Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

by Christopher Bram

  Unfolding chronologically, Beautiful Room does not have the broken, somnambulistic feel of the earlier book. The prose is tighter, with urgency and momentum. Best of all, the narrator changes. He unhappily cruises the toilets in college, but then gets a room off campus, where he happily beds men and also begins to write. We hear for the first time of his ambition to be an author. The sex grows less guilty. One of the most famous scenes in the book is a highly democratic orgy in a New York subway restroom around a young man who looks like a farm boy:

  Now everyone is at work on him at once, breath in his ear, lips on his lips, mouths on his balls, cock and ass, that arm around his waist, as though he really is a bride and this the last minute flurry of seamstresses fitting him into his gown.

  When it’s over, there’s none of the old guilt and shame. The narrator uses the second person to make the reader a participant:

  In two seconds you’ve buttoned up, wrapped your raincoat around you, and rushed out into the flood of passengers flowing up the stairs and rivuleting into the night. Your hair is rumpled, your face flushed, and your hand still smells of the country boy. At the subway entrance you catch sight of the businessman just behind you. Without thinking, you glance at his trousers… he looks at your wet knees at the same moment, and you and he exchange the tiniest smile of wintry complicity.

  White does not include anything like The Blue Boy in Black, the college play that first brought him to New York. He also leaves out his first lover, acting student Stanley Redfern. (The book, however, is dedicated to Redfern.) The great love of this novel is a vague, elusive blond named Sean, based on Jim Ruddy. Sean is even more divided over his sexuality than the narrator. He decides to go straight and, in a puzzling development, the narrator follows him into group therapy. Not until the last pages, when he is a witness at the Stonewall riots—as White was himself—is the narrator finally blasted out of his maze-like closet.

  “Gay is good.” We were all chanting it, knowing how ridiculous we were being in this parody of a real demonstration, but feeling giddily confident anyway. Now someone said, “We’re the Pink Panthers,” and that made us laugh again. Then I caught myself foolishly imagining that gays might someday constitute a community rather than a diagnosis.

  That last sentence is a surprise coming from Edmund White, sounding more like propaganda than literature. Yet it makes clear how necessary politics is to his protagonist’s liberation.

  The Beautiful Room Is Empty was published in 1988 by Knopf. White’s editor at Dutton, Bill Whitehead, had just died, and his agent moved him to the more prestigious house. The novel received excellent reviews in the gay press and admiring if uncomfortable ones in the straight press; the sales figures were good. Yet it was never as popular as A Boy’s Own Story. I suspect many readers simply prefer adolescence, no matter how miserable, to later periods of life. Gay wits who hadn’t read the novel took to calling it “The Beautiful Book Is Empty,” but I find it superior to its predecessor, with better characters, stronger narrative, and an exciting change in the protagonist. One looks forward to what will happen to him.

  White intended to write two more novels, one about the Seventies and another about the Eighties and AIDS. He outlined his plans in an interview in the Paris Review in 1988. But instead of writing the next novel, he took another detour, this time to produce a fat biography of French novelist Jean Genet. He received a good advance for the project and it gave him a good reason to stay in Paris. He thought he could do it quickly, but it took five years. Genet: A Biography won White praise and attention when it finally appeared in 1993, including a review on the front page of the New York Times Book Review and an award from the National Book Critics Circle; in France he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. The literary world prefers biographies of dead writers to novels by live ones. Among my well-read friends I know of only two people who have read it. Yet the book established White’s talent for literary biography, which he later continued with his excellent short lives of Proust and Rimbaud.

  White now had a new boyfriend, a young French architect, Hubert Sorin. Sorin was married, but even his wife knew he was gay. He claimed his family was minor French nobility, but White later learned his mother was a hairdresser. Shortly after he moved in with White in 1989, Sorin tested positive for HIV. The two men came to the States together in 1990 when White taught for a year at Brown University. They bought a dog there, a basset hound named Fred, whom they took back with them to Paris.

  Sorin grew more ill. Unable to do architectural work, he began to draw cartoons and illustrations, working in a style that suggests Aubrey Beardsley crossed with the animated Beatles movie Yellow Submarine. He collaborated with White on a humorous sketchbook about their life in Paris. His health continued to deteriorate.

  Sorin loved the desert—he had studied architecture in North Africa—and he wanted to visit one last time while he was well enough to travel. White reluctantly agreed. They flew to Morocco in March 1994. The first days went well. While visiting a small town in the mountains, however, Sorin’s body suddenly gave out. In a nightmare journey that lasted several days, White rushed Sorin by ambulance to a hospital in Marrakesh. Exhausted, he fell asleep beside Sorin in his hospital bed. He woke up the next morning to find his partner had died alongside him an hour earlier.

  White knew of only one way to deal with grief, which was to write about it. That morning he found a private corner and wrote an introduction to their sketchbook.

  Hubert Sorin, my lover, who just died two hours ago in the Polytechnique du Sud in Marrakesh, was an architect who turned himself into an illustrator with a remarkable patience and diligence and above all with a flair for capitalizing on his talents and pictorial discoveries….

  I’m writing this page with his beautiful Art Pen, which he always forbade me to touch; today I couldn’t find anything else to write with, and I wanted to—needed to—give a form to my grief that he would approve of. That’s why I’m daring to use your pen, Hubert.

  The book was published in Britain as Sketches from Memory with the pages about Sorin’s death as the introduction. In the United States the book appeared as Our Paris, with the introduction moved to the back.

  White had briefly resumed work on his tetralogy the summer before Sorin’s death. He returned to it now and made an important decision: he would combine the last two novels into one. He later said he did this because he feared a novel about just the orgy years would be “intolerable to read in this post-AIDS period, just as a fourth volume which would be nothing but people dying would be equally intolerable.” But White was HIV positive himself. After Sorin died, he may have feared he didn’t have enough time to write two books. He has never said this outright, but admitted in an interview that he felt haunted by death. “First I had to finish the Genet book, and now I have to finish this novel. I think when I finish that, then I’ll die…. It’s like some fairy tale; when the princess finally finishes weaving the cloth, then she must die.”

  The Farewell Symphony consists of the third novel, the novel about the Seventies, wrapped in a few notes for the fourth novel, the novel about AIDS. The narrator begins at the grave of his French lover, here named Brice. He warns us that he might not have the courage to tell us about Brice’s death when he comes to it in the narrative. The reader assumes he’s saying this only for suspense.

  This is a long book, longer than both Boy’s Own Story and Beautiful Room combined, yet its prose is the best White has ever written. The tight sentences of Room have relaxed and lengthened; they are full of metaphors that surprise without ever being gaudy or silly. The language is tough rather than flowery, literary but gritty with facts. The novel is full of wonderful things—maybe too many wonderful things.

  The chief drama in the Seventies portion is the story of a young man breaking into the literary world, a gay New York version of Lost Illusions by Balzac. As in Beautiful Room, White works chiefly in portraits, exploring the scribbling class in lively character
studies: the poet/teacher Max Richards (based on Richard Howard); the critic/teacher Joshua (based on David Kalstone); and a famous poet, Eddie. Eddie is James Merrill, and White offers a full-length portrait of the actual artist and his work.

  In Eddie the man I detected a perversity and snobbishness that he radiated in spite of himself, qualities he’d entirely transformed in his writing into impishness and humor. In life he had an age… a maddening drawl; on the page he was eternally youthful, a charged field of particles, a polyphony of voices.

  White evokes a congenial life of art and friendship in a circle of gay men. He also captures, in his anxious narrator, the hunger and self-doubt of the writer who’s still unpublished, who fears he’s deluding himself, who questions his own sanity.

  There’s also a lot of sex. It’s presented more matter-of-factly than in the previous books, treated as a human necessity almost as natural as eating. White weaves it in and out of the rest of life so sex is never just sex. A threeway with a couple in Capri fills the narrator with admiration for the love the other two men share. A visit with his mother in Chicago is purged afterward in an orgy with a large, friendly man called the Doofus. A snotty speech in praise of secrecy by an older gay writer (based on Glenway Westcott) is answered a few pages later with a compressed account of an encounter in a warehouse that involves beer and piss. “I supposed Ridgefield [Westcott] would assign us both to Brunetto Latini’s [Dante’s] ring in hell, but I thought eternal damnation seemed an excessive punishment for a game babies in a playpen would have found wonderfully sociable.”

  Yet the sex is important for darker reasons. White is setting us up for the epidemic to come, for the deaths alluded to in the brief flashforwards and the inspired title. Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 45 in F sharp minor is known as “The Farewell Symphony” for its simple but chilling final movement, an adagio where, one by one, the musicians stand up and depart, until only two violinists remain.

  There is also love, but, as before, it’s unrequited. The vague, elusive Sean is replaced with the vivid, funny Kevin, a boyish actor like a gay Huck Finn. He is modeled on Keith McDermott and, like McDermott, ends up in a play like Equus. (The visiting boy in the opening chapter of A Boy’s Own Story was also named Kevin; White told us there “the only love is the first. Later we hear its fleeting recapitulations throughout our lives….” The only trait the two Kevins share is that they don’t love the narrator, but maybe that’s enough.) There is also family love, represented by the narrator saving his nephew from a mental hospital. Keith Fleming is called Gabriel here, the same name White used for him in Caracole.

  The narrator finally publishes a first novel, Gabriel goes back to the Midwest, and Kevin leaves New York. This span of narrative bridge reaches a satisfying conclusion. We expect the novel to jump ahead to Brice and Paris. After all, only ninety pages remain.

  Instead, the novel starts all over again. New friends and lovers are introduced, along with new developments in the author’s life. The prose remains excellent and there are some fine episodes, such as last visits with the father and the mother, and the sad account of the bookish Joshua ill with AIDS. But for this reader, the novel falls apart, turning into loose, overly inclusive autobiography. When we finally do get to Brice, three pages before the end, it becomes a powerful novel again. The narrator describes his life with Brice and Brice’s death in Morocco in two startling pages, then closes with a beautiful page on the deaths of Joshua and Eddie—White could give his fictional Merrill an AIDS death when the real world was still secretive. He hopes their spirits will continue to live on in his book.

  It’s a frustrating finish to a sometimes great novel. The death of Brice is similar to the shaggy dog story of prophecy in Angels in America, yet it doesn’t have its own meaning; it only feels like fatigue. One reviewer, the usually hypercritical Dale Peck, the future author of Hatchet Jobs, actually praised White for his silence, claiming this was the most honest way to write about AIDS. One could even argue that Symphony’s shapeless finish makes it a good bookend for A Boy’s Own Story: White’s trilogy begins with a broken novel and ends with a broken novel. But I am not alone in wishing he had given us the sustained story he promised. White must’ve felt it, too, because his next book, The Married Man, published three years later, told the very tale left out of Symphony: how he loved and lost a young Frenchman. He told it in third person with a slightly different protagonist (a historian of eighteenth-century furniture, of all things) and a grayer voice. The prose is plainer, looser, even flabby—White needs his artistic lobster shell. But his life with Sorin is a good story and the last days in Morocco are very powerful, even after the shorthand version in Symphony.

  Despite its problems, there are great things in White’s trilogy—or maybe we should call it his trilogy and a half. It’s full of fine prose, excellent portraits, and fresh observations. Several strong narratives run through the three novels. There is the social history of American life, gay and straight, from the 1950s to the 1990s, including manners and morals, food and travel. There’s the portrait of the artist as a young gay man. There’s the classic coming-out story: the narrator is buried so deep in a closet of many rooms that it takes him two whole novels to get out. Gay people regularly dismiss coming-out stories, as if embarrassed that we all have one to tell. Yet it’s a great plot in its own right—“When we dead awaken” or “I once was blind but now I see”—and it overlaps with White’s other major narrative: the bildungsroman, the story of spiritual education. As noted before, spiritual is not a word one associates with White, yet such a plot is visible in these books. A cold, heartless, wounded boy escapes to the big city, where he remains a neurotic man of poses. He falls in and out of love, growing less neurotic, until he falls in love with a young man who becomes ill and dies. The hero breaks his heart and gains a soul. This plotline is broken up in the three novels, like a horizon viewed in a broken mirror. It might not be entirely true for the real Edmund White, but that doesn’t mean it’s untrue for his fictional protagonist.

  I think it was a mistake for him to combine the last two books. He needed more space to work out the development of ideas and character. He shoveled too much into the end of Farewell Symphony, as if afraid he might die with these stories untold. But all art involves chance and accident. Sometimes circumstance can enable an artist to find something better than what he or she intended. Sometimes it can cause a writer to take the cake from the oven too soon—or leave it in too long. We never know in advance what will work for the best. The trilogy is White’s Jean Santeuil, the unfinished novel Proust wrote on the way to In Search of Lost Time. White published his own work in progress without revising it. But he remained in good health and continued to write. He is now working on his third nonfiction memoir, as if trying to make up for the book he didn’t quite finish.

  Meanwhile, Larry Kramer had been working on his own novel. Now called The American People, it was up to one thousand pages with no end in sight. He was also trying to get a movie made of The Normal Heart. He continued to revise the screenplay for Barbra Streisand, but she decided to do another movie instead and her studio let the option lapse. On the plus side, he finally had a boyfriend, David Webster, the very man who was the model for Dinky Adams in Faggots—the beloved who’s told to commit to love before “you fuck yourself to death.” Webster hadn’t fucked himself to death. Like Hubert Sorin, he was an architect; he designed a house for himself and Kramer in Connecticut, a large, postmodern box of wood and glass. (Kramer has said his wealth comes from money made in movies and theater and invested by his brother, but one can’t help suspecting there is also family money.)

  Kramer had criticized White a few years earlier for writing about Genet when he felt all gay writers should be writing about AIDS. White had now written a novel that did just that. Kramer asked to see the advance galleys of the new novel. White sent them, thinking his old friend might give him a quote.

  Instead Kramer wrote a vicious attack. “Sex and Sensibility”
ran in the Advocate in May 1997, three months before The Farewell Symphony was published and anyone else had a chance to read the book. Kramer accused White of doing little more than turning his sex diary into a novel:

  [H]e parades before the reader what seems to be every trick he’s ever sucked, fucked, rimmed, tied up, pissed on, or been sucked by, fucked by, rimmed by, tied up by…. Surely life was more than this, even for—especially for—Edmund White. He did not spend thirty years with a nonstop erection and an asshole busier than his toilet.

  He says nothing about the prose, the portraits of friends or family, the accounts of literary life or the deaths from AIDS; all Kramer can talk about is the sex. He goes on to trash all gay men’s fiction, saying it was all sex, nothing but sex, but that his own novel would set things right, when he finally finished it. (Thirteen years later, he announced it was done, all four thousand pages, but as of fall 2011 none of it has been published.)

  It is an ugly piece of writing. To my mind, it’s unforgivable Kramer wrote it. It’s more unforgivable the Advocate printed it. But the Los Angeles–based magazine seemed to be losing interest in books. They gave more space to movies and television, even when little was available. A catfight, however, was something they could appreciate. And so, many years after Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, another generation of gay men were quarreling. One can’t help but think of the Charles Ludlam subtitle, “When Queens Collide.” Literary history is full of feuds, of course, from the age of Alexander Pope to the time of Lillian Hellman. Membership in a minority only turns up the volume and makes such attacks a little crazier.