense, I steal each day, but I steal it by making no effort. It is just there, sunlight or rain, nightfall or morning. I am still living at least a kind of life, and I don’t want to be reduced to an image now, or, in my own mind, feel I am spending all my time on my dying instead of on living, to some satisfying extent, the time I have left.
If you train yourself as a writer to look at these things—this vulnerability, when the balance is gone and the defenses are undone so that you are open to viruses and their shocking haywire excitement—then facing them becomes almost habitual. You will have the real material, and it will arise from this new-to-you, dense memory of being jostled by medical and natural violence to the edge of life.
People like to speak of what really happened…. The New York agreement among people of my sort is that everything about one another’s lives is knowable. You take a few clues, regard them with sophistication, and you know everything. In the end, this is a city that acknowledges no mysteries, one that is set on prying, or getting, or revealing. I find New York talk horrendous, the personal conclusions stupid, the idealization of others’ experience and the demonization of others’ experience hateful and contemptible. And the bottom-lining, the judgments made as if all were known, the lies, the fraud, the infinite oral thuggery here of Jews and Gentiles alike, the cold ambition is, I repeat, unlivable.
What we really have in this city are able people, competent people, who as they rise in the world have more and more complicated professional lives. Quite logically, that eats them up, and the monstrous residue that is left is beyond emotion, but with an appetite for it, and a terrible and terrified longing and unsuitability for it. This monstrous residue is beyond friendship, beyond anything. (It is capable of truly marvelous, if ogreish, companionship.)
I have been lectured on this subject, told I am wrong when I say what dregs they are, what dregs we are, what a creeping madness our adulthood becomes. The above has been denied to me by nearly everyone in New York. But surely they must know.
I have no shyness now.
I can without hysterics describe the anal diddling that probably led to the transmission of this virus and to my death: I did go to bed with men, nameless, not famous, men, who could not ask me for anything or blame me for anything or expect revelation from me. I could offer a list of the men I have had (or the women I have had). But the real truth is that in this country sex is not yet regarded as a fact of life.
The arts in the twentieth century have not pictured the reality of actual sex and actual love as they are in life, on actual days, over actual time, but instead have tended to recoin them as, oh, socialist bliss, or as paradise before the nightmare strikes, or as nonexistent (Joyce and Beckett, the sexual yet sexless Irishmen), or as obsession and victimization (Freud and Proust), or as some idyll of heat and whatnot. For me, the greatest portrayer of high-art sexlessness was Balanchine, because he captured and beautified so physically the rage and longing and the attempts to escape loneliness. And then there is Eliot; one should remember that Lawrence was driven out of England while dry, sexless Eliot came to be idolized. And perhaps rightly. Sex, after all, is unwise: look at me. The foolish nature of sexual love is there in front of you, always. Civic duty, ambition, even personal freedom are opposed to it. One appreciates the urge to sanitize and control, the punitive framework and the denial of sexual authenticity. (Think of Jon Vickers’s singing, for instance. He caused embarrassment in American audiences as Sinatra never did. He caused embarrassment in the way Billie Holiday did—people sometimes called her impact sinister.)
But what happens in a competitive city, among people who are clever imitators, students, really (more or less sedulous apes), is that the paucity of such authenticity leads to the constant manufacture of what you might call a sore-nerved and sensitive counterfeit sex. Counterfeit sex is a large part of what New York is. People here rebel by means of a jealous promiscuity, a jealously restless sense of the possible happiness of others. What we have and live with is the institutionalization of sexual terror and sexual envy.
As for me, I will say peevishly that I was never accepted as gay by anyone, including someone who lived with me and claimed to be a lover. I did think that, for me, no decent relations were possible with women back then; the women were rotten with their self-expectation, their notions of femininity, their guilt. And I saw no male role I could play that was acceptable to me. Toward the end of my experience of homosexuality, before I met Ellen, I underwent the most outrageous banishment to a role of sheer, domineering, hated and worshipped masculinity.
I was never handsome. But until I was fifty, I almost never wore clothes in private. My nakedness had all sorts of meanings, including those of a goodish body for a vain man with insufficient money to buy good clothes. And a body to counterweigh the lost head. I stopped being interested in my body five years or so ago when I published Stories in an Almost Classical Mode—it was as neat as that. Now I have the strangest imaginable tie to my own flesh; my body to me is like a crippled rabbit that I don’t want to pet, that I forget to feed on time, that I haven’t time to play with and get to know, a useless rabbit kept in a cage that it would be cruel to turn loose. It doesn’t have a prayer for survival. Or any chance of an easy death. It is mere half-eaten prey. Like a captured snake or rabbit in an Audubon.
But I know people, crippled and uncrippled, who have felt that way all their lives. So I am not complaining now. I am even a bit amused at the irony that I might complain. I am only saying that I am prejudiced toward a nakedness in print—toward embodiment in black-and-white.
Not constantly but not inconstantly either, underneath the sentimentality and obstinacy of my attitudes, are, as you might expect, a quite severe rage and a vast, a truly extensive terror, anchored in contempt for you and for life and for everything. I believe that the world is dying, not just me. And fantasy will save no one. The deathly unreality of Utopia, the merchandizing of Utopia is wicked, deadly really.
Now Ellen and I traded places on physical strength. I wanted to be a good sport about it. In what I once called our regular life, because of the disparity in our sizes (she is nearly a foot shorter and weighs at least sixty pounds less), we had been physically close in a defiant way encoded with all sorts of mutual mockeries and defenses against each other—all of which were still present, in ghostly irony, in pallid nostalgia. The sensitive and tactful nursing she did included a startling respect for what was left of my strength. (This re-created me at moments, as when I woke from a nap in pain.) She wasn’t tearful about its disappearance. She watched it ebb with tenderness. To be honest, it kept as a presence in the raw air a quasi-sexual intimacy.
I understood it but not entirely. The pattern was just the two of us in a room, with her, in her usual defiance of ordinariness, performing a honeymoon-of-death observance with a kind of gravity, a bit like a Japanese ceremonial occasion. Extinction was just a piece of shit off to one side: who gave a shit about death? Everything that mattered was in the pride and utter seriousness of the ceremony. It was a kind of snobbery toward death.
An American male idiom is this fucking intimacy. (The phrase can, as you know, imply a kind of impatience with intimacy as well as the sexual nature of it, depending on your voice and on whether you smile when you say it.) In Ellen, who reconstituted me, this was expressed as a kind of merciful echo of my moods. She was hostess in the narrow hospital room to my mothers, my mothers’ ghosts or spirits, and to the line of fathers, the four millennia of unkillable Jewish males in their conceited stiffneckedness, then to all the dead and dying literary figures, then to all the characters who die in the books I most admire (I can’t bear death scenes in movies)—Prince Andrei and Hadji Murad and Proust’s narrator’s grandmother—and then to all the widowed women back to Andromache or Hecuba. And she made room for the nurses and the nurses’ aides, for the interns and the residents, for Barry. I have never seen such intent or such subtle