THIS IS THE SECOND PART of my interview with Edmund White, in which he discusses two books that have recently been released: Jack Holmes and His Friend, a novel; and Sacred Monsters, a collection of more than twenty of his essays and reviews on artists and authors. In the first part, he talked about amour fou (“crazy love”), Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Susan Sontag. Here, White discusses other “sacred monsters,” a term derived from the French, which describes “a venerable or popular celebrity so well known that he or she is above criticism, a legend who despite eccentricities or faults cannot be measured by ordinary standards.”
Of the authors and artists discussed in Sacred Monsters, White explains: “Fifteen of my subjects were gay or bisexual or closeted or conflicted about their sexuality. Glenway Wescott, for instance, lived openly with his partner Monroe Wheeler and with their erstwhile third wheel, the photographer George Platt Lynes, but they were all three in the public eye and had to practice a measure of discretion, especially during the witch-hunting McCarthy years. Wheeler directed publications for the Museum of Modern Art, Wescott was for a long time the president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Lynes was one of the most celebrated American photographers.” White also continues his discussion of his latest novel, Jack Holmes and His Friend, which represents a departure from his notably cerebral fiction and edges toward a more narrative prose style, one less discursive and æsthetic.
Edmund White spoke with me last November from his home in the Chelsea section of New York City.
— Michael Ehrhardt
Michael Ehrhardt: Your latest novel concerns an unrequited love of a gay man for his straight friend. In this respect, it’s more about frustrated desire than about love as conventionally understood, am I right?
Edmund White: Well, I’ve always felt that love is a kind of terrible crisis. It’s something that happens to you like a disorder, and it leads nowhere, like Proustian obsession—unless it’s transformed into esteem. I think we live plural lives today. That’s why I called my autobiography My Lives and categorized my different relationships as “My Blondes” and “My Master.” Maybe there are many different ways of loving someone; it’s an ongoing project that I prefer, like my relationship with Michael [Carroll].
ME: In your new novel, you’ve gone for a different approach to writing. Can you explain how it differs from your earlier novels?
EW: Michael suggested I write more of a page turner, less intellectual. Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road and Cold Spring Harbor, is one of Michael’s favorite writers, and he kept urging me to try to write scenically, one scene after another, such that there’s a lot of dialogue and very little analysis or description. Jack Holmes was also influenced by the British writer Henry Green, whom I read lot of when I was younger. He wrote several novels with generic names, like Loving, Party Going, Doting and Nothing, which were comedies of manners, composed mainly of dialogue. Green was admired by Christopher Isherwood and John Updike.
ME: What’s behind the strategy of dividing the novel into an authorial point of view and then a first-person perspective?
EW: I did this because I wanted him to be ambiguous in some way. I think it’s interesting to have a character with whom you’re on very close terms, and yet there’s a lot about him that’s mysterious.
ME: The theme of un-returned love in Jack Holmes brings to mind Djuna Barnes, though your novel isn’t as perverse and has a happy ending. Would Barnes count as a “sacred monster,” a phrase that appears in the title of your new book of essays?
EW: Sure! Even though she’s only really known for her one stand-out book, Nightwood, it was certainly a classic in the forefront of gay novels. Her other work isn’t as accessible; and later on she became a grouchy old recluse living here at Patchin Place. Barnes always claimed she wasn’t really a lesbian, except for her obsession with Thelma Wood, who inspired Jenny [Petherbridge] in Nightwood.
ME: As sacred monsters go, would Willa Cather make the cut?
EW: Oh, yes, definitely. She was one of the first great gay woman writers who came out from the American plains, and whose work has a sort of mythic scope to it—novels like My Antonia and Song of the Lark. Her short story “Paul’s Case” is very moving and even has a gay protagonist.
ME: In the new documentary film Paul Goodman Changed My Life, directed by Jonathan Lee, you read some of Goodman’s poetry. Was he an influence on you?
EW: I always wanted to meet Paul Goodman. When I moved to New York in 1962, I dreamed of meeting Susan Sontag and Goodman, who was even more famous at that time. But I never met any published writers until I was around 29. Eventually I met Sontag and we became very close, until I published Caracole, which was viewed as a roman à clef that satirized Sontag, and which led to a falling out between us. (However, shortly before she died, I met her in a restaurant and we sort of kissed and made up.) As a progressive bisexual Jewish intellectual, Goodman was at the forefront and anticipated the gay rights movement. I knew he had written Growing Up Absurd and I was blown away when he published his diaries in 1966, called Five Years, in which he talked about having sex on the docks and in the back of trucks, which is what I was doing at the time. And he wrote a remarkable essay called “Being Queer” in 1969. However, he somehow always remained elusive. Unfortunately, he died at only 61 in 1972.
ME: Would you classify James Baldwin as a sacred monster?
EW: Well, I think Giovanni’s Room is a good novel despite its tragic view of gay life, which was de rigueur at the time it was written, not unlike Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, where it’s all gloom and doom.
ME: How about Iris Murdoch? She was a great writer of obsessive love. Her gay characters are often more sympathetic than her straight ones, as in A Fairly Honorable Defeat and Henry and Cato.
EW: Certainly, she fits the category. I really liked The Black Prince very much, and The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. I met Iris Murdoch through a friend who was her editor late in her life, when she was already sick with Alzheimer’s. She was with her gay husband [John Bayley]. It was sad; they were both disheveled and unwashed. Matthew Evans, the head of Faber and Faber, had us to dinner with Iris Murdoch and John. Iris was already forgetting everything and was quite touching. She asked Michael over and over where he lived, each time as if it were a brand-new question. John was loquacious and completely in control and not altogether clean.
ME: You refer to Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man as “the first truly liberated gay novel in English.” What did you think of the movie version, directed by Tom Ford?
EW: Well, I had reservations. I liked Colin Firth, but felt the film was a lot like a Tom Ford fashion ad. But then, I’m very attached to the book.
ME: Pasolini is certainly a sacred monster, right?
EW: Oh, yes. I love his films, especially Mama Roma, which is very moving. There’s something very pure about him. He’s never perverse, never decadent, except maybe in 120 Days of Sodom, which is horrible to watch.
ME: Would you include Tom of Finland, with his hyper-masculine gay æsthetic, on the sacred monster list?
EW: Sure. A sacred monster is someone who is part of the cultural landscape and is inevitable—someone it would be senseless to try to banish or denigrate.
ME: Well, that would seem to fit the case for James Purdy. You say that you’re not a fan of Purdy, who was praised by Gore Vidal as “a genuine American genius.” What makes you allergic to him?
EW: I don’t like Gothic elements that are preposterous—the crucifixion of a farmer on the barn door at dawn, for example.
ME: How would you assess Coleman Dowell’s work; is it relevant today? You knew him somewhat, right?
EW: I think most of Coleman Dowell’s work is unreadable, with the exception of a story “The Silver Swanne.” I knew him, yes, quite well, and he was a self-pitying drunk who was afraid of aging and who committed suicide.
ME: Your falling out with Gore Vidal over his semi-biographical, albeit fictionalized, portrayal in your play Terre Haute seems unfortunate; even stranger is your feud with Larry Kramer, with whom you and several others once bonded to form the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. How did that feud come about?
EW: Kramer is notoriously provocative. Larry was resentful that I was away living in Paris in the middle of the AIDS crisis. And he was pissed off that I had written a biography of Jean Genet when every gay writer should have been focusing on AIDS. In response, Larry decided to attack my book and denounce me to the public even before the book came out in America. Larry attacked The Farewell Symphony in The Advocate— I think mainly because it was sex-positive—months before it came out in the States. I thought that was so unfair, especially since he based his reading on an early manuscript I had sent him and before readers could form an opinion of their own. But since then we’ve buried the hatchet.
ME: Were you and Robert Mapplethrope ever lovers?
EW: I was never his lover, though I would have been. I think he thought I was too vanilla.
ME: In your piece on John Cheever, you say that his living in Italy for extended periods was “a foil to his obsession with American exurbia.” How is it that you lived in Rome for a good while but never wrote any Roman-influenced stories?
EW: In The Farewell Symphony I have quite an extended passage about Rome. The extract, “Diamantina,” which was published in The New Yorker as a story, is entirely set in Rome. Cheever, who was the bard of the buttoned-down set, was closeted and alcoholic, but when he came out and went to AA meetings he wrote Falconer, which is arguably his best novel and an openly gay love story.
ME: What do you think of James Merrill as a novelist [author of The Seraglio (1957) and The Diblos Notebook (1965)]?
EW: I’m an enormous fan of Merrill’s poetry. The Diblos Notebooks is an experimental novel of the period. The Seraglio is a truly autobiographical work that would interest anyone fascinated by Merrill. His memoir, A Different Person, is also very good.
ME: I think Merrill’s epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover is as good as The Divine Comedy—if Dante had a sense of humor. Would you agree?
EW: I agree with you thoroughly, and think that’s a very funny way to put it. But there are snobbish, very un-PC opinions in it—that there were not enough souls to go around, given over-population, and that many people are therefore without souls—which would rub some people the wrong way. In his early poems, Merrill used the “you” strategy; I mean, he addressed his love poems to a “you” that in English is not gendered. So, someone translating Merrill into a Romance language would have to decide whether the adjectives modifying “you” should be masculine or feminine. Later, especially in Sandover, he revealed his gay identity with humor and even includes his lover, David Jackson, as a main character.
ME: In your essay “Beat Memories,” you note that late in their lives, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs discovered that “making works of art is the way to get money. Literature just doesn’t do it.” (Burroughs did well with his shotgun paintings, while Ginsberg sold photographs of his friends.) Have you found this to be the case?
EW: Yes, people imagine a writer is rich and must be able to live off his backlist and translations. But none of that amounts to more than a few hundred dollars a year. Between teaching at Princeton and my books I earn enough to live, but I just had a stroke, which reminded me of how little I’ve saved and how little I’d have if I couldn’t work.
ME: Who are the writers you admire these days?
EW: I love Colm Tóibín’s books. He incorporates gay characters into his work, but there’s nothing exceptional about them. I really liked his novel The Master, about Henry James, where he touched on James’ queerness very subtly in the scene between him and the butler (Hammond); and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child. There’s Pierre Guyotat’s novel Eden Eden Eden. He’s the last great avant-garde visionary of the 20th century; he’s been championed by Michel Foucault and compared to Rimbaud, Genet, and de Sade. I like the poet Henri Cole. And David McConnell, whose The Silver Hearted is a very fine novel. Among the straight writers, there’s Gary Shteyngart [author of Super Sad True Love Story], Dana Spiotta, and Aleksandar Hemon. I like the stories of Wells Tower [Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned], because he writes so well about older people.
Michael Ehrhardt is a freelance writer based in New York City and in Roseland, NJ.
