by Edmund White
I wrote the first chapter in Key West in the autumn of 1979. I was sharing a rented house with Chris Cox, then my lover. He sat in one room and typed over a hundred versions of the first page of a hilarious story he could never finish about a Southern small-town lady right out of Eudora Welty. We spent four months first in the sweltering September and October heat then in the bearable warmth of December and January. Key West is a writers’ colony and we spent time with the poet James Merrill and the playwright Tennessee Williams as well as with Jim Boatwright, the editor of Shenandoah. We’d ride our bikes at night over to the Papillion Bar. Chris would scream at his cats, which were always running away, and we entertained a few house guests – my mother, my shrink and the ancient American composer Virgil Thomson. Otherwise we’d do nothing but read and write. I read Chateaubriand’s memoirs and wrote the first chapter of A Boy’s Own Story and completed the long (and confused) first chapter of Caracole, which I’d already been struggling with for three years.
I’d lie on clean white sheets while the ceiling fan turned and remember the cool summer nights of my boyhood at our summer house on Walloon Lake in Michigan. Chris would be tearing pages out of his typewriter, but I scribbled away contentedly, caught up by the long lines of my idyll. When I’d actually been a teen on Walloon I’d read with rapture Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, and now I tried to imitate its build towards transcendence, at least as I recalled it.
I read my first chapter to Virgil Thomson, who liked action, wrote succinctly and expected titillation. He handed it back with the devastating comment, “As we say in Missouri, there’s a lot of wash here and not much hang-out.”
When I wrote A Boy’s Own Story I was still taking drugs and drinking heavily and couldn’t hold the design of a book in my head. All I could hope to do was to wing my way somehow or other through a chapter and then sink into silence for a month or two before I found the courage to undertake another chapter, a unit I saw as being as momentous and unbidden as the elegy was for Rilke. My drinking explains the form of the book and its circular chronology, as well as its wilfully logical surface and sudden gusts of inexplicable lyricism.
Those were also effects I was striving after. While I was working on A Boy’s Own Story I gave a reading in Baltimore where a young woman said, “I really like what you do.” “Please tell me what I do.” “You skip over the important parts,” she said, “and dwell on the minor things. It’s like rubato in music.” Thanks to her I became conscious of a technique I’d been blindly groping towards.
In A Boy’s Own Story I touched on all the themes of my youth: the exaggerated consolations of the imagination; the sexy but crushing teenage culture of the 1950s; the importance of Buddhism, books and psychoanalysis to my development; my first contacts with bohemianism, the sole milieu where homosexuality was tolerated; and finally my cult of physical beauty. In recent years politically correct gay critics have taken me to task for my “looksism.” I never respond, but if I were to I’d say, “Put the blame on Plato, who originated the seductive if unwholesome idea that physical beauty is a promise of Beauty, indistinguishable from Truth and Goodness.” All artists are responsive to beauty in any form it appears.
Towards the end of A Boy’s Own Story I chose the title. A lesbian writer I knew in those days said the title was overly ironic and self-dismissive and I should replace it with something classic and straightforward. Actually I was hoping not only to pervert the cleancut Edwardian shelf of books with names such as A Boy’s Own King Arthur but also to invoke the early oral histories taken down by University of Chicago sociologists interviewing working-class boys and delinquents.
Although this book has been around since 1983 people assume it was first published over half a century ago and are often surprised I’m still alive. It has been translated into many languages including Catalan and Hebrew. In Japan it is read mostly by teenage girls who admire gay men for their “impossible loves,” i.e. against the grain of society – and impossible for a woman to participate in. In France it is dismissed as old-hat and a terrible falling-away from the excellence I’d achieved with Nocturnes for the King of Naples. In England it made me so well known that English fans are always astonished to learn that most Americans don’t know who I am.
Now that I’ve finished filling in the background, I hope the reader will look with an indulgent eye at what I put out on the line.
Paris, February 1994
‘Every so often a novel comes along that is so ambitious in its intention and so confident of its voice that it reminds us what a singular and potent thing a novel can be’
San Francisco Chronicle
‘Edmund White is one of the three or four most virtuosic living writers of sentences in the English language’
Dave Eggers
‘The boy’s self-portrait shines with authenticity, he is an extraordinary but plausible mixture of sweetness and deviousness . . . Add to this the fact that White’s prose is marvellously sensual while his eye is sharply satiric and you have something of the flavour of an outstanding text which should appeal to a wide audience. The book goes beyond its homosexual theme to say something about the whole process of growing up’
Guardian
‘The story Edmund White tells is spellbinding – by turns incisively satiric, goldenly nostalgic, calmly voluptuous, and throbbing’
Washington Post
‘Edmund White is one of the best writers of my generation; he’s certainly the contemporary American writer I reread more than any other, and the one whose next book I look forward to reading most’
John Irving
‘With A Boy’s Own Story American literature is larger by one classic novel’
Washington Post Book World
‘Enchanted, dreamy, elegant and exotic . . . The book touches universal bases with smashing success’
Publishers Weekly
‘A breathtaking evocation of a young boy growing up in the fifties in an American town . . . The book’s extraordinary power lies in the tension between the obsessive longing and then moments of denial, the attempts to transcend or avoid the inescapable fact of the boy’s sexuality . . . There have been many good novels of adolescence; this one surpasses them all’
Jeremy Seabrook, New Society
‘The subject of this book might be that brief eloquence between the fantasies of a dream-bound child and his implementing those through charm, sexuality, his wits . . . This work of principled sweep and great observational power also champions the centrality of Art as a governing quest. It offers this view with a faith that must recall Proust’s life project, his attempt to hold all of time, its characters at synchronous ages, all its warring textures, in one head, one work’
Allan Gurganus
A Boy’s Own Story
EDMUND WHITE is the author of many novels, including A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Farewell Symphony, and, most recently, Jack Holmes and His Friend. His nonfiction includes City Boy, Inside a Pearl, and other memoirs; The Flâneur, about Paris; and literary biographies and essays. White lives in New York and teaches at Princeton University. He is the official novelist for the State of New York.
Also by Edmund White
Forgetting Elena
The Joy of Gay Sex
Nocturnes for the King of Naples
States of Desire: Travels in Gay America
A Boy’s Own Story
The Beautiful Room is Empty
Caracole
The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis
Genet: A Biography
The Burning Library
Our Paris: Sketches from Memory
Skinned Alive
The Farewell Symphony
Marcel Proust
The Married Man
Loss Within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS
The Flâneur
Fanny, A Fiction
Arts and Letters
My Lives
Terra Haute
Chaos
> Hotel de Dream
Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel
City Boy
Sacred Monsters
Jack Holmes & His Friend
Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris
First published 1982 by E.P. Dutton, New York
First published in the UK 1983 by Picador
This Picador Classic edition first published 2016 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2016 by Picador Classic
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
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Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-5098-1387-2
Copyright © Edmund White 1982
Introduction copyright © Alan Hollinghurst 2016
Afterword copyright © Edmund White 1994
Cover Design: Ami Smithson, Picador Art Department.
Cover Image © Leon Steele / Lensmodern.
The right of Edmund White to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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