Autobiography: Edmund White, the godfather of gay fiction, disappoints with his queasily graphic memoir, writes Eileen Battersby
The non-campaigning campaigner, US writer Edmund White, placed gay writing firmly among mainstream literary fiction. His work has always been openly autobiographical, and if, for him, it has been a personal quest for self and self-fulfilment, for his readers it has proved an insight into the challenge of life on the social margins. HIV-positive since 1985, he is a storyteller in the sense that he knows how to make the ordinary appear an event.
Admittedly, most of the events on offer are invariably his own personal experiences, but such is White's candour that regardless of the often shockingly explicit sexual nature of his work, his fluent, conversational tone - and the sheer honesty with which he explores the levels of humiliation he has readily sought - wins the trust of his reader.
Considering what we know of White's life from his fiction, and the damage inflicted by his repressive father and demanding mother, one might wonder exactly what he could have left out to justify his new book, My Lives, a memoir which even his admirers, such as myself, can not help greeting with a mixture of anticipation and concern - for him.
It was to be hoped that White would concentrate on telling the story of how he conducted the research that became his outstanding biography of Jean Genet, a book that shows exactly how much there is to Edmund White, who has returned to the US and is now teaching at Princeton.
Unfortunately, My Lives never becomes the book it could have been and quickly settles into a queasily graphic account of life with mother, a dangerous misfit who used her son as a confidant to offset her despair at the collapse of her marriage. The damage this did to White - "her live-in guinea pig" - is obvious; the lack of sensitivity she subjected him to is unforgivable - not least because this ridiculous woman was a trained child psychologist who delighted in her son's oddness and expected him to assist her in dressing and undressing. When Mom leaves off, White then settles into an adult life spent watching a succession of male bodies do much the same thing.
Autobiographical narratives such as A Boy's Own Story (1982) and The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988) plotted the making of the writer. White, who was born in 1940 to soon-to-be-divorced middle-class parents in Cincinnati, Ohio, conferred a strange beauty on these studies of loneliness and despair.
There was also a sense of distance. With time, he has reduced this, age and his awareness of his following has made him sufficiently confident to tell his story with a relaxed bluntness, as well as his always-engaging humanity.
During the course of his career, he has also, unlike most US writers, settled abroad, and spent close on 20 years in Paris. This European dimension set him slightly apart. Whereas Paul Theroux became a professional nomad, the Boston patrician abroad, White embraced the role of an outsider who found a home. There is also the fact that though born into the Vietnam generation and also eligible for the entire Civil Rights revolution, his experience appears to be almost exclusively rooted in his sexuality and his response to physical beauty in other men.
This would suggest an oppressively narrow self-absorption, yet White managed to transcend this through his good humour and flair for engagement with life. He is a writer who never sets himself above his reader, such is the power of his self-effacing voice and his habit of presenting himself as an incurable fool for love. White, although well aware of the threat of Aids, placed his dread of loneliness above his desire to survive.
No one else would have been capable of writing a 500-page novel chronicling the brutalities and cold impersonal, casualness of much of gay sexuality. Yet his finest novel, The Farewell Symphony (1997), is just that. Drawing its title from Haydn's famous symphony which only ends when the last musician leaves the stage, that novel was a lament for the many dead left in the wake of the Aids plague. One by one White told the stories of friends, lovers and one night stands who died from the virus that challenged a male sexuality governed by difficult codes. It is a remarkable book, often funny and at times, shockingly, unexpectedly moving.
Even more moving was his account of the slow death of his French lover, Hubert Sorin, a beautiful young man whom I had met with White in Dublin in 1989. White turned novelist for this task and wrote the story in another fine novel, The Married Man (2000). As always with White there is a bizarre bravery at work. Behind the good humour and camp one-liners lies a defiant wail of grief. That book not only offered a graphic description of the various stages through which a person with Aids disintegrates, to the point that the body is a corpse while its owner is still alive, it bluntly recorded the very human hope the narrator finally expresses, that his once lover, now patient, will die and free both of them. As the married man, now dying lover, nears death, it is decided to bring his body to Africa. The black comedy which surrounds that odyssey, in which death and burial amount to release, is brilliantly handled by White.
Yet there is more to him as a writer than merely a person candid enough to share his sexual hopes and needs, disappointments and losses. In 1993, he published Genet, a serious study of the French writer whose life of abandonment, prostitution and early crime was followed by an extraordinary literary career that broke just about every taboo, sexually and politically.
White approached his colourful subject with a surprising sense of distance. Unlike many biographers, he made no attempt to climb into Genet's mind. Instead what emerged from the disciplined, ordered work, some seven years in the making, was a thorough and atmospheric study of the 20th century French artistic and literary scene in which Genet flourished. It won White a National Book Award. It also revealed yet another side to Edmund White the man every reader thought they knew thanks to the highly autobiographical nature of his fiction.
Very late, too late in My Lives, this staggeringly graphic, meandering and casually conversational reminiscence of parental nastiness and multiple sexual encounters, White writes: "I decided that Genet deserved a scrupulous, highly detailed, strictly chronological biography in which the biographer himself would never intrude as a voice or a character. Maybe because I was an autobiographical novelist and tired of the word 'I', I longed for the 'otherness' of traditional biography. Nor did I believe 'Monsieur Genet, c'est moi', since I knew Genet had despised fellow homosexuals, most whites, all white Americans, fellow writers, all middle class people - on five counts I was out."
Unfortunately, White defers his account of his Genet until page 307 of My Lives. By then, the reader is already reeling under the sexual content and the many descriptions of the lovers who have walked through his life. Early in his sexual life, White decided his role would be sexual slave to many masters. His own emotions and hopes are invariably secondary to his intense focus upon a lover's, or potential lover's, body.
From the opening sentence it appears that White is unlikely to spare even the most intimate details and is even less inclined to subdue his naturally jaunty tone. "In the mid-1950s, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I told my mother I was homosexual; that was the word, back then, homosexual, in its full satanic majesty, cloaked in ether fumes, a combination of evil and sickness." By the end of the first page, he has already mentioned his older sister, "who disliked me". Such is the horrific nature of his memories of his deeply unpleasant, grotesque parents, it seems that White, with some justification, has decided to publicly settle the score. If a fraction of what he has written about his mother andfather - who also tried to seduce White's sister when she was 14 - is true, it is to White's credit that he has succeeded in having a life at all.
Throughout the book he stresses the effort he has placed on sustaining friendships. But for all the lightness, often difficult to appreciate such is the sexual content and the litany of male body parts, this is a squalid, over conversational embarrassing book fuelled by more anger than the urbane White would ever admit to.
"Because my mother suffered so much beside the silent phone, drinking highballs and listening to the same sad record, I came to think of men as monsters with absolute powers and women as victims . . . Even today, if a woman friend of mine is considering leaving her husband, I always counsel her against it. All I can foresee is loss of status, loneliness, poverty, whereas a man, a straight man, no matter how boring and abusive and ugly he might be, will always find another woman to humour him, forgive him, even support him."
One may be excused expecting an account by a US writer now in his mid-1960s to include a vivid account of US social history. In the chapter entitled 'My Europe' he begins: "I belong to the last generation of Americans obsessed with Europe and intimidated by it. When I was a small boy in Ohio, America was simultaneously isolationist and truly isolated." The isolation White has endured because of his parents and his sexuality proves a cautionary tale and little sense of the US of White's youth emerges.
Memory is a dangerous thing; it hurts and comforts. John McGahern's Memoir is both personal testament and profound Irish social history. Edmund White, survivor, no less hurt, no less angry, is far too much concerned with sex as performance and self-expression than with real feeling. Unlike McGahern's account, it is too conversational. There is no poetry, no lyric grace, no profound discovery and most disappointing of all, none of White's proven intellectual sophistication.
White was emotionally paralysed from childhood and has spent a lifetime hiding behind his quick wit and camp responses, while trying to heal himself. This private struggle may well prove too public for most readers; it was for me.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
My Lives. By Edmund White, Bloomsbury, 356pp, £17.99