The Beatrice Interview


Edmund White

"My reputation is still very much under attack, which I like..."


interviewed by Ron Hogan



P L A N E T O U T

"Genet wrote four autobiographical novels," Edmund White, who's written a comprehensive biography of the French author, tells me, "and when he came close to the point in his life at which he became a published writer, he stopped writing altogether. It's as if that didn't fit into his idea of what writing was about or what he was about." The subject comes up as we're discussing White's new novel, The Farewell Symphony, the third in a series of autobiographical novels that began with A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and which seems as large in size and scope as both of those novels combined. White fictionalizes his early attempts to write and publish his fiction within the heady (no pun intended) milieu of gay New York of the late '60s and '70s. He also pushes ahead, past his first publication, into the beginnings of the AIDS crisis and the deaths of many of his friends and lovers (the novel takes its title from a Haydn symphony which ends with all of the orchestra leaving the stage except for two violins). White makes no apologies for the promiscuity of the past, however, and in fact deals with it, as he deals with everything, with a combination of frankness and lyricism that conveys the carnal and intellectual passions of his life. It was daunting, he admits, but "when you get to the moment in a series of autobiographical fictions that you become a published writer, you have to swallow hard and decide whether you have the courage and resourcefulness to go on with that or abandon the whole project. So I tried to go on."

RH: Let's start with a quote from the book. "The writer's vanity holds that everything that happens to him is material. He views everything from a distance, and even when the cops arrest him for sucking a cock through a gloryhole, he smiles faintly and thinks, 'Idea for Story.' As he submerges himself in the bilge of everyday life, all its disorder and tedium, he holds his thumb out at arm's length and squints, as if to get a take on this patch of swarming nonsense. Each new occurrence offers a new end to the story, in the light of which everything that proceeds must be revised."

That paragraph, to me, essentially sums up this novel.

EW: I think I've always been somebody who led his life as though it were a novel or going to become one, so I'm always looking for pattern and repetition or meaning in what is, of course, the essentially indeterminate swarming madness of life. And several times in the trilogy, I've talked about how, if there is a devil, he's not somebody in a bright red suit with a tail, he's some man in a T-shirt sitting in a room at midday watching daytime television. What's really scary and frightening is boredom and the idea that the world is really winding down through entropy. And what art does is to go in the opposite direction -- to inject energy, find pattern, lend meaning and vitality into what seems tepid.

RH: As the conclusion of the trilogy, this is more than a continuation of the first two books. In previous interviews, you've discussed how, with each new book, you're struggling to carry your own mastery of the form a bit further, and in this book you've pushed yourself to write in ways you've never written before.

EW: For one thing, I never dared to talk about art and writing [in my fiction] before. I had that typical American mistrust of anything that was too cultural or arty, a feeling that the subject would only be of vague professional interest to a few other writers. But then, because I'm writing a little biography of Proust, and have been rereading Proust recently. He talks so much about his vocation as a writer; it's one of the main themes of his work. And he compares everybody he meets to paintings he's seen. So I thought, why not break my own rule, and take on art as a subject?

RH: It's interesting to watch you look back on the transition from Edmund White, struggling writer, to "Edmund White, gay literary icon."

EW: Well, I haven't really -- either in this book or anything else I've done -- come up to that part. My protagonist has still just published his first novel and is struggling to make ends meet. And I can't say that I'm that far away from that in my own life, even now. My reputation is still very much under attack, which I like -- I think it shows that you're still a living, vital writer if you still irritate people.

RH: The reaction from the gay right, who charge the book with sexual immorality, is particularly interesting, because to you or me, the counterargument might seem obvious. These are books about a certain historical era in which the morality was simply different.

EW: Yes. I want to do a book about Brice, the lover who dies of AIDS in this book, because when I got to the end, I didn't want to tack his story on to what was already a very exhausting, long book. (At least I was exhausted by writing it, if the reader isn't exhausted by reading it.) And when I do write that book, I think people will be taken aback by how little sex there is in it. But when you have a lover who's sick with AIDS and dying, you don't have much sex with him, because he's not well enough, and you would feel rotten going out to have sex with other people, so you basically enter a period of several years of chastity. People who nudge each other in the ribs and say "Ooh la la, Paris!" when they read this book will be shocked by how little sex there is in the next one.

But my point is that you write what's appropriate to each decade, and to that moment in your own life. You don't try to even them all out. I think it's ridiculous to try to rewrite the past so that it comes out as a kind of position paper about contemporary sexual mores.

RH: That historical honesty is just one facet of a broader intellectual and emotional honesty that's really essential to a project of this nature. Even though you deploy certain fictional techniques of conflating and diffusing traits from real people into fictional characters, those techniques are in service of a broader truth.

EW: That's right. You don't want to bother people with every last little detail of your life, and I try to concentrate on just a few themes, like the development of a writer, the importance of friendship to a gay man, how he comes to terms with his biological family, the development of his sexual orientation... Those are the themes I concetrated on, and although there were a lot of other things happening in my life, as there are in any life, I left them out. In the period this book covers, for example, I was living in San Francisco for a while, working as an editor at Saturday Review, I was an editor at Horizon in New York, I was in touch with Nabakov and other writers... but I left that all out because it didn't seem relevant.

RH: Had you wanted to tackle biographical projects before your Genet book?

EW: No, and I wouldn't do another big, thorough biography again like the one I did on Genet, at least not one that was so difficult. Genet was probably the most difficult biography anyone could have undertaken. Most literary biographies are about somebody who's middleclass, whose mother starts collecting his juvenilia the minute he starts producing it, then moves on from success to success and is surrounded by other writers who all keep journals and record every thought and conversation. Genet was entirely different -- a foundling placed in a peasant home who became a juvenile delinquent very quickly and was sent off to reform school, and spent many years in prison. The people who knew him in those days either died young, as people tend to do when they're criminals or members of the underclass, or impossible to locate, or wouldn't talk if you did locate them, or wanted to be paid, or didn't tell you the truth... No biography could have been more difficult, which is why it took seven years to complete, only one of which was actually spent writing.

I'd never do something like that again, but this little book on Proust [I'm working on] is part of a series that Viking Penguin is launching of 100-page biographical studies of important people, not just writers, by contemporary recognized writers, which seems to me a fun thing to do.

I think, though, that writing the Genet biography influenced the composition of The Farewell Symphony in that when I started to write the biography, I thought, "How am I ever going to get a coherent life, a sense of a book that hangs together, out of all these bits and pieces I've collected in research?" What amazed me is that if you start at the beginning of somebody's life and chronologically go to the end, and trace out certain lines of development emotionally, no matter where you go, it all seems to hang together. A person is something like a coatrack -- you can keep putting garments on it, but it's still a recognizable object. That made me more daring in this book to go off in all sorts of little directions, as long as I maintained the throughline of the narrator's emotional and intellectual development.

RH: It frees you up to go back and forth in time and subject matter in... well, I guess the obvious adjective to describe it is "Proustian."

EW: I hope so. It's nice of you to say.

RH: Do you feel, because of your seropositive status, that there's only so much more time for new projects...?

EW: (interrupts) Well, I'm 57, and I think that anybody at that age will sort of feel that a bit. I've always felt that Nabakov, my idol, did his best book, Lolita, in his mid-50s, and then the next book he did, Pale Fire, was pretty damn good, too. So I've always felt that if I lived long enough, I'd do my best work in my fifties. That seems to me the right time for a writer as ambitious as I am, who wants to write not only about an individual but also about society, who wants to tackle certain subjects essayistically within a novel, and wants to cover a large period of time... it's very hard to do that when you're very young. Some writers can pull it off, as Balzac did, but they're geniuses; I'm not, and all I can do is slowly work up to it. I think that for most writers, that comes together in their fifties.

Now, I don't know. I feel that, if I were told I had to die in a month, I wouldn't feel that I'd failed to fulfill my promise [as a writer]. But I'd regret dying. I enjoy life and I feel I have a lot of other projects to do. [In addition to the Proust booklet and the novel about Brice,] I'm doing a collection of interviews with famous gay men. I've already done David Geffen, Elton John, and some important painters like Cy Twombly.

RH: In many non-fiction pieces over the years, you've been concerned with issues concerning gay fiction and the "gay canon."

EW: In one of the essays in The Burning Library, I say that the whole idea of a gay canon is distasteful to me because I feel that a canon is for people who don't like to read much. They want to know the absolute minimum list of classics so they can read them and be done with reading. Whereas people who really love to read, like me or like you, are always asking friends if they've read anything good recently, always trying to expand our list of books, open ourselves to new talent. I spend a lot of time each year reviewing books, so I can come across a lot of new writers -- straight and gay -- and I love finding out what other people are doing and thinking.

As far as the gay canon is concerned, I think the whole project is misguided. What people are trying to do is take a traditional canon that begins with Homer and goes through Dante and Shakespeare, and then tack on to this tradition of gay white men a few living or recently dead gay men. I think what should be done is that we should abandon the whole notion of a canon and embrace the full implications of a multicultural society, which is not just to bring in one Asian-American or two African-Americans to this sacred list, but to let our reading become as promiscuous as the nation is itself.

RH: You also make the point in The Farewell Symphony that the canonization of gay literature also leads to its ghettoization. When Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar came out...

EW: ...it was read by everybody and reviewed by everybody. But now I hear from one gay writer after another that the New York Times won't even review his book. There's a trend of frustration. In order to enter into a national discourse about books, if such a thing exists, the feeling is that you have to breach that threshhold of the Times, and if you don't, you feel somehow excluded. I'm not sure things really work that way -- the Times has reviewed many books and crowned them that have entirely forgotten, while other books they've ignored or dismissed in "Books in Brief" have crept up on us and established themselves as books we need to read.

Obviously, in the immediate response to a book, and to its sales, this matters, but.. I'm reading a biography of Keats right now, and he sold something 50 copies of Hyperion. Virginia Woolf sold only 10,000 copies of The Years. The writers of the past had very small sales. If a book sold five to seven thousand copies it was a huge bestseller. In our age, where everything's so gargantuan, we think a book has to have huge sales to have any impact, but I don't think history bears that out.

RH: And the larger danger seems to me, as you mention in the same passage, being confined to two shelves in the back of the bookstore.

EW: I always wonder whether, if a straight man wanted to read me, he'd have the courage, especially if he lives in a smaller town, to go to the 'gay fiction' section and pick up my book, which has a sort of 'gay cover' on it, then stand in line behind ten other people to buy it -- or if it would feel like some sort of 'confession'. And I don't think people felt that way about buying and reading James Baldwin or Gore Vidal in the '50s. People just assumed that those books were books like any others.

RH: You mentioned this in your Paris Review interview, and I was fascinated by it -- you're one of the few writers I've met who likes to read when you're writing.

EW: I feel like it fills up the word banks that might be draining dry otherwise. Colette, Nabakov, Isherwood, and Proust are talismanic writers for me, and of all those writers, perhaps Colette the most is somebody who, when I feel that I'm running out of words or no longer taking any pleasure in life, I read her and it gives me that shock of how beautiful the sensual and sensuous world around us is. She communicates that so perfectly -- she's probably the most visual of verbal artists.

Of course, right now I'm reading Proust, and all the other stuff around him, his letters, various biographies... I reviewed Alain De Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life and I think it's a terrific little book. It's very high concept, and he's able to impose his own concept onto a writer who could so easily swamp a writer. It's very important to take these giants and wrestle them down to some sort of manageable size.

BEATRICE Suggested further reading
Allan Gurganus | John Banville

All materials copyright © 1997 Ron Hogan