I’ve been reading Edmund White’s The Farewell Symphony, and out of curiosity, I looked up a couple of reviews. It is White’s last autobiographical novel in a series of three. The first, A Boy’s Own Story, focused on his teen years. The next, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, was about his college days and his life as a young adult in New York. In The Farewell Symphony, the unnamed narrator who, more or less, represents White, talks about his life as a mature gay man in the ’70s and ’80s. Many of the men he meets in his thirties ends up dying of AIDS.
I read two reviews from two well known publications and became disgusted. Both reviewers showed considerable writing skills. Both wore their education on their sleeves. Neither seemed particularly interested in trying to understand what this novel was really about or why White might spend years writing this nearly 600 page book.
One reviewer devoted nearly his entire review to revealing who the characters were based on. (As I said, the novel is autobiographical, so many of the characters are real people, but White sometimes gave them fictional names.) The other went on for two paragraphs about the number of sex partners White’s protagonist, and presumably White himself, had in his youth. The reviewer seems to think White was bragging or lying or both. He even calculated how many lovers White would have had if he truly had an average of three lovers a week between 1962 and 1982...as if White intended to give a painfully correct and honest to God tally. The point was that he tricked a lot. He wasn’t bragging or lying in order to shock the reviewer. White was describing what life was like for him, a gay man who had been brought up to believe he was a mentally ill criminal. He was trying to reject that mentality, as many were, by the late ’60s, and when the fight for gay rights got underway, gay sex was billed as liberating and defiant. But White still didn’t take his sexuality seriously. He saw homosexuality as somehow counterfeit and beneath heterosexuality. White took straight couples seriously, but his attempts at gay romance were, in his eyes, a shallow and childish imitation of the “real thing.”
The reviewers understood that the novel was to a significant degree a response to the AIDS crisis—maybe because the title strongly hints at that—but it seemed to go over their heads that White was attempting to describe a perfect storm. The ’50s were repressive, but the ’60s brought liberation. However, it wasn’t a complete liberation. Gay men couldn’t simply forget what they were taught about themselves in the ’50s, and it’s not like society was ready to accept LGBTs simply because the police stopped raiding gay bars. So if you lived in a gay Mecca like NYC in those years, and you were young and widely considered at least relatively attractive, fucks were readily available, and fucking was celebrated among the gay tribe. You were not only satisfying a basic need by fucking, you were also sticking it the system that harmed you as a kid, the system that told you that wanting to do it with other boys was dirty, sinful and sick. But partners… You still couldn’t take a partner home to meet the parents on Thanksgiving, and taking a partner to the office Christmas party would have been risky. And did gay men really want to live like heterosexuals? The reviewers didn’t touch on any of that. Maybe they’re not quite as smart as they think they are. Maybe they should drop the bored pose and actually pay attention to what they’re reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment