TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/073090/0730520.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 12.4 KB | 254 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 58

Imagining Other Lives


EDMUND WHITE, America's most influential gay writer, is living
--  and writing -- with AIDS. And the crisis continues.

By LEONARD SCHULMAN


    In 1985, when the HIV blood test was first available, Edmund
White insisted that he and his boyfriend take it. His lover was
somewhat reluctant, but White insisted. "I'll be positive,
you'll be negative, and then you'll leave me," White recalls
telling him. "And I was right." And so America's most
influential gay writer, a man whom Le Monde once called the
most accomplished American novelist since Henry James, began
to live with AIDS.

    Since the publication of his first novel, Forgetting Elena,
in 1973, White's Proustian prose style caught, if not the
public eye at first, the eyes of the masters: Vladimir Nabokov
(White's literary hero)  praised his first novel, and Gore Vidal
hailed his second, Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978). A
book of nonfiction titled States of Desire: Travels in Gay
America (1980) enjoyed encomiums from Christopher Isherwood.
In reviewing A Boy's Own Story (1982), the New York Times said,
"Edmund White has crossed . . . J.D. Salinger with Oscar Wilde
to create an extraordinary novel."

    A Boy's Own Story, a longtime big seller in both the U.S.
and England, was the first of a projected tetralogy on gay life
in modern America. The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)
chronicles gay life through the liberated 1960s; if White lives
long enough, he hopes to complete the series with novels about
the frenzied bathhouse '70s and the plague-ridden '80s. In the
meantime he is working on a biography of Jean Genet and
teaching courses on the French playwright and on creative
writing at Brown University. Although his semi-autobiographical
coming-out themes are staples of gay fiction, White has
transcended the genre with his wit, attention to sensuous
detail and intensely explicit style. Stripping himself as bare
as any writer in history, he writes with a passion that is
meant to save his soul and those of his readers.

    White, 6 ft. tall, stocky but with an athletic build, deals
with "the constant low-level anxiety" of being HIV-positive by
keeping busy with his work. He prefers to be called a gay
writer. "Capote was a writer who happened to be gay; I am a gay
writer," he insists. In fact, he has based his career on it,
a high-stakes gamble that has worked. All gay writing can be
labeled pre-AIDS or post-AIDS, and White's is an exemplar of
the latter. His most recent short stories, three of which are
collected in a book called The Darker Proof, deal specifically
with the AIDS crisis.

    On a snowy Tuesday in March, White meets a visitor at the
Providence railroad station. "Both Diane Von Furstenberg's
daughter Tatiana and Jane Fonda's daughter Vanessa Vadim are
in my writing class, and Ann Charters -- do you know who she
is? -- she wrote a biography on Kerouac -- is in my Genet
class," White says breathlessly. On the way home, he stops off
at a student's house to pick up a copy of Genet's The Screens.
"Isn't he cute," White says of the student when he returns to
the car. "I have to avert my eyes when I talk to him or I lose
my concentration. `I'm straight; I hope you don't find that
repellent,' he said to me the other day. Wasn't that cute?
`You're doing fine,' I told him. `Stay just the way you are.'"

    White's study overlooks a small park by the Seekonk River,
a remote area where sex-obsessed men in cars come to cruise.
Although he practices safe sex, he is a man of admitted
compulsive-obsessive sexual behavior. Looking out at the
cruisers, he says, "You know, nobody believes me when I tell
them I rented the house not knowing about this, but I didn't.
Anyway, I won't get involved, I'm too busy."

    That afternoon White and his class of 30 view a BBC
interview with Genet. It's something the class has been looking
forward to for weeks, and a strong buzz of intellectual fervor
is in the air, academia at its best. But before running the
video, White has an announcement. It seems that next week there
will be someone in the class to evaluate him, "so . . ."

    "I know," a bright young man cries out, "clap at the end."

    Lots of laughter, White smiles graciously, and then on to
Genet. White helps out with some background information:

    "These are scenes from a porno movie made in the '50s. It
was shot in a nightclub called La Rose Rouge . . .

    "That's Lucien, Genet's lover; see how cute he is! He's now
running a garage." Discussing a scene where two prisoners, in
separate cells, share forbidden cigarette smoke passed through
a straw, White notes, "It's totally improbable; in reality you
couldn't put that straw through a brick wall, but it's sexy,
isn't it?"

    Each day the phone at his apartment begins ringing by 8 in
the morning. White speaks on the phone in soft tones,
patiently, calmly, in both English and French. He lived in
France for seven years, returning in January of this year. The
calls, he says, are "generally from French gay boys sick with
worry about coming down with AIDS." Or about those already
sick, like Herve Guibert, a young Frenchman who just published
a book titled To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. "He's
dying. He was beautiful, and now he looks like an Auschwitz
victim."

    In the early 1980s White and several other men helped found
the Gay Men's Health Crisis to deal with the cases of "gay
cancer" that were just being reported. Of that group, only
three survive, including activist-writer Larry Kramer. White
is perplexed about the pathology of the illness. So far,
although he is HIV-positive, he does not have any symptoms of
AIDS. "But I don't understand it," he says. "So many others
have already died. Forty of my friends, including my best
friend, David Kalstone . . . my editor, Bill Whitehead. Students
of mine have died. It doesn't seem right, students dying
before their teacher -- like children before their parents, the
worst tragedy."

    But White has learned to cope. "A close friend is visiting
on the weekend," he says. "We have so much fun together that
I forget how sick he is, that he could die very soon -- that
I could too. Denial, that's how we're all dealing with it."

    Edmund Valentine White III was born 50 years ago in
Cincinnati to a father who was a chemical engineer and a mother
who was a psychologist for retarded children. He is the seventh
Valentine in the White descent. His older sister Margaret
Fleming, a psychotherapist, recalls that even as a small boy
her brother was different: "Like most kids I was a conformist,
but not Ed. I didn't understand him then and probably tortured
him a lot . . . Today he's my hero. When my parents divorced,
he was only seven, and he took it very hard. He became a very
lost little boy; our father was very rejecting of him."

    Before learning to live with AIDS, White had to learn to
live with his homosexuality. "I didn't want to be gay," he
says. "I wanted to be normal, to have a wife and kids, not have
a lonely old age." So why gay? "He has always said," says
Marilyn Schaefer, a lifelong friend, "that it happened because
of the divorce. That he absorbed too deeply his mother's
longing for a man."

    For years White sought a cure through analysis. "But in my
fourth and final go at therapy (this time, at last, with a gay
psychoanalyst), I'd finally come to some sort of terms with my
homosexuality," White writes in States of Desire. By the time
he graduated from the University of Michigan in 1962, he had
accepted -- indeed become fully committed to -- a homosexual
life and life-style. He moved to Manhattan's Greenwich Village,
working by day, writing by night, and coming to the realization
that his art would suffer unless his culture were reflected
in his writing: "You see, many of us began by thinking that we
were basically heterosexual except for this funny little thing,
this sexual habit we had somehow picked up carelessly -- but
we weren't homosexuals as people. Even the notion of homosexual
culture would have seemed comical or ridiculous to us,
certainly horrifying."

    Nocturnes for the King of Naples, his second novel, was
written in a mood of gay fantasy. It was turned down by 12
publishers before it found its way to Michael Denneny, an
editor at St. Martin's Press. Denneny was mesmerized by White's
poetic prose and daring story. "Of all the gay writers who made
it in the '70s, Edmund was the only one who had entree in the
pre-existing literary circles, the sophisticated world of Susan
Sontag and Richard Howard, but he turned his back on it. He
wanted it known that he was a gay writer. That was a very brave
decision on his part. For me, that made him a gay leader."

    In States of Desire, his 1980 travel book, White set out "to
suggest the enormous range of gay life to straight and gay
people." William Burroughs said, "In Edmund White we may have
found our gay Tocqueville." But the book had its critics as
well. In a blistering review in the New York Times, Paul Cowan
wrote, "In this journey through the baths, the bars, the
streets full of preening young men, the narcotized one-night
stands that are the signposts of nearly every city he visits,
Mr. White shares what seems to me his characters' tragic
self-delusion."

    Sadly enough, White's was a kind of life that his father
could never accept, or even imagine, for his only son. "The Joy
of Gay Sex [which White co-authored in 1977] was promoted
widely enough that I supposed some rumor of it might have
reached even the Republican Valhalla of Cincinnati. My father
had never mentioned the book to me. He had also stopped writing
me. For that reason I was reluctant to face him. Thank God I
did; he died a month later. At the funeral my stepmother told
me he'd never known of the book. She had torn out the ads for
it from the newspapers, and no one in his circle could have
begun to form the syllables making up its title."

    On a Friday night White is host at a small dinner party in
his house with help from a friend, Stephanie Guss, who has
prepared stuffed pheasant. At 8, the doorbell rings and Henry
Abelove, a visiting associate professor of history from
Wesleyan University, arriving with two others, says, "What a
notorious neighborhood!" "I know," White replies, not missing
a beat, greeting his guests, some of whom he is meeting for the
first time, "and nobody believes me, but when I rented this
house, I swear I didn't know. I didn't know."

    Before sitting down, White observes to Henry Majewski,
acting chairman of Brown's French department, that he's not
sure how long he'll be at Brown. "Quite frankly, it all depends
on whether they let my boyfriend in or not," he says, referring
to a decision by the immigration service to bar his friend's
entry from France because of a work-related visa problem. "He
was sent back when he arrived, you know."

    "Oh, how cruel," says Pierre Saint-Amand from Haiti, a
professor in the French department.

    "Yes," White says. "Since then, we've met a couple of times
in Canada. If he gets in, we'll get a dog, travel. It could be
nice."

    Near midnight, the last guests leave, and Bob Praeger, a
friend visiting from California, turns to White. "Ed, you were
fabulous! Those stories you told, my God! I just can't believe
there wasn't someone at the table with pencil and paper taking
it all down." Bob is in Providence tracking down a letter for
a book he is writing on General George Custer. One story leads
to another; one letter leads to 300 others. It seems that Bob
has all these letters, which he wants to sell, from a "male
writer who," he explains, "has signed every one of them with
a female name -- sometimes Judy Florida, sometimes Judy L.A."

    "Judy Florida," White laughs. "What a riot! He's an old
friend, a writer who tells his old mother that he's a waiter.
You know the one about the waiter who tells everyone he's
really a writer -- well, this is just the reverse. His mother
doesn't really know, and he's quite famous. He writes under the
pen name of Andrew Holleran. Have you ever heard of Dancer from
the Dance? He's the most famous gay writer in America."

    "Ed," Bob interjects, angry. "He is not! You are!"

    "I am," White says modestly, and then suddenly, for just the
briefest moment, a look of fierce pride steals over his shining
face.