A Boy's Own Story

by Edmund White

  Oh, there are lots of stories I could tell. Dr. O’Reilly, who of course turned out to be a speed freak, had a breakdown one day and had to be hauled off to a clinic for several years. My friend Howie, true to his prediction, died before he was twenty. I saw him when he was very ill in the hospital. He was yellow and bloated from nephritis. I had to hold a mirror for him while he trimmed his own hair: “Don’t want to leave my last haircut to these hacks,” he said gallantly, a trace of the old Nazi dandy having reemerged in extremity. At the funeral Howie’s father turned out to be a young middle-level executive for a big corporation. The funeral was held at the McCabe Funeral Home (I pronounced it “macabre”). I was a pallbearer. There was a Hammond organ toothlessly mouthing hymns as though the music were bread soaked in milk. Our handsome, oafish chaplain gave the sermon. He’d never spoken for two seconds to Howie, who in any event had been a militant atheist. Oh, and the chaplain was found soon afterward in another master’s wife’s bed and he was not only dismissed from Eton but also defrocked. His brother found him a job leading ski tours of eager coeds to Switzerland, where he was last heard yodeling on his way to his death as he missed a turn and sailed off into a crevasse.

  The college I went to was near Eton and I often visited the Scotts. One day I discovered Rachel laughing and sobbing. Finally overcome by curiosity, she’d broken open the casket where DeQuincey kept his pastoral letters from Father Burke. They were all love letters, hysterical avowals of pornographic desire, some of it clearly referring to actual nights of passion they’d spent together. “To think Burke kept urging me to stay with Quince,” she said. “I was their cover.” She kept sifting through the letters, and her horrible silent chuckle resumed. Tim, older now and in first grade, looked in, but when he saw his mother talking to herself he frowned and clattered up the stairs to his room.

  *

  As I left the headmaster’s office that day I noticed the wind was now sharp with snow needles. Evening was coming on rapidly. It had been implicit in the dim day all along, just as the snow had been. In the gray light the snow could be felt but not seen; suddenly lamps along the walkway snapped on and their halos were grained by a million, million lights. The return to the music building wasn’t lustful or fearful but ceremonial. I felt as though I were a dancer not up to his role but inspired by the expectation everywhere in the darkness around me. Or I felt like someone in history, a queen on her way to the scaffold determined to suppress her usual quips, to give the spectators the high deeds they wanted to see.

  Mr. Beattie was stoned. His smile was unfocused and perpetual. He started telling me a long story I couldn’t follow, something about something someone had once said to him somewhere, but then he noticed we’d drifted into the listening booth. He didn’t turn on the light. The darkness was illumined by light reflected up through the windows off the snowdrifts outside. He put on a record. He sat in an armchair, lit another marijuana cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling. When he offered me a drag I smiled with what I hoped passed for affection and shook my head. A moment later I was kneeling on the floor beside him. I opened his fly and pulled out his large and already erect penis. “Here,” he said, “let me make it better for you,” and he undid his belt and dropped his trousers to his knees. I’d been right; his thighs were very powerful. He took my right hand and guided it to his testicles in the loose, floppy bag. I gathered I was supposed to roll them around.

  I can swear that not even one volt of desire passed through me. I did my job; I simulated excitement. But I was scandalized when Mr. Beattie asked me to lick the bright red head, to roll my tongue around the head of his penis. I’d forgotten that this act was not as purely symbolic for him as it was for me. I remembered that he considered all this to be pleasure, as Herod thought Salome’s dance was fun until he heard what she wanted as a reward.

  At last it was over. Mr. Beattie told me to go on up to the dining hall for supper. He’d follow me in a few moments. He didn’t think we should be seen together, just in case.

  Sometimes I think I seduced and betrayed Mr. Beattie because neither one action nor the other alone but the complete cycle allowed me to have sex with a man and then to disown him and it; this sequence was the ideal formulation of my impossible desire to love a man but not to be a homosexual. Sometimes I think I liked bringing pleasure to a heterosexual man (for after all I’d dreamed of being my father’s lover) at the same time I was able to punish him for not loving me. My German teacher and Mr. Pouchet had not loved me. Tommy had not loved me. My dad had not loved me.

  Beattie was a friend of sorts, or at least an accomplice, but he was also a stand-in for all other adults, those swaggering, lazy, cruel masters of ours (how refreshing it was that at Eton the teachers were actually called masters). I who had so little power – whose triumphs had all been the minor victories of children and women, that is, merely verbal victories of irony and attitude – I had at last drunk deep from the adult fountain of sex. I wiped my mouth with the back of an adult hand, smiled and walked up to the dining hall humming a little tune.

  On the Line

  I wrote A Boy’s Own Story between 1979 and 1981, just as I was entering my forties. The autobiographical incidents it was based on had all occurred to me before I was sixteen. This separation of a quarter-century helped to promote the calm, self-accepting tone of this novel.

  If I’d hated myself as a boy and adolescent, I now felt an affection for the miserable kid I’d once been, a retrospective kindliness one might call “the pederasty of autobiography.”

  In the 1950s, when I was growing up and beginning to write, people felt a certain contempt for autobiographical fiction and the usual bored question addressed to a fledgeling novelist was, “I suppose it’s based on your own story?” Despite this scorn I’d tried to write my own story many times: the first attempt was made when I was fifteen, and the 140-page manuscript was called The Tower Window. In that version my stand-in (named Peter Cross) had been forced to go gay when his girlfriend rejected him (the same girlfriend who became Helen Paper in A Boy’s Own Story).

  But only with age had I come to the serenity (fragile, provisional) that marks the tone of A Boy’s Own Story, a tone that subliminally suggests a happy outcome, some day in the future, despite the protagonist’s current anguish. The distance I’d achieved was also geographical (I’d lived in New York since 1962, far from relatives, close to friends) and ideological (gay liberation, which had begun in 1969, had put an end to my search for a psychoanalytical “cure,” which is one of the subjects of the novel).

  My father died shortly before I began writing this book, which is in part an elegy for him, though even in death he was still such a powerful subject that in my book he wanders into and out of focus; in the first chapter he seems a slightly different character than in the subsequent pages.

  While he was alive I was afraid to write about him. Fear had always been my main response to him. I’d avoided seeing him during the last ten years of his life, although I’d visited him for one evening in Cincinnati about a month before his death.

  I went to his funeral, which I worked hard to forget. But one day, a year later, I was riding in a taxi in Manhattan and the driver was smoking a cigar, one that smelled exactly like those powerful, noxious cigars my father had chain-smoked. It hit me that my father – this man who’d terrorized everyone, who’d earned and lost so much money and occupied such a large part in the lives of his dependants – was now less substantial than this unpleasant smoke. I thought that if I didn’t write about him he’d soon be forgotten entirely.

  My mother was then still very much alive, but I knew that no matter how harsh my portrait of her might be her uncritical, doting pride in my writing would anesthetize even her most wounded feelings. And she and I both knew that she was no longer the heavy-drinking, love-starved woman she’d been when I was growing up. Moreover, she realized that few of her friends would ever read such a book (or any book). In America the best way to bury a secret is to publish i
t.

  I had already written a non-realistic novel, Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978), in which I’d given an exaggerated, condensed and abstracted version of my childhood. Much of the book was wish-fulfillment: I turned my father into an amoral playboy, more attractive than the boring, self-made businessman he actually was. But I’d already hinted in Nocturnes that his indifference had made me long to seduce him and, later, to evince affection from other older men, despite the alternating rage and desire I felt towards him (and them).

  Fantasy preceded realism again and again in my writing. After exploring my childhood pain in a pleasurably melancholy vein in Nocturnes I was able to master it with more candor in A Boy’s Own Story. Later I would treat the triumphs and humiliations of adult sexuality first in a Venetian heterosexual fairy-tale (Caracole) before tackling the same subject more “frontally” in The Beautiful Room is Empty, the sequel to A Boy’s Own Story. Similarly, after taking potshots at AIDS in short stories, I was at last ready to complete the trilogy begun with A Boy’s Own Story in a final novel (about the AIDS era) called The Farewell Symphony.

  Although gay liberation had begun in 1969, it did not immediately produce much fiction. By 1978, however, Andrew Holleran had published his Dancer from the Dance and Larry Kramer his Faggots and my own much less noticed Nocturnes had come out – and gay male fiction was suddenly on the map.

  The most discussed topic in gay circles then was coming out, yet it had not been dealt with by any of the new self-labelled gay writers. In States of Desire: Travels in Gay America, published in 1980, I had looked at how gay men were living and defining themselves. Their stories, of course, often began with coming out, an umbrella term that covers not only a private recognition of one’s own sexual orientation but also a public avowal of that identity. States of Desire was a non-fiction, cursory look at the process; in A Boy’s Own Story I wanted to trace it out in detail through the life of an individual, one I knew intimately.

  The novel is not a political tract nor is it meant to be representative or typical. I was determined to keep in some of my eccentricities, even my creepiness, and I was stunned later to learn that so many readers could identify themselves with such an odd young person despite his leanings toward Buddhism, his fear of smelling bad, his beady-eyed longing for power and his appallingly heartless betrayal of a teacher. The reception of the book (especially in England, where it was read as a book about adolescence in general rather than gay adolescence in particular) was the most dramatic proof I’ve ever had that an honest report of intimate feelings can be if not universal at least widely recognizable.

  The book is not simply disguised autobiography. As a youngster I was an excellent student in every subject except maths. I conversed with adults easily and confidently and I was brashly eager to express myself in all the arts. I wrote plays, poems and novels, acted and even danced in school productions, composed an opera, played the harp and harpsichord, painted paintings of Roman centurions and so on. Moreover, I was sexually precocious, even driven, and by the time I was sixteen I’d had many sexual experiences with other boys, a few girls and several men.

  My protagonist, by contrast, is far more timid and less of a show-off; he corresponds to the way I felt rather than the way I acted. The well-known novelist Thomas McGuane, a classmate at my boarding school in Michigan (Cranbrook, the model for Eton), remarked in a interview a few years ago that I had been quite open about my homosexuality, which everyone thought was funny and took for granted. He remembered also that I’d encouraged him to become a writer and had even introduced him to Proust’s novel!

  I may have struck others as self-confident, but inwardly I was depressed, fearful and self-hating, even suicidal. My book is a portrait of that inner loser rather than of the outer winner.

  It was not written in a vacuum. At the time I was giving courses in literature and creative writing in several different universities and I was coming into contact with inspiring and gifted students (including John Fox, Fae Ng, Steven McCauley, Louise Erdrich and Mona Simpson, all of whom were about to break into print). I’d only begun to teach and the experience was new enough to be both intimidating and enriching; I had to think about fiction in a concrete and technical way.

  At the same time I was a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities, a think tank in which the most famous members were Carl Schorske, David Kalstone, Susan Sontag, Joseph Brodsky and Richard Sennett. I was provided with an office (where I wrote many pages of A Boy’s Own Story) and regaled with a lot of good conversation. One of the running seminars was on gender and consumerism. Michel Foucault conducted another seminar on the history of sexuality (specifically the transition from late pagan to early Christian morality). Roland Barthes, whose mother had just died, spoke to us of his newborn desire to write a novel (he, too, died soon afterwards).

  By mentioning all these exalted names I mean only to suggest that after years of seeing the same few friends, mostly pals from university days, I was suddenly in direct contact with other writers, many of them concerned with what today would be called “gender studies.” Their encouragement gave me a sense of an audience – and of one not exclusively homosexual.

  The New York gay community was also entering a triumphant stage, though by 1981 the first reports of a new “gay cancer” were already clouding our confidence. Nevertheless clone culture appeared to be in the ascendant. I can remember reading a chapter of A Boy’s Own Story in New York’s SoHo long before the book was published (only one chapter had appeared in Christopher Street, a gay literary monthly). I was five minutes late for the event, which was held in the Leslie-Lohman art gallery, a gay venue. I supposed I’d have my usual turnout of ten or twenty friends, but this time I was overwhelmed by the size and enthusiasm of the overflow crowd and could hardly make my way through it to the stage. The same thing happened when I gave another prepublication reading, this time at the old Three Lives bookstore in Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village. A packed crowd was sitting on the floor, even Michel Foucault.

  Later, after the book came out and received mostly favorable notices, I was again taken aback by the crowds in gay bookstores wherever I went during my tour of the States. What I concluded was that there was something like an empty niche in the gay literary ecosphere crying out to be filled – a coming-out novel that would be serious and carefully written, sexy but not pornographic, anguished but not apologetic. No matter that my novel answered this description imperfectly and provided everything but a “positive role model.” It was the only candidate available for the position (now there’s an excess of coming-out novels and critics talk of creating a ban against any further one).

  I learned that no matter how unsentimental, even cold-eyed, my book might be, readers inevitably had a soft spot for their own childhood and any echo of it. I learned that no matter how offended most readers might feel by a novel about adult homosexuality, they were unexpectedly receptive to a book about an adolescent homosexual, especially one without much experience, since his confusion could be interpreted as a general teenage malaise about love and sex.

  The gay literary movement in New York in the early 1980s had been partly hatched during the ten or twelve meetings of an informal writers’ group called The Violet Quill. Its members included: Andrew Holleran, who was then working on Nights in Aruba; Robert Ferro (Second Son); Michael Grumley (Life Drawing); George Whitmore (Nebraska); Felice Picano (The Lure); Chris Cox (A Key West Companion); and me. We were all “supportive” (the vogue word) of one another, so much so that we considered calling our organization “The All-Praise Club,” which in any event was more an excuse for creating elaborate desserts and teas than for reading manuscripts.

  What we were tacitly doing, however, was figuring out how to divide up the turf. If Holleran was to have Fire Island, our most glamorous resort, Grumley the theme of black and white men together, Ferro the integration of the gay couple back into the family, Picano the gay thriller, Whitmore the tragicomedy of sex (in The Confe
ssions of Danny Slocum), then I could have childhood. Nothing so explicit was ever thought, surely, and the spirit was far more collaborative than competitive; we were simply jockeying for space.

  Now at last a few editors were willing to take a risk on our work. Bill Whitehead at Dutton was my editor and Ferro’s; Michael Denneny at St Martin’s was bringing out a dozen gay titles a year. At the same time Charles Ortleb at Christopher Street and his henchmen Tom Steele and Patrick Merla were publishing our essays and chapters from our books as well as articles about us.

  A novel, of course, is not a group effort; only La Princesse de Clèves appears to have been written by a salon. But what I’m hoping to demonstrate is that the apparently straightforward task of writing an unapologetic coming-out novel was actually so daunting (and previously unimaginable) that in order to do the job – to do nothing but this job and to do it simply – I needed the sense I was writing something people would read.

  Of course there were many influences on me, chiefly that of Christopher Isherwood, whose novel of the early 1960s, A Single Man, set an example of wry and honest self-awareness devoid of the lachrymose self-pity that characterized most gay fiction then. Just before I started to write A Boy’s Own Story I met Isherwood and his lover the artist Don Bachardy, and their kindness and high spirits, their vast social, literary and intellectual experience and innate decency struck me forcibly. Isherwood preferred the personal, flamboyant style of States of Desire to the hermetic, mannered prose of Forgetting Elena and Nocturnes for the King of Naples. I suppose the writing in A Boy’s Own Story reveals my inner struggle between a desire to maintain my minor literary reputation (hadn’t Nabokov singled out Forgetting Elena for praise?) and at the same time to portray my past with as much humor and immediacy as possible to all those eager young men who were coming to my readings.