Imagining Other Lives

By LEONARD SCHULMAN

In 1985, when the HIV blood test was first available, Edmund White insisted that he and his boyfriend take it. His lover was somewhat reluctant, but White insisted. "I'll be positive, you'll be negative, and then you'll leave me," White recalls telling him. "And I was right." And so America's most influential gay writer, a man whom Le Monde once called the most accomplished American novelist since Henry James, began to live with AIDS.

Since the publication of his first novel, Forgetting Elena, in 1973, White's Proustian prose style caught, if not the public eye at first, the eyes of the masters: Vladimir Nabokov (White's literary hero) praised his first novel, and Gore Vidal hailed his second, Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978). A book of nonfiction titled States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980) enjoyed encomiums from Christopher Isherwood. In reviewing A Boy's Own Story (1982), the New York Times said, "Edmund White has crossed . . . J.D. Salinger with Oscar Wilde to create an extraordinary novel."

A Boy's Own Story, a longtime big seller in both the U.S. and England, was the first of a projected tetralogy on gay life in modern America. The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) chronicles gay life through the liberated 1960s; if White lives long enough, he hopes to complete the series with novels about the frenzied bathhouse '70s and the plague-ridden '80s. In the meantime he is working on a biography of Jean Genet and teaching courses on the French playwright and on creative writing at Brown University. Although his semiautobiographical coming-out themes are staples of gay fiction, White has transcended the genre with his wit, attention to sensuous detail and intensely explicit style. Stripping himself as bare as any writer in history, he writes with a passion that is meant to save his soul and those of his readers.

White, 6 ft. tall, stocky but with an athletic build, deals with "the constant low-level anxiety" of being HIV-positive by keeping busy with his work. He prefers to be called a gay writer. "Capote was a writer who happened to be gay; I am a gay writer," he insists. In fact, he has based his career on it, a high-stakes gamble that has worked. All gay writing can be labeled pre-AIDS or post-AIDS, and White's is an exemplar of the latter. His most recent short stories, three of which are collected in a book called The Darker Proof, deal specifically with the AIDS crisis.

On a snowy Tuesday in March, White meets a visitor at the Providence railroad station. "Both Diane Von Furstenberg's daughter Tatiana and Jane Fonda's daughter Vanessa Vadim are in my writing class, and Ann Charters -- do you know who she is? -- she wrote a biography on Kerouac -- is in my Genet class," White says breathlessly. On the way home, he stops off at a student's house to pick up a copy of Genet's The Screens. "Isn't he cute," White says of the student when he returns to the car. "I have to avert my eyes when I talk to him or I lose my concentration. 'I'm straight; I hope you don't find that repellent,' he said to me the other day. Wasn't that cute? 'You're doing fine,' I told him. 'Stay just the way you are.' "

White's study overlooks a small park by the Seekonk River, a remote area where sex-obsessed men in cars come to cruise. Although he practices safe sex, he is a man of admitted compulsive-obsessive sexual behavior. Looking out at the cruisers, he says, "You know, nobody believes me when I tell them I rented the house not knowing about this, but I didn't. Anyway, I won't get involved, I'm too busy."

That afternoon White and his class of 30 view a BBC interview with Genet. It's something the class has been looking forward to for weeks, and a strong buzz of intellectual fervor is in the air, academia at its best. But before running the video, White has an announcement. It seems that next week there will be someone in the class to evaluate him, "so . . ."

"I know," a bright young man cries out, "clap at the end."

Lots of laughter, White smiles graciously, and then on to Genet. White helps out with some background information:

"These are scenes from a porno movie made in the '50s. It was shot in a nightclub called La Rose Rouge . . .

"That's Lucien, Genet's lover; see how cute he is! He's now running a garage." Discussing a scene where two prisoners, in separate cells, share forbidden cigarette smoke passed through a straw, White notes, "It's totally improbable; in reality you couldn't put that straw through a brick wall, but it's sexy, isn't it?"

Each day the phone at his apartment begins ringing by 8 in the morning. White speaks on the phone in soft tones, patiently, calmly, in both English and French. He lived in France for seven years, returning in January of this year. The calls, he says, are "generally from French gay boys sick with worry about coming down with AIDS." Or about those already sick, like Herve Guibert, a young Frenchman who just published a book titled To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. "He's dying. He was beautiful, and now he looks like an Auschwitz victim."

In the early 1980s White and several other men helped found the Gay Men's Health Crisis to deal with the cases of "gay cancer" that were just being reported. Of that group, only three survive, including activist-writer Larry Kramer. White is perplexed about the pathology of the illness. So far, although he is HIV-positive, he does not have any symptoms of AIDS. "But I don't understand it," he says. "So many others have already died. Forty of my friends, including my best friend, David Kalstone . . . my editor, Bill Whitehead. Students of mine have died. It doesn't seem right, students dying before their teacher -- like children before their parents, the worst tragedy."

But White has learned to cope. "A close friend is visiting on the weekend," he says. "We have so much fun together that I forget how sick he is, that he could die very soon -- that I could too. Denial, that's how we're all dealing with it."

Edmund Valentine White III was born 50 years ago in Cincinnati to a father who was a chemical engineer and a mother who was a psychologist for retarded children. He is the seventh Valentine in the White descent. His older sister Margaret Fleming, a psychotherapist, recalls that even as a small boy her brother was different: "Like most kids I was a conformist, but not Ed. I didn't understand him then and probably tortured him a lot . . . Today he's my hero. When my parents divorced, he was only seven, and he took it very hard. He became a very lost little boy; our father was very rejecting of him."

Before learning to live with AIDS, White had to learn to live with his homosexuality. "I didn't want to be gay," he says. "I wanted to be normal, to have a wife and kids, not have a lonely old age." So why gay? "He has always said," says Marilyn Schaefer, a lifelong friend, "that it happened because of the divorce. That he absorbed too deeply his mother's longing for a man."

For years White sought a cure through analysis. "But in my fourth and final go at therapy (this time, at last, with a gay psychoanalyst), I'd finally come to some sort of terms with my homosexuality," White writes in States of Desire. By the time he graduated from the University of Michigan in 1962, he had accepted -- indeed become fully committed to -- a homosexual life and life-style. He moved to Manhattan's Greenwich Village, working by day, writing by night, and coming to the realization that his art would suffer unless his culture were reflected in his writing: "You see, many of us began by thinking that we were basically heterosexual except for this funny little thing, this sexual habit we had somehow picked up carelessly -- but we weren't homosexuals as people. Even the notion of homosexual culture would have seemed comical or ridiculous to us, certainly horrifying."

Nocturnes for the King of Naples, his second novel, was written in a mood of gay fantasy. It was turned down by 12 publishers before it found its way to Michael Denneny, an editor at St. Martin's Press. Denneny was mesmerized by White's poetic prose and daring story. "Of all the gay writers who made it in the '70s, Edmund was the only one who had entree in the pre-existing literary circles, the sophisticated world of Susan Sontag and Richard Howard, but he turned his back on it. He wanted it known that he was a gay writer. That was a very brave decision on his part. For me, that made him a gay leader."

In States of Desire, his 1980 travel book, White set out "to suggest the enormous range of gay life to straight and gay people." William Burroughs said, "In Edmund White we may have found our gay Tocqueville." But the book had its critics as well. In a blistering review in the New York Times, Paul Cowan wrote, "In this journey through the baths, the bars, the streets full of preening young men, the narcotized one-night stands that are the signposts of nearly every city he visits, Mr. White shares what seems to me his characters' tragic self-delusion."

Sadly enough, White's was a kind of life that his father could never accept, or even imagine, for his only son. "The Joy of Gay Sex ((which White co- authored in 1977)) was promoted widely enough that I supposed some rumor of it might have reached even the Republican Valhalla of Cincinnati. My father had never mentioned the book to me. He had also stopped writing me. For that reason I was reluctant to face him. Thank God I did; he died a month later. At the funeral my stepmother told me he'd never known of the book. She had torn out the ads for it from the newspapers, and no one in his circle could have begun to form the syllables making up its title."

On a Friday night White is host at a small dinner party in his house with help from a friend, Stephanie Guss, who has prepared stuffed pheasant. At 8, the doorbell rings and Henry Abelove, a visiting associate professor of history from Wesleyan University, arriving with two others, says, "What a notorious neighborhood!" "I know," White replies, not missing a beat, greeting his guests, some of whom he is meeting for the first time, "and nobody believes me, but when I rented this house, I swear I didn't know. I didn't know."

Before sitting down, White observes to Henry Majewski, acting chairman of Brown's French department, that he's not sure how long he'll be at Brown. "Quite frankly, it all depends on whether they let my boyfriend in or not," he says, referring to a decision by the immigration service to bar his friend's entry from France because of a work-related visa problem. "He was sent back when he arrived, you know."

"Oh, how cruel," says Pierre Saint-Amand from Haiti, a professor in the French department.

"Yes," White says. "Since then, we've met a couple of times in Canada. If he gets in, we'll get a dog, travel. It could be nice."

Near midnight, the last guests leave, and Bob Praeger, a friend visiting from California, turns to White. "Ed, you were fabulous! Those stories you told, my God! I just can't believe there wasn't someone at the table with pencil and paper taking it all down." Bob is in Providence tracking down a letter for a book he is writing on General George Custer. One story leads to another; one letter leads to 300 others. It seems that Bob has all these letters, which he wants to sell, from a "male writer who," he explains, "has signed every one of them with a female name -- sometimes Judy Florida, sometimes Judy L.A."

; "Judy Florida," White laughs. "What a riot! He's an old friend, a writer who tells his old mother that he's a waiter. You know the one about the waiter who tells everyone he's really a writer -- well, this is just the reverse. His mother doesn't really know, and he's quite famous. He writes under the pen name of Andrew Holleran. Have you ever heard of Dancer from the Dance? He's the most famous gay writer in America."

"Ed," Bob interjects, angry. "He is not! You are!"

"I am," White says modestly, and then suddenly, for just the briefest moment, a look of fierce pride steals over his shining face.