Edmund White on the Power of Destabilizing His Readers

Damon Galgut and Edmund White have been friends for more than a decade, and although they live on different continents they speak at least once a week. This particular conversation took place over email and over several days.

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Damon Galgut: We became friends (one of the great thrills of my literary life) in 2012, but I first “met” you in print thirty years before that when I read A Boy’s Own Story. I still recall my double excitement, not only at its subject matter—astonishingly “new” at the time—but at how richly it was rendered. I have noticed in your subsequent books how each one seems to have its own distinct register and range of language.

I wonder how consciously important it is to you to find the “voice” of each new work? And how closely tied is a fullness or lushness of language to the use of a first-person voice? As an extension of that question, could you say something about the (third person) voice of your newest novel, The Humble Lover? 

Edmund White: Meeting you on the page and again in person was a thrill for me since you are one of the handful of living writers I admire. I was with three other American gay writers the other day and we all agreed In a Strange Room  is one of our favorite books. When I was young I read a remark of Paul Valery (cited by André Gide) that a writer should lose with every book the fans he might have gained with the previous one, which in my case, sadly, has come only too true.

Paradoxically, I find that the third-person voice can give a fuller account of a character than the first-person. In the third-person the writer can not only render all the character’s thoughts but also (occasionally) describe and observe her or him from the outside. In my forgotten novel Caracole I distributed myself over six third-person characters, whereas in a memoir one is limited to the first person alone and can’t really look at the self.

To be sure, the first-person can be warm and, one hopes, engaging. Even charming (charm is the literary quality that I think is the most underestimated; Colette is the most charming and seductive writer I know. Proust is more companionable than charming).

Anatole France thought the most lively style stayed close to the conversational but refreshed it with small inventions. Your style is always involving, never ostentatious but never predictable.

DG: Why, thank you! I do think that the writer should work to keep the reader’s attention; it’s part of the job requirement. And I have learned some tricks from you in that regard. It’s maybe a small point, but I have always been delighted by how you often undercut the main thrust of your sentence with an oblique aside in parentheses, almost like an editor commenting from offstage. The constant shift in tone is part of the charm you mention.

So is your deftness with the deadpan throwaway line. In your new novel, I took huge pleasure in observations such as, “Like everything in life except a Robert Wilson play, the dance went by too fast to be understood.” Or the way a raincoat salesman says the garment is rain resistant “as if that was an unusual feature in a raincoat.” I recognize these little flourishes from your own conversational style.

EW: I have always tried to destabilize the reader, surprising him but not altogether arbitrarily. You are a master of that. If one puts a hand over the end of a sentence one can rarely guess where it will go.

DG: I often refer mentally to a comment I read in an interview with Tom Stoppard, where he talked about “ambushing” his readers. I understood him to mean that the writer needs to be constantly surprising, on the larger scale, with plot, but also on the much more granular level of the sentence or the phrase. Things should never end up quite where they might seem to be going.

EW: Why are you drawn to crumbling empty places like Lesotho or reptile farms or homeland hospitals?

DG: Probably because they are good metaphors for my inner state, but also for the state of my country.

EW: In The Good Doctor, the narrator thinks: “it was only real life, unsettling and tacky and strange.” Is that also your view?

DG: Mostly! Well, isn’t it? Of course life can surprise you sometimes with unexpected wonders, and one has to be open to that. But epiphanies are few and far between, at least in my version of the world.

EW: In your great prize-winning novel The Promise and in The Good Doctor you write about mature white men who are failures especially in that they are too pessimistic or honest to be able to support post-apartheid South Africa. Do you feel that politics is always doomed to be false or that this generation is incapable of adjusting to the new order?

DG: Both, really. Apart from one heady period in the nineties, the politics of South Africa have always been good cause for disgust. But the character of White South Africa is especially conducive to revulsion. And the subject in both books you mention is definitely White South Africa.

EW: In The Promise only Amor seems conscious of the inequities of South African life.  She alone wants to honor the promise her mother made to give the Black maid the ownership of the very humble house she lives in.  All her siblings and relatives resist this thought, including the would-be novelist brother Anton.

DG: Yes, it’s a pretty bleak view. There are exceptions, of course, and I know some fine people who are willing to change and sacrifice to measure up to our present moment. But most white South Africans, and certainly the ones I write about, seem unable even to admit their sins, let alone repent for them.

EW: Were you born in Africa because you are a landscape painter in words?

DG: I was born in Africa because my parents conceived and brought me forth in Pretoria, a very inconsiderate choice on their parts. But I have always responded to the landscapes of Africa with an almost visceral passion and excitement. I’ve never been able to write a novel with an urban setting, whereas you, I think, turn cities into landscape.

You have lived in Paris and traveled widely in Europe, and there is a wealth of worldly knowledge in your work. I remember (with slight shame) how you expected me to understand a French poem you casually tossed into an email, which of course was beyond me. Europe has been the “other place” for lots of American writers, a trend seemingly begun by Henry James. There are a couple of mentions of James in The Humble Lover and I wonder how consciously you have tried to subvert the obvious tropes of ‘the European connection’ in American writing?

EW: Explore or renew rather than subvert.  I may be of the last American generation who looked at England and France worshipfully. Many younger Americans have written Peace Corps novels in which they explore Asian or developing cultures; Bryan Washington has used Japan brilliantly as a foil to African-American reality.

DG: To me, there seems an ongoing tension in your work between the “High” Culture and refinement of Europe versus the meatier “real” culture of newer societies like America. Specifically, in this book, the world of ballet (re which you quote Balanchine: “the real world is not here”) is offset against some cruel physical realities. Aging, for one, but also sex, especially of the S&M variety. It seems you use this for comic effect. Would you agree? And do you see The Humble Lover as a comedy or a tragedy?  (It certainly ends badly for all concerned.)

EW: One of the most powerful early influences on me was Marilyn Schaefer, a friend for sixty years. She was very conscious of the suffering and injustices of humanity but at the same time she always had an impish sense of humor. Although she’s been dead for a decade she’s still one of my essential Ideal Readers.

DG: So it’s a tragedy with added humor? But for me, it also had the quality of a fable. The love rivalry between Aldwych and his nephew’s wife Ernestine, both competing for August’s attentions, heads inexorably—one might say balletically—towards an unhappy conclusion.  The motto could be your sub-title, Protect Me From What I Want. What your central characters often want is beauty, especially male beauty. In your novel Our Young Man, the protagonist, Guy, seems never to age or lose his looks.

But more recently, you have come down very hard on yourself and the toll that aging has taken on your body. In your new book, the humble lover is Aldwych, an older gay man, in terrible physical shape, who becomes obsessed with the physical loveliness of a dancer, August.

The self-disgust that Aldwych feels seems to echo your own harsh judgements on the character “Edmund White” in A Previous Life. Even as a young god, August has bad teeth and ends up as a pale shadow of the way he starts out.

EW: Aldwych repairs August’s teeth, which are black as a result of an impoverished childhood and a bad diet. His body is his own achievement as a dancer. He is destroyed by the sadist Ernestine for whom only the suffering of others can penetrate the ennui of her own life. I’m not an intellectual so I rarely think of general truths in my writing; my plots are generated by the characters.

DG: For a non-intellectual, you’re one of the most thoughtful and erudite people I know. Are you saying that your novels grow out of the sense of a few characters in an interesting situation? You don’t know more than that when you begin?

EW: Often I get the idea of a book from a parody of an earlier one. Forgetting Elena  was inspired by The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon and The Tale of Genji. I was fascinated by a world in which ethics could be replaced by aesthetics. Our Young Man  was modeled on Sapho by Daudet and my most recent, unpublished novel, A Wild Night and a Long Road, was inspired by Gautier’s Spirite.

DG: Ernestine keeps August’s devotion partly through torturing and humiliating him. By contrast, Aldwych will do anything and sacrifice everything for him. Reading your various memoirs, and in particular the extraordinary “My Master” sequence from My Lives, one imagines you identify more with Aldwych. Do you see yourself generally as a “humble lover?”

EW: Oddly enough I was a sadist at the beginning but eventually a masochist (often aided by mild drugs).  Now the whole thing bores me.

In the first part of In a Strange Room, Damon is the victim of an unfeeling man, in The Good Doctor, the protagonist is the unfeeling man. Was this a conscious choice?

DG: Life provided the unfeeling proto-Nazi in In A Strange Room. He was real and all of it happened; I had only to shape the memories. In The Good Doctor, Frank is my imaginary creation, so some conscious choice was required.

EW: You frequently in writing about your protagonist switch even in the same paragraph from the first person to the third. Is the “I” meant to suggest intimate reflection and the he to convey the narrative mode?

DG: I discovered this little trick in the writing of In A Strange Room. It wasn’t planned; just something my psyche threw out onto the page, though it immediately excited me. I felt it spoke for the deeper themes of the book, in that I wasn’t only writing about three journeys I’d made, but how I remembered those journeys. In memory one is sometimes back in the recollection, a la Proust, almost as if the moment is being relived, and then one is very much an “I.”

But often one is looking back from a distance, narrating the past, and then the third person takes over. (As an aside, this internal split also seems to mimic the process of writing itself. One needs to be engaged, passionately connected to the inside of any narrative moment, but one also needs to be outside it, as a critic, judging the effect. This duality accounts for the messed-up psyches of writers, in my opinion.)

EW: I was much influenced by Erving Goffman, who argued that life is theatre in which one plays consciously or not a role. He guided me in my first published novel Forgetting Elena, in which the protagonist is an amnesiac hoping to convince others he remembers everyone and everything, but fakes it by playing off the social cues they send.

I also used to encourage my students to read An Actor Prepares by Stanislavski, who tells his performers to evoke the sense memory surrounding a moment rather than attempting to recall it directly.  To me building a character has always seemed like role-playing. Your I/he transformations seem to me to be an acknowledgment of that process.

DG: I went to drama school in an earlier life, and I agree that there are strong similarities between actors and writers, in the way they conceptualize and “feel” a character. Speaking of life roles, you have been a transformational force not only in writing but in sexual politics too. Many young gay writers take certain freedoms for granted, which were hard-won by you and other writers of your generation.

In your new book, there are all sorts of bodily fluids on display, and graphic accounts of sadomasochistic sexual practices. If these descriptions can’t be counted as transgressive any more, I wonder whether any transgression is still possible. What, if any, are the taboos of our current moment? Is it in political correctness and “woke” culture? (Re which, it’s been interesting to read about how similar constraints were in operation even back in the 1980s.)

EW: I suppose the people who are likely to read us are mostly taboo-proof. Right now I’m writing my sexual memoirs. When I started writing it seven years ago I thought I could never publish this stuff. Now my heterosexual editor wants to publish it before another novel! This loosening of moral strictures among the evolved has taken me by surprise. The other day in my rented vacation cottage and among the hundred cable channels I discovered one all about book-burning in Florida!

DG: You pride yourself on being able to write anywhere at almost any time, and sometimes those circumstances have been very challenging indeed. I was amazed to find out that you began writing almost immediately after the death of your lover Hubert Sorin in Morocco, and I know you wrote most of Our Young Man while in hospital after a heart attack. I cannot tell you how much I respect that. The urge in you to speak, to create, has been irrepressible all through your life.

I hope we can still look forward to a few more books, but it’s probably true that you are looking back on the greater part of your working life. I wonder how it seems to you now? The shape of your career, the arc that your books have left behind? Or is this not a way you think about yourself and your work?

EW: I suppose I thought of male homosexuality as my turf, and I’ve explored the anatomy of gay life at various ages and epochs (Hotel de Dream for the late nineteenth century), in various countries, the friendship between a gay man and a straight (The Married Man). I even tried to depict those fops of the eighteenth century (Caracole) who were straight but seem so gay to us.

Gay life appeared such a rich subject to me because at the time I started writing it was new, it subverted the traditional class system, it involved disguise and revelation, it examined desire in a distorting mirror, it was considered to be sinful or criminal but was actually vital and transforming.

Damon: We had an exchange recently in which we wondered whether one improves as a writer over time, or whether it involves a loss of passion. You made your position clear by sharing a poem you’d recently written. If you’re open to it, I’d love to share it with a few more people here:

Looking At Rubenstein                                                                                                            

I like the look of old, liver-spotted hands
Playing Rachmaninov with complete agility
Pounding out the chords or whispering the pianissimi
Thundering through the descending octaves or
Singing like a bird on an endless trill.
We know old dancers are too weak  and spavined to dance
And athletes have only two or three good years
But writers, painters and pianists only get better
With age, the white-haired, raddle-necked profile
Lifted arrogantly above the precisions
Of the supple hands working the huge musical loom.

 Thank you, Edmund White, for your books and your friendship. You’re a genius at both.

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The Humble Lover by Edmund White is available via Bloomsbury.