Critical empathy

Edmund WHITE’S 39 reviews, interviews and essays collected in “Arts and Letters” are a shocking display of friendliness, optimism, openness and tact. Psychology, academic criticism and simple prurience have convinced us that the truth about creative minds is to be found in whatever they are unwilling to divulge about themselves. Critics are supposed to be critical. White, by contrast, warns us not to expect an interrogator-journalist. “Not all the people in this book are on easy terms with their sexuality and as a consequence I’ve not always dwelled on it.”

The novelist and cultural critic tells grim tales of growing up in 1950s America, when “no gay man, no matter how clever, had found a way to like himself.” White writes that he struggled to “cure” his homosexuality “with a weird psychiatrist” and that clandestinely gay editors refused to publish his novels lest they were thought to be homosexual. His “ultraconservative Republican” father was sarcastic about his son’s prize-winning play, “The Blueboy in Black”: “ ‘What’s it about -- the usual?’, which was his way of referring to a gay theme.”

White makes life as a gay man seem an ideal preparation for life as a writer. Since no gay man could talk openly about his adventures, they had to be transformed into plausible fiction. Real men would have to be turned into imaginary women “and one had to have a detailed and capacious memory to keep track of all the lies one had invented, often on the spur of the moment,” he writes. Still, gay life was liberating even before the gay liberation movement. It proved that human existence need not possess the claustrophobic coherence of a 19th century novel.

White’s association of artistic modernity with the quiet heroism of gay life is a triumph of sympathy and cheerfulness. It is easy to forget that he spent 16 years writing in Paris, a refugee from “American isolationism and self-absorption.” “In our day,” he writes in a 1995 essay on Djuna Barnes, “American fiction has become monosyllabic, regional and catatonic.” Contemporary criticism, he suggested the same year, is more concerned with the po-faced intellectual doodling known to its academic exponents as “playfulness” than with setting the record straight and changing the reader’s mind. It is no coincidence that many of the writers and artists who elicit his sympathy also spent much of their lives in voluntary exile: Paul Bowles (“one of the keenest observers of other civilizations we have ever had in America”), Bruce Chatwin (who never allowed his “enthralling” tales to be ruined by the truth) and Christopher Isherwood, who was “the closest thing to a saint I’ve ever met.”

This sympathetic approach is just as provocative now as in 1846 when poet Charles Baudelaire urged critics to stop criticizing and start appreciating: “Isn’t it more original to look at people from their good side?” White associates this openness with his gay “fellow travelers,” especially Allen Ginsberg, who, he says, “possessed in abundance the gift of appreciation.” He found it, too, in Chatwin, who made love to him a few seconds after meeting him for the first time, and in the young American writer who was introduced to him by Ginsberg. A few days later, the young writer turned up on White’s Paris doorstep completely naked: “I felt my life was being touched just this once by the sort of lyrical good luck that Ginsberg must have enjoyed every day.”

This happy promiscuity is, by White’s account, an essentially American characteristic. He describes himself as a typical Midwesterner, “routinely more fond of sunny unanimity and easygoing optimism than anything more controversial.” This desire for peace and unanimity leads him to defend some unfashionably pleasant aspects of the modern novel -- “loyalty, innocence or happiness, especially family happiness” in James Baldwin and a “tradition of tender sensuality” in Vladimir Nabokov. It also makes him atypically critical of some of the great gay icons: the foolish Oscar Wilde, the sadistic Andre Gide, and Andy Warhol, whose “coolness and ... apparent indifference ... made him both the prophet and exemplar of our cold epoch.”

Four interviews with famous personalities -- Yves Saint Laurent, Catherine Deneuve, David Geffen and Elton John -- are less engaging, because there is less of White in them. But even here, he shows that courtesy and compassion cut to the quick more effectively than journalistic bullying and nosiness. In the eyes of a novelist, a photogenic surface can be just as revealing as a confession: Elton John “has a funny, knock-kneed way of walking, almost as though he’s a wind-up doll which has been overwound and sent heading for the top of the stairs -- there’s something reckless and unreflecting and determined about every movement he makes.”

This “overly polite journalist” is curiously reminiscent of the first-person narrator of White’s autobiographical novels, described in the opening essay of “Arts and Letters”: “Whereas in real life I had been bizarrely brazen (or perhaps driven) sexually, and just as unpleasantly precocious intellectually, in the fictional derivation from my life I could make my stand-in shy and not outstanding in any way. In short, I could make him much more likable.” Perhaps it takes a shy, gay Midwesterner to dream up so unlikely a character: a critic who wants to be liked and who treats his subjects as lovers rather than as criminals. *