EDMUND WHITE’S latest book, Arts and Letters, brings together 39 essays spanning nearly twenty years in the career of one of America’s most accomplished men of letters. In addition to his autobiographical trilogy—A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony—White has written several other novels as well as an earlier essay collection and a volume of short stories. His biography of Jean Genet won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also written a biography of Proust and a pair of memoirs about his years living in Paris.
White’s new essay collection compiles a gifted writer’s reflections on some of the most important writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Thrown into the mix are his conversations with some of the world’s most intriguing painters, sculptors, and photographers, as well as entertaining and revealing celebrity portraits of the likes of Catherine Deneuve, David Geffen, Elton John, and others. I interviewed Edmund White in person last October.
— Jim Nawrocki
Jim Nawrocki: There’s a wonderful breadth to this book. You mention in your introduction that Donald Weise conceived of this collection—hadn’t it occurred to you before to bring these essays together? Was there any reluctance on your part to do so?
Edmund White: I suppose I always thought that some day I’d bring them together, but Don presented me with a list of contents that made everything seem breathtakingly easy. Of course, being who I am, I had to change everything all around and rewrite lots of the essays, but his initiative was the necessary spark. At one time a few years back I thought I’d do a book about gay male makers and shakers, but this book seemed to have a broader appeal.
JN: You list Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov, Jean Genet, Christopher Isherwood, and James Merrill as personal icons. What creative qualities of theirs do you most admire?
EW: Nabokov I admire because he is the supreme entertainer, if “entertainment” can mean a simultaneous appeal to the intelligence, memory, feeling, and sensuality. Merrill is the Nabokov of poetry, though he goes much further towards creating a strong personal myth. Merrill has also shown how social comedy can conceal the depths of emotion; no wonder he loved Der Rosenkavalier! Proust turns out to be the supreme writer of the 20th century, for the many devious ways that he combined the personal and the political, the autobiographical and the entirely invented. Even though he writes about a rarified world, his insights into time, love, jealousy, art, and family life are the truths that affect us all, no matter how humble our backgrounds. Isherwood is the founding father of modern gay fiction with A Single Man, the single most important gay novel in English of the 20th century—and the first to show a gay protagonist unashamed and unexplained. Genet, writing forty years earlier, invented the drag queen for literature (Divine in Our Lady of the Flowers) and brought a tough-guy intransigence to what had been, until then, a literature of apology and pathology.
JN: You also try to focus some attention on “unjustly forgotten writers”: you mention Bunin, Hamsun, and Robbe-Grillet. Is there anyone else you’d add to that list?
EW: Many of them, including Denton Welch (A Voice Through a Cloud), a young French writer, René de Ceccatty, and countless others.
JN: You speak admiringly of Grace Paley’s gift for writing politically inspired fiction. Given what’s going on in our country and in the world today, would you like to see more writers take on politics and politicians in their work?
EW: Yes, I think it’s shocking that so many writers are still writing fiction about their father’s death, their arguments with their mothers, and the thrills of adultery, when there are so many great serious issues to address. These issues can certainly be treated imaginatively—I’m thinking of Gabe Hudson’s wonderful book of stories about the first Gulf War, Dear Mr. President.
JN: Your essay “Writing Gay” is a wonderful overview of your career. In it you mention that you had originally planned your series of autobiographical novels as a tetralogy, but in the end collapsed the 1970’s and 1980’s into one volume (The Farewell Symphony). Was that a difficult decision? Can you envision yourself revisiting AIDS in future fiction?
EW: I think I’ve probably written out AIDS, though it’s in my memoirs, which I’ve just finished. It’s always in the background.
JN: At the conclusion of this essay you label one trend in recent gay fiction as “post-gay” writing, “in which one or two characters might be gay but in which they are more or less inserted into a more general society.” Do you see this development as a kind of victory for gay writers, or for gays in general?
EW: Of course it can be used as a strategy for keeping mainstream readers, and in that sense it could be cynical. But in general I think it brings gay writers back into the center of people’s concerns. Whereas my fiction is read mostly by gays, The Hours was read mostly by straights—and that’s all to the good, since it exposes straight readers to gay content in acceptable doses and makes gay experience familiar (which is a progressive move).
JN: In another essay, “The New Historical Novel,” you argue for a historical fiction that “unearths” the past, “not as we would have it be but as it truly was.” Similarly, in “Writing Gay” you defend Brad Gooch’s biography of Frank O’Hara as a true depiction of the life this poet lived. Do you think there’s a tendency that’s endemic to American culture, or at least the current culture, to recreate history and biography to suit our needs?
EW: What is considered “shocking” and “daring” is usually just a very small deviation from the norm. Anything that truly delves into transgressive material—like Samuel Delany’s The Mad Man—is quickly sidelined.
JN: There’s a moment during your interview with Cy Twombly in which he laments the fact that writers are paid so terribly. Do you share that view? What’s your take on the current state of American publishing and the American reading public?
EW: I think publishing is like cable TV or the Internet. It’s moving towards atomization and dispersion. In the past we had the Book-of-the-Month Club and three channels and no Internet; you could always be sure that the secretary at the next desk at work had seen the same Alcoa Theater Hour or read the same James Gould Cozzens novel that you had. Now the culture is more and more fragmented, at the same time that the economy and politics are more and more consolidated and “rationalized.” People read and buy books, but the “books” are fanzines or graphic novels or porn or fiction on-line or blogs. Does this constitute literature? I don’t know. Is it more or less democratic? I don’t know.
JN: Your essays in the “Personalities” section of the book include a nice bonding moment in your discussion with Catherine Deneuve over your mutual dislike of the way interviewers sometimes describe each of you. How has the sense of your own celebrity shaped the way you examine and respond to the celebrity of others? It seems as if it’s made you more sympathetic to them.
EW: Well, compared to a real celebrity, I’m a big nobody, but I do understand some of their peeves a bit better. Like making awful remarks about how one looks. One critic recently said that I was the fattest writer in America, rivaled only by Harold Bloom. Then he e-mailed me the article to make sure I didn’t miss it. In journalism school they teach you not to deduce someone’s character from his home decoration, but no one observes this rule.
JN: You address the topic of bisexuality in your essay about Marjorie Garber’s work. You wrote that essay in 1995. Have your views of bisexuality and gay sexuality changed at all since then? Do you think it’s fair to say that our American views on sexuality, both hetero- and homo-, are somewhat simplistic?
EW: Well, some people who say they are bisexual are just closeted. But others really are bisexual, and the gay and the straight communities aren’t very tolerant of them, because bisexuals are unpredictable, not easy to categorize. Before “gay” became so conspicuous and discussed as a minority, a lot more guys experimented with it casually—which I thought was fun.
JN: You write admiringly about Allen Ginsberg the person, and describe the encounters and conversations you had with him. To a large extent Beats are still revered in American culture, at least in youth culture; they seem to be able to enchant new generations of younger readers. Do you admire the writing of the Beats?
EW: I love On the Road and certain Ginsberg poems like “Wales’ Visitation.” I love the free-love, bohemian, Buddhist, peacenik, jazz-listening mix of the Beats—and their spontaneity, the whole “first-thought-best-thought” credo.
JN: You write about visual art and artists and photographers such as Twombly, Mapplethorpe, and others. Have you ever fantasized about working in the visual arts yourself?
EW: No, but I admire artists and photographers and respond to their work. The contemporary arts are also a great trope for more general discussions about the culture.
JN: Who are your reading (or re-reading) these days?
EW: My favorite writer just now is Jean Giono, a lyrical nature writer and epic novelist [notably Horseman on the Roof (1953)]from Provence of the 1930’s to the 1960’s. He brings me more pure pleasure than any other writer. He writes densely—there are at least two things going on in every sentence. His character Angelo, who appears in five different novels, is a great Stendhalian hero.
JN: You mentioned finishing your memoir. How did that writing process go?
EW: I found it to be a lot of fun, and a bit like auto-analysis in the sense that I made connections where I never suspected they existed. I always thought a memoir would be a sobering project, but I found it to be quite giddy.
