RH: Let's start with a quote from the book. "The writer's vanity
holds that everything that happens to him is material. He views
everything from a distance, and even when the cops arrest him for
sucking a cock through a gloryhole, he smiles faintly and thinks,
'Idea for Story.' As he submerges himself in the bilge of everyday
life, all its disorder and tedium, he holds his thumb out at arm's
length and squints, as if to get a take on this patch of swarming
nonsense. Each new occurrence offers a new end to the story, in the
light of which everything that proceeds must be revised."
That paragraph, to me, essentially sums up this novel.
EW: I think I've always been somebody who led his life as
though it were a novel or going to become one, so I'm always looking
for pattern and repetition or meaning in what is, of course, the
essentially indeterminate swarming madness of life. And several
times in the trilogy, I've talked about how, if there is a devil, he's not
somebody in a bright red suit with a tail, he's some man in a T-shirt
sitting in a room at midday watching daytime television. What's
really scary and frightening is boredom and the idea that the world
is really winding down through entropy. And what art does is to go
in the opposite direction -- to inject energy, find pattern, lend
meaning and vitality into what seems tepid.
RH: As the conclusion of the trilogy, this is more than a
continuation of the first two books. In previous interviews, you've
discussed how, with each new book, you're struggling to carry your
own mastery of the form a bit further, and in this book you've
pushed yourself to write in ways you've never written before.
EW: For one thing, I never dared to talk about art and writing
[in my fiction] before. I had that typical American mistrust of
anything that was too cultural or arty, a feeling that the subject
would only be of vague professional interest to a few other writers.
But then, because I'm writing a little biography of Proust, and have
been rereading Proust recently. He talks so much about his vocation
as a writer; it's one of the main themes of his work. And he compares
everybody he meets to paintings he's seen. So I thought, why not
break my own rule, and take on art as a subject?
RH: It's interesting to watch you look back on the transition from
Edmund White, struggling writer, to "Edmund White, gay literary
icon."
EW: Well, I haven't really -- either in this book or anything
else I've done -- come up to that part. My protagonist has still
just published his first novel and is struggling to make ends meet.
And I can't say that I'm that far away from that in my own
life, even now. My reputation is still very much under attack, which I
like -- I think it shows that you're still a living, vital writer if you
still irritate people.
RH: The reaction from the gay right, who charge the book with sexual immorality, is particularly interesting,
because to you or me, the counterargument might seem obvious.
These are books about a certain historical era in which the morality
was simply different.
EW: Yes. I want to do a book about Brice, the lover who dies of
AIDS in this book, because when I got to the end, I didn't want to
tack his story on to what was already a very exhausting, long book.
(At least I was exhausted by writing it, if the reader isn't exhausted
by reading it.) And when I do write that book, I think people will be
taken aback by how little sex there is in it. But when you have a
lover who's sick with AIDS and dying, you don't have much sex with
him, because he's not well enough, and you would feel rotten going
out to have sex with other people, so you basically enter a period of
several years of chastity. People who nudge each other in the ribs
and say "Ooh la la, Paris!" when they read this book will be shocked
by how little sex there is in the next one.
But my point is that you write what's appropriate to each decade,
and to that moment in your own life. You don't try to even them all
out. I think it's ridiculous to try to rewrite the past so that it comes
out as a kind of position paper about contemporary sexual mores.
RH: That historical honesty is just one facet of a broader
intellectual and emotional honesty that's really essential to a project
of this nature. Even though you deploy certain fictional techniques of
conflating and diffusing traits from real people into fictional
characters, those techniques are in service of a broader truth.
EW: That's right. You don't want to bother people with every
last little detail of your life, and I try to concentrate on just a few
themes, like the development of a writer, the importance of
friendship to a gay man, how he comes to terms with his biological
family, the development of his sexual orientation... Those are the
themes I concetrated on, and although there were a lot of other
things happening in my life, as there are in any life, I left them out.
In the period this book covers, for example, I was living in San
Francisco for a while, working as an editor at Saturday Review,
I was an editor at Horizon in New York, I was in touch with
Nabakov and other writers... but I left that all out because it didn't
seem relevant.
RH: Had you wanted to tackle biographical projects before your
Genet book?
EW: No, and I wouldn't do another big, thorough biography
again like the one I did on Genet, at least not one that was so
difficult. Genet was probably the most difficult biography anyone
could have undertaken. Most literary biographies are about
somebody who's middleclass, whose mother starts collecting his
juvenilia the minute he starts producing it, then moves on from
success to success and is surrounded by other writers who all keep
journals and record every thought and conversation. Genet was
entirely different -- a foundling placed in a peasant home who
became a juvenile delinquent very quickly and was sent off to
reform school, and spent many years in prison. The people who knew
him in those days either died young, as people tend to do when
they're criminals or members of the underclass, or impossible to
locate, or wouldn't talk if you did locate them, or wanted to be paid,
or didn't tell you the truth... No biography could have been more
difficult, which is why it took seven years to complete, only one of
which was actually spent writing.
I'd never do something like that again, but this little book on Proust
[I'm working on] is part of a series that Viking Penguin is launching
of 100-page biographical studies of important people, not just
writers, by contemporary recognized writers, which seems to me a
fun thing to do.
I think, though, that writing the Genet biography influenced the
composition of The Farewell Symphony in that when I started
to write the biography, I thought, "How am I ever going to get a
coherent life, a sense of a book that hangs together, out of all these
bits and pieces I've collected in research?" What amazed me is that if
you start at the beginning of somebody's life and chronologically go
to the end, and trace out certain lines of development emotionally, no
matter where you go, it all seems to hang together. A person is
something like a coatrack -- you can keep putting garments on it, but
it's still a recognizable object. That made me more daring in this book
to go off in all sorts of little directions, as long as I maintained the
throughline of the narrator's emotional and intellectual
development.
RH: It frees you up to go back and forth in time and subject
matter in... well, I guess the obvious adjective to describe it is
"Proustian."
EW: I hope so. It's nice of you to say.
RH: Do you feel, because of your seropositive status, that there's
only so much more time for new projects...?
EW: (interrupts) Well, I'm 57, and I think that anybody
at that age will sort of feel that a bit. I've always felt that Nabakov,
my idol, did his best book, Lolita, in his mid-50s, and then the
next book he did, Pale Fire, was pretty damn good, too. So I've
always felt that if I lived long enough, I'd do my best work in my
fifties. That seems to me the right time for a writer as ambitious as I
am, who wants to write not only about an individual but also about
society, who wants to tackle certain subjects essayistically within a
novel, and wants to cover a large period of time... it's very hard to do
that when you're very young. Some writers can pull it off, as Balzac
did, but they're geniuses; I'm not, and all I can do is slowly work up
to it. I think that for most writers, that comes together in their
fifties.
Now, I don't know. I feel that, if I were told I had to die in a month, I
wouldn't feel that I'd failed to fulfill my promise [as a writer]. But I'd
regret dying. I enjoy life and I feel I have a lot of other projects to
do. [In addition to the Proust booklet and the novel about Brice,] I'm
doing a collection of interviews with famous gay men. I've already
done David Geffen, Elton John, and some important painters like Cy
Twombly.
RH: In many non-fiction pieces over the years, you've been
concerned with issues concerning gay fiction and the "gay
canon."
EW: In one of the essays in The Burning Library, I say
that the whole idea of a gay canon is distasteful to me because I feel
that a canon is for people who don't like to read much. They want to
know the absolute minimum list of classics so they can read them
and be done with reading. Whereas people who really love to read,
like me or like you, are always asking friends if they've read
anything good recently, always trying to expand our list of books,
open ourselves to new talent. I spend a lot of time each year
reviewing books, so I can come across a lot of new writers -- straight
and gay -- and I love finding out what other people are doing and
thinking.
As far as the gay canon is concerned, I think the whole project is
misguided. What people are trying to do is take a traditional canon
that begins with Homer and goes through Dante and Shakespeare,
and then tack on to this tradition of gay white men a few living or
recently dead gay men. I think what should be done is that we
should abandon the whole notion of a canon and embrace the full
implications of a multicultural society, which is not just to bring in
one Asian-American or two African-Americans to this sacred list, but
to let our reading become as promiscuous as the nation is itself.
RH: You also make the point in The Farewell Symphony
that the canonization of gay literature also leads to its ghettoization.
When Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar came out...
EW: ...it was read by everybody and reviewed by everybody.
But now I hear from one gay writer after another that the New
York Times won't even review his book. There's a trend of
frustration. In order to enter into a national discourse about books, if
such a thing exists, the feeling is that you have to breach that
threshhold of the Times, and if you don't, you feel somehow
excluded. I'm not sure things really work that way -- the
Times has reviewed many books and crowned them that have
entirely forgotten, while other books they've ignored or dismissed in
"Books in Brief" have crept up on us and established themselves as
books we need to read.
Obviously, in the immediate response to a book, and to its sales, this
matters, but.. I'm reading a biography of Keats right now, and he sold
something 50 copies of Hyperion. Virginia Woolf sold only
10,000 copies of The Years. The writers of the past had very
small sales. If a book sold five to seven thousand copies it was a huge
bestseller. In our age, where everything's so gargantuan, we think a
book has to have huge sales to have any impact, but I don't think
history bears that out.
RH: And the larger danger seems to me, as you mention in the
same passage, being confined to two shelves in the back of the
bookstore.
EW: I always wonder whether, if a straight man wanted to
read me, he'd have the courage, especially if he lives in a smaller
town, to go to the 'gay fiction' section and pick up my book, which
has a sort of 'gay cover' on it, then stand in line behind ten other
people to buy it -- or if it would feel like some sort of 'confession'.
And I don't think people felt that way about buying and reading
James Baldwin or Gore Vidal in the '50s. People just assumed that
those books were books like any others.
RH: You mentioned this in your Paris Review interview, and I was
fascinated by it -- you're one of the few writers I've met who likes to
read when you're writing.
EW: I feel like it fills up the word banks that might be
draining dry otherwise. Colette, Nabakov, Isherwood, and Proust are
talismanic writers for me, and of all those writers, perhaps Colette
the most is somebody who, when I feel that I'm running out of words
or no longer taking any pleasure in life, I read her and it gives me
that shock of how beautiful the sensual and sensuous world around
us is. She communicates that so perfectly -- she's probably the most
visual of verbal artists.
Of course, right now I'm reading Proust, and all the other stuff
around him, his letters, various biographies... I reviewed Alain De
Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life and I think it's a
terrific little book. It's very high concept, and he's able to impose his
own concept onto a writer who could so easily swamp a writer. It's
very important to take these giants and wrestle them down to some
sort of manageable size.
