posted on 25 Nov 2016

City Boy by Edmund White

The American novelist John Irving has observed that Edmund White is that unusual creature, a literary triathlete, excelling in novels, memoirs and biographies. It’s perfectly true and I had never previously thought of him this way. His accomplishments are formidable. And – sometimes – infuriating.

His two 1980s novels, A Boy’s Own Story and The Beautiful Room is Empty, a highly autobiographical coming-of-age duet, are superb. The non-fiction work which preceded these, States of Desire, offered many a primer in the history of US gay culture. His biography of Jean Genet is a masterpiece, although its length may be greater than Genet’s current standing and reputation can support.

He has now completed four highly personal memoirs – My Lives (2005) and City Boy (2009), and two further memoirs about his life in Paris.

My Lives was shockingly frank and although I haven’t read it for some years, its candour and unflinching self-revelation have stayed with me.

But recently I tried rereading City Boy. When I first read this I didn’t finish it. It contains riveting asides about artistic, literary and cultural history, and has an immersive diary-like atmosphere. The greatest names of 60s and 70s cultural ‘society’ make almost daily appearances and at times it is almost as if Pepys, say, had just this moment returned from a grimy downtown bathhouse or the steam room of the local Y – or a society dinner or a light bohemian supper – and is pondering the day’s encounters. Even his most wrong-headed opinions – his enthusiasms, his prejudices, his heroes and his bêtes noires – are fascinating.

And yet there is also something shallow and gossipy about the book. It reveals both the best of White and his greatest weaknesses. He is lightly erudite, widely read and highly cultivated. Art and culture matter deeply to him and anyone interested in the literary or artistic life will find something to enjoy in this unashamedly intellectual kind of writing. But he also has the most extraordinary drive to cultural celebrity and in City Lives, perhaps moreso than in anything else of his I have read, this manifests itself as an obsession with ‘society’, wealth and fame. The French, he notes approvingly at one point, have no word for “name dropping” and do not regard arrivisme as the same thing as social climbing. This appears to give White license to engage promiscuously in both. And it becomes extremely wearing. What begins as somewhat tongue-in-cheek, self-ironising, even, ends as being precisely what it is: a literary/cultural memoir in which the gay outsider becomes the society insider.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no problem whatsoever with ‘gay writing’. Gay life – its codes and values and aesthetics – and gay social history fascinate me, and White offers a window onto a high-intellectual camp New York world of a kind that I don’t think any other writer matches. But the name-dropping and infatuation diminish the book. Too many of the writers he discusses turn out to have private banking fortunes or beautiful heiress wives, or elegant worldly male lovers with the manners of Renaissance diplomats. Indeed, some possess all these things. The splendour of his regular summers in Venice are covered at length – but whether they were worth the insurmountable tedium of endless days and nights spent in the company of Peggy Guggenheim and her dogs seems questionable. The Connecticut literary aristocracy – “Cheever characters, hard-drinking readers and writers with old patrician names and big houses along the coast and genteel jobs in the law or publishing” – turn out to be far less fascinating than White clearly finds them.

I went back to this book because I thought I had judged it too hastily the first time round. I felt I had read too little of it to form such a spiteful conclusion. In fact, I had judged it too leniently. For all its cultural interest it really is a hugely self-satisfied book and I simply couldn’t feel warmly towards it. Its faults seem too glaring, too obvious. But worst of all, it made me think less of White the man. I had always found him enigmatic – that strange mixture (as with some other gay writers) of high culture and indefatigable hedonism (Derek Jarman comes to mind). But City Boy reveals that what drives White is in fact rather ordinary: celebrity. I wanted him to emerge as being above all that, and it turns out he isn’t.

Alun Severn

November 2016