Glory Days

A book review by STACEY D’ERASMO

In the early 1980s, when I was in college,Edmund White's work was a revelation to me. I lay around my Barnard dorm room listening to Nina Simone records and reading his first novel, “Forgetting Elena,” which takes place in a highly mythopoeticized version of Fire Island and nominally concerns a man with amnesia. Radically and unabashedly lyrical, polymorphously sexual, phantasmagoric, finely wrought and peculiar, “Forgetting Elena” showed me that beauty could be a gun. Its excess was its ars poetica, an invitation and an argument about appetite, possibility and the uses of pleasure. His second novel, “Nocturnes for the King of Naples,” opened with the most gorgeous evocation I have ever read of the 1970s gay male nighttown at New York’s old rotting piers, a twisted, rusting, metallic ruin of anonymous sex and unexpectedly sublime tableaus. I wanted to go there — not to the piers, where girls wouldn’t have been welcome anyway, but to the mind-set that apprehended the world that way, as an abundant, carnal and glittering place, populated by fearless, libidinal aesthetes. Let’s just say it was a long way from suburban high school dances and “Hotel California.”

After these first two novels, which seem to take place in elaborately embroidered floating worlds not quite our own, White turned toward the more autobiographical novels and straight-up memoirs that made his name. From his third novel, “A Boy’s Own Story,” forward, White has told again and again, with variations, the story of being Ed White: the closeted, yearning, treacherous Midwestern boy; the art-struck, out, exuberantly promiscuous young man; the successful, sophisticated writer losing half his world to AIDS; the arts elder, looking back on all yesterday’s parties. Along the way, it can also fairly be said that White helped to invent the discourse of modern homosexuality as the co-writer of “The Joy of Gay Sex” in 1977 and the writer of “States of Desire: Travels in Gay America” in 1980, which mapped the brave new post-Stonewall world of the late ’70s. The love of outrageous beauty, and the outrageous love of beauty, that he brought to the early novels he also brought to his take on modern gay life, especially gay male life: far from apologetic, pathological or half-truthful, White’s joy in gayness was almost Nietzschean, brash and even ruthless. No more weeping by his Judy Garland records; this was rock ’n’ roll, leathery and muscular and raw. In his autobiographical novel “The Farewell Symphony,” White writes of gay men of that period, “Everyone had to be unambiguous, as glowing as a peacock’s tail and as towering as a stag’s antlers.” And so, for a time, they were.

“City Boy,” the latest installment of White’s memoirs, takes up once again his life in New York in the ’60s and ’70s, the years before he was famous, when he was fashioning himself out of an awkward mix of desire, poverty, thwarted ambition, well-connected friends and sheer perseverance. He was often, as he writes, “the youngest, least known person in the room,” a condition that persisted until he was 42, with the publication of “A Boy’s Own Story” in 1982, blurbed by his idol Susan Sontag (she later retracted the blurb in a fury). After that success, he left New York to live in Paris for many years.

“In the 1970s in New York,” he begins, as if it were a fairy tale, “everyone slept till noon,” a statement that immediately makes one think: Who is “everyone”? But it is, ironically, the strength of this moving chronicle that White can’t quite make that sort of sweeping gesture stick. That peacock’s tail, those stag’s antlers — they’re here, to be sure, but so are vulnerability, doubt, failure and long years toiling at the sort of cruddy day jobs that most literary writers know all too well. White himself didn’t sleep till noon; he had to show up at the office before then. In “City Boy,” White is as amusing and raucous as ever, but he also lets the mask slip. The prose tends toward the straightforward; sex is mentioned but rarely described in detail; and if White is sometimes slightly cranky about, say, the state of literature today or certain eminent artistic closet cases (Jasper Johns, Sontag, Cy Twombly, Elizabeth Bishop et al.), he is also more openly tender and affectionate. His losses and struggles, as a consequence, seem less sculpted, but more real. “City Boy” is a memoir not so much of desire, inspiration or even treachery as it is of work.

It’s a relief. One can’t glitter in antlers all the time, and sometimes the spirit gum holding on that peacock’s tail just won’t stick. White describes himself in those years as a lonely, absurdly ambitious (“I wanted my prose to be un-American, not of any era, unidentifiable because it was original”), “self-hating,” somewhat sexist (“I didn’t think of women as horny but as needy”), pseudo-Marxist, insecure transplant from the Midwest who spent long hours pumping up at the Sheridan Square gym when he wasn’t at his job at Time-Life Books, “wasting time.” More than once, he fell in love with a man who didn’t return his love, whereupon White moved in with the elusive beloved so that he could spend his time weeping over his roommate. “I was a free agent,” White writes, with what one can only imagine is a wry smile; freedom at one point meaning that “now I was 30 and unemployed and living in a roach trap.”

The New York of that time was “a broken city,” crime-ridden and nearly bankrupt. “Forgetting Elena,” the book whose otherworldly beauty took my head off, took White three years to write and was rejected by more than 20 publishers, and when it was finally published, it was often reviewed as a mystery. By 30, he already felt he was too old for the scene in the back rooms and piers, though he apparently managed to drag himself there nonetheless. At 19, I was too young to understand that what White was writing was as much a dream to him as it was to me. I thought he must live like that, this fabulous Edmund White person. Now, I see his invention as the mortal gift it is, dreamed up in a roach trap by an office worker, and all the more precious for that.

What got White through were his friends. The lovers come and go, but over all “City Boy” is a chain of deep friendships and lifelong conversations. The eminent poet and translator Richard Howard; David Kalstone, an English professor at Rutgers; Marilyn Schaefer, model for the “Maria” in much of White’s fiction and a wildly smart, free-thinking, bisexual painter; the poet James Merrill; Richard Sennett, a legendary sociology professor and bon vivant; Sontag, until White savaged her in his novel “Caracole”; and many others. For gay New Yorkers in the ’70s, according to White, friendship had “the starring role.” He writes, “We could say strategic things to lovers and seductive things to tricks, but a friend deserved the truth.” Many of these friends, of course, are now dead. “AIDS killed off most of my circle,” White writes, succinctly. The New York that he left in 1982 was about to become a graveyard. “City Boy,” plain-spoken and knowing, is a survivor’s tale, a missive from one of those antlered boys of that era to the others who are gone: this is who we were, this is how it was, this was our city. Some stories don’t need to be embellished to glow.

Stacey D’Erasmo’s most recent novel is “The Sky Below.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/books/review/DErasmo-t.html?ref=books