Edmund White - Arts and Letters

SOME FORTY YEARS AGO I won a college literary award for a play Id written that was called The Blueboy in Black. The prize money I spent buying cases of a terrible sweet fizzy Italian wine named Asti Spumante, which I considered wildly elegant. Though the award money was quickly dissipated, my name and the name of my play were announced in the New York Times, which led to an agent contacting me. Through her a production was arranged and two years later my play, starring the black actors Cicely Tyson and Billy Dee Williams, opened off-Broadway. The play, partly because at the time I was out-of-touch with the newest trends, was a bit dmod, a recycling of the Theatre of the Absurd and Jean Genets The Blacks, and I was criticized for being dated. Worse, in 1964 we were at the height of the Civil Rights Movement when the race problem was supposed to have been solved, but I was showing angry blacks on stage who were taking revenge on their white employers. The critic for the Times, Bosley Crowther, said, Negroes in America have enough problems without Mr. White. The most positive review, by Alan Pryce-Jones in Theatre Arts, called it one of the two best plays of the year. But when I met Mr. Pryce-Jones twenty years later (and this is the Proustian part) and thanked him for his kindness, he had no recollection of my play.

The play was not only about race but also about homosexuality. When my ultraconservative Republican father came to the opening night with a business associate he asked me privately, Whats it aboutthe usual?, which was his way of referring to a gay theme. I had to confess that it was a little bit about the usual. Of course for him discussion of race was almost as offensive, so it must have made for a rather uncomfortable evening.

When I was a junior at the University of Michigan I had won a somewhat smaller award for a collection of short stories, and there again the usual had been a recurring theme at a time when almost no gay literature existedand when even the very term was unknown. To be sure, Baldwin had recently published a despairing homosexual-themed novel, his beautiful book Giovannis Room, and Gore Vidal and Paul Bowles and Tennessee Williams were all experimenting with short gay fiction, much of it extremely deft and sophisticated, but none of them became celebrated or successful for their gay fiction. They all had to go on to quite different work in order to achieve their immense fame.

I suppose I never had much of a choice. For some reason I had a burning need to explore my own gay identity in fiction. Id written my first gay novel when I was just fifteen and a boarding student at Cranbrook boys school in Bloomfield Hills, outside Detroit. Since I didnt play sports I had the long afternoons in which to do my homework and then the official two-hour enforced study hall in the evenings to work on my novel, which I called The Tower Window. It was all about a boy much like myself who turns to an adult man, a handsome Mexican, because hes been rejected by a girl his own age. I had a highly developed fantasy that I would sell this novel and make a fortune, which would allow me to escape my dependence on my parentsbut even though my mothers secretary typed it up for me I never got around to sending it off. Perhaps I didnt know where to send it.