Context
Edmund White on Coleman Dowell
Gene Hayworth
Interview conducted on December 9, 2000. The
following is one of several interviews Gene Hayworth is currently
conducting with the friends and acquaintances of the writer Coleman
Dowell. A Reading of Dowell’s Island People was published in CONTEXT #3. We include the interview here because it contributes to a broader
understanding of Dowell’s work, but also because it demonstrates how
writers use materials from their lives toward an artistic end. Gene Hayworth: In the foreword to A Star-Bright Lie, you mentioned that you and Coleman Dowell became friends after your review of Island People. Do you remember the circumstances of your first meeting? Edmund White: I had reviewed Dowell for the New York Times.
I didn’t know him, where he lived or anything about him, and I got a
call from him inviting me to dinner. He was a famous cook, who would
take two or three days to prepare a dinner and would use food as a
substitute for travel. For instance, he would prepare a Brazilian
dinner instead of going to Brazil. It was so elaborate—there
would be twelve different kinds of meat, and everything would be
marinated in just the right way. I go on about it because he probably
would have ranked it almost as highly as his writing. GH: That sounds remarkable. EW:
There were really three domains of his artistic life: cooking, music,
and writing; and they probably all had an equal status in his mind, I
think, depending on the day. He was an extremely shy man who had a big,
blustery way of talking. He was very tall and commanding, and you
assumed that he was perfectly in control. But he had what I regard as a
kind of English affectation, which is a sort of stutter that isn’t
really a stutter. Isherwood had it—a lot of English people have it—and
I think it was a kind of Oxford affectation, where he’d say . . . "Ah,
ah, Edmund . . . what, what, what. . . ." He had that. And he had a
very deep voice. He had a strange way of talking. He would murmur a
whole long phrase and then punch one word very loudly. It would startle you, but it wasn’t necessarily a word that meant anything, it could be a, the, or of. GH: Do you think that was something he picked up in the military? Obviously it wasn’t from his southern heritage. EW: I don’t think military is the right word. It was more some notion he had of Europe. America
has produced so many writers who are obsessed with Europe, who either
never went or only barely went. Wallace Stevens, for example. He
corresponded his whole life with a lady who worked for him in Paris.
She bought him the latest books and the latest paintings, but he never
went to see her. Another one was Joseph Cornell, who was obsessed with
Europe. All of his constructions have titles like "Medici Slot Box." I
think Coleman was like that, too. He did travel there three or four
times, but considering how obsessed he was with Europe and his idea of
Europe, it was amazing how little he actually went. But he didn’t
travel well. His boyfriend loves travelling, and now that Coleman has
been dead for quite a while . . . I think he is in Morocco right now as
we speak. He’s always someplace. But Coleman didn’t want to leave home,
and he didn’t like to come to one’s house for dinner. He liked to stay
home. He would do anything, including three days’ preparation of food,
to get you up there rather than submit to coming to your house. GH: You mentioned that he called you. EW:
Yes, he called me out of the blue. I’ve always been listed in the phone
book, and my name isn’t sufficiently unusual that you couldn’t track me
down. So he called and invited me to dinner. I felt my review had been
three quarters positive but one quarter negative, because I thought
there were preposterous things in his writing, but I basically liked
it. The invitation seemed to me totally aboveboard, because I’d written
the review without knowing him, and then after it came out he decided
he wanted to meet me. The first time I was there he treated the review
as though it had been altogether positive, and I didn’t contradict him,
and so everything went very smoothly. But then subsequently he would
get drunk. There would always be a point in the evening when he would
say, "Well, you don’t really like my work, do you?" And, "You said. . .
." And so on. It made one very uncomfortable. But we became friends,
and I read all of his other work after that. It feels like I was often
championing his work. After his death I wrote the foreword for A Star-Bright Lie.
And it seems I was always sending his work to book-review editors,
trying to get them to do something about it. Of course he was reviewing
things in Louisville, wasn’t he? GH: He was. For the Louisville Courier-Journal. I have the impression he was very kind to most of the people he reviewed. EW:
Yes. And very conscientious. He read everything by the author, and he
worked very hard on those reviews. I think he had an ideal of being a
kind of man of letters, who would keep a journal, who would have a
literary correspondence with a few people, and write all of these
complicated books. My main feeling was that he was somebody who was
very disappointed by the reception of his work, and I think that was a
contributing factor to his suicide. Part of it comes from the fact that
he had been a television personality when he was younger and had known
a kind of big, public fame. If he sold 2,000-3,000 copies of an
avant-garde novel, that seems like very small potatoes. Although I
always say that if you can imagine 2,000-3,000 people in the same room,
that seems an awful lot of people to be reading such an obscure and
difficult book. GH: Definitely. Now let me ask, after your first meeting with Dowell, did your perceptions of Island People change? EW:
Whenever you meet someone and you become part of their process, you
begin to value it a bit more. That’s probably why we can’t be really
objective about our friends—at least in my case. Once I know how this
poor writer is struggling so much, and hoping so much, and that
everything, his very life, really, depends on the reception of his
work, it’s awfully hard not to feel that it’s terrific. And so I think
it was probably just human sympathy that made me value it slightly more
highly after I met him. GH: I can understand that. EW:
That would be true for almost anybody. But maybe especially in his
case, because he seemed to be so vulnerable to the ups and downs of his
reputation. GH: You described Island People as a postmodern novel that plays tricks with point of view. This also seems true of White on Black on White, but less so of Dowell’s earlier novels. Do you think there are any unifying aspects underlying all the works? EW:
There is something that wouldn’t show up on a formal level, a kind of
rawness. It’s an appreciation for the grotesque. It’s not just a Gothic
convention, although there is that, too, in his work. He is a southern
Gothic writer, among other things. He liked bigger-than-life characters
who are slightly upsetting. Mrs. October was one of them, and I think that . . . what does he call Carl Van Vechten? GH: Carlo. EW: Yes, Carlo. That’s Carl Van Vechten. Did you know that? GH: I was curious about that. EW: I never met Van Vechten. But Coleman knew him and had been his protege, and had written a musical based on The Tattooed Countess, a novel by Carl Van Vechten. And Coleman often talked about him. There is a good example of his love of the grotesque. He would talk about how
Carl Van Vechten had long, pointed teeth and ate very badly, sloppily,
without closing his mouth. The food dripped off these fangs, and
Coleman really enjoyed the description of how repellant Van Vechten
was, physically. He liked to talk about Van Vechten and his wife, going
to the opera, shouting to each other. Things like, "how are your
hemorrhoids?" Because Van Vechten was deaf they had to shout, I guess,
but they knew they were bothering everybody at the opera. It gave
everybody around them gooseflesh. Coleman loved all that. I’ve never
read that or heard anybody say it independently about Carl Van Vechten,
but Coleman relished it. And he loved to talk about the time he met
Isak Dinesen at Carl Van Vechten’s house. GH: I am curious
about that. He doesn’t really go into depth about Isak Dinesen, but I
understand that he was fascinated having met her. EW: Like many
shy, antisocial people, the few events that happened to him he blew up
into these epic stories. If you could imagine Emily Dickinson meeting a
man once on a street corner and then thinking a whole romance had gone
past: he was like that. GH: I’ve read a letter Dowell wrote to the New York Times, in the late sixties, that had to do with the police harassing people.
It was interesting because it talks about hanging out in Central Park. EW:
He did that. He was like an eagle up in his nest. He would swoop down
on Central Park during the day while his partner was off working.
Coleman claimed to have family money and to be from the Heaven Hill
Bourbon family, all of which was nonsense. He didn’t have a penny. It
was his partner who trudged along as a psychiatrist, making a pretty
good living, who supported him. Coleman would while away his days, when
he wasn’t writing, going down to the park, spending hours picking up
men and bringing them back. People who were virtually bums. He loved
that. He also corresponded with black men who were in prison, who wrote
to him as though their correspondent were a white woman rather than a
white man. They would say vulgar things. There’s a certain kind of gay
man who finds that exciting. But the problem is that the day of
reckoning comes, when they get their parole and are suddenly free. It’s
like the character Calvin, in White on Black on White. The
narrator has a man living with him. That’s all based on fact. Coleman’s
partner put his foot down and couldn’t bear to have such an evil person
around. So Coleman rented a house on Long Island and took the guy out
there. Of course the fellow chased women, because he was basically
heterosexual. He tried to steal things and got very menacing. There was
always this undercurrent. You felt that there were different levels of
life. That while his partner was at work, Coleman was having this whole
life with black men that he met in the park or through personal ads
when they got out of prison. GH: Do you think it was that element of fear that he was attracted to? EW:
Who can explain sexuality? I never make an effort. I think there must
be something about being a southern white man, especially of his
generation, essentially mine but a little older. There’s something
about having grown up when there’s still, in the south, separate
seating in theaters and buses. And I think that has to play an element
in making this "other" sexy. GH: The idea of the taboo. EW: Yes. He had no interest in middle-class, educated black men, except socially. GH: In an interview with John and Linda Keuhl, Dowell stated that Island People took the form of a symphony. Having recently written your own symphonic novel, do you think that this is an apt description of Island People? EW: Yes, I do. Although I see it almost more as Chinese boxes. It’s more like the form of Wuthering Heights.
Something symphonic I see as having movements that are sharply
contrasted one from another, with themes that come back, and a sense of
development. Basically, a sense of forward propulsion. In other words,
there are big noble feelings and there are also light scherzo feelings
and often times a kind of deliberately antiquated feeling, like in the
minuet section. There is a sense of sections that are highly contrasted
and a sense of forward propulsion and a sense of big drama and a sense
of repetition. Those are all qualities that I would call symphonic,
that you find in Proust, for instance. I think Proust is justified in
calling his book symphonic in its structure, but I don’t really see
those elements so much in Dowell’s work. There are certainly highly
contrasted sections in that book but it seems to me that there’s this
kind of nesting, Chinese box within Chinese box kind of structure,
which is different from the more simple, straightforward progression of
a symphony. GH: Do you think that Dowell was aware that that made it very difficult for readers to find their place in the structure? EW:
I think he liked that. I don’t know who his models were, really, but I
think he liked that kind of high modernism. Somebody like James Joyce,
I would guess, was one of his favorite writers, certainly Faulkner; and
neither Faulkner nor Joyce let the reader off lightly. Historically
Dowell comes at a period when people, well, I have this whole theory
that . . . do you really want to hear my theory? GH: Yes, I would. EW:
My theory is that, because of postmodernism and the idea that
everything is really a quotation of everything else and that plagiarism
is fine, you can’t make a distinction between high art and lowbrow art.
It’s all interrelated and part of the same enterprise. Because of that,
the whole ideal of the martyr to art has come to seem ridiculous—that
somebody who sacrifices his life to write a few books that are read by
a few hundred people who know that this is a masterpiece—I think there
are very few people who would appreciate that anymore. GH: Probably because it’s happened so often now. EW:
Yes, that’s right, but I also think that we’ve shifted from a kind of
idea of art as religion to the idea of art as a superior form of
entertainment. And that’s been a huge ground shift that’s happened in
the last thirty years. I believe that part of Coleman’s suffering came
from the fact that he subscribed to the earlier theory of art as
religion, as the most noble human enterprise worthy of any kind of
sacrifice including poverty, but that the whole society was shifting
away from that and ultimately respecting only best-sellers or fame. And
he wasn’t getting either. GH: Do you think he saw himself as a martyr? EW: Definitely. GH:
Dowell published many sections of his novels prior to completing them;
often sections in one novel appear in slightly different form in
another (for example, the ghost story that appears throughout Island People seems closely related to The Silver Swanne). Dowell also makes frequent reference to other writers, such as Oscar Wilde. Would you consider him a kind of bricoleur? EW: Yes, that’s good. I think that is good. Although I don’t have any proof, because he wouldn’t talk much
about the methods of his composition, I have the feeling that if one
could examine his journals in depth what one would see is that he would
start little different stories and then end up with a whole bunch of
stories. Some of them would just materialize in his journal and then
finally he would start putting them all together through some elaborate
method of assembly. Did you ever hear of the French writer Raymond
Roussel? He did that. He had mysterious theories of composition that
would dictate the forms of his books, which were very shocking and
unexpected. I would bet that’s something Coleman did. A lot of writers
did that—many more than want to admit it. For instance there’s a young
gay writer called Dale Peck who wrote a book called Martin and John.
It was essentially a bunch of short stories until the editor said,
"Well we’ve got to sew these together and sell it as a novel." And so
he found a way. He’d written lots of different stories about different
pairs of boys, so he decided just to call all of them either Martin or
John. GH: Just to make them one pair. EW: Yes. Even
though there are so many inconsistencies from one story and another. I
think that Coleman had a different notion. His idea was to examine
reality, that this is really happening, but in any event, who’s telling this story about somebody else. For instance, in Too Much Flesh and Jabez, when
you find out that the narrator of the whole thing is actually that old
lady—well that seems so impossible. How would she know all of those
sexual details? But that’s the kind of sudden reversal in perspective
that fascinated him. GH: You mentioned in your foreword that Dowell knew two
forms of gay life—the camp of the fifties and the machismo of the
seventies. Dowell’s homosexual characters take on various guises: Do
you think that either of these decades had more influence on the way
Dowell depicted homosexuality? EW: No, I don’t think so. The main gay novel is Too Much Flesh and Jabez and that seems to me to be a kind of rural fantasy, one that involves
other tropes like the heterosexual. It’s actually a fairly ridiculous
book. I’ve always been surprised that people take it as seriously as
they do because, although there are a lot of Faulkner plots that are
just as ridiculous, the idea of the straight man whose penis is so
large that his wife can’t take it and he has to have this special
machine to put it in to reduce its working length, and that then he
finds a boy who can take it all, it’s so nutty. It is a kind of
a fantasy from a porno magazine. But of course it is well-written and
written with tremendous vigor and power. But I actually found that book
highly embarrassing to read. GH: I’ve wondered too if he thought that it would fit into mainstream literature. EW:
I know. It seems to me, sometimes when people get too close to their
own fetishes or their own personal sex fantasies, that they lose
perspective. They think they can somehow pull this off and that
everybody will be as equally hypnotized by this thing—this obsession with a huge penis—but I think it makes most people laugh. Gay readers I
suppose would like it, would swallow it, but I think it really does
seem ridiculous. GH: In literary criticism there is a tendency
to look for geographic or temporal groups of influence. Dowell’s circle
included you, Walter Abish, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Bradford Morrow,
among others. As a group of writers living or working in New York in
the sixties and seventies, are there any coherent themes or
similarities that link this group? EW: Coleman, being a very
private person, tended to see those people independently. He would work
up a tremendous dinner that was meant to dazzle you, and you’d go over
and you’d sit and have drinks for an hour and then you’d sit at that
long refectory table and eat course after course after course. His
partner would be the waiter, and then it would all be over and you’d
sit around and have drinks until very late. He’d play the piano and so
on. Coleman’s partner would eclipse himself around 11:30 because he had
to get up to go to work about 6:30. He would leave and then the rest of
the guests would go on until the dark hours of the day. But I don’t
think that Coleman liked sharing people; I never met Gilbert
Sorrentino, I don’t believe. I met Walter Abish, because Walter Abish
was ubiquitous at a certain point. Maybe he still is. I don’t think
he’s in good health, though. One thing that all of those guys have in
common is that they are all heterosexual. Which is interesting, too.
Walter is married to the famous artist, Cecile Abish. Walter is a very
friendly, very curious person who would go to the opening of an
envelope. He really wants to be everywhere. And he goes to every
cocktail party, at least in those years he did. But you know he
absolutely offended Coleman over the dog. Did you hear this story? GH: No, I didn’t. EW: It’s such a funny story. When Tammy died, you know the famous Tammy who was the dachshund.
Coleman claimed that he had based most of his female characters on
Tammy the dog. He absolutely idolized this dog, as Emily Bronte adored
her dog—he would beat her, and then bring her back to life and he would
have these terrible dramas where he would get angry at her and then
beat her and then feel so repentant; it was this alcoholic drama,
revolving around this poor weenie dog. When Tammy finally died,
of old age, Walter apparently wrote Coleman a long letter all about
various literary matters, and then he added, "P.S. Sorry to hear the
dog died." Well, Coleman said, "When I think of how often Tammy had played hostess and received Walter here, and how charming she had always been to him and his wife, and the idea that he would refer to her as the dog—I
just hope that Cecile Abish will die very soon, and I can write Walter
a letter about something else, and then put a P.S.: Sorry to hear the woman died." GH: That’s hilarious. EW:
He was always going on about this. I think that was the real falling
out between them. I’m sure that to Walter, who’s never had a pet in his
life and doesn’t think about animals, it was probably a real strain, a
test to even remember that the dog died. GH: He’d never even considered it. EW:
And then the Keuhls—I never met either. Brad Morrow I did meet quite a
bit. Brad was younger than all those other people and Coleman was one
of his heroes. I think Coleman represented to him . . . you know Brad’s
quite important, he has that magazine Conjunctions, and at the time he had a charming girlfriend called Leslie, who designed the Silver Swanne for Coleman. You know that story, The Silver Swanne? GH: I’ve seen the manuscript at the Library of Congress. It’s beautiful. EW:
She designed this incredible book. She was a tall, attractive,
upper-class girl who was interested in doing fine editions, limited
editions, a hundred copies or so, and she and Brad and Coleman were
extremely close. They would go over there and they just doted on
Coleman and I must say Coleman was always on his best behavior with
them. And I think that Coleman was really Brad’s idea of what an artist
should be: above compromise, serious, and difficult. There was a lot of
real affection and human warmth there. It was a very nice relationship.
I haven’t kept up with either of them, but I hear from them and every
once in a while I’ll see Brad on the circuit. I don’t really know all
of the details because I lived in Europe all of those years, but I
think that Brad had also been driven away. I sound slightly
contemptuous of him I guess, of Coleman. But I’m not really. I do
admire his work, and at its best it’s very, very good stuff. And of
course sometimes I think it’s silly, like Jabez. But there are
people who take it all terribly seriously. And I know that the Keuhls
always resented me because they thought I was going to drag Coleman off
to be a gay writer. And they thought that would be a terrible
limitation.
