Impish secrets

Long ago, I interviewed Edmund White and found that the photographer assigned to the job was the incomparable Jane Bown — a bit like having Matisse turn up to decorate your kitchen. After we talked, Jane shot. She managed to convert a tiny hotel courtyard into a sort of antique Grecian glade. In her pictures, White peeped through the foliage with the smile of some demonic faun come to spread ribald chaos in the service of the great god Pan.

I remembered that look when, in this patchwork of pieces about his life as a reader, he discloses that a heart attack followed by surgery in 2014 had one weird outcome. Temporarily, he felt ‘no desire to read’. The prolific author, critic, memoirist, biographer and teacher who had first slipped through a ‘magical portal’ into books as a ‘fierce little autodidact’ in the postwar Midwest now shed all sceptical curiosity. Instead, he just told ‘tall tales’ prompted by florid post-operative dreams.