The importance of being Edmund - interview with writer Edmund White - Interview

Interview, Sept, 1997 by Brendan Lemon

Edmund White has had a cult following ever since he started writing, and there was a time when it seemed like he was the only writer who was honest about being gay. Many of the subjects he pioneered have now become mainstream, but there is still nothing cliche about Mr. White

Edmund White's latest novel, The Farewell Symphony (Knopf), is the final installment in an exquisite trilogy. The bookish boy narrator of A Boy's Own Story (1982) who fled the Midwest for New York City during the liberationist '60s - chronicled in The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) - is now living as a writer in Paris, a location from which he surveys his life during the past quarter century. If a postscript to this frank, beautifully rendered narrative ever appears, it may be set in Texas, which is not only the home state of White's ancestors, but perhaps the future abode of the writer himself: White may move to Austin in 1998 to take a position at the University of Texas.

Like its predecessors, the language of The Farewell Symphony is poetic, "mixing," in T.S. Eliot's phrase, "memory and desire." Memory, in fact, colors the book's very first sentence, which invokes a character based on White's recent real-life lover, Hubert Sorin, who died a few years ago and may serve as inspiration for the writer's next novel. Desire, meanwhile, permeates at least two-thirds of the book - namely, the sections sat in 1970s New York City, a decade that continues to be heavily plundered by all manner of artists, although not always, according to White, very accurately.

BRENDAN LEMON: The '70s have been refiltered a lot lately through the eyes of artists who were too young to have lived those years fully. What do you think of all the reinterpretations?

EDMUND WHITE: Who are you referring to?

BL: Tom Ford, for example, who's the designer for Gucci, has been inspired by a sexy, '70s aesthetic in recent seasons, and a lot of filmmakers have projects in the works about Studio 54.

EW: Well, as Anne Hollander once argued very well in writing about the costumes for the movie The Great Gatsby: If you really created the costumes of another period accurately, everybody would laugh, and they would look ugly. You have to render them in a new adaptation to give modem audiences the same feeling that people had at the time.

At the time, for instance, the clothes looked fresh, they looked elegant, they looked sexy. And now those shoes would look absurd to us, you know; the lapels wouldn't be wide enough, the fabrics wouldn't be smooth enough. Everything would look kind of bunched up and ugly, and the haircuts would look ridiculous. I feel that, in my own case, the fact that I left America in 1983 and went back very rarely meant that the '70s stayed in my mind in a more laboratory-pure state than they did for other people. I think the universal tendency - even for people of my age [fifty-seven], who knew the '70s - is to rewrite the past in the light of the present and make it all seamless. Since I didn't really know New York in the '80s, I haven't rewritten the '70s in the light of that. For instance, it used to be a fairly dowdy city. And now it's not. Expatriate Americans who come to New York now say, "Oh, it's very elegant now, and clean, like Paris." And it used to be so filthy and dangerous.

BL: But don't you think that's part of the standard mythology of the '70s - that because New York was filthy and dangerous, it was also sexier?

EW: Yes.

BL: I think one of the reasons the '70s are slightly distorted now is because people tend to assume that everyone spent all night at Studio 54. But in fact for the whole first half of the decade, New York seemed very apocalyptic and strange. I'm talking a little fancifully here, since I was a kid at the time and not living in New York.

EW: But I think you're absolutely right. In the beginning of the '70s, people kept standing around going, "Oh, when is this decade going to get off the ground?" It was a period when the city government was going broke, and I remember I even wrote an apocalyptic play at the time, a Mad Max' kind of thing. So I agree with you completely. But I think - if I can bring the subject back to myself a tiny bit - what's interesting about The Farewell Symphony is that I never went to Studio 54 and it's not described. I was never a scene-maker. I mean, this is really a book about somebody who's serious and arty and interested in high culture, but is also interested in having lots of sex in trucks and stuff. In real life, when I went to the Continental Baths, I found the fact that Bette Midler was there to be irritating - because I wanted to get down to the sex part right away. I didn't like it thai everybody was standing there watching her. It wasn't even the kind of music I liked! [laughs]

BL: Finally, someone tells the truth: "Get her outta here!"

EW: Yeah, really.

BL: Does it bother you that people mistake your autobiographical fiction for a direct, factual memoir?

EW: Yes. I read something the other day to a group at a bookstore in Scotland, and during the question-and-answer period a man said, "So how come you don't call this a memoir?" And I said, "If I had told you in advance this was a memoir, and then put in all those details about the precise way a boy's hair was combed, how he slouched around the room, the precise words he said, how he smelled, how he sat down, and so on, you would have laughed at me. Because no one could possibly have remembered all that."