Understanding Edmund White
by Nicholas F. Radel
University of South Carolina Press 160 pages, $39.95
IN an astonishingly generous review that appeared in The New York Review of Books last October, Edmund White used the term “ingenious” to describe David Halperin’s recent book How to Be Gay. Here is how White responded to Halperin’s bizarre dismissal of an entire generation of gay liberation-era writers, in- cluding a reference to White himself:
As [Halperin] puts it, “Why would we want Edmund White, when we still have The Golden Girls?” No doubt some would. But surely the opportunity that novelists of my generation had to explore the previously uncharted territory of gay life, and to write about gay consciousness, was too much of a tempta- tion to ignore, and our efforts to map out gay experience re- vealed a part of the culture that had been largely hidden.
Characteristically, White makes only the mildest claims for his own output, which ranges across several genres and a period of four decades. Of this fact we are amply reminded by Nicholas Radel’s succinct, comprehensive, and intelligent critical study of White’s entire œuvre—the first such study to appear.
Radel has clearly done his homework and deftly steers the reader through all of White’s fiction— from 1973’s Forgetting Elena, a debut which saw few sales but won critical ac- claim from Vladimir Nabokov, to last year’s Jack Holmes and His Friend. He draws upon White’s late nephew Keith Fleming’s two remarkable accounts of growing up in New York under White’s guardianship, as well as Stephen Barber’s flawed biography (1999) and numerous critical essays. This reader longed for more on White’s nonfiction—including short biographies of Rimbaud (2008) and Proust (1999) and the de- finitive life of Jean Genet (1993), as well as White’s mem- oirs—Our Paris: Sketches from Memory (1995), My Lives (2005) and City Boy: My Life in New York during the 1960s and ’70s (2009)—which are introduced largely as adjuncts to his fiction. To give but one example of the stature of these works: Genet, described by Radel as “magisterial,” won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1994 and led to White being made a Chevalier (later Officier) de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.
Radel has also interrogated the White archives at the Bei- necke Library at Yale, and he summarizes several unpublished works of juvenilia. Dark Currents, a novel White wrote at age fifteen, will never appear. But its preoccupations, and to some degree its literary style, foreshadowed White’s mature writings.
The 1963 play The Blue Boy in Black had a brief run off-Broad- way, which Radel also describes, though he only briefly cites “Like People in History” (also known as “Woman Reading Pas- cal”), by far the most important of White’s unpublished early fictions, and the one that the author himself thinks might still be worthy of publication today.
Sometimes, inevitably, one questions Radel’s emphases. His study undersells White in concluding that his “greatest achieve- ment is to have helped create a literature that represents gay lives to an American reading public in middle-class terms.” I would argue that any group affiliations of White’s characters are much less significant than their intelligence, self-awareness, confi- dence, and erudition. Although Radel writes well about the his- torical and cultural contexts of White’s writings, he is somewhat less thorough on White’s key influences and on the novelty of the narrative voice that he adopts. The concept of “autofiction” remains central to understanding White’s transitioning between fiction, memoir, and something in-between. A key force in shap- ing his ideas concerning “autofiction” was the writing of Christo- pher Isherwood, whose example goes entirely unmentioned.
Central to White’s cultural significance is his autobio- graphical fictional trilogy of the 1970s and ’80s. Radel notes the critical importance of White’s decision to eschew a straight- forward chronology in the first volume, A Boy’s Own Story, since this shows that gay men at this time simply did not expe- rience a coherent development from childhood to maturity. The very form of the bildungsroman—nevertheless used by other novelists—thus admits to a misconception. The idea of the nar- rator-protagonist “developing” in malformed or unstable ways returns in The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988). While the book ends with the narrator witnessing the Stonewall riots and feel- ing a sense of impending self-emancipation, Radel notes that the novel “is replete with the narrator’s description of himself and other gay men as sinful and sick.” Still, that volume did in- troduce one of White’s major themes: the essential value of friendship to gay men, something The Farewell Symphony (1997) and The Married Man (2000) both also adumbrate. In the latter novel, Austin opines that “among male homosexuals friendship ruled supreme.”
Radel pays careful attention to the multiple types of narra- torial personæ in White’s novels, even as he rightly points out the apparent lack of mediation of the last book in the trilogy, The Farewell Symphony. I would have welcomed further com- ment on that book’s shapelessness compared to its predeces- sors—conceded by White and cause of one of novelist-critic Dale Peck’s notorious “hatchet job” critiques. But Radel does record the senseless accusation by a consistent antagonist, Larry Kramer, that this novel lacked the degree of necessary hindsight when recounting, in the wake of AIDS, the “golden age of promiscuity” (Brad Gooch’s phrase) which had preceded it.
Radel makes a strong case for White’s AIDS fiction as among his finest achievements, particularly the three stories written for 1987’s The Darker Proof (co-authored with English writer Adam Mars-Jones). These stories had a new subject but prove consistent with all of White’s writings in perceiving, but never explaining, the chaos of modern lives. This trait was first announced when the boy narrator in Forgetting Elena notes pre- cociously: “I am the first person in the house to awaken, but I am unsure of the implications.” This statement might well take us back to the narrator’s famous formulation at the start of Ish- erwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1938), equally self-conscious in its use of the present tense: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”
Radel is particularly thorough on Forgetting Elena, avoid- ing the temptation to read too much specificity into its fantasti- cal mise en scène. The book’s genesis in White’s experiences of Fire Island gay beach culture is the least interesting thing about it. Its plot Radel nicely summarizes as “a contest among the island’s various inhabitants to control their own and others’ understanding of a reality open to constant re-inscription.” And he cleverly connects the “devious and improvisational” quality of the narrator to that later found in A Boy’s Own Story. It is compelling also to recall that White argued for the “modernism” of Forgetting Elena, telling us in City Boy (2009) that he had been reading Kafka and Beckett before writing it. It is, Radel concludes, both a queer novel, decades before its time, and a “paranoid,” self-closeting text.
If Radel expresses certain reservations about White’s two historical novels—Fanny: A Fiction (2003) and Hotel de Dream (2007)—he nonetheless makes us aware of the ways in which they develop themes in White’s more contemporaneous works, rather than displacing them. In the later novel, White’s act of ventriloquism whereby Stephen Crane, a heterosexual author, writes about gay love in “The Painted Boy” is accommodated alongside another storyline, in which White, a gay author, writes about the heterosexual romance between Crane and Cora. This capacity—both for mutual understanding and misunderstand- ing across sexual identities—would be revisited by White in the way he described parallel gay and straight lives in Jack Holmes and His Friend.
Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978) and Caracole (1985)—favorites of many of White’s devoted readers—prove the least easy of his novels to integrate into Radel’s analysis. Nocturnes was an astonishing technical achievement in its confident reconceptualization of the mordant form of devo- tional literature, with its second-person (“you”) narration. Caracole, as English novelist and critic Neil Bartlett has ar- gued, may take up a heterosexual storyline, but its lush, Baroque rhetorical excesses proclaimed a gay æsthetic, quite distinct from sexual themes and sexuality in characterization. Its young protagonist Gabriel desires women. But the contin- gent, self-constructed nature of his personality connects him to the life experience and self-conception of gay men, who must construct a self to avoid having a less benign one forced upon them. As The Married Man later has it, “everything had to be invented, reimagined.”
Radel’s bibliography is surprisingly incomplete, omitting White’s influential 1992 anthology, The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction, the selections in which say much about his un- derlying literary affinities. It also falls short of citing particular stories, only collections, and so a few rarities such as “The Beautiful Room is Empty” (only found in Seymour Kleinberg’s 1979 anthology The Other Persuasion and unrelated to the novel of the same name) are missing. Nonetheless, this is a most helpful primer for anyone studying White’s many accomplish- ments, and succeeds in making the case for his eminence and enduring importance as the most talented gay author of the last half-century.
Richard Canning’s most recent publication is an edition of Ronald Fir- bank’s Vainglory for Penguin Classics (2012).
