Forget Freud, Fiction Is The Key

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday December 3, 2005

STEVE DOW. Steve Dow is a Sydney journalist and the author of Gay, published by www.worldwriting.com.

A lacerating honesty and dark beauty pervade this account of a life lived in self-doubt, writes STEVE DOW.

My Lives

By Edmund White

Bloomsbury, 356pp, $29.95

At 65, the life of the mind and an appreciation of beauty have failed to yield Edmund White enough happiness to overcome his self-loathing. The gay US novelist and libertine has snatched some sublime moments, but his abjection and questing for the unattainable linger.

White lays it all bare in his memoir My Lives: his sexual addictions, the intense masochism, and an at times fragile mental state. Of course, White has been parading his vulnerabilities publicly for some 30 years; in 1977, having recently co-authored a book called The Joy of Gay Sex, he told a university group in Washington DC that he lost his virginity at age 12. "I was so guilt-struck about being gay," he said, "that I spent a lot of my parents' money going to straight psychoanalysts and attempting to be cured."

White has always prized emotional honesty in his writing. The young man whose history is chronicled in the semi-autobiographical novels A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony took much the same path as White. The author has long enunciated his homosexuality in one form or other, perhaps fearing detachment of his essential self from his art would turn him into another Truman Capote. White once observed that Capote, his writing unmoored from his sexuality, had a fairytale storytelling talent "exquisite but a bit remote, since it seldom rehearse[d] real feelings; the world is all too well banished".

Nonetheless fiction, we learn in My Lives, is White's ideal form, a "stand in for me". White grew up in Cincinnati in the 1950s, an oppressive place and time for homosexuals. His parents, Edmund and Delilah, conformed to Freud's trope that an absent father and smothering mother make for a homosexual son. The teenage White enthusiastically pursued psychoanalysis in a failed quest to reprogram his sexuality as "normal".

Freud might have had a hand in White's decisions to favour a translucent fiction over straightforward non-fiction. Even though White would much later reject psychiatry as "arid and reductive", promoting a culture of shame, those experiences even now, he says, underpin the ambiguous nature of his writing and thinking. "Self-doubt," he writes, "which is a cousin to self-hatred, became my constant companion. If today I have so few convictions and conceive of myself as merely an anthology of opinion, interchangeable and equally valid, I owe this uncertainty to psychoanalysis."

Rather than present his memoir in a strictly linear form, White gives us thematic essays, wonderfully observed pieces on shrinks, on women friends, on writing the life of the French novelist Jean Genet - who, like White, "wallowed in the poetry of abjection" - and on befriending Michel Foucault (a bitchy queen notable in part for LSD freak-outs and hissing behind Susan Sontag's back at a dinner party). White also candidly tells of paying male prostitutes. But for all My Lives' elan, wit, verve and poignancy and the author's fine understanding of himself and the men and women who have enriched him or made him suffer, I wondered if White exaggerates his intellectual diffidence and lack of physical self-worth because recently he's been swamped in an unhappy epoch, and that he might see things differently when the fog passes.

We learn in a chapter named "My Master", at first a fascinating essay about a sado-masochistic relationship between the author and a much younger actor named T, that White was prescribed antidepressants in 2004 when the relationship ended. The depths to which White indulges his abjection - he makes T promise to "piss on my grave" - and then the aftermath of White barricading himself in tears in his office, are difficult to grasp. His neediness is the core of his identity, rather than a symptom of any obvious fear of imminently dying unfulfilled (White has known of his HIV-positive status for 20 years now, and is healthy).

The author tries to explain: "Masochism gives the slave something sexy to do with his abjection, but rejection leaves him with nothing but self-hatred."

Something went very wrong at this recent juncture in White's life. He says: "My two months of suffering over T were the most lacerating of my life."

Pardon? T was a part-time lover, while other key people in White's life - current live-in partner, student Michael Carroll, and a former key lover, architect Hubert Sorin, whom White lost to AIDS in 1994 - are barely mentioned. Still, we have the beauty of White's observations and I cannot help but respect his openness. Even if we are gripped by this raw honesty, most of us will still probably struggle to understand, and have to pause for breath.