Men Without Women: 

Edmund White’s Trilogy — A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony

By Lee Andrew Weiss

I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.

Philip Roth, Deception.

… Because in autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe…

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

1.
            Of writers of his generation, Edmund White’s reputation is among the least settled. With his 1973 debut, Forgetting Elena, White was acclaimed by Vladimir Nabokov, notoriously ungenerous as a critic, as “one of the American writers he most admired.” Since then, after eight novels, a variety of non-fiction projects he has either penned or edited, a collection of short stories and two of essays, a recent autobiography, a long biography of Jean Genet and a short one of Marcel Proust, White remains a polarizing figure.
Blurbed by many of the leading poets and fiction-writers of the last few decades, there have also been numerous negative reviews: pans, misreadings, a willingness to pigeonhole and castigate his work—and not just whichever work is being reviewed, but his entire oeuvre.

While White’s fiction presents a trove for the literary-criticism contingent of academia, he has not yet been embraced by those circles; similarly, despite the commercial success of A Boy’s Own Story, his subsequent efforts have largely been neglected by a general readership. Much of this is no doubt due to his frankness, especially in his graphic depictions of homosexuality. However, to ignore White’s gifts for this reason—for any reason—is criminal. There are so few writers capable of anything comparable to his eyeopening fiction: stories where memory haunts and vivifies; stories that at their best seamlessly blend the actual with artifice; stories that masquerade as memoir—that are manipulated memoir, calling into question the subjective boundary between fact and fabrication. In these ways, White is an heir to Proust, Colette, Celine, Genet, and Isherwood, and also to the confessional poetry of Lowell and Merrill.

If one of the pleasures of fiction is gaining glimpse of (or an extended visit into) inaccessible or undescribed ways of life, White is as good a guide as a reader could hope for. He has at length depicted what was neglected or undocumented, providing his readers with further evidence of human motivation, the inexorable draw of vice, the difference between the public, private, and interior self; he has expanded the accepted definition of what humans are and do. Even at his most graphic, White’s descriptions aren’t gratuitous—they are tethered to emotion, memory, grasping at the idea of love or its absence in relation to physical pleasure and intimacy. His writing is lyrical, his characterizations compelling, his powers of observation and attention for detail first-rate; but most importantly, he is a great storyteller, and even in his largely plotless trilogy: A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony, autobiographical novels that are the best of his books, the reader partakes in adventures of wild excess, several decades of life crammed with incredible experiences, shared by an often depressed, constantly questioning, fiercely intelligent, overtly hypersexual narrator, and the many whose lives are entwined with his.

White himself has led an experience-dense, unconventional life for a man of letters, which at least in part accounts for the uniqueness of his fiction. His writing is undoubtedly the product of a man who has lived. The author of eight novels, until the publication of A Boy’s Own Story in1982, he was probably best known for two non-fiction works: co-author of a manual, The Joy of Gay Sex, and of a first person account of his experiences in gay communities throughout the United States, States of Desire: Travels in Gay America. An insightful critic of Nabokov, James Merrill, William Gass, Roland Barthes, George Eliot, Ivan Bunin, and Thomas Pynchon, it is in his “autofiction,” his curious blend of mirror and manipulation that he’s made his most remarkable contribution. Not for inventing the form: confessional writing is old as self-expression, and many great books (and countless lesser ones) use the self and the solipsistic mode as a starting place. It is in the elegance of White’s style and the freshness of his approach, his analysis of the past and it’s implications on the present, his coupling of “high” and “low” culture, the social and the personal, the intellectual and the sexual, that he has transcended the conventions of the form, and left his footprint.
A graduate of the University of Michigan where he majored in Chinese, he moved to New York City in the early 1960s, wrote for Time-Life Inc. for nearly a decade, and then was an editor at two national cultural periodicals. Winner of the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award for Genet: A Biography, White has taught at Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Yale, and Brown Universities, lived the better part of sixteen years in Paris, where while writing his fiction and Genet, he was an editor for the American edition of Vogue magazine and a translator (French into English) of Milan Kundera. He returned to the United States in 1999, when he began in his current capacity as director of the creative writing program at Princeton University.
           

Born into an affluent Cincinnati family in 1940, White’s parents divorced when he was seven. After, he lived mostly with his older sister and stifling, overaffectionate mother with occasional visits to his remarried, emotionally distant father. It is in a parallel of these years that the unnamed narrator of A Boy’s Own Story begins his tale.           

2.
            Like his first two novels, the slim, baroque, dreamlike Forgetting Elena, and Nocturne for the King of Naples, White’s third, A Boy’s Own Story, is a first person account of an unnamed narrator. Like À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (and many novels since), it is the recollection of a older writer of his younger self, and of the world that shaped him; like Proust’s long work, A Boy’s Own Story is not organized chronologically, but by associations and shifts through time. Similarly, both Proust’s and White’s narrators are close with their mothers and distanced from their fathers; both are flattering to the face of others while internally judgmental; both have their hearts broken and hardened by jealousy and unrequited love.(1) A Boy’s Own Story begins in the mid-1950s, with the narrator a boy of fifteen, lonely and book-obsessed, home from his first year of boarding school, at his father’s summer house, off Lake Michigan. There the narrator relates the details of a midnight ride he takes with his nocturnal, workaholic father in their Chris-Craft powerboat. Joining them are his father’s acquaintance Mr. Cork, and Cork’s sons Kevin and Peter, both younger than the narrator. The narrator informs us of this social-world: White is among other things a novelist of manners, and the reader learns quickly of the narrator’s Cadillac-driving, classical-music loving, tailor-made suit wearing, cigar-smoking father, who regards guests “as nuisances,” and is less than pleased with his “sissy” son. The Cork’s are social climbers, especially Mrs. Cork; as the Corks and the narrator’s father and stepmother carouse above, down in the basement, “right under the noses of these boring old grown-ups,” the athletic twelve year-old Kevin questions the narrator about girls and sex. From the narrator’s fabricated stories of his female conquests, Kevin is sufficiently convinced of the narrator’s manliness. Kevin asks the narrator if he’s ever done what the guys in his neighborhood back home do all the time: “We all cornhole each other. You ever do that?” “Sure.” “What?” “I said sure.” “Guess you’ve outgrown that by now.” “Well, yeah, but since there aren’t any girls around…”
 

Through the next few nights they alternate—giving and receiving. To Kevin it is no big deal—he in no way sees it as a gay thing to do, though he is disgusted when the narrator attempts to kiss him. Kevin’s feelings change the afternoon the narrator feels he has given himself away: “Somehow—but at what precise moment?—I had shown I was a sissy; I replayed a moment here, a moment there of the past days, in an attempt to locate the exact instant I’d betrayed myself.” He cannot recall the moment, but from then on, in the narrator’s eyes their friendship is changed (though their nights together continue). Soon the Corks, drunken and destructive, wear out their welcome and leave.
            In this first chapter, and the pages that follow, the reader is introduced to the major themes of A Boy’s Own Story: coming of age, attempting to come to terms with homosexuality, experimenting with sexual partners and practices, and experiencing the push-pull of a suffocating mother and a distant father. It is the story of every adolescence: trying to fit in and stand out, be popular, win the approval of an older sibling and parents, and also establish his independence from them. But it is also a story unique to a boy of high intelligence, precocious reading habits, strong libido, a manipulative nature, and an overactive imagination; a boy who wants not to be gay, but deeply enjoys the pleasure he experiences with men—until each encounter ends and a wave of guilt and shame overtakes him.
           

The novel progresses in an episodic manner. In succession the narrator learns the thoughts and impressions the narrator held in his younger years, and sometimes, how they affect him now in adulthood. Vivid, shocking happenings are followed with abrupt transitions in topic and tone. The summer before Kevin, while working for his father before leaving for prep school, the narrator earns enough money to buy a male hustler. His popular older sister who “tormented” him; he “loved and feared” her. In earlier childhood, often lonely and solitary years, the narrator was close with three imaginary friends. His mother, after her divorce struggles with respectability (a good address, the right clothes, failed attempts to meet another man) as their, “fortunes teetered and careened and ground to a halt.” He blames his mother and his sister for causing him to be homosexual.

Continually the reader is introduced to new people whom the narrator recalls as touchstones of specific points in his life: Fred and Marilyn, an older couple he meets in a bookstore who guides his reading habits, and introduce him to a male German tutor whom the narrator longs for; Tom, a close friend and crush, one of the most popular boys in his public school, who sets him up with Helen Paper, the most popular and beautiful girl in school. The narrator desperately desires Helen—he believes her his last chance to be straight. When she rejects his advances he is dejected, crazed; determined to work past his problems, he asks to be sent to boarding school.
            Attending a Midwestern boarding school, a hodgepodge with the borrowed name Eton, he begins meeting thrice weekly with a psychiatrist, John Thomas O’Reilly, a white-haired, mustachioed quack who is supposed to cure the narrator of his homosexual urges. Not a Freudian (or a good listener), “he quite cheerfully broadcast his wisdom by spilling handfuls into fertile minds he himself had furrowed.”
            At Eton, the narrator meets Chuck, (based upon White’s classmate, novelist Thomas McGuane) “a gangly, pimply popular guy with a gift for gab and the ambition to be a writer like Hemingway.” Smart, hard drinking, promiscuously heterosexual, and reckless, he makes an interesting companion and friend for the narrator. He also befriends Mr. and Mrs. Scott—DeQuincey and Rachel, teachers at Eton, poets for whom the narrator occasionally baby-sits; he takes part in a threesome with them in which he is basically passive—“as it ended up, he mounted her while I stroked her face”—an unclothed observer of the Scott’s sexual encounter.
            Finally, the narrator is able to seduce and betray an adult, a teacher at Eton named Mr. Beattie. Masquerading as a, “guardian of public morality,” he turns Mr. Beattie in to the Eton headmaster, tipping the school off on Mr. Beattie’s marijuana stash. Then he seduces Mr. Beattie, a married man and a father, proudly feeling like a Rimbaud to Mr. Beattie’s Verlaine, thrilled to have caused so much trouble. It is a chilling end to the novel, as this boy proudly brings down a teacher who meant him no harm. As an explanation for his actions, the narrator writes,
I’d never spoken out against anyone before. Would his wife and children go hungry? Would he ever find another job? Never before had I wielded so much power over an adult man; the power excited and scared me

Pages later the narrator writes:

Sometimes I think I seduced and betrayed Mr. Beattie because neither one action nor the other alone but the complete cycle allowed me to have sex with a man and then to disown him and it; this sequence was the ideal formation of my impossible desire to love a man but not be homosexual. Sometimes I think I liked bringing pleasure to a heterosexual man (for after all I’d dreamed of being my father’s lover) at the same time I was able to punish him for not loving me. My German teacher and Mr. Pouchet had not loved me. Tommy had not loved me. My dad had not loved me.

Beattie was a friend of sorts, or at least an accomplice, but he was also a stand-in for all other adults, those swaggering, lazy, cruel masters of ours…

With this description, the boy sheds another skin of innocence, his sadistic happiness a byproduct of continued sadness and frustration. Just the next summer he has his nightly encounters not with another adult, but with twelve year-old Kevin Cork. The reader wonders: what will this boy grow up to be?

3.        
            The Beautiful Room is Empty takes its title from a letter from Kafka to his friend Milena Ješenská in which he describes the inability of two individuals spatially close to one another, who cannot find a way to connect. The narrator is now in his third year at Eton boarding school, deeply involved with the students of an art academy just down the road, especially with a girl named Maria becomes a lifelong friend. The creative energy and alternative-mindedness of students at the academy energize the narrator to continue toward his goal of becoming a published writer.
            The novel ends in the summer of 1969 with the Stonewall Uprising in Greenwich Village. In between characters pass in and out of the narrator’s life, first at Eton, then at the University of Michigan, and finally in his post-college years in New York City. Quick-moving and seemingly formless, within these pages the narrator takes on friendship, sexual encounters, and development as a writer as his three major themes. He bonds and sleeps with Maria, and later with Lou, his first real relationship, whom he meets in Chicago; both end up living not far from him in New York City. He discovers and frequents the toilets in the student union and elsewhere on campus where he (and numerous other anonymous men) perform fellatio on any man willing to offer himself under a stall, predecessor to his experiences of anonymous group sex in the bathhouses and gay clubs of New York City. Drinking Drambuie with a Puccini or Bartók record playing in the background he reads and writes though the night as his “lights burned their way into the dawn.” The narrator’s three themes mix into one in passages like this:

At first I’d feel lonely, afraid, itchy, very afraid to go on with my story, afraid it wasn’t any good, afraid is was terrific and I was about to spoil it, afraid it was better than I understood and I would never know how to equal it again, afraid it was cold, repellent, inhuman, and my friends would see through me and realize I wasn’t such a nice guy after all.

I’d jump up, pace the room, get halfway down the fire escape in search of the third sexual partner of the night—and then this partial retreat would calm me sufficiently so that I could pick up the signal my page was faintly beeping… … Some afternoons, after twenty hours of writing, reading, drinking Drambuie, playing my twelve records, and hectoring and praising myself , I’d stagger into the union…

Sex and friendship are often intertwined for the narrator, and, intimating the widespread and devastating AIDS epidemic to come in The Farewell Symphony, White writes, “Anyone who ever let me into his body or arms I still feel grateful to. That’s why so many of my friends are old lovers, I suppose. And that includes, these days, dying and dead friends as well, to whom the flesh, my flesh, still connects me.”

The Beautiful Room is Empty is the most stylistically taut novels of the trilogy. It is also the happiest. Aside from the narrator’s suffering from the unrequited love of Sean whom he meets in New York, and which passes quickly from these pages (only to return with renewed intensity in The Farewell Symphony), the letdowns the narrator faces are inevitably cushioned with comedy. As in Colette or Isherwood, the tone of the writing is lyrical and playful. Even the culmination at Stonewall is portrayed in this manner: the protestors’ slogan is “Gay is good,”—a parody of “Black is beautiful,” and one of the marchers refers to the group as the “Pink Panthers,” as they form a chorus line and can-can down Christopher and Gay Streets in Greenwich Village.

Rarely in The Beautiful Room is Empty does White force a metaphor or extend one too far; rarely does he make bad pun or write in cliché as he occasionally does in the first and last books of the trilogy. As in much of Philip Roth’s trilogy Zuckerman Bound, in terms of plot points, not a lot happens, in the Beautiful Room is Empty, but everything that does is so emotionally honest, so interesting and entertaining that the reader’s experience is overwhelmingly pleasurable.