About halfway through My Lives by Edmund White, I expected to give it a two-star rating. White spends so much time narrating his abject erotic experiences. But the last two chapters of the book redeem it for me. White seems to lift his eyes from his own feelings of lovelorn inadequacy so that other aspects of himself are revealed.He's not only a sex-obsessed lover; he's also a writer, professor, biographer, an advocate for gay rights and AIDS awareness. And he's a good friend. He's funny and tender. I learned from the last two chapters to appreciate the excruciating honesty of the preceding pages. And to see how different one life can look when viewed from within - through a lens glazed by White’s self-doubt and, even, self-loathing - vs. when the view pans out and we see, for example, the perspective of a person blossoming as he engages in the challenging work of writing a biography.
In The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr writes, “the self-aware memoirist constantly pokes and prods at his doubts like a tongue on a black tooth.” White spends much of the memoir prodding the black tooth, sharing intimate details of his sex-life and S&M experiences and his feelings of inadequacy as a misfit in a society trying to cure him of his homosexuality.
His early stories bear witness to a dark pessimism that's evident in his adolescent attraction to the nihilism he perceives in Buddhism:
“No matter how pessimistic I might become, I could never begin to approach the extent of Gotama’s nihilism. He saw the self as an illusion, desire as the root of all evil, rebirth as the worst of fates and extinction as the only goal. In this world the most and the least one could expect was sickness, old age and death. Whereas Hindus posited an irreducible soul, the atman, the Buddha preached the doctrine of ‘no soul,’ anatta. In an unpeopled universe full of nothing but illusion and suffering, not a single entity existed, certainly no deity. This is realism, I thought with grim satisfaction.”
As his memoir progresses, it becomes apparent that relationships are of primary importance for White, offering a path of becoming. His identity is formed by encounters with the other. The pitfall, one he seems to stumble into repeatedly, is to be pulled into the orbit of another person, losing his own forward momentum. Yet it is also through relationships - like those described in the chapter “My Women,” which details how he’s brought out of his shell through comfortable friendships with women - that he learns to navigate the world with sympathetic and caring engagement.
His aim is never to achieve peachy-keen ease with his partners and friends, especially if that ease is brought about by covering up or denying the darker truths of relationship. White is learning to become the kind of friend who can walk the dark roads that take him and his companions off the beaten path. (How many friends does he accompany through the valley of the shadow cast by AIDS?) He's meeting his own psychological wounds through relationships: baggage must be unpacked, flaws faced with fierce honesty, dark predilections acknowledged - predilections that he plays out in his childhood games and in his erotic encounters as an adult. As White says of his childhood, “I always had a single game in mind: king and slave… I didn’t much care which role I played so long as the drama of domination and submission got properly performed.”
Over and over, White teaches the reader to make room in our own psyches for the self-torturing glutton for degradation and the charming, loving friend and lover. Reading his memoir was an experience in cognitive dissonance. Wide-eyed at White’s descriptions of sometimes grotesque sexual experiences, I would have an image of him as Baron Harkonnen engaged in degrading sex acts. Then I would turn the page to a photo of White with puppy-dog eyes and a shy smile and I would wonder how I got such a distorted image in my mind.
Those sweet eyes and smile indicate a sensitivity that is apparent in his boyhood feelings toward his mother: “As a little boy I’d lived for her. I’d suffered when she wept over the divorce. I would read to her the beautiful words of Emerson and feel the same glow of admiration as she did, for such depth, such wisdom. I would sometimes cry hysterically when I was unable to console her.”
The distortion between White’s sensitivity and his stories of debasement arises because White writes from what Melissa Febos calls the “super messy” inside of consciousness. The outer mask creates an organized image by which the outside world knows us. All memoir—or all good memoir, as in White’s case—takes us below the mask. As Karr explains it:
“The life chroniclers who endure as real artists come across as folks particularly schooled in their own rich inner geographies. A quest for self-knowledge drives such a writer to push past the normal vanity she brings to party dressing. She somehow manages to show up at the ball boldly naked.”
Memoir-writing, then, becomes part of White’s healing path, drawing him into the realm of his “own rich inner geography.” And he does indeed show up boldly naked.
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