On Edmund White

In a photograph taken by Slava Mogutin in 2016, the writer Edmund White, who died on 3 June, sits, corpulent and resplendent, in an unbuttoned black suit in front of overstuffed bookshelves. Draped by three graces, twinks in high athletic socks and underwear, butch cocksucker lingerie, he stares directly into the camera, smiling devilishly, each hand occupied by a smooth, naked leg.

‘I thought,’ White wrote in his autobiographical masterpiece The Farewell Symphony (1997), ‘that never had a group been placed on such a rapid cycle, oppressed in the 50s, freed in the 60s, exalted in the 70s, and wiped out in the 80s.’ He was describing, as he always did, the generation of gay men of which he was a part. To his and our luck, he survived, living to be applauded in the 90s, unjustly overlooked in the 00s, and rediscovered in the 10s and the 20s by a new generation of gays for whom prophylactic antiretrovirals have brought back the industrial sexual liberation he wrote about in his novels.

White described that sexual liberation in some of the most extraordinary prose this side of Henry James. His early novella Nocturnes for the King of Naples, more abstract and experimental than the novels for which he is better known, opens with several pages describing men cruising on the Christopher Street piers in New York City:

Congeries of bodies; the slow, blind tread on sloped steps; the faces floating up like thoughts out of ink; then trailing away like thoughts out of memory; entrances and exits; the dignified advance and retreat as an approaching car on the highway outside casts headlights through the window and plants a faint square on the wall. The square brightens til it blazes, then rotates into a trapezoid narrowing to the point of extinction, its last spark igniting a hand raised to hit a face. A new square grows on the wall but when it veers off it rears not the stunned face, nor the punishing hand – ooze on old boards, nothing else.

I love to look at these sentences with writing students, teasing out the strangeness of ‘congeries’, the alliterative plosives of ‘blind tread on sloped steps’, the specificity of ‘extinction’ for the dying of the light. In a series of metaphors, White constructs the collapsing warehouses as a cathedral full of music, ‘the waves drumming the dock in triplets of dotted eighths over the sustained crescendo-diminuendo of a passing barge’, the barge’s beam disturbing

isolated men at prayer, that man by the font (rainwater stagnant in the lid of a barrel), and this one in a side chapel (the damp vault), that pair of celebrants holding up a flame near the dome, those communicants telling beads or buttons pierced through dent, the reader number shuffling through, ignoring everything in their search for the god among us.

To write this way about cruising is to insist that faggots are people and our experiences are human: that we, like everyone else real or invented, deserve the open destiny of life. White, raised in a complex and abusive upper-class family in the Midwest, began writing about faggotry this way as a schoolboy. For decades, therapists tried to ‘cure’ his homosexuality, even as he became one of the best-known chroniclers of what he once called, in the LRB, the ‘non-subject’ of homosexuality, ‘endlessly fertile, ceaselessly shifting, devoid of all stable content, an invitation to musing rather than a fixed object of enquiry’.

White insisted that non-subject was worthy of literature, and simultaneously refused to fix or define it too precisely, or to imbue it with essential goodness. It is perhaps for this reason that his work had meaning both for the generation of gay writers and thinkers influenced by the liberation politics of the 1970s and for the generations of queers who came of age during and after Aids: queers far less interested in fixing or defining sexuality than in using it to explore what Michel Foucault called the ‘slantwise’ positions it could draw through the social fabric.

Even in his late career, thirty years after Stonewall, the literary discourse was ambiently homophobic enough for John Updike to open a review of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Spell in the New Yorker with the complaint that Hollinghurst’s novels are ‘relentlessly gay’ and lack the ‘chirp and swing and civilising animation’ of ‘a female’. In gay fiction, Updike went on, ‘nothing is at stake but self-gratification’; even the most frivolous heterosexual writing, he proposed, was ‘sacralised’ by the ‘institution of the family’ and the ‘perpetuation of the species’. It is presumably such sacred bonds that Updike had in mind when he wrote, in The Widows of Eastwick (2008): ‘She said nothing then, her lovely mouth otherwise engaged, until he came, all over her face … Her face gleamed with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room.’

Two years earlier, James Wolcott wrote in the Wall Street Journal that The Farewell Symphony, the third part of White’s magisterial trilogy of gay life beginning with A Boy’s Own Story,had ‘a rather fancy title for a book that might have been more honestly called Hilly Buttocks I Have Known’. For Wolcott, a novel describing in rich prose the coming together in ecstatic communion and fast, painful, untimely death of a generation was ‘trashy’ gossip. Proposing that gay promiscuity requires a ‘defence’, Wolcott, in a sentence dripping with disdain, wrote that White ‘crams the page with such graphic, gross, non-stop, indiscriminate, inside-gayworld flutter and abandon that giving the characters names seems a mere courtesy, they’re such interchangeable receptacles’.

But The Farewell Symphony, which borrows its title from Haydn, is full of brilliantly specific characterisation. One character, named Butler, is described as keeping ‘carbons of all his letters, which were obviously written with one eye on posterity, full of nature descriptions, lengthy impressions of historical monuments he’d visited and reflections on current social problems, all adorned with appropriate tags from Horace or Boileau’. Another, Sergio, encountered in a garden in Venice, has ‘a big, comic smile that was out of phase with his eyes, as though he were wearing a commedia dell’arte half-mask … He had a prominent jaw and his face looked as though it were flooded with blood. Laugh lines flowed away from his eyes like the tails of colliding comets.’ ‘Interchangeable receptacles’?

Writing these men as human beings was at the centre of White’s literary project. The narrator of The Farewell Symphony recalls: ‘I can still remember the joy in certain quarters when the “fags” started to die. It was not withheld. Not at all, it was a joyous, prancing, self-righteous, far-right victory lap.’ What a joy and what a gift that Edmund White survived, was embraced by a new generation of readers, and in his late years wrote a flurry of brilliant, inventive books.

In his last years he was also a generous mentor to a new generation of gay writers. Garth Greenwell, who knew White well, wrote this week that he ‘had all the best, the gayest virtues, gliding among centuries, languages, worlds … He always knew more than you did, about everything, but he never made you feel small … Maybe that was the key to his charm, or to his legendary generosity: he could imagine the ideal version of yourself you might one day become.’ This is the queer art of friendship, and White was, by all accounts, its master as well as its chronicler.

In his 1995 piece for the LRB, White describes the gay attraction to autofiction, to writing thinly veiled romans a clef like The Farewell Symphony, as a ‘wavering between authority and un-accountability’, a ‘doubleness’ that ‘reflects perhaps the unfinished business and ambiguous status of homosexual identity itself’. ‘Is the particular form homosexuality takes in any given era,’ he asked, ‘the result of a social elaboration of a biological predisposition? Wouldn’t such a formula correspond well to both the creative and the documentary claims of this peculiar modern literary form?’ Strikingly, White refused the ‘temptation’ of a simple affirmation of literature as a vessel for shaping an individual identity; rather, he argued, gay fiction was most useful at ‘adumbrating the arbitrariness of social conventions … challenging the “naturalness” of gender roles’. This is a genuinely radical analysis: radical in the sense of getting to the root, in this case the ever-shifting bodies and economies of sexuality. Words shape the mess we’re given into worlds we can survive. Edmund White will be remembered as a model for how to write dissident life.