BOOKS by Edmund White are among those that are still “eagerly awaited” in this post-Gutenberg age, and all at once he has out a new novel and a collection of essays, both published in November 2011.
The novel is called Jack Holmes and His Friend (Bloomsbury USA), and it’s about the relationship between two men—Jack, a gay “libertine,” and a preppy, liberal-minded straight guy, Will Wright—which develops into a conflicted friendship enduring across three decades. In the saga of Jack and Will, White has managed to whip up a bittersweet Nabokovian capriccio in three parts with an epilogue; what’s more, it’s a bona fide page-turner. White’s longtime fans will recognize a semi-biographical resemblance between Jack Holmes and his precursors in the author’s middle-class, Midwestern rubes adrift in an alien society—New York City—and gradually learning the necessary tactics of survival in the swarming urban beehive. White’s keen insights into the dark Eros and messy psychodynamics of frustrated sexual desire, both straight and gay, are woven into this rich, sensuously imagined narrative. The novel covers the decades of the golden Aquarian Age of free love to the dawning era of AIDS.
Also out this past November is a collection of essays titled Sacred Monsters (Magnus Books), which includes more than twenty essays on artists and writers, including Auguste Rodin, John Cheever, Henry James, Tennessee Williams, Paul Bowles, James Merrill, Vladimir Nabokov, Edith Wharton, Christopher Isherwood, Martin Amis, Allen Ginsberg, Marguerite Duras, John Rechy, David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe, and E. M. Forster. White’s title refers to the familiar French expression denoting “a venerable or popular celerity so well known that he or she is above criticism, a legend, who despite eccentricities or faults cannot be measured by ordinary standards. Lady Gaga is our newest one.”
Edmund White spoke with me last November from his home in the Chelsea section of New York City. — Michael Ehrhardt
Michael Ehrhardt: The nude on the cover of Sacred Monsters is quite graphic and homoerotic. How did that come to be?
Edmund White: I write at the beginning of the book about Rodin, and about how I fell madly in love with this statue as a kid. It was the nude figure of a Belgian soldier, originally called The Vanquished and then Age of Bronze; there’s a copy of it in the New York Metropolitan Museum. However, its realism was so great that Rodin was accused of forming its mold on a living person, which is absurd, because it’s very modeled and you can see the thumbprints in the molding. The cover is actually a sepia photograph of the very model that Rodin used.
Paul Bowles
ME: Your piece on Paul Bowles is a fine read; but you never touched on his music, which seems to be appreciated only by cognoscenti. Do you know any of his music? It’s very different from his writing.
EW: I do know his music very well. I went to a conference on Bowles not very long ago, and I got there a disc of all of his music—songs and waltzes.
ME: He also wrote an opera based on Lorca’s “Yerma,” which seems to have disappeared.
EW: He also wrote incidental music for Tennessee Williams’ plays.
ME: His music is very different from his writing. It’s very American and romantic.
EW: Yes, it’s very pretty. He’s not as original a composer as he is a writer, but I love his music and his writing.
ME: Ned Rorem admires him as a composer but thinks he had a cold, sadistic streak that emerged in his writing. In fact, Rorem states that Bowles based his story “Pages from Cold Point” on him.
EW: Yes, Bowles saw Ned as a teenager with his father, and they were extremely physical with each other and affectionate. So Bowles just assumed they were lovers, but of course they weren’t.
Tennessee Williams
ME: Another of your sacred monsters is Tennessee Williams, whose short stories you talk about. But were they as good as the plays?
EW: I think the same impulse that animates the stories works better in the plays. Because the plays are outrageous and very daring and very theatrical, which is what you want the plays to be. In the stories, however, there’s insufficient lift-off to justify such crazy endings, and it skirts close to the Gothic nonsense of James Purdy. But still, he’s always memorable, for instance in “Desire and the Black Masseur” and “One Arm.” I mean, he loved Broadway, and he loved having a hit. I heard him say towards the end of his life, “If I had one more hit I would fuck a monkey!”
Most novelists who turn to plays are not exciting because they’re not outrageous enough. Tennessee’s so great because he’s outrageous. And I think he was one of the very few playwrights who could maintain a high degree of literary quality and have a blockbuster hit.
James Purdy
ME: You’re still obdurate in your opinion of James Purdy?
EW: Yes. I think maybe his novel Malcolm has some merit. After all, Edward Albee liked it enough to write a play version of it.
ME: Which Purdy deplored, since Albee took all kinds of liberties with it.
EW: Purdy deplored everything. He was miserable and nasty. I’m aware that he has a loyal following and admirers, but his writing never appealed to me.
Truman Capote to Susan Sontag
ME: Your essay on the fan-dancing Truman Capote is both funny and sad. What did you think of him as an essayist and a journalist.
EW: Oh, he was very good. I think he was good at everything he did, from The Muses Are Heard, about Porgy and Bess touring the Soviet Union, to Music for Chameleons, and some of Answered Prayers. I especially liked the story “Unspoiled Monsters,” based on the Southern boy, Denham Fouts, an opium addict and hustler, whom he called “the best-kept boy in the world.” Fouts was also the inspiration for a story in Gore Vidal’s collection A Thirsty Evil, in a story called “Pages from an Abandoned Journal.” Christopher Isherwood also based a character on him in Down There On a Visit.
ME: In your essay on Capote you suggest that he might have been a more prolific fiction writer if he hadn’t been so fey and ambiguous in his work about his homosexuality. You write, “One could say that he devoted a great deal of creative energy to avoiding honesty.”
EW: Yes. As Adrienne Rich once remarked, if Elizabeth Bishop had acknowledged her lesbianism, she may not have written better poetry, but she would have written more poetry. Capote was similarly gifted and blocked.
ME: Gore Vidal denigrated his stories in A Tree of Night as a poor man’s E.T.A. Hoffman.
EW: Well, that’s Gore! Yes, Capote always filtered his psyche through a fairy-tale, remote aspect in his fiction. The non-fiction writing was stronger later on. In Cold Blood was a classic. But he went too far with La Côte Basque, which led to him turning on his friends and being ostracized by society.
ME: In your review of Martin Amis’ The Pregnant Widow, you remark on his “hilarious essay style,” and wonder why certain writers who are “witty and restless and worldly in the essays become dull narrators” in their novels.
EW: I think I had Susan Sontag in mind, especially her earlier novels, like The Benefactor, which were fairly dull, in my opinion, where she was never dull as an essayist. I think she was one of the greatest of our cultural essayists—but it always seemed to me that she lost twenty IQ points the minute she started writing fiction. Her later fiction is perhaps better. The Volcano Lover, say, was certainly more entertaining than her earlier books, because it wasn’t trying to be avant-garde. Anyway, there’s an example of what I was talking about. I think Martin Amis is an example of someone who was both a good novelist and great essayist. He has a magical way of writing.
Digression
ME: I think your observational digressions in your fiction are interesting—when you go a trifle off track. I think it makes things more interesting to see the authorial mind behind it all, not just a concern with plotting the course.
EW: I think those short divagations—I got the courage to do that from Elizabeth Bowen (d. 1973), who has lots of that in her writing. They’re usually moralizing, she’ll say something about human nature in so many words, which even in her day was not very popular because it’s sort of a throwback to the 18th century, to make pronouncements. “Dear reader, all women are such and such…” You get a lot of that in Balzac. But I think I always found that fun to do, if you do it with a very light touch.
Jim Ruddy
ME: Your new novel is about an unrequited, “crazy love,” what the French call amour fou. Here and elsewhere you talk about love as a destructive force. Did this feeling originate with your unhappy love affair with Jim Ruddy?
EW: Yes, that was certainly a significant event. I was in love with him for about eleven years. It was an extremely unhappy love affair. I was in a kind of trance of love. Sex is important for me, but the heart of that relationship wasn’t sexual. It must have been that part of me was self-loathing, that I also fell in love with someone unattainable. The Beautiful Room Is Empty was written in the mid 60’s as virtually a diary during my extremely unhappy love affair with Jim Ruddy. Jim was an intelligent, strapping blond of Polish descent from Ohio. He was gay, but hated being gay, and suffered from it terribly. And he was mentally unstable. We went to the same shrink together. I was so in love with him that it took me a while to realize he was lock-up crazy.
In fact, he was taken off to Minnesota and placed in a mental hospital. But later he came back to the East Coast and went to Rutgers and got a PhD in comp lit. Then, he took up with a Puerto Rican poet a decade or so older called Miguel Algarin, who started the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and he was quite happy with him. After that, I’d see him very occasionally. Then, he took up with a very nice bearded guy called Ivan, and they moved to California and opened a ski lodge together. Then, in the early 90’s, he died of AIDS. But it was after my novel The Beautiful Room is Empty came out, and Ivan wrote me a letter saying that Jim lived long enough to read it, and liked it. But he never responded to the second letter I sent.
My Master
ME: You wrote in My Master about going into an emotional tailspin after losing a friend and ex-lover—a man with whom you had a slavish attachment.
EW: Yes, that was the last time that happened to me, and I hope it never happens again. I think I hadn’t yet quite figured out at that point that via the Internet, no matter how old and chubby you get, you can constantly go on meeting people through sites such as Silverdaddies. But at that point, I really felt that he would be the last attractive man who would be interested in me. I felt as if it was sort of the end of my erotic life. As it turned out, it wasn’t at all.
ME: But you had a lot of emotion invested in your Master, and the rejection hurt, yes?
EW: Oh, yes, it was terrible. Well, I really loved him. Actually, more than I thought. It was only after he broke up with me that I realized how crazy I was about him. But, I was also glad to feel that I could still get my heart broken. Just recently, I sent him an e-mail and he wrote back and we sort of made noises about wanting to get together, but we haven’t done it.
ME: I’m thinking of Swann in love with Odette; when he comes to the tragic conclusion that “She wasn’t even my type.”
EW: Well, I would say that boy is exactly my type. I mean Jim Ruddy and my Master were my type, insofar as they were tall, macho, blonde…
Jack Holmes
ME: Is it fair to say that your new novel is also a symposium on the differences between heterosexual unions and gay relationships? And whether love and friendship can co-exist?
EW: Yes, and it also has a historical dimension in that it starts in 1962, long before Stonewall, when no gay person, no matter how intelligent, was self-accepting. And it ends at the close of the 1980’s, when gays, partly because of the battle against AIDS, had come to have a lot of self-respect in the sense of being agents in the world. Jack is also in love with Will in a very sensual way. He’s also having sex with a lot of cute boys—ballet dancers, etc.
ME: Jack is also self-loathing. And he treats the gay guys despicably. He projects that onto them.
EW: Yes, he is. Partly because they are gay and readily available, there’s something that revolts him about that.
ME: Does the fictional magazine Jack works for, Northern Review, resemble your own job as a staff writer for Time-Life Books, including “the dear ladies” with the hats?
EW: No, it was actually based more on Horizon magazine, which I worked for. It was a chic hardcover magazine.
ME: Are the eccentric headshrinkers in your novel based on your own experience with psychoanalysis?
EW: Yes, and those shrinks never come off well in my books. This one is sort of based on a woman I went to for a while. I’ve written about her before; I tried to kind of stylize and simplify her. It reflects my experience insofar as shrinks themselves were against homosexuality in those days, even gay shrinks. They were all trying to cure you, which was a very lucrative business, since no one ever had a cure.
ME: You say Nabokov’s Look at the Harlequins was an inspiration for you new novel?
EW: Yes, my idea was based on Nabokov’s answering his critics with a comic and baser version of himself, who had several affairs with women, never with an underage girl, but following the general outlines of his life … and making the fictional character a real pedophile. So, I thought it would be fun to follow his example with Jack Holmes.
ME: In your acknowledgments, you credit your partner Michael Carroll for suggesting “a new way of writing a novel.” What was that specifically?
EW: Well, he gave me several books to read by Richard Yates—Revolutionary Road and Cold Spring Harbor—one of Michael’s favorite writers. And he kept trying to urge me to write scenically, in other words one scene after another, in which there is a lot of dialogue and very little analysis or description, and wasn’t terribly plotted. Besides, maybe The Married Man and Hotel de Dream were well-paced. But I think this new novel is my biggest page-turner, and that’s a result of this new method—or new to me anyway.
ME: What’s behind the strategy of dividing the novel into an authorial point of view and first person perspective?
EW: Yes. I did so because I wanted him to be ambiguous in some way. I think it’s interesting to have a character whom you’re on very close terms with and yet there’s a lot about him that’s mysterious.
John Irving, Gutenberg, and Gore Vidal
ME: You note that John Irving, who was writing a novel at the same time as you, gave you encouragement. What form did that take?
EW: John Irving’s a good friend and started out being a fan of my work. And we often speak on the phone to one another, and exchange ideas about what we’re working on at the time.
ME: Irving has always been a gay-friendly writer. There’s a transvestite character in Garp.
EW: And a gay son in Hotel New Hampshire. As it turns out, he’s written a book with a gay protagonist that will be coming out soon, and it’s sure to be a best seller.
ME: How do you feel about this post-Gutenberg age of e-books and the ever-expanding blogosphere? Do you get an apocalyptic feeling about the end of publishing as we know it?
EW: Yes, definitely. There was a time when dinner conversation would center on the latest novel of Saul Bellow, John Updike, or Norman Mailer. Now, we’re in a dumbed-down era of diminished expectations, the collapsing economy, globalization, a sinking in the status of artists, no respect for bohemians and the tradition of honorable poverty. Writers like myself have a reasonable coterie of fans, but not enough to make publishers real money. I live largely from advance to advance.
ME: Gore Vidal’s The Best Man is being revived again on Broadway. Do you think you and Vidal will ever smoke a peace pipe?
EW: It’s kind of late now for that. I don’t see it happening.
ME: What’s your next project?
EW: I’m working on a book about Paris in the 1980’s.
To be continued…
Michael Ehrhardt, a frequent contributor to these pages, is a freelance writer based in New York City.
