BOOK REVIEW / ESSAYS : An Attempt to Fathom His Identity, That of His World : THE BURNING LIBRARY: Essays By Edmund White, <i> Edited by David Bergman</i> , Alfred A. Knopf,$25, 386 pages

David Bergman, the editor of this collection of Edmund White’s essays, writes in the introduction that he was told by one of White’s old friends, “Don’t trust anything Ed says.” Bergman goes on to stress the appreciations of irresponsibility--sexual and social as well as aesthetic--to be found here, primarily in White’s appraisals of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and pop singer Prince. At one point Bergman even proposes, coyly, that readers of White’s essays “must expect to be betrayed.”

Edmund White--best known as a novelist and biographer of playwright and author Jean Genet--does flout cultural conventions in “The Burning Library,” usually while celebrating the homosexual lifestyle of the 1970s and early 1980s, but it’s disingenuous to imply irresponsibility is one of his major themes.

White doesn’t proselytize for homosexuality, or engage in hetero-bashing, or mock Americans for their sexual conservatism, or advocate free love in the age of AIDS, or suggest medical science devote itself exclusively to seeking a cure for the disease. Most of “The Burning Library” is in fact strikingly traditional, a writer’s attempt to fathom his own identity and that of the subculture in which he works and lives.

If the writer’s highest task is to seek transcendent truths, White takes that responsibility very seriously; as he writes in the book’s final essay, “The Personal Is Political,” writers are “at their best when exploring themes about which they themselves are of two minds. . . . in which the writer sinks a probe into a question that is difficult to resolve but urgent to consider.”

White was born in Cincinnati in 1940 and now resides, HIV positive, in Paris. That simple sentence indicates the extended arc of his life, and also why a collection of his essays could be organized only chronologically; the modern gay experience has compressed centuries of experience into a handful of decades, for as White wrote in the 1987 Artforum essay “Aesthetics and Loss,” gays were “oppressed in the 1950s, freed in the 1960s, exalted in the 1970s and wiped out in the 1980s.” This volume includes articles touching on each of those periods, and were it not for White’s distinctive, sensible, compelling voice, you’d have a hard time believing they were written by the same person.

In the 1950s, White at first resisted his homosexual cravings, being “horrified at myself” and hoping that religion, and then psychoanalysis, would cure him of unsettling urges. By the 1960s he was fully “out,” comfortable with, if not proud of, his sexuality and ripe for politicization; in one previously unpublished essay he lambastes Time magazine for a horrifying 1966 article calling homosexuality “a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality” and a “pernicious sickness.” The 1970s seemed, for a time, a golden era; White co-wrote “The Joy of Gay Sex,” published novels with gay protagonists, and indulged in sex, anonymous and otherwise, across the globe. In the 1970s one could, I suppose, legitimately charge White with championing irresponsibility, for in the articles of this decade he seems to enjoy casually shocking straight readers, and perhaps arousing gay ones, with descriptions of sexual encounters generally considered beyond the pale.

Even when delving into gay promiscuity and practice, however, White is never prurient, for his descriptions consistently serve a broader theme. White, for good reason, doesn’t want to be perceived as a spokesman (let alone spokesperson) for gay culture, but he is perhaps its most brilliant explicator, for time and again in “The Burning Library” he tries to untangle the origins of gay conduct, tease out its impulse toward self-examination, decipher its meanings and consequences.

In “Sado Machismo,” published in New Times in 1979, he examines the attractions and politics and displacements of the leather world; in “Paradise Found,” he compares gay men in the United States to banyan trees, able to draw support and sustenance through a wide web of relationships rather than the single taproot of marital monogamy; in “Sexual Culture” he goes further, suggesting that heterosexual conventions can be limiting--that gays, “masters of improvisation, fully at home with the arbitrary, and equipped with an internal compass that orients them instantly to any social novelty, are perhaps the most sensitive indicators of the future.”

“Paradise Found” and “Sexual Culture” appeared in 1983 in Mother Jones and Vanity Fair, respectively, and showed White joining the literary mainstream just as gay culture was coming out, and into, its own. Then terror struck in the form of AIDS, and you can be sure that White takes no satisfaction from the fact that his star has continued to ascend while that of the gay community itself has been eclipsed.

AIDS is a shadowy specter in “The Burning Library,” for although White publishes much more literary criticism than social commentary, his reflections on AIDS are uncommonly thoughtful. Other writers show the necessary anger and pain: White, by contrast, notes the urge “to record one’s own past--one’s own life--before it vanishes,” the paradox that AIDS has made homosexuality “a much more familiar part of the American landscape,” the parallels between gay literature in the 1990s and literature of the Holocaust, of exile, of prison life. White’s observations about AIDS are all the more powerful for being infrequent and understated.

In a 1988 interview first published in the Paris Review and reprinted here, White says something very telling about his writing standards. “When the sentences get longer and more ornate,” he said, “and there’s more and more sensuous detail, that’s when I’m writing happily or well. When the sentences get shorter, clearer, more pure or classical, then I’m not enjoying the book and neither is the reader.”

That’s an accurate description in many ways--with the caveat that the prose White disparages as merely “classical” is beyond the ability of many published, popular writers. White, at his worst, is a fine craftsman; at his best he obliterates stereotypes, illuminates the idiosyncratic, and remains fully conscious that “art is sacred and shouldn’t be compromised by mere ambition.”