My Lives: An Autobiography (2005)

Gay lives today, at least in most western democracies, have lost their heroic dimension. Bravery and originality are less evident in a culture of general acceptance, and in London, Paris or New York we are so unignorable as to have become unremarkable. That gay life has a complex, brilliant and tragic history seems often unknown to gay men born, as it were, after the war, when many rights had been won, and the terror of Aids contained. Edmund White is sometimes called a chronicler of that history, since his autobiographical novels have described a gay life closely bound up in the slow progress from repression through liberation to the catastrophe of Aids and on into a survivor's world of revised expectations. But "chronicle" is a dull and misleading word to describe his intensely personal books, which embody his conviction that homosexuality entails a redefinition of love, dismantling received ideas about "the couple, manhood, love and sexual roles", and freeing the gay novelist to write about "a big fresh genuine subject" in often quirkily original ways. It is this originality that gives White's novels both their psychological urgency and their languorous charm.


In My Lives he has turned to autobiography in a comparably inventive way. It is such a vital and engrossing book because White has evidently written in it precisely what he wanted to write. He has a luxuriantly observant memory, and his past is evoked with keen feeling as well as a pervasive self-deprecating wit. The book is arranged not chronologically but by subject: "My Shrinks", "My Hustlers", "My Friends" and so on. There is no dutiful résumé, and wide areas of his life and achievements go undescribed. It has no chapters called "My Work", in any of the senses of that word; it is difficult for a writer to discuss his own writing without showing off, and My Lives is the least boastful of autobiographies.

If his homosexuality is the governing theme, the sexual impulse itself is the animating principle. The book turns on the illuminating paradox of homosexuality being a struggle, a source, at different times of his life, of "terrible pain", as well as the most irresistible natural compulsion. White calls himself a "sex-addict" who has "never failed to act on my erotic impulses", and it is integral to his personality as a writer that the compulsion to tell has been as strong, in its way, as the compulsion to act. There is nothing furtive or titillating about his memoir. He may speak of his "few heterosexual readers" but his book is based on the premise of the intrinsic human interest of gay sexual behaviour, as well as that of his own very particular sexual psychology. As with other kinds of addiction, the compulsion is not concerned always, or even primarily, with pleasure, but rather with the satisfaction of its own mechanisms, the constantly renewed state of anxiety and anticipation.

The chapter "My Blonds", about earlier love-affairs, has a certain vagueness of romance to it; but it is in "My Master", about a much more recent episode, that White has written the most remarkable chapter in a career dedicated to sexual truth-telling. It describes his masochistic relationship, in his early 60s, with an actor in his 20s, called here T, and it is written with what at first seems reckless candour. "TMI!" he imagines a friend saying. Too much information - about just what T did to him and just what he did to, or rather for, T. The record of the affair, the routines, the tensions, the dream-like advances into new sexual possibilities, "arbitrary and drenched with emotion", is built up with a steady insistence; and it works, as a narrative, it compels and alarms, because of its completely authentic subjectivity: everything we learn of T is coloured by White's adoring advocacy of a young man whose charm, we can't help feeling, may be largely a thing of his own imagination. The self-prostration of the older slave finds a fascinating counterpart in the self-exposure of the memoirist, and the objections we might feel to sexual bragging are undercut when what is bragged of is a kind of abjection.

For White sex is a primary mystery, but he can see the funny side of it. He is funny about S&M and the inconvenient disjunctions of fantasy from normal day-to-day life: ordered by a "master" on a website to relocate to Cleveland and live in a cage for the rest of his life, he thinks: "But I must finish my semester at Princeton, then there's Rome in June and Provence in July ..." When a 29-year-old Latvian commands him to eat biscuits from a bowl and have a dog's tail permanently attached to his backside, White thinks "that sounded tempting", before more practical considerations intervene ("These men are serious"). White is serious too, but he is "a masochist who doesn't like pain", and when T starts to close the relationship down the comedy dries up with the rapture. What follows is an account, more naked than the sexual descriptions that precede it, of the two months that White calls "the most lacerating of my life". As a young man, he says, "my sense of self could survive rejection since it was built on it"; but at 64 he finds the burden much greater: "He made me feel I'd crossed that terrible line into old age." No other writer of White's eminence has described his sexual life with such purposeful clarity. So unusual is it that one feels in writing about it a challenge to the norms of what one can say about the private life of a living writer.

This chapter is so strong and so unforgettable that it risks eclipsing others that are equally fine but quite different from it. "My Father" and "My Mother" are masterpieces of a complex, and often difficult, kind of portraiture, in which the personality and history of the writer are also intimately involved. They confront the currents of desire and disgust that run between parents and children, young Edmund's longing to be seduced and penetrated by his father, his suppressed revulsion at having to strap his mother, who weighed 12 stone and was five feet tall, into a nightmarish corset called the "Merry Widow". But they also create vivid and complex images of the parents as individuals, in all the particularity of their separate worlds, homes and habits. They divorced when Edmund was eight. His father, a successful broker of chemical equipment in Cincinnati, married another woman and led a life of sterile bourgeois comfort, while his mother, a child psychologist, carried on alone, in a fervour of self-motivation and increasingly drunken romantic fantasy about possible new men in her life. White recalls the embarrassment and complicity of their visits to bars and restaurants where his mother might get picked up by a suitable man; it is part of the poignancy of this chapter that he sees how like her he has been at various times and in various aspects of his life.

Sometimes the chapters are not quite about what they claim to be. "My Europe" is really just about Paris, where White lived for 13 years, with inset portraits of two friends who died of Aids: the writer and editor Gilles Barbedette, and Michel Foucault, whom White again exonerates from the charge of having knowingly passed on HIV. The experience of Parisian life is for White one of deepening engagement with "the nuance and staggering complexity of the most civilised people on earth", and an evolution of his writer's sense of people not as types but as unique individuals.

"My Friends", which for so sociable and generous a figure as White might have been a book in itself (and might aptly have been the name of one or more of his novels), is really all about himself, about his need for friendship, the way friendship can grow out of lust, and the exhilaration "almost to the point of hysteria" that he feels at the end of an evening spent with friends. His account of himself is clear, humorous, never coy. He knows that his "painful honesty" is the source of his humour. And we feel strongly, at the end of this remarkable book, that it is more than that: it is the source of everything, however artful and luscious, that he has ever written.

Alan Hollinghurst
Saturday, September 17, 2005
The Guardian

An excerpt from My Lives.