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Authors: Edmund White
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my principles. But surely you've introduced the subject because you're dying to tell us about your own belletristic efforts."
Buder, Lynne and I all froze, looked at each other, drew a breath and rocked with laughter. Penelope laughed too, delighted by the effect she'd produced. I speculated that she was one of those people who prefer being admired for their eccentricities than liked for their common fund of humanity, if they ha\'e such a fund. Soon we were eagerly talking about our belletristic efforts. Buder was a short story writer who favored the "avant-garde" and who had translated several of Raymond Roussel's obscure "te.xts" into a stiff-jointed English. Lynne was writing a thesis on Max Jacob and his influence on Picasso. I said, "My novel is purely autobiographical. Exerything in it is exacdy as it happened, moment by moment—sometimes even written dov^Ti moments after the event. The main character bears my name. I'm writing it in order to persuade the love of my life to come back to me; I'm afraid it's going to be a very long book. That's the avant-garde technique I've invented: it's called realism."
Penelope asked, "Isn't that what most people call a diary?"
The truth was, I'd long since finished and typed my four-hundred-page novel and it was slowly making the rounds of all the New York publishers. It had already been rejected by a dozen. My agent sent me the editors' comments, if there were any. What shocked me most were how personal and arbitrary they were. Whereas I saw publication as a medal conferred
on merit, the notes suggested how haphazard and capricious acceptance must be.
Butler said, "But everything written is a version of reality, even a betrayal of it— tant mieux, since a betrayal is already a choice, which is a conscious, imaginative act."
I protested that since "reality," at least the psychic reality that is the subject of books, takes place in our heads and nowhere else, a fictional account of reality is in no way a translation or "betrayal" of that material into another medium. Lynne murmured, "Tradurre, tradire" exactly as I knew she would.
Butler's eyebrows shot up to indicate his alarm at my heresy, whereas his beautiful hands lazily calmed the waters I'd riled. For if he was both a benevolent despot and a shockable miss, it was his hands that were benevolent and the eyes that were permanently alarmed. He pointed out that language is a closed system in no way connected to reality and that books can only be about other books; I pictured shelves in a dim library where all the books were gabbling contentedly amongst themselves like old people in bed.
"And yet realism is the great challenge," I said, "not the School of Realism with its sordid kitchens and tough streets, much less Social Realism, but rather the burning desire to render the exact shade of sadness, the sadness you feel when you finally get what you want." I spoke facilely, my commas eliminated by drink, and now I was looking into Lynne's merry eyes that were astonished by my recklessness. Suddenly I realized I was talking too much, a temptation I surrendered to only when the subject turned to books, and I dutifully returned to interviewing my new friends. My father had taught me that I need never feel ill at ease socially since all people love to talk about themselves at the slightest provocation—a lesson he, the world's most boring conversationalist, never observed except during business dinners.
While the gay boys around us were slow dancing, a romantic excuse for bumps and grinds and bodily examinations of a nearly mediczJ thoroughness, I was trying to ingratiate myself v\dth Lynne and Buder. I took them more seriously than the boys because they were a heterosexual couple or at least ambiguous sexually.
Couples fascinated me. All my life I'd been dancing attendance on them. I worked harder than they did to keep them together and often failed to see that their spats were just the fleeting coquetry of sex
The
Buder, Lynne and I all froze, looked at each other, drew a breath and rocked with laughter. Penelope laughed too, delighted by the effect she'd produced. I speculated that she was one of those people who prefer being admired for their eccentricities than liked for their common fund of humanity, if they ha\'e such a fund. Soon we were eagerly talking about our belletristic efforts. Buder was a short story writer who favored the "avant-garde" and who had translated several of Raymond Roussel's obscure "te.xts" into a stiff-jointed English. Lynne was writing a thesis on Max Jacob and his influence on Picasso. I said, "My novel is purely autobiographical. Exerything in it is exacdy as it happened, moment by moment—sometimes even written dov^Ti moments after the event. The main character bears my name. I'm writing it in order to persuade the love of my life to come back to me; I'm afraid it's going to be a very long book. That's the avant-garde technique I've invented: it's called realism."
Penelope asked, "Isn't that what most people call a diary?"
The truth was, I'd long since finished and typed my four-hundred-page novel and it was slowly making the rounds of all the New York publishers. It had already been rejected by a dozen. My agent sent me the editors' comments, if there were any. What shocked me most were how personal and arbitrary they were. Whereas I saw publication as a medal conferred
on merit, the notes suggested how haphazard and capricious acceptance must be.
Butler said, "But everything written is a version of reality, even a betrayal of it— tant mieux, since a betrayal is already a choice, which is a conscious, imaginative act."
I protested that since "reality," at least the psychic reality that is the subject of books, takes place in our heads and nowhere else, a fictional account of reality is in no way a translation or "betrayal" of that material into another medium. Lynne murmured, "Tradurre, tradire" exactly as I knew she would.
Butler's eyebrows shot up to indicate his alarm at my heresy, whereas his beautiful hands lazily calmed the waters I'd riled. For if he was both a benevolent despot and a shockable miss, it was his hands that were benevolent and the eyes that were permanently alarmed. He pointed out that language is a closed system in no way connected to reality and that books can only be about other books; I pictured shelves in a dim library where all the books were gabbling contentedly amongst themselves like old people in bed.
"And yet realism is the great challenge," I said, "not the School of Realism with its sordid kitchens and tough streets, much less Social Realism, but rather the burning desire to render the exact shade of sadness, the sadness you feel when you finally get what you want." I spoke facilely, my commas eliminated by drink, and now I was looking into Lynne's merry eyes that were astonished by my recklessness. Suddenly I realized I was talking too much, a temptation I surrendered to only when the subject turned to books, and I dutifully returned to interviewing my new friends. My father had taught me that I need never feel ill at ease socially since all people love to talk about themselves at the slightest provocation—a lesson he, the world's most boring conversationalist, never observed except during business dinners.
While the gay boys around us were slow dancing, a romantic excuse for bumps and grinds and bodily examinations of a nearly mediczJ thoroughness, I was trying to ingratiate myself v\dth Lynne and Buder. I took them more seriously than the boys because they were a heterosexual couple or at least ambiguous sexually.
Couples fascinated me. All my life I'd been dancing attendance on them. I worked harder than they did to keep them together and often failed to see that their spats were just the fleeting coquetry of sex
The
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