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 ESSAY ALFREDCORN 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. 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 thenouveau 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 romanand 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 28 TheG&LR Remembering Elena, and Ed White Alfred Corn and Edmund White in 1974 (detail).
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