I
briefly met Edmund White in 1983 when, being in NYC to see “A Chorus
Line”,  I went down to Greenwich Village and he was ‘manning’ a table
for the GMHC and I told him that I had enjoyedhis “A Boy’s Own Story”,
of which I still have a copy.

Edmund
Valentine White III (born January 13, 1940) is an American author and
literary critic. He is a member of the faculty of Princeton University's
Program in Creative Writing


This is the forty-first post in a
series highlighting the best gay and lesbian authors from the 20th
century (with a few before and after that period) who have recorded in
fiction, and nonfiction, the history of gay people telling what life is,
and was, during an important time of history.

Life and work
 

Born
in Cincinnati, Ohio, he largely grew up in Chicago. White attended the
prestigious Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan as a boy,
then studied Chinese at the University of Michigan. He later worked in
New York as a journalist. From 1983 to 1990 he lived in France.

Incestuous
feelings existed in White's family; his mother was attracted to him.
White spoke of his own sexual attraction to his father in an interview:
"I think with my father he was somebody who every eye in the family was
focused on and he was a sort of a tyrant and nice-looking, the source of
all power, money, happiness, and he was implacable and difficult. He
was always spoken of in sexual terms, in the sense he left our mother
for a much younger woman who was very sexy but had nothing else going
for her. He was a famous womanizer. And he slept with my sister!"

White's
best-known work is A Boy's Own Story, the first volume of an
autobiographical-fiction series that continued with The Beautiful Room
Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, describing stages in the life of a
gay man from boyhood to middle age. Several characters in these latter
two novels are recognizably based on well-known individuals from White's
New York-centered literary and artistic milieu. White was a member of
The Violet Quill. The Violet Quill included other prolific gay writers
like Andrew Holleran and Felice Picano.
 

An
earlier novel Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978) and a later novel
The Married Man (2000) are also gay-themed and draw heavily on White's
own life. In 2006 he published a nonfiction autobiography entitled My
Lives. It is unusual in that it is organized by theme, rather than
chronologically. White's autobiographical works are frank and
unapologetic about his promiscuity and his HIV-positive status. In 1982,
White helped found the Gay Men's Health Crisis, in New York City

White
has explained: "Writing has always been my recourse when I've tried to
make sense of my experience or when it's been very painful. When I was
15 years old, I wrote my first (unpublished) novel about being gay, at a
time when there were no other gay novels (not quite true). So I was
really inventing a genre, and it was a way of administering a therapy to
myself, I suppose."

Though he is openly gay himself, not all of
his works centre on gay themes. His debut Forgetting Elena (1973) is set
on an imaginary island. The novel can be read as commenting on gay
culture, but only in a highly coded and indirect manner. Caracole (1985)
centers on heterosexual characters, relationships, and desires. White's
2006 play Terre Haute (produced in New York City in 2009) portrays
discussions that take place when a prisoner based on Timothy McVeigh is
visited by a writer based on Gore Vidal. (In real life McVeigh and Vidal
corresponded but did not meet.)

White has been influential as a
literary and cultural critic, particularly on gay issues. He has
received many awards and distinctions; among these, he is a Member of
the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an Officier de l'Ordre des
Arts et des Lettres, and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences


First gaining critical attention for his
experimental fiction from such critics as Vladimir Nabokov, White has
continued to explore the intersections of art and life. That the lives
he treats are often those of gay men is not incidental to his work, yet
he is not easily comprehended within the stereotypical bounds of "gay
literature.

White cast his next novel, Nocturnes for the King of
Naples (1978), in the form of a lament of a young man for his older
lover, mixing mythic allusion and baroque description; a tour de force,
this novel achieves the "impossible" goal of sustained second-person
narrative.


White also excels as reporter and social critic.
Coauthor of the groundbreaking volume The Joy of Gay Sex (1977), White
contributed to the sumptuous how-to manual a sense of the social and
cultural dimensions of gay male sexuality.
Broadening his focus with
States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980), White wrote about gay
Americans in fifteen major cities, producing a mosaic of gay life in the
late 1970s.

These two books made White a de facto gay
spokesperson, a role that he has neither refused nor totally accepted.
The dilemma of the gay writer, White told William Goldstein in 1982, is
that "the novelist's first obligation is to be true to his own vision,
not to be some sort of common denominator or public relations man to all
gay people."

His 1993 biography of Jean Genet, together with an
edition of Genet's work, provides an in-depth look at one particular
gay life, one whose experiments in narrative form and literary
treatments of gay life influenced White's own work.
Bridging his
fantastic imaginative creations and his cannily realistic social
observations, White's series of semiautobiographical novels (A Boy's Own
Story [1982] and The Beautiful Room Is Empty [1988]) attempts, as White
said in a Paris Review interview "to show one gay life in particular
depth."

Tracing the quest for self-identity against the
expectations of family and friends in A Boy's Own Story, White
remarkably mixes the cosmic and the commonplace, as when the unnamed
narrator and his friend Kevin explore the outer boundaries of their
common masculinity:
When he turned his face my way it was dark,
indistinguishable; his back and shoulders were carving up strips of
light, carving them this way and that as he twisted and bobbed. The
water was dark, opaque, but it caught the sun's gold light, the wavy
dragon scales writhing under a sainted knight's halo. At last Kevin swam
up beside me; his submerged body looked small, boneless. He said we
should go down to the store and buy some Vaseline.

Such grappling
with male bodies, both physical and mental, propels A Boy's Own Story
onward against the backdrop of Midwestern family life.
The Beautiful
Room Is Empty traces the narrator's experiments with desire and romance
as he moves through an exclusive prep school, sessions with a
psychotherapist, and the Stonewall riots. The narrator's swings between
joyful acceptance and critical self-loathing reflect the emerging
national gay consciousness.

The events of these novels mirror the
shape of White's own early life: growing up in Cincinnati, dealing with
a demanding father, attending the exclusive Cranbrook Academy. As an
undergraduate at the University of Michigan, White twice won the
prestigious Hopwood award, the first of numerous awards for his writing.


He worked for a while at Time-Life Books until his writing
brought him teaching jobs at Yale, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins. Since
1983, he has lived in both New York and Paris.

His two
autobiographical novels, conceived as part of a tetralogy, are generally
acknowledged as White's most successful work. His nonfiction has often
been read through a moralistic or sociological lens. States of Desire,
for example, was broadly criticized for the promiscuity of its subjects.


The changing lives of gay men, particularly as they are
devastated by AIDS, continue to shape White's work. His collection of
stories with Adam Mars-Jones, The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis
(1988), was one of the first works of serious fiction to treat the
impact of AIDS.


In a 1987 essay in Artforum, White
summarizes his obligation to gay culture in these words: "To have been
oppressed in the '50s, freed in the '60s, exalted in the '70s, and wiped
out in the '80s is a quick itinerary for a whole culture to follow. For
we are witnessing not just the death of individuals but a menace to an
entire culture. All the more reason to bear witness to the cultural
moment."
All of White's work can be seen as intimately bound to gay
culture, simultaneously reflecting its shifting contours and shaping its
most provocative edges.
Randal Woodland


Works
Fiction
Forgetting Elena (1973)
Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978)
A Boy's Own Story (1982) ISBN 0-525-24128-0
Caracole (1985)
The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)
Skinned Alive: Stories (1995)
The Farewell Symphony (1997)
The Married Man (2000)
Fanny: A Fiction (2003)
Chaos: A Novella and Stories (2007)
Hotel de Dream (2007) Review from the NYT
Plays
Terre Haute (2006)
Nonfiction
The Joy of Gay Sex, with Charles Silverstein (1977)
States of Desire (1980)
The Burning Library: Writings on Art, Politics and Sexuality 1969-1993 (1994)
The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris (2000)
Arts and Letters (2004)
[Biography
Genet: A Biography (1993)
Marcel Proust (1998)
Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel (2008)
Memoir
Our Paris: Sketches from Memory (1995)
My Lives (2005)
City Boy (2009)
Anthologies
The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis, with Adam Mars-Jones (1987)
In Another Part of the Forest: : An Anthology of Gay Short Fiction (1994)
The Art of the Story (2000)
A Fine Excess: Contemporary Literature at Play (2001)