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Ouf
Finished Edmund White's Inside a Pearl, his gossipy anecdotal book about his life in Paris in
the 80s and 90s, and his many lovers in various countries and his acquaintances in London and the many many artistic people he introduced to other artistic people or had dinner with, and who all these people were sleeping with then, or who they slept with later. A gay writer will have many gay friends, but to read White you'd think Kiinsey's statistic was reversed, and that half of the French artistic world is Jewish as well.
The book needs an index, because the names come thick as autumn leaves in Vallambrosa:
"I first met Robbe-Grillet in the early seventies at a cocktail party hosted by Tom Bishop, head of the French department at NYU and a great defender of the New Novelists. I went with Richard Howard, Robbe-Grillet's translator, a close friend of mine at the time and of Susan Sontag, who dedicated her Against Interpretation to him. As Alice Kaplan said in Dreaming in French, her book about the role Paris played in the lives of Jacqueline Kennedy, Sontag, and Angela Davis, during the sixties Susan and Richard were allies introducing French artists and intellectuals to America, she through her essays and he through his translations."
No wonder I have a headache now. (And that's one of the more comprehensible passages, because at least I know most of those names.) To compound matters, if it's someone who plays a large part in his life, White will introduce them once and thereafter refer to them by first name alone, which is intensely confusing. Who are Bernard and Jack and Hubert and James and John? Yes, an index.
I half thought that maybe I should try reading some of these writers White promotes so energetically- James Lord, Harry Mathews, Neil Bartlett- but fortunately, very near the end of the book, he refers on two sequential pages to "the great Erskine Caldwell" and "the great Charles Bukowski", and I saw at once that our tastes would never converge.
The book needs an index, because the names come thick as autumn leaves in Vallambrosa:
"I first met Robbe-Grillet in the early seventies at a cocktail party hosted by Tom Bishop, head of the French department at NYU and a great defender of the New Novelists. I went with Richard Howard, Robbe-Grillet's translator, a close friend of mine at the time and of Susan Sontag, who dedicated her Against Interpretation to him. As Alice Kaplan said in Dreaming in French, her book about the role Paris played in the lives of Jacqueline Kennedy, Sontag, and Angela Davis, during the sixties Susan and Richard were allies introducing French artists and intellectuals to America, she through her essays and he through his translations."
No wonder I have a headache now. (And that's one of the more comprehensible passages, because at least I know most of those names.) To compound matters, if it's someone who plays a large part in his life, White will introduce them once and thereafter refer to them by first name alone, which is intensely confusing. Who are Bernard and Jack and Hubert and James and John? Yes, an index.
I half thought that maybe I should try reading some of these writers White promotes so energetically- James Lord, Harry Mathews, Neil Bartlett- but fortunately, very near the end of the book, he refers on two sequential pages to "the great Erskine Caldwell" and "the great Charles Bukowski", and I saw at once that our tastes would never converge.
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he refers on two sequential pages to "the great Erskine Caldwell" and "the great Charles Bukowski"
AAAAGH. WHAT?
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I'm of the opinion that certain writers require a Y chromosome to be appreciated, or indeed, read without extreme pain.
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TOO TRUE
I'm of the opinion that certain writers require a Y chromosome to be appreciated, or indeed, read without extreme pain
I feel that way about Henry Miller and John Updike.
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OTOH for lockdown reading I'm thinking of Tale of Genji and I think there's a new translation of Kristin Lavransdatter! which I can never, ever freaking spell.
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Long long ago I started the only translation of Kristin L. and abandoned it in a fit of ennui. God luck with the new one (said unironically: I mean it.)
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And then I tried to read other books by him, and they were just awful! Truman Capote parodies. So, I never could figure out how he came by his literary reputation. Was it because there was so little literature that was unapologetically gay literature when White first began writing? Maybe.
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I've only read Caracole which was very untypical and not a success. Remember almost nothing of it save for its idealization of Youth, however spotty, and how older people must be grateful if spotty Youth deigns to notice them. At which I rolled my eyes and left the Tokyo coffee house I was reading in because someone nearby had started to smoke.
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