A Boy's Own Story Read online

  EDMUND WHITE

  A Boy’s Own Story

  With an introduction by

  ALAN HOLLINGHURST

  PICADOR CLASSIC

  Introduction

  A Boy’s Own Story, first published in 1982, is both a masterpiece in the literature of adolescence and a pivotal book in the history of gay writing, opening up the landscape of teenage homosexuality with revelatory frankness. ‘What if’, its narrator wonders, ‘I could write about my life exactly as it was? What if I could show it in all its density and tedium and its concealed passion, never divined or expressed?’ The ‘realism’ of the nineteenth-century fiction he devours seems to him a kind of fantasy, creating a ‘parallel life’, ‘tinglingly far-fetched’. Could there be a new realism, which faithfully depicted the inner and outer worlds he actually lived in? In the Midwest of the 1950s the growing-up of a young gay man is a vulnerable, marginal, barely visible thing, riven by confusion, self-hatred and doubt. Edmund White’s novel, doing justice to all this confusion, tingles none the less with its own excitement: the value, and novelty, the sheer teeming interest, of telling the truth. More than thirty years on, in a culture where sexual truth-telling is ubiquitous, it retains its power to startle: in the tense insouciance with which it describes a fourteen-year-old’s lust for his father, or his earning money to pay for a hustler; or in the hair-raising betrayal which brings the novel to its close, a wilful act towards which we see the whole narrative has been moving with an awful logic.

  If it changed the rules for what was possible in literary fiction, A Boy’s Own Story, a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, marked a new direction for Edmund White, and confirmed the liberating potential of a closely autobiographical kind of novel, where the testamentary force of memoir is coupled to the artifice of fiction. The embrace of such a genre, as a career-long practice, was a surrender to adventure, undertaken with no knowledge of how the story would continue. It was bound to find its form less in the conventional architecture of plot than in the symmetries of the narrator’s inner world, the driving force of his desires, the selective harmonies of memory. White himself cannot have known, when he wrote A Boy’s Own Story, that he would write the sequels which were to join it in a kind of first-person trilogy, The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1998) – books telling as it were a Young Man’s Story, since youth, in the gay world of the 60s and 70s, seemed magically extended until it was brutally curtailed. We see now that A Boy’s Own Story appeared at a turning point in the history that White’s later books would unfold, just before the AIDS virus violently reconfigured the very world he was describing. The trilogy thus has a second personal thread running through it, and intimately connected, the growth not only of a gay man, but of a driven and ambitious writer, of extraordinary gifts, destined to define gay literature for a generation.

  White’s earlier two novels, though both first-person narrations, had been very different from the astonishingly frank chronicles that were to follow. Each approached the question of how to write gay fiction in its own way His brilliant debut, Forgetting Elena (1973), reads the gay social and sexual rituals of Fire Island in terms of the parallel rituals of tenth-century Japanese court life, ‘idle and gossipy’, ‘profoundly hierarchical if superficially egalitarian’, where decorous social behaviour contrasted with brutal sensuality, and ethics were liable at any time to be overruled by aesthetics. White’s book is itself an aesthetic conundrum, of dreamlike ingenuity, in which an amnesiac narrator learns through observation the codes of a specialized world. Nocturnes for the King of Naples, published five years later, is a confessedly baroque novel, a sequence of highly wrought addresses to an absent male lover. The narrative voice is subjective, self-analytic, self-accusing, in the manner of White’s later books, but the ‘plot’ unfolds with none of their airy and compulsive candour, being glimpsed obliquely, a partial mystery revealed through fragments and refractions. White at this time, like other gay artists before him, treasured the baroque aesthetic for its moral ambivalence, for making ‘little distinction between ornament and substance’ – feelings hidden in digressions, in the expressive uncurling of a metaphor.

  Anyone who reads A Boy’s Own Story will be struck by the contrasts in it between a plain brisk clear-eyed language in which any boy’s story might be told, and the luxuriance of its similes, which open up beyond the mundane world a shimmer of secret reference and private value. Even when White writes of suppressing his urges the metaphor he uses, of a candle snuffed out, multiplies with an unsuppressible life of its own – ‘a candle, two candles, a row of twenty, until the lens pulled back to reveal an entire votive stand exhaling a hundred thin lines of smoke as a terraced offering before the shrine’. These unfurling images seem to translate libido into style, the unstoppable expressions of a hidden life. Adolescent experience is both intense and incommunicable; being so much discovery it also seems, to the accustomed adult eye, disproportionate: ‘it’s the particular curse of adolescence that its events are never adequate to the feelings they inspire, that no unadorned retelling of those events can suggest the feelings’. A kind of figurative exuberance (which will never be lost from White’s writing, and remains one of its magical pleasures) is therefore especially marked in this book, where it not only gives body to adolescent reverie and conjecture, but subtly recreates the frame of reference of a receptive child whose sense of the world comes through reading and music as much as through direct experience.

  A Boy’s Own Story is a book about loneliness – if the story now seems to embody the experience of a whole generation, it’s of the essence that to the narrator it seems his alone, the belated sharing of something at the time incommunicably his ‘own’. ‘I had ached and writhed with loneliness, twisting round and smearing it on me as though it were a tissue of shame pouring out of my body: shameful, familiar, the fell of shame.’ The fourteen-year-old who has been reading Wilde and Balzac and Thomas Mann has been reading Hopkins too – ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day’ – and wraps himself in the fell, a second animal skin, of self-disgust and isolation. Imagining the aura of the male bodies around him at school, he sees it as ‘a kind of oriflamme, if that means the golden banner a knight wraps himself in’; he could by now have found out if it does mean that, but the potency of the word lies in that first teenage surrender to its literary magic, and as it were to its protection.

  In a book about isolation, likenesses proliferate like daydreams around ordinary objects and people, lending fantasy narratives to them, resonances that fill the empty spaces. The rapt habit of describing people (White was from the start a superb portraitist) entails, at this youthful stage, recasting them in images out of art and literature. The body of Kevin, the younger boy with whom the narrator first experiences the unguessed miracle of mutual pleasure in a simple sex-act, is exquisitely described, transmuted against the late sun into an emblem, ‘the waves dragon scales writhing under a sainted knight’s halo’. The observer’s gift is also from the start the aesthete’s, or alchemist’s. To catch a likeness is, however remotely, to possess, and what has been possessed may be retained through the strange mnemonic chemistry of metaphor. So in a later book White speaks of giving a young man he was in love his ‘metaphorical due’, captured and let go like a dragon-fly, but fixed for ever on the page.

  It’s the essence of this adolescent’s world that he doesn’t belong there, and his mind is burningly, sickeningly possessed by what he can’t have. He seems, indeed, to be a figure in the unrealistic literature he reads – a changeling, a prince, a person with some as yet unguessed but redemptive identity. The necessity of escape is also a dream of Europe – that deep American dream that has moved generations of writers, and a profound and lasting pull in
White’s life and writing. The imagery of royalty permeates the book, a further magic sprinkled on American democracy, a ‘secret power’. He sees himself as a ‘dying king’, or as a dauphin; a girl he optimistically dates is ‘royalty’, her beauty ‘a Trooping of the Colour’; another beloved boy is seen as a ‘paupered prince’. In his own ‘fondest if most dangerous fantasy’ he is ‘the harsh young lord, the prince with the pewter ornament stuck in his hat’, who dominates and then betrays his older lover. The prince as sexual autocrat abuses his own power, condemns the older man he has seduced in order to save himself – so there is, as he shockingly discovers, something toxic as well as liberating in the fantasy persona.

  It’s a marvel of A Boy’s Own Story that this subjective realm coexists with the piercingly exact depiction of the social worlds of the boy’s schools, his home-towns, his already divorced parents. The remarried father, an unsocial businessman with his own strange routines (working at night) and socially ambitious new wife; the desperate amorous mother, taking her son with her to restaurants and bars where her efforts to pick up a new man seem hauntingly to prefigure the compulsions of the narrator: both are extraordinary presences in the book, in their complex mixture (for the son) of power and irrelevance. If the compulsions of sex, and of telling the truth about it, are united at the heart of White’s writing, he has, almost as strongly, an avid, insatiable interest in other people; and if his first curiosity will be about those people’s sex-lives, he is also hungry for all the oddities and accidents of their life-stories, and acutely responsive to the strange nexus of character, mood and appearance. He is the least boastful, the least narcissistic of autobiographers. The intense life-likeness of the social world in his novels is achieved in part through the retentive accumulation of anecdote, gleeful gossip tested against sharp observation and coloured always, however delicately, with glamour, a tribute to the mystery of other lives. He absorbs and reconstitutes his subjects, but never reduces them. In the longer perspective of his later memoirs we can see him return to individuals – lovers, writers, and, most hauntingly, his parents – whom he has already portrayed in fictional form. To contemplate these versions side by side is to enter into the imponderables of art, the adjacent claims, when it comes to portraiture, of accuracy and artful arrangement, plain fact and wise condensation. We see that all are works of art, executed at different times and with varying freedoms of style.

  To say all this is to run a little ahead of A Boy’s Own Story, which will lead to these later books, with their busy social panoramas, but which retains the painful essence of being out of, and not yet ready for, the swing of the world. Its amazing luxuriance of recall – of what was done, said, felt or merely imagined – makes it a defining study of a phase of life many writers struggle, if they try at all, to re-enter. It distils a state of mind where loneliness and desire are so fused as to be indistinguishable. Something of this must lie at the heart of White’s life-long sex-obsession, so memorably evoked, in all its addictive compulsion, in his subsequent fiction and memoirs – the thousands of sex-partners totted up in The Farewell Symphony (and, he later claimed, dramatically reduced, for fear readers wouldn’t believe him). The youthful self-portrait in A Boy’s Own Story projects, as you would expect, a complex psychological light on all that will follow. It was written when the subject was about forty, and judging perhaps that this was the personal as well as the historical moment to trace his own earlier history.

  Alan Hollinghurst

  To Christopher Cox

  Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  On the Line

  ONE

  We’re going for a midnight boat ride. It’s a cold, clear summer night and four of us – the two boys, my dad and I – are descending the stairs that zigzag down the hill from the house to the dock. Old Boy, my dad’s dog, knows where we’re headed; he rushes down the slope beside us, looks back, snorts and tears up a bit of grass as he twirls in a circle. “What is it, Old Boy, what is it?” my father says, smiling faintly, delighted to be providing excitement for the dog, whom he always called his best friend.

  I was bundled up, a sweater and a Windbreaker over today’s sunburn. My father stopped to examine the bottom two steps just above the footpath that traveled from cottage to cottage on our side of the lake. This afternoon he had put in the new steps; fresh boards placed vertically to retain the sand and dirt, each braced by four wooden stakes pounded into the ground. Soon the steps would sag and sprawl and need to be redone. Whenever I came back from a swim or a trip in the outboard down to the village grocery store, I passed him crouched over his eternal steps or saw him up on a ladder painting the house, or heard his power saw arguing with itself in the garage, still higher up the hill on the road.

  My father regarded guests as nuisances who had to be entertained over and over again. Tonight’s expedition was just such a duty. But the boys, our guests’ sons, didn’t register the cheerlessness of the occasion and thought it was exciting still to be up at such an hour. They had run on down to the water as I lingered obediently beside my father, who caressed the steps with the flashlight. The boys were racing to the end of the dock, feet pounding the boards. Old Boy started out after them, but then came back to round us up. Now Kevin was threatening to push his little brother in. Squeals, breathing, a tussle, then release, followed by the sound of two boys just being.

  As Dad and I went on down, his flashlight veered off into the water, scaring a school of minnows and illuminating bands of sand. The Chris-Craft, moored to the short end of the L formed by the dock, was big, heavy, imposing. Two tarpaulins covered it; one was a square, corners rounded, that fitted over the two seats in front; the other was a smaller, perfect rectangle that protected the bucket seat aft of the engine, which itself lay concealed, redolent of gasoline, under the double wood doors trimmed in chrome. The canvas, as I undid the grommets and gathered in its folds, had the familiar smell of a sour washcloth. Neither my father nor I moved very gracefully over that boat. We were both afraid of the water, he because he couldn’t swim, I because I was afraid of everything.

  Dad’s most constant attribute was the cigar clenched between his small, stained teeth. Since he could usually be found in an air-conditioned house or office or car, the system under his control, he saw to it that the smoke and smell filtered evenly and thickly into every corner of his world, subduing those around him; perhaps, like a skunk parent, he was steeping us in his protective stink.

  Although it was chilly and I had on a sweater and jacket, I was wearing Bermuda shorts; the wind raised goose bumps on my legs as I installed the wooden flagpole at the stern, an accoutrement patriotism forbade at night but which we needed for the white light that glowed from its top. How the electricity could run through this pole as soon as it was plugged into its socket mystified me; I dared not ask Dad for an explanation lest he give me one. The leather seats were cold, but they warmed under flesh soon enough, skin to skin.

  Pulling away from the dock generated high anxiety (pulling in was worse). My father, who’d been a Texas cowboy as a young man, could laugh at twisters and rattlers, but everything about this alien medium – cold, bottomless, sliding – alarmed him. He was wearing his absurd “captain’s” hat (all his leisure clothes were absurd – jokes, really – as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed). He was half standing behind the wheel. The motors were churning, the spotlight on the bow was gyrating, the red tip of his cigar was pulsing. I’d ventured out on the deck, untied the ropes, tossed them in, jumped in the boat myself; now I was crouched just behind my father. I was wielding a long pole with a hook on one end, the sort used to open upper windows in stuffy grade schools. My job was to push us safely out of the berth before my father threw the toiling motors into gear. It was all an embarrassment. Other men moored their powerboats with a single line, backed away from docks in a simple, graceful arc, talking all the while, a
nd other men’s sons scrambled like agile monkeys across lacquered decks, joking and smiling.

  We were under way. The speedboat lunged forward with so much force that we were pressed back against our seats. Peter, Kevin’s seven-year-old brother, was in the rumble seat, his hair streaming under the rippling flag, his mouth open to scream with delighted fear, though the sound was lost behind gales of wind. He waved a skinny arm and with his other hand clutched a chromium grip beside him; even so, he was posting high as we spanked over someone else’s wake. Our own was thrown back from the prow. The night, intent seamstress, fed the fabric of water under the needle of our hull, steadily, firmly, except the boat wasn’t stitching the water together but ripping it apart into long white shreds. Along the shore a few house lights here and there peered through the pines, as fleeting as stars glimpsed through the moving clouds above. We shot past an anchored boat of fishermen and their single kerosene lamp; one of them shook his fist at us.

  The lake narrowed. Over to the right lay the nine-hole golf course (I knew it was there, though I couldn’t see it) with its ramshackle clubhouse and wicker armchairs painted green, its porch swing on creaking chains. Once a month we showed up there late for Sunday supper, our clothes not right, our talk too distant and forthright, the cigar a foul smudge pot set out to ward off the incoming social frost.

  Now Dad’s cigar had gone out and he stopped the boat to relight it. From our high windy perch we drifted down. Engine cut to a mild churning. When the exhaust pipe dipped above water level, it blatted rudely. “Boy, I’m soaked!” Peter was screaming in his soprano. “I’m freezing. Gee, you sure let me have it!”

  “Too much for you, young fellow?” my father asked, chuckling. He winked at me. The children of visitors (and sometimes their fathers) were usually called “young fellow,” since Dad could never remember their names. Old Boy, who had been squinting into the wind, his head stuck out beyond and around the windshield, was now prancing happily across the cushions to receive a pat from his master. Kevin, sitting just behind my father, said “Those fishermen were mad as hell. I’d’ve been, too, if some guy in a big fat-ass powerboat scared off my fish.”