Edmund White has been much praised by fellow writers and figures in the literary establishment since his first novel, Forgetting Elena, first caught the attention of Vladimir Nabokov nearly thirty years ago. To many gay readers, White remained better known until the early 1980s as the author of an innovative book of gay travel writing—States of Desire—and coauthor of The Joy of Gay Sex. This changed with the breakthrough success—both in the United States and Great Britain—of the first of White’s semiautobiographical fictions, A Boy’s Own Story, in 1982. Born in 1940 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and raised there and in Chicago, White majored in Chinese at the University of Michigan. He moved to New York on graduating, working for Time-Life Books from 1962 to 1970. White then lived in Rome for a year, before returning to New York and briefly working for Saturday Review and Horizon.
White was writing prose and plays from an early age. His first published novel, Forgetting Elena (New York: Random House, 1973), was an elaborately written work of fantasy set on an imaginary island. Though critically well-received, the book sold sparingly. In 1977, White raised his profile among gay readers by coauthoring The Joy of Gay Sex (New York: Crown, 1977) with Dr. Charles Silverstein. A second novel, the equally baroque Nocturnes for the King of Naples (New York: St. Martin’s, 1978), received much attention and praise. Nocturnes self-consciously invoked the school of religious devotional literature, though it could equally, if implicitly, be read as the narrator-beloved’s homage to his older, second person lover.
The widely acclaimed and best-selling travel book, States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (New York: Dutton, 1980), followed. Between 1979 and 1981, White formed part of the “Violet Quill,” a reading group of six New York gay authors which included Andrew Holleran and Felice Picano. Manuscripts of various unpublished works from this period and earlier—including the novel “Woman Reading Pascal” (sometimes entitled “Like People in History,” and referred to below)—are now held at the Beinecke Library, Yale University.
White’s breakthrough fictional work was the semiautobiographical or “autofictional” novel A Boy’s Own Story (New York: Dutton, 1982), in which his prose style displayed a new lucidity, and gay themes appeared explicitly for the first time. This was followed by White’s fourth published novel, the less well-received and commercially unsuccessful Caracole (New York: Dutton, 1985), a highly wrought, imaginative telling of the maturation and sexual and social initiation of a heterosexual adolescent.
White next published the sequel to A Boy’s Own Story, the similarly acclaimed The Beautiful Room Is Empty (New York: Knopf, 1988; London: Chatto and Windus, 1988). This dealt with the gay protagonist’s growing acceptance of his sexuality, culminating with his witnessing 1969’s Stonewall riots. The same year, White wrote three stories on the AIDS epidemic—“Palace Days,” “An Oracle,” and “Running on Empty”—for a collection coauthored with Adam Mars-Jones, The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis (New York: New American Library, 1988; London: Faber and Faber, 1988).
Having himself been diagnosed HIV-positive, White remarkably took on the monumental research task of the first, and authorized, biography of Genet (New York: Knopf, 1993; London: Chatto and Windus, 1993). This won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Award. The following year, a collection of White’s essays appeared as The Burning Library: Writings on Art, Politics, and Sexuality, 1969–93, ed. David Bergman, (New York: Knopf, 1994; London: Chatto and Windus, 1994).
White’s small book of reminiscences about life in Paris with his lover Hubert Sorin, who had recently died, was first published in Britain as Sketches from Memory (London: Chatto and Windus, 1995), then in the United States as Our Paris: Sketches from Memory (New York: Knopf, 1996). The volume was coauthored with Sorin in the form of line drawings which accompanied White’s stories. The year 1995 also saw the publication of a collection of stories, Skinned Alive (London: Chatto and Windus, 1995; New York: Knopf, 1995), including those from The Darker Proof.
The Farewell Symphony (London: Chatto and Windus, 1997; New York: Knopf, 1997) marked White’s completion of the “autofictional” trilogy he began with A Boy’s Own Story and The Beautiful Room Is Empty. The Farewell Symphony dealt in fictional form with the sexual hedonism of New York in the late seventies, and the loss of many of White’s acquaintances to AIDS during the 1980s.
White has recently published a small biography of Proust (New York/London: Viking, 1999) and completed a novel, The Married Man (New York: Knopf, 2000; London: Chatto and Windus, 2000). He lives in the Chelsea area of New York City and teaches at Princeton University, having previously taught at Yale, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, New York, and Brown universities. Among other positions, White was executive director of the New York Institute for the Humanities between 1981 and 1983. In 1983, White received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Award for Literature from the National Academy of Arts and Letters. In the same year, White moved to Paris, where he spent most of his time until 1998, when he returned to New York. In 1993 he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres. He has also been a judge for Britain’s Booker Prize.
This interview took place on Saturday, April 25, 1998, in Princeton, New Jersey.
RC In The Farewell Symphony you describe Paris as a “middle-aged town,” “ideal for someone of a certain age.” You’ve just decided to move back to New York.
EW Well, Chelsea, where we’re going to buy a flat, isn’t at all a young person’s place. Everyone seems to be thirty.
I never said I wanted to live in a middle-aged city. I was just characterizing Paris. I didn’t find it especially congenial for that reason. If anything, it’s slightly strange to live in a city like Paris that doesn’t have any youth culture. I find England, America, and even Germany, where there’s a very strong youth culture, somewhat more interesting. Also, I think in England and Germany there’s a working-class culture, which there isn’t in America or in France—though some black culture you could say is working-class. In any event, the fact that there are all these different cultures in America makes it very vital. In France, it still hasn’t gone beyond a certain saturation point. French culture tends to be very strong. Minority groups are forced to some extent to assimilate: whether you’re American, Vietnamese, or from the Ivory Coast, you have to behave in a certain way in order to pass in the ordinary daily functions.
RC You’ve been teaching at Princeton recently. What do you think the experience of coming back here permanently will be like? Things must have moved on.
EW Yes. It’ll be like discovering an entirely new city. All the people are different; all the behavior is different. Everything seems different. I left New York when it was still a fairly poor city. Now it’s terribly rich. Most of the time I lived in New York, you could still be a middle- or lower-middle-class person and live there. There were always apartments available. Now it seems there’s nothing available. The middle class have been squeezed out. Also, gay culture—especially in places like Chelsea—is utterly triumphant and completely visible. But it seems very much a body culture; not at all a bookish culture.
RC Gay literature now has a peculiar relationship to this gay subculture—one in which, AIDS notwithstanding, many problems seem solved. Gay life can seem perfectly straightforward in Chelsea. Key political questions from the past seem to have receded, even where they haven’t necessarily been solved.
EW I think only in certain big cities, and then only in certain regions. To me the Christian Right still seems strong. One out of every four Americans still counts him- or herself as a member of the Christian Right. I find most Europeans always underestimate the importance of religion here. Or else they’ll be told about it and take it on board, then they’ll forget about it. They don’t realize it affects absolutely everything in America. All you have to do is flip through your fifty channels on TV. Three of them will be from the Christian Right.
RC One point about the contemporary gay subculture that struck some writers as anomalous was the sense you’ve described of gay self-discovery in the past being intimately related to reading and discovering likeminded figures through fiction. To the extent that popular culture and society at large have moved on, that may not be such an elementary or necessary move now.
EW Obviously if you’re growing up in Chelsea it won’t be. But if you’re growing up in Evanston, Illinois, I still think you probably won’t find very many films or TV programs that speak to you more than once a year—and then somewhat superficially. I think people will still need to read David Leavitt’s Family Dancing, or my A Boy’s Own Story, or lots of other coming-out novels. Maybe I’m vaunting my own product more than necessary, but on an impressionistic basis, an awful lot of teenagers still come up to me at readings and say: “I read your book three years ago and came out.” Where else do they turn?
RC Well, Hollywood seems prepared to have a go: The Object of My Affection, presumably, will play in the Midwest.
EW Sure. But that’s new. And I think most things that are made into so-called gay movies are mainly about straight people. Take In and Out: 99 percent of the people in it are straight. Maybe two of the characters are gay, although the main one doesn’t seem too sure about that. But it’s basically this whole community’s response to this “problem”: the sudden outing of one of their members who himself doesn’t realize he’s gay.
RC You don’t make it sound very progressive.
EW Well, probably only three percent of the population is gay. If you contrast the problem of gay literature with the problem of black literature, the truth is that once white readers got past the minor barrier of color, they found themselves entire and intact in the black novel. That is, there are mothers and fathers, children and divorce, adultery and breast cancer, and all that stuff: church, sin, drinking, and wife-beating. There’s a whole array of subjects they’re interested in. It’s all there, which isn’t so in gay literature, unless it’s about straight people, which is the case of Family Dancing or The Object of My Affection or Armistead Maupin’s writing. If you look at the stuff that’s been most popular and been made into adaptations for TV or cinema, there’s always quite a large cast of straight characters. The gay character tends to be someone who forces straight people to reconsider, or who calls into question some of their assumptions.
RC But in a “softly, softly” way. These are narratives for bourgeois liberalism.
EW I suppose. There are people who would disagree with us. For instance, the late Gene Siskel, a leading film critic in America who had a weekly television program, wanted me to be on when In and Out came out. He thought it was the most subversive film ever made. He said he and his wife came out of the movie saying they didn’t want to be straight anymore. They felt the only attractive characters were the two gay men, and that the straight people looked so foolish and hidebound. That’s something you and I would never even think of, because it would never occur to us that straight people would think it was cooler to be gay.
RC But what is meant by “being gay” in this context? It sounds like a set of material packages; a lifestyle.
EW Yes. It certainly doesn’t mean having sex with a man.
RC In Paris you wrote overwhelmingly about New York and other places. Is the sense of having a contrast to your working environment important?
EW Well, now I’m writing a novel about Paris. In a way it’s the next thing to write about. It’s based on my relationship with Hubert, and of course that took place in both France and America.1 But it began and ended in Paris. I always felt very much like an American in Paris, just as I feel something like a Europeanized American in America.
RC Does this book amount to an expansion of the autobiographical trilogy?
EW No. It’s called The Married Man, and is written in the third person. I’ve only written about seventy-five pages, but once I started writing in the third person, I felt that the character Austin, who was ostensibly based on me, began to drift away from me and become somebody quite different. The fictional Austin is a lot less ambitious than I am. He’s a freelance writer of articles, mainly about home decoration and furniture, and an expert in eighteenth-century furniture. His life revolves around a whole world of decorators and antique dealers in Paris. That’s why he’s there. The Hubert character “Julien” is fairly close to Hubert, although he is starting to drift too. I realize in writing this that Hubert himself was always very mysterious to me. Since the point of view is from the Austin character, it’s OK that this Julien should be mysterious, because probably love is always based on finding the other person mysterious.
RC On the move to the third person: you had been trying this out in the short stories of Skinned Alive.
EW Yes, especially in “Palace Days,” in which there’s a character who was sort of based on me, but also on a friend of mine who organized gay travel events. He was a promoter of gay tourism, which AIDS brought to a screeching halt. In real life the guy would organize ships to the Caribbean and up and down the Nile. It was a continual orgy. He always talked about coming to Paris. Every month he’d call me and say: “I’m on my way.” But he never came. I took that guy and enjoyed imagining him leading my life.
By the same token, when I wrote “Running on Empty,” I’d been to Texas with my mother shortly before she died, and had had a lot of contact with my Texan cousins. Shortly after that, a friend of mine who was a translator from French, Matt Ward, was very ill. So I imagined what it’d be like if he’d made that trip to Texas instead of me. I was in perfectly good health, but he wasn’t. Plus I knew from our friendship what his own background was like. Apparently his parents felt a lot of class resentment. He’d risen above their station through his academic prowess; now they were all saying his life had been a terrible mistake because he had the virus. So it was a story about a little virus being allowed to win the argument he’d been having with his rather bigoted parents. Again, I knew enough about Texas and had strong enough feelings about my own Texan relatives. Matt, in fact, was not from Texas but Colorado. But I was able to project his life onto mine. That kind of hybridization is something I very much enjoyed doing.
RC Is this essentially something new for you?
EW I think it is. When you write in the third person, you’re not establishing a character through his voice, as you do in the first person. The first-person narrator is just this eye that travels over things, and if you come to know the parameters of his personality, it’s partly because you learn where this eye goes. You see what he sees, and see what he’s interested in looking at. If he looks at sex and cute boys a lot, then you realize he’s got that on the brain. If he’s looking at nature a lot, you realize he’s interested in natural beauty. If he’s always looking at the slightly foolish things people do, you realize he has a satirical eye. I think the “I” character in my trilogy has all three of those: an interest in the beauty of the world around us, an interest in sex, and an interest in social comedy. But you only learn that indirectly; through what he looks at. When you deal with a third-person figure, he’s more of a character, in which you try to build him up through small strokes into an actual portrait of somebody. So it helps if you hybridize yourself with somebody else; that permits you to be more objective.
RC It’s a much more difficult thing to do. With the first person, you can use consciousness to describe experience cumulatively, and the way it impacts on somebody’s sense of him- or herself. With the third person, you must either lean on free indirect discourse a lot, which can get clumsy, or the person has to act the process out in some way. So it’s more visual.
EW It is. And in tune with what you’re saying, I’m writing very short chapters—of five or ten pages each. I have a lot more dialogue; therefore it’s more scenic, in the sense of setting up scenes. The first-person technique I was mentioning works well over the long haul—if you have a long book like The Farewell Symphony. But in a short story it doesn’t work at all, especially if the narrator has a peculiar or idiosyncratic point of view. You don’t have enough space to discover it. So it’s good to write about this third person, whose point of view may be the one you’re constantly assimilating, but you still have the opportunity of drawing the camera back and looking at him as an object, too; as a character: summarizing his history; giving a quick sketch of his quirks, mannerisms, and so on, because you can be external from a third-person character in a way you never can from the first person.
RC Do the shorter chapters mean you’re experiencing some greater degree of formal control?
EW Yes. I was engaged to write The Farewell Symphony by the fact that I’d written the earlier two volumes. At one point I was thinking of writing four books. I abandoned the idea of a tetralogy because I’d waited so long to do The Farewell Symphony that by the time I got’round to it, I thought a third volume that ended with everybody romping around and having a great time would be intolerable to read in this post-AIDS period, just as a fourth volume which would be nothing but everybody dying would be equally intolerable. So it was partly a strategy for keeping the reader interested that made me want to write a very long, single volume that would cut back and forth from the pre-AIDS to the post-AIDS period.
The funny thing is, the actual negative reaction that the book prompted in America in certain quarters was scandal at its sexual excessiveness. That never occurred to me. Just before it went to press I said to Michael:2 “I have terrible misgivings about this book, because formally it’s such a mess. It’s too long; it covers too long a period. It seems to me out of control.” Nobody ever objected to that in the reviews I read. So I thought: “Maybe I did solve it.” Certainly I was rewriting it right up to the very last moment: trying to restructure it, simplify it. Originally I had a present tense, in which the narrator is meditating on things, that was also moving forward in time. I had a past tense moving forward in time more or less chronologically with a present tense moving forward in time. And in fact, that’s more realistic, because it suggests the person is taking a year or two to write this book.
Chateaubriand was my model. In Mémoires d’outre-tombe, he wrote chapters very slowly. It must have taken him ten years to write that book. When he writes about having starved to death as an émigré during the [French] Revolution in London—where he’d have to suck the sheets to get the starch out of them, he was so hungry—he’s writing it as the ambassador to London from France. Later, when he’s living in Germany, again he’s writing as the ambassador. So there’s this weird parallelism. But my editor Jonathan Burnham convinced me it was too complicated; it was expecting too much of the readers, and they just wouldn’t get it. He felt it would lend a lot more formal clarity if I pretended it was all being recalled in one day.
RC One possible objection, perhaps only because of the fact that you’d flagged the period it was about, is the sense that ultimately the book doesn’t say much about the experience of AIDS.
EW I didn’t want to talk about Hubert in The Farewell Symphony. I do talk about him in The Married Man. I was sincere about not wanting to get into all that yet. It was partly a formal decision, based on a subjective feeling. That book from the very beginning says: “Will I have the courage to talk about it?”; then the narrator doesn’t. I think that’s fair enough. There’s a little bit about “Brice’s” death, and a few readers were kind enough to say that they found that really scorching writing, really powerful, even though it was so minimal, compared to the rest of the book. I think sometimes very skimpy material, when strategically placed, can have a lot of weight.
That was one of the things I learned from Moby Dick, which actually only has enough plot to make a short story. Yet it’s this great long book. Why? Because Melville was interspersing it with all these other disquisitions on other topics like ropes, boats, tackle, whaling, a lot of technical stuff. It’s as though he wanted to let out this extremely powerful narrative material and didn’t want to corrupt it by expanding it. He wanted it to remain very nugatory. But he wanted to lend it dignity and weight by placing it in a big book in which there’s an enormous amount of delay before he gets to the next installment of the plot. That book always fascinated me, and I wondered how to do that myself. That was one of the echoes in my mind when I was planning that book.
The other book—you’re going to think this is name-dropping, but it is one of my favorite books—is a book I think about a lot: The Tale of Genji.3 It’s a thousand-page book, which is thousands of variations on the same theme: namely, Genji and his gallant adventures. He’s courting all these different ladies; going to their houses, and it’s always the same ritual. It’s oftentimes some lady who lives in an obscure place; her father was once a great noble, but has died. She’s fallen into obscurity and lives in a twilight world where nobody ever sees her. Then Genji hears about her, exchanges letters with her, is impressed by her beautiful calligraphy, and makes a midnight sortie. He calls on her, has sex with her, then there’s a great exchange of letters back and forth; then she remains in his heart the rest of his life in an abstract way: abstract in the sense that he doesn’t continue oftentimes seeing her, although he imagines building a great palace and bringing together all these different ladies who have meant something to him at some time or another. It’s sort of what J. Paul Getty did!
Again, that was a book that I thought gained tremendously by being a compendium of variations on the same theme. You felt there was a very poetic and therefore narrow sense of reality. There are only certain occasions that seem properly poetic to Lady Murasaki and that she wanted to keep coming back to. I felt very much that way in The Farewell Symphony—about going out cruising, picking up somebody. Of course there aren’t that many encounters in my book. There are maybe twenty, not five hundred, as there are in the Genji, but it still has somewhat that effect.
RC There are several gay novels you could think of in the same way: Renaud Camus’s Tricks especially.
EW Yes. One of the things I admired in Renaud’s book was the idea that not all the affairs were fabulous: some of the guys looked terrible; in some of the scenes he couldn’t get it up. In other words, it’s a record of what really happens in sex, not just what happens in some pornographic fantasy. That’s why I think Tricks is so good; it’s very realistic. When he wrote the book, he was young and very attractive himself. But he doesn’t present himself that way; as a stud. He really presents himself as a fallible human being who has all of these strange encounters. Some of them work; some don’t. I think that’s true of my book, too. Some people think I’m too harsh on the narrator of The Farewell Symphony; that I take the piss out of him too much. I don’t know. It is my tendency to do that.
RC In terms of your novels, The Married Man is the first experiment with the third person since Caracole.
EW Caracole was a disaster.
RC You know it wasn’t. How do you mean—in terms of ledger sheets?
EW No—but that way surely it was. It was the worst-selling of all my books. But I think it was also a book that profoundly confused people. It has six major characters and shifts in a very pell-mell way from one point of view to the other. With this book I’m really going to stick solidly to one point of view. That will give it a lot more unity. The other thing about Caracole is it took place in some kind of never-never land. Depending on your taste, you either find it an amusing hybridization of Europe and America, the past and the present, Italy and France—or you find it absolutely maddening and can’t identify with it.
It’s like the whole question of people’s tolerance for fantasy in fiction. Those who like it love it—and most people hate it. Caracole was my homage to one of the great failed books of all time: Nabokov’s Ada, which has Terra and Anti-Terra. Nabokov was trying to imagine what it’d be like if there had never been the Russian Revolution, and if America and Russia had been the same country, Amerussia, and you blend their cultures together. It was a hybridization, too, and a kind of alternative version to history as we know it. I was trying to do something similar. I have said of Caracole that, if you were taking a course in world literature, went to sleep the night before the exam and had eaten too much Stilton and had a bad dream, then this is what would come out. It seemed to me at one and the same time this sort of compendium of European literature, with a heavy emphasis on figures like Stendhal and Proust, plus a hybridization of straight and gay America and Europe.
Plus, I was very interested in the idea of a subject people who were superior to their rulers. I was thinking of Parisians under the Nazis, or the Venetians under the Austrians, or the Chinese under the Mongols. At one point Louis Malle wanted to make Caracole into a movie. Over this long lunch, he was telling me about his childhood, and I said: “That’s your movie!” That was Au Revoir Les Infants, which I think is his best work. So I convinced him not to make Caracole into a movie.
I think this new book will only superficially resemble Caracole, because it’s very grounded in reality: in a very particular historical moment—the late eighties in Paris; and in the whole expatriate scene; and with AIDS, before the new treatments. Do you think there’s a glut in AIDS literature, to the point that there’s tremendous resistance now on the part of readers?
RC I think it’s long been a problem for publishers. They don’t like marketing stories about AIDS, which certainly suggests some resistance.
EW One of my fears in writing this book is that it’s yet another book that’ll deal with AIDS. I don’t know whether the commercial curse on AIDS books is so great I’ll have trouble selling it.
I’m not somebody who has ever been terribly interested in writing about the ups and downs of the illness. That, it seems to me, has been done so much. I wonder how many people it speaks to, if they haven’t had the experience. For instance, if you read a story about a woman who had breast cancer, I think it could move you very deeply, but I’m not sure you’d want to follow every point of her treatment. Obviously the first gay writers who were considering AIDS wanted to be as close to it as possible. Now that seems to me probably not a good thing.
RC So what hasn’t been done—the documentation of the inner life?
EW That’s right. Plus, Hubert was somebody who was never totally incompetent. He was always a very competent man, who fortunately never had any kind of dementia, so until the very end he was able to handle his own case perfectly. The fact that I was an American and he was a Frenchman meant he could understand the French system of filling out those millions of forms and getting reimbursements and so on much better than I could. So I never got into it with him very much. I didn’t even go that often with him to the hospital. I was working to earn a living for both of us. In France they’re quite good about sending you taxis or ambulances, even when you’re in perfectly fine health. They take you in charge, so I didn’t really go through every detail.
Obviously when somebody dies and you love them, you always feel guilty. One of the things I feel guilty about is that I didn’t do more to help Hubert. On the other hand—I didn’t, so it’ll be perfectly truthful to leave out all the treatment stuff. There were only for me high points and low points. There were moments where he was hospitalized. Then I went every day several times. Then there were times when he was out and in bed. I’d feed and take care of him. Otherwise we traveled an awful lot. We had quite a nice life. His brother would always say: “Our family is grateful to you”—which I found so crazy. What he meant was: “We’d never have had the money to have shown him such a good time, and he needed to compress a whole life into five years.”
RC Some reviews of The Farewell Symphony were concerned with the extent to which the book felt so close to lived experience that it was closer to autobiography than to fiction or the hybrid “autofiction.” What’s your perspective on The Married Man, in acknowledging that the “Austin” figure is drifting away from you? Does the kind of book that’s written matter to you?
EW It does. But I’m always thinking more about readers. If there’s one kind of criticism that makes sense to me, it’s reader-response theory. It’s about the only one I ever think about when I’m writing. When I read other kinds of criticism—postmodernist or whatever—I think: “Oh, that’s true; that’s interesting; why not?” But it never seems to reflect anything that would go on in my mind when I’m actually writing. Whereas what does go on in my mind at a theoretical level—to the degree that I ever think about theory—is a constant concern about how this is going to affect the reader. Then of course you say: “Which reader?” There’s that whole question of the ideal reader.
I feel the writer is always modeling a kind of reader as a sort of averaging out of the people he knows and the people he wants to address. In other words, it isn’t just a mathematical average of all the people he’s ever met, because I think that would lower the tone in a way. You’d be writing down to people you’d happen to have met, many of whom don’t like literature or don’t even read. But you make a compendium of all the various people who have written you letters, of the reviews you’ve read that are intelligent, whether negative or positive. You’re constantly responding to that.
So one of the things that enters into my considerations when I’m planning a book is that I don’t really want to write about a well-known writer who, though not rich, was sufficiently at ease financially that he was able to do what he wanted and travel around as he wanted—because how many people would ever be able to identify with that? Just as the boy in A Boy’s Own Story I made a little less precocious than I was, both sexually and intellectually. I dumbed him down in the interests of making him easy for people to identify with. Even so, especially in England, people are always complaining in reviews that my characters all lead this glamorous life, and that they’re seen as inaccessible. The character I’ve chosen in “Austin” is sort of lazy; not terribly ambitious—like one of those expatriates who really was a misfit in his own country and has gone abroad partly for that reason—which I find is the usual expatriate—and who doesn’t have that much money. Their struggle is partly a financial one to survive.
RC The way you describe the importance of the reader’s reaction to a given situation made me think of the dramatist’s conception of character and audience. There’s this triangle, with you, the author, and the two figures you have in mind. The hybrid figure of the reader you’re describing is essentially a character; then there’s your other “staged” character. You’re looking at the relationship between these two, rather as a dramatist must; that is, you think of fiction in a dramatic way.
EW That’s very interesting. I think you’re absolutely right. But if that’s the case, I think a novel like The Farewell Symphony is like an extended dramatic monologue, because it isn’t really built up in scenes very much. They’re often half-scenes, quarter-scenes; not terribly developed. I think people who really start with drama as their template when they’re writing fiction—where that’s all they’ve ever thought about fiction—have a lot of dialogue, and scenes of about the same length. They tend to have rather complex scenes in which they try to sweep up all the leaves of everyday life and get them into one big scene. They also tend to believe in things I don’t—like turning points in life, or recognition scenes, or denouements.
RC Isn’t there an uncanny relationship between the short story and the play? [American writer] Jim Grimsley said he found the ideas that used to occur to him as short stories he now uses in plays. Tennessee Williams literally worked out of one form into the other. And these turning points and so on you mention do resemble the “epiphanies” of shorter fiction like Joyce’s. The nearest your work comes to that is in a story like “An Oracle.”
EW Yes. You’ve put your finger on something which is true in a complex way in my work. I did start off mainly as a playwright. I was very interested in theater for years and years. I wrote fifteen plays—all but two unproduced. It’s certainly something I worried and thought about constantly. When I came back to fiction, it was certainly with a lot of frustrated and failed training. But one of the things that interested me was how fiction was different from theater. It seemed to me that theater was based on a number of lies—like the lie that action always reveals character.
RC People like Fitzgerald relied on that.
EW Sure they did. But I don’t think it’s accurate. Both Hemingway and Fitzgerald would have thought that if, in a moment of great challenge, you turned out to be a physical coward, that says something definitive about you. But I’d say: “Wait a minute, if you’ve never been faced with somebody crazed and with a gun in his hand before, it’s hardly likely you’ll have a reasoned position to take there.” You’ll probably just squeal like a ninny and run away, because you’ve never thought about the situation before. Anyway, is physical courage in the face of a madman with a gun a very healthy or realistic response? And who wants to prove you’re this macho superman who can face a bullet and die bravely, when you could go on living another fifty years if you just were cowardly for a moment?
RC Now I hear the voice of George Eliot the moralist. You’re looking at fiction in terms of ethics.
EW Only moralistic in this sense: I oftentimes say to my students: “It’s perfectly all right to write an all-dialogue novel. But do you really think the most interesting exchanges between people or the most interesting moments in your own mental life have been based on speech?” Do people actually say the truth when they talk, or are they as Elizabeth Bowen believed they were—either deceiving themselves or deceiving other people? It’s a very cynical position, but one you could defend. I also feel there are certain other dangerous ideas: that there’s a unitary character; that we have a character that’s revealed through how we behave in something like a crisis; that childhood is the template for our later behavior; that sexuality is even more important than childhood, and so on. These are ideas I haven’t elaborated explicitly, but when I was writing the Genet book, I was very against this totalizing view of the self. I didn’t want to find the clue to his personality. I wanted to show him as somebody who probably transformed himself more than almost anybody I can think of. Genet goes from being this cunning peasant boy in the Morvan, to being a juvenile delinquent, to being a thief, to being a great writer, to ending up as somebody with broad humanitarian concerns for other groups of people, like the Black Panthers and the Palestinians. Obviously there’s a continuity in his life, but to get from point A to point Z seemed to me very hard to do if you only looked at A. You couldn’t have predicted Z from A; you could only move the way Wittgenstein talks about overlapping definitions as a way of looking at the word game. Wittgenstein says if you take that word, any one definition might suit meaning A, or any other might suit meaning Z, but there are all these other meanings in between, and there’s no single one that would include all of those meanings. You have to see them as a series of overlapping circles.
I think in the same way the self can be a series of overlapping circles. The boy in A Boy’s Own Story obviously has some of the same preoccupations as the grown man at the end of The Farewell Symphony—but not that many. You can see a continuity. It’s not like there is a radical rupture from one book to another, or from one chapter to another, but there’s not a predictable trajectory.
RC When you spoke of the objection to dialogue as deceitful, somebody like Ronald Firbank sprang to mind. He is somebody who seized on precisely what you described as the dramatic possibilities of dialogue; yet he refuses this will-to-truth you spoke against and produces something absurd.
EW Yes, but his dialogue is very unusual. He, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and an American writer called W. M. Spackman are the only three writers I can think of who write unrealistic dialogue. When other writers get to writing dialogue, no matter how experimental or unrealistic they might present themselves as being elsewhere, it’s always coffee-cup realism.
Nabokov recommended that a writer not use any dialogue in the first thirty or forty pages of a novel. He thought it very important that the writer impose his own tone of voice and point of view before handing it over to all these characters, who necessarily would talk in a realistic—that is, banal—way. I think Firbank, because he wrote in this terribly arch, mannered way, treated almost every line as poetry. It’s no accident that people like John Ashbery are fascinated by Firbank, and that other poets have turned to him—or that conscious, artistic writers like Alan Hollinghurst have turned to him too. Although I don’t see Hollinghurst as a development out of Firbank, it’s no accident that he’s fascinated by him.
RC I wanted to return to Caracole and your use of the word “disaster.” You described it as concerning history. Yet elsewhere you’ve objected to the Tolstoyan idea of the novelist as chronicler of history. You came up with an opposite understanding of the novelist: as an archivist of gossip, say. Instead of describing Caracole in terms of history, then, can’t we take it as a kind of absurd or fantastic retake on a trope which is common to all your early novels: the presumption or assumption of innocence or blankness in an individual at the very moment he is inducted into some climate of experience or adulthood.
EW Yes. That’s true of all my books.
RC You’re remembered in the most celebrated books for this direct and personal account of experience. Caracole feels like another writing self, wreaking a kind of vengeance on that material. It’s a fascinating book—and one that will last. Caracole is the book for which the time isn’t right. You’ve spoken candidly of the ways in which your other books found their moment—which isn’t to diminish them, but to contextualize their success. There’s the same potential for Caracole, too, so I’m intrigued by your use of the word “disaster.”
EW Well, I hope I’m wrong. I remember being very wounded by the reception among publishers of a book that never got published, called “Like People in History” or “Woman Reading Pascal.” At that time, my psychotherapist Charles Silverstein said: “Well, you mustn’t really like it that much yourself, or you wouldn’t be suffering that much. I think when you finish a book in the future, you need to ask yourself before it goes out, before anybody else looks at it, whether you’re satisfied with it; whether you think it’s actually good; whether it’s the best you can do. If it is, then fuck it. That’s all you can do.”
I remember thinking about that when I finished Caracole. I thought: “This is a book I’ve labored on long and lovingly. Every detail seems to me burnished or high-finished. Maybe there’ll be people who’ll dislike the whole conception—and there were plenty—but I think that, within its terms, it is one that is realized.” Its terms are very peculiar, and mostly invented by me. It’s not like they were preestablished. I remember in Germany, people hated it. They thought it was like Thomas Mann; “Weltkulturliteratur,” or something. There was something repellent for them about that. They wanted something like David Leavitt: short, minimalist, modern, and contemporary.
RC Something more transparently written would also be easier to translate.
EW That’s right, whereas with Caracole, somebody said it was the most European of all American novels.
RC Was it not also the work that took the most energy and time? It reads as it if must have done.
EW Definitely. I found a kind of release in writing it, too, because when you write a first-person autobiographical narrative, you’re obliged to be the first person, not really the other people. In other words, you’re writing about your own experience, and if you can get in touch with your own feelings; if you can recall them well enough, that’s what you’re feeling, and it’s a pretty simple, one-track story. If you’re writing a novel like Caracole, you have the possibility of dramatizing your inner conflicts and distributing them over six characters, so in a way you’re all of them. That must be the kind of pleasure that real novelists like Dickens had, where he’d whip up characters—or Balzac, who would enter into states of hallucination and not even remember he was writing. He’d take dictation from the people. There was something of that. I really felt that I was Matilda; I was Angelica. I wasn’t confined to one person, since there was no first-person point of view.
RC In The Farewell Symphony, you revisit the critical burying of Caracole in fictional form; the figure who objects to it, however, is heavily disguised—as a man.
EW You’re talking about Susan Sontag? That’s right.
RC So you retell that story in fictional form. Yet The Farewell Symphony also risks causing the same offence that the modeling of people in Caracole caused to some you knew. Some of the people in it are dead, but there are less disguised portraits of living people—one of whom, Alfred Corn, got to review it and didn’t like the portrayal of himself. So there’s a peculiar parallel between Caracole and The Farewell Symphony.
EW Definitely. I was very content that The Farewell Symphony came out in England first. It seemed to me that there it got a laboratory-pure reading, in the sense that even though some people liked it, some hated it, and there was a whole gamut of opinion, nevertheless nobody was too concerned about it as a roman à clef. My own feeling is that a real roman à clef is one you don’t even enjoy unless you know who the originals are, because the characters tend not to be very well-rendered on the page, whereas I pride myself on having created characters who might interest the reader even if he or she never suspected there was an original. Plus I think a real roman à clef tends to rely upon famous originals, whereas the people I wrote about were people who had some local celebrity, maybe, but who aren’t really internationally famous.
RC You got that negative review by Alfred Corn.
EW Yes. I never read it. I don’t tend to read bad reviews. But he had given a bad review to my stories in The Nation, and I’d been irritated with him. I said to Alfred: “We’re old friends. Usually friends don’t review each other, but if they do, it’s usually because they want to give a good review to each other. Your negative review is the only bad review Skinned Alive got in America. It seems odd to me that it should have come from a friend.” He wrote back a perfectly hateful letter all about how I was the one who’d had a glorious career, and how he’d had to suffer and been neglected by everybody. So then I said: “Don’t worry about it. I don’t care. Now it gives me the freedom to say anything I want to in my new book.”
I was a little shocked that The Nation asked the same person to review me again. Apparently in the review, he actually reveals he knows me, and that he’s a character in the book. That seems so peculiar to me, the whole thing, particularly as I’d recently given a large piece to The Nation, which was the speech I had given on “AIDS and Literature” at the Key West Literary Seminar.4 That was just before Alfred’s review came out.
Then, of course, the Larry Kramer response was of a different sort—again, though, from a friend. Who needs enemies with friends like that?
RC That received a lot of coverage. In the case of Kramer’s attack, you turned on him. It’s the first time you’ve turned on strongly hostile reaction like that. It felt uncharacteristic of you.
EW It is. But it was also the lowest blow. Alan Hollinghurst and Adam Mars-Jones gave negative reviews to A Boy’s Own Story. I’ve read those reviews, but they didn’t bother me, and I actually sought them out as friends, because they were perfectly defensible positions. They expressed them well and had lots of reasons. Also, they didn’t know me when they reviewed the book. They had no axe to grind, one way or another. With Larry, I think he’s a pathetically bad writer, so I just found it ludicrous that he’d even be given a forum to deliver himself of an opinion about my writing.
RC You’ve commented elsewhere on the possibility of being guilty to some extent of perpetuating a cult of the gay novelist as public figure, which is interesting. It put me in mind of the objection in Gore Vidal’s Screening History to the very idea of the novelist as public figure in a cinematic age.
EW Maybe in minority groups writers have a certain celebrity. Toni Morrison is really a huge figure in the black community. She teaches here and I know her. I went to a very moving party given for her the other day. It was all black people, except for me and a couple of others. They were all saying the kinds of things gay people are always saying at their literary reunions: “Who’d ever have thought that some day a black woman—of all things—would be on the cover of Newsweek, or would win the Nobel Prize?”
RC The gay people say: “Who would ever have thought he would achieve such-and-such . . .”
EW Well, that’s true. There’s more resentment, maybe, within the gay community. Maybe there is in the black community, too, for all we know.
RC When you said it was surprising that Kramer should have found a forum for his ideas, they’re ideas deeply removed from literature or aesthetics. I was wondering whether this cult of the figure of the author might point to some more general movement in culture towards reifying experience as the fount of creativity: in the current dominance of the memoir form, for instance.
EW There’s a peculiar American variety of that, which is that the celebrity is celebrated for being celebrated.
RC In terms of literature, we’re in an awkward climate, in that aesthetic criteria seem very unimportant—in gay contexts and elsewhere. I was thinking of the way the author as public figure is invited onto a talk show to attest to the “truth” of the fictional account he or she gave in a novel. By contrast, the imagination is distrusted.
EW That’s right. People just become vexed when you tell them: “This isn’t a hundred percent my life.” People will review, as Larry Kramer did, a book as though it were exactly true.
What’s interesting is that this has shifted. When A Boy’s Own Story came out, nobody dared to ask: “Is this really your life, or is this a novel?” They respected the word on the cover: “novel.” There was a whole convention in that period—which had always existed, I suppose—that if somebody called it a novel, it was a novel. People would always say: “Your hero says such-and-such.” But by the time The Farewell Symphony came out, things had shifted so much people would now say: “You got fucked a lot, didn’t you?”
There’s a technical aspect to the talk show we should mention, which is that even if the interviewer is an intelligent person who reads fiction for its imaginative pleasures, it’s almost impossible to talk about the art of fiction in the format of television. Last night, quite an excellent gay poet, Frank Bedard, came up to me. Instead of saying, “Your short story or novel I loved,” he said: “Your interview with Terry Gross, in which you talked about Hubert’s death, was the most moving thing I have ever heard.” He said: “That was the best talk show I’ve ever heard.” It was interesting to me that a talk show now is almost an aesthetic form in itself. A woman said to me: “I heard you on Terry Gross, and I was sobbing, because my father was dying and I was taking care of him at the same time that you were talking about the trials and tribulations of taking care of your lover. I went out and bought your book. I’ve never had time to read it, but I did buy it.” That’s very characteristic.
RC Now something connected to this sense of the writer as public figure. You introduced the question of A Boy’s Own Story and its fictionality. That book is perplexing because of the ease with which it was accepted by a wide readership. Robert Glück’s article touches on this question: how can the presentation of such a dysfunctional state of affairs easily come to embody anything universal?5
EW Yes. My own feeling is that there was an empty ecological niche at that time. People were looking for a “coming-out” novel. Now it’s such a cliché that an editor would yawn if you presented him with another “coming-out” novel.
RC The odd thing, given its content, is that A Boy’s Own Story becomes one of a group of books referred to with pride in terms of an emerging tradition of portraying homosexuality normatively.
EW But I think a lot of people haven’t really read it.
RC It’s a shameful book: the book is, among other things, deeply concerned with shame.
EW Sure it is—which is probably what’s universal about it. The universal thing about being gay is that you’re ashamed of it. In other words, we live in a shame culture; one that uses shame and guilt as one of its main policing devices.
I think gays are made to feel guilty not just about being homosexual but about being sexual. It’s the fact we insist on our sexuality that’s already the disgusting point for most people. They have abnegated their sexuality in the interests of career, marriage, dinner, or gardening. So many adults have entombed their sexuality in these enormous, corpulent bodies—especially in America—that they just don’t have sex. I really think that’s the dirty little secret of heterosexual marriage: that there’s nothing going on. Gays are resented and detested partly because they’re always presenting their sexuality and staking themselves on that.
RC The marketing of A Boy’s Own Story, too, contributed to its reception. You have to wait till the end of the next volume for the “I” figure to be on the threshold of self-acceptance, and in a position where beauty itself may finally be in reach, as well as political liberation. That casts an interesting shadow over A Boy’s Own Story’s appearance—including the notorious cover photo.
EW Sure. Because who did that look like? It doesn’t look like the hero, who describes himself as funny-looking. Mind you, I gave cover approval for that. I was very excited about it, though it cost us a fortune because the boy who was pictured sued and won a million dollars. It’s an interesting story, because so many gay men will oftentimes come up and say: “I’ve always been in love with that person. Could you tell me who he is? Can I meet him? Could you give me his address?” I say: “I don’t think you want his address because he’s a horrible pig. Even though you’ve been mooning over him for twenty years, it turns out you were on the wrong track.”
The truth is he was a boy walking down the beach in Cape Canaveral about the time of a launch. A photographer came up to him and said: “May I take your picture?” “Yes.” “Would you sign this release saying you’re over eighteen?” “Yes.” “Will you accept this check for three hundred dollars?” “Yes.” “Do you realize I do book covers, and you might end up on one?” “Yes.” “Do you understand I don’t necessarily know which book it might be?” “Yes.”
So far, so good. The book came out. Dutton wasn’t a rich publisher, but when it went into paperback, that publisher was, at that point, part of a greater company that was rich. So, about four years after the book came out, the boy’s father, a rich real estate developer in Coral Gables, Florida, decided to take it to court, saying the boy had been fourteen, not eighteen—though he looks quite old in the picture—and that his life had been destroyed, although we found out that only three or four copies of the book had been sold in his area. It was settled out of court for a huge sum—I think a million dollars.
I was living in Europe at the time. My poor editor, Bill Whitehead, had to go down and testify. It was one of the last things he did; he was so ill he died soon after. The idea he’d have to waste his last month or two in this idiotic trial with this greedy pig seemed to me so stupid. In any event, I felt as if we all had more energy—if I’d been in the States, and we’d all been courageous and idealistic—the real battle to be fought would have been to say: “Why should being considered gay ruin your life?” That’s what he was claiming.
RC Your books are often caught up in the tortuous relationship between art and life—particularly as understood by the law.
EW Yes. It’s true that there are about a hundred and sixty minor changes in The Farewell Symphony in the American version from the English version. They were all legal. One of the reasons the changes were made was they didn’t want me to imply anyone was gay. You can be taken to court for saying somebody’s gay, even if they are—unless you have absolute proof of it—or better, consent from them.
RC One incident you took out had caused a big reaction in British reviews: where you drunkenly fuck someone, knowing you’re HIV-positive.
EW I think I was cowardly. Americans are so puritanical—little did I realize to what degree. I thought: “I just can’t face going on the road for three weeks having to defend that”—not that I do defend it, even in the book; nor would I. But I felt bad later, because a number of people said to me: “Oh, I’d read the English version and I did that once. I felt you were the only person who ever had the courage to talk for all of us who are positive and have had unsafe sex knowingly without telling our partners.” It’s one of the dirty little secrets of gay life, and no one has ever addressed it, admitted to it, or done anything about it. Anyway, I lost my nerve too.
RC I wanted to talk about the unpublished novel you mentioned earlier: “Like People in History” or “Woman Reading Pascal.” It would’ve come between Forgetting Elena and Nocturnes for the King of Naples. You’ve now deposited versions of it along with all your papers at the Beinecke Library at Yale. I know you’ve long felt that, of all your unpublished work, this is the novel you wouldn’t mind being published after your death.
It wasn’t what I expected at all. Looking back over your own accounts of your career, a seamlessness is suggested, because it’s quite easy for you to talk about the first two books in relation to one another—as to some extent similar literary experiments. But effectively in the middle, there is this very different book: written in the third person; at the “Isherwood” end of your writing style, as opposed to the Nabokovian strain that predominates in the two novels published around it.
EW Yes, it was very realistic. David Bergman, my literary executor, went up to read it and was very enthusiastic. Then Richard Howard begged him not to publish it until he was dead too. So David thought that made sense, although I think my portrait of Richard is flattering in “Like People in History.” Also, it’s mostly a portrait of me; the “Dan” character seems to me much more me than Richard. I haven’t read it in fifteen years.
RC It’s interesting stylistically.
EW Well, if you’d ever read the original The Beautiful Room Is Empty, it was very simple in its writing and very realistic too. I think the one off in this regard was Forgetting Elena. When “Like People in History” went around twenty-two publishers and was rejected by everybody, it was probably the single most painful moment in my life. If it was painful before to have all my novels rejected, at least when I finally had one accepted—Forgetting Elena—I thought then I was on Easy Street. The idea that I was back to ground zero—that the next one couldn’t get published either—made me wild with desperation. So I think Nocturnes was a return not to the style of Forgetting Elena exactly, but at least to the level of experimentation. It avoided gay subject matter in the form I found was most obnoxious to people, which was middle-class gay life. Nocturnes is a very dreamy, poetic book, in which homosexuality is confused with longing for the father or God. It’s a sort of devotional book—one that certainly wouldn’t disturb a nice middle-class heterosexual man or woman. They wouldn’t say: “Oh, too many cocks and balls in this!” Nor would they say: “This is too close for comfort,” because it’s not close to anybody, except in some poetic way.
RC Another exceptional element in “Like People in History” is that it’s very funny. Humor has come to be central to your books, but isn’t so much in the first two. Why do you think it emerged in this spare, more social, accessible style?
EW I think “social” is the key. My humor has always been social comedy of an almost Jane Austen-like sort. I like gentle satire about the self and others. A lot of it comes out of the personality of Marilyn Schaefer [literary agent and close friend], somebody who has influenced me as much as anyone. She is the “Maria” in all my books, and plays a very prominent role in “Like People in History.” She constantly saw us all in a humorous light. She was always taking the piss out of herself and everybody in her circle and had this gently satiric view.
One of her favorite books is Cranford by Mrs. Gaskell. We’d read that and giggle; that whole way of treating a little, closed world as slightly absurd, which is also affectionate. That was a note she sounded for me. She’d find books and give them to me to read and find humor in. I think I was so under her spell that she shaped my sensibility quite a bit.
RC You’ve divided the books that have appeared into two types: the fantastic/experimental tradition versus the more realist tradition. On a basic level, the realist tradition won through after Caracole. The Farewell Symphony, I thought, however, was interesting in the extent to which this other, fantastic tradition reemerges. As the third part of the trilogy, it felt as if the book was pushing stylistically quite hard away from the first two; also, in terms of its moralism. Among other things, The Farewell Symphony is deeply engaged with morals. Is that an appealing description to you?
EW It definitely is. For one thing, once you get older and more conscious in your own life, you become more reflective. So if there’s an evolution in the style of the books, it’s partly reflecting the evolution of the man I’m writing about. It seems to me that once you’re in your thirties and forties, and have to deal with questions such as how you treat lovers, how you deal with AIDS, even the opposing claims of love and friendship—all these things are aspects of a life that’s entirely chosen.
Descartes said everyone should leave his or her country and move to some other country because by doing so, you invent a life that’s entirely chosen; you haven’t inherited any part of it. Being an expatriate means having an entirely voluntary life. It means replacing family with friends. All your associations are ones you’ve actively chosen. I think in a life you’ve chosen, the life of the expatriate, you are morally accountable for every part of it in a way that’s even more vivid to you than it would have been otherwise.
RC You’ve written about the way recognizing you are gay means having to make a near-infinite number of choices about how to construct yourself and your life, which sounds similar. So it would seem obvious that the moralist tradition would be a big one within gay literature—but I’m not sure it is.
EW I don’t think it is. I always feel that what a lot of gay writers want to do is normalize—even trivialize—the experience. It would be like treating AIDS from the Monty Python point of view if you were English. There’d be something disgusting about it. I feel that AIDS is a rupture in meaning; a hemorrhage, an outrage—something that no matter how hard you try, you can hardly describe how it took everyone by surprise and reversed all their values. It was a scandal. To try to domesticate it and make it humorous, and to show that Mother Camp is once more up to all this . . .
RC This is the same controversial position you adopted in the essay “Esthetics and Loss.”6 I thought you’d since modified your views on literature and AIDS.
EW Well, I have, only in the sense that I think humor of an absurdist sort is suitable now. I was too broad in that essay. But the basic feeling behind it I still embrace: the idea that you shouldn’t be on cozy terms with your own experience—ever. The idea of some gay man referring to some phenomenon of his immediate world and saying: “Well, he was a typical Chelsea kind of guy.” What is that going to mean to anybody in England?
One of the benefits of living internationally is you realize how these odd references to things don’t carry very far; just as, if you’re American but speaking French all the time, you learn to cut out all the parentheses, ironies, and all the whirligig of meanings, because you’re just struggling to get the primary meaning through. In the same way, I think that begins to influence your own effort to communicate in fiction too. For me, living abroad and in another language has simplified my English quite a bit. It’s made me use fewer of those inside references that are strictly culture-bound.
RC What’s the relationship between reading and writing for you?
EW One of the writers I keep coming back to is Colette. I feel she’s one of the most underrated writers, though I suppose that’s because her books don’t amount to much unless you read them all as chapters of one novel. If you do that, your fascination with this persona she’s creating—with “Colette”—can sustain you, sort of the way Jean Rhys does, book by book. But she’s a more interesting writer than Jean Rhys.
Colette has the largest vocabulary in French, because she’s always describing the natural world with enormous precision. She also has a marvelous feel for the sensuality of male bodies—and female bodies—and an awareness of all the cross-grained complexity of every erotic occasion. She renders that beautifully. She seems to be this graceful raconteur; but buried in the midst of all that stylish attitudinizing is a very precise—almost Elizabeth Bishop-precise—view of the body, of sex, of other sensuous moments: the appeal of furs, cars, cats, of food. She’s great on food.
RC Is fiction your first love and duty in reading?
EW Well, I read Colette when I feel like I am getting dry. It feels to me like I’m filling up the cisterns. I often get ideas about books from books. For instance, one of my favorite writers is a Uruguayan called Juan Carlos Onetti. Nobody has ever heard of him, but he’s actually one of the greatest writers of all time. He’s very well known in France, where all of his books are published by Gallimard. In English, it’s catch-as-catch-can.
Onetti came before the Latin American boom writers. He doesn’t write in magic realism at all. It’s kind of “film noir” writing, but tends to be very beautiful and philosophical. In a novel called Bodysnatcher, he has this incredible situation of a woman, about thirty-nine, who was madly in love with this guy and married him. He dies, and he has a sixteen-year-old brother whom she takes up with. She’s really mad; half-mad with grief. I thought: now there’s something I could write. I could make a whole novel out of that one incident in this book.
Oftentimes I’ll start vibrating to a situation I find in a novel that appeals to me—as a fantasy, perhaps. Or in real life, sometimes, situations will strike me. For instance, in America there was this big case concerning a woman in her thirties who fell in love with this twelve-year-old boy. I’m dying to do something with it. Matthew Stadler has been researching the story for an article. I want him to collaborate with me in doing a film script. We proposed it to Gus Van Sant, but he felt he’d covered that kind of material in To Die For.
RC Are you going to pursue it?
EW As a film-script idea, yes. Or it could eventually end up as a book or short story for me.
I think I have a kind of pedophilia I’ve gratefully always held in check; not ever acted on—or not since I myself was a boy. You see it even in the first chapter of A Boy’s Own Story—this thrill at the pubescent body. Luckily I don’t do anything about that. But I certainly would enjoy writing about it. It would be a thrilling fantasy. Anyway, the Romeo and Juliet aspect to their love story appeals to me a lot.
RC Tell me finally about the little book you’ve written on Proust.
EW It is kicking off a whole series of short, hundred-page biographies Viking Penguin are doing in the States. Proust actually had a very uneventful life, so it’s strange that almost all of the books about him are as long as his own. Mainly he was in bed writing, and suffering terribly from asthma. That’s not made up.
What I do is concentrate on the gay aspect of Proust, which nobody has really done very much. One excellent book called Proust and the Art of Love does go into it.7 Proust is a man who told André Gide he never had sex with a woman. It’s so obvious that a lot of the female characters—especially the primary one, Albertine—are based on men, or on several men, in fact. There are all these weird strategies Proust gets himself into because of the transposition. There’s what I call “literary lesbianism”—in other words, if you’re writing about a heterosexual man you’re in love with, and that man cheats on you, his gay lover, by having an affair with a woman, then you have to present him as a lesbian. I find this literary lesbianism completely wide of the mark as far as any realistic description of lesbianism, but it’s Proust’s way of talking about heterosexuality.
RC Did you come to feel a greater sense of affinity with Proust, compared to Genet?
EW Definitely. Proust is one of the great companions as a narrator. You love being in his company. He has a way of normalizing, generalizing, and universalizing everything, whereas, as Gaetan Picon wrote in a brilliant essay on Genet in 1947, he was the only great writer who wasn’t universal. When you read Genet, you’re aware what a nut he is. He’s doing everything to make his experience seem unrepresentative. Even though he was inspired directly by reading Proust, nevertheless Genet came up with something extremely different. In this very prickly way Genet has, he was always insisting on his difference, and that he was elusive and not understandable. Proust, however, universalizes: if he was actually half-Jewish, in the book he was entirely Catholic; if in real life he fought with his parents all the time, in the book he has a pious respect for his parents. If he was gay in real life, he’s virtually the only person who is a hundred percent straight in the book. After he died, a lot of books congratulated Proust for his bravery in dealing with this terrible gay subject matter!
One of the things I found was that I felt it was precisely at the points where he had to disguise his sexuality that Proust was at his most creative. I know that sounds as if I’m saying people should all go back into the closet. I think it’s too late for that, and that there’s been a different kind of energy released by people coming out of the closet. But in his case, it’s undeniable that the creative part—the part that wasn’t just mimetic but actually imaginative—was about working up all these disguises. It’s just like those men my age who are gay. In the fifties, we all had to hide the fact we were gay, so we were endlessly inventing girlfriends, or transposing in the midst of a conversation. If you wanted to talk about going out with Richard, you’d have to say: “I have this girlfriend, Rickie.” You’d have to make it a name close enough to the real one, or else you’d forget it the next time people asked: “How’s Rickie?”
RC You’ve anticipated a good closing question: whether gay liberation might have been bad for gay culture. Is gay culture, in the broadest sense, exhausted? Is there a chance that the material’s no longer there; it’s been mapped; the disguise’s no longer necessary; the subterfuge, the invention doesn’t need to be there?
EW Well, I think even sociologically there are a lot of worlds to be described. Take Lee Williams’s After Nirvana: that’s a world that hasn’t been described yet, that I know of.8 There’ll always be that—these hybrid things: gay and Mexican; lesbian and French-Canadian. There’ll be all those books to write. In general, though, I think you’re right. It is exhausting itself, though it seems to me there are some things that will still be interesting to describe—among them, negative pictures of gay life.
RC Pedophilia remains less mapped.
EW Yes. One of the great gay novels of the last thirty years is Terry Andrews’s The Story of Harold [1974]. Nobody knows it. That’s an outrageous book on that subject—very scary, scandalous, and beautiful. A real transgressive book.
RC And formally very inventive.
EW Yes, because of the playing off of the passages from the children’s book, and the relationship of the little boy with the masochist. It’s all intertwined. Andrews shows there are links between these areas—some of them so transgressive; some, perfectly normal and even considered gooily sweet—like an older man taking an interest in a sad little boy in a big brother way. The fact that that can be linked to these other areas of horror is fascinating.
RC On that note, thanks very much for your time.
1. Hubert Sorin was White’s partner for much of his time in Paris, and coauthor of the nonfiction Our Paris: Sketches from Memory. Sorin died in 1994.
2. Michael Carroll, writer and White’s current partner.
3. The Tale of Genji: Shikibu Murasaki (978–c. 1031) was a Lady of the Japanese court and wrote Genji Monogatari, or The Tale of Genji, the world’s earliest long novel.
4. White is speaking of “Journals of the Plague Years,” in The Nation, May 12,1997,13–18.
5. Robert Glück, “A Boy’s Own Story,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.3 (Fall 1996): “Edmund White, Samuel R. Delany,” 56–60.
6. “Esthetics and Loss” was first published in Artforum (January 1987); reprinted in John Preston, ed., Personal Dispatches: Writers Confront AIDS (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989), 145–52, and in White’s The Burning Library: Writings on Art, Politics, and Sexuality, 1969–93, 211–17.
7. J. E. Rivers, Proust and the Art of Love: The Aesthetics of Sexuality in the Life, Times, and Art of Marcel Proust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).
8. Lee Williams’s After Nirvana (New York, 1997) is a novel describing the world of drugged-out street kids in Oregon.