At Home with Ed White
The theme of "home" comes to play often in your work and your life; you're solidly a member of the gay community and identify yourself as a gay writer, but you have also been embraced by the wider literary community; you're from the Midwest, but spent a lot of time in both New York and Paris. It brings to mind something Stephen Barber wrote in his biography about you—your work looks forward to a world where culture is "joyfully elusive." Can you elaborate on this ideal of an elusive identity and how it affects what home means to you?
Americans who have lived abroad for many years, like me, don't feel completely American or completely European—the people they like best are other Europeanized Americans! A French person will always ultimately feel foreign to me: there's a moment when I cannot predict how they are going to react. For example, I wrote a biography of Jean Genet and there was a woman who was a friend of his who was a really nasty, vile person and my French boyfriend said, "She has a nasty character which is very seductive." Only a French person can say those words—to an American it makes no sense. But they always think we're bon enfant—a nice child—"goody goody" is what it really means. Also, when they say someone is nice they'll say "he's nice—but not stupid." You have to add that right away, because nice usually means "kind of stupid." There are all these cultural differences, which will always exist and create a gulf between an American and a real French person. On the other hand, a pure–blood American who has never been abroad—like Palin, let's say—they feel kind of mysterious to expatriatesÉSo I guess my home is located somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. I don't visit the Midwest very often—I recently went back for the first time in almost fifty years to give the Hopwood Lecture at the University of Michigan—but I get along really well with some Midwesterners, who I call public library intellectuals. Whereas I always feel like my own students at Princeton are often prepped to say clever things—they have about five little phrases about Aristotle that they've worked out—a Midwestern intellectual has probably read all of Aristotle but can't talk about him very well.
Has living abroad specifically influenced your writing style?
I think that when learning a new language, it is hard to make yourself understood, and you come to value more than anything extreme clarity; I found that my writing became a lot clearer. My sentences were shorter, my word choice was more precise, I relied more on very strong visual images. Also, if you live in France and your works are translated and you help with the translation, you're less likely to write things that only Americans would understand.
What about your childhood home life? How do you see that influencing your writing and career? Do you feel that childhood is an inevitable influence for a writer?
When I was writing A Boy's Own Story, I thought I'm not going to make it very clear where this is happening or when so even though everybody now says it happened in the Midwest in the 1950s there's actually no indication of that in the book. Susan Sontag said, "Oh, you shouldn't do that, that's a weird modernist trick, that's tiresome." But I thought I had a more serious reason for doing it, which is that I really think all middle–class childhoods resemble each other. You're not really strongly inserted into history as a child, unless you're living through the Holocaust or something. But if you're a Midwestern kid now or then, fifty years ago, it's not all that different; you're playing on your tricycle and you have endless hours of afternoons, and you're very much a prey to your moods. You don't know how to label your experience, you just endure it. And I think those are in some ways the most powerful feelings you can have. I think that childhood is one of the great themes, and when I teach undergrads, they all write about their parents and their siblings. And I see how different families are from one another. The single biggest difference I notice from back when I was a child is that then we weren't friends with our parents. Our parents were very distant and we were sort of brought in by the nanny to say hello or something, but we didn't really spend any time with them, whereas now, many children consider their parents their best friends. That never would have happened when I was a kid.
The theme of "home" comes to play often in your work and your life; you're solidly a member of the gay community and identify yourself as a gay writer, but you have also been embraced by the wider literary community; you're from the Midwest, but spent a lot of time in both New York and Paris. It brings to mind something Stephen Barber wrote in his biography about you—your work looks forward to a world where culture is "joyfully elusive." Can you elaborate on this ideal of an elusive identity and how it affects what home means to you?
Americans who have lived abroad for many years, like me, don't feel completely American or completely European—the people they like best are other Europeanized Americans! A French person will always ultimately feel foreign to me: there's a moment when I cannot predict how they are going to react. For example, I wrote a biography of Jean Genet and there was a woman who was a friend of his who was a really nasty, vile person and my French boyfriend said, "She has a nasty character which is very seductive." Only a French person can say those words—to an American it makes no sense. But they always think we're bon enfant—a nice child—"goody goody" is what it really means. Also, when they say someone is nice they'll say "he's nice—but not stupid." You have to add that right away, because nice usually means "kind of stupid." There are all these cultural differences, which will always exist and create a gulf between an American and a real French person. On the other hand, a pure–blood American who has never been abroad—like Palin, let's say—they feel kind of mysterious to expatriatesÉSo I guess my home is located somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. I don't visit the Midwest very often—I recently went back for the first time in almost fifty years to give the Hopwood Lecture at the University of Michigan—but I get along really well with some Midwesterners, who I call public library intellectuals. Whereas I always feel like my own students at Princeton are often prepped to say clever things—they have about five little phrases about Aristotle that they've worked out—a Midwestern intellectual has probably read all of Aristotle but can't talk about him very well.
Has living abroad specifically influenced your writing style?
I think that when learning a new language, it is hard to make yourself understood, and you come to value more than anything extreme clarity; I found that my writing became a lot clearer. My sentences were shorter, my word choice was more precise, I relied more on very strong visual images. Also, if you live in France and your works are translated and you help with the translation, you're less likely to write things that only Americans would understand.
What about your childhood home life? How do you see that influencing your writing and career? Do you feel that childhood is an inevitable influence for a writer?
When I was writing A Boy's Own Story, I thought I'm not going to make it very clear where this is happening or when so even though everybody now says it happened in the Midwest in the 1950s there's actually no indication of that in the book. Susan Sontag said, "Oh, you shouldn't do that, that's a weird modernist trick, that's tiresome." But I thought I had a more serious reason for doing it, which is that I really think all middle–class childhoods resemble each other. You're not really strongly inserted into history as a child, unless you're living through the Holocaust or something. But if you're a Midwestern kid now or then, fifty years ago, it's not all that different; you're playing on your tricycle and you have endless hours of afternoons, and you're very much a prey to your moods. You don't know how to label your experience, you just endure it. And I think those are in some ways the most powerful feelings you can have. I think that childhood is one of the great themes, and when I teach undergrads, they all write about their parents and their siblings. And I see how different families are from one another. The single biggest difference I notice from back when I was a child is that then we weren't friends with our parents. Our parents were very distant and we were sort of brought in by the nanny to say hello or something, but we didn't really spend any time with them, whereas now, many children consider their parents their best friends. That never would have happened when I was a kid.