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City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s

City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s
By Edmund White

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An irresistible literary treat: a memoir of the social and sexual lives of New York City’s cultural and intellectual in-crowd in the tumultuous 1970s, from acclaimed author Edmund White.

In the New Y ork of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult. Combining the no-holds-barred confession and yearning of A Boy’s Own Story with the easy erudition and sense of place of The Flaneur, this is the story of White’s years in 1970s New York, bouncing from intellectual encounters with Susan Sontag and Harold Brodkey to erotic entanglements downtown to the burgeoning gay scene of artists and writers. I t’s a moving, candid, brilliant portrait of a time and place, full of encounters with famous names and cultural icons.
An esteemed novelist and cultural critic, Edmund White is the author of many books, including the autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story; a previous memoir, My Lives; and most recently a biography of poet Arthur Rimbaud. White lives in New York City and teaches writing at Princeton University.
An irresistible literary treat: a memoir of the social and sexual lives of New York City’s cultural and intellectual in-crowd in the tumultuous 1970s, from acclaimed author Edmund White.

In the New Y ork of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult. Combining the no-holds-barred confession and yearning of A Boy’s Own Story with the easy erudition and sense of place of The Flaneur, this is the story of White’s years in 1970s New York, bouncing from intellectual encounters with Susan Sontag and Harold Brodkey to erotic entanglements downtown to the burgeoning gay scene of artists and writers. I t’s a moving, candid, brilliant portrait of a time and place, full of encounters with famous names and cultural icons.
“[A] moving chronicle . . . that peacock’s tail, those stag’s antlers—they’re here, to be sure, but so are vulnerability, doubt, failure and long years toiling at the sort of cruddy day jobs that most literary writers know all too well . . . In City Boy, White is amusing and raucous as ever but he also lets the mask slip…his losses and struggles, as consequence, seems less sculpted, but more real . . . Some stories don’t need to be embellished to glow.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
"An open-throttled tour of New York City during the bad old days of the 1960s and early '70s . . . it's all here in exacting and eye-popping detail . . . There is a great deal of sex and gossip in City Boy, but it is also a minor-key account of Mr. White's coming of age as a writer . . . City Boy is Mr. White's second memoir in three years, and a great deal of his fiction has been autobiographical. You get the sense of a writer slowly peeling his life like an artichoke, letting only a few stray leaves go at a time . . . This one is salty and buttery, for sure. Mr. White's 'Oh, come on, guys' meekness has vanished into thin air."—The New York Times
 
"Chronicl[es]Gotham’s cultural highs and lows during those two heady and iconic decades . . .
fleshing out our notion of how vital a period the ’60s and ’70s were . . . Since White is a born raconteur, his gimlet-eyed anecdotes about celebrities of the era are as tangy as blood orange sorbet served after lobster Thermidor . . . [he] matches his talent for journalism with brilliant imagistic prose."—Gay City News

"City Boy is an amazing memoir of White’s hunger for literary fame—for publication even—and intellectual esteem in the superheated creative world of ’60s and ’70s New York. His sketches of writers and artists, including everyone from poets James Merrill and John Ashbery to artist Robert Wilson and editor Robert Gottlieb, are full of bon mots, sharply observed details, and great honesty about his own desires for love and esteem. City Boy vividly brings to life the sheer squalor of life in 1970s New York . . . A wonderful raconteur with a well-stocked fund of anecdotes and observations, White’s writings reveal much about alliances, alignments, and personalities from a vanished world that still echo strongly in our own."—This Week in New York

"[An] exuberant, thoughtful memoir. Arriving in 1962 and determined to be famous, [Edmund White] found a job in publishing and got to work on his dream. Away from the office, he dedicated his energy to meeting people (some famous, some not) and, of course, having sex with lots and lots of men. Ambition, amphetamines, neurosis and an era when New York vibrated with desire combined for heady times in his young life . . . White wrestled with self-acceptance as he pursued therapy to reorient himself for a (never-to-be) heterosexual marriage; he admits he was so consumed with internalized self-loathing that he didn't have a clear idea of how he looked. Others, however, did not miss the handsome, eager man in all his '60s and '70s glory, and he made friends easily. White's affectionate yet candid portraits of literary celebrities Richard Howard, Harold Brodkey and Susan Sontag celebrate those friendships, with the eminences coming across as quite distinct from their forbidding pubic personas, even lovable. White got around in less elevated circles too. He saw a lifetime of scandalous acting out that bubbles up in passing remarks like, 'When gay men say in their personals, 'No drama queens, please,' they are trying to avoid someone like Coleman.' Sparkling cameo appearances by the likes of Truman Capote, Robert Mapplethorpe and Fran Lebowitz expand the feeling that artistic Manhattan then was a very different place than it is today. All fun aside, the gadabout boulevardier at some point had to take a back seat to the fiercely ambitious emerging writer. White's vivid analysis of his artistic struggles and literary progress during these years is like a master class for other writers. As he notes, the years of uncertainty helped him develop and refine his themes, otherwise he 'would never have turned toward writing with a burning desire to confess, to understand, to justify myself in the eyes of others.' Many readers of his landmark novel, A Boy's Own Story, will sit up at attention when he links his goal of writing 'a modern tragedy in which there were two choices and both were bad' to Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen. That like-minded connection to Bowen also serves to explain his insistence that any truly satisfying work of literature must embrace a mysterious element of charm. Let it be known that White's memoir takes that lesson to heart and has charm to burn."—John McFarland, Shelf Awareness

"A graceful memoir of a decidedly ungraceful time in the life of New York City . . . A welcome port

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #8016 in Books
  • Published on: 2009-09-29
  • Released on: 2009-09-29
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 304 pages

Features

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Novelist and critic White (A Boy's Own Story; The Joy of Gay Sex) weaves erotic encounters and long-ago literati into a vast tapestry of Manhattan memories. He arrived from the Midwest in 1962, worked at Time-Life Books, haunted the Gotham Book Mart and went street cruising: We had to seek out most of our men on the hoof. In 1970, he quit his job to live in Rome, returning to find sexual abundance in New York. An editor with Saturday Review and Horizon, White knew artists, writers and poets, yet his own writing remained at the starting gate. He fictionalized Fire Island rituals for his first novel, Forgetting Elena (1971), which took years to find a publisher and then sold only 600 copies. Nabokov later labeled it a marvelous book, ranking White along with Updike and Robbe-Grillet. His second novel, about hetero/homosexual friendships, was never published, yet he longed for literary celebrity. How he overcame setbacks and confronted his insecurities to eventually write 23 books makes for fascinating reading. Along the way, he notes how Fun City became Fear City with the AIDS crisis, and he recalls meeting everyone from Borges, Burroughs and Capote to Peggy Guggenheim, John Ashbery, Susan Sontag, Robert Mapplethorpe and Jasper Johns. White writes with a simple, fluid style, and beneath his patina of pain, a refreshing honesty emerges. This is a brilliant recreation of an era, rich in revels, revolutions and leather boys leading the human tidal wave. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by by Michael Lindgren The central truth about American manhood, the one that drives writing from Whitman to Hemingway to Roth, is that our secret inner nature is always in flux, always being questioned, evaluated and redefined. To be a man is to have your soul crammed into a coarse, needy and often unreliable physical apparatus and then beset by a daunting and contradictory set of imperatives and expectations, not least the acknowledgment that the accident of your gender has favored you with a substantial head start. That's why the most swaggering man-child can, if pricked in precisely the right spot, implode in a swirl of self-doubt. Don't tell anyone, but we're all just faking it. The authors of these three memoirs are expert fakers indeed. Edmund White's writing of the past quarter-century adds up to a story of inner life repressed and then bursting forth into full expressive flower, as well as a neat encapsulation of the history of gay subculture. White's often clumsy but essentially sweet-natured City Boy (Bloomsbury, $26) relates his years in a New York City riddled with crime and drugs but all the more vital and electric for its desperation and violence. He's eloquent on the horrific psychic cost of closeted gay identity, pre-Stonewall: "Half the time that we were claiming our gay rights we were really whistling in the dark, trying to convince ourselves we weren't really public menaces or monsters." By his own admission relentlessly promiscuous, White writes with graphic relish about the fetish-dominated sexuality of the downtown gay scene, as well as giving vivid and occasionally acidic character studies of such famous peers as James Merrill, Thom Gunn, Robert Mapplethorpe and Susan Sontag. But for an iconic writer of his stature, the prose in "City Boy" is often borderline incoherent and riddled with repetition, and its gossipy tone will be either catnip or castor oil to readers, depending upon their age, orientation and level of cultural curiosity. If White is all funk and sweat, then Paul Rudnick is all Jewish-boy-made-good humor and heart. As it happens, Rudnick got his start in the same scarifying milieu that White did, but the two might as well be describing different planets for all that their accounts of '70s New York have in common. A screenwriter and staple of the New Yorker's "Shouts and Murmurs" column, Rudnick has a shtick that is as reliable and surprising as a whoopee cushion. Granted, a gay New Jersey Jew in a convent (researching "Sister Act," a screenplay he ultimately disowned) is practically its own punch line, but Rudnick is a likable and accomplished raconteur who never loses sight of his own absurdity in I Shudder: And Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey (Harper, $23.99). The most successful chapters of Rudnick's book relate the fictional adventures of his alter ego, Elyot Vionnet, a fussy, aging boulevardier who gleefully enacts superhero-like vengeance on the dimwitted and the tasteless. All in all, Rudnick is so glib and weightless as to make David Sedaris seem like Samuel Beckett, but only the most sour and jaded reader will be able to resist him. Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs (Harper, $25.99) is an entirely different animal: thoughtful, perceptive and maybe just a little dull. A "liberal agnostic empiricist" who is "proud to be a semi-observant, bacon-eating Jew," Chabon offers accounts of grappling with the complexities of modern manhood -- from the dreaded "drug talk" with one's children to the double standards inherent in male parenting -- all propelled by the shimmering prose that won him the Pulitzer Prize. Chabon is not the first writer to find humor in feckless attempts at home improvement, but he is probably the only one capable of locating its source in Rudyard Kipling's "code of high-Victorian masculinity in whose fragmentary shadow American men still come of age." As winning as Chabon's meditations are in these essays, many of which were first published in Details magazine, contrarians may detect a whiff of the much-loathed Hipster Dad persona, especially when he reveals that he and his son own matching vintage Dr. Who T-shirts (ouch). Chabon is so wise and generous-spirited that one occasionally wishes he would crack and come out in favor of schoolyard fisticuffs, say, or turning his son's future over to the Marine Corps. In the end, though, like all of us grown-up boys -- Jew or gentile, gay or straight, urban or rural -- he's just trying to do the best he can.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review

“[A] moving chronicle…that peacock’s tail, those stag’s antlers—they’re here, to be sure, but so are vulnerability, doubt, failure and long years toiling at the sort of cruddy day jobs that most literary writers know all too well…In City Boy, White is amusing and raucous as ever but he also lets the mask slip…his losses and struggles, as consequence, seems less sculpted, but more real….Some stories don’t need to be embellished to glow.”  - New York Times Book Review
 
"An open-throttled tour of New York City during the bad old days of the 1960s and early '70s… it's all here in exacting and eye-popping detail… There is a great deal of sex and gossip in City Boy, but it is also a minor-key account of Mr. White's coming of age as a writer… City Boy is Mr. White's second memoir in three years, and a great deal of his fiction has been autobiographical. You get the sense of a writer slowly peeling his life like an artichoke, letting only a few stray leaves go at a time… This one is salty and buttery, for sure. Mr. White's 'Oh, come on, guys' meekness has vanished into thin air." - New York Times
 
"City Boy is an amazing memoir of White’s hunger for literary fame — for publication even — and intellectual esteem in the superheated creative world of ’60s and ’70s New York. His sketches of writers and artists, including everyone from poets James Merrill and John Ashbery to artist Robert Wilson and editor Robert Gottlieb, are full of bon mots, sharply observed details, and great honesty about his own desires for love and esteem. City Boy vividly brings to life the sheer squalor of life in 1970s New York… A wonderful raconteur with a well-stocked fund of anecdotes and observations, White’s writings reveal much about alliances, alignments, and personalities from a vanished world that still echo strongly in our own." - This Week in New York

“Edmund White is no one-trick pony. The prolific novelist, critic, memoirist, gay activist, professor and social aspirant has waded into countless literary and intellectual pools and sent visible ripples through each. White's latest book, a ruminative and rambling memoir of his time in New York City in the 1970s, takes readers on a dime tour through the writer's initiation into circles that spun with such blinding talents as Susan Sontag, Richard Howard, John Ashbery, Michel Foucault, even Vladimir Nabokov and Anthony Burgess… City Boy presents an exhilarating sketch of the grizzled, untamed and dangerous way of life that was New York in the 1960s and '70s… His New York was …a place where high and low collided in an irreproducible frisson of ecstatic creativity… White's reflections on what it meant to be an out ‘gay’ writer at a time when there was no such thing are valuable and illuminating… We're lucky for [his] pioneering work… White's latest reflection offers a valuable glimpse into the mind of an indispensable writer and critic.” —Buffalo News

"The 1960s and 70s were a pivotal time for gay men, a time when homosexuals made history by redefining their role in society at large by standing up for the basic human rights we enjoy today – and then there's all that rampant, unbridled sex on the Chelsea piers. Popular gay historian, novelist, memoirist and survivor Edmund White takes us there in style in City Boy…. In his own classy, restrained, inimitable style, Edmund White presents graceful ruminations on an ungraceful time as one forgotten decade casts a long shadow on the one that followed. Simply put, this book is a gem, and if time travel were indeed a possibility, White would make the ultimate tour guide." —Bay Area Reporter
 
"Chronicl[es] Gotham’s cultural highs and lows during those two heady and iconic decades...
fleshing out our notion of how vital a period the ’60s and ’70s were... Since White is a born raconteur, his gimlet-eyed anecdotes about celebrities of the era are as tangy as blood orange sorbet served after lobster Thermidor... [he] matches his talent for journalism with brilliant imagistic prose." —Gay City News

“A colorfully detailed remembrance…with his novelist’s brilliance in turns of phrase in evoking these places, [White] also recalls the many celebrated writers he encountered over the years in his slow climb to writerly success. A special invitation to a world gone by.” —Booklist

“Novelist and critic White weaves erotic encounters and long-ago literati into a vast tapestry of Manhattan memories… How he overcame setbacks and confronted his insecurities to eventually write 23 books makes for fascinating reading…White writes with a simple, fluid style, and beneath his patina of pain, a refreshing honesty emerges. This is a brilliant recreation of an era, rich in revels, revolutions and ‘leather boys leading the human tidal wave.’” —Publishers Weekly

"A graceful memoir of a decidedly ungraceful time in the life of New York City... A welcome portrait of a time and place long past, and much yearned for." —Kirkus Reviews
 
"[An] exuberant, thoughtful memoir. ...Ambition, amphetamines, neurosis and an era when New York vibrated with desire combined for heady times in his young life... Sparkling cameo appearances by the likes of Truman Capote, Robert Mapplethorpe and Fran Lebowitz expand the feeling that artistic Manhattan then was a very different place than it is today... White's vivid analysis of his artistic struggles and literary progress during these years is like a master class for other writers... [His] memoir ... has charm to burn." —Shelf Awareness

Customer Reviews

New York Days -- And Nights4
In Edmund White's latest book he fleshes out-- no pun intended-- material he has covered previously in MY LIVES, the time he spent in New York in the 1960's and 70's. It was the time that Brad Gooch has labeled "the golden age of promiscuity" in his novel by the same name and that Susan Sontag-- one of the people White writes extensively about-- describes as the only time in human history when people "were free to have sex when and how they wanted," because of access to birth control pills and before the advent of AIDS. Sontag wrote a recommendation for White's groundbreaking novel A BOY'S OWN STORY but asked that her blurb be removed from editions that appeared after she severed her friendship with him because he modeled a character on her in his novel CARACOLE, the only White novel that I have never been able to read. Besides Sontag, he writes about dozens of people he knew during this period: Robert Mapplethorpe, who used the N word; William Burroughs, whom White deliciously describes as having "the look of an unsuccessful Kansas Undertaker"; Jasper Johns; Thom Gunn; Lillian Hellman; John Ashberry; James Merrill et al. Never having met any of these people-- getting Mapplethorpe to sign a book doesn't count-- I have no idea whether or not White's descriptions of these individuals are accurate nor not. He certainly convinces you, however, that they are. Since White is now as famous as many of the people he discusses, he can hardly be called a name-dropper, a word, as he tells us, that does not exist in the French language.

White also chronicles his days at Time-Life as well as other dull jobs and of course his nights of sex as well: "We tried to trick every night, if we could do it efficiently, but we reserved the weekends for our serious hunting sorties." He certainly is not shy about what he calls his self-hatred and low self-esteem and wonders about his "impulses toward treachery, especially toward people who's helped me and befriended me. A BOY'S OWN STORY ends with the boy (me) betraying his teacher, a man with whom he had sex."

White writes beautifully-- as he always does on any subject-- about lovers versus friends with friendship the winner: "I always placed a high value on friendship, but even I had no way of guessing back then that it was more fun to get drunk with a friend than with a lover. Love is a source of anxiety until it is a source of boredom; only friendship feeds the spirit." In the 1970's the New Yorkers White knew separated love, friendship and sex. "The division of labor gave the starring role to friendship."

In the closing pages of CITY BOY White discusses the advent of AIDS, his being the first president of GMHC and Larry Kramer's founding of ACT UP-- "We were naive, but there was no way to be sophisticated about an unprecedented plague"-- and says simply that AIDS killed most of his circle, a statement that many of us far away from New York understand all too well. I cannot call up my best and oldest friend for many years and tell him to read Edmund White's latest book since he died in the first wave of AIDS-related deaths while the President of the United States remained silent.



City Bore2
First, I do admit that I bought this book partially because I was interested in the nether tales of the sexual freedom of the 60s and 70s in New York and the gay subculture as it was then called. White does occasionally pepper his book with some of these raunchy tidbits from chapter to chapter along with some good, campy humor. However, this turns out to be a cleaver device to revive the reader's languishing interest as White drops names to no end and fills pages and pages in between with unbecoming attempts to convince someone... anyone, that he really is/was a very well-read, avant-garde intellectual.

It seems obvious that since no one has "tooted" Mr. White's "horn" for such a long time and never as long and hard as he would prefer, he has no qualms vigorously doing so himself... and in public! Although, the book starts out well, he freely admits early on that it was his desire for recognition and fame (no big surprise there) which drove him to write (not the actual art of telling a story or writing itself). What doesn't seem to dawn on him is the simplest concept which he has managed to miss for quite some time and that is that we, the audience, read books because they are interesting and thought provoking.

I expected better and this could have been a wonderful opportunity to experience what it was like to be gay in the 60s and 70s through the eyes of someone who was there. However, and unfortunately, I have only two words that aptly describe this book and these two words apply to many of my insecure gay friends whose lives revolve around getting attention and constant attempts to upstage others in order to prove their worth: pretentious queen.

Actually, this book personifies all that is detestable and especially unrealistic about a significant portion of our community (New York particularly) and with the recent trouncing of a chance for marriage equality in New York, is a perfect example of the attitudes of denial and delusion which have greatly contributed to the defeat of equal rights well into the twenty-first century.

Shades of gray5
Nostalgia is one of those funny compositions of humanness...one can see it in the faces of those who wear it....slightly sad eyes with an upturned little smile. This is how I picture Edmund White while writing his incredibly expressive "City Boy". Reading his collection of remembrances of New York in the sixties and seventies is akin to overhearing a conversation he must be having with a friend or a shrink. It's intimate and just warm enough. A lasting pleasure would be to have him read this book to me or, for that matter, any other reader.

The author enjoys being in the midst of celebrity and indeed "City Boy" is a literary panoply of those recollections. While his men often appear to be troubled and smaller than life, (though sometimes closer) the women are as troubled but loom larger. His paragraphs on Peggy Guggenheim open the book up to its first real humor and Susan Sontag's emergence toward the end is frightfully funny. (White loves to toss in the occasional French idiom and one must like a writer who uses "palimpsest"... a word that could have been designed by a committee)

While reflection is central to White's thinking, there is a wonderfully hurried aspect to his narrative....as if the clock will run out before the book is finished. He correctly notes that New York today is unrecognizable from the New York in the seventies in which he lived. For me, the most remarkable thing about "City Boy" is the fact that while White is gay (and tells about it) most of that is transcended by relationships themselves. Gay, as a "condition" of life, is a component, though an important one, of a broader "way" of life. That propels his writing and keeps the reader focused and wanting more.

For those of us lucky to have known the gray days of the seventies in New York, "City Boy" is an accurate depiction of that decade. Those days of ultimate sexual freedom, before AIDS, was a heady time of hope, wonder and excitement. Edmund White captures it all and I highly recommend this book.