more nuanced than we give it credit for. We have to fight this idea of seeing things in black and white: you’re either this thing or that thing. Because human beings are far too complicated for that. And there are human beings who fall through the cracks and wind up suffering as a result. RMB: InPunch Me Up to the Gods, you show that this hard Black masculinity is a response to contemporary American racism. Can you elaborate on that? BB: I was just watching a television show about the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, and I thought: that’s pretty much par for the course in America. Black Americans live in a society where we are guilty even when we’re innocent and white people are innocent even when they’re guilty. I was told very early on that you cannot do the same things that your white counterparts do. You cannot go to the same places. It will be viewed differently when you show up. And that was from a very young age, because of white American fear: this idea that Black people are naturally nefarious. Somehow we’re more criminal-minded, we’re more libidinous, we’re more of all the worst things of humanity. We have to carry those loads so that white people can feel safe when we’re not around. They can feel superior about themselves. That is something that I learned and was told very early on in my life. Black children do not get a very long childhood. Black girls are sexualized far earlier than their white counterparts. Black girls are not seen as innocent. Black boys are not seen as innocent. Tamir Rice. We can name people who have been murdered until the end of the day because of this idea that white people still carry around that we are somehow worth less, that we are less human, that when we do something bad it’s a sign of our natural bad character, but when white people do something bad, there are always mitigating circumstances around it. So, I think Black parents have felt the responsibility to start telling their children earlier. White people start treating our children differently when they’re very young. And it’s a shame. It’s the core tenet of racism: that somebody else is worth less than you and deserves to be treated accordingly. That’s one of the things I didn’t feel in France. But it runs very deep in this country. RMB: You’ve said that you hope Punch Me Up to the Gods will help someone. Whom would you like it to help, and how? BB: I think that one of the themes that runs through the memoir is shame—shame in who you are, where you were born, who your parents are, what you look like physically. We start this process early on of shaming men for looking vulnerable or weak, or for feeling the full range of human emotion. That’s why [needing to be supermasculine] is so ingrained in some men’s heads. This is who I am, this is what I should be. And that’s all there is to it. I think I would like the book to connect with people who are feeling that sort of shame, as I felt most of my life, of not being born right. To be born right is to be born white in this country, to be born heterosexual, to be born with money, to be born “attractive” in this traditionally kept sort of idea of what is attractive. So, I think I would really like to help people to realize that that’s all bullshit, and that your life is your own. It’s the only life you get, and you may as well live it in a way that makes you as happy as you can be. At the end of the book, I say something like: I’m tired of white people telling me who I am. I’m also tired of Black people telling me who I am. I just want to be who I am. Richard M. Berrong, professor of French literature at Kent State, is the author of Pierre Loti (Critical Lives, 2018) Ruggero’s conversational style—“full of radical shifts in register from hieratic to demotic, serious to frivolous, flipping lightly from a big subject (the Czech baroque) to a small one (the best way to cook perfectly round potatoes fondant in the oven)”— very much describes his own literary mode. It’s a style I’d call Classical High Gay. It will delight some readers and probably turn others off. I don’t know to what extent A Previous Life is a roman à clef, and I’m not sure it matters. What White has given us here is a supremely satisfying divertissement, one that delivers on multiple levels. It’s a comedy, a satire, a meditation on aging, an homage to the long lineage of gay novels that have come before. And it manages to achieve a kind of wistful wisdom about the nature of relationships, both gay and straight. Late in the novel, Ruggero meets Colin, a thirty-something “boy” who’s writing a thesis on Edmund White, “the forgotten gay novelist of the twentieth century.” Hilariously, Colin says he has only read one of White’s novels, A Previous Life. “It’s oldfashioned metafiction and White himself is only a minor character.” Already in the not-too-distant future of 2050, one of the darling fictional trends of our time, metafiction, has become “old-fashioned.” As will we all, alas, our love affairs, our passions. Remarkably, A Previous Lifemakes something exuberant out of this unavoidably sad fact of life. Like the work of another octogenarian artist, Giuseppe Verdi, White’s novel emphasizes the burla, the joke, that is life. Not everyone can, like White— the “fat, famous slug”—chuckle at the stupendous absurdity of it all. A Previous Life is the kind of novel that Henry James might have written had he been more fun. March–April 2022 41
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