The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  We were all bookish, as it turned out, and we talked about Proust, Isherwood, Stendhal, with the zest of true readers, excited into appreciation not analysis, endlessly eager to evoke favorite scenes and to judge characters as though they were real people. “Oh, God, remember when they realize they’re in love just because the word love is pronounced—”

  “Is she his aunt or his mother? I forget.”

  Lynne kept mentioning James Baldwin, and I wondered if it was because they were both Black. If we’d been Europeans, snobbism might have slipped into our talk, but since reading bore no cachet at all in America we were reduced to a pleasure as inconsequential as that of the stamp collector or armchair traveler.

  What I liked most of all was that all three of my new acquaintances were not only bookish but also beautiful.

  “Do you write?” I asked Penelope.

  “Yes,” she said, “though I shouldn’t talk about it since I’ve never published anything.”

  “Join the crowd,” I said. “What are you working on?”

  She smiled a dodgy little smile, as though I might be mocking or stalking her, but she overcame her fear—and her vanity—to say with great firmness, “No one, not even Rod, has ever read anything I’ve written, though you’ll all be encouraged to buy my first novel as soon as it comes out.”

  “Come on, tell,” I said.

  She straightened her skirt around her knees and said, “That would be against my principles. But surely you’ve introduced the subject because you’re dying to tell us about your own belletristic efforts.”

  Butler, Lynne and I all froze, looked at each other, drew a breath and rocked with laughter. Penelope laughed too, delighted by the effect she’d produced. I speculated that she was one of those people who prefer being admired for their eccentricities than liked for their common fund of humanity, if they have such a fund. Soon we were eagerly talking about our belletristic efforts. Butler was a short story writer who favored the “avant-garde” and who had translated several of Raymond Roussel’s obscure “texts” into a stiff-jointed English. Lynne was writing a thesis on Max Jacob and his influence on Picasso. I said, “My novel is purely autobiographical. Everything in it is exactly as it happened, moment by moment—sometimes even written down moments after the event. The main character bears my name. I’m writing it in order to persuade the love of my life to come back to me; I’m afraid it’s going to be a very long book. That’s the avant-garde technique I’ve invented: it’s called realism.”

  Penelope asked, “Isn’t that what most people call a diary?”

  The truth was, I’d long since finished and typed my four-hundred-page novel and it was slowly making the rounds of all the New York publishers. It had already been rejected by a dozen. My agent sent me the editors’ comments, if there were any. What shocked me most were how personal and arbitrary they were. Whereas I saw publication as a medal conferred on merit, the notes suggested how haphazard and capricious acceptance must be.

  Butler said, “But everything written is a version of reality, even a betrayal of it—tant mieux, since a betrayal is already a choice, which is a conscious, imaginative act.”

  I protested that since “reality,” at least the psychic reality that is the subject of books, takes place in our heads and nowhere else, a fictional account of reality is in no way a translation or “betrayal” of that material into another medium. Lynne murmured, “Tradurre, tradire,” exactly as I knew she would.

  Butler’s eyebrows shot up to indicate his alarm at my heresy, whereas his beautiful hands lazily calmed the waters I’d riled. For if he was both a benevolent despot and a shockable miss, it was his hands that were benevolent and the eyes that were permanently alarmed. He pointed out that language is a closed system in no way connected to reality and that books can only be about other books; I pictured shelves in a dim library where all the books were gabbling contentedly amongst themselves like old people in bed.

  “And yet realism is the great challenge,” I said, “not the School of Realism with its sordid kitchens and tough streets, much less Social Realism, but rather the burning desire to render the exact shade of sadness, the sadness you feel when you finally get what you want.” I spoke facilely, my commas eliminated by drink, and now I was looking into Lynne’s merry eyes that were astonished by my recklessness. Suddenly I realized I was talking too much, a temptation I surrendered to only when the subject turned to books, and I dutifully returned to interviewing my new friends. My father had taught me that I need never feel ill at ease socially since all people love to talk about themselves at the slightest provocation—a lesson he, the world’s most boring conversationalist, never observed except during business dinners.

  While the gay boys around us were slow dancing, a romantic excuse for bumps and grinds and bodily examinations of a nearly medical thoroughness, I was trying to ingratiate myself with Lynne and Butler. I took them more seriously than the boys because they were a heterosexual couple or at least ambiguous sexually.

  Couples fascinated me. All my life I’d been dancing attendance on them. I worked harder than they did to keep them together and often failed to see that their spats were just the fleeting coquetry of sex antagonism, the natural play in a joust that was more exciting because it was half-hostile. When I was with my couples I was never happy. In fact I was constantly anxious, afraid they’d separate, fearful I might unwittingly be the cause of their separation. Yet I could imagine becoming happy soon if only some movable part (I never figured out which) would tumble into place. I would resolve every morning not to become too involved with my couple of the moment, but by midafternoon I’d already been on the phone with each partner half a dozen times and had invited them to a peace-conference dinner that very evening. I would do everything to bring a smile to their lips, as though my survival depended upon their caprices. I invariably took the side of the man and counseled the woman to give in, concede everything, since to my mind it was clear that it was a buyer’s market and she was selling. I had no doubt that he, no matter how unappealing, would find another woman right away, whereas I thought it was only a polite fiction that she was a full and equal partner in any marriage with a man. After all, I’d grown up with a woman—a frustrated, heavy-drinking, headstrong woman—who writhed with loneliness and impatience beside the silent phone. A woman took on importance only if a man desired her, but male desire itself was illusory or at best brief, and women desirable only by convention, not conviction.

  Suddenly everyone was whispering, “Brandy,” and the next thing I knew I was being introduced to a tall, slender drag queen in a sequined ball gown. She was young but had a mature, expertly painted face designed to appear—I won’t say “natural,” since nature had nothing to do with it—but plausible only if seen at a distance, on the stage, say. She took my big mitt in her tiny, slightly feverish hand. “I’m so upset,” she said in a thrillingly low voice. “Jorge has just taken off with all my jewels. He threatened to kill me if I called the cops.” Her eyes were tragic but a ghost of a smile alighted with a delicate “ping!” on her glossy scarlet lips outlined in black. Penelope said, “You poor girl,” and pressed a whiskey into her hands. I tried to imagine Brandy’s penis.

  “Who’s Jorge?” I asked, feeling as though I, too, were on stage, the embarrassed volunteer dragged up out of the audience.

  “My husband,” Brandy said solemnly. “He’s the bouncer at the Club 86, a big Puerto Rican bruiser who beats me though I love him, God help me.”

  Like an idiot I didn’t respond with another Billie Holiday or Helen Morgan song tag but with some irrelevant psychoanalytic twaddle. Brandy was too good an actress to let me spoil her scene; just as the audience was getting restless, she suddenly lifted my hand to her lips (though she was careful not to allow me actually to touch that gooey pot of strawberry jam) and whispered huskily, “Look, all these guys and dolls around us are all licking their chops over you, so slim and muscly in your grey T-shirt. You know what you are? You’re
the Universal Ball.” It took me a moment to register what she meant.

  As a former fatty and stoop-shouldered bookworm I had a hard time believing my amphetamine-powered diet, my years of working out, my painful hair-relaxing, and my newly acquired contact lenses, always attracting cinder specks and provoking tears, had actually paid off. Or perhaps the previous year’s bout of hepatitis had made my face gaunt to just the right degree. So everyone desired me?

  More likely, Brandy knew how to flatter me into the blushing silence she required. Once my pop-psychology remedies were disposed of (those were the years when we would have told Medea, had we encountered her still steaming in her sons’ blood, “You must not like yourself very much”), she took the spotlight. She told us of Jorge’s jealous rages, his epic drunks, his violence and, like a ballad singer, concluded each verse with a whispered chorus, “But I love him, he’s my man.”

  Brandy was young like us but a throwback to an earlier era of butch-femme role-playing raised to the intensity of Greek drama; her high heels were her cothurni. She expressed our feminine longings to be beat and betrayed by a real man, half-buried wishes we could never have unearthed, wishes that in any event had been superseded by our desire to be wolves running with the pack, men among men, two hard cocks held together in one hand. Unlike us she didn’t flash on an imagined glimpse of a raised hand or an angry snarl; instead she articulated those desires in well chosen words through expertly rendered lips, addressing us in an alto voice that fell within a female register but packed a virile wallop. We were Village kids with hippie hair, we were sporting tight jeans, no underwear, cheap deodorant, loose T-shirts and scuffed dirty bucks worn down at the heel; she was a Gallé bud vase, her green fishtail gown molded to her lightly padded hips, her blondined hair, interwoven with various falls and pieces, as full and fragrant as a blown rose. Important hair, as people say now. She was seductive, not sexual. Like rubes at the fair we were gawking at the bearded lady, or rather the beardless gentleman (do the rubes sometimes long to become the beautiful freak?).

  Most of us gay guys had last dated a woman when we were eighteen; Brandy reminded us of our senior prom and brought out in us a throwback to gallantry, the deference paid to something deemed universally desirable that we just didn’t happen to desire. At the same time it was all a trick, her act, something done with mirrors, as her sad smile and irony-drenched voice revealed.

  BUTLER AND LYNNE were graduate students at Columbia. They invited me to dinner at their apartment in one of the teeming, shadowy side streets near the university. Lynne looked exhausted when I arrived. Very quickly I understood why. Everything in her dinner came out of an elaborate cookbook popular at that time; I recognized the very recipes I myself had devoted five and six hours to realizing. Butler looked cool and languid, and received me with alternating bouts of nerveless elegance and prim surprise.

  I had adopted after six years in New York a certain saucy directness that shocked the recently arrived Butler. I’d learned to flatter people shamelessly, an excessiveness that took them by surprise but that they found to be shamefully gratifying. My theory was that, afraid of sounding insincere, no one dared to compliment his or her friends on quite obvious virtues; I was going to eliminate all half-hearted reticence. Then I’d also acquired the related knack of asking personal, even embarrassing, questions; I’d spring my question, “Do you really like sex?,” without any advance warning or a plausible transition. I was careful to avoid painful subjects (“Are you still sleeping with your husband?”), because I wasn’t a sadist, just a provocateur. I wanted to render conversations entertaining even to the participants; whereas few people had ideas to develop, they all had secrets to reveal. My impertinence was just another form of flattery.

  Butler didn’t take to it. He and Lynne were too Europeanized for it and preferred decorous vacuity, if need be, to premature confidences that might later be regretted. They didn’t know me well enough to have heard I was “famous” for the question direct; what my friends considered an adorable eccentricity they regarded as rude. What they were particularly eager to ward off were any questions about their marriage. Was it a real marriage? How much did Lynne know about Butler’s homosexual encounters? Did she resent them? Did she plan on having children? Would the children be told about Daddy’s cock sucking? Did she like France because she felt more accepted there as a Black woman?

  Nothing vulgar touched them. A record of Gérard Souzay singing Duparc was playing; for once I understood the French words and when the baritone suddenly exclaimed, “Like a dog love bit me,” I burst out laughing, but Butler simply raised an eyebrow and I subsided back into silence.

  Soon we were dipping into the crusty Lobster Thermidor. Outside, Negro neighbors were sitting on the stoop eating hot dogs from the Nathan’s on the corner and listening to Aretha Franklin; they’d placed loudspeakers in the open ground-floor windows. Smiling with curatorial pride, Butler silenced Souzay and opened wide his windows so we could better enjoy Aretha; nothing escaped his connoisseurship. Or were they proving that Lynne had not rejected Black American culture?

  As the good Burgundy flowed, our ideas became more heated, our smiles more lingering, our faces hotter. I was so fascinated by Butler that I thought I must be attracted to him—his long, smoothly muscled body, the muscles laid on like furled sail; his Smilin’ Sam good looks, as I labeled them in deference to a mustachioed, brilliantined comic-strip hero of my youth; his beautiful dark eyes that winced with real pain when forced to look at the world’s wickedness.

  We discussed ideas for hours and hours, for in those days we did not yet see a dinner party with friends as a social ritual that must end no later than midnight, and that, in any case, would be repeated over and over, year after year, week in and week out, the tiniest variations on a few choice themes and a mildly pleasant way to feed in company. No, we saw each occasion as the unique opportunity to get to the bottom—of our minds, our hearts, of universal problems. The night set no limits on our fancy, fueled by wine. Dawn would sometimes creep up on us, unbuttoned and still garrulous, curled up on the carpet half-listening to Das Knaben Wunderhorn, our eyelids heavy, our veins pumping music and Muscadet instead of blood.

  With Butler and a good bottle I found I had plenty of ideas, although they were all reactions to something he said, points where my barbed sensibility resisted his smooth assertions. He was convinced that all values including truth were arbitrary functions of a self-sustained cultural code, a floating web of relationships not attached to anything, mapping nothing. Worse, he imagined we were locked inside a cage of language and couldn’t even look out through the verbal bars. Next to him I felt I truly was the thorough realist I’d half-jokingly presented myself as being the first time we met.

  Butler was vexed with me because I wouldn’t agree with everything he said and in truth my feistiness was more an effort to oppose him—a sort of intellectual arm-wrestling—than a defense of a solid position. My argumentativeness proved that what I felt for him was friendship. I might have been willing to submit to the idiocies of a beautiful lover, knowing all the while that what I really thought was hidden and sacrosanct somewhere within me. But with Butler I was facing someone more deliberate than I, perhaps, but also more cultured. When I would phone him and ask him what he was doing he’d say, “Oh, just sitting in the sun and practicing Italian verbs” (a subject he wasn’t even studying at the university). His very application I took as a reproach to my disorder, although of course I made fun of what I called his “bluestocking” perseverance. Around him I wanted to seem frivolous and Wildean, but in fact I was as thick-thighed and self-improving as he.

  We liked each other. He surprised me with his precise opinions expertly expressed and I liked his interest in me, the way he courted me. I even feared he might fall in love with me and leave Lynne for me—an eventuality that my vanity may have sought but that my conscience feared because of my exaggerated respect for heterosexual couples. I myself wanted to go straight some vagu
e day very soon and marry a woman. For my twenty-eighth birthday Butler and Lynne invited me to an expensive French restaurant in Midtown where Butler translated the carte for me, consulted the sommelier at length and even paid the bill during a mock visit to the toilet—a discreet bit of European elegance opposed in spirit to everything my father enjoyed, since for him his solemn, conspicuous verification of the waiter’s addition and his slow, deliberate stacking up of one twenty-dollar bill after another was the ceremonial bride-price weighed in before his awed guest, the clear measure of his cold esteem.

  Butler and I spent long hours together walking through Central Park. I kept quoting the Logical Positivists to him, philosophers such as Rudolf Carnap or A.J. Ayer, whereas he spoke of Saussure and Roland Barthes; he’d never heard of my men nor I of his, nor was either of us eager to learn anything about the other. We each wanted to convince, something we’d always been able to do with friends up till now. I accused him of being uncritical, not sufficiently skeptical (I meant original), a slave to French fads, although in 1968 Structuralism and semiotics had not yet triumphed in America and he was ahead of the fad. He accused me of embracing a stony-hearted Austrian Positivism that went against my own artistic ambitions. I saw my Positivism as parallel to my Socialism; I could believe in them both precisely because they worked against the cultural and social elitism my natural allegiances might favor.

  “Anyway,” I said, “your Mr. Barthes or Bartleby, you say, believes in the death of the author whereas my ideas merely assign the writer a useful if highly limited role in the ideal society of the future.”