Genet, AIDS and Mrs. Nabokov

Edmund White was born in Cincinnati in 1940. After a childhood spent "painting and dancing and singing and generally being a nuisance," he decided to become a writer. His literary hero was Russian-born novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who, after reading White's first two books, proclaimed him his favorite American author. White's fiction, like Nabokov's, is marked by the combination of a baroque linguistic sensibility with a mordant picture of middle America. White says he has always written as "a representative member of my generation of gay men." That purpose has not limited his work, which ranges from the lyrical abstraction of the early Nocturnes for the King of Naples to the more straightforwardly autobiographical A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room is Empty. He was one of the first American artists to speak openly about his own HIV-positive status. He moved to France eight years ago and began researching his biography of the French novelist Jean Genet, published last month. In addition to writing fiction, he has taught at Brown, Columbia and Yale and worked as a Vogue correspondent. The Crimson recently spoke with White about his own fiction and his most recent book.

Q: One critic called your novel Caracole her favorite French novel written in English. Do you seen yourself as an American author? In what American tradition would you place yourself?

A: Oh, yeah. I do see myself as an American author, but I think that we often have a very narrow notion of what American writing is. I think that what's happening right now in American literature is a kind of avant-gardism of content...People are less interested in experimenting with form and are more interested in dragging into the novel all kinds of new content, including talking about ethnic groups that have never been represented before. And to the degree that everyone seems to have decided that homosexuals will be treated as though they were an ethnic group, I suppose I'm doing the same thing. [The decision] has good and bad aspects. The good aspect is that in America nothing ever gets done politically unless you represent yourself as an ethnic group. But the bad aspect is that if you're a ghetto then you're subject to pogroms.

Q: The Darker Proof, the collection of stories you wrote with Adam Mars-Jones, was one of the first books of short fiction to deal with AIDS. What kinds of literary issues do you think AIDS brings up?

A: It was really Adam Mars-Jones' idea to do it. His idea was that if you write an AIDS novel there's a sort of inevitability about it because of the nature of the novel. The trajectory of the novel--particularly an AIDS novel--is a trajectory that ends inevitably in death. So he felt there was a predictability about it and a kind of melodrama and bathetic response that was required that could be avoided really in short stories. What we did was to publish it always as a paperback original...Our idea was to write quickly and have it have all the excitement of confetti; it shouldn't be some belabored work. A short story is something that does cut into and out of a subject matter that is very serious, like at odd angles. There's a way of sort of breaking through the carapace of expectations.

Q: You wrote a piece discouraging the use of humor in AIDS writing, and received considerable flack for it. What was your rationale for writing the piece?

A: I wrote an essay in '87 for Artforum. [Artforum] wanted me to write something for "AIDS in Art." It wasn't exactly a subject that I had thought about very much as such. But [they] kept pushing me so I did it, and maybe it was slightly premature. I didn't want to list great dead artists because I was afraid I'd miss somebody who was already dead...So I just felt very worried about the whole thing and I ended up making these prescriptive statements, which isn't really characteristic of me and which I slightly regret. But one of the things I said was that art about AIDS should avoid humor. I felt that some of the writing about AIDS was trying to get into a Borscht-Belt comedy act, that there was a way it was being domesticated and treated as though it were one more phenomenon in the ghastly-but-we'll-somehow-survive-it New York cityscape. I felt that [AIDS] is a scandal and should remain a permanent scandal, and that everything should treat its oddness and unacceptability. There's a certain kind of humor that is used to domesticate the horrible and I didn't want to do that.

Q: You mention in the biography that Genet was very conscious of writing his novels for himself and the plays for others, with the audience in mind. Is it a distinction you think about when you write?

A: I think about it very much. It's quite a conscious strategy for me as I think it was for him. In my early writing I was thinking of my ideal reader as a European, heterosexual woman--Mrs. Nabokov in fact, who did actually read my writing and would write me nice letters about it. I think I had sort of chosen her as my reader because I thought if I think of her then I won't just be nudging another gay person in the ribs with little in references. In other words I would be forced to render whatever I'm writing about from the ground up. I can't just say, "He was the Donna Summer kind of queen," you know, because it wouldn't mean anything to Mrs. Nabokov. So I think that it's kind of useful to have that sort of distance from your material.

But on the other had, after AIDS became such a serious problem, I began to feel isolated--partly because I was living in France, partly because I was dealing with my own HIV status and most of my friends were back in America and they were dying--and suddenly I felt very isolated and I felt that I wanted to share my thoughts with other gay men who were in the same situation. I suppose one wants it both ways; one wants to write for other gay people and also for a larger public. And now I suppose I run things through both sets of computers, analogue computers, if you will. I know a lot of women and I'm used to reading to them and I know the certain moment when all those cocks and balls begin to get tiresome for them. Although sex is one of my favorite subjects, I try to approach it in a fresh way, or in a way that I think will actually be sexy to women.

Q: You've said several times that you don't think Genet would have liked you, as you are so many things he despised: white, middle-class, homosexual and a biographer. Do you think you would have liked to meet him?

A: Well. I think I would have enjoyed meeting him a few times, but not have him as a friend because I like to veg out with my friends. A friend who's a deep challenge, constantly overthrowing all my previous ideas, annoys me. [But] I think he could be good fun, and I think I under-represent that in my book. He in fact made people laugh a lot. Certainly [novelist] Monique Lange, who is funny, she adored him and they laughed all the time. There was a moment when she asked him as a nice middle class girl what was it like to be a prostitute and how did you actually pick up men, so he dressed her up and put her out on the sidewalk and he played her pimp. They howled with laughter over that, especially when she got a client. I think that was a lot of fun. But he also had a tendency to decapitate everybody after a certain point, decide they were unsuitable or not morally rigorous enough. He was always dropping his friends. One of the problems in writing the biography is that every time I met somebody it was somebody who was wounded by him. So you had to overcome that before they'd open up and talk about their feelings...I've made a few friends out of the Genet crowd. Mostly his friends I found rather somber people. I think he went for a certain kind of Stalinist-leaning leftist intellectual that isn't exactly my idea of a barrelfull of laughs.

Q: You make frequent contributions to The New York Times Book Review, have compiled Faber and Faber's collection of gay short fiction, and been made a Chevalier de I'Ordre des Arts et Letters by the French government---all things you've described as "establishmenty." Is that trend just a personal preference or is there a strategy behind it?

A: I think there is. We're going through a period when gay life and gay literature are being normalized. Of course there's a part of me that feels that outlaw status is preferable, and that there's an excitement that comes from that, and a writer like Dennis Cooper or Gary Indiana have a lot of fun playing the outsider--I think their work really thrives on those conditions. On the other hand, I feel in my own mind there's a clear division between my writing and the way I package it so that I'm never compromsing in my writing...I feel like I've never written to order, but once I have written things, I do think it's sort of amusing to see them enter into a kind of traditional framework. So that for instance people tease me about having been made a Chevalier de I'Ordre des Arts et Lettres. But my feeling is, gee, I must be the first openly gay writer to have received that award, and I'm just old enough to have remembered when people threw stones at gays. So it seems to me a worthwhile normalization of the status if not the work.

I just don't believe in this phenomenon of crossover. I think that most gay books are not read by straight people, certainly not in America. I think the big phenomenon has really been getting gay people to read gay books and not just gay pornography. One of the largest groups of readers in America is probably gay men, but I think most of them have read books that everyone else was reading until now, I mean biographies of movie stars, or The Cain Mutiny or something--and then suddenly there's this new gay market. I think that has meant the development of a gay consciousness amongst gay people. That's really been the crossover, to cross gay people over to their own literature, because I don't think straight people are actually sitting around reading this stuff.

Somebody like Genet, I feel, is basically irrecuperable; you can't co-opt, you can't normalize, recuperate him. There's this biography and he exists in Gallimard's Ouvre Complete, all that stuff, but the truth is that people in the provinces still don't buy Genet, he'll never be taught in schools. Bourgeois women, who are most readers, can't read him or don't want to. I think it's really always going to remain like that. There's no way he's going to ever really fit in. I don't think my works are as hard to follow as his are, but I doubt, in spite of all the establishment window dressing, that people are ever going to take my books to heart.