Saturday's Child (35 page)

Poor Kenneth. His cholesterol levels, about which we were ignorant back then, must have skyrocketed. He tried hard to be appreciative. But at heart he'd wanted to be a vegetarian ever since he'd worked in an Armour slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant to put himself through school back in Minnesota. The man worshiped macaroni and cheese; he loved soft edibles because his teeth gave him problems, and he adored his working-class childhood's comfort-food casseroles with plain ingredients. His favorite—“Ken's baked dish,” the one thing he liked to cook himself—consisted of pasta (usually rigatoni), onions, tomatoes, melted cheese, and, in a grudging bow to the carnivores who surrounded him, crumbled hamburger. It wasn't bad; the problem was that he only knew how to make it in vast quantities in a massive army-mess pot that could have served as a bathtub for a three-year-old child. Consequently, whenever he made the baked dish it was for a party, or else we'd be eating it for weeks.

There
were
parties, though, and celebrations to show off the latest carpentry accomplishment, or how the upstairs looked as one impressive peaked cathedral loft with all the walls down and the beams exposed above ranked bays of bookshelves and our two imposing desks. We liked being by ourselves but we also loved showing off, and friends were curious voyeurs as to how this experiment was going. I admit we royally enjoyed giving them something to talk about; it was fun being considered beyond the pale by people who were rather outlandish themselves. But as the years went on, that sense of fun would harden into a modus operandi that adopted outrageousness as its standard. This was intensified by an Us vs. Them attitude, a draw-the-wagons-in-a-circle-around-this-marriage
stance that was nowhere near as necessary or healthy as we pretended, even on those occasions when it may have seemed called for. Kenneth adopted a Promethean style: fist shaken in defiance at the gods. I tended more to identify with Sisyphus: rolling the stone up the mountain again and again in characteristic denial of gravity—a pretentious version of The Little Train That Could. In 1962, though, it really did feel like us against the world. When I look now at the photographs of us during that period, I see two people slightly stunned at their own accomplishment, at having flown so in the face of conventions both bourgeois and nouveau, at having stepped off the precipice into a void—two people who, as if caught by the camera in the act of falling, steal a glance at each other to see if maybe the other one knows what in hell we're actually doing here.

We were, at least briefly, “hot” in downtown artistic social circles. That meant loft parties where Andy Warhol would reel through with his blank stare, trailed by his vapid catamites; where the poet Anthony Hecht, whose work I so admired, would laugh, on my being presented to him, “But, my dear, women should
be
poems, not
write
them!” I backed off quietly, found the bathroom, and threw up in disgust. This reaction would become fairly common, an at-the-time-unrecognized sensible response to unswallowable crap. But it was the early 1960s. Acknowledgment of racism was only beginning to surface in general American society (including among so-called radical artists); consciousness about sexism was a long way off. On social occasions, Kenneth was lionized and I was introduced (if at all) as “Oh! And this is, um—Ken's, uh, wife.” Now and then a charitable host might add, “She, uh, also writes.” Then again, Kenneth had had a book of poems published, was working on a second, had published a novella, and was writing a novel. I'd had a few poems appear in literary journals and was wobbling uncertainly from apprentice to journeyman (sic). The word “sexism” didn't exist in my vocabulary. “Ego” did—but so did “humility.”

The best social events were the salons of the composer Ned Rorem. Ned, who remains a friend to this day, and who was the longest-term “life witness” present at my fiftieth birthday party, lived in Greenwich Village then; this was long before his Pulitzer Prize, although he was already regarded as a major figure in American music and the preeminent composer of contemporary art songs. Kenneth and Ned were friends, and Ned
had set some of Ken's poetry to music (the first time he chose one of
my
poems to set, I was certain I had Arrived). Because Ned set contemporary poets' work, knew and liked writers, and wrote essays and diaries himself, he bestrode both literary and musical society as well as gay and straight. There were usually two sets of guests at Ned's soirees, because of limited apartment space: those invited to dinner, and those invited to “join us for dessert and coffee after dinner.” On different occasions, Kenneth and I revolved into one or the other of these groups. My mouth hung open no matter what was being forked into it, because you never knew whom you'd meet at Ned's. All you knew was that everyone except yourself would be madly clever, probably famous,
au courant
, and arch.

A youngish, erudite Susan Sontag, sitting in a corner defending the ideas behind her essay on “camp.” Paul Goodman, whose success had come too late, bitterly denouncing anyone who had the misfortune to stray across his path. Allen Ginsberg, stoned out of his beard but the essence of sweetness to every man present (the younger the better) and coolly dismissive to the women. Caresse Crosby—with other luminaries from the Black Sun Press, a center for expatriates in Paris, where Ned had spent so many years—literally flipping her feather boa into the osso buco one night. The
Paris Review
crowd warily circling the
Chelsea Review
crowd. Frank O'Hara, usually surrounded by his own mini-circle of painters, poets, and hangers-on (including a barely-out-of-adolescence Stephen Holden, now music and theater critic for the
New York Times
). One night, O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Janet Flanner had a huge argument; I do wish I could recall what about. Elizabeth Hardwick (yet again re-separated from Robert Lowell) was a regular, as was Hortense Calisher, and both went out of their way to lessen what must have been my painfully obvious reticence in such glittering company. The poets Richard Howard and Howard Moss (then poetry editor of the
New Yorker
) were regulars, too. I first met Gore Vidal at one of Ned's evenings; he was especially cordial to me on god-knows-what grounds, a gesture I've not forgotten, and one we remind each other about in various greenrooms of TV studios around the United States, whenever we happen groggily to bump into one another during overlapping book tours. At Ned's I met Edward Albee (who was especially
not
cordial, to
any
body, but then who would be, living as he was with Bill Flanagan?), and David Windham, Paul and Jane Bowles, Jules
Feiffer, and James Dickey—all of whom, it must be said, were as normally boring in person as any other dinner guest you might find to your right or left. Writers, artists, and composers rarely talk about “Art,” I learned. Everyone is too busy gossiping about lovers and ex-lovers, and carping about money problems, agents, publishers, gallery owners, conductors, and, most of all, reviewers.

The music world was represented even more impressively than the literary world. One night Alice Tully—yes, as in Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall—got piggily possessive over Ned's homemade orange cake. Eleanor Steber came by briefly another evening, croaking with a cold like any ordinary voice, and demanding hot tea “with lods of lebon, blease.” Eugene Istomin must have said
some
thing, primarily to the musicians perhaps, but I only remember him chewing blissfully. Ned's circle of composer mentors/rivals/friends extended from Aaron Copland through David Amram and Gian Carlo Menotti to Samuel Barber and David Diamond. Diamond surprised us by being actively supportive of Kenneth, me, and our marriage; David had been for years in a relationship with a married man, was godfather to his lover's children and would in time put them all through school—so this “transcending of petty sexual categories by carrying a passport stamped mere Human,” as he put it, was nothing new to him. Meanwhile, Virgil Thomson would be pontificating from the most comfortable armchair about every subject, whether he knew anything about it or not—a sort of chubbier Peter Lorre bestowing judgmental aphorisms in a high, petulant wheeze. But everything froze when the Entrance was made: the electric presence of a composer-conductor at the height of his fame (though not of his powers), arriving freshly damp from some podium, French-kissing
everyone
—male
and
female, friend
and
stranger—and requiring a towel
instantly
because “Oh
God
I'm still
so
sweated up!”: Leonard Bernstein or, simply, “Lenny.”

And in the center, there was Ned himself—blessed with both beauty and talent, basking in the certainty that every man in the room wanted (or had already had) him, and every woman in the room believed
she
could turn him straight (that is, if
she
were). Ned, radiating rampant egotism but always managing to get his work done nonetheless, dripping with sophisticated ennui yet touchingly inclusive of his parents, lifelong Quakers who remained political activists into their eighties. I was nervous and excited
about going to these soirees, and some evenings I'd spend most of the time in the kitchen chatting with whoever was Ned's always unfamous live-in lover of the moment. But I shyly liked Ned. He was hard
not
to like. His sometimes studied superficiality has always masked genuine depth (a refreshing switch on the usual), and he was/is a kind man who, unlike some others in those circles, has never hated women. Certainly he found my acting background fascinating (as, to my unease, did many of the literati, once word leaked out—certainly not from me). But he knew I was en route to another identity and respected that. He never treated me as Kenneth's appendage, regarding me as a serious poet well before my first book of poems came out. Years later, he would urge me to apply for a residency at Yaddo, the arts colony, and offer to stand as my recommender. But Ned, who like Colette has never made the mistake of trivializing vanity, once also startled me by announcing to a gathering at his home that he believed “Robin is one of the great beauties of our time.” Naturally I knew then we'd be friends for life, despite my awareness of the obvious fact that I was not a great beauty and never would be. Mostly, I was so thankful that Ned neither patronized nor marginalized me (not for
him
the “She's, uh, also …” introduction). He set a generous standard I've tried to follow myself with younger artists over the years.

Kenneth never patronized or marginalized his new wife the also-poet either. On the contrary, he defended me with flaring-nostril gallantry and was shocked at the bigotry of most of his male peers. (We'd both simplistically assumed that gay male artists would somehow be more welcoming to a woman than would their straight brothers. I now find this notion side-splitting.) Ken, especially during the first years of our marriage, was extremely influential on my writing, and it flowered with his support, patience, and humor. Draft after draft of my poems would improve with the aid of his keen eye and ear, and his voluminous knowledge of poetry. I was euphoric when he would admit to being impressed by a line or stanza of mine. Bliss was it to be critiqued, but to be
praised
was very heaven.

Several years later, we would go on a trip to Moorhead, Minnesota, and to Minneapolis, to visit his birthplace, childhood friends, and the teachers who had influenced him as a young adult, and then on to Seattle, where his family had moved, so I could meet his parents and older sister, Norma. At each stop, poetry readings had been arranged for the returning prodigal
son—who insisted they be turned into joint readings for both of us. I appreciated this hugely, since my work was just beginning to come into its own and his was already established. (Not that being established made sufficient difference for the writer who was a woman in those days.
¹
I recall attending a joint reading at the 92nd Street YMHA in New York, where the prize-winning poet Isabella Gardner came onstage quickly reassuring the audience that she was “merely the brief curtain-raiser for the one you
really
came to hear, my husband, Allen Tate.”) Of course, every couple manages to believe, “
We
will be
different
,” and I was grateful to Kenneth because I was living in a state of aesthetic excitement. Daily life had become a perpetual poetry workshop.

Nightly life was different. Here, dear reader, we draw a veil across certain specific memories. Not to consign them to the total privacy some would say they warrant, because the truth is they've already been bled across many pages (Kenneth's
and
mine) as subject matter, explicitly in poems and implicitly in prose—neither the first nor the last time writers have mined their lives to fuel their work. But anyone famished for graphic details must read elsewhere to find them. Here a few facts must suffice, and those only because they are unavoidably central to the story. These facts are simple enough, though the attempt to put down even the barest outline of them, and to do so without blame, remains complex.

Kenneth's crush on Thatcher was not a crush. He was in love with him, for a while perhaps obsessed with him, and further seduced by Thatcher's casting him in the role of intellectual guru (as, in truth,
I
had also done). Thatcher's sexual games enjoyed flirting with Ken's adoration, but for physical intimacy he required the additional presence of a woman so as to comfort himself that he wasn't godforbid “queer.” I, meanwhile, had let myself be convinced that I knew nothing about my own desires and nothing about sex, despite those heated adolescent encounters that had stopped short of the “real” thing. I was less than six months out of literal
virginhood, too, and curious, and pathetically more eager to be pleasing than to be pleased.

So the Ideal American Girl bought into every sexual myth the guys could fling at me—about Bloomsbury, sexual liberation, not being a puritan; about keep-on-doing-what-you-don't-like-because-the-more-you-do-it-the-more-you'll-like-it; about D. H. Lawrence's ideal quartet (two women, two men, all possible sexual permutations). I never questioned
whose
needs and self-interest these models served.