The truth laid bare

Edmund White’s books deal with the great issues – life, death, art, love, guilt. He has immortalised his life and loves in print, chronicled a gay generation annihilated by Aids, and likened himself to the final musician left on stage “still squeaking away on my violin”. You might expect a tortured soul; you would be wrong.

White is charming, modest, matter of fact: an intellectual with rare patience; a teacher (professor of creative writing at Princeton) always ready to listen. He ponders the anonymity of writers in New York, where he now lives, and the press attention they get in London, and says it’s because Britain has so few film stars. The absence of ego may account for the strength of his work: he does not seek to judge but to report.

When White’s novel, The Farewell Symphony, appeared in 1997, the irresistible hook in all the interviews was that the narrator (clearly based on White himself) had had sex with 3,120 men. This was held up as some sort of defining fact, but White simply mocked the figure – “Is it enough?” – and implied that three partners a week over 20 years wasn’t really so shocking. It is typical of his disarming style: his subject matter can be raw and painful – his new novel, The Married Man, details the death of his lover from Aids – but he refuses to emote.

The novel is a memorial to a young French architect called Hubert Sorin, who died in 1994. The odd fact has been altered, but in essence the novel records their life together in Paris and the US, and Sorin’s death in Morocco. White was diagnosed as HIV positive in 1985, and Sorin moved in with him in 1989 believing he would have to nurse him through his inevitable decline. But White did not decline – he knows now that he has a rare non-progressive form of the infection and his condition is stable. Instead, Sorin was diagnosed as having Aids (not contracted from White) and it was the author who had to do the nursing over the five years they lived together.

But why novelise what is so obviously a memoir? “This is a terribly personal book,” says White, “but I found that by writing in the third person I was able to look at myself in a more satirical way. When you write in the first person, you’re expected to be presenting a kind of apology for your life. People assume that this is you at your best, as though you are St Augustine showing your progress towards your present point of moral superiority, whereas in fact you have a fairly rounded and satirical view of yourself. The third person gets you off the hook; it makes it seem as if you’re writing about someone out there, objectively.”

That remorseless truth-telling is typical of White. “There will be people who say The Married Man deals with Hubert harshly,” he says, “but I felt that if I didn’t deal with him honestly, it wouldn’t be a good book. So much of the Aids literature I’ve read is lachrymose and sentimental, with the couple shown as very noble from beginning to end. There is that side to Julien [Hubert’s name in the novel], but there’s also a lot of anger, which to me seems normal to someone who is in his early 30s, terribly ambitious and has his life taken away.”

White, who is 60, is now so well established, and gay writing so much a part of the literary landscape, that it is easy to overlook the struggle that characterised the early part of his career. He was one of the first gay writers – Christopher Isherwood was his hero and literary role model – to want explicitly to explore his sexuality in fiction. But he suffered more than 20 years of frustration before the publication of his breakthrough book, A Boy’s Own Story, in 1983.

“I wanted to write about gay life, but people didn’t want to publish it,” he says. “I wrote a number of books that still exist in my archive at Yale, which were never published. But I think they were rejected not because they were low in literary quality but because they were so explicitly gay.”

Is there a danger that, as a writer of gay fiction, he might be marginalised? “I had already published two avant-garde artistic novels when I started writing gay fiction, and people said to me, ‘Oh, you’re going to ruin your career.’ I remember reading a Paris Review interview with Saul Bellow in which he said that when he first started writing Jewish fiction all of his friends told him the same thing – nobody wants to read about Jews, it’s too small, you should write about universal themes.”

White worked as a journalist and editor in the 1960s and 70s (he wrote The Joy of Gay Sex and a book called States of Desire about America’s gay communities), and lived the cruisy gay life in New York documented in The Beautiful Room is Empty and The Farewell Symphony. Those books are, in part, elegies to a pre-Aids world, but he defends the hedonism of those times.

“It was very mandarin in one way – dedicated to the highest, most abstract notion of culture – but it was also highly sexual,” he says. “New York in the 70s was like the last gasp of the old bohemian spirit. People weren’t materialistic; they were interested in the idea of living in a cold-water flat and being a great artist. I wanted to show that cultured world, too – people who were intellectual but also very sexual. The stereotype is that you are either one or the other, but you can be both.”

White’s trilogy – A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony – is an attempt to record the history of a gay culture (he once called himself “Everyfag”). He is, against all the odds, a survivor, and feels it is his duty to honour the generation wiped out by Aids. “I believe that in another 20 years someone will sit down to write the history of New York in the 70s, and it will turn out to be one of the great periods of creativity in American life. Gays played an enormous role in that and sexual licence was part of the package.”

Does he feel guilty that he lived? “People who are HIV positive don’t have much survivor guilt,” he says. “They feel that they are going to be victims soon enough. But now that I seem to have entered this category of non-progressives, I do feel some degree of guilt. It’s also hard not to feel numb, and the worst thing for a writer is to feel numb. Your natural tendency is to want to forget; but your deepest sense of duty and obligation is to history and to the people you knew and loved.”

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