All Those Lonely Intellectuals

Edmund White recalls sociologist and author Dick Sennett, who lived in a converted stables off Washington Square where he entertained the Sontags and Foucaults who regularly dropped in.

“No one paid much attention to the food or the liberal lashings of plonk. It was all a plush background for the startling mondaine reality in the frame: the good talk and the promise of even better talk.

“Dick knew not to quiz the great about their Subjects, their Accomplishments, but rather to tease them about their secret Vices, their hidden charms, their unheralded powers of Seduction. He was always grabbing the hoary hand of a grizzled Oxford don and saying, ‘Oh, what a naughty pussycat you are! Aren’t you? Aren’t you? Such evil, evil naughty thoughts — and Deeds! Yes, Deeds, Mr. Pussy-Boy. Okay, everyone, ´å table, ´å table, and remember: Paws up!’

“No one quite knew what paws up meant, but it sounded like a cross between an eating club slogan and a half-forgotten piece of nursery (or else Masonic) mummery.

“All those lonely intellectuals, their eyes hollowed out from years of reading microfiches and medieval script, from gabbling to themselves over tinned beans and Bovril in unheated Rooms, were now being stroked and feted and fed. They were like feral cats being tickled behind the ears for the first time. They were purring, though still looking around anxiously for the next boot in the rear, the next nasty review by a rival in the Times Literary Supplement. Nor did Dick invite just the old and famous. He knew they needed young and lovely nobodies to make a fuss over them.”

I had to look up “mondaine,” a sociological term meaning “characteristic of fashionable society; worldly.” Indeed. I also had to research “Bovril.” Sounds like dreadful stuff.

— Edmund White, “City Boy”

The Gems Among the Jaspers

Reading about Jasper Johns in Edmund White's memoir prompted me to look up his art. Intriguing, in terms of both visual pleasure and ironic cultural comment.

Solitude and Sunlight

"Morning Sun" by Edward Hopper

“She loved solitude and needed it as a plant needs light.”

— Edmund White, “City Boy”

Young in the White City

Greenwich Village in 1971

In the 1970s in New York everyone slept till noon.

It was a grungy, dangerous, bankrupt city without normal services most of the time. The garbage piled up and stank during long strikes of the sanitation workers. A major blackout led to days and days of looting. We gay guys wore whistles around our necks so we could summon help from other gay men when we were attacked on the streets by gangs living in the projects between Greenwich Village and the West Side leather bars.

The upside was that the city was inexpensive, and Manhattan, especially the part of it below Fourteenth Street, was full of young actors-singers-dancers-waiters who made enough money working their restaurant shifts three nights a week to pay for their acting lessons and their cheap rents. Unlike our hometowns back in the Midwest, where the sidewalk was rolled up at six p.m., the delis and coffee shops were open all night and the bars till four in the morning. That whole army of actor-waiters saw their restaurant jobs as just another opportunity for “scene study” (“Who am I tonight? An Austrian aristocrat who’s fallen on bad times? A runaway from an incestuous family in the Tennessee hills? A Swedish gymnast?”)

No matter how big their tips were, they managed to drink them away in a bar after the restaurants closed as they talked excitedly about their art and their loves. Everyone smoked all the time, and when you French-kissed someone, it was like rubbing one ashtray against another.

New York seemed either frightening or risible to the rest of the nation…

Source: “City Boy,” Edmund White’s memoir