A Case of Good Instincts

Edmund White is above all a novelist, one of our more significant ones, author of “The Beautiful Room Is Empty” and “A Boy’s Own Story.” It is with a novelist’s instinctive eye that he turns again and again to the sex lives of the personalities treated in his new collection of criticism, “Arts and Letters” (Cleis Press, 350 pages, $24.95).Having lived in Paris for 16 years, Mr. White remains chagrined by the Gallic discretion of Catherine Deneuve, who has a “rule about never talking to a journalist about her love life, her family, her children, her homes, her friends.” With cynical patriotism he says he misses, “everything American stars systematically divulge if they hope to be good copy.”Not every human being thinks of herself as copy – good or bad. But most of Mr. White’s heroes – Jean Genet, Michel Foucault, Vladimir Nabokov – are fascinating to read about. That most are gay men – like Mr. White – provides a sort of theme.As a novelist, Mr. White might be expected to prize the readymade plot of a modern gay life – discovery, concealment, disclosure (or exposure). Some say that the gay novel is, like the immigrant novel, one way to relive the societal pressures that produced the great 19th-century novels. If straight sex is usually non-scandalous, can’t gay sex step in to facilitate the new novel of adultery?Not a bit, says Mr. White. “Emma remains our ideal of the novel, the Urnovel. There is no way modern gay life could be shoved into this Procrustean bed. Often the most intense and memorable moments in a gay life are without foreshadowing or consequence.” Mr. White recalls that Foucault once suggested that “if courtship was the most romantic moment for the heterosexual couple, for a gay lover the most romantic moment was after sex and after one had put one’s brand-new partner in a taxi.”This attitude toward gay life depends upon Mr. White’s attitude toward literary history. He is quick to ally himself with an alternative heritage: “In our day American fiction has become monosyllabic, regional and catatonic … but Djuna Barnes remains as a reminder of the road not yet taken – international, devious, perverse, verbally abundant, psychologically subtle.”Barnes remains a minority taste, but her influences – Mr. White cites Hawthorne, Melville, and James – hardly represent a lost tradition. Moreover, Mr. White’s emphasis on discrete moments of intense feeling recall Virginia Woolf’s famous “Moments of Being.” Reading Mr. White, we are tempted to argue that it is not his tradition, but what he deftly calls “coffee cup realism” or “the action-and-dialogue adventure realism epitomized by Hemingway” that was new and ancillary in the 20th century.Mr. White is quick to admit his attraction to the recherche. He happily mentions that Christopher Isherwood “didn’t like my early, arty novels.” He goes out of his way, in interviews, to tell his subjects about his own troubles with weight and aging. He happily rues the time he was working for the middlebrow Saturday Review and offered Alain Robbe-Grillet space to write about American pornography on 42nd Street.Perhaps this mode of confession comes from Mr. White’s instinct for good copy. He is at his best when he distinguishes between what is marginal and what is strange. Writing about George Eliot, he makes a case for the “wise and odd”: “I’m convinced that almost all masterpieces in the English language are characterized by something preposterous, homemade, and all seem too long or too far-fetched or too narrow or too bizarre.” The canon, then, is itself strange. He cites “The Faerie Queene,” “Gravity’s Rainbow,” “Moby-Dick,” and “Our Mutual Friend.”“Arts and Letters” collects a handy roster of that strange canon, at least in its 20th-century incarnation. Mr. White’s criticism is characterized by the combination of arcing theories and personal anecdotes described above. Contemporary thinkers are always at hand: Roland Barthes is a frequent foil; Foucault’s notion of socially constructed identities – of madness, of homosexuality – pervades Mr. White’s thinking.If Mr. White’s literary criticism is preoccupied with large skirmishes and forgotten heroes, his profiles of celebrities allow him to settle down. Mr. White seeks to understand his subjects as a novelist would understand his characters. He seems most intrigued by David Geffen, who sits by the shore in Malibu, receiving phone calls, taking on projects at the suggestion of others.” It struck me as a rather passive, respond-to-the-latest-stimulus method,” but he notes that it “has made him one of America’s most successful record and movie producers.”Mr. White takes journalism on his own terms: “I despise journalistic invulnerability, the code by which an atmosphere of camaraderie is created and then only one-half of the conversation is reported.” His journalism is not as fine as his criticism. But together they add up to a fascinating book.

A Case of Good Instincts

A Case of Good Instincts

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