Conversations with Edmund White

229 Pages·2017·1.611 MB·English

by  Will Brantley (editor), Nancy McGuire Roche (editor)

Conversations with Edmund White
Literary Conversations Series
Monika Gehlawat
General Editor

Conversations with
Edmund White
Edited by Will Brantley and
Nancy McGuire Roche
University Press of Mississippi / Jackson
www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the
Association of American University Presses.
Copyright © 2017 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2017
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: White, Edmund, 1940– | Brantley, Will, editor. | Roche, Nancy McGuire,
editor.
Title: Conversations with Edmund White / edited by Will Brantley and Nancy
McGuire Roche.
Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2017. | Series:
Literary conversations series | Includes index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017017861 (print) | LCCN 2017033168 (ebook) | ISBN
9781496813565 (epub single) | ISBN 9781496813572 (epub institutional) |
ISBN 9781496813589 ( pdf single) | ISBN 9781496813596 (pdf institutional)
| ISBN 9781496813558 (hardback) | ISBN 9781496815057 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: White, Edmund, 1940–—Interviews. | Authors, American—20th
century—Interviews. | Gay authors—United States—Interviews. | Gay
men—United States—Interviews. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY /
Literary. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gay Studies.
Classification: LCC PS3573.H463 (ebook) | LCC PS3573.H463 Z48 2017 (print) |
DDC 813/.54 [B] —dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017017861
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
Books by Edmund White
Forgetting Elena. New York: Random House, 1973.
The Joy of Gay Sex: An Intimate Guide for Gay Men to the Pleasures of a Gay
Lifestyle. With Charles Silverstein. New York: Crown Books, 1977.
Nocturnes for the King of Naples. New York: St. Martin’s, 1978.
States of Desire: Travels in Gay America. New York: Dutton, 1980.
A Boy’s Own Story. New York: Dutton, 1982.
Caracole. New York: Dutton. 1985.
The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis. With Adam Mars-Jones. London: Faber & Faber, 1987.
The Beautiful Room Is Empty. New York: Random House, 1988.
Genet: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1993.
The Burning Library: Essays. Ed. David Bergman. New York: Knopf, 1994.
Our Paris: Sketches from Memory. With Hubert Sorin. New York: Knopf, 1995.
Skinned Alive: Stories. New York: Knopf, 1995.
The Farewell Symphony. New York: Knopf, 1997.
Marcel Proust. New York: Viking, 1999.
The Married Man. New York: Knopf, 2000.
The Flâneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris. New York: Bloomsbury, 2001.
Fanny: A Fiction. New York: Ecco, 2003.
Arts and Letters. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2004.
My Lives: A Memoir. New York: Ecco, 2006.
Chaos: A Novella and Stories. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007.
Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel. New York: Ecco, 2007.
Terra Haute. London: Methuen Drama, 2007.
Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel. New York: Atlas & Co., 2008.
City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009.
Sacred Monsters. New York: Magnus Books, 2011.
Jack Holmes and His Friend. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012.
Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Our Young Man. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.

Contents
Introduction ix
Chronology xvii
PW Interviews: Edmund White 3
William Goldstein / 1982
An Interview with Edmund White 7
Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory / 1985
Edmund White: The Art of Fiction 105 26
Jordan Elgrably / 1988
An Interview with Edmund White 49
Kay Bonetti / 1989
Paris Interview with Edmund White 63
Dawn-Michelle Baude / 1991
From the Stonewall to The Burning Library:
Interview with Edmund White 68
Ryan Prout / 1994
The Day That Edmund White Kissed Me 78
Greg Johnston / 1995
Edmund White in Conversation 93
Mark Ford / 1996
Edmund White 101
Ron Hogan / 1997
vii
viii Contents
Edmund White: The Man Who Wrote The Married Man 108
Christopher Matthew Hennessy / 2001
The Sensual Part of Beauty Is the Wound 117
Chris Freeman / 2003
AIDS, Arts, and Responsibilities: An Interview with Edmund White 123
Mark Mascolini / 2005
Line of Beauty: Laurie Taylor Interviews Edmund White 133
Laurie Taylor / 2005
Edmund White: Hotel de Dream 139
Michael Leonard / 2007
Poetry as a “Disordering of the Senses” 145
Michael Ehrhardt / 2009
New York City Boy: A Conversation with Edmund White 152
Richard Canning / 2009
An Interview with Edmund White 158
Carlos Motta / 2011
Interview: Edmund White 173
Patrick Ryan / 2012
Edmund White: Invention, Imagination, and Memory 177
Frank Pizzoli / 2012
Q&A with Edmund White 184
Jon Wiener / 2014
The Art of Being Edmund White: A Capstone Interview 187
Will Brantley and Nancy McGuire Roche / 2016
Index 199
Introduction
Readers acquainted with the writing of Edmund White already know a
great deal about his life. White’s fiction is often autobiographical, and he is
the author of three celebrated memoirs in addition to many self-reflective
essays on other artists and cultural trends. White is also a noted raconteur
who has used interviews to promote his work and vision and to engage in
dialogue with readers. Hence the value of a collection such as this one.
For those readers who are interested in sexuality, White has chronicled
gay culture as it has taken shape since the Stonewall uprising of 1969. For
many readers, White’s collected works have come to define an era. Gore
Vidal may have been the central gay American writer in the years before
gay liberation, as Christopher Bram argues in Eminent Outlaws: The Gay
Writers Who Changed America, but Edmund White has occupied that posi-
tion since the 1970s.1
“If you had to write a PhD thesis on the works of Edmund White, what
would it be about?” This flattering question was posed to White at the end
of an interview in 1994. Although he generally resists a coherent summary
of his work, White replied that the thesis would be “about somebody who
was subjected to a tension arising from two very different sets of expecta-
tions: one set came from a literary community that wasn’t particularly gay-
identified and the other came from a gay community that wasn’t particularly
literary. I think the tension has been a fruitful one and an unusual one for a
writer.” White added that it wasn’t until Vladimir Nabokov praised his first
published novel, Forgetting Elena (1973), that people began to take notice of
his work, even people who had no interest in homosexuality.2
White is, of course, more than just a celebrated gay writer; he is an inter-
national man of letters with a body of work that spans five decades and
crosses several genres. White’s fiction includes a well-known autobiograph-
ical trilogy—A Boy’s Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988),
and The Farewell Symphony (1997)—along with collections of short stories
and more recent novels such as Jack Holmes and His Friend (2012) and Our
Young Man (2016). For most of the 1980s and 1990s White lived in France.
ix