White's albums

Rejecting Freudian analysis and embracing his true identity, Edmund White penned two landmarks of gay literature and redefined the autobiographical novel.

By Allen Barra

Read more: Fiction, Books, Gay Culture, Allen Barra, Reviews, Book reviews

April 26, 2006 | Edmund White's remarkable career, unique in American letters, has had more facets than the Hope Diamond. It began with a rough diamond of a short novel, "Forgetting Elena" (1973), was shaped by the more polished "Nocturnes for the King of Naples" (1978), and finally set by his jewel, "A Boy's Own Story" (1982). While establishing his reputation as a fiction writer, he wrote two books that became landmarks in gay literature. I have not read "The Joy of Gay Sex" (1977, with Charles Silverstein) and "States of Desire: Travels in Gay America" (1980), but I am told their good humor and frankness raised the bar and widened the horizons of gay nonfiction. Along the way, White also established himself as the definitive biographer of Jean Genet and as one of our most personal and best literary and cultural critics.

Straight novelists in America must, I'm convinced, secretly envy their gay counterparts. Gayness, in the hands of the right sensibility, provides a ready-made perspective from which to cast a wry eye at the world. Or as David Berkman phrases it in his introduction to White's collected essays, "The Burning Library," "The value of homosexuality is that it has the potential to assist the gay man not by stripping the trappings of life away, but by revealing the trappings in all their decorativeness. The homosexual knows the illusion of naturalness firsthand, because he learns at any early age how to ape what other people believe is 'natural' and hears from all sides that what has come to him 'naturally' is 'unnatural.'" In White's case, a life that would sound unexciting related by nearly anyone else has been crafted into a handful of wonderful novels and, now, a delightful autobiography, "My Lives."

At first glance, it appears as if White's novels fit into two distinct categories. "Forgetting Elena," a Kafkaesque evocation of life on Fire Island, and "The King of Naples," an elegiac gay love story in which chapters are arranged accordingly to theme and tone, as in a long poem, rather than chronologically, are fabulous, dreamlike creations with self-consciously baroque imagery, unlike anything written by other American gay writers -- he seemed to be uninfluenced by Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, William Burroughs or almost anyone else except perhaps poets such as James Merrill. "Forgetting Elena" was praised by Vladimir Nabokov, who evinced no particular interest for homosexual themes but who homed right in on a charming and original poetic voice. (Nabokov died before "The King of Naples" was published.) White survived the kind of praise that might have ruined a lesser writer and went on to redefine the autobiographical novel, a genre that Nabokov, who thought autobiographical details "should be awarded sparingly, like medals," would not have approved of, unless perhaps it was written by Edmund White.

One of the unusual things about "A Boy's Own Story" -- unusual, that is, in the general scheme of American fiction -- is that White didn't begin his career by mining the material of his own early life but waited 10 years after his literary debut. Why exactly? Presumably so he could distance himself emotionally from his own past. In an oft-quoted line from "Forgetting Elena," a character says, "We all know that human emotions are banal," a remark that in some writers would seem to advocate a sterile aestheticism but that in White merely indicated the more complex level on which he wanted to experiment with autobiography.

"Originality in writing," he said in a 1988 Paris Review interview, "isn't a presentation of those emotions or even in their occlusion -- the way in which feelings are stopped or diverted or disguised." Writing, he told his interviewer, should be a way of "making the banal strange."

In one form or another, then, autobiography is the gemlike flame that has run through all of White's work, and his oeuvre is a testament to the power of imagination and intellectual curiosity to weave poetry from the prosaic. "My Lives" is subtitled "An Autobiography," but while it honors the conventional form, it's much more ambitious than that. Chapters are titled "My Shrinks," "My Friends," "My Father," "My Hustlers," "My Women," "My Europe" and even "My Genet" -- they are essentially critical essays on people, places and times that have affected the author and therefore his fiction, and they slide effortlessly back and forth in time. (Like Jean-Luc Godard, White likes a beginning, middle and end, though not necessarily in that order.) As in his novels, the chapters in "My Lives" are at once playful and serious.

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