Apologising

James Wood

• The Burning Library: Writings on Art, Politics, Sexuality 1969-93 by Edmund White
  Picador, 385 pp, £20.00, May 1995, ISBN 0 330 33883 8
• Skinned Alive by Edmund White
  Chatto, 262 pp, £12.99, March 1995, ISBN 0 7011 6175 2

Edmund White has always struggled between appeasing the gods of his art and paying off the princelings of politics. Endearingly, and sometimes infuriatingly, he insists on doing both, and the result often leaves his pockets rather empty. Thus in his book of selected journalism, The Burning Library, he can move from a sublime celebration of Nabokov’s ‘greatness’ to a demand that ‘even the hierarchy inherent in the concept of a canon must be jettisoned.’ It is how he is able, in a piece about Robert Mapplethorpe, to argue that ‘passion, like art, is always irresponsible, useless, an end in itself, regulated by its own impulses and nothing else’ and to propose in another that the best gay writing should be a combination of confession, reportage and witness.