Susan Sontag described him as “one of the outstanding writers of prose in America.” A trailblazer in gay literature, American novelist, biographer and literary critic Edmund White died at his New York home on Wednesday, June 4. He was 85 years old.
Unflinching and without taboo, White made the “gay novel,” as he called it, the epicenter of his body of work. “What I aim to do is explore facets of it that have not yet been addressed,” he told Le Monde in 2013. At the time, he was in Paris for the French release of Jack Holmes and His Friend, the story of a friendship between a gay man and a straight man – a visit that delighted the renowned Francophile. From 1983 to 1990, he lived in France and often pointed out that he had “met everyone,” from Yves Saint Laurent to Catherine Deneuve and Michel Foucault. He chronicled this cherished period in Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris (2014).
Born on January 13, 1940, in Cincinnati, Ohio, White was the son of a Texas businessman and a psychologist. In A Boy’s Own Story (1982), he recounted his childhood in the Midwest and described his father, “who’d been a Texas cowboy as a young man.” As a teenager, he realized he was gay and confided in his mother, who sent him to a psychoanalyst claiming he could “cure” him. Isolation and self-loathing marked those years, as White described in the second volume of his autobiography, The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988). When he learned he had been admitted to Harvard, the young White chose not to attend so he wouldn’t have to leave his therapist.
Prolific body of work
The 1960s marked a liberation for him. In New York, he discovered the antithesis of family values, haunted the underbelly of the Village, reveled in sex and became the great chronicler of the “life among men.” He described it with a precision whose boldness fascinated some and repelled others. With a wealth of detail, he depicted the frenzy that consumed him, describing it like an itch: “The more we scratched the more we itched (…) For us, there was nothing more natural than wandering into a park, a parked truck or a plundering body after body,” he wrote in The Farewell Symphony (1997). His writing blended rawness, violence, ugliness and beauty.
About Lou, a character in The Beautiful Room is Empty, he wrote a line that summed up the essence of his approach: “But through some curious alchemy, he’d redeemed our illness by finding beauty in it. He loved Baudelaire and like Baudelaire he searched out beauty in whatever was foul, artificial, damned…” With more than 20 books to his name, White’s body of work unfolded like a polyptych – a shifting tableau of what he called the social and sexual history of three decades of gay life in the United States. He sought to recount this history as a witness, as lived by his generation: “psychoanalyzed and oppressed in the ’50s and liberated in the ’60s and exalted in the ’70s and wiped out [by AIDS] in the ’80s.”
Also in 2013, and in perfect French, he told us how, in 1985, he learned he was HIV-positive and how he reacted. “I thought: I’m obviously going to die. So I challenged fate. I began writing a biography of [French writer] Jean Genet. Everyone thought I was crazy. In fact, I probably am.” By chance, he was among those in whom the virus advanced slowly. Not only did White complete his biography (which came out in 1993), but he later turned his attention to Marcel Proust (1998), and above all to Arthur Rimbaud, whom he first discovered, dazzled, at age 14 in his Michigan boarding school (Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, 2008).
At Princeton University in New Jersey, where he taught fiction writing, White was a colleague and friend of Joyce Carol Oates. The writer paid tribute to him on the social network X, praising his “boldly pioneering subject matter” and “astonishing stylistic versatility.”
