MY FAVORITE ED WHITE STORY took place in Yale’s beautiful Beinecke Library, where I was doing research for a book on the Violet Quill. Yale had purchased Ed’s papers, and I was the first person to open the boxes in which he had unceremoniously dumped the contents of his drawers; the cartons were filled with kibble and dog treats, napkins, matchbooks with phone numbers hurriedly scribbled inside, and other detritus of a busy life. When I lifted one stack of papers, a photograph of Ed—not just naked but with a full erection—floated off the top and across the reading room. I tried to grab it, but the glossy sailed above the heads of the academics and toward the window. When I finally got hold of the photo, I expected to see everyone looking up at me angry and shocked, but no one noticed the frenzied pirouette to reclaim the pornographic image. The tale says more about scholars than it does about the 9×12 glossy of Ed’s attractive naked body. Still, it seems only proper that he should appear improperly undressed in so hallowed a place. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that Ed and I had wonderful sex on multiple occasions. Nothing special given his estimated 3,000 partners.)
It has always been the louche parts of Ed’s work that I’ve thought deserved notice—his willingness not just to reveal what others would deem abject, but to thrust the abject their way. The last book White published during his life, The Loves of My Life, is subtitled A Sex Memoir, not a subject that an eminent man of letters in his eighties is supposed to write about: the book is filled with explicit sex. One notable example occurs after a sexual escapade with Stan Redfern, a friend from college who visited White days before his death. While still young, they vacationed in Puerto Rico, where they picked up two locals who “fucked us in the same room on twin beds without sheets while laughing and chatting”: “I shit out my partner’s semen (which we call his ‘babies’). I was pleased to see how copious it/they were. It wasn’t part of our intimacy repertoire for me to ask Stan how much sperm he’d harvested.”
The brief passage plays with the notion of what is said and left unsaid in their “intimacy repertoire.” As a result of the language rules, White can speak of the copiousness of his partner’s ejaculation, while he cannot question Redfern about the consistency of his bowel movement. The delicacy of the language is mirrored in White’s uncertainty whether he should refer to jism in the singular or plural. Sex is not at the center of this passage; it is semen and shit, which regresses to the childlike reference to sperm as “babies.” The passage ends with harvested, a turn toward the pastoral. So, what begins as lines out of William Burroughs or John Rechy turns into child’s play that ends with a suave gesture toward The Shepheardes Calender of that other Edmund, Edmund Spenser. Or perhaps we are meant to picture that very American scene—two innocents being cornholed in a hayloft above an International Harvester.
What other American writer can in the space of three sentences evoke four very different cultural settings through the magic of his diction or can make us so fully aware of language as anthropological artifact that causes both wincing and laughter? What made the gay culture of White’s time so rich was its ability to combine high and low cultural registers seamlessly—from La Traviata to The Anvil and back again.
But there were limits to this exposure, things that because of the “intimacy repertoire” must remain unsaid. In The Loves of My Life, White wrote: “I’ve always thought that writing about someone is the kiss-off. … My husband is Michael Carroll, whom I’ve been with since 1995. I’ve never written about him; he’s too precious to me.” In our last email exchange, I asked Ed about the expression “kiss-off,” which sounds rather noir. He wrote back: “I meant that we factor into our feelings about lovers, their own ambitions and hopes and goals, whereas a portrait in words freezes someone in a moment in time and, finally, is dismissive. It is about someone’s being, not their becoming. Most people live a bit or a lot in the future, whereas a portrait freezes them in this moment. That’s why people resent writers, who seem to be getting the last laugh.”
One’s “intimacy repertoire” doesn’t stifle expression but allows people and things the space to grow, to develop, to change before language freezes them. As the author of three biographies, he allowed even the dead the dignity of remaining unsettled. White would want an unquiet grave and to resist anyone who thought he (or she) was getting the last laugh.
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David Bergman is the poetry editor of this magazine.
