The Farewell Symphony Read online

  Acclaim for EDMUND WHITE’s

  The Farewell Symphony

  “White’s prose style is at its best … filled with perfectly pitched descriptions…. The Farewell Symphony is about the page-by-page brilliance of White’s elegant and honest voice.”

  —Boston Globe

  “Ambitious and elegiac … vivid and variegated … [White’s] voice … is textured and rich, an ever-replenishing reservoir of fresh images and elegant phrasing.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “A jolting novel. Mr. White writes about love as sex, sex as love, with candor that eventuates in often alarming honesty. Yet sympathy and compassion are his vital resources, and his novel … leaves you not sad or bitter, but actually quite wondrous of life.”

  —Richard Ford

  “Engagingly bittersweet…. White’s writing modulates from rich lyricism … to the flat factuality of the cruiser’s life.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Rife with brilliance…. No one writing in English today may turn out more striking metaphors as consistently as White.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Also by Edmund White

  Copyright

  To Michael Carroll

  The Farewell Symphony is an autobiographical novel. Although its action parallels many of the events in my life, it is not a literal transcription of my experience. The characters are stylized versions, often composites, of people I knew in those years. Sometimes I have used Proust’s method of merging or mitosis, i.e. condensing two people into one or distributing the traits of one person over two or more characters. These changes have been made to protect the privacy of people living—and of the numerous dead—but also to give a coherent shape to so many destinies.

  Only those who are sad

  or else have been sad at some time

  need bother with my works.

  Qui no és trist, de mos dictats no cur

  (o en algun temps que sia trist estat).

  —AUSIÀS MARCH,

  fifteenth-century Catalan poet

  The author thanks The Rockefeller Institute at Bellagio, where many pages of this book were written. He also expresses his gratitude to Jonathan Burnham at Chatto and George Andreou at Knopf for their sensitive, detailed and useful responses to this work, and to Alex Jeffers for typing it. He specially thanks Holly Ely for a close reading.

  I’m beginning this book on All Saints’ Day in Paris, six months after Brice’s death. This morning I went with Brice’s brother and his brother’s lover to the Père Lachaise cemetery to leave some flowers before the white marble plaque that marks the niche where Brice’s ashes are stored in an urn. At first there wasn’t a receptacle for the flowers and we’d just leave them on the cold floor, where they’d quickly wilt. But then someone—the Spanish woman who cleaned for us once a week, perhaps—attached a little brass vase to the plaque, and that’s where we put the flowers now. Today I left yellow freesias. Someone had Scotchtaped the photo of a young man to Brice’s plaque and I wondered if it was a secret admirer who’d left his own portrait; retrospectively I was jealous. Maybe it was a photo of one of the other dead young men that had been taped to our plaque by mistake.

  The ashes are in the columbarium, a fancy word for “dovecote.” We wanted to be buried together, but since technically I’m not a Parisian, there was no way I could buy a plot or a niche at Père Lachaise, which is reserved for citizens of the capital. Brice thought of everything in his methodical way; he bought the niche for his urn but in my name. Now, legally, I can’t be refused entrance when I die.

  I’ve never liked to feel things in the appropriate way at the right moment. I know that Brice’s brother is slightly puzzled that I don’t visit the long, subterranean corridors of the columbarium more often. Even today I was dry-eyed, bored, more curious about the new plaques than anguished about Brice’s. The day Brice was interred, there were only four other niches occupied along this whole wall. Now it’s filling up quickly—at least two hundred newcomers have arrived in the last six months. Some are Vietnamese and their inscriptions are in both French and in Chinese characters. A few are young men in their twenties—I imagine they died of AIDS, too. There are Jews and Protestants as well as Catholics; Poles and Italians as well as French. There’s even an American writer shelved just above Brice; he’s had inscribed the words “Writer-Ecrivain” just below his name.

  It’s not that Brice’s brother Laurent doubts my grief. He saw me six months ago, sitting on the curb just outside the funeral home, sobbing. We’d just made all the arrangements for the cremation and now I was crying like a Sicilian widow.

  I’d been afraid I wouldn’t feel anything when Brice finally died—but my body did all the feeling for me. It took over. My knees buckled, I lost my balance, tears spurted from my eyes. I staggered in the sunlight and nearly fell and had to be held up by Laurent and his lover.

  Everything I’d lived through in the last five years had changed me—whitened my hair, made me a fat, sleepy old man, matured me, finally, but also emptied me out. I met Brice five years before he died—but I wonder whether I’ll have the courage to tell his story in this book. The French call a love affair a “story,” une histoire, and I see getting to it, putting it down, exploring it, narrating it as a challenge I may well fail. If I do fail, don’t blame me. Understand that even writers, those professional exhibitionists, have their moments of reticence.

  STRANGE THAT I should be living here, in Paris. Ever since I’d been a child, an imaginary Paris had been the bright planet pulsing at the heart of my mental star map, but the one time I’d gone to Paris I had been dressed in a horrible shiny blazer and everyone in the cafés had laughed at me. I said to a French acquaintance as we left the Flore, “I know I’m being paranoid,” but he said matter-of-factly, “No, they are laughing at you.”

  A sign in the tailor shop window off the Boulevard St.-Germain warned that customers would not be allowed more than three fittings after the purchase of a suit and my mind winced at this proof of shameless male vanity, so exotic to an American since Americans equated male vanity with effeminacy or Mafia creepiness. The year was 1968 and stylish young American men back home were wearing fringe and puffy-sleeved pirate shirts, headbands, mirrored vests and winklepicker boots, but the materials were synthetic, the colors garish, the fit very approximate and the mood one of dressing up. Orange and black were popular colors. The long Mardi Gras of that decade in the States was a mockery of traditional good taste, a send-up of adult propriety, the recklessness of a generation that would never settle down long enough to study the fine gradations with which quality, and especially beauty, begin. And if the mood was festive, the festivity seemed more a gesture defying parental drabness than an assertion of a new-born hedonism. A true search for pleasure is an exacting science and is born from a profound interest in raglan versus fitted sleeves and in the precise arc a weighted hem on the bias will describe.

  In 1968, Paris, despite Malraux’s clean-up efforts, had not yet been converted into the triumphant, international capital it was to become in the eighties, a city gleaming with spotlit, steam-cleaned façades and newly built monuments (arch, pyramid, circular opera house). Back then it seemed a dim anthill. The Marais, which is
now the chic gay ghetto, was then a dilapidated quarter of garment workers surging through the cold rain, a populous slum swarming over seventeenth-century aristocratic houses, a neon-lit sweatshop glimpsed through soot-streaked shutters, the old carved wood doors replaced by undulating tin barricades, a pitiful line of laundry strung across a cour d’honneur spouting crabgrass.

  I was traveling with Jamie, a New York blueblood who shared an office with me. Although we’d talked about love and Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot and even Keats for hours back in New York in our Midtown office on the thirty-second floor, in Paris Jamie was irritatingly brittle and philistine and I began to despise him until we visited the Sainte Chapelle one morning. As we stood there beneath the soaring stained-glass windows, our feet dappled by the reds and yellows, I noticed that his face was glassy with tears at so much beauty and I liked him all over again. Somehow he had come by an introduction to another American, an American baron in Paris, gay like us, though Jamie had yet to tell me in so many words that he really was himself homosexual. This expatriate, Mr. Boulton, had created such a successful public relations campaign for Liechtenstein that he’d been made a papal baron, his fondest wish, and now he’d inscribed his coat of arms on his calling cards, his black velvet slippers and the chauffeur’s door of his portly old Rolls.

  Jamie, always in search of a bargain, had found us a smelly little Latin Quarter hotel that had nothing English about it except its name, the At Home. The proprietors were a minuscule, slippered couple who smoked Gauloises, drank red wine in the morning and, by all olfactory evidence, seldom bathed. They were Communists and looked at us with genuine class hatred the afternoon Mr. Boulton’s chauffeur dropped a card on us, inviting us to dinner two days hence. Nothing could have been less in keeping with the times. A month later would be May, 1968, the moment when French students and workers would revolt and transform their society. Already the signs were everywhere, including the anti-American slogans scrawled in spray paint along the embankments of the Seine.

  Mr. Boulton’s nine other dinner guests were all French and all male. They switched seamlessly into perfect English whenever the two black servants, an old couple from the Antilles, entered to clear, but otherwise they crackled away in the lightest, most luxurious and incomprehensible French. The fifty-year-old man next to me, owner of a cosmetics firm, starved exquisitely thin, who left early before even the cheese was served (as he explained, in order to keep his figure and ensure his beauty sleep), thrilled his friends with his account of his weekend with an American Marine hitchhiker he’d picked up as he was driving back up to Paris from his château near Sancerre. Not that I knew what he was saying at the time; over dinner I’d merely tilted my mouth into and out of a variety of knowing or approving smiles and raised and lowered my eyebrows in a perfect hydraulics of feigned sympathy as his hands and voice expressed so much to everyone but me and won him gasps, laughter and quick, excited intakes of breath. Even Jamie understood more than I did.

  After dinner, as everyone was standing around sipping bad brandy that came from the American baron’s own vineyard, Jamie filled me in. I felt all the more crestfallen. Not only could I not contribute to or even follow the conversation, I wasn’t masculine or handsome enough to provoke the sort of interest the Marine had awakened. The French, apparently, liked their Americans big, butch and dumb. I had read Proust but in English, which left me with the longing but not the language needed to shine in a Paris salon. Now I saw I’d have had better luck if I’d shaved my head and worn fatigues to dinner, anything rather than the shabby blazer I was still paying for on-time, with its buttons already shedding their gilt to reveal the tin underneath. I hated my shaggy haircut, my bad shoes, my limping tongue. A dashing young Parisian whose jacket sleeves were unbuttoned and rolled up like Cocteau’s found himself trapped beside me for a moment on a small couch covered with pink velvet. In a characteristic American rush of confession, I said to him, “You know, it’s so embarrassing not being able to speak French. I’ve never felt such an idiot. And the worst of it is I can read French perfectly well.”

  “Unfortunately we’re not reading anything tonight,” he said coldly.

  An immense silence installed itself as I felt my smile dry and harden on my lips like spilled wax. I’d learned the day before that the French ascribe social silence to the unseen passage of angels; now I said, “Un ange passe,” and he said, “Very witty,” and fled to an amusing group of friends he’d finally spotted.

  I stood up and dropped my drained glass on the marble floor and awoke the next morning in my hotel room to discover I was terribly ill. I had a high fever and was so nauseous that even the smell of the café au lait the maid brought to our room sickened me. Jamie, who was being psychoanalyzed, decided I was “resisting” Paris.

  I swooned into deep, uncomfortable sleeps, soaked my sheets through, pushed away the croissant that marked yet another morning. The sympathetic but sharp eyes of the maid frightened me because I feared she would deduce I had an incurable and highly infectious disease. She kept up a sprightly monologue as she made the bed and plumped the pillows; I sat on the only chair, smiled weakly, too feeble to care about much except returning to sleep, afraid she might denounce me to the Stalinist proprietors downstairs. Once she was gone I turned fitfully on a spit of dreams basted by the sounds of Paris—the bells, the passing conversations, always about money, the click of heels, the rain dripping from a choked gutter like a hypnotist’s patter…. Somewhere, far from here, near the Arc de Triomphe, Odette was presiding over a salon beside a winter garden filled with white orchids that glowed palely under snow just beginning to fall and to stencil in ermine the iron casements holding the immense clear, cold panes.

  Or so I thought, not knowing that the month was April, not February, and that the coming revolution of students and workers would eradicate the last traces of the Belle Epoque. I had a rare capacity for sleeping through history. In my infrequent moments of lucidity I’d contemplate, then achieve, a transit to the foul-smelling toilet in the hall. Since I’d stopped eating, nothing much was coming out of my body, except one day I noticed—despite the feeble light in the water closet that was turned on automatically only when the lock slid shut—that I’d produced a single rabbit pellet, shockingly white.

  Jamie was intent on not humoring me, a policy that happened to fit in nicely with an affair he was apparently having with a Parisian, since he came back to the At Home now only to shave, give himself a maid’s bath from the sink in our room and change his shirt, stockings and underwear. He was tinnily cheerful, as though afraid he might take pity on me. I asked him to get me a hard-boiled egg from the bar downstairs, given that was the only thing I could imagine eating. We were on the third floor and I didn’t think I could negotiate so many stairs or even dress myself. With a shrug he agreed to indulge my hypochondria just this once.

  One day, I don’t know which, I did dress and go down to a Vietnamese restaurant in the street. I felt old and refined in my shabby clothes that hung loosely on me. I ordered something that turned out to be a lovely soup strangely perfumed, perhaps with citronelle and coriander. Paris seemed dangerously foreign; I knew that if I collapsed in a foaming fit I’d just be nudged out to the curb by an expensive little boot.

  As soon as I was back in my room I plunged down through warm, brackish tides to wrest one small yellow pearl from the depths but it was poison, the sea heavy, my oxygen supply compromised. For a long time I was dragged across the shingle, my battered body wound and unwound on a bobbin of white water.

  Then I woke up, perhaps it was midnight, my fever was in remission. I was clear-headed and in a panic. I knew that if I didn’t do something now I might never emerge from sea-racked dreams. I showered, dressed and descended into the empty streets. Somehow I’d just assumed cabs would be cruising here as in any New York neighborhood. Finally I saw a deserted taxi stand and three people in line ahead of me. Half an hour later I told the driver to take me to the American Hospital—far away in
Neuilly, as it turned out. No one but a nurse was awake, but finally an English doctor was aroused. He examined and informed me I had “glandular fever”; had I known what this meant, I would have told him I had already had mononucleosis, the kissing disease. I said I suspected I had hepatitis.

  “Oh, nonsense,” he yawned. “The shellfish is perfectly good in France.”

  “But you can get it from sex, too,” I said, “and lots of people in New York are coming down with it.”

  He said he seriously doubted my diagnosis, but a day later I jaundiced. When I went back to Neuilly with my yellow face he said, “But hepatitis isn’t a serious disease. Just don’t visit more than one museum a day. No reason to cut short your holiday.”

  In fact there was one museum I wanted to visit before flying home, the Musée Guimet of Oriental art. In college my favorite course had been Buddhist Art and half the things we’d studied had been slides of sculptures from the Guimet. As I struggled up the endless marble staircase I couldn’t help but remember Bergotte, the novelist in Proust, who pays a dying visit to a Vermeer exhibit and collapses after seeing a little patch of yellow wall, presumably in the View of Delft. My goal was a Bodhisattva of the Sui dynasty, a slender figure in hesitant contrapposto, the tenderly modeled body girdled by a low chain over a pleatless gown, a long pearl necklace dangling like a flapper’s to a point below the knees. The face was undeniably worldly (after all, the stretched-out ears revealed that the saintly Gautama had once been Siddhartha, a prince who’d worn heavily jeweled earrings), but it was sacred, if to be sacred meant to be Nothing at all. Of course the sculpture wasn’t there or was in storage and I wandered, jaundiced, through acres of bad blue and white Ching pottery.

  WHEN I FLEW back to New York, I was the color of old teeth and so thin and indifferent that everyone at the airport spoke to me in French. My doctor in New York hospitalized me. After eleven days he released me and I went home. He prescribed two months of bed rest, six months of sexual abstinence, a year without drink.