The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 27 May 2014
by Edmund White
You only have to watch Taxi Driver once to see how gritty life was in New York City in the 1970s. That era has become a touchstone for urban decay and a kind of swealtering collapse. The city was crime-ridden, dirty, and bankrupt. At the same time, some of its more unsavory qualities also made the city an ideal place for artists and writers of all stripes. It was affordable and tough, politically and socially liberal, a real place in which to incubate one's creativity. And, still, vestiges of cultured, well-heeled, New York remained. Now, of course, all of that has changed. But, we have our memories, and our memoirs. Patti Smith did it well with Just Kids, and here we have Edmund White's reflection on twenty years in the city.
White arrived in 1962, hoping to one day be a recognized writer, but also to explore his independence as a young man in an energetic and changing place. White's career grew steadily, and, in New York's literary world, his contacts expanded exponentially, so that, by the end of the book, he is writing about some of the most recognized names in American intelligentia. In the meanwhile, he is also exploring his sexuality as a young gay man during a sexual revolution. So, the book has an interesting dichotomy, that of White's entertaining stories about the famous and not-so-famous people in his career and intellectual life, and that of his intense and explicit sexual self-discovery in a culture of elated promiscuity. He meets and befriends the famous, such as Peggy Guggenheim and Susan Sontag. But he is also present at the Stonewall riot, a pivotal moment in the gay liberation movement, and he visits the S&M sex clubs and bath houses for almost anonymous sexual encounters. White is intensely intellectual in his writing and in the stories he tells. And he is vividly explicit in his personal reflections without being confessional. His stories are sometimes full of name-dropping asides, but he also paints detailed portraits of people he knew throughout this time in his life, people he met in New York, Venice, Paris and San Francisco. Some of these people will be easily recognized by astute readers. Others, like obscure poets and lovers, will be less so. The cultural backdrop is faded here, in the political and social background, but it is the cultural earthquake of the AIDS crisis, starting in the early 1980s, that eventually brings this chapter of White's life to a close. Everything changed. The sexual revolution was well and truly over, and White had become an established and respected New York author.
Also by Edmund White: [The Flâneur] [Marcel Proust]