Literary giant Edmund White talks exclusively
to Martin Flynn about books, sex and surviving with HIV
For
more than 30 years Edmund White has written about growing up and accepting
homosexuality, living the gay life and seeing his friends and lovers die from
Aids. His novels are eagerly awaited and avidly read - often in just one hand.
His work rate is phenomenal: 20-odd books, plays, fiction and non-fiction
from the Joy of Gay Sex in 1977 to the coming out classic A Boys Own Story
in 1983. Then there are the autobiographical novels chronicling gay life and
living with HIV in the 1980s and 1990s.
Edmund White’s witty prose and honest explanation of the highs and lows
of modern gay life have made him the number one author in the English language
for a whole generation of gay men. The presence of White’s novels on
another man’s bookshelves was clear identification of another friend
of Dorothy.
Survivors’ tales
White is part of a generation of gay men decimated by the disease in the 1980s
and early 1990s before any hope of effective treatment.
Like so many of us, he lost friends and lovers and experienced too much distress
and death too close, too young.
“I’ve been seropositive for a decade,” he dropped almost
as an aside into his 1998 autobiographical novel A Farewell Symphony. The
title refers to a piece by Joseph Haydn where, one by one, members of the
orchestra leave the stage until just one is left playing.
“I lost hundreds, virtually my whole generation, except the straight
ones. But a few survived,” he explains. “I belong to a writers
club called the Violet Quill and we were active in the late 70s and early
80s; of the seven members only three are still alive.”
Hard at it
This May Edmund White headlines at the Queer up North Festival in Manchester.
“I’m not sure what I’ll read. Maybe one of my stories from
Chaos. They’re really quite lively, I think. Very now.”
His play Terre Haute, about fellow author Gore Vidal at the execution of Oklahoma
bomber Timothy McVie, opens at the Trafalgar Theatre, London, in early May.
“McVie did invite Vidal to his execution. Gore didn’t go but I’m
pretending he did.
“Vidal was very nice about it. ‘It’s fine by me’,
he said, although I don’t think he approved of the politics or the way
I characterised him. But he’s been pretty big spirited about it.”
White is also publishing Hotel de Dream, a novel about the last days of American
writer Stephen Crane.
“I hope to flog it at the Edinburgh Festival,” White says. “Stephen
Crane was friends with Henry James, HG Wells and Joseph Conrad and they all
make little appearances.”
“He died at 28 of TB and I have him telling the story of meeting a male
prostitute, whereas in real life he loved female prostitutes and was actually
married to a girl who was a prostitute and wrote Maggie: A Girl of the Street,
which shocked the literary world.
“His friends convinced him that if he wrote another word it would destroy
his career. He did destroy the book in 1894, the year of the Oscar Wilde trial,
but I am pretending he did write it and dictated it to his wife.”
Chaos - a Novella and Stories, also new, is to be published around the world
but strangely not in Britain.
“It’s a lot about the problems of ageing and being gay.”
But writing is easy for a man who ghostwrote thousand-page history text books
while trying to make it as a writer in 1980s New York.
“It doesn’t seem very hard what I do. I think people make too
much of a fuss over writing. It’s not that hard. If you write a page
a day you’ve got a whole long book in a year.
“Even though I’d been in New York for ten years I wasn’t
very clever about finding well paid freelance work. I did a tremendous amount
of writing for miserable wages because I couldn’t find anything better.
“But I learned something about American history so I certainly learned
not to have any writer’s block.”
Forget me not
Is he still involved in campaigning about HIV and Aids?
“I write about it. I just attended the 25th anniversary of the Gay Men’s
Health Crisis. I was one of the six founders and Larry Kramer was there and
Hilary Clinton came and spoke.
“It was actually a very eerie and strange event for me because there
were a thousand people there for dinner, most of them in their 30s and 40s,
and most of them, I guess, heterosexual and dressed for power.
“But nobody knew who I was or that I had been the president of the organisation.
“It turns out if you live long enough you can return to the very organisation
you founded and nobody will know who you are.”
Sex
in the City
White writes with amusing and disarming honesty about his sex life, which
seems every bit as prolific and varied as his writing.
“What do I do for fun? Oh yeah, sex. I’m mad for sex. I love that.
It’s my main hobby.”
He writes about sex in a conversational way, without exaggeration, expletives
or invective. It is just part of his life; something to enjoy and laugh about.
“Themes of death and loss appear again and again in my writing. I had
a memoir out last year called My Lives and in it there’s quite a bit
about Aids.”
Every 30 pages or so there’s usually a sex scene set often in the back
room of a leather bar.
“That’s true. But I want to point out they’re never pornographic.
They’re never designed to arouse people. They’re actually meant
to be realistic.
“I think I write about sex in a way almost no one else does, which is
realistically and honestly. It’s designed to describe something going
on which is usually ignored. And it’s often very funny, before, during
and especially after the sex.”
HIV
in the novel
There should be a huge amount written about HIV in novels especially given
the number of bright gay writers around over the last 20 years?
“Alan Hollinghurst did it in Folding Star and again in his novel about
Thatcher’s London in the 1980s, The Line of Beauty. You can’t
get better than that.
“In America a lot of us started writing about HIV but many died. Allen
Barnett wrote The Body And Its Dangers but he died after that first book.
“There was David Feinberg who wrote Eighty-Sixed which was excellent
and very funny and sadly he died too.
“And then there’s the novels of Paul Monette, Andrew Holleran
and Felice Picano. So there’s actually been quite a few top writers
writing about HIV.
“My most direct book about Aids was probably The Married Man, a novel
about an affair I had with a French architect. He had been married when I
met him and within six months he found out he was HIV positive and really
quite ill already. So I nursed him for about four and a half years until he
died in Morocco.
“I’ve also written a lot of short stories which deal with HIV
and Aids one way or another. I wrote a book of short stories called Skinned
Alive which pretty much dealt with Aids. Then there’s A Farewell Symphony
in which I wanted it to show the hedonistic 1970s and then the gloomy 1980s
all mixed together.”
Writing
as revenge?
White says in A Farewell Symphony that “writing is a way of reasserting
the mastery of the ego”. Does he write to put things into perspective
or does he do it to get his own back?
“The process starts even before I start writing. I live my life as if
it’s a book. I observe things that are happening to me knowing that
I’ll write about them later.
“If a lover leaves me and I go crazy, burst into tears and have a nervous
breakdown, I’ll still be taking mental notes of what was said. In a
way, being the writer helps keep me sane.
“In my memoirs there’s a section called ‘My Master’
about an S&M relationship I had with a young man who left me and I completely
cracked up. It was only four or five years ago.
“I realised I had failed to take adequate notes in those situations
before in my life in my 20s. So I tried to be very accurate this time.”
“I don’t name people or name-drop. I’ve known a lot of famous
people but I don’t write about them or try and get revenge by writing
about people I’ve known.
“I don’t like name-dropping but I could do it if I liked. I have
known the Queen of Sweden, I have known the Queen of England. In fact I’ve
known quite a few different queens.
“Even when I say those things I get attacked as a snob and as a name-dropper
so there’s no way of winning in those circumstances as a writer.
“I wrote a very weird novel called Caracole which not many people read,
except one injured party. Susan Sontag decided I’d written a nasty portrait
of her, so we had a tremendous feud which went on for years. But we became
reconciled before she died.”
Safe sex works...
White writes a lot about two men together where one is HIV positive and the
other HIV negative. A lot of Positive Nation readers are in that situation.
What is his advice?
“I’d say that safe sex works. I don’t drink so I think if
you stay relatively sober and careful then safe sex works.
“I believe that oral sex probably doesn’t communicate HIV but
that’s my own opinion. And for anal sex a condom normally works OK unless
it breaks.
“I know many serodiscordant couples who’ve had sex for years and
they’ve remained that way.
“And I have lost partners to Aids. The one I wrote about in ‘The
Married Man’ died of Aids and I’ve had several partners die of
Aids. But I don’t think I gave it to them.”
Crystal meth
“I think the biggest single enemy of the gay community is crystal meth.
When people are addicted to it they throw caution entirely to the wind and
it gives them the power to have sex three or four days in a row. They don’t
seem to care at all about what happens to them.
“In America the rising rates of HIV infections among young gays are
almost all associated with crystal meth. So the real campaign should be against
crystal meth.
“The good news is that among the intravenous drug users the rate of
new infections is going down because of the disposable needle programme. It’s
a very simple solution and it works.
“Another bright spot is that very few HIV positive babies are now being
born. There were only 17 born in New York State last year and that’s
because they’ve learned to pump the mother full of antiretrovirals and
that keeps the mother from infecting the baby.
“The trauma and bleeding at birth is what often infects the baby but
the antiretrovirals can keep the baby from being infected.”
“All that is very different from what’s happening in Africa. In
Ethiopia there are over a million Aids orphans. My sister has started an Aids
orphanage in Addis Ababa and she runs the only adoption agency that places
HIV positive babies with families. It’s called Chances by Choice.
“When you’re 67 you think you’ve only got a few more years
and you have to think what you can do with it that only you can do. Even if
my writing’s only good or bad only I can do it.”
Message of hope...
Can he give a message of hope for the readers of Positive Nation?
“I think so. Obviously living with HIV is a constant worry and preoccupation.
You’re always adjusting your medications and you’re always trying
to deal with the bad side effects. But I think it’s no more difficult
than, say, diabetes which millions also live with their whole lives.
“It’s definitely a disease that can be coped with. And the longer
we survive the more medications will come on stream.”
• www.edmundwhite.com
• Edmund White will read at Queer up North in Manchester on 15 May at
7-30pm. www.queerupnorth.com
• Edmund White’s UK publisher is Bloomsbury Books. www.bloomsbury.com
