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

changes. The twenties had seen mass migrations of African-Americans from the South to the industrial cities of the North. In the thirties much of the country had been unemployed, poor, and spoiling for a fight. The fight came unexpectedly in the forties in the form of a world war; domestically the war had meant women went to work in offices and factories as young men were killing and dying in the trenches. The fifties—the period of my adolescence—had put all these rebellious impulses to sleep; it had functioned as a soporific to the spirit. I’d belonged to the Eisenhower Club at the YMCA, and General MacArthur’s farewell tour (after he was fired by President Truman for his excessive martial zeal in Korea) was one of the significant events of my youth—he came to our town! I saw him! The arts were actually flourishing during the 1950s in America, but almost secretly. The museums were empty, the concert halls were dedicated to no one more adventurous than the three B’s—Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. People read and discussed the same ten “serious” novels every season. During the student shows at the Cranbrook Art Academy, the Detroit public came to scoff at the messy, scary abstract paintings—and the students stayed to scoff at the scoffers.
    Marilyn seldom applied her theoretical acumen to her own development as a painter. I can’t recall her ever discussing the art-historical underpinnings of her work—or the changes in her work. She admired Richard Diebenkorn, the California painter, because he’d returned to figurative art when everyone on the East Coast was still resolutely nonrepresentational. She liked the way he painted those California excesses of sunlight and their blue, accumulating shadows. She loved Bonnard, whom the New York critics could never quite place in the first rank. She was an improbable kind of Midwestern German sensualist. Not that she surrendered to the appeal of luxury or decadence, but rather she followed her nose and her eyes and her sense of touch and taste toward what intrigued her in some direct, unmediated way.
    Perhaps because I lived in a world made of words, I half envied Marilyn her wide-open senses. She was alert to the beauty of the everyday, even the banal. She’d go into raptures over something anyone else would have considered ugly, but not out of perversity or an inverse snobbery. She would suddenly be struck by some purely visual aspect of something—a wonderful passage of brickwork or a slice of Tiepolo-blue sky above a windowless wedge of black buildings or the weave of metal in a manhole cover, the dissolving steam exhaled by a subway grate, or a kitschy but carefully done memorial wall hanging of John F. Kennedy in a Puerto Rican beauty shop on Columbus Avenue.
    The New York School poets (John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler) were hymning the city in the same casual, shrugging, but secretly precise terms. In “An East Window on Elizabeth Street,”Schuyler writes, “I don’t know how/it can look so miraculous and alive/an organic skin for the stacked cubes of air.” Later he writes:
Mutable, delicate, expendable, ugly, mysterious
(seven stories of just bathroom windows)
packed: a man asleep, a woman slicing garlic thinly into oil
(what a stink, what a wonderful smell)
burgeoning with stacks, pipes, ventilators, tensile antennae—
that gristling gray bit is a part of a bridge,
that mesh hangar on a roof is to play games under.
But why should a metal ladder climb, straight
and sky aspiring, five rungs above a stairway hood
up into nothing?
    Marilyn had a two-room apartment on the West Side between Riverside and West End that she was endlessly decorating, then stripping and filling up again. Bits of savage finery, a blue feather on a bone, would hang on the burlap wall above a massive bedouin bracelet with its brass welts and multiple locks, like some horrible chastity device. She had a kneehole round table that her father had made her of good pale oak