Sacred Monsters
by Edmund White
Magnus Books
256 pages, $24.95
IN HIS INTRODUCTION to Edmund White’s 1994 essay collection, The Burning Library, David Bergman wrote: “As an essayist, White is at his best when he brings to his subject a kind of novelistic color and texture. … [H]is best pieces rely as much on atmosphere as on facts.” While such a description of White’s essays is certainly accurate, I would hesitate to define them solely through the lens of his fiction. In White’s most recent collection, Sacred Monsters, we have another occasion to consider White’s essays on their own terms, and in so doing to consider writing long ignored in the tradition of gay and lesbian writing: the essay.
While most of the essays in this new collection have been published elsewhere (mostly in The New York Review of Books, to which White is a regular contributor), they remind us how erudite and fluid White the essayist can be as he moves between history, experience, and reflection. The collection’s title comes from the French word monstre sacré, referring to cultural celebrities who rise above criticism, who stand on a pedestal beyond our judgment. As such, these essays are not critical interrogations (as the literary scholar may define it), but rather appreciations of these writers and artists that attempt, in White’s words, to put them “into an artistic landscape,” examining their work through their biographies—and, as White so often asks us to consider, through the sexual and emotional lives of these individuals.
There are here the usual suspects that have been the subject of his earlier essays in The Burning Library (1994) and in his 2006 essay collection Arts and Letters. We encounter again Christopher Isherwood, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Hockney, Tennessee Williams, Marcel Proust, and Marguerite Duras. We also wander along as White meditates on Edith Wharton and Martin Amis, as well as lesser-known writers such as Glenway Wescott and Howard Sturgis (whose 1904 novel Belchamber White calls a “portrait of a sissy”). Strangely, this collection is without essays on either Arthur Rimbaud or Jean Genet, both the subject of biographies by White. In “Sweating Mirrors,” one the best essays in Sacred Monsters, White details an encounter with Truman Capote on a hot Manhattan afternoon at Capote’s apartment. Barefoot and holding a “torn pink palmetto fan,” Capote is described within the melting interior where the two writers conversed in a small sun room, absent air-conditioning, that “looked out on the steaming East River and the UN Secretariat, which today looped up more like a static tornado than a building.” The afternoon proceeds in a strange but alluring way, Capote running down the hallway every few minutes, returning a bit more tired each time. Each moment White is left alone is an occasion to reflect on Capote’s eclectic décor, leading the essayist toward larger reflections on Capote’s writings. A young Robert Mapplethorpe arrives to take photos, and White notes that Capote had not the “faintest sexual interest” in either the photographer or his handsome assistant. What White the essayist renders so well in these essays are the precise details of setting, where sexual desire is so richly part of the scene. When discussing writers or artists, his essays offer up a vision that is more sociological than psychological. In an essay on Tennessee Williams’ notebooks, a subject that one would think calls for a meditation on the playwright’s psychological turmoil, White turns the writing outward, considering the importance of such journals for “young self-respecting gays today” to find insight on how the oppressions of the past “distorted the personalities of the oppressed.” In an essay on David Hockney’s attraction to California in the 1960’s, White takes a detour to remind us of World War II’s effect in relocating thousands of young men to beach communities in California, where they explored “hedonism, the body and the cultivation of the self.” What White often returns to is a consideration of how such writers and artists were themselves set within history and culture, and, more accurately, how sex and sexuality are so central to our social lives. As he has so often done in his cultural criticism, White captures his subjects with keen, lyrical prose. On John Cheever’s stories, he writes: “Cheever’s canvases, like Breughel’s, are always crowded with incident and minor characters going about their activities oblivious to the pink legs of Icarus poking up from the sea where he has fallen. Plots are productive and cartwheeling as dreams.” On Edith Wharton, a writer he admires, it seems, for her ability to maintain social standing while offering bitter social critiques, White writes that she was a woman “who embraced the modern age but dismissed modernism in art, who, as far as we know, maintained her dignity but who wrote passionate pornography.” Such paradoxes of personality thread through many of these sacred monsters, pointing toward the layers of complexity and contradiction that reside just below the surface of each—a theme that White has so often explored in his fiction and essays over the years. Sacred Monsters gives further evidence of White’s skill as an essayist, a genre he has exploited since the start of his career, stretching the form in all its flexibility and possibility, whether in personal reflections, erudite cultural criticism, or keen-eyed appreciations of his favorite creative giants, as in this volume. Whatever the subject, his essays constantly situate sexuality within the complex fissures of personal and social histories, forcing us to ponder the social life of sexual desire. James Polchin teaches writing in the Liberal Studies program at NYU and is the founder and editor of the website www.writinginpublic.com.
