I'm absolutely devastated to hear that Edmund White—unquestionably my favourite writer, and the chronicler of a generation—has passed away at 85.
I met him three or four times and he was always funny, generous, and kind. I didn't bug him, but I think he appreciated having a few minutes to talk about his work with someone who got it—literary "celebrity" is no celebrity at all, really. After one lengthy conversation, he gave me his home and email addresses; I didn't write to him because I thought it would be a little crass. I also knew from his writing that he was a bit of a people-pleaser; would he really welcome my contact? I never found out because I never wrote to him, although I now wish I had.
It took me a while to warm to his work (which I now realise is generally a good sign). The first time I read The Farewell Symphony, in 1999, I was young, still in thrall to Virginia Woolf and, frankly, a little bored. White’s subtle, elegant prose style felt like no prose style at all in comparison. The fault was all mine, of course.
I’m not sure what made me pick up The Farewell Symphony again in 2002 (well—okay—I do: by that point I was living a life in Manchester that rhymed with White's experiences of the 1970s, documented in the novel). I read it three times in succession—something I’ve never done with any other book.
I suddenly saw what I was missing: it was so elegant, so full of beauty and longing and regret; so stuffed with startling metaphors, and vivid imagery, and fresh perspectives. It reshaped the way I saw relationships and intimacy. I would be a different person had I not encountered it, which is not something I can really say about any other book.
Since then, I’ve had 23 years of exploring everything he’s published, and eagerly anticipating each new release. I was lucky enough to be connected with his husband, Michael Carroll (also a great writer), on socials—which allowed me to keep up with Edmund’s exploits at one remove. I understand there are still two works to be published, now posthumously.
I’ve learned quite a few things from Edmund White during the time that I've admired his work—things that I’ve applied to my music in ways that might not be immediately obvious. First, I suppose, would be the sophisticated moral perspective he brings to bear on his characters (or, since he is an autobiographical novelist, the people he knew)—an outlook that resists sentimentality or cynicism, that employs a clear-eyed realism about desire, compromise, and human limitation—what I sometimes think of as a kind of “moral longsightedness”: people in the rear-view mirror are treated with compassion and mercy and fairness, even if at the time they caused pain, heartbreak, or even professional frustration.
I’d like to think that this has been reflected in many of the songs I’ve written since The Dream of the Red Sails. The songs that feel most successful to me, lyrically—and to my bandmates too—are those written from a place of compassion towards people who are not typically the recipients of such feelings: ex-partners, passing hook-ups, even, at times, my younger, more conflicted self (White has said elsewhere that the gay “superpower” is the ability to remain friends with one’s exes). That ethos has found its way into much of my recent writing (“Cobalt Blue", “Skindivers”, “Long Before the Weather”, “Southern Soul”, and even the poem I published last year)—these pieces are all predicated upon a feeling of: we were, once, something to each other. Even if that’s passed, I’m grateful for your love, no matter how temporary, and no matter how partial.
A second, and major, thing I've learned from Edmund comes from understanding the arc of his career—I feel that my work has moved from the lyrically opaque towards the transparent in a way that mirrors his development as a writer. Edmund’s first two novels, Forgetting Elena and Nocturnes for the King of Naples, were dense, formally experimental (often described as “baroque”) and attracted only a small readership. But by the time he reached A Boy's Own Story, he had moved away from abstraction towards the elegant, plain prose style (and queer, autobiographical content) for which he is now best known. This shift was undertaken in pursuit of what he later called “total transparency”. As he wrote in City Boy (2010):
I’d acknowledged that life had handed me a brand-new subject and that my job was to present it in the clearest, least wavering light. A straight writer, condemned to show nothing but marriage, divorce and childbirth, might need a new formal approach or an exotic use of language. But a gay writer, free to record for the first time so many vivid and previously uncharted experiences, needed no such tricks…
I’ve come to feel a strong affinity with that sentiment, and I recognise I've been moving towards the musical equivalent of this for most of my career. It strikes me how rarely queer musicians have been given the space to present the full range of our interior lives. And yet there is something inherently compelling, to me, about filtering those experiences—with their particular heartbreaks and ecstasies, their quirks and rough edges—through the shoegaze genre, which offers such a richly expressive palette; which is capable of holding ambiguity, melancholy, and transcendence—sometimes all at once.
If I’ve ever had reservations about the genre I work in, it’s because, lyrically, at its most vapid, it can become little more than hazy escapism: all those nauseating skyward glances and drug metaphors. These have long felt to me like a squandering of the genre's emotional potential.
I don’t think I’ve ever claimed that my work is "innovative", in the sense of pushing the sonic boundaries of the genre (in fact, having studied a master’s degree in the Musicology of Record Production, I’ve come to think the whole concept of “innovation” is often misapplied and misunderstood—but that's a different essay). What I've learned from Edmund, I think, is that there are other ways to be “new”. That innovation can reside in subject matter (or even things like vocal delivery style) not just in advancing the technical edges of a genre.
Which is to say, I'm not interested in pushing the envelope sonically; I'm interested in pushing the envelope emotionally, and thematically. What interests me is achieving the same “total transparency” that White describes: being vulnerable, being honest, and mapping a particular (and sometimes perculiar) emotional reality onto genres that have not traditionally been a home for those kinds of narratives. This feels like a kind of intra-generic novum—a small innovation from within—one that is inherently interesting, since what is being described is (to borrow one of Edmund's phrases in The Farewell Symphony) “a whole new world of experience”.
I adored this man. Not just his writing—which quite inadvertently helped me come to a deeper understanding of my own work, and for which I’ll always be grateful—but also him personally: the example he set of someone generous and open with his time, willing to help or to offer an ear to younger writers, artists, and even musicians. I will sorely miss his wit, his sly, impish sense of humour and, of course, the thrill of purchasing, receiving and reading his newest work.
I actually have a more substantial essay on his writing, which I've been pecking away at for a year or so; I think I’ll probably furbish that up, and publish it. But I suppose my main thought is that I feel somewhat as I did when Harold Budd died. Other people felt this with Bowie, or during the wave of celebrity deaths in 2016. But for me, it feels as though the era of losing one’s most beloved artists is only just beginning.
Rest in peace, lovely man.