6 June 2025 - 1:20pm
At the end of Evelyn Waugh’s novel of madness and authorship, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Gilbert starts to write. “He knew what had to be done […] a hamper to be unpacked of fresh, rich experience — perishable goods.” Novelists dream of fresh, rich experience, and readers, too. Not many novelists have made so much of unexplored lives as Edmund White, who has just died at the age of 85. His frankness and stylistic elegance opened up unexplored territories of human behaviour and social custom.
The centre of White’s appeal was a series of autobiographical novels about growing up gay in postwar America. Beginning with A Boy’s Own Story and continuing with The Beautiful Room Is Empty and the experience of Aids in The Farewell Symphony, they gathered a large readership from the start. His books are what serious American fiction rarely is: totally frank and exceedingly funny. The classical, aesthetic beauty of White’s balanced prose turned lives of evanescence — casual sex, faithless friendships, moments of unforgivable silliness — into something permanent.
It’s what the best novelists have always done: annex areas of human behaviour that have not been thoroughly explored, and make them accessible to a new and wide readership. Anyone who delved back beyond A Boy’s Own Story found an unexpected backlist for a bestseller — two ravishingly baroque books, The Joy of Gay Sex and a brilliantly witty travel book, States of Desire, voyaging through homosexual America. (Instantly a period piece — I read it in the mid-Eighties and was thrilled by its hilarity and rather appalled by the sympathy in its Boston chapter towards politicised paedophiles).
White had a literary perversity that wouldn’t play to expectations. His first book after the immense success of A Boy’s Own Story is the fantastical romance of Caracole. White was the most sociable of men, not just on the piers of Manhattan, but this book seemed calculated to put him outside the pale, containing a fictionalised defamatory account of Susan Sontag’s relationship with her son David. On the other hand, he was the most supportive of literary stars, going on with his gay writers’ group The Violet Quill, always interested in meeting and reading a new author.
I loved him. My acquaintance with him didn’t go as far as calling him Bunny, but I treasure the memory of taking him, a new boyfriend and an English novelist friend into the House of Commons when I was working there in the mid-1990s. When the security staff at the entrance ran an enormous shopping bag of Edmund’s through the X-ray, they had to pull him aside. It had revealed a dagger. It turned out that Edmund had come straight from a highland attire shop — he was rather keen about kilts as bedtime wear for his new boyfriend, and had gone so far as to include a skean dhu. The security staff forgave him. How could you not?
Edmund was a glorious human being, and a wonderful writer. His superb biography of the French novelist Jean Genet shows just how responsible and professional he could be, and to the end, he continued to write magnificent books. I strongly recommend his saucy late novel Jack Holmes and His Friend, an account of a man with (the friend of the titular character) a gigantic penis, liberally shared around. He hardly ever won a major prize or the acclaim of the polite establishment. On the other hand, I dare say that anyone who has read one of his books to the end comes away with one of his sentences burned in their memory. Words unused by others, but unforgettable from his pen.
Philip Hensher is the author of 11 novels and a Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. His new book, A History of the Novel in Britain, will be published by Pelican in September.
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