Most commonly if somewhat arguably known as “America’s pre-eminent gay writer,” Edmund White has also become one of America’s pre-eminent men of letters. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and an officer of France’s Order of Arts and Letters. He is the author of 13 story collections and novels, including his highly regarded trilogy of autobiographical fictions; four memoirs; nine works of nonfiction, including biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud; and a play, Terre Haute, which presents an imagined encounter between Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and a character bearing a strong resemblance to Gore Vidal, who himself seems to have regarded White as a competitor, once exclaiming to an editor they shared, “You want me to die” so that White would become what might be termed, to put it more politely than Vidal did, King Homosexual.
Of course, Vidal famously refused to identify as gay, despite his authorship of The City and the Pillar, one of the first modern gay-themed novels, and his 53-year relationship with Howard Austen. White, however, has taken contemporary gay life as his primary and recurring subject, illuminating a culture, as he has noted, that was “oppressed in one generation, liberated in the next and wiped out in the next.”
This culture is also the subject of White’s new novel, Our Young Man, which is set largely in 1970s and ‘80s New York City and Fire Island. It chronicles the life of a gorgeous, ageless French model, Guy, whose “more ironic and cultured friends called him, as the dying Proust had been called by Colette, ‘our young man.’ ”
Discovered at 17 while on a church trip to Paris from his impoverished home in the industrial city of Clermont-Ferrand, which he longs to leave for a brighter world, Guy is an immediate success, starting out in a runway show for Pierre Cardin, after which he finds his face “splashed all over Paris.”
For 10 years, before moving to New York in 1980, just before the advent of AIDS, he’s “the darling of Paris,” an earnest and even oftentimes naive Dorian Gray whose scouting agent tells him that he’s “universally liked” because he’s a “black hole in space,” a beautiful creature onto whom “everyone projects . . . what they’re looking for,” which is easy to do because he doesn’t “stand for anything definite.”
It’s in New York that White’s novel comes most alive, even if Guy remains indistinct to both himself and the reader, defined far more by his perfected beauty – which induces in him a deep melancholy, as well as an awareness of “how brief his perfection would be” – than by any sustained and revelatory dimensionality.
White’s 1980s New York City, however, is given shape by his attentive homages to such places as Studio 54 and the BDSM bar and sex club the Mineshaft, as well as by his frequent imagined cameos with such celebrity icons as Halston, Liza Minnelli, Andy Warhol, Bruce Weber, Richard Avedon and the legendary model Dovima, whom Avedon once photographed standing in a Dior dress between a brace of circus elephants.
As for Guy’s New York life, he finds himself the object of the attentions of older, wealthy men, such as the lovelorn Fred, “a fat man in a sports jacket” who leaves his family and comes out at 66 and who sleeps with Guy only once before buying him a house on Fire Island; or the grotesque, masochistic and vindictive Belgian baron, with his “terrible old body” and his “ancien regime French,” who gives Guy a Mercedes 450SEL and a house in Greenwich Village in order to “switch his butt” and take a turn in his dungeon.
These lives make for heady stuff, lived as they are in the shadow of AIDS and told by a narrator who is as arch as he is knowing – un peu blase, as the French would say.
But Our Young Man is not without its disappointments and failures. The novel’s sex scenes, for instance, too often recall those in Gordon Merrick’s overwrought 1970 gay novel, The Lord Won’t Mind, in which there’s quite a lot of what one might think of as men erotically brandishing their gleaming swords. In addition, White’s prose is sometimes so worked up and strained as to become comic, as when he describes a man “drawn” to another man’s member “like a sunflower to the sun.” One often wishes that in this novel about beauty and surfaces, White – to paraphrase Grace Paley – would punch more holes through the surface and down into the darkness below.
Still, even with this novel’s flaws, White remains an important writer in both his fictional and confessional tales of his own fraught era. Unlike, for instance, Vidal – who said almost nothing about HIV and AIDS, despite pleadings from his nephew Hugh, who died of AIDS – White’s great achievement lies in his never holding back.