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

book couldn’t be called Something Valentine since, in fact, the narrator is wrong—he’s not one of the Valentines. Richard said the book was too short. I needed to add another long chapter of thirty or so pages, since a novel shorter than two hundred pages was impossible to sell.
    I worked on the book for several months. My heart sank at the prospect of adding new pages since I’d composed the novel by instinct alone. It was as if I had tuned my dials to a certain frequency; once my mind started emitting the right hum, I knew I could proceed. I was convinced I’d written a wonderful book—but I wasn’t exactly sure how I’d done it. Richard didn’t overpraise me but in a businesslike way let me know that he thought it was worth rescuing. His practical manner gave me the courage to revise.
    Once I’d finished the revisions he did no more than glance at them. I gave the revised, much longer novel to my agent, who submitted it to Robert Gottlieb, who was then head of Knopf. He took months and months considering it (which, I was later told, was quite uncharacteristic of him). Finally he rejected it, though at one point he’d seemed on the verge of buying it. He wrote, “I like high-class junk and junky junk—but this book isn’t junky at all.” I was confused. By that time I was living in Rome. I remember walking back from the American Express office beside the Spanish Steps, where I received my mail, and thinking that I wanted to commit suicide. I sobbed and said aloud to myself as I walked along, “I can’t speak! They won’t let me speak!” I sat down on a bench looking out over the ruins of the forum and thought that if God didn’t send me a sign, I’d just kill myself. At that point a handsome blond Roman came up and asked me if Iwas all right. I decided to live at least long enough to have sex with him—he was obviously an angel.
    Maybe my book was bad, I conceded, or too weird, but hundreds and hundreds of bad books were published every year. Anyway, it wasn’t bad. It was good. I felt that all I’d ever wanted was to be a published writer. Now I was thirty and nothing was working out. I felt humiliated. Gottlieb went on to edit the New Yorker and to write with lyricism and insight about Balanchine. In the late 1980s, in Paris, I was introduced to him several times, and mutual friends told me I was all wrong about him, he was a great defender of the arts, poor man—he’d suffered for his exquisite taste. Now that I’ve become someone to whom other people submit manuscripts, I know there must be at least a dozen young writers out there who detest me for not helping them enough. One of them has started savaging my books in print. He wrote, “Edmund White is the fattest, ugliest writer in America, rivaled only by Harold Bloom.” He asserted that all my books were failures, including my biography of Jean Genet—a subject, he said, I’d spoiled for a whole generation.
    Richard Howard, back then when I first met him in 1969, suggested my book be sent to Anne Freedgood at Random House, even though that publisher had already rejected it once (as had twenty-some other publishers). Richard called Anne and told her she must accept it. She did, but only after waiting many more months. I’d finished and revised Forgetting Elena by 1969 after three years’ work; it was published in 1973—seven years from start to finish for a book of two hundred pages. When I was back in New York, and Mrs. Freedgood and I had lunch to discuss revisions (more revisions!), it suddenly dawned on me that my agent had submitted the old manuscript to her, not the one I’d rewritten under Richard Howard’s direction. I asked to look at it; yes, it was the old dog-eared text. I realized the agent had been sending out the wrong version all along.
    Anne liked the revised text when she finally received it a few days later, but she still insisted that the book couldn’t end so vaguely. I, who’d been so impressed by the