The Lonely City by Olivia Laing

the talk is of who deserves to stay inside the charmed circle of the Factory. Elaborate rules are drawn up, protocols of expulsion developed. Society as centrifugal force, separating the elements, policing division.
    But speaking, participating, is almost as terrifying as being ignored. Warhol takes the desire for attention – to be looked at and listened to – and sharpens it into an instrument of torture. ‘I’m making love to the tape recorder,’ Ondine says towards the end of his marathon of speech, but from the very beginning he also keeps begging to stop, asking over and over how many more hours he has to fill. In the john: ‘No, oh Della, please, I, I, my . . .’ In the bathtub: ‘may I ask you in all fairness – this is no private . . .’ At Rotten Rita’s apartment: ‘Don’t you hate me Drella, by this time? You must be so disgusted with putting that thing in my face . . . Please shut it off, I’m so horrifying.’
    Putting that thing in my face: there’s certainly something sexual about Warhol’s behaviour: stripping Ondine down, encouraging him to ejaculate a torrent, to spill his secrets, to dish the dirt. What he wants is words – words to fill or kill time, take up empty space,expose the gaps between people, reveal wounds and hurts. He says very little himself beyond a reticent, repetitive litany of Oh , Oh really? What? (In 1981, by which time he’d become considerably more fluent, even chatty, one of his first superstars called him on the phone. He immediately fell back into the old stuttering speech, telling his diary: ‘The dialogue was straight from the sixties.’)
    Towards the end of the book, Ondine escapes for a while and Drella is left with the Sugar Plum Fairy, Joe Campbell, the actorcum-rent boy who starred with Paul America in his movie My Hustler in 1965. Slender, dark and quick-witted, a former boyfriend of Harvey Milk, Campbell was astonishingly skilled at making even the most reluctant people open up. He turns the tables on Warhol, submitting him to the same kind of scrutiny he forced on others. First he examines his body, describing him sweetly as soft, not fat. ‘How old are you?’ he asks. A long pause. ‘Very great silence.’ ‘Yeah, uh talk about Ondine.’ ‘Nah, why do you avoid this problem?’ Warhol repeatedly tries to turn the flow of the conversation. For a minute or two, Joe plays along, and then he returns to the attack.
    SPF—Why do you avoid yourself? Huh?
    SPF—Why do you avoid yourself? What?
    SPF—I mean you almost refuse your own existence. You know- Uh—it’s just easier SPF—No I mean I like, I like to know you (talking very quietly) I always think of you as being hurt. Well, I’ve been hurt so often I don’t even care anymore. SPF—Oh sure you care. Well uh, I don’t get hurt anymore. . . SPF—I mean, it’s very nice to feel. You know. Uh-no, I don’t really think so. It’s too sad to do (opera) And I’m always, uh, afraid to feel happy because then uh . . . just never last . . . SPF—Do you ever, do you ever do things by yourself? Uh no, I can’t do things by myself.
    Talking so much you horrify yourself and those around you; talking so little that you almost refuse your own existence: a demonstrates that speech is by no means a straightforward route to connection. If loneliness is to be defined as a desire for intimacy, then included within that is the need to express oneself and to be heard, to share thoughts, experiences and feelings. Intimacy can’t exist if the participants aren’t willing to make themselves known, to be revealed. But gauging the levels is tricky. Either you don’t communicate enough and remain concealed from other people, or you risk rejection by exposing too much altogether: the minor and major hurts, the tedious obsessions, the abscesses and cataracts of need and shame and longing. My own decision had been to clam up, though sometimes I longed to grab someone’s arm and blurt the whole thing