White's albums

White was born in Cincinnati and raised in Evanston, Ill., "a city I liked with its big Congregational and Episcopal churches no one seemed to take too seriously, since their religion was a pleasant social habit, not an occasion for red-faced fervor." Unlike so many portraits of the artist as a gay young man, the writer's hometown is recalled pleasantly: "There were hundred-year old elms shading wood houses behind their underclipped hedges. Plain girls straddled cellos at home and practiced for hours. Boys wrestled with one another after school in piles of autumn leaves. Everything smelled of quietly smoldering leaves."

His mother, brought up in the Baptist Church in Texas and, like her inspiration, Mary Baker Eddy, a convert to Christian Science, denied the existence of evil "except as it was embodied in my father's mistress and believed in thinking mightily positive thoughts ... When my mother was distraught, which occurred on a daily basis, she found consolation in bourbon, and Eddy's 'Science and Health' and 'Key to the Scriptures.'" She also detected in her son signs "of a great soul and highly advanced spirituality."

Aware as a boy that he wanted to be a writer, young Edmund feared that he "could never be a great artist if I remained ignorant of the classical verities of marriage and child-rearing, adultery and divorce." He sought help in psychiatry but worried that if psychoanalysis "could convert me into a heterosexual, might it not at the same time ablate the very neurosis that made me want to write? Should I tamper with my neurosis?" God, no. As the writer grew older, he found "Freudian psychology went up in flames and became no more powerful or present than the smell of ashes in a cold fireplace the morning after. Most of the problems Freudians had addressed were no longer experienced as an individual need to adapt to conventions, but as conventions that needed to adapt to individuals ... In the 1950s people had been ashamed to admit they were inadequate. In the 1960s they became proud to announce they were victims."

Psychoanalysis did leave him with a few beliefs, notably "the conviction that everyone is worthy of years and years of intense scrutiny -- not a bad credo for a novelist." Before long, the cult of the novelist replaced that of the analyst: "A novelist can work with Nabokov's insight because it respects the details, the sinuous surface, of experience, but not with Freud's theory, which is arid and reductive." White seems to have no deep-seated hostility toward his father, "a conservative Republican who worried about the growing national debt and was opposed to the racial integration of the armed forces and graduated income tax." Homosexuals, of course, "were beyond the pale, unmentionable perverts." Only belatedly did he realize that "my father had been one of the most boring men ever to draw breath." It was his mother and her own "mightily positive" way who encouraged his imagination. "'With a gifted child,' she would say, opening her hands palms up as if to display self-evident principles, 'you must let him set the pace, you must follow his lead.'" When she finally accepted him as a gay writer of some renown, she'd say, "'You've truly become a spokesman for your people.'"

In high school he and his friends were "public-library intellectuals, magpies of all knowledge, but like most autodidacts, we were incapable of evaluating our sources: we usually read the wrong book." At college in Ann Arbor, Mich., White found himself one of the "arty types ... We were neither scrubbed and perky, like the Greeks, nor alienated and uncombed, like the Beats. We drank but didn't smoke pot, we had nothing resembling a credo beyond a faith in the permanent avant-garde. We revered Brecht, not Marx; Mayakovski, not Lenin ... both Ingmar and Ingrid Bergman." Later, after experiencing Village life and beginning to establish his own reputation, he would come to envy the relative status of important European writers compared with those in America. "Both [Roland] Barthes and [Michel] Foucault had announced the death of the writer, but their very efforts desacralized the office, realized just how sacred it was in France; in America, no one would have bothered."

In late middle age, after returning to the States and teaching at Princeton, White would discover he had "a small but faithful readership." "Perhaps, I was the last writer to care about posterity; believing that there would be readers in the future had become an act of blind faith." After an interview with a trendy unnamed English critic who doubted even the continued survival of Shakespeare, he became, for a brief period, depressed: "We still hailed writers for being as original and profound and lasting as Hemingway or Flaubert, but maybe it was an empty rhetorical gesture. Maybe even libraries had a short shelf life."

Now, at 65, he hopes "the solitary twenty-year old in Kansas might be able to hear my voice, scratchy and bleeding as it may be, as we can still hear Caruso's. Like Walt Whitman. I want to excite at least one young man not yet born; the kid in Singapore or Salt Lake City." I can't speak for the unborn kid in Singapore or Salt Lake, but at least one straight middle-aged reader in South Orange, N.J., numbers himself among the small but faithful readership.

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