In His Pink Negligée 
Colm Tóibín
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He was world-weary from the beginning. Nowhere was safe. Before he was 25 he declared New York to be a ‘giant snake pit’, Los Angeles to be ‘quel hole’. Naples was ‘crooked’, London ‘a dreary place’. Even Paris, ‘a divine city’, could be ‘colder than a nun’s cunt’. Once he had passed the quarter century he hit on Rome: ‘a beautiful city, really – though inhabited by a quarrelsome and cynical race’. From Taormina in Sicily, where he was renting the house in which D.H. Lawrence had lived, he wrote to a friend: ‘Italians are just niggers at heart.’ Portofino, where he spent the summer of 1953 with his boyfriend, Jack Dunphy, was no better:
Everything became too social – and I do mean social – the Windsors (morons), the Luces (morons plus), Garbo (looking like death with a suntan), the Oliviers (they let her out), Daisy Fellowes (her face lifted for the fourth time – the Doctors say no more), then Cecil [Beaton] and John Gielgud came to stay with us, and we went to Venice on Arturo Lopez’s yacht . . . Oh yes, I forgot Noel Coward – he fell in love with Jack. Jack hated it All.
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Colm Tóibín is Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University. His essay in this issue is based on a lecture he gave at the University of Genoa’s Ford Madox Ford conference.
Other articles by this contributor:
A Man with My Trouble · Henry James leaves home
Roaming the Greenwood · A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition by Gregory Woods
The Wickedest Woman in Paris · Rupert Everett
At St Peter’s · The Dangers of a Priestly Education
Issues of Truth and Invention · Francis Stuart’s wartime broadcasts
Don’t abandon me · Borges and the Maids
My Darlings · Drinking with Samuel Beckett
How to be a wife · The Discretion of Jackie Kennedy
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