City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s by Edmund White Read Free Book Online Page A

father of contemporary art (not Picasso, as we’d so long imagined)? Ironically, only in retrospect could anyone be sure what the true path had been.
    The evolution in fiction was less obvious, though it did seem that the novel was steadily moving away from realism and that the most vital new novels were inventing new forms, new language, new strategies. We were all bewitched by Donald Barthelme’s bejeweled word collages in which nothing was predictable, everything was surprising to the point of headiness.
    I was so convinced of these notions that in some of my first book reviews I haughtily dismissed any novel that struck me as old-fashioned—until I was asked to review a collection of stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. His way of narrating a story, his love of strange and telling details, his humanity (joined unexpectedly witha bracing lack of sentimentality), all bewitched me. This stuff wasn’t new formally, I conceded, but it was obviously good. I decided to put aside my art-historical preconceptions and to embrace what was inarguably great.
    Because of Singer I became interested (through an illogical and strictly private set of associations) in the Great Russians—Tolstoy and Chekhov, Turgenev and Gogol and, as best as I could make him out in translation, Pushkin. For two years I immersed myself during every free moment in these authors. I’d put behind the avant-garde tricksters I’d so recently admired, who now struck me as nothing but classy jugglers. Their cleverness shrank into insignificance next to the pathos and clear-eyed universalism of Tolstoy and Chekhov. I was in my late twenties and early thirties and at that point still had an excellent memory, an entirely involuntary and untrained gift, like good eyesight. My living guide to these writers was Nabokov, whose lectures on literature had not yet been published but whose interviews had been collected in Strong Opinions . Like Nabokov I dismissed Dostoyevsky, just as Nabokov convinced me to skip over Conrad and Faulkner in English. At about this time the great Russian scholar Simon Karlinsky published in TriQuarterly an essay called “The Other Tradition,” which rejected the “radical utilitarianism” prevalent in Russia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (all that social uplift, which anticipated socialist realism) in favor of a more purely artistic tradition: Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov and Nabokov. I read Chekhov’s letters to Gorky in which he instructed him not to try to be inventive in his descriptions of nature. He told him to stick to expressions such as “the sun set” or “the snow began to fall.” Simon Karlinsky’s and Michael Henry Heim’s annotations to Chekhov’s letters constituted the best biography of the short-story master that existed—and one of the most fascinating books about literature published at that time. My immersion in Russian literature was sototal that when I met Karlinsky, he told me that I could easily pass the Ph.D. orals in Russian—except for the inconvenient fact that I knew not a word of the language.
    It is difficult to convey the intensity and confusion in our minds back then in the sixties and early seventies as we tried to reconcile two incompatible tendencies—a dandified belief in the avant-garde with a utopian New Left dedication to social justice, both of which in my case could be overruled by an admiration of the simple humanity of the Great Russians or Singer. Looking back now, I’d say that because we were Americans emerging from the stultifying 1950s, we were extraordinarily naïve about both politics and esthetics—humorless, unseasoned, dogmatic because untested. What was shared by these two doctrines—the continuing (and endless) avant-garde and radical politics—was an opposition to the society around us, which we judged to be both philistine and selfish. America had changed in seismic ways in the decades that preceded us, but we knew little or nothing about these forgotten