‘Is your autobiography really necessary?’ Something along the lines of that war poster which asked a similar question about railway journeys should be tacked up above the desk of every self-respecting author. Edmund White is one such, and we are already entitled to feel that we know an awful lot about him. He has skilfully fictionalised episodes from his youth and mature adulthood in A Boy’s Own Story and The Married Man, he has made hay with characters based on his friends in Caracole and mapped out his socio-sexual milieu as a gay American during the 1970s in States of Desire. What more can he possibly have to disclose?
My Lives, as it turns out, is hardly full-on autobiography. Readers wanting the total balance sheet of successes and failures will be disappointed. Which particular heartbreak made White cry on Gloria Vanderbilt’s shoulder or how exactly he got invited to Elton John’s 50th birthday are questions left unanswered. His preoccupation has always been with style and nuance, with seeking out le mot juste and framing his theme within an overall handsomeness of design. Thus this book’s form matters as much as its content in deepening our perspective of the author.
Presented as an album of sketches from various angles, the work seems to replicate White’s somewhat disingenuous view of himself as a flibbertigibbet, restless, intellectually shallow, for ever in search of reassurance. Having discarded the help of psychotherapists in determining his true nature for us, he turns for assistance to his dead parents. Those famous gay graffiti, ‘My mother made me a homosexual’, ‘If I give her the wool will she make me one too?’, might have been devised for Edmund and his bizarrely dysfunctional momma Lilah Mae.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in