REREADING
Alan Hollinghurst on Edmund White's gay classic A Boy’s Own Story
A Boy’s Own Story chronicles a teenager’s journey to adulthood in the 1950s midwest
Alan Hollinghurst
Friday 10 June 2016
ABoy’s Own Story 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 19th-century fiction he devours seems to him a kind of fantasy, creating a “parallel life”, “tinglingly far-fetched”. Could there be a new realism that 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 30 years on, in a culture in which sexual truth-telling is ubiquitous, it retains its power to startle: in the tense insouciance with which it describes a 14-year-old’s lust for his father, or his earning money to pay for a hustler; or in the hair-raising betrayal that 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, also marked a new direction for White, and confirmed the liberating potential of a closely autobiographical kind of novel, where the testamentary force of memoir is coupled with 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 that were to join it in a kind of first-person trilogy, The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1998) – books telling a young man’s story, since youth, in the gay world of the 60s and 70s, which 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 New York’s Fire Island in terms of the parallel rituals of 10th-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 specialised 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 contrast 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 20, 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 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 14-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 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 with his “metaphorical due”, captured and let go like a dragonfly, but fixed for ever on the page.
It is 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 unknown 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 is 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 hometowns, his already divorced parents. The remarried father, an unsociable 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 their 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 lifelikeness 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 he returns to individuals – lovers, writers and, most hauntingly, his parents – 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 lifelong sex obsession, 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 addict’s need, less the pursuit of pleasure than obedience to the terms of his addiction. It all makes a deeper sense in the light of the youthful self-portrait in A Boy’s Own Story, written when the subject was about 40, and judging perhaps that this was the personal as well as the historical moment to trace his own earlier history.
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