The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  It was also a way of serving him without thinking of him, for now that he was dead he seemed dark, even black, and bigger, certainly crueler. He frightened me and I didn’t want to think too much about him, nor about our life together, it had taken too much out of me, cost too much.

  Perhaps the price I’d paid was in what I’d lost. Brice had been the first man I’d loved at the same time he loved me. After our first six months together I learned he was, or soon would be, seriously ill. Maybe because I knew he was dying I could love him, for I’d always been more afraid of being overwhelmed by what I possessed than of being abandoned by someone who’d never belonged to me.

  He died in Morocco. The day before he died we were in an oasis town. We’d been driving through mile after mile of baked mud and straw cities, humble citadels that bordered a river in the desert that sometimes became nothing more than a brook or even a damp line through the sand. The structures were tall, squared off, often polished, crazy congeries of balconies and turrets and tiny, lopsided doorways. Date palms flourished beside the river; we saw a woman collecting dates in what looked like a bath towel. Little boys were selling dates in small cages made of palm fronds; bees were hovering around the rich, oozing fruit.

  Brice had stretched out in the backseat, although sometimes he’d sit up and say, looking at the mud houses, “C’est superbe … superbe …” He spoke only in a whisper now. His face was covered with a week’s growth of beard. He was so skinny that it hurt him to wear jeans (the seams cut into his fleshless nerves and bones); he’d put on a long, flowing blue robe. With his darkened skin, his beard, his cadaverous face, his skeletal hands, his feeble walk (I had to hold him up whenever he left the car), he looked Biblical, like an ancient prophet about to die before we entered the Promised Land.

  I was in a panic, determined to drive as fast as possible with the fewest possible stops back to Marrakesh, where I’d arranged for a private plane to fly us back to Paris and a good hospital and Brice’s own doctor, a celebrated specialist. But now, in this oasis town, he’d lost control of his body, he was covered with shit. I tried to mop him up as best I could and put him in clean clothes, long enough to get him into the luxury hotel where I’d found us an air-conditioned room. We’d rest up, we’d order food from room service, I’d place calls to Paris, lining up his doctor for an appointment—but as I was helping Brice towards the hotel entrance he fainted and fell on the hotel lawn. A passing Frenchman said, “Good God, let’s call an ambulance,” and I couldn’t object, though I knew perfectly well that an ambulance would take him only to an Arab hospital where there would be no food, dirty beds, no medicine, lots of flies, doctors who’d never seen a case of AIDS before….

  I can’t go on. I can’t tell this story, neither its happy beginning nor its tragic end, the all-night ride through the snowy Atlas mountains in a freezing ambulance, Brice’s angry hateful words to me, the look of his face, dead, when I awakened at dawn, his mouth open, his eyes startled, as though he’d seen something dreadful and I’d not been there, conscious, to share it with him—

  I LEARNED that Sean had died. His lover wrote me to say he’d lived long enough to read what I’d written about him in my Stonewall novel. I’d always thought that I’d get back to Sean, as though he were a letter, an important letter, I’d failed to answer. Now my correspondent was dead, someone who, because I hadn’t watched him age, remained eternally young in my mind. Once, in the 1990s, when I’d given a reading in New York, I saw someone who resembled an old fuck-buddy from the sixties. I rushed up to this guy in his twenties, relieved to see he was alive—but of course it wasn’t the same person, how could thirty years have gone by, leaving him untouched? In the same way, if I’d seen Sean at fifty—or seventy, since AIDS would have added twenty more years—I could never have recognized him. When I wrote back to his lover, asking for more details, he didn’t respond. As a result, Sean remains for me a booming voice, wincing blue eyes, a long, smooth swimmer’s body, courtly manners, a love of literature in every language, a cock that twisted to one side when erect, a Midwesterner’s guileless confidence in authority, a desire to laugh and have fun not matched by any genuine merriment….

  I’d once told him that I thought in a masterpiece the whole network of impulses could be isolated in any paragraph throughout the book, a monad containing all the important features in miniature; Sean developed this notion into a dissertation. Ironically, for me he was the monad, the person whom I’d loved the most intensely and who awakened in me if not the widest, then the deepest feelings. I told him that in a medieval shield when the whole coat of arms was repeated in a miniature inset, this device was said to be placed there en abîme; Sean was the abyss into which all of me had fallen.

  Now I understood why Eddie had invented his dress-up party version of the afterlife with its amusing social introductions across the centuries and its continuing revelations. It was a normal way of keeping the dead alive. I remember that a graduate student researching a thesis interviewed Eddie about Auden and finally asked, rather peevishly, “Did Mr. Auden say that before or after he died?” But even for Eddie the Ouija board became a drawing room game that turned sour. Before his own death from AIDS just last year, a depressed, emaciated Eddie told me that he’d followed the board’s instructions to go to a certain café in Athens where he’d be sure to meet the fat Indian girl who was Joshua’s reincarnation, but the child didn’t come. Eddie waited until two in the morning, when the café closed, but the child never showed up.

  Nevertheless, a death without rituals is intolerable. Most people would do well to stick with church ceremonies, which are noble and full-throated in the right well tested places and even dull and distracting elsewhere in just the desired degree, but Eddie had a solemn, awed, fluent way of celebrating the great, hard moments. He swirled Joshua’s ashes from a gondola into the Grand Canal while reciting a poem he’d written for the occasion.

  I went back to the palazzo where Joshua had lived. The principessa had asked me to stop by. She led me up to the attic, which looked like the reversed hull of a war ship, all ancient, rough-hewn beams. There, in that maritime desolation, stood a little pile of Joshua’s things—dirty white trousers, sunscreen, the typewriter his computer had replaced, an old copy of a Beaux-Arts magazine, an extra fan. The principessa behaved as though it was, well, even legally necessary that I do something with these pathetic possessions, Joshua’s half-hearted pledge that he’d come back if not the next summer then the one after.

  I shrugged, even laughed a bit rudely, took the things away (did she think they were infected with the “Ides” virus?), and dumped them in the trash just outside the door. Joshua’s spirit was no more in these things than was our virus; his spirit was lodged in Eddie’s pages, in his own, even, I hoped, in mine.

  EDMUND WHITE

  Edmund White was born in Cincinnati in 1940. He has taught literature and creative writing at Yale, Johns Hopkins, New York University, and Columbia; was a full professor of English at Brown; and served as executive director of the New York Institute for the Humanities. In 1983 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Award for Literature from the National Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1993 he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Genet: A Biography. He teaches at Princeton University and lives in New York City.

  www.edmundwhite.com

  Books by Edmund White

  Fiction

  The Married Man

  The Farewell Symphony

  Skinned Alive

  The Beautiful Room Is Empty

  The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis (with Adam Mars-Jones)

  Caracole

  A Boy’s Own Story

  Nocturnes for the King of Naples

  Forgetting Elena

  Nonfiction

  Our Paris: Sketches from Memory (with Hubert Sorin)

  The Burning Library

  Genet: A Biogra
phy

  The Joy of Gay Sex (with Dr. Charles Silverstein)

  States of Desire: Travels in Gay America

  Marcel Proust

  ALSO BY EDMUND WHITE

  THE BEAUTIFUL ROOM IS EMPTY

  When the narrator of White’s poised yet scalding autobiographical novel first embarks on his sexual odyssey, it is the 1950s, and America is “a big gray country of families on drowsy holiday.” That country has no room for a scholarly teenager with guilty but insatiable stirrings toward other men. Yet even as he launches himself into the arena of homosexual eros, White’s protagonist is also finding his way into the larger world. Moving from a Midwestern college to the Stonewall Tavern on the night of the first gay uprising—and populated by eloquent queens, butch poseurs, and a fearfully incompetent shrink—The Beautiful Room is Empty conflates the acts of coming out and coming of age.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75540-1

  THE FAREWELL SYMPHONY

  In The Farewell Symphony, Edmund White creates a novel of opulent sensuality and manifold sorrows that is at once the story of a writer’s education and an elegy for the gay world that flourished between Stonewall and the present. White’s narrator is that world’s survivor and its eulogist. As he marks the six-month anniversary of his lover’s death from AIDS, he leads the reader back on a thirty-year journey of memory and desire. From the 1960s to the 1990s, from Parisian salons to the dunes of Fire Island, and from evenings of brilliant conversation to nights of unfettered sex in the basement clubs of the West Village, The Farewell Symphony commemorates lust and friendship, the beautiful dead and their prematurely aged mourners.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75476-3

  THE BURNING LIBRARY

  Twenty-five years of Edmund White’s nonfiction writings are collected in this volume of exhilarating wit, acuity, and candor—a book that is at once a living record of the author’s intellectual development and a chronicle of gay politics, sexuality, literature, and culture from Stonewall to the age of AIDS. The Burning Library includes such groundbreaking essays as “The Gay Philosopher,” “Sexual Culture,” “Out of the Closet, on to the Bookshelf,” and “The Personal Is Political: Queer Fiction and Criticism”—works that redefine sexuality, identity, and friendship in the light of gay experience and desire. Alongside them are brilliantly subversive appreciations of cultural icons as diverse as Truman Capote and Cormac McCarthy, Robert Mapplethorpe and the singer formerly known as Prince. The resulting volume confirms White’s reputation as a thinker of formidable intelligence and prophetic audacity.

  Gay Studies/Essays/978-0-679-75474-9

  CARACOLE

  In French caracole means “prancing”; in English, “caper.” Both words perfectly describe this high-spirited erotic adventure. In Caracole, White invents an entire world where country gentry languish in decaying mansions and foppish intellectuals exchange lovers and gossip in an occupied city that resembles both Paris under the Nazis and 1980s New York. To that city comes Gabriel, an awkward boy from the provinces whose social naïveté and sexual ardor make him endlessly attractive to a variety of patrons and paramours.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76416-8

  FORGETTING ELENA

  Forgetting Elena takes place on a privileged island community where manners are everything. Or so it seems to White’s excruciatingly self-conscious young narrator, who desperately wants to be accepted in this world where everything from one’s bathroom habits to the composition of “spontaneous” poetry is subject to rigid conventions. But no sooner has he begun to intuit the islands’s Byzantine codes than the mysterious and charismatic Elena is urging him to transgress them, with results that are at once shocking and wickedly funny.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75573-9

  GENET

  Bastard, thief, prostitute, jailbird, Jean Genet was one of French literature’s sacred monsters. In works from Our Lady of the Flowers to The Screens, he created scandalous personal mythology while savaging the conventions of his society. His career was a series of calculated shocks marked by feuds, rootlessness, and the embrace of unpopular causes and outcast peoples. Now this most enigmatic of writers has found his ideal biographer in novelist Edmund White, whose eloquent and often poignant chronicle does justice to the unruly narrative of Genet’s life even as it maps the various worlds in which he lived and the perverse landscape of his imagination.

  Biography/978-0-679-75479-4

  THE MARRIED MAN

  Austin Smith is an American furniture scholar living in Paris. He is pushing fifty, loveless, drifting. One day at the gym he meets Julien: French, an architect, much younger, and married. Against every expectation, this chance acquaintance matures into a relationship of uncommon intensity. In the beginning, the lovers’ only impediments are the easily surmountable and comic clashes of culture, age, and temperament. Before long, however, the past begins to catch up with them. With increasing desperation, in a quest to save health and happiness, they move from the shuttered squares of Venice to sun-drenched Key West, to Montreal in the snow and Providence in the rain. But it is amid the bleak, baking sands of the Sahara that their love is pushed to its ultimate crisis.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-78144-8

  SKINNED ALIVE

  In Skinned Alive, Edmund White measures the distance between an expatriate American and the Frenchman who tutors him in table manners and “hard” sex; the gulf that separates a man dying of AIDS from his uncomprehending Texas relatives; and the inequality between a young playwright and the coquettish actor who is the object of his adoration. Beautifully written, uncannily observant, and by turns funny, erotic, and heartbreaking, these nine stories are brilliant shards of sensibility and experience, fashioned by one of the finest writers of our time.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75475-6

  VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL

  Available at your local bookstore, or visit

  www.randomhouse.com

  VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION

  Copyright © 1997 by Edmund White

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus Ltd., London, in 1997. First published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1997.

  Parts of this book have appeared in a different form in The New Yorker and Ploughshares.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  White, Edmund, 1940-

  The farewell symphony : a novel / Edmund White.

  p. cm.

  I. Gay men—United States—Fiction.

  II. Autobiographical fiction.

  PS3573.H463F37 1997

  813′.54—dc21 97-73825

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76447-8

  Author photograph © Jerry Bauer

  Random House Web address: www.randomhouse.com

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