Malcolm Bradbury
THE FAREWELL SYMPHONY by Edmund White (Chatto & Windus, R110)
UNDER one possible gaze, we can consider Haydn’s extraordinary Farewell Symphony as a musical tragedy. Performances flower but then fade; in the last movement, the musicians leave the stage one by one, extinguishing their candles, till only a single violin is left. Under another gaze, it’s a kind of triumph. As the collective music reduces to one instrument, a symphonic whole is made complete.
That is the motif for The Farewell Symphony – the third novel in Edmund White’s autobiographical sequence that began with A Boy’s Own Story (1982), the erotic record of its unnamed narrator’s break away from family and middle-American origins into a homosexual and aesthetic awakening, and continued in The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988), which took the story through the gay glory days of the Stonewall riots into a sexual and cultural revolution.
Like Henry Miller, James Baldwin and John Rechy, like William Burroughs and Jean Genet, White found a world of fiction in an urban world, broken loose from convention, that was somewhere between utopia and inferno. It was a world that reached back into the history of bohemia, those explosions of aesthetic and cultural revolt that have challenged straight culture over two bourgeois centuries.
For White it was a world of unremitting adventuring: cruising, promiscuity, sado- masochism; of gay bars, bathhouses, sex clubs, multiple encounters, frequent brutalities. It was freedom claimed, but also a fall into sin; it was evanescent, yet somehow eternally lit from within.
More than any of the newer gay writers who caught at this world, White became its specific recorder, its Proustian memory man, its satirist, its aesthete, its most outrageous parvenu, its snob. He calls himself here someone whose instinct is “to characterise and seduce the people around me”. Elsewhere he identifies himself as an “archaeologist of gossip”, who sees history as made up not of political events or objective records but “feuds and conversions”.
Opportunistic, promiscuous, attractive, artistic, White is cruiser and aesthete, mandarin and cunningly ambitious author. By a mysterious magic, the human meat picked up in a bar or bathhouse often transposes into this major poet or that modern composer. This is not Henry Miller’s world of the downside; it is a network of culture that incorporates a large segment of innovative theatre, cinema, music, literary, academic and social life.
What at one moment is a physical encounter is also a meeting with art, history, ideas, with Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci. The book encompasses Greenwich Village and SoHo, Paris, Rome and Venice. It marks the point where the gay revolution and bohemia itself become indistinguishable, and where both enjoy common triumph. The sexual and feminist revolution, the post-bourgeois, post-family consciousness, a new non-racist, non-sexist freedom has triumphed, come out at last. As its styles, experiments and gratifications multiply, perhaps a quarter of American males are confessing themselves gay.
The triumph of bohemia in the Seventies and Eighties put gay life in a new relation to culture; the new age had come at last. Yet crisis was near: “Never had a group been placed on such a rapid cycle – oppressed in the Fifties, freed in the Sixties, exalted in the Seventies and wiped out in the Eighties,” White writes. What wiped them out was, of course, Aids. Hence The Farewell Symphony, as now the story from the Fifties on is told again, re-explored in much of its homoerotic detail, but under the shadow of finality.
Scanned from the griefs and darker moods of later life (White himself is HIV-positive), the book is told as autobiography – a genre of realism that has itself to be re- explored in the shifting world of aesthetics. Set in the frame of the death of a late-life lover, it revisits the old scenes of several decades: the bathhouses and cruising spots, the cities and cultures, the transient, luminous or wild moments that something – writing – can now try to hold.
Not only gay lovers are fading, dying. There’s a reconciliation, of sorts, with his ageing and fading father, once an object of incestuous hatred. There’s a compromise, of sorts, with his once innocently vain, now physically and mentally failing mother. Strange responsibilities are acquired, above all a nephew with a 13-year-old Mexican girlfriend whom he adopts, takes into his New York gay household, and tries to put through school at his own expense.
It’s these responsibilities, these sobrieties that give the book its dignity. What it evokes is often disturbing and outrageous – not least an act of unprotected sex after he has been diagnosed HIV-positive. But, written in Paris, from the standpoint of age and pain (White describes himself – even this is a come-on – as now looking like a professor nearing retirement age), this memoir-novel is often dignified and moving. It lights up memories, cultures, places; it transposes bathhouse hulks into dignified, artistic and, often, dying men.
Its strongest chapter is its last, which is a reflection on all that has gone before — a meditation on dying, writing, and the best way of keeping the dead alive. Necessity or civility have obscured some of the identifications, but there are scenes – in New York, Paris, Rome – that provoke vivid recognition. There’s the story of a dinner party with Foucault in Paris, which Burroughs attends. Burroughs becomes slangily incomprehensible; Foucault tries unsuccessfully to understand. Two months later he, too, is dead.
“I wanted to build a monument of words for Joshua, big and solid, something that would last a century,” White says after disposing of the effects of one of the more distinguished and academic of his lover- friends. The Farewell Symphony is a try at playing that last violin – disturbing, often ugly and spiteful, but with the kind of salvation that genuinely good writing can give.
@Terror of an ordinary man
Barbara Ludman
THE BIG PICTURE by Douglas Kennedy (Macdonald Purnell, R74,99)
THE middle-aged photographer as hero is back with us, this time on the run. Ben Bradford has put aside his cameras to lead the drab lifestyle of the ultimate Wasp: he’s a high-earning lawyer living in a Connecticut suburb with two small sons and a wife who hates him.
One night, goaded beyond endurance, he kills his wife’s lover, a photographer trying to build a career. To cover up this moment of madness, he assumes his victim’s identity and takes to the road.
Kennedy is good at the terror and disgust of an ordinary man forcing himself to carry out extraordinary acts. Nothing’s easy for Bradford: not leaving his sons, or disposing of his victim’s body, or trying to deal with the mess he’s suddenly made of his life.
In the bestseller genre, The Big Picture has a bit more going for it than the usual suspects from the Follett/Grisham/Smith stables: interesting characters, for one, and a pervading sense of mid-life crisis.