Tim Adams
THE MARRIED MAN by Edmund White (Chatto &Windus)
Edmund White has always trawled his own intensely sexual life in his novels, and since that sexual life has charted the course of gay liberation, his books have been beautifully candid political acts. His last novel, The Farewell Symphony, was a vast valediction to his own promiscuity. Its narrator calculated that he had taken more than 3 000 lovers during the golden age of gay sex that began with Stonewall and ended with the onset of Aids, and White admitted the tally was not far removed from his own.
There was, though, in that teeming homage to libido, a loose end. The novel contained a ghostly figure called Brice, whose brief life the narrator challenged himself to detail along with all the one-night stands, noting at the outset: “I may well fail. If I do fail, don’t blame me. Understand that even writers, those professional exhibitionists, have their moments of reticence.” The ephemeral Brice was based on White’s long-time lover Hubert Sorin, who died of Aids, aged 32, before White completed the book. And the author did fail in his efforts to delineate him; Brice, always an insubstantial presence, simply disappears from view, without explanation, before the book ends.
The Married Man is an attempt to flesh that story out, give it closure. It details the relationship between an American in Paris called Austin, and Julien, the younger married man he courts at his local gym. While working on the book White explained how, “I am writing a novel loosely based on my years with Hubert … What shocks me about my response to him, however, is that my anger with him – for deserting me, for not releasing me, for not always being honest with me, as I discovered after his death – keeps seeping out on to the page. I thought I would show nothing except our growing isolation – and love – as he became more and more ill.”
The result bears witness to these tensions: this novel is in part a tender memorial, in part a kindly satire on the differences between Americans and the French, in part an examination of the possibilities of fidelity. It bears the imprint of lived experience, yet is set loose by White’s ability to conjure a flighty romance from the resolutely grim aspects of his story.
The Married Man is both an odyssey – we follow the lovers from Paris, on day trips to the country, and then on to New England and the Florida Keys, and finally to Morocco – and an elegy. White brings to the wasting of his lover’s body the same forensic attention that he has always reserved for the physicality of his descriptions of lovemaking.
To begin with, though, it is the narrator, Austin, in whom our sympathies are rooted. Austin, who like White, has long been “seropositive” without developing Aids, has an apartment on the Ile St Louis. White uses the misty magic of that place as a touchstone for his sense of the “posthumous, post-diagnosis, foreign days” that he spends among the camp banter of his young circle of friends, mostly former lovers. The sparkle of his past lust is pricked on summer evenings with the fairy- lit bateaux-mouches passing his window, but that life has gone.
Meeting Julien changes all of this. The relationship seems to offer the chance of something that has never made sense to him previously: monogamy. Julien has already experienced marriage, but for Austin this is the first time, and “he day-dreamed his way into the mind of a 19th-century bride who looked at those pale male hands beside her, and thought … that he’d explore her body with them for 50 years”.
That these daydreams are short-lived fuels the poignancy of a profound little novel that shows White, once the chronicler of “golden lads”, able to bring his distinctive kind of poetry to their coming to dust.