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| Mirror image? | Theo Hobson Photography and film, once thought of as tools of rationalism, in fact reflect our fantasies and our fallennessWhat is the relationship between religion and photography? I pondered this as I visited the current exhibition at the British Library, Points of View: Capturing the 19th Century in Photographs. Photography is a tool of rationalism, surely? It encourages us to focus on the real world around us, and so helps to discredit imaginary worlds. And it is a tool of political progress, surely, a democratic leveling medium? In the late 19th century secular humanists must have seen photography as a gift from providence.The first clue that things are less straightforward is the group of spiritualist photographs, taken during séances. These are portraits of the customers, who included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with ghostly apparitions of their dead loved ones hovering in the background. They had to send the studio a photograph of their dearly departed in advance, but this seems not to have excited their scepticism.This hardly counts as photography, some might reply: it is a perversion of its benign truth-telling power. But things are less clear-cut than that. Consider the many "ethnographic" photographs on display. A barebreasted African woman stands in front of a measuring chart, impassively. There can be few better snapshots of the underbelly of science, which is so innocently sure that it is simply recording the facts, serving nothing but enlightenment.Because photography is in the hands of humans it is a mirror of fantasy and fallenness. Pornography is perhaps the best example: it gives the lustful gaze new authority. The same is true of the moving image of course. We see has only the most rudimentary moving images, of horses jerkily trotting. The history of cinema lies ahead, including those Nuremberg spectaculars.This exhibition ought to be more honest and have a final display showing Hitler doing his magic, and a selection of the internet porn that most of us are fairly ignorant of, but is a cultural staple of the average teenager, moulding his view of humanity. This medium has brought out our fallenness like no other: let's admit it.Later the same day I was prompted to ponder a related question: can religion make positive use of the moving image? I attended the launch of a series of little biblical films, for use in churches. You can see a sample here. Instead of someone reading a passage from the Bible, one of these films can be shown. They are directed by David Batty, who has made many religious documentaries. Introducing one of these films he said that the aim was to create "stained-glass windows for the 21st century." It will be interesting to see whether they catch on. Some vicars use the occasional film clip to kick off a sermon: they may like the idea of a cinematically accompanied reading. Anything that helps wandering minds to focus on the text of the day is perhaps worth trying, even if it involves a slight aura of Hollywood.But there are dangers in offering images along with the biblical words. I was watching the film alongside a man who knew London's black majority churches very well. I asked him if they might appeal to this audience. "I don't think so, the cast is too Eurocentric," he said. It was a useful reminder that images tend to pin a narrative down: they perhaps make it more vivid, more dramatic, but they may make it in some ways more alien.ReligionPhotographyBritish LibraryExhibitionsTheo Hobsonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Poster poems: Englynion Britain's equivalent of the haiku is your challenge this time, with a number of fiendish variations availableIt's short, based on strict rules of syllable count, and British; in fact the englyn (plural form englynion) is among the oldest indigenous verse forms in the Welsh tongue, dating back at least as far as the 9th century Juvencus Englynion, a verse paraphrase of the Gospels.So, why aren't englynion as popular with contemporary poets as the haiku? Well, the first problem that faces the would-be englynist is that it isn't a single fixed form. The earliest englynion, for instance, are written in three-line stanzas, each line of seven syllables, with a single end rhyme, thus:_ _ _ _ _ _ a_ _ _ _ _ _ a_ _ _ _ _ _ aThis is the form known as the englyn milwr.Straightforward enough, you might think. There is, however, another three-line version, the englyn penfyr, with a more elaborate rhyme scheme. In this form, the first line is 10 syllables long, and the second and third are seven syllables each. The final word of the first line must be polysyllabic and must rhyme with the first word of the second line. The second and third lines have end rhyme:_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ aa _ _ _ _ _ b_ _ _ _ _ _ bThe rhymes can be full or you can use assonance or alliteration. Easy, isn't it?The three-line englyn soon evolved into a four-line stanza, an evolution that can be seen in the well-known Englyn on Padarn's Staff. Of course, these quatrains wouldn't be englynion if they didn't come in all kinds of shapes and forms. Perhaps the most common is the englyn cyrch, four seven-syllable lines of which lines one, two and four rhyme and the end of line three has an internal rhyme in line four:_ _ _ _ _ _ a_ _ _ _ _ _ a_ _ _ _ _ _ b_ _ _ b _ _ aThe englyn lleddfbroest also has four seven-syllable lines, rhyming a-a-a-a. Naturally, this is far too easy, so the rhymes have to be on dipthongs (in Welsh, ae, oe, wy, ei). The englyn proest dalgron follows an almost identical pattern, except that the syllables with the dipthongs are consonant rather than rhyming. The englyn proest gadwynog seeks to combine these two forms, dropping the dipthong requirement and having lines one and three rhyming and lines two and four consonant. There are two further four-line englynion, the englyn unodle crwca and the englyn unodle union, but please don't ask me to explain them!If the englyn is the British equivalent of the haiku, then the great Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym is its Basho. However, it would be a mistake to imagine that the form is dead, a relic of some distant medieval past. It is very much alive and current in Welsh poetry and a number of English-language poets have tried their hands at it. For example, Richard Caddel's Nine Englynion is clearly based on the Juvencus form, with the syllable count retained but the rhyme pattern dropped. And so this month's challenge is to add to the body of English englynion. You may want to stick rigidly to one or more of the traditional variants, or you may, like many western haiku writers, take a more flexible approach. The choice is yours, but one way or another let the englynion roll.PoetryBilly Millsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
A grand old lady of letters The doyenne of English literature has fascinating tales to tell, not least of her dealings with some of the greatest writers of the century and her own ménage à trois with a playwright and his young lover. Here she talks to Tim Adams with the same piercing candour she brings to her new volume of memoirsDiana Athill, at 91, is widely praised for her honesty, but as with all exacting writers she is as interesting for what she leaves out as what she puts in. "Honesty is really guesswork, isn't it?" she wonders aloud. One of the things she is in denial about is being a writer at all. In her attic flat overlooking Primrose Hill in north London, the evidence is hard to ignore, however. It's on the table in front of us: Life Class, a 800-page volume of memoirs, selected from four of her books. "I hate that fat book," she says, with feeling, quietly scrutinising my reaction. "I'm just an amateur, really I am."Athill's conviction in this assertion has its foundation in the "proper" authors she worked with in 50 years as the senior editor at the literary publisher André Deutsch: Philip Roth, Jean Rhys, VS Naipaul, Brian Moore, John Updike and many others. She remembers how the Irish novelist Moore used to tell her never to marry a writer: if he was not writing it'd be hell and he'd be wanting to shoot himself. And if he was he'd be in so deep he'd forget he had a wife. "I think," she says, brightly, "that is what convinces me that I must be an amateur. Writing is supposed to be torture isn't it? But I absolutely adore doing it."Athill first started writing more than 50 years ago, a collection of stories, and then a memoir of her life up to the age of 42, Instead of a Letter. That book was an act of self-therapy as much as anything. It recounted, in flinty detail, the humiliating stain that had clouded her privileged youth – daughter of an army colonel, large family estate in Norfolk – and that she had been unable to erase. Athill was jilted. She had been hopelessly in love from the age of 15 with an Oxford graduate named Tony Irvine, who came to tutor her brother. By the time she was at Oxford herself, and Irvine was a pilot in the RAF, they were engaged, but the marriage was never to be. The war began, and Irvine, who had so lovingly set out the promises of their future together, abruptly stopped replying to Athill's letters. She heard nothing from him for two years, during which the pain was like "a finger crushed under the door, or a tooth under a drill", and then he wrote briefly, asking to be relieved of their engagement because he was marrying someone else. Soon after that, Irvine was killed in action. Athill subsequently lost a part of herself, for 20 years, in emptiness and disastrous affairs, 20 years in which her "soul shrank to the size of a pea". It was only through writing about it all that she surfaced again properly, found her voice. But then, just as suddenly, she gave it up."If I had something bad happen to me, then I needed to write so it would get better," she says now. "But then when for a while bad things stopped happening, I didn't have anything to write."Her more recent memoirs were begun after she had left André Deutsch – who had never paid her anything much – and was pretty much penniless, living in this flat in a house owned by her cousin. She published her first, Stet, in which she told the story of her working life, nine years ago, and two more volumes – Yesterday Morning, mostly about her parents' unhappy marriage, and Somewhere Towards the End, about approaching 90 – have followed, to great and warranted acclaim. Having spent a career nurturing the careers of other writers, Athill is now in the curious position of literary celebrity herself, which, to her surprise, she hugely enjoys. She is in hot demand on the festival circuit, where people say two things to her. The first, which baffles her, is that she is "such an inspiration". The other, without fail, (and whispered) is, "Do you mind my asking, how do you keep such wonderful skin?"The morning I visit her she is suffering with a cold, and irritated that she has had to abandon plans to fly to Canada where she was due to share a platform with the writer Alice Munro. "This is the first time I have had to cancel anything," she says. "I have been packing myself with antibiotics. But I got up yesterday and I felt so weak I knew I had to say no. So I think it is coming."By "it" she means the end of book events and everything else, but she notes this, like she says everything, evenly and frankly and with an element of curiosity. Her singularity, as the books attest, has been hard won, but she wears it now with some pride. Her memory is her accomplishment; lapses make her anxious. She talks of a recent trip "up north to Wigton with a gang of young people" from her publisher, Granta. "We were all singing silly songs. I tried to remember "The Captain Bold from Halifax". And I couldn't get it right. But then I woke up the next morning and the whole thing was in my head." She sings it now for me in an unfaltering voice:"The Captain bold from Halifax would leave his married quartersTo see a girl, who hanged herself, one morning with her garters.His wicked conscience smited him, he lost his stomach dailyHe took to drinking turpentine and thinking of Miss BaileyOh unfortunate Miss Bailey… "It's funny what stays with us. As she is singing, I can't help feeling that Athill's own life has something of the texture of a barrack-room ballad, though she has avoided the darkest fates. Reading her memoirs in one volume is to have a sense of life as pain mitigated by time. There is a sense of wicked humour in many of her recollections, occasional bright flashes of possibility, an exhilarating sharpness to her voice, but it is the hurt, and her resilience in the face of it, that remains with you.Athill has applied to herself one or two times Graham Greene's observation that all writers need a "chip of ice" at their heart. The question that her books never answer, quite, is whether that ice was something she was born with or learned.She calls it her beady eye. "There was always a watcher somewhere in me," she says. "Before I ever dreamt of being a writer, when I was in my teens, I remember saying to somebody, 'I keep on hoping that something will one day happen to me, that will matter so much that I won't see myself as foreign to everybody.'"The first thing her beady eye fell on was her parents, whose relationship informed all that followed. As well as being a portrait of a life in letters, Athill's writing is a careful unpicking of the emotional strictures of a particular class at a particular time. Her mother had been undone by an affair not long after she married, torn up with guilt, which she buried. She told her daughter about it the day after her husband, Athill's father, died, though Athill had found out long before."The worst of it was my father went on adoring her, and she would be irritated by that all the time and there would be dreadful quarrels. You have no idea how that affects children. When I was a little girl I had poor health, lots of stomach problems; later my grandmother said to me, 'You were a poorly little girl; it all made you so upset.' I had never put those things together but, looking back, she was right. You were always waiting as a child for the next time that things would blow up. Children find that unbearable to cope with."Did the absence of love at home infect her own relationships, does she think?"I think it did, a great deal. My mother was completely innocent when she got married. She was a normal, sexy, healthy girl but when a young man kissed her at a dance she thought she must marry him. But then it pretty quickly became clear I suppose that they weren't in the least compatible sexually. I have a feeling my father was a pretty hopeless lover, a parson's son. Poor thing. It is sad to think about, all those years together."Her father wrote well, an elegant account for the Royal Geographical Society of a journey he took to Abyssinia. Her mother was a wonderful gardener, very good with animals and believed poetry to be a lot of nonsense.Talking to her, reading her books, you get the sense that Athill measured much of her life against that maternal briskness. "You are not the only pebble on the beach," her mother would say. Athill's own candidness did not come easily as a result, and it was always an act of defiance. Her mother was still very much alive when she published Instead of a Letter, a book which catalogued Athill's own promiscuity and an abortion. How did she react?"I did a rather sly thing," Athill recalls. "I had an American publisher who wanted to do it, so I did it there first, so none of her friends would read it. I sent that edition to her. And I heard nothing at all. For ages. We were going to stay together with a godmother of mine, and I planned to ask her what she thought. But I couldn't. And then I was driving her home, so I thought I would do it then. And then it was: after supper I'll ask her. During supper my brother phoned to speak to her. And she put me on the phone and he said, 'Mother was going to tell you never to publish that book, and I told her not to be so damn silly."'And then, she says, a remarkable thing happened. They sat down and talked like two adult women about it all for the first time, the love affairs and the abortion, and Athill thought: "This is marvellous! We have made this tremendous breakthrough!"It didn't quite work out like that. After that brief opening up, the shutters came down once more. Not another word was spoken about Athill's intimate life after that evening.I wonder if she can see any virtues in her mother's sense of propriety, of holding things together?"I suppose there were some but I can't see them," she says. "I always wanted to know everything."One of the things she knows is exactly how easily candidness can shade into callousness: that is some of the shock of her books. Another relationship, with a lodger, the writer Waguih Ghali, continued even after she read his diary entry about her: "I have started to detest her… I find it impossible to live in the same flat as someone whose physical body seems to provoke mine to cringe…" Ghali killed himself subsequently in this flat.Perhaps as a result of such experiences, Athill displays an unnerving sense of the limits of her responsibility to those she has loved. I ask her at one point what the best of times in her life have been and without hesitation she answers that it was "when I first met dear Barry and we had a lovely kind affair that went on for years".The playwright Barry Reckord lived with Athill here for 40 years, punctuated by six years in the late 1970s when he brought his young girlfriend, an aspiring actress called Sally Cary into their home, and the three of them all lived together. If they survived that, how did Athill's relationship with Reckord end, I wonder?"Well, of course he got so ill and so old," she says. "Now his niece is looking after him in Jamaica, thank God. For the last two years when he was here I was coming up to my 90th birthday, and all he wanted to do was lie in bed and watch sport and read thrillers, which he hated. When dear Margaret, his niece, called, it was like a miracle. He didn't want to go, and he still wants to come home. But I have pretty much stopped calling him now."How had their relationship differed from a marriage?"It differed right from the beginning," she says. "Our affair had been a good one and it had gone on well before he had broken up his marriage. As a consequence, by the time he moved in, the passion, so to speak, had gone. He told me right away he wouldn't marry again. I was in my late-ish 40s. Then darling Sally turned up, and we were both so very fond of her. He used to say he loved me and he loved her. I don't know if he did. She was and is one of my favourite people, though. She lived here for six years. It was perfectly easy. When she eventually went off, she met her Henry at agricultural college and got married. I think I was in a way more upset about it than poor old Barry, really."Would she say Reckord was the love of her life?"No, but I trusted Barry's love the most."Even though he moved another woman into their home?"Well, we weren't sleeping together by then. And if I wasn't sleeping with a man, I didn't see why he shouldn't want to sleep with other people. I hate possessiveness. Loathe it."Does she construe her lack of jealousy as an acceptance of the impossibility of constant love?"Well," she says, smiling, "loyalty is a bit overrated, I think. To make it important between men and women seemed to me foolish."I have a sense of just a hint of long-overcome betrayal in her when she says this, but she doesn't acknowledge it herself, and maybe I'm imagining it.As she thinks about her life, Athill is sitting in her favourite chair, surrounded by piles of letters from her past, which an American scholar has dug out of the André Deutsch archive held at a university in Tulsa. There is the prospect of a book of her correspondence with Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea, to whom she was editor, confidante and "nanny". She is loving going through the letters again, missives from another life. As she shows me little extracts, I hear the cadences of her abiding sternness of will, taking on all-comers, and living to tell the tales.Athill faces the future in this spirit. Beside the manuscripts she gestures at a letter offering her a place in a "sheltered house" in Highgate, which she is planning to take up. "It's time, I think," she says. "I had a friend there called Rose Hacker, who was the oldest newspaper columnist in London. She said I must come. I asked her about the waiting list, and she said well don't worry about that, someone's always dying…"If she were to draw a trajectory of her life, I say, how would it go?"Well," she says, "a goodish beginning and then it went right down, and since then it has been rising steadily." She traces her finger in the air between us. And she seems determined not to let the upward curve come to a stop.Diana AthillTim Adamsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Edmund White, City Boy: exclusive extracts Edmund White paints a fascinating picture of gay and literary life in 60s and 70s Manhattan in his latest memoir, City Boy. In these exclusive extracts, printed over the following three pages, he covers the Stonewall riots, the leather bar scene and the intellectual circles he moved inON THE GAY 'SCENE' IN 1970S NEW YORKIn 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 by the sanitation workers. A major blackout led to days and days of looting. The city seemed either frightening or risible to the rest of the nation. To us, however, it represented the only free port on the entire continent. Only in New York could we walk hand in hand with a member of the same sex.Back in the mid-60s, New York had just one leather bar and it was inconspicuous and customers would wear their normal clothes and carry a change of costume in a bag, then switch to their chaps and black leather vest in the taxi. They were terrified a friend, even a gay friend, might see them going out in this freaky rig. Sado-masochism still sounded perverted and ever so slightly tacky – sort of New Jersey. And elderly. As if working-class, old gay men who couldn't compete in the real bars could look appealing in leather or at least threatening.By the 70s, all that was changing. In 1972 LA Plays Itself, a hard-core porn film starring the charismatic director Fred Halsted, opened on 56th Street and ran briefly before the cops closed it down. The Anvil, a bar with go-go boys, opened in 1974 just south of 14th Street. Boys danced on the bar on the ground floor while men had sex downstairs in the darkened bowels of the building.In 1975, a hard-core S&M monthly magazine, Drummer, started publishing. It had fairly technical information about how to torture and submit to it – we read it with avidity. The whole look and smell of gay New York culture was changing toward beefier bodies, beards and the odour of brew, harness, sweat and Crisco. A boyfriend of mine said that New Yorkers were so pale and unhealthy looking that black leather was the only look that suited them.The leather bars kept pushing farther and farther uptown until they reached 21st Street and 11th Avenue with the Eagle's Nest. There, all the men seemed older and bearded and muscular and over six feet tall. At 5ft 10in, I'd never felt short before except in Amsterdam. Now I was a shorty in my own city. To get from the West Village up to the Eagle, gay men had to go past three blocks of projects on Ninth Avenue starting at 16th Street. Gangs who lived in the projects would attack single gay men. We started wearing whistles around our necks to summon other gay men to our defence – a fairly effective system. I thought back to the 50s when everyone was a sissy boy with straightened hair, cologne and a baby-blue cashmere sweater and penny loafers. Back then, we would have been terrified of gangs. Not any more. Now many of us were taking judo classes.And now the dress code was strict. The Eagle would allow "No hat other than leather cycle caps, western hats, construction hats or uniform hats. No jackets or coats other than leather or western style".At one time, the Mineshaft was New York's most notorious "members only" club. Membership was granted on the spot if one passed muster – no designer clothes, no sneakers, no cologne. Located on Washington Street at Little West 12th Street in the heart of the meat-packing district, it was open around the clock from Wednesday night through Monday morning, featuring a clothes check, dungeons and other amenities. Yes, one was allowed to check all one's clothes and stroll about naked or in a jockstrap – undress was encouraged. The Mineshaft opened in 1977 before the Aids era and was finally closed by the city's Department of Health in 1985, four years after Aids was first diagnosed.Within the nondescript, street-level door of the Mineshaft were stairs leading straight up to the doorkeeper, sitting on a barstool, no longer the stogie-smoking Mafia guy of yore in a porkpie hat but, rather, a bearded and equally heavyset gay man in jeans and workboots. Inside was the big bar area with its low lights and pool tables. Behind a partition was the "action" part of the club on two floors. There was an entire wall of glory holes with people kneeling in front of crotch-high holes and servicing disembodied erections.A whole rabbit warren of small rooms was downstairs and in one was a bathtub where men would take turns being pissed on. In 1979, I wrote an essay in the left-wing New Times justifying gay S&M. I acknowledged: "As for gay S&M, it is as disturbing for heterosexuals to contemplate as was the thought of fair Celia on the potty for Jonathan Swift." I was alert to the drama and romanticism of glimpsed scenes at the Mineshaft: "In the basement, two stoned men are kissing under black light. Absurdly, touchingly, anachronistically romantic, they are unaware of everyone around them, their fluorescent white shirts gleaming eerily like Baudelaire's swan bathing its wings in the dust."In the early 80s, the Mineshaft scene turned sour. Not only was the spectre of Aids dogging everyone's steps but there was also a ghastly ritualistic murder. Apparently, a coke-snorting art dealer, Andrew Crispo, while sitting in his apartment, kept dialling the number of the public phone booth just outside the Mineshaft. A handsome Norwegian model answered and agreed to be picked up by Crispo's passing car and to submit to a night of torture. The fun and games got out of hand, however, and the model, after hours of being tortured, was shot twice through the head by Crispo's assistant and bodyguard, a renegade rich boy. The body was dumped in a smokehouse on the estate of the bodyguard's parents' estate on Long Island. When the victim was found much later, the leather mask had burned into his face but most of the body had become unrecognisable.INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN 1970s NEW YORKI don't remember how I met Richard Sennett but dozens of roads led to the intellectual and social Rome he represented. Dick was a professor of sociology at New York University and had written several remarkable books, including The Hidden Injuries of Class and The Fall of Public Man. He was a well-known professor and sought-after lecturer and he entertained with charm and tirelessness in his little house on Washington Mews, a brick-paved lane just off Washington Square.Dick mainly liked to entertain, but not just anyone. At his house on the mews you could meet Isaiah Berlin or Michel Foucault or Susan Sontag or Jürgen Habermas or Alfred Brendel. Some of the younger guests would look in before heading off to the disco of the moment, Studio 54. I'd never gone there but apparently the owner, Steve Rubell, let in both beautiful nobodies and celebrities of any sort.Studio 54 had a giant, smiling man in the moon up above the dancers, slowly shovelling a spoon of cocaine toward his nose, over and over. This was still when many acquaintances assured me that cocaine was harmless and not addictive. People joked that it was the perfect yuppie drug since it made your head clearer and inspired you to want to work even more.Dick Sennett's salon was far from the Studio though no less exclusive in its way. 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. He was wonderfully encouraging as a friend. He hired me to be the executive director of the New York Institute for the Humanities even though I was only marginally an academic and had never been an administrator, except briefly at Saturday Review. The part-time job paid me just $22,000 a year – and my main duty was getting everyone coffee.In many ways, however, I was a good choice. I liked most people, I wanted to know all about their scholarly pursuits, I was even-tempered and I had a small reputation as a writer. I was teaching a fiction workshop or two at Columbia and another one at New York University. I had a low rent and few expenses.Dick did everything to encourage me. When I wrote a play, a fairly tedious one, he decided we should give it a reading at the institute. Val Kilmer, at that point a young, unknown actor, agreed to read the young lover. In real life, Kilmer's lover was then reputedly the much older Cher, who would wait for him outside the door in her limo every evening after rehearsals. No fool Cher – she wasn't about to let this treasure (a drool-makingly young, masculine heterosexual beauty) escape from her. Maria Tucci, who was married to Bob Gottlieb, head of Knopf, the publishing house, played one of the other parts.The institute gave glamorous parties and lunches where visitors from all over the world presented their latest thoughts and findings in an informal, collegial way and the question-and-answer periods following the brief talks were as stimulating as any I ever attended.We invited Jorge Luis Borges to come to New York. He and his wife, Maria Kodama, had to fly first class, of course, from Buenos Aires and we arranged for them to stay in a beautiful NYU apartment looking down over Washington Square. The only drawback was lack of room service. Maria Kodama called me on a Sunday afternoon and asked: "Who will wash out Borges's underthings?" I thought to volunteer my own services, but I was afraid of embarrassing everyone. Finally, I had to hire a maid at $100 an hour to go over there on Sunday evening and wash out the distinguished panties.Borges gave a talk, one of the two talks he gave everywhere all the time with no variation. This talk was his one on how the best metaphors are cliches because they're true: Life Is a Dream and Time Is a River and any effort to invent newer, fresher images is false and misleading. No one paid much attention to what he was saying. He was iconic because he'd written a half-dozen brain-twisting stories of an admirable lightness in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Now, all these years later, he was invited everywhere because of these few brilliant stories that few people in the audience would have read, much less understood. I suppose I'd never before witnessed up close such a huge career nor noticed how his was based on such a slim oeuvre written four decades previously.ON HIS FRIENDSHIP WITH SUSAN SONTAG' The biggest star at the New York Institute for the Humanities was Susan Sontag. I think I must have met her at Dick Sennett's house. At least I imagine I fell into a conversation with her, she who had been my idol for many years. It's strange that I can't remember our first meeting since I can remember in vivid detail reading her essay on pornography when it first came out and agreeing and disagreeing with it in such an intense way. I read it because it addressed thoughts I'd had for years but not known how to formulate. Reading the essay on camp was the same gripping experience.To be sure, Isherwood in one of his novels, The World in the Evening, had mentioned camp (high and low), but Sontag thoroughly explored the subject and saw it as a way of rescuing failed glamour –"so bad it's good"– and putting the world in quotation marks, of aestheticising all experience. Everyone, even Time magazine, grabbed on to "Notes on Camp" as a kind of parlour game, the exploitation of a vogue word, the pinpointing of a new sensibility.What became clear in reading and talking to Sontag was that she wrote best about subjects she was most ambiguous about. Campiness both attracted and repelled her. Indeed, her whole personality was based on this same push-pull dynamic. She was also just a bit anti-semitic and homophobic. She once told the African-American novelist and essayist Darryl Pinckney that he was "reducing" his stature as a writer by calling himself a black writer. She asked me how I could bear to be considered a gay writer. Her questions were meant to guide the people she cared about, Darryl and me among others, away from our own "narrowing" labels. And it's perfectly true that she maintained world-class status partly by staying in the closet.Soon after I met Susan I started hanging out with her. Other people have described how going out in public with her was like being seen with royalty. By and large, New Yorkers were too discreet to bother her but they did recognise her, especially at cultural events – at the ballet, at movies, at lectures. Phillip Lopate in his Notes on Sontag talks about how she'd stroll about in front of a movie audience before the lights went down, supposedly looking for someone but – in his opinion –making sure that everyone was aware of her presence. On the other hand, Susan didn't like people to refer to their friendship with her in print. I remember that the talented, if bitter, writer Gary Indiana, who wrote about heroin in a powerful novel of the period called Horse Crazy, remarked in the Village Voice that Sontag knew all the best Chinese restaurants in Manhattan – and for that one indiscretion he was banished from court.Susan's closest friend was her son, David Rieff. For two years, he and I were virtually inseparable and I was very, very fond of him. He had grown up with "gay uncles" such as Richard Howard and Jasper Johns and I seemed to be falling into the familiar mode of the queer avuncular, though in my mind we were something more like cousins. David could be as contemptuous of other people as his mother was, but for the most part he seemed admiring and vulnerable and just a bit of a puppy dog.Jamaica Kincaid was a friend of ours in those exciting days – a tall black woman with a much smaller husband, the composer Allen Shawn, brother of the actor and playwright Wally Shawn, and they were of course the sons of the long-time New Yorker editor William Shawn. When I ran into Jamaica recently after two decades of not seeing her, I asked timidly: "Do you remember me?" and she overwhelmed me by saying: "Of course I remember you – those were some of the happiest days of my life!"They were happy days for me, too. David was attachant and dear. Susan could be impossibly vain and imperious, but she was also protective and generous. She wrote a blurb for my breakthrough novel, A Boy's Own Story, which she did in her usual serious, thorough, time-consuming way. Just to write a few lines she felt she had to reread all three of my novels as well as States of Desire. She put me up for a $7,000 prize at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which I won, and wrote a letter of recommendation for a $22,000 Guggenheim Fellowship, which I received. After A Boy's Own Story came out she said: "You'll never be poor again in your life." And though I've often had to scramble to pay the rent, what she said was true –I was never really desperate again.Years later, after I'd broken with Susan, Marina Warner told me that during a visit to New York she'd met Susan and that I was wrong about her, she was a delight, no one could be warmer or kinder. I was quick to agree with Marina but I astonished her when I said: "But I'll tell you exactly how you spent your time with her. She invited you to a good Chinese restaurant and ordered for you and paid for it. Then she accompanied you to several bookshops and expressed her scandalised amazement that you'd never read Trelawney's Adventures of a Younger Son or Aksakov's Family Chronicle. She bought those books for you and gave them to you in a nice little ceremonious moment. During the unrushed afternoon, she talked to you about her struggle with cancer and her love affairs – five women and four men." Marina's jaw dropped and I said, "It's perfectly sincere, but that's the day with Susan. Always the same."Susan seemed to have no old friends. Like all famous people, she constantly attracted new people and she didn't have to cultivate old friendships, resolve disputes, soothe ruffled feathers. She could just move on.She was a terrible snob. Once, I had her to dinner with a beautiful and charming young couple who each eventually went on to write successful novels but who were unknown at the time. Susan said in an embarrassingly loud stage whisper: "Why did you invite them?" I was so vexed that I lied and said: "They're terribly rich." Susan nodded sagely, as if that answered all her doubts. In fact, they weren't rich at all, but later split up and each of them married extremely "well". Oddly enough, when I invited Susan to dinner in Paris in 1981 with Michel Foucault, he whispered, when she left the room for a moment: "Why did you invite her?" I didn't realise that he didn't like to socialise with women.Susan could be sweet and melancholy but she was often "out of it" in social settings, never getting the joke and needing everything to be spelled out. Her laugh was mirthless and heavy. She lacked spontaneity. Elle n'était pas bien dans sa peau, as the French would say.She could be little-girlish and tender at times, though normally she was brusque, lordly, dissatisfied. Someone who might have been trying too hard would walk out of the room and Susan would wrinkle her nose and shake her head dismissively.She should have been given the Nobel prize. That would have made her nicer. She was friendly with lots of Nobelists, including Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Czeslaw Milosz, all writers I met through her. Around all these people Susan was wonderfully natural and they perceived her as their equal, even their superior.After moving to Paris in the early 80s, I wrote a novel, Caracole, that came out in 1985. Although it read like a fable taking place in Venice in the 19th century, it could equally be read as an attack on the institute and on Susan. In all my years of therapy, I never got to the bottom of my impulse toward treachery, especially toward people who'd 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. Oddly enough, I felt Susan would appreciate the aptness of my portrait, that she would learn from my implied admonitions. Of course, on another level, I knew I was trashing her and that she'd be angry. Susan was so angry that she asked Roger Straus, her editor, to contact all my foreign publishers and request as a courtesy to her and to him that they remove her blurb from the next edition of A Boy's Own Story in every language.Sixteen years later, I moved back to New York and one day I ran into Susan in a restaurant. I'd rushed over to her table without recognising her because I'd spotted a Parisian friend, the Argentine film director Edgardo Cozarinsky. Suddenly, I thought: "Oh, dear, this woman with the short white hair must be Susan Sontag after her chemo." I hurriedly slunk back to my table. But then, in a flash, there was Susan standing by my side. She said: "Ed, I hope you don't think I was ignoring you because of our silly little feud."I stood and she embraced me. We agreed that we'd get together, that all was forgiven, that we'd patch it up. But the next day when I saw her at Cozarinsky's screening, she was distant. I realised too much time had gone by. That our reconciliation hadn't really "taken". That was all right. We'd both become different people.ON AIDSAids first started to be mentioned in 1981. No one had ever heard of it before then. Larry Kramer, a screenwriter and producer (Women in Love) and novelist (Faggots), convened a meeting of gay men in his Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Washington Square. We were addressed by Dr Alvin Friedman-Kien, who'd studied several cases of Kaposi's sarcoma, a rare skin cancer that usually appeared in old men of Jewish or Mediterranean origin. Suddenly, it was showing up in young gay men, as was an unusual and virulent form of pneumonia. Soon, this new cluster of diseases was being called gay-related immunodeficiency or Grid.Larry invited five or six other men, including me, to discuss forming an offensive against Grid (which a year later was renamed Aids). We decided to call our group the Gay Men's Health Crisis. We wanted to emphasise that it was a "crisis" and not a permanent condition, since gays were not eager to be equated with yet another medical diagnosis.We were naive but there was no way to be sophisticated about an unprecedented plague. Nothing like this had ever happened to anyone before.Dr Friedman-Kien said he thought we should give up sex until researchers understood more about how the disease was transmitted. We looked at him as if he were mad. Just as the crash of 1929 ended the Roaring 20s, so the Aids epidemic of 1981 ended the sexy 70s. Susan Sontag once said to me that in all of human history in only one brief period were people free to have sex when and how they wanted – between 1960, with the introduction of the first birth-control pills, and 1981, with the advent of Aids. For those two decades, all sexually transmitted diseases could be treated with antibiotics, unwanted pregnancies were eliminated through the pill and legalised abortion and Aids did not yet exist. Religion seemed to be on the wane and promiscuity appeared to be the wave of the future.In 1981, all that came to an end. Gays of my generation were especially unprepared to accept the new reality since for us gay liberation had meant sexual liberation and gay culture still meant sexual access and abundance. Now, we were being told to limit the number of our partners, to know our partners' names or to abstain from sex altogether. Later, we were told to suck, not fuck, but even so the definition of safe sex was highly unstable and to this day, almost four decades into Aids, no one seems certain exactly which practices are safe or unsafe.Sontag followed the developments carefully and soon began to see that the demonising of the gay population because of Aids was not unlike the previous blaming of patients with tuberculosis and syphilis in the 19th century or cancer in our own day. She thought that she might add an appendix about Aids to Illness as Metaphor, her 1978 study. Charles Silverstein and I thought that our influential The Joy of Gay Sex should be revised to include warnings about Aids, but with still so little information about it, no one knew how to frame that cautionary advice. The revision did not come out until several years later.I was the first president of GMHC, though I quickly retired in favour of Paul Popham, an attractive, macho businessman who was far more competent. Almost from the beginning, Larry Kramer was sharply critical of the other members and by 1983 he had founded a much more militant group called Act Up. Certainly, we all made lots of mistakes. Instead of instantly enlisting the help of the federal government, we organised a disco fundraiser. We thought small. We thought ghetto. We didn't understand that we were watching the beginnings of an epidemic that would soon enough infect 40 million people worldwide.New York didn't change right away but a feeling of dread was now in every embrace. What had seemed innocent revels now felt like the manoeuvres of a death squad. What had felt warm and sticky with life was now the cool syrup of mortality. Those gangs of tall men in leather jackets walking joyfully down the street, their engineer boots ringing sparks off the pavement, now broke up, dissipated into the night, melted into furtive individuals. Whereas in the late 1970s everyone wanted to be bisexual, the height of trendiness, now people were starting to deny they'd ever had experiences with members of the same sex. People who'd been fashionably skinny the year before now were beefing up to prove they weren't besieged by a wasting disease.I didn't want the party to stop and I moved to Paris in the summer of 1983.David Rieff gave me some sartorial advice. He told me that every man in Paris wore a coat and tie and that I'd have to get rid of my dirty, torn jeans. David assumed I was leaving New York because I'd become too famous. "You'd never be allowed to write another book if you stayed here, right?" he asked. My concerns were more sybaritic than professional; in any event, he exaggerated my success. I wanted to go on having industrial quantities of sex – and I thought I could go on in Paris. New York was turning into a morgue.In the end, I didn't really escape from Aids. Many of my French friends died, including Foucault, just as back in America so did my dearest friend, David Kalstone. Aids killed off most of my circle. Every time I would come back to New York, more and more of my friends would be dying or dead. Gradually I became more and more sombre and my Parisian life became as dark as my New York life. I sat by many bedsides and held many emaciated hands. I didn't feel the famous survivor guilt only because I was positive myself and expected throughout the 80s to die within a few months.Every time I would come back to New York from Paris in the 80s and 90s, I was shocked by how sleek it had become, how expensive ice cream boutiques had replaced the corner shoe repair shops, how the city neighbourhoods were being gentrified as more and more rich young workers in finance moved into town and drove out the older, poorer ethnic minorities. And the bohemians. New York was no longer a dangerous, run-down ghetto; it had become a chromium, spotlit, palm-festooned singles bar.I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to young, penniless artists. That was the era of "coffee shops" as they were defined in New York – cheap restaurants open round the clock where you could eat for less than it would cost to cook at home. That was the era of ripped jeans and dirty T-shirts, when the kind of people who were impressed by material signs of success were not the people you wanted to know. I suppose that finally New York is a Broadway theatre where one play after another, decade after decade, occupies the stage and the dressing rooms – then clears out. Each play is the biggest possible deal (sets, publicity, opening-night celebrations, stars' names on the marquee), then it vanishes.With every new play, the theatre itself is just a bit more dilapidated, the walls scarred, the velvet rubbed bald, the gilt tarnished. Because they are plays and not movies, no one remembers them precisely. The actors are forgotten, the plays are just battered scripts showing coffee stains and missing pages. Nothing lasts in New York. The life that is lived there, however, is as intense as it gets.Extracted from City Boy by Edmund White, published by Bloomsbury at £18.99. 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