Andrew Sean Greer
Author, “Less Is Lost”
Edmund White was my college thesis adviser, my role model as a gay writer and my friend. He was the Cole Porter of literature: a genius writer who sang dirty lyrics at parties. Always a twinkle of mischief in his eye, a morsel of gossip from the French court, a bit of history about a painting, a comical take on a serious novel, a serious take on a comic one, all in the course of a few minutes’ chat. Other countries celebrate writers who are equally adept at criticism, theater, fiction, biography, memoir — letters in every sense of the word — but in the U.S. the tradition has lapsed. Perhaps Ed was the last of his kind.
Yiyun Li
Author, “Things in Nature Merely Grow”
Edmund and I were close friends for the past eight years. During this time, he was one of the most loving friends supporting me through the losses of my two children. At the onset of the pandemic, we established our two-person book club, meeting Monday through Friday at 5 p.m. on Skype. This continued, and my estimation is that we read between 80 and 120 books together. But if that sounds heavy or dry, the reality was rather the opposite. We spent most of the time giggling and gossiping (about writers living and dead, about characters we just met in a novel, about an actress in Madame de Sévigné’s letters or a courtesan in Louis XIV’s Versailles). Sometimes I would get a detailed and illuminating description of gay sex from 30 years ago, or from an encounter two days ago. Nearly all our conversations would end with irrepressible laughter on both ends. I shall miss his wicked humor, his erudition and most of all, his irreplaceable presence in my life.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Author, “The Marriage Plot”
A good argument can be made that it was Ed White who invented autofiction. He used that term himself, long before it became fashionable. More important, it was the nature of his work, its astonishing candor, its lack of shame (at a time when that was needed, unlike the present), and the overriding charm that made every detail, no matter how pungent or revealing, feel like a confession between friends. White is a writer whose originality came from his material rather than his style. He had style, but he needed it only to tell his long and obsessional boy’s own story.
Alejandro Varela
Author, “The Town of Babylon”
I corresponded with Edmund only a few times, but I awaited his replies the way one does news of the winning lottery numbers. His writing wasn’t just intimidatingly brilliant or cross-your-legs-on-the-subway sexy, or full of compassion, humor, and devastation; it was all of these at once. He was a literary icon who titillated the mind and body, and whose work, in ways I’m still deciphering, gave us permission to be and to explore. It was gratifying to see Edmund receive some of his flowers in life, but I always wondered why his bouquet wasn’t fuller, bigger. I suspect it was the rampant homophobia of an industry and a society that, ironically enough, he helped to tame.
Adam Haslett
Author, “Mothers and Sons”
Ed White was the great permission-giver of gay literature. His frankness about sex between men, beginning at a time when almost no one else wrote that explicitly, and in almost every mode — elegiac, ecstatic, documentary — opened countless doors in the minds of younger writers, myself included. I can still remember picking up “A Boy’s Own Story” as a teenager in a bookshop in London and taking it furtively to the counter because I was afraid the picture of the beautiful young man on its cover would give me away. But it was the cleareyed beauty of the prose that actually thrilled me. That book told me my desire didn’t have to be divorced from the urge to make art: it could be that art.
And then, when I got to know him in the early ’90s, he gave me a whole different kind of permission: to be less self-serious. He once playfully accused me of being an intimist, meaning I preferred tête-à-têtes to gossipy parties, and, implicitly, favored what used to be called “serious relationships” to different partners every night or week. I was guilty as charged, but his joyfulness let me laugh about it — and myself. And for that, and for his work, I will always be grateful.
Adam Tendler
Pianist, “Inheritances”
It’s hard to imagine a time in the last couple of decades when I wasn’t reading an Edmund White book, with each one scratching a particular itch. The nostalgia of a budding queer identity in “A Boy’s Own Story” or “The Beautiful Room Is Empty”; the fascination with a gay world I’ll never know in “City Boy”; the longing of an impossible love affair in “Jack Holmes and His Friend”; or the gasp-worthy raunch of his autobiography, “My Lives,” whose “My Master” chapter has some of the most intense sex writing I’ve ever encountered, and yet also the truest depiction of obsession, lust and heartbreak. I knew Ed. He read my own self-published memoir, “88×50,” about traveling the 50 states, a genre for which Ed laid the blueprint in “States of Desire,” and even though I’m a concert pianist, he would always introduce me to people as “the author of a fabulous book.” Truly, to this day, only Ed could make me blush, and with such elegance and style.
Kristen Arnett
Author, “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One”
Edmund White wrote about sex and bodies in beautiful, outrageously visceral ways. His art was both romantic and deeply horny (in my opinion, a perfect compliment). The way he was able to render bodies on the page gave many of us queer people permission to write about the largeness of erotics with real abandon. It was true genius; there was no other like him.
Hanya Yanagihara
Editor, T Magazine; author, “To Paradise”
Contemporary gay literature as we know it wouldn’t exist without Edmund White. From his earliest memoirs and fiction, he wrote without shame or apology about his life as a gay man, about art, about love, about desire, and, most thrillingly, about sex — this in an era when doing so meant risking opprobrium. No one wrote as sexily, or frankly, about sex as Ed did. He read hugely, across eras and cultures — he adored the works of the Japanese author Junichiro Tanizaki, especially “The Makioka Sisters” — and he was unusually generous to younger writers. Getting a note from Edmund White, and then, if you were lucky, being invited over to his apartment, was a rite of passage for many novelists. He was just as generous with his laugh: an infectious trill that began high in the head and spilled into the room. Ed offered a way to be a late-career artist in New York (he published his most recent book last year) who was still engaged, still curious, still hungry and never bitter — a role model for many of us, both on and off the page.
Alexander Chee
Author, “How to Write an Autobiographical Novel”
When I began writing “The Queen of the Night,” a friend said, “If you’re writing about courtesans, you have to speak to Ed White.” So I called him up. When I told him my title, he said, “Is that about the male brothel near the Vatican where all the priests go?” I almost changed my subject. I have joked that I might write another novel set there and title it the same, in his honor. He told me about courtesans, about the French, about how they speak social class — it’s a language for them alongside the French language — and his insights were a tremendous help.
In later years I had the good fortune to teach at Princeton for one autumn, and I would meet up with him and [his husband] Michael Carroll on the train from New York. We’d gossip as we passed through the suburbs out to the campus. He had a busy love life, a busy career, and he was by then in his mid-70s. Whatever I thought getting married or getting older as a writer or a gay man looked like, his life said, “Oh, it isn’t like that.”
Garrard Conley
Author, “All the World Beside”
In person, he lived up to every myth. He welcomed me into the competitive, often superficial world of New York gay letters with warmth and generosity, and became a mentor when I was launching my first novel. I carry his early encouragement with me still — it made me believe, as it did for so many others, that I had a place in this world.
Neel Mukherjee
Author, “Choice”
I’ve known no one more generous, more big-hearted, more supportive. He was an omnivorous reader, and he read the works of younger writers with an avidity and engagement that was extremely rare. He endorsed almost everyone, especially gay writers. It was not just part of his politics, but also part of his soul, of who he was. It was a lesson in life for me; here was a better way to be in the world.
He sent me an unedited version of his last book, the sex memoir. When we next Zoomed, I told him that he had written the most explicit book — and there’s, erm, stiff competition in that field — and the most hilarious in his entire career. It was a masterpiece, I added. He smiled, he was genuinely pleased, then he moved on to talk about Elizabeth Bowen, a writer we both adored.
Thomas Beller
Author, “Lost in the Game: A Book About Basketball”
The book of his I feel closest to is “My Lives,” and the essays on his mother and his father in particular. There are whole sentences of his that live in my memory like remembered phrases of poetry. But they are prose, and delivered in such a breezy and matter-of-fact way as to make their ornate sophistication quite approachable. “We had grown up in harem conditions, our ears filled nightly with the counsel and complaints of the counsel’s former favorite” is a line describing his mother after she and his father divorced. Maybe it is poetry.
Manuel Betancourt
Author, “Hello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacy”
Reading him could feel like talking to a deliciously slutty friend who would just as easily amuse you with a raunchy tale about who he’d just had as inspire you with some wounding musings about what it means to live and love and lust and mourn and thrive and cry and hope and yearn and ache and every and anything else you could possibly imagine makes up our day to day existence.
Trish Bendix
Journalist
His sense of humor was enduring, particularly when it came to respectability and those who found his sexual explicitness a threat to political progress. He told the truth: that being a queer person can and has often been dark and undesirable, but that it can also be a beautiful inheritance, experiencing the world from a radically different point of view. Sharing that queer context without shame or fear was his gift to us.
These recollections have been condensed and edited for clarity.
The post ‘The Cole Porter of Literature’: Writers and Artists Remember Edmund White appeared first on New York Times.
