Latest news with #AlanHollinghurst
Irish Examiner
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Author interview: ‘Gay life and history keeps on developing and changing'
Alan Hollinghurst is recovering from a nasty bug and is still a little under the weather when he chats to me from his home in London. 'I will do my best to sound intelligent,' he says. The British author has been garlanded with some of the most prestigious literary awards throughout his career, and is considered by many to be one of the great writers of our time. The reviews for his most recent novel, Our Evenings, the story of a gay Anglo-Burmese actor and his life across seven decades, have been glowing. As a former deputy editor of The Times Literary Supplement himself, does he pay attention to the critical response to his work? 'Occasionally, I am warned by a kind friend or a publicist to skip a review,' he says. 'And I do because there is no point, you end up arguing in your head with this person you don't know and it doesn't do you any good.' But generally I do read them and bringing out a book so rarely, I feel quite interested in how it is going to fare when it goes out into the world. Hollinghurst's debut novel The Swimming Pool Library, published in 1988, was described by writer Edmund White as 'the best book on gay life yet written by an English author'. Hollinghurst went on to be named one of Granta's best young British novelists in 1993. However, it was his fourth novel, The Line of Beauty, which really catapulted his work into the literary mainstream when it won the Booker Prize in 2004. It was an engrossing evocation of Thatcher's Britain, seen through the eyes of gay narrator Nick Guest — an outsider who is drawn into British high society. From today's vantage point, it is hard to imagine the fuss that surrounded the win; Hollinghurst chuckles about the newspaper headline that screamed, 'Gay sex wins Booker'. A great deal has changed in those two decades. 'Yes,' says Hollinghurst. 'A lot was happening already and gay fiction as a phenomenon really took on salience through the later '80s and '90s. 'But it hadn't broken into the echelons of Booker Prize shortlists and so on until that point, rather amazingly. 'I had been writing from a gay point of view for quite a while, so it did all seem rather like old hat to me.' It was an inevitable journalistic talking point about the whole thing and it didn't do any harm. The world of LGBTQ+ fiction is a completely different proposition now, and is flourishing thanks in no small part to writers such as Hollinghurst. 'The interesting thing of taking gay life and gay history as your subject is that it is a live subject, it keeps on developing and changing in ways that you couldn't have anticipated. 'Back in the '80s, it was all far more binary, gay, or straight. Now we are in a much more complex terrain of not so much defining as exploring sexuality. 'I love the sense that the whole thing has grown and become more complex and subtle,' he says. There are echoes of the political themes in The Line of Beauty to be found in Our Evenings, which takes in the rise of populism and Brexit although Hollinghurst is at pains to point out that is not the book's main concern — 'It is not, thank God, a Brexit novel'. Does he feel that what is happening in politics today is too fantastical to be portrayed realistically? 'The extreme acceleration in America, you couldn't keep up with it. My tendency has been not to write out of the immediate political moment,' he says. ' The Line of Beauty is set in the mid-'80s but it came out in 2004. Both the political moment of the Thatcher boom years and the extended moment of the Aids crisis, I had to let it settle before I saw how to deal with it.' The new book does take on the slightly more immediate thing of Brexit and that kind of nationalism. 'I address it fairly obliquely through the experience of somebody who is not in that world politically but on whom inevitably it impinges. 'There are writers who are up to the challenge of writing things that are more topical. I don't think that's generally in my nature.' The book is certainly elegiac in tone, with the protagonist Dave Win looking back on his youth in a very different Britain. Hollinghurst says it was 'awful' to watch Brexit unfolding. 'I am furious, incredulous, and very sad. I think it was an absolutely disastrous decision,' he says. 'We were led astray by implausible politicians. Nothing good whatsoever has come out of it.' Not unlike the character of Dave Win, who is an actor, Hollinghurst, aged 71, has been honing his craft across six decades now. In some ways, writing has become a more challenging process. 'I started writing in my early teens, I wrote appalling poems,' he says. 'The disconcerting thing about being a lifelong novelist is that I first imagined you worked out how to do it and after that it got easier and easier.' But I have found the reverse has been true. Each one is harder than the one before. 'There was a sort of ease and pleasure about writing my first book when I had a full-time job. 'I was writing it in the evenings and at weekends, and no-one knew anything about it, it was just this lovely thing that I was doing. 'I have never quite recaptured that sense of happiness in writing.' Of course, there are many more distractions now — although he is not really on social media, the online world still encroaches. 'When I was finishing Our Evenings and finding it a struggle, I went back 30 years, and I had the thing of having no phone or contact with the internet until 6pm,' he says. 'It was completely magical — you just take possession of your day again and you know you cannot be interrupted. 'It was like when I was writing in the '80s and I would just unplug the telephone in the morning. I do recommend it, it is absolutely wonderful.' Although it is slightly hellish when you go back on at six o'clock and you have 153 emails. He acknowledges that he has been fortunate to be able to ply his trade as a full-time writer for most of his career: 'I was lucky my first two novels both did very well. With sales of literary fiction going down, it is getting harder and harder. You really need another job. 'I am aware of the more perilous position of literary fiction and the problems of getting people to read anything longer than 140 words. 'It has become more cutthroat, the bid for public attention, and probably harder for new literary novelists to get established.' Hollinghurst has been enjoying some book-related travel, including a visit to the West Cork Literary Festival next week. Cork is a place he knows relatively well, having spent time in Skibbereen, and with his friend, the poet Bernard O'Donoghue, at his home place in Cullen. He is refreshingly forthright when I ask him if he is working on a book at the moment. 'Absolutely not,' he says. 'I am having a lovely time not writing anything. I usually feel quite emptied out when I get to publishing a book and it takes a year or two for the tank to refill. 'I'm far from starting anything else and I am very much enjoying not having that pressure. 'After a while I shall miss it and I shall long to be back in that other mysterious place messing around.' Alan Hollinghurst will be in conversation with Sue Leonard on Friday, July 11, at 8.30pm, The Maritime Hotel, Bantry, as part of the West Cork Literary Festival which takes place from July 11 to July 18; Read More Book review: Sublime characterisation and empathy make a novel to savour
Spectator
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Beware taking up running in your fifties
Over a hotel breakfast in Brisbane, I showed Sir Alan Hollinghurst my injuries. We'd met the previous week at the Auckland Writers' Festival and would meet again, post-Brisbane, at the Sydney Writers' Festival. A book tour of Australia and New Zealand is a bit like being in a David Lodge novel – writers are more likely to travel halfway round the world if a few potentially sizeable crowds are waiting for them. A.C. Grayling, who I broke bread with in Auckland and saw again in Sydney, seemed to have scored the most palpable hit by being invited to be philosopher-in-residence at a festival in Margaret River, centre of Australia's most prestigious wine region. It was déjà-vu as I kept bumping into Lemn Sissay, Samantha Harvey, Philippe Sands and Colm Tóibín, Colm reminding me that I'd once advised him to improve his sales by adding the occasional murder. Back to those injuries. I took up 'running' in my fifties. I put the word in inverted commas because the most I can usually manage is 5k at a pace somewhere below a slow trot. But I've grown to enjoy it, and whenever I go somewhere new I like to go for a run to get a feel for the place. Having flown from Auckland to Brisbane, I duly set out before breakfast, only to be undone by a particularly vicious stretch of uneven pavement. Back at the hotel, my wife dressed my wounds so we could enjoy breakfast before seeing a doctor. Nothing needed stitching, but I was sporting so many plasters and bandages that I felt mummified. The doctor seemed most concerned about my elbow: 'But I can't quite see bone,' she concluded cheerily. Sharing the story afterwards, I learned that people my age (65) don't actually fall. Rather we 'have a fall'. This is the stage of my life I have reached. The trip (hah!) had begun with a long flight (Edinburgh-Doha) followed by an even longer one (Doha-Auckland). We found ourselves exiting the international terminal in New Zealand at around 3.30 a.m., only to find that the domestic terminal (we were heading to South Island) didn't open for another 90 minutes. Joy. But things improved once we'd reached Nelson and rented a car. We headed for the wineries of Marlborough, where our first cellar-door tasting was hosted by a chap from Wales. So obviously we talked about the Welsh-speaking community of Gaiman in Patagonia – something I knew nothing about prior to visiting the place during a South American cruise a couple of months earlier. My wife Miranda has a knack for booking holidays. The cruise lasted over 50 days, during which time we circumnavigated South America. Once home, we just had time to do the laundry before we were off to Lisbon for my birthday – the day itself coinciding with a power cut that blacked out the whole of Portugal. Having survived that, we were ready to repack for the Antipodes. Which would be fine, except that a while back I signed up to write a new novel. I did the plotting and planning during the cruise's many sea days, but there hasn't been much time since then to actually write the story. I lugged all my notes and as much of the first draft as exists to New Zealand, but never felt the need to remove any of it from my bag: there always seemed to be another wine region, art gallery or bookshop to visit. It was especially interesting to see the changes in Christchurch since my last visit in 2017. The shipping containers – turned into everything from shops to wine bars after the 2011 earthquake – have all gone. A few buildings remain to be demolished and progress on the cathedral has come to a halt due to lack of money, but the city itself was buzzing and the 'cardboard' cathedral (built as a temporary replacement) is as glorious as I remembered it. After the Sydney Writers' Festival we tacked on a bit more holiday, which involved the wineries around Adelaide and then three days on the Ghan, a well-appointed train that chugs its way north to Alice Springs and Darwin. This, I thought, was when I'd get down to doing some actual work – but the scenery rolled past, hypnotic in its intense, ever-changing sameness, and I became fascinated by the parade of termite hills. The book stayed where it was. Novels need to be credible while the real world does not. In a doctor's waiting room in Sydney, where my injuries were to be reassessed and the dressings changed, a man walked in with his elderly mother and sat down opposite. 'Ian?' he said. This was Andrew, who used to be my publicist back in the day, and is just about the only person I know in the city. His mother had had a fall…
Irish Times
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Writers remember Edmund White: The chronicler, artist and patron saint of queer literature
Edmund White, the American writer, playwright and essayist who attracted acclaim for his semi-autobiographical novels such as A Boy's Own Story – and literally wrote the book on gay sex, with the pioneering The Joy of Gay Sex – has died aged 85. Over his career, White wrote more than 30 books and was a major influence on modern gay literature. Here, Colm Tóibín, Alan Hollinghurst, Adam Mars-Jones and more recall the high style and libidinous freedom of a writer who 'was not a gateway to gay literature but a main destination'. 'He loved gossip and intrigue' – Colm Tóibín, novelist Edmund White wrote with style; he cared about style; he made it seem natural and effortless. He wrote and indeed spoke with a kind of delightful candour. He loved revelation and gossip and intrigue. The idea that everyone he knew had secrets fascinated him. He chuckled a lot. He read all the latest French novels. He saw no reason why he should keep things to himself and, because he was gay in a time when gay life had not appeared much in fiction, that became one of his great subjects. A Boy's Own Story, which came out in 1982, had enormous influence. It was an essential book for several generations of gay men. In The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, White charted the changes and the tragedies of the gay life that had seemed so promising in A Boy's Own Story. READ MORE In writing about gay characters, White also became one of the chroniclers of city life, especially New York and Paris . (During a brief stay in Princeton, he suggested that the only relief from tedium was to howl nightly at the moon.) White was in full possession of a prose style that was deceptive in how it functioned. His writing could feel like conversation or someone thinking clearly and honestly or taking you slowly into his confidence. The cadences were close to the rhythms of speaking, but there was also a mannered tone buried in the phrasing, which moved the diction to a level above the casual and the conversational. The book of his that I love most is his 2000 novel The Married Man, which is a kind of retelling of Henry James's The Ambassadors. White dramatises with considerable subtlety the conflict between the idea that the personal is political ('which,' White wrote in 2002, 'may be America's most salient contribution to the armamentarium of progressive politics') and the legacy of Vichy France filled with secrecy and ambiguity and the ability to live several compartmentalised lives. In the recent years, White's apartment in Chelsea, shared with his husband, the writer Michael Carroll, was a centre of fun and laughter, a place where you got all the latest news. Books were piled up. They, too, were treated as kind of news. He worked every day, writing at the diningroom table. He made light of his illness. He was, in many essential ways, a lesson to us all. 'He showed me gay fiction could also be high art' – Alan Hollinghurst, novelist Edmund White in 1986. Photograph: Louis Monier/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images Edmund White's luminous career was in part a matter of often dark history: he lived through it all. He was a gay teenager in an age of repression, self-hatred and anxious longing for a 'cure'; he was a young man in the heyday of gay liberation, and the libidinous free-for-all of 1970s New York; he was a witness to the terrifying destruction of the gay world in the Aids epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. All these things he wrote about, in a long-term commitment to autofiction – a narrative adventure he embarked on with no knowledge of where or when the story would end. He is often called a chronicler of these extraordinary epochs, but he was something much more than that, an artist with an utterly distinctive sensibility, humorous, elegant, avidly international. You read him not just for the unsparing account of sexual life but for the thrill of his richly cultured mind and his astonishingly observant eye. What amazed me about A Boy's Own Story, when it came out in 1982, was that a stark new candour about sexual experience should be conveyed with such gorgeous luxuriance of style, such richness of metaphor and allusion. This new genre, gay fiction, could also be high art, and almost at once a worldwide bestseller. It was an amazing moment, which would be liberating for generations of queer writers who followed. These younger writers Edmund himself followed and fostered with unusual generosity – I feel my whole career as a novelist has been sustained by his example and encouragement. In novels and peerless memoirs right up to the last year of his life he kept telling the truth about what he had done and thought and felt – he was a matchless explorer of the painful comedy of ageing and failing physically while the libido stayed insatiably strong. It's hard to take in that this magnificent experiment has now come to a close. 'He brought a lightness into my life' – Yiyun Li, author Edmund White in 1988. Photograph: Peter Kevin Solness/Fairfax Media via Getty Images About 10 days ago, when I left the east coast for a book launch in London, Edmund and I were in the middle of reading Elizabeth Bowen's first novel, The Hotel. 'Don't you worry, darling, we'll finish when you get back,' he said. Edmund and I were close friends for the past eight years. At the beginning of the pandemic, we met at 5pm on Skype, Monday through Friday, which became our two-person book club. This continued after the pandemic. The first book we read was The Complete Stories by Elizabeth Bowen. Between that collection and The Hotel, my estimation is that we read between 80 and 120 books. Sometimes we marvelled with fake shivering ( Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat, for instance). Sometimes we compared our underlined parts in the books, and when we found we underlined the same adjective, the same phrase, or the same paragraph, we pretended, once again, to be surprised. When we read Henry Green's novels, Edmund would act the dialogues out in a British accent. There was a detail from a Yasunari Kawabata novel that we returned to often as a private joke: 'Are you low on B?' (As in Vitamin B.) 'Yes, I feel low on B.' This would be the closest that we would admit that we were feeling saddened by the losses in our lives. Edmund lost many beloveds to Aids; I lost two children to suicide. And yet there was never a heaviness in our conversations. I think Edmund brought a lightness and a cloudlessness into my life. We gossiped, we giggled, and sometimes I would stare at my little screen, dumbfounded, when Edmund enlightened me with a graphic reminisce of gay sex from 20 or 30 years ago, in a castle or back alley in Europe. Then we would stare at each other before bursting into laughter. When we first read Bowen together, sometimes Edmund or I would say, 'I wish I could write like this.' And the other person would repeat, 'I wish I could write like this.' In a few days, I shall return to the US where Edmund Valentine White III is no more, and I shall finish The Hotel by myself. Neither he nor I will make our friendship into fiction. I wish I knew a pair of characters like us in literature. 'I gave his novel a bad review – which positively inflamed his charm' Adam Mars-Jones, novelist Author Edmund White at his home in New York in 2019. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP I met Ed White in London in 1983, at the time of the UK publication of A Boy's Own Story. I had reviewed the novel for Gay News, and he knew that my verdict was unfavourable but not what my objection was (I described it as a cake that had been iced but not baked). This didn't deter him from making a conquest of some sort – a degree of resistance could positively inflame his charm. We took a stroll round Covent Garden. I bought him a punnet of whitecurrants, a fruit with which he was unfamiliar, though feigning ignorance to please me would have been perfectly in character. He must have registered my lack of carnal interest but went on sexualising our promenade, asking me if one bystander was my type, telling me that another had given me the eye. To have become his friend without even a moment of sexual closeness was, a least at that time in the New York gay world, an anomaly and perhaps even a distinction. I visited Ed several times in Paris, sleeping on the daybed in his enviable flat on the Île Saint-Louis. In the morning he would help his ex-lover John Purcell get ready for a day of graduate study, a routine – as he was well aware – with overtones of a mother packing her son off to school. We would have one more cup of coffee and listen to some chamber music, Poulenc a favourite. Then he would say, 'I must get back to the darling novel' (he was working on Caracole at the time), and lie on his bed to write in longhand. I loved those visits, and some of that was down to Paris, but most to his hospitality. For a night in he might buy rabbit loin in mustard sauce pre-prepared from a traîteur, unthinkable sophistication. It was from him I learned that 'cutting the nose off the brie' was not just bad mannersBrie I hadn't known, but a named crime. He was writing a monthly column for American Vogue, socialising was a job requirement as well as a pleasure. Even so, I was mildly scandalised that his French literary friends took it for granted that he would pick up the tab in restaurants. Priggishly I would treat him to a meal now and then, though I think he took more pleasure in largesse than in the presumption of equality. 'He expanded the bounds of what could be written about' – Olivia Laing, writer Edmund White in his New York home in 2016. Photograph: Ethan Hill/New York Times I saw Edmund White on the A train once, like glimpsing an emperor in the grocery shop. I must have been barely in my teens when I first read A Boy's Own Story, the Picador paperback with the brooding boy in a purple vest on the cover. I was seduced by everything: the lovely, supple, almost shimmering language, the explicit precision applied to sex and class. Cornholing, a word I'd never heard before. Above all, it held out an invitation. It was from White that I realised a writer takes the rough material life gives – unwanted, shabby, maybe repellent – and makes it their own by way of sensibility and style, that alchemical translation. Years later, I met him. He was at an adjoining table when my first American editor took me out for lunch. He was celebrating too, toasting the publication of Justin Spring's Secret Historian, a book about the unconventional sexual researcher Samuel Steward. It was pure White territory: sex explored exactly and without shame. His presence that day felt like a blessing. He interwove the elegant and the explicit, he expanded the bounds of what could be written about and also how a life could be lived. There is a generation of writers you write for without quite realising it. They set the bar, and then they go. That beautiful room is emptier now. 'His work was as fresh as gay bar gossip' – Mendez, novelist Edmund White was one of those writers whose work was as fresh and immediate as gay bar gossip, but from a place of deeper learning and knowledge. I met him once in 2019, over dinner with Alan Hollinghurst in New York, and he remained every bit as witty and sex-positive as I'd found him in his books. The incredible thing about him is that he was one of very few gay writers to remember the pre-Aids era and survive into old age. When I think of White I think of the bathhouses of 1970s New York City and his conspiratorial storytelling, though that's not to undersell him as a prose stylist. Such was his keenness to connect with a gay-literate rather than a mainstream, almost anthropologically minded audience, that The Joy of Gay Sex, which he co-wrote, retains a contraband feel to this day. 'He showed us what was really going on' – Tom Crewe, novelist Edmund White in New York City, 2000. Photograph: David Corio/MichaelEdmund White was not a gateway to gay literature, or to the gay experience, since that would imply that he was not in himself a main destination. However, he was very often the man who opened the door to the expectant reader, who took them by the elbow, led them inside and eagerly showed them everything that was going on – that was really going on. There are his novels and his memoirs, of course, with their brave, bracing, dirty and dignifying candour, and his biographies, of Genet, Proust, Rimbaud, not to mention The Joy of Gay Sex, co-authored with Charles Silverstein. But I am thinking especially of States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980), which records his visits to the diverse gay communities across the country, before they were united by the internet and representation in mainstream culture. It is of its time – often magnificently so, as in its description of the 'San Francisco look': A strongly marked mouth and swimming, soulful eyes (the effect of the moustache); a V-shaped torso by metonymy from the open V of the half-unbuttoned shirt above the sweaty chest; rounded buttocks squeezed in jeans, swelling out from the cinched-in waist, further emphasised by the charged erotic insignia of coloured handkerchiefs and keys; a crotch instantly accessible through the buttons (button one already undone) and enlarged by being pressed, along with the scrotum, to one side; legs moulded in perfect, powerful detail; the feet simplified, brutalised and magnified by the boots. For gay men there are three erotic zones – mouth, penis and anus – and all three are vividly dramatised by this costume. But it is also of its time in its repeated, inevitable attention to the brute facts of homophobia and how it crowds, limits and costs lives. The book, accidentally, became a vital record of gay life on the brink of Aids: the epidemic's outsize impact in the US (which White went on to describe and protest) was a direct consequence of this indulged prejudice. But States of Desire doesn't memorialise a lost Eden – 'Gay life,' White said, 'will never please an ideologue; it's too untidy, too linked to the unpredictable vagaries of anarchic desire.' At one point in his travels, in Portland, he discovered 'an unusual degree of integration with the straight community' worthy of remark: 'A gay single or couple must deal with the family next door and the widow across the street; the proximity promotes a mixed gay-straight social life – parties, dinners, bridge games, a shared cup of coffee.' It's a reminder of how amazingly far we've travelled. Edmund White was one of the people that brought us here – but he didn't think integration and toleration, the right to marriage and a family, was an end-pend pointwas just one sight on the tour, and White showed us, with a proper absence of shame or embarrassment, many others rather more thrilling. Gay life shouldn't ever mean one thing in particular; but what it can provide, as he wrote in States of Desire, 'is some give in the social machine'. 'His books were a fabulous reel of anecdote and savage humour' – Seán Hewitt, writer Edmund White was true giant of letters, the patron saint of queer literature. I can still remember, vividly, reading (in the wrong order), the books of the trilogy from A Boy's Own Story to The Farewell Symphony, completely absorbed in White's camp, biting humour, his name-dropping, his ability to capture self-delusion, fantasy, disappointment, anger, lust and romance in a heady, whirling voice. I remember saying to a friend, then, that I thought I could read him forever. White's books were a fabulous, unending reel of anecdote and savage humour, attuned to the erotic impulse of writing, full of mincing queens, effeminate boys and brutal men: a fully stocked world of idolatry and abnegation. What stays with me, years later, is not only the biting social observation, but also the religious tenor of his mind, the affinities of his characters with the world of the sacred, of mystics and martyrs, which processed shame with such exuberance of feeling. I felt, in the company of his voice, educated in a secret, glamorous world, which was operatic in its emotion and brilliantly arch in its range of reference. In his final book, The Loves of My Life, White proved himself an iconoclast to the end. Even the epigraph made me chuckle, because I could almost hear him chuckling to himself while setting it down: 'Mae West hearing a bad actress auditioning for West's hit comedy Sex: 'She's flushin' my play down the terlet!''. His honesty, even in his last years, was still enough to make you wince, still sharp enough to bring a shock of laughter, still melancholy and occasionally self-pitying enough to catch you off guard with all the many sadnesses of the world. I'm grateful that he left us so much work, and that the full, unadulterated sound of his voice is so potent, so convivial, so fresh and living on every page. – Guardian
BBC News
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Front Row Daisy Goodwin on her play about the late Queen and her dresser
Daisy Goodwin discusses her debut play, By Royal Appointment, which stars Anne Reid as Queen Elizabeth and Caroline Quentin as her dresser, and which opens this week at Theatre Royal, Bath. The life and legacy of Irish novelist playwright and poet Edna O'Brien is discussed by writer Jan Carson and the director of the documentary Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story, Sin?ad O?Shea. And we hear from the curator of Design & Disability, an exhibition at the V&A in London which showcases the contributions of Disabled, Deaf, and neurodivergent people to contemporary design and culture since the 1940s. Plus Booker Prize winner Alan Hollinghurst pays tribute to American writer Edmund White, whose death has just been announced. Presenter: Kirsty Wark Producer: Mark Crossan
The Guardian
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Edmund White remembered: ‘He was the patron saint of queer literature'
Alan Hollinghurst British novelist Edmund White's luminous career was in part a matter of often dark history: he lived through it all. He was a gay teenager in an age of repression, self-hatred and anxious longing for a 'cure'; he was a young man in the heyday of gay liberation, and the libidinous free-for-all of 1970s New York; he was a witness to the terrifying destruction of the gay world in the Aids epidemic in the 1980s and 90s. All these things he wrote about, in a long-term commitment to autofiction – a narrative adventure he embarked on with no knowledge of where or when the story would end. He is often called a chronicler of these extraordinary epochs, but he was something much more than that, an artist with an utterly distinctive sensibility, humorous, elegant, avidly international. You read him not just for the unsparing account of sexual life but for the thrill of his richly cultured mind and his astonishingly observant eye. What amazed me about A Boy's Own Story, when it came out in 1982, was that a stark new candour about sexual experience should be conveyed with such gorgeous luxuriance of style, such richness of metaphor and allusion. This new genre, gay fiction, could also be high art, and almost at once a worldwide bestseller! It was an amazing moment, which would be liberating for generations of queer writers who followed. These younger writers Edmund himself followed and fostered with unusual generosity – I feel my whole career as a novelist has been sustained by his example and encouragement. In novels and peerless memoirs right up to the last year of his life he kept telling the truth about what he had done and thought and felt – he was a matchless explorer of the painful comedy of ageing and failing physically while the libido stayed insatiably strong. It's hard to take in that this magnificent experiment has now come to a close. Colm Tóibín Irish novelist Edmund White wrote with style; he cared about style; he made it seem natural and effortless. He wrote and indeed spoke with a kind of delightful candour. He loved revelation and gossip and intrigue. The idea that everyone he knew had secrets fascinated him. He chuckled a lot. He read all the latest French novels. He saw no reason why he should keep things to himself and, because he was gay in a time when gay life had not appeared much in fiction, that became one of his great subjects. A Boy's Own Story, which came out in 1982, had enormous influence. It was an essential book for several generations of gay men. In The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, White charted the changes and the tragedies of the gay life that had seemed so promising in A Boy's Own Story. In writing about gay characters, White also became one of the chroniclers of city life, especially New York and Paris. (During a brief stay in Princeton, he suggested that the only relief from tedium was to howl nightly at the moon.) White was in full possession of a prose style that was deceptive in how it functioned. His writing could feel like conversation or someone thinking clearly and honestly or taking you slowly into his confidence. The cadences were close to the rhythms of speaking, but there was also a mannered tone buried in the phrasing, which moved the diction to a level above the casual and the conversational. The book of his that I love most is his 2000 novel The Married Man, which is a kind of retelling of Henry James's The Ambassadors. White dramatises with considerable subtlety the conflict between the idea that the personal is political ('which,' White wrote in 2002, 'may be America's most salient contribution to the armamentarium of progressive politics') and the legacy of Vichy France filled with secrecy and ambiguity and the ability to live several compartmentalised lives. In the recent years, White's apartment in Chelsea, shared with his husband, the writer Michael Carroll, was a centre of fun and laughter, a place where you got all the latest news. Books were piled up. They, too, were treated as kind of news. He worked every day, writing at the dining-room table. He made light of his illness. He was, in many essential ways, a lesson to us all. Adam Mars-Jones British novelist I met Ed White in London in 1983, at the time of the UK publication of A Boy's Own Story. I had reviewed the novel for Gay News, and he knew that my verdict was unfavourable but not what my objection was (I described it as a cake that had been iced but not baked). This didn't deter him from making a conquest of some sort – a degree of resistance could positively inflame his charm. We took a stroll round Covent Garden. I bought him a punnet of whitecurrants, a fruit with which he was unfamiliar, though feigning ignorance in order to please me would have been perfectly in character. He must have registered my lack of carnal interest but went on sexualising our promenade, asking me if one bystander was my type, telling me that another had given me the eye. To have become his friend without even a moment of sexual closeness was, a least at that time in the New York gay world, an anomaly and perhaps even a distinction. I visited Ed several times in Paris, sleeping on the daybed in his enviable flat on the Île Saint-Louis. In the morning he would help his ex-lover John Purcell get ready for a day of graduate study, a routine – as he was well aware – with overtones of a mother packing her son off to school. We would have one more cup of coffee and listen to some chamber music, Poulenc a favourite. Then he would say, 'I must get back to the darling novel' (he was working on Caracole at the time), and lie on his bed to write in longhand. I loved those visits, and some of that was down to Paris, but most to his hospitality. For a night in he might buy rabbit loin in mustard sauce pre-prepared from a traîteur, unthinkable sophistication. It was from him I learned that 'cutting the nose off the brie' was not just bad manners, as I hadn't known, but a named crime. He was writing a monthly column for American Vogue, so socialising was a job requirement as well as a pleasure. Even so, I was mildly scandalised that his French literary friends took it for granted that he would pick up the tab in restaurants. Priggishly I would treat him to a meal now and then, though I think he took more pleasure in largesse than in the presumption of equality. Olivia Laing British writer I saw Edmund White on the A train once, like glimpsing an emperor in the grocery shop. I must have been barely in my teens when I first read A Boy's Own Story, the Picador paperback with the brooding boy in a purple vest on the cover. I was seduced by everything: the lovely, supple, almost shimmering language, the explicit precision applied to sex and class. Cornholing, a word I'd never heard before. Above all, it held out an invitation. It was from White that I realised a writer takes the rough material life gives – unwanted, shabby, maybe repellent – and makes it their own by way of sensibility and style, that alchemical translation. Years later, I met him. He was at an adjoining table when my first American editor took me out for lunch. He was celebrating too, toasting the publication of Justin Spring's Secret Historian, a book about the unconventional sexual researcher Samuel Steward. It was pure White territory: sex explored exactly and without shame. His presence that day felt like a blessing. He interwove the elegant and the explicit, he expanded the bounds of what could be written about and also how a life could be lived. There is a generation of writers you write for without quite realising it. They set the bar, and then they go. That beautiful room is emptier now. Mendez British novelist Edmund White was one of those writers whose work was as fresh and immediate as gay bar gossip, but from a place of deeper learning and knowledge. I met him once in 2019, over dinner with Alan Hollinghurst in New York, and he remained every bit as witty and sex-positive as I'd found him in his books. The incredible thing about him is that he was one of very few gay writers to remember the pre-Aids era and survive into old age. When I think of White I think of the bathhouses of 1970s New York City and his conspiratorial storytelling, though that's not to undersell him as a prose stylist. Such was his keenness to connect with a gay-literate rather than a mainstream, almost anthropologically minded audience, that The Joy of Gay Sex, which he co-wrote, retains a contraband feel to this day. Tom Crewe British novelist Edmund White was not a gateway to gay literature, or to the gay experience, since that would imply that he was not in himself a main destination. However, he was very often the man who opened the door to the expectant reader, who took them by the elbow, led them inside and eagerly showed them everything that was going on – that was really going on. There are his novels and his memoirs, of course, with their brave, bracing, dirty and dignifying candour, and his biographies, of Genet, Proust, Rimbaud, not to mention The Joy of Gay Sex, co-authored with Charles Silverstein. But I am thinking especially of States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980), which records his visits to the diverse gay communities across the country, before they were united by the internet and representation in mainstream culture. It is of its time – often magnificently so, as in its description of the 'San Francisco look': A strongly marked mouth and swimming, soulful eyes (the effect of the moustache); a V-shaped torso by metonymy from the open V of the half-unbuttoned shirt above the sweaty chest; rounded buttocks squeezed in jeans, swelling out from the cinched-in waist, further emphasised by the charged erotic insignia of coloured handkerchiefs and keys; a crotch instantly accessible through the buttons (button one already undone) and enlarged by being pressed, along with the scrotum, to one side; legs moulded in perfect, powerful detail; the feet simplified, brutalised and magnified by the boots. For gay men there are three erotic zones – mouth, penis and anus – and all three are vividly dramatised by this costume. But it is also of its time in its repeated, inevitable attention to the brute facts of homophobia and how it crowds, limits and costs lives. The book, accidentally, became a vital record of gay life on the brink of Aids: the epidemic's outsized impact in the US (which White went on to describe and protest) was a direct consequence of this indulged prejudice. But States of Desire doesn't memorialise a lost Eden – 'Gay life,' White said, 'will never please an ideologue; it's too untidy, too linked to the unpredictable vagaries of anarchic desire.' At one point in his travels, in Portland, he discovered 'an unusual degree of integration with the straight community' worthy of remark: 'A gay single or couple must deal with the family next door and the widow across the street; the proximity promotes a mixed gay-straight social life – parties, dinners, bridge games, a shared cup of coffee.' It's a reminder of how amazingly far we've travelled. Edmund White was one of the people that brought us here – but he didn't think integration and toleration, the right to marriage and a family, was an end-point. It was just one sight on the tour, and White showed us, with a proper absence of shame or embarrassment, many others rather more thrilling. Gay life shouldn't ever mean one thing in particular; but what it can provide, as he wrote in States of Desire, 'is some give in the social machine'. Seán Hewitt Edmund White was true giant of letters, the patron saint of queer literature. I can still remember, vividly, reading (in the wrong order), the books of the trilogy from A Boy's Own Story to The Farewell Symphony, completely absorbed in White's camp, biting humour, his name-dropping, his ability to capture self-delusion, fantasy, disappointment, anger, lust and romance in a heady, whirling voice. I remember saying to a friend, then, that I thought I could read him for ever. White's books were a fabulous, unending reel of anecdote and savage humour, attuned to the erotic impulse of writing, full of mincing queens, effeminate boys and brutal men: a fully stocked world of idolatry and abnegation. What stays with me, years later, is not only the biting social observation, but also the religious tenor of his mind, the affinities of his characters with the world of the sacred, of mystics and martyrs, which processed shame with such exuberance of feeling. I felt, in the company of his voice, educated in a secret, glamorous world, which was operatic in its emotion and brilliantly arch in its range of reference. In his final book, The Loves of My Life, White proved himself an iconoclast to the end. Even the epigraph made me chuckle, because I could almost hear him chuckling to himself while setting it down: 'Mae West hearing a bad actress auditioning for West's hit comedy Sex: 'She's flushin' my play down the terlet!''. His honesty, even in his last years, was still enough to make you wince, still sharp enough to bring a shock of laughter, still melancholy and occasionally self-pitying enough to catch you off guard with all the many sadnesses of the world. I'm grateful that he left us so much work, and that the full, unadulterated sound of his voice is so potent, so convivial, so fresh and living on every page.
