FOR OVER THIRTY YEARS, Edmund White has been turning the messy, tragic and exalted experiences of life into transcendent and scintillating fiction; at 65, the author shows all the moxy and audacity of an enfant terrible. A blurb for his new book, My Lives: An Autobiography (Ecco/HarperCollins) refers to White’s “well-deserved reputation as America’s Marcel Proust.” While this may be an obvious comparison when it comes to his fiction, this pungent, no-holds-barred memoir displays his close affinity to André Gide, who was notable for his castigation of bourgeois society: “Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessors of happiness!”
As the doyen of contemporary gay literature, White is grounded and pragmatic about his well-deserved fame and his ability to attract ambitious young disciples to his agora. A teacher and role model, he’s well known in the literary community for his encouragement of up-and-coming writers (including his longtime companion, Michael Carroll). White’s own literary success arrived when he was fairly young, in 1973, with Forgetting Elena, his impressionistic debut novel about a young man without qualities or memory, which won praise from his lifelong idol, Vladimir Nabokov. His next book, the lushly homoerotic Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978), was hailed by Gore Vidal as “a baroque invention of quite startling brilliance and intensity.” White’s 1982 novel A Boy’s Own Story is widely recognized as a coming-of-age classic, with a hero who holds his own alongside Huck Finn or Holden Caufield.
In My Lives, White offers an intimate glimpse behind the screen of his fiction at his various “lives”—those of son, writer, lover, flâneur, bon vivant, activist, HIV survivor, friend, and slave—yes, slave, in an episode of fairly recent vintage in which he explored the dark Eros that is his muse. This story, like the others, is told with a masterful bravado. Expansive and ostensibly truthful to a fault, this memoir is sure to throw some “sensitive” readers into a tizzy. My Lives is a Proustian scrapbook, crammed with formative events, lovers, tricks, shrinks, and others—people both famous and obscure, who populate his life history. Happily, the author subverts the usual chronological order of the memoir form and divides it into free-standing categories, such as “My Shrinks,” “My Father,” “My Mother,” and “My Europe.” This scheme is reminiscent of Hogarth’s allegorical serial prints The Rake’s Progress and The Harlot’s Progress, where each adventure serves as a part of the overall narrative. Like Hogarth, White fills each story with sundry satiric and revealing details. In the first chapter, “My Shrinks,” White is seen in a vintage photo, standing studiously erect beside a medical growth chart. He then enumerates his travails growing up during the button-downed Eisenhower era and describes his grueling encounters with Freudian quacks who hoped to “cure” him of his emergent homosexuality. Certainly all the years and money spent by his parents on his conversion therapy must have taught him a thing or two about confronting his demons. Although psychoanalysis ends up a bust—“The residue of this indoctrination was a narrow, normative view of humanity”—he concedes that “Psychoanalysis did leave me with a few beliefs, including the conviction that everyone is worthy of years and years of intense scrutiny—not a bad credo for a writer.” In “My Father,” we meet the workaholic, emotionally withholding, misanthropic martinet of A Boy’s Own Story. In “My Mother,” Delilah is presented as a pint-sized virago, an intelligent, boundary-hopping steel magnolia who would commandeer White into lacing her into a medieval Merry Widow corset and then escorting her around Chicago’s cocktail lounges on quixotic man-hunting quests. A precocious observer of adult social behavior, young Edmund participated vicariously in the subtle art of scouting and seducing available male prospects. In “My Hustlers,” White shows he’s very much his capitalist father’s son, as he spends his summer salary in the pursuit of pleasure with yokels on the make. At this point he awakens to the fact that ready money can buy willing male tail—if not love. In “My Blonds,” he confesses to his erotic passion for Aryan male pulchritude (“blondes make me cry”), and discusses past lovers who are either like “Blake’s sword-wielding angels” or manic and crazy. One Rabelaisian anecdote refers to an incident you won’t find in the recent autobiography Tab Hunter Confidential involving a tryst with “the still youthful Tab Hunter,” who’s overheard bellowing from the boudoir, “Go on boy, sit on that big Daddy dick!” White isn’t above telling tales out of school and dropping names, such as that of French philosopher Michel Foucault, playwright Arthur Laurents, musical comedy star Larry Kert, and writer Susan Sontag. White’s exposure of himself to public scrutiny and judgment finds him at his most vulnerable in “My Master,” the psychodrama in which, like an experienced ecdysiast, he gradually reveals his escalating sessions with a dominant young Adonis and their explorations of primal pleasure-pain. Yielding to the call of the pleasure principle, White ends up caught on an emotional treadmill of compulsion; his exultation in his groveling submissiveness is reminiscent of an Elizabethan devotional sonnet. In a tribute to the anonymous “T,” he observes: Sometimes I felt sex—our sex—had little to do with pleasure and was merely a symbolic transaction, another notch in my belt. … I was worried that this much younger man would become irritated by my prolonged milking and would push me aside as someone sleeping might wave off a mosquito. I suppose I want to say the simple fact of our being together felt like a miraculous act of generosity on T’s part. I was always grateful. Gratitude is my main erotic emotion, one that goes well with abjection. For a walk on the wild side of sexual experimentation, you couldn’t ask for a more erudite, cultured, and accommodating guide. Sometimes White admits to feeling like Scheherezade with a case of cotton-mouth: ”After sixty, you feel you are recounting the nine hundredth of the thousand and one tales you have been allotted to tell and a new friend will never catch up. Better to meet some breezy new kid who has no idea who you are.”At the book party held at the GLBT Community Center in Chelsea, he jokingly observed: “Most people will recognize a lot of the experiences and characters in My Lives from reading my novels, which, after all, were based on my own life—but always presented as fiction. Now, in order to prevent any misunderstandings, this is a memoir presented as my life—so as not to be confused with the creative fiction non-fiction of James Frey [author of A Million Little Pieces].” White shared his thoughts about his new book just prior to its April release at his home in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, where he has lived with Michael Carroll since 1995. — Michael Ehrhardt Michael Ehrhardt: You dedicated My Lives to poet-librettist-editor J. D. McClatchy. ME: Some of the book is pretty raw. Did you get a charge out of reliving some of your sexual experiences while writing such a candid memoir? ME: You’re braver than Proust in the sense that he hid behind his gay characters. He’s always reporting things by peeping over transoms, or hiding in courtyards or a bordello. ME: Do they still run male brothels in France? ME: You’re always being compared to Proust, but wouldn’t Gide be more to the point, what with his cult of sincerity? ME: His Corydon was a gay milestone too, written in the early 1920’s but not published in the U.S. until the 50’s. Corydon even took a quasi-scientific view of homosex. ME: Wasn’t Gide’s view of homosexuality somewhat limited? He was basically just talking about “pederasty,” no? ME: Getting back to My Lives, Cocteau once said that the tact in being daring involves knowing exactly how far is going too far. How did you decide how far to go in your memoir? ME: Did you find it liberating? ME: You’re friends with Ned Rorem. Were you influenced by his tell-all Paris and New York diaries? You only mention him once in your chapter on Paris. ME: You were a member of the Violet Quill literary circle that met in the early 80’s. Why did they disperse? ME: Do you feel we’re going through a cultural war today—with the new surge of religious intolerance? What’s happening here and in Scandinavia, for example? ME: The paradox is that the Muslim culture, which is so homophobic, has a gay culture on the down-low. Genet had a married Arab lover. By the way, have you ever seen Tony Richardson’s movie Mademoiselle, which is based on Genet’s screenplay? ME: Genet seemed to enjoy being an enigma. Was he really a tough, with a criminal streak, or was it a pose? ME: I got a kick out of your dancing Harry Beaton and doing a sword dance in a school production of Brigadoon. That was pretty courageous. Michael Ehrhardt is a writer living in New York City.
Edmund White: Yes. He’s a longtime friend, and he’s always been very supportive of my work; so it was a perfect time to show my appreciation.
EW: Well, I didn’t get a hard-on writing it. I’m willing to imagine that I’m not at all exhibitionistic, or a voyeur either; not even in the sense that Proust was. Writing isn’t an auto-erotic experience for me.
EW: Like in the scenes with Jupien and Charlus.
EW: Not since Proust’s day. Although the French are still open and permissive about sexuality and prostitution, it’s not legal to run an operation in which there’s an intermediary, such as a pimp or a madam. That’s so that sex workers won’t be exploited.
EW: I love Gide. In prep school I read his Journals and The Counterfeiters, as well as his coming out book, If It Die, and The Immoralist. I think The Counterfeiters is one of the great modernist novels.
EW: Yes, it was very courageous of him. Actually, he started those dialogues as early as 1908, and he published some of them—the first two dialogues—as early as 1911, I think. The trial of Oscar Wilde was still fresh in the public’s mind. All of Gide’s friends were horrified—not about the fact that he’d written it, but that he would publish it as a defense of homosexual love. They were concerned that publishing it would marginalize him. Claudel begged him not to publish an openly gay reference in Lafcadio’s Adventures, as well. But Gide never saw himself as a victim in his being gay. I found that very admirable about him.
EW: Well, that depends on what you mean by limited. Gide was only limited by his tastes. He liked adolescents, but he never forced himself on anyone.
ME: Again, the Greek ideal. But he frowned on certain practices, such as anal sex between grown men. He was shocked by Oscar Wilde’s behavior.
EW: Even though Wilde helped to bring him out. Well, Gide’s Protestant Puritan background still colored a lot of his opinions. But he was very liberal and progressive. He denounced the exploitation of African colonial workers, which resulted in French reforms. And he denounced Stalin in his paper “Return for the USSR” in the 1930’s.
EW: I suppose you’re referring to the chapter on “my master.” I don’t really know, now that it’s finished and it’s out in print. Maybe I’ve gone a little too far, and people will say that it’s really “too much information.” Maybe in retrospect it was a little tacky to write about that area of my life. I just thought it seemed right to give the truth about my relationship in all its details, without censoring myself.
EW: Oh, yes! Also, a few years ago, when I gave a reading in Germany, a young man in Munich stood up and burst into a rage against me, saying: “You always write your books from a smug, remote, and safe distance in your past! Why don’t you ever write about the angst in your life now, in the present?” Well, that stayed with me, and I decided that now, after I’ve mined most of my past in my work, when I have the chance I should address that and write about events that are immediately relevant. I wanted to write “My Master” while it was still fairly recent. I wanted to write about something that was from the frontlines of my life.
EW: I’ve written about Ned before. I didn’t meet him until the 70’s and we’ve become good friends over the years. I think we’re both influenced a lot by Gide. Ned is always surprised when younger people say they know all about Gide and Cocteau. Ned’s book Lies, for which I wrote the introduction, is very moving, especially the parts in which he talks about his lover dying of AIDS.
EW: Many of the writers in the Violet Quill moved on to other things. Back when it was formed, there were just a handful of venues, like the Oscar Wilde [Bookstore] in the Village, to find gay literature. And even then, it was scarce. Now the megastores stock all sorts of titles. And there are so many more “alternative lifestyle” books, and many more gay writers. Of course, we’re going through a dumbed-down culture, too. Specifically, gay bookstores are disappearing and quality literary magazines, with the exception of The James White Review and The Gay & Lesbian Review, are slowly disappearing. Gay literature has become more mainstream, less ghettoized. Michael Cunningham is very successful. Gays have become staples on sitcoms.
EW: Definitely. I think America is almost in a state of civil war. It’s divided exactly down the middle, between people who are on the religious right and those on the left. But I think what’s happening in Holland and Denmark is more understandable than intolerance in the States. After all, Muslims are an oppressed minority there. And the cartoon was published in a right-wing Danish newspaper. Making fun of a minority’s religion is insensitive, wrong-minded, and provocative, even if it was a cartoon. The cartoon was a caricature, and it wasn’t even funny—of someone with a bomb concealed in his turban. It was inflammatory. I think they were foolish in that case. Of course, I would defend their right for freedom of speech. Even if it’s a cartoon, it’s a little like screaming “Fire” in a crowed theater. You have to expect a negative reaction when you ridicule a vulnerable social group’s identity—and one that hasn’t been allowed the opportunity to assimilate into the dominant culture. That’s different from the fundamentalists in this country.
EW: Yes. It was based on his screenplay “Forbidden Dreams.” The Jeanne Moreau part was based on the young boy Culafroy, who is originally from Our Lady of the Flowers. In the novel, he is fascinated by Alberto, the sexy snake handler, and he gets a hard-on watching him. In the screenplay, Genet changed Culafroy into the repressed schoolmistress and Alberto into the immigrant woodcutter she’s obsessed with.
EW: Genet was an orphan brought up in a petit bourgeois environment, and he never pretended to be anything else. When he was in his teens and early twenties he took a passive sexual role, and as he got older he was more flexible.
ME: Is writing a memoir a good opportunity to even scores, set records straight, indulge in a bit of mythomania?
EW: I haven’t fabricated anything or told any lies, if that’s what you mean by mythomania. I have made enemies over my lifetime, but I don’t talk about them in the book. Instead, I have a chapter on “My Friends” as a tribute to them.
EW: I was sort of brassy in school. I had a kind of freakish courage.
ME: What’s your latest project?
EW: These days I spend a lot of time at the library, where I’m currently working on a book about Hart Crane.
