Edmund White - My Lives

Edmund with Delilah at Mullet lake, Michigan, 1940

As a teenager I was often in love with my gym teacher, with a blond senior who shared the locker room at the same hour, with a painter at the art academy, with my best friend Steve, with a farmer I met on the train named Orville to whom I dedicated an opera I was composing (it was named Orville , too, and dealt with farming and incest and madness my only Faulknerian work).

I imagined that ardor was enough, that if I felt strongly, then that intensity would inspire a reciprocal passion in anyone I fancied. Only later did I discover that people ranked one another, that what they wanted was not devotion but wealth or beauty or celebrity or social status and that if they themselves had very few of these attractions they would attempt to marry someone just a bit higher than they and to trade up from there. In the gay world I can remember when I was fifteen I met someone in his thirties, a Texan who owned a bookstore on Rush Street in Chicago, and he asked me what I was looking for in a man.

Someone rich who will take me away from my parents and support me.

But, Doll, he drawled, the rich ones always end up with each other.

I mentally protested. What about my youth, my pure, hairless body, my near-virginity, what about my love, the beauty and urgency of my feelings? I used to hear older teenage girls argue about who was sexier Rock Hudson, Farley Granger or Tab Hunter and these pimply, fat-ass girls with their braces and limp yellow hair would quibble with a sense of absolute privilege over the relative merits of these superb males (all gay, as it turned out). I was no different; since all my choices existed only in the realm of fantasy, I poured all my psychic energy into becoming a connoisseur of masculine desirability rather than doing anything to improve my viability on the open market.

If that was how I approached movie stars, of the real men I occasionally met I required only one thing that they should want me. A rich man or a blond athlete might compete for me in my dreams but in my waking life anyone could have me if he showed the slightest interest. I slept with pockmarked, shiny-nosed heavy smokers with fetal bodies as pale and glabrous as plucked baby chickens. I slept with a big strapping redhead with an enormous uncircumcised bright red penis head smelling of Cane, a sweet cinnamon-and-clove cologne popular in those days. I went with a fat black Chicago bus driver to the end of the line and to his apartment where he discarded his uniform and slid into fluffy angora slippers and a ruffled pink robe and put on scratchy records of what people called race music. I slept with a handsome Mexican student from Northwestern whom I met in a lakeside park and within minutes I was in love with him and his penis, so much darker than the rest of his body. I brought him back to our apartment, assuring him that my mother was away until midnight, but as I was caressing his heavily oiled black hair I looked out the bay window and saw Mother, hood up, scuttling unexpectedly through the rain. I panicked and pushed him out the back door and never saw him again. All that remained was his name, which I enshrined at the end of my first novel, The Tower Window (or, alternatively, Dark Currents ) [ed: unpublished], in which a teenage boy is torn between his love for a girl his age, based on Sally Gunn at high school, and the handsome Mexican. When Sally fails to return the love of Peter Cross he ends up in the arms of Miguel.

After all these crushes, these flashes of sheet lightning crackling through the sky and sizzling down through this rod or that, everything condensed into one single bolt when I fell in love with Stanley Redfern. I was a senior at the University of Michigan. It was January 13, 1962, my twenty-second birthday. A grad student, Bart Wimble, had adapted Rilkes text, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, for the stage, and Stanley was playing Malte. I had never seen him around the campus. He looked three or four years younger than his twenty-one years. He was just five-foot-seven, solidly built, with a long, lean face of classical John Barrymore beauty. His nose descended in a straight line from his brow, without a bump to indicate the transition. Wasnt it Pascal who said, If Cleopatras nose had been shorter, the whole face of the earth would have changed?

Stanley was blond, very blond, and his skin glowed with a radiant health that contradicted his melancholy role. The play was static, post-Wagnerian in its preoccupation with death, solitude and love, but I welcomed its noble longueurs since I was so entranced by this blond god onstage with his slightly husky voice and extreme personal remoteness. He looked as if he had been hypnotized into believing he was moving slowly underwater, delighted by every hallucinated fish that brushed past him, leaving a streak of fluorescent glow on his skin that only he could see. He was dressed all in white.

Id gone to the play with a wry, unhappy medical student from Scotland named Billy, a guy with gentian blue eyes and gold-red hair, to whom I had written a love poem. Within three days Id copied the poem again and dedicated it this time not to Billy but to Stan. I was efficient in recycling the products of passion. Whereas Billy was quite capable of pushing me away with a sad smile and a firm hand, Stan seemed elusive but vulnerable, confused, ultimately biddable.

But Im jumping ahead. I was so besotted by Stanley (how I disliked that name then, which seemed to me so common, and how I love it now, forty-two years later) that I invited the entire cast of twenty to the big Victorian pile where I lived with five other students, most of them older. I knew we had some ethyl alcohol from a lab that I could mix with orange juice to make a nearly lethal punch. Everyone in the cast came except Stanley, who, in his Hamlet way, went off to walk through the arboretum till dawn, meditating on his role and Rilke and his own interesting and tragic isolation.

Our whole catty, gossipy but kind and funny gay group in Ann Arbor seemed thrilled that I was pursuing Stanley. Id spot Stan in the middle room of the Student Union, which was for kids who were neither Beat (an identity that could be established from their black clothes and green book bags and by the chicks raccoon eyes) nor Greek (frat boys and sorority girls). We arty types, especially the theater queens, were in the middle room, as if we were the intermediate sex. We were neither scrubbed and perky like the Greeks, nor alienated and uncombed like the Beats. We drank but didnt smoke pot, we had nothing resembling a credo beyond a faith in the permanent avant-garde. We revered Brecht, not Marx; Mayakovski, not Lenin; Lotte Lenya, not La Pasionara; both Ingmar and Ingrid Bergman; Elizabeth Taylor the actress and Elizabeth Taylor the reserved English novelist. Ten years later and the idea of High Culture would begin to crumble, battered by the American cult of success and the distinction-dissolving ironies of Pop Art. But in the late fifties we still believed in honorable poverty. We still thought that beauty should be difficult, that incomprehension was a first necessary step toward initiation and that time would determine irrefutably which of our current artistic developments had been the one, the only, the inevitable next one.