EDMUND WHITE AND I met at a gay party in Greenwich Village in 1966. Ed had brought his friend Marilyn Schaefer, and I was with my soon-to-be-wife Ann Jones, both of us doing graduate work at Columbia. We exchanged contact info, and within a week Ed and I met again—just me, not Ann. There was a not-too-serious effort at bedding down together, and once that was out of the way, we settled into a nonsexual friendship that lasted (with interruptions) for nearly sixty years.
Apart from Ann, I felt that Ed was the most amusing and fascinating person I’d ever known—quick-witted, campy, learned, with a streak of seriousness that would surface at unforeseen moments. He was from the Midwest (Ohio and Illinois) and had a Midwesterner’s no-nonsense perspective concerning people, places, and things. He disliked pretension and fakery, a trait that explains one of his persistent strategies as a writer: the merciless exposure of human vanity, hypocrisy, avarice, and delusion. His social style was never suave and filtered, but direct and unguarded, fronting an apparent interest in every person encountered, no matter how ordinary they might be. That ban on pretension extended to the few letters he sent, which were always flat, informational, unadorned. He didn’t want to be accused of writing personal letters “for posterity’s sake.”
Over the years I came to see that only a half dozen people qualified as fully truthful and admirable in his eyes. Also, that I was not one of them. He had ways of informing me of my failings, ways not always gentle. I think he continued the friendship because of my extensive education and passion for the arts, which equaled his. He didn’t need to explain who Stendhal was, or George Eliot, or Kafka, and that saved time. Then, too, I had the semi-secret goal of becoming a writer, a quixotic ambition that always kindled his interest in people. Throughout his life he encouraged hundreds of novices suffering from that aspiration, as several who succeeded have reported in print.
The first novel of Ed’s that I read (in draft) was transparently autobiographical, the story of a young gay man from the provinces who came to New York and got work at Time-Life Books as a researcher. It was cleanly written, and I enjoyed it, but I had my upstart grad-student prejudices about what was great in contemporary literature and told him that, though engrossing, his novel was a little too obvious. In French literature of that era, the vogue was for the nouveau roman, pioneered by Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, and Nathalie Sarraute. For me, any new novel, if it wanted to be considered serious literature, had to be experimental and innovative. A contemporary author shouldn’t give us narrative productions that could have been written in the 19th century. In the decades since, I’ve lost interest in the nouveau roman and experimental fiction in general, but the convictions I held at the time were strong. I believe Ed was at least temporarily persuaded by them. He put aside that novel and didn’t attempt to publish it.
In 1967, I was awarded a Fulbright grant to do research for my dissertation in Paris. Even though neither of us had much regard for conventional wedlock, Ann and I decided to marry so that she could suspend her graduate program and come with me. Early during our year abroad, she and I had stayed at a cheap hotel on the Île Saint-Louis called, reasonably enough, the Hôtel Saint-Louis. It was the hotel’s location that interested me. Readers of Proust will recall that his character Swann lived on the island, even though it wasn’t a fashionable address like the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. I mentioned this to Ed, who found it interesting.
On our return from Paris, Ann and I took a very ordinary apartment on West 113th St. Ed came up several times that year to enjoy the French cuisine Ann had mastered (with Julia Child’s help). A feature of these evenings was Ed’s reading to us, chapter by chapter, the draft of his new novel. It was a mixture of realism and inventive fantasy, drawing on his experience of gay life on Fire Island and blending that with the exquisite sensibility of the Heian-period Japanese diarist Sei Shonagon. Her terminally refined The Pillow Book had been translated a few years earlier and read by Marilyn Schaefer, who recommended it to Ed. Both Ann and I found Ed’s new work amazingly good—for me a welcome shift from the bald naturalism of his earlier novel. We cheered him on, with the result that when it was published five years later under the title Forgetting Elena, he dedicated it to us.
More generally, the novel dramatizes a shift away from, a “forgetting” of, heterosexuality in favor of gay orientation, and the guilt feelings that go with that shift. It will sound implausible if I say that Ed, celebrated as a fiercely committed champion of gay rights, never entirely rid himself of a pronounced disapproval of his own orientation. This contradiction is resolved once you know what it was like to grow up in America’s fag-bashing 1950s, an atmosphere that scarred everyone who lived through it. The distinctly negative depiction of gay experience in Ed’s novels, elaborated in relentless detail, can be paradoxically understood as an argument for acceptance, tolerance, and affirmation.
The notable exception to Ed’s mostly humdrum letters was one he wrote to Ann and me describing the Stonewall uprising in Greenwich Village in June of 1969. I’d been a few times to the Stonewall earlier in the spring, but that summer Ann and I were staying at her mother’s out in Oregon. Ed’s well-written letter about what happened may not be entirely factual, but it is entertaining and has been quoted in several histories of the Gay Liberation movement. He couldn’t be blamed, so early, for not realizing that what he saw as a camp event would prove pivotal in LGBT history. Activism became more important for him in the ’70s than it had been before.
Ed’s collaboration with Charles Silverstein on The Joy of Gay Sex was part of that, though at the time I disapproved. Not of the book itself, but that Ed, a literary writer, not a commercial one, was the co-author, soiling his singing robes in the pop-culture marketplace. But the fact is that book performed a valuable social service, helping tens of thousands of fearful gay people to accept themselves and come out. No doubt the sex techniques described were the upshot of a lot of first-hand experiences.
Let me backtrack a bit and explain how Forgetting Elena came to be published. A friend of Ed’s had met the poet and translator Richard Howard and thought the two were likely to hit it off. An introduction led to an important literary friendship for Ed—and for me. Ed soon introduced me to Richard, who was an important early influence. Specifically, I stopped attempting to write fiction and went back to poetry, my first love, not returning to fiction until the 1980s. Richard had notable contacts in the publishing world and eventually took Ed’s novel to editor Anne Freedgood at Random House. She accepted and brought out the book in 1973. Ed had it sent to Nabokov, one of his idols, and here is what seems to have happened. The seigneurial Russian-American author added it to the stack of books recently sent to him, where his wife Vera found it, read it, and praised it to her husband. Nabokov, who took all his wife’s opinions seriously, picked up the book and decided he liked it too. Shortly afterward, in an interview published in Esquire, he was asked if there were new authors he liked, and he mentioned Edmund White. That was the beginning of Ed’s acceptance as a notable writer by the New York literary community. But a succès d’estime was never enough for Ed. He also wanted to be famous. The Joy of Gay Sex contributed to that as did the realistic novel A Boy’s Own Story, which was more accessible than his first two experimental novels. Finally, his nonfiction book States of Desire: Travels in Gay America set the seal on his fame. I say “nonfiction,” but I know a lot of it was invented, sometimes by a mix-and-match method of people, incidents, and locations. The point was to make the thing interesting, not to restrict himself to factual reportage.
It was around this time that he took the job of director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, where he met and became friendly with Susan Sontag. They got along famously at first, but he became disillusioned (too much so, I thought) and began to find fault with her. One result is that a heavily disguised portrait of her emerged in his fantasy novel Caracole. Not disguised enough: when she read it, Sontag was furious and pronounced him anathema in New York’s elevated literary circles. Ed always cited the literary defense of fictionality, saying the portrait was based as much on the 19th-century author Madame de Staël as on Sontag, but the latter didn’t buy it. It took two decades for Ed’s reputation to recover among the New York intelligentsia.
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By the late 1970s, Ann and I had mutually decided to part company, and I was living with J.D. McClatchy in Silliman College at Yale, where he was junior faculty in the English Department. I’d published two volumes of poetry that were praised by James Merrill, John Ashbery, Antony Hecht, and Harold Bloom. Ed came up from New York to size up my new situation, and I introduced him to Sandy (my partner’s preferred nickname). They didn’t immediately like each other, but in time they became fast friends as Sandy’s publications and reputation as poet, critic, and opera librettist expanded. In 1981, once Yale had denied tenure to Sandy, we moved to New York. The move might have brought us closer to Ed, but he had gone to live in Paris, working as a journalist at large for Vogue magazine.
It was at that moment that the AIDS crisis erupted. One result was Ed’s founding, with Larry Kramer, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the only organization mobilized to deal with the pandemic in the early ’80s. A second result came a few years later when Ed drafted an AIDS novel, which he described to me during one of his rare visits to New York during that decade. I remember that we were walking up Chris- topher Street as he explained that one by one the characters began to die, leaving only a couple still alive, but waiting for the end. I said, “Oh, it’s the fictional equivalent of Haydn’s Farewell Symphony. In the last movement the musicians get up and one by one leave the orchestra, until there is only a duo left still playing.” Ed said, “Oh, that’s terrific. I’m using that as my title.” And so it was. What I didn’t know at the time was that the novel included a rather ridiculous character based in part on me, with touches borrowed from Richard Howard and a few others. The reflection that he’d done the same thing with Sontag didn’t much smooth down ruffled feathers.
After that book appeared the friendship went into a decline, accelerated by the decision I made to end the relationship with Sandy McClatchy, which earned the latter’s offended ire and vindictiveness. Our mutual friends had to decide whose side to take, and once James Merrill opted for Sandy’s, Ed followed suit. He never banished me in so many words but just became much less available, which, as he was living in Paris, would have been true in any case. When I heard he had tested positive for HIV, I felt sympathy and was disposed to get past rancor and a sense of betrayal. When he began teaching at Brown University, a short visit to him in Providence went without negative incident, though I admit to being put off by the accoutrements of his new fame. By then he was well integrated into the Parisian literary set and had brought an entourage with him—his French boyfriend Hubert Sorin, a young woman who had become a follower, and a rather large dog named Fred. The telephone would ring, he’d speak a few minutes and then say: “Oh, that was Nathalie Prouvost, you know, the wife of the publisher of Paris Match.” (I didn’t know). “She wants her young son to come and live with me for a while, you know, to get some life experience.” That never happened, and years later Ed told me the boy had committed suicide after an unsuccessful, though socially prominent, marriage. Not every Paris match works out.
Years went by, but we kept in touch intermittently. Late last year, we had a dreadful quarrel after I sent him a critical piece I’d published about the question of racism in James Merrill’s poetry. He wouldn’t hear of it and wiped the floor with me. Shocked, disbelieving, I nevertheless assumed that we would get past it. But several messages that I sent went unanswered, as if transmitted into the void.
Alfred Corn has published eleven books of poems, two novels, and three volumes of critical essays. His new collection of short stories, Hosts, is being published by MadHat Press.
