Edmund White / Features / Untitled Books

'As a teenager in Midwest America in the 50s it was very hard to find any information about anybody who was homosexual and certainly it was very exciting to find a great French poet who was able to seduce an older man.'

Edmund White

Edmund White, author, playwright and biographer, was born in Ohio in 1940. His breakthrough novel, A Boy's Own Story, drew heavily on his childhood and difficult relationship with his parents, and established him as American literature's foremost gay author. His most recent book is an account of the early life of the French poet Authur Rimbaud. He talks to Beth Jones.

'I’m a good enough novelist to know that I’ll be positive, you’ll be negative and within a year you’ll have broken up with me because you won’t be able to stand the heat.'

"I'm 69 years old and I'm 5 foot 9 and I'm terribly overweight and I huff and puff around the apartment and I have grey hair, but a lot of it. I have a round face and brown eyes and I think a nice smile but I'm really very unremarkable looking." Author, playwright, literary critic and gay activist Edmund White's description of himself drifts down the phone line from New York where he is ensconced, on a bitingly cold January afternoon, in his apartment in Chelsea, Manhattan.

While White may consider his looks unremarkable, his conversation is anything but. The following are just a taster of the topics he covers in the course of our forty minute phone call: a letter sent to him from Vladimir Nabokov; a German fan who emails him five times daily; nineteenth century French poetry; his friend Michel Foucault; the importance of having sex without condoms for those living with HIV; his dislike of cheesecake.

It's not surprising that White's conversation spans so many subject matters. His career has been just as diverse: his first novel, Forgetting Elena, set on an imaginary island, was said by Nabokov to be his favourite novel by an American author; his fifth book, A Boy's Own Story, an autobiographical work about growing up in 50s America, is a landmark in gay literature; he has written celebrated biographies of Jean Genet and Marcel Proust; he co-authored the nonfiction guide The Joy of Gay Sex; he is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University and he has just welcomed in his 70th year with the opening of his play, Terre Haute, about the terrorist Timothy McVeigh, on Broadway in New York. (An earlier production opened in London in 2007.)

When writing, White has, he says, "no plan or design at all. I just panic eventually because I run out of money and then I finish a book very quickly, sort of like an old horse that speeds up when it gets near to the stable." He works on a computer on his dining room table at home where he can hear German mass from the Lutheran church next door: "I used to write by hand and then I'd dictate the whole thing to [my secretary] Patrick and things which weren't very good would cause Patrick to wince and the wince-factor was very useful. But now Patrick is too busy to do this kind of work and I wish I could train my computer to wince or mark a flaw but it won't do any of those things," he laughs. White's current partner of 13 years, the writer Michael Carroll, now serves as his censor: "I read absolutely every word I write to him," he says.

White published his debut novel, Forgetting Elena, in 1973 and soon afterwards received a note from fellow author Vladimir Nabokov. "He wrote me a very nice little letter saying 'My wife Véra and I both liked your book. We thought it was wonderful and everything was poised on the edge of everything else.' It was three lines, but it was exhilarating, and a great feeling of affirmation," White says. Nabokov was to be the first of White's many fans. Today, a German lady living in Melbourne, is one of White's most ardent admirers. "She's retired, she's called Helga and she has a husband whom she calls Mr. Helga," White explains. "I get five emails a day from her and I try to answer at least every third one. She sends me articles and reviews that she thinks might interest me and we talk about our lives so that's nice."

Helga has been flattering, apparently, about White's latest work, Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, which is a part biography, part literary critique of the work of Arthur Rimbaud, the nineteenth century French poet who grew up in a small town near the Belgian border but ran away to Paris at the age of 16. There, he formed a friendship with the established older poet Paul Verlaine which was intense, tempestuous and often violent. White has, he says, written "more about him [Rimbaud] as a gay figure...than previous writers had done," painting him and Verlaine as the first prominent gay artist couple in history. It was Rimbaud's sexuality which first drew White to his work: "As a teenager in Midwest America in the 50s, where I was living, it was very hard to find any information about anybody who was homosexual and certainly it was very exciting to find a great French poet who was able to seduce an older man," he says.

Unlike his biography of Genet, which took years of research, this work took White just a year to complete. "There must be over two thousand books about Rimbaud in the Princeton library where I teach so it really wasn't a question of doing any original research. This was just a short book and the only original thing about it was my own take on Rimbaud and not the information which has already been gone over and over," White says.

While the subject of the novel is Rimbaud, the 'I' which appears three times in the first line of the book refers not to the poet, but to White himself. The first chapter is dedicated to how White discovered Rimbaud, and how this helped White, "an unhappy gay adolescent." But why pen such a personal introduction? "When I was a young writer," he explains, "I tried to be as objective as possible, I certainly never put myself in anything. But I think in the last fifteen years there's been a tremendous pressure on writers to be personal about everything. I just finished a new book about New York in the 1970s and I originally tried to get a contract to write an objective book but no one was interested. So then I said, 'okay I'll write a tell-all memoir with lots of name dropping' and they liked that idea. I think 30 years from now people will say 'Gosh those people in the early 21st century they were so vain they were always talking about themselves' but they won't realise that they couldn't get a contract if you weren't talking about yourself."

The late French philosopher Michel Foucault, one of White's great friends, abhorred this preoccupation with self. "It's funny that I was such good friends with him," White says, "because he hated that American tendency to avow. He hated the culture of avowal. I understand what he means - there is a way that people come out and say I am gay and that's all you need to know about me. I know that people do limit themselves through avowal or confession but I personally, I guess because I am a product of this culture, have felt a need to be very open."

Born Edmund Valentine White III in Cincinnati to Texan parents who divorced when he was seven, White has always been open about his own experiences. His mother, he says, was "very high strung and stressful to be with" and his father was "a deeply misanthropic person who hated humanity." It was on his family that he drew on for his autobiographical trilogy of novels, A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty, The Farewell Symphony.

"My mother, who was still alive at the time, was a very, very good sport about it, she never complained. And my sister would say "Oh, Eddie's written about me" and my mother would say "Well I think you've got off lightly, a lot better than I did,"" White laughs.

"As for my father, I didn't start to write about him until after he died. One day I was in a taxi and a man was smoking a cigar like my father did and suddenly I burst into tears because I thought my father has now been entirely forgotten. I thought that if I don't write about him, then people won't remember him at all and that's when I started writing A Boy's Own Story which was a lot about him."

White has been forced to contemplate death and mortality more than most. In 1985, he was diagnosed with HIV which, at the time, was an almost certain death sentence. He watched gay friends and lovers die and wrote in The Farewell Symphony: "I thought that never had a group been placed on such a rapid cycle, oppressed in the 50s, freed in the 60s, exalted in the 70s and wiped out in the 80s." White was part of a club called The Violet Quill, a group of seven gay writers who occasionally met to read and critique each other's work (as well as to eat carefully crafted puddings). By 1990 only three were left alive.

"It made me pull the blanket over my head for about two years," White says. "I was really quite depressed. I was going out with a man at the time and as we went to get the results I said to him "I'm a good enough novelist to know that I'll be positive, you'll be negative and within a year you'll have broken up with me because you won't be able to stand the heat." That turned out to be exactly the case and that was painful, you know. I've experienced a lot of stigmatization and rejection over the years because of my status. I announced it very early on. I mean most people, especially in the early 80s, would not talk about it, but I decided to treat it the same way I treated coming out which was to trumpet to the rooftops."

Today, White is on medication for his HIV, and is delighted at a recent controversial claim by The Swiss Federal Commission for HIV/AIDS that positive people can have sex, without a condom, without endangering their uninfected partners, as long as they meet certain criteria such as successfully having been on medication for a set amount of time. "It's a very good reason to be on meds," White says. "Many men, young and old, find it difficult to use condoms and so I think that this makes a big difference in the degree of intimacy and sexual possibility within the couple."

White's willingness to discuss and write about his sexuality and positive status has shaped much of the public's perception of him. "I think maybe I did get a bit ghettoised as a gay writer. In America, if someone knows who I am, it usually means that they are gay," he says. And it's true that while his friends and colleagues such as Foucault, Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes have achieved legendary status, he is less well known. White could, he laughs, do with a little more recognition. "I think every writer thinks he deserves to be better known," he jokes, "and perhaps if I'd been better looking I'd have had more success. If you look around at people like Paul Auster, he's not only an excellent writer, he's terribly handsome and it helps. Then again, not every writer is beautiful so I don't know. I don't know. I guess the only thing I can do is try to make the quality of my work as high as I can and then later people can discover it. Or not."

Monday, 9 February, 2009