Waiting for the Barbarians (50 page)

But for White, there is a far larger issue at stake here. For him, the entire fabric of gay men’s lives, socially as well as sexually, is radically different from that of straight people: whereas the contours of a straight life are, according to him, conventional in a way that filters
into heterosexual writers’ writing (“a straight writer,” he startlingly asserts at the end of
City Boy
, is “condemned to show nothing but marriage, divorce, and childbirth”), gay men’s lives—characterized by unrestricted sexual play, serial rather than monogamous erotic involvements, and a correspondingly high valuation of friends over erotic partners—don’t follow a straightforward (or at least conventionally mainstream) narrative. They therefore merit a different kind of narrative altogether: the gay lit that White helped create.

This is the point of his defense, in “Writing Gay,” of
City Poet
, Brad Gooch’s 1993 biography of Frank O’Hara—a book, White writes, that was unfairly attacked by critics who complained about Gooch’s emphasis on the poet’s sex life, at the expense of a corresponding emphasis on his work. “But in fact,” White argues,

And yet despite its lively allure, this argument is sentimental and unrigorous, built as it is on unexamined assumptions and impressionistic
logic. It is not entirely clear, for one thing, what “the usual literary biography” might be, and why White thinks such works can’t handle messy or episodic or picaresque lives. (Richard Ellmann’s biography of Oscar Wilde seems to have no problem doing just that.) Nor is it clear whether White thinks that straight poets (or whoever) who had messy and irregular lives filled with sexual adventures—there are more than a few—deserve “gossipy” biographies, too. But then, the word “gossipy” does not, in fact, occur in Joan Acocella’s long and thoughtful essay on O’Hara; nor indeed did she complain at any point that O’Hara’s life wasn’t enough “like a straight man’s.” Although White wants to cast her as a prig, the fact is that she’s not shocked at all: if you actually read her piece you can see that she makes the very sensible argument that, given the well-known sexual and romantic excesses of downtown bohemians, both gay and straight, in the 1950s and 1960s, O’Hara’s habits were simply not worth noting in the excessive detail in which Gooch’s book indulges, at the expense of a full consideration of the poet’s work—the thing that makes his life worth writing about in the first place.

Still, despite the wishful arguments and a certain casualness with other people’s words (habits that recur in
City Boy
), there can be no doubt about the genuineness of White’s impassioned defense of specifically gay writing. He has, indeed, chafed at characterizations of his own work as narrow or small, a criticism that he sees as coded distaste for homosexual writing itself. “When I wrote my Penguin life of Proust,” he recalls in “Writing Gay,” “I decided to discuss his homosexuality … but I was attacked for this approach in the
New York Times Book Review
and in the
New York Review
.” (“How else could I make my book different from the hundreds that had preceded it?” he adds, an aside that, it must be said, makes you wonder what other biographies he had consulted.) He doesn’t go into the details of the criticisms in question, but his paraphrases make clear the lineaments
of what is, essentially, a political argument. The
Times
critic “took me to task for reducing Proust to his sexuality”; the late Roger Shattuck, in
The New York Review of Books
, “struck a blow for Proust’s universality against my supposedly narrowing view.”

“Universality” brings us back to “universalism,” the word that cropped up in Poirier’s critique of White’s advocacy of “gay writing” many years before White wrote his Proust biography: you could say that the whole of the author’s career has traced an arc from one of these poles to the other. His first couple of novels,
Forgetting Elena
(1975), a witty experiment with a fabulously unreliable narrator, and the plotless but oddly mesmerizing reverie on lost love that is
Nocturnes for the King of Naples
(1978; it might remind you of Marguerite Yourcenar’s
Alexis
), were idiosyncratic and coolly stylish, with a pungent whiff of chloroform that betrays the influence of White’s idol, Nabokov.
Forgetting Elena
fuses an arch haiku sensibility to a plot involving amnesia, set in a Fire Island–esque colony of excruciatingly status-conscious gay men. It’s interesting to speculate how the young White, who was capable of an impressive elegance and was clearly preoccupied, too, with interesting formal questions, would have evolved.

But with
A Boy’s Own Story
, although an evocative prettiness remains (“just as each shell held to the ears roars with a different ocean timbre, each of these bodies spoke to me with a different music”), the contours of White’s incipient project came into focus—which is to say that “life” overtook “art” as his primary concern. He began to devote himself to the sometimes almost dogged recording of the quality, nature, and substance of gay life and experience that has been at the center of most of his output ever since, in fiction and essay, in biography and memoir. You feel it in the several thinly disguised autobiographical novels (
The Married Man
, for instance, with
its minute re-creation of an illness and death from AIDS) as well as à clef portrayals—not always flattering—of famous friends such as Susan Sontag (as in his roman à clef
Caracole
). But it is perhaps most plain in this author’s commitment to gay biography (Proust, Rimbaud, Genet) and, of course, undisguised autobiography: first
My Lives
(2005), with its detailed descriptions of S&M episodes and unapologetic recollections of rent boys, and, now,
City Boy
.

The virtues and flaws of the latest of White’s autobiographies—the talented gossip’s eye for the good story, dragged down by a tendency to dish out payback; a passionate chauvinism on behalf of gay writers and their writing, hobbled by unsound and approximate judgments about a larger literary world; a carelessness about the privacy of other people for the sake of a good anecdote—reflect, in the end, the strengths and limitations of the relentlessly personal perspective that White advocates.

City Boy
is interesting not least because it is a reminiscence about the period when the gay way of life White sees as so distinctive from straight life had its brief, dazzling
floruit
: the heady, hedonistic stretch of time between the Stonewall riots (the event that marked the beginning of the contemporary gay movement and coincided with a marked, if uneven, increase in the visibility of gay people and gay issues in American culture) and the advent, not even fifteen years later, of AIDS, which would cast a dark shadow on the culture of unrestrained sexual play. That this short period coincided with White’s literary advent—the tentative and often unsuccessful beginnings of which he narrates with an amusing lack of vanity—only overdetermines the connection he likes to make between life and art. His literary rise precisely followed the rise of modern gay culture.

There’s a point in
City Boy
when White—who, in addition to being a well-known writer, is a well-known teacher who has, admirably, always made time to put himself at the service of the younger generation (most recently, at Princeton)—offers some professorial thoughts about the qualities of good fiction, which, he says, “depends on telling details and an exact and lifelike sequencing of emotions, and on representative if not slavishly mimetic dialogue, and on convincing actions.” The best passages in the new memoir (whose arc reminds you at times of
Lost Illusions
, a novel that White mentions) have those qualities. Predictably, White is at his best when reminiscing about the gay sexual culture of the 1960s and 1970s in New York City, with its elaborate codes of conduct and erotic ceremonials as rigid as the Japanese court protocols that first fascinated him years ago, as
Forgetting Elena
made clear. Here he is on the preparations for a typical night out during his Greenwich Village days:

What makes the passage work so well is the deliberately sharp and unexpected contrast that snaps into place with the last sentence, between the meticulous, even maniacal preparations, which attempt to foresee every contingency from raw sex to an affectionate sleepover to “marriage,” and the elusive unknowability of the trick himself.

White can be as shrewdly observant of others as he is of his younger self. Many readers of
City Boy
are likely to cherish the louche anecdotes and tales out of school about the famous writer friends whom White acquired (and not infrequently lost) on his way up the literary ladder—Sontag, of course, but also Ashbery (“a hapless, amusing presence”), James Merrill, and his early mentor Richard Howard, one of the many more established figures to whom the young White attached himself and who tried to give him advice and help. In keeping with his own stated interests, White prefers to dilate on the quirky detail, the mannerism of speech or gesture or appearance. (He goes on about Howard’s shiny bald pate, not nearly as common in the 1960s as now.) It must be said that the occasional detours into discussions of these writers’ work, as opposed to their private lives, feel obligatory and none too profound—they have the vacant chirpiness of blurbs. (“A long, sustained look at the self, at what it might and might not be in these godless days”: so White on Ashbery’s
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
.)

Significantly, White gossips best about those he knows—or who matter to him—least. One of the most entertaining stretches of
City Boy
occurs during a reminsicence of a trip to Italy, in which White reincarnates his wide-eyed younger self on a visit to the Cipriani pool, ogling the decadent, unhappy, much-married jet-setters—a bit of dishing that sparkles with fun precisely because it has the lightness of touch, the clarity, and the
disinvoltura
that characterize a really good gossip. No one knows this better than White, who clearly sees
himself as something of a connoisseur of gossip. In
The Married Man
, the White character, a gay American expat long resident in Paris, returns home and sniffs at the locals’ inability to gossip with any savoir faire. “They didn’t know how to serve it up. They got bogged down in detail, they introduced too many names, and they never told the end.”

And yet he himself commits these very errors when he’s overly invested in the people he’s gossiping about. When he writes about other writers who were more acclaimed or recognized in those days—he has a long memory for people who, like the playwright Mart Crowley (
The Boys in the Band
) didn’t understand his work, or who, like the editor Robert Gottlieb, rejected it—the retributive barbs can seem petty and the anecdotes often feel gratuitous: he includes unflattering stories not only about Sontag herself (with whom White had a violent break after
Caracole
came out in 1985) but about her son, David Rieff. When, contemplating his failed friendship with Sontag, he blithely notes that he “never got to the bottom of my impulse toward treachery, especially toward people who’d helped me and befriended me,” what strikes you is not so much the unpleasant admission but the blitheness with which he makes it—and, even more, his unwillingness to use the memoir to explore this trait, to get to the bottom of things instead of skimming the surface. This is what a memoir ought to do.