Daniel Land

When the news dribbled out, a couple of years ago, that Edmund White was sitting down with a biographer, even I, as a resolute admirer of his work, was a little bemused. Another biographical work? 

This is, after all, a writer who published a string of memoirs—including City Boy (about his life in New York in the 1960s and 1970s), Inside a Pearl (about his time in Paris in the 1980s and 1990s), and an autobiographical trilogy, closely mirroring his life, which covers some of the same period (beginning with A Boy’s Own Story, continuing with The Beautiful Room Is Empty and ending with The Farewell Symphony). Along the way there are also his transparently autobiographical works of fiction (Chaos; Skinned Alive; The Married Man), and My Lives, an autobiography, in which his life is broken into discrete subject matters (“My Blonds”, “My Hustlers”, “My Mother”, etc.) And let’s not overlook the late 1990s biography Edmund White: The Burning World, by Stephen Barber, and the two books about him, by his nephew, Keith Fleming (Original Youth, and The Boy With the Thorn in His Side).

It is possible, in fact, to plot two entirely separate but parallel courses through White’s life, the reader creating their own informal biography of the man simply through his books: one fictional (beginning with the trilogy, continuing through the stories in Skinned Alive, the novel The Married Man, and ending with the late-life novella Chaos) and another through the “factual” counterparts in his memoirs, the books by Keith Fleming and Stephen Barber, White’s The Unpunished Vice (about his life of reading) and The Loves of My Life (his most recent work, a sex memoir, published mere months before he died). 

One might reasonably ask whether any life can bear such repeated excavation. Is there really any meat left on the bones? The answer, somewhat surprisingly, is yes; as Marcel Proust understood—and as Edmund White himself reflects in My Lives—there are, in fact, limitless ways of shading or rendering a life, and even a relatively “ordinary” one—though White’s is anything but—can continue to yield quirks and surprises, despite already forming the substance of ten or more volumes.

White’s was, in any case, an unusually full life. With the possible exception of Gore Vidal—who would have hated the term—it is hard to think of a known gay writer whose experience so neatly tracks the arc of twentieth-century American history: born in 1940, raised in the repressive climate of the 1950s, arriving in New York on the cusp of the 1960s, present at the Stonewall uprising, and fully immersed in the exuberance of the 1970s. He witnessed, at close quarters, the onset of the AIDS crisis and served as chair of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, one of the first major advocacy organisations. Diagnosed HIV-positive in the mid-1980s, he survived into the era of effective treatment as a result of being a “slow progressor”, a piece of medical good fortune that was also—as his work makes clear—a burden, since survival entailed, through the 1980s, the gradual loss of friends, lovers, and an entire social world.

And yet White’s survival redounds to our benefit: his literary career prior to AIDS was arguably patchy and incomplete—some experimental novels here, a gay travelogue there, the co-authored The Joy of Gay Sex (with Dr. Charles Silverstein), and only one book, A Boy’s Own Story, that is recognisably the writer he would become; his stronger work came after—and arguably in response to—the AIDS crisis. 

This is, perhaps, a controversial thing to say, since the “Cocktail 101” on Edmund White maintains that A Boy’s Own Story is his “best” work (many readers, it seems, are unable to distinguish between “best-selling” and “best”, just as many critics seem unable to understand the difference between “best” and “favourite”). Original in its content and lyrical in its style (if inconsistently so—a function, White later said, of his still being a heavy drinker and being unable to control his writing properly), A Boy’s Own Story filled the ecological niche of the Coming-Out Story and was widely reviewed in the English-speaking world, particularly in the UK, and translated into several other languages—a semi-autobiographical account of a nameless young man’s sexual awakening, shaped by shame, longing, and (in its surprise ending), treachery. A Boy’s Own Story is classic auto-fiction: a stylised, fictionalised version of Edmund White’s youth (since, as Keith Fleming shows in his Original Youth, his biographical study, White was, as a teenager, both cleverer and more sexually precocious than his fictionalised counterpart). But across the trilogy, the nameless narrator and White’s real life begin to converge; by the close of The Farewell Symphony, with the narrator finally established as a gay writer and his world burning down from AIDS, there is only a handsbreadth between fiction and life.

It took me a while to warm to Edmund White’s work, which I now realise is often a good sign. When I picked up secondhand copies of A Boy’s Own Story and The Beautiful Room is Empty from a bookshop on Exeter’s quay in 1999, I was young, very much in thrall to Virginia Woolf and—frankly—a little bored. Say what you like about Woolf, but even a daft, uncomprehending 18-year-old can read her and sense, from her prose, that it is supposed to be GREAT WRITING. In comparison, White’s subtle, elegant prose style felt like no prose style at all; by the time I reached The Farewell Symphony, the capstone of the trilogy, it struck me—wrongly, as I would later understand—as little more than a series of diaristic entries. I missed not only its formal subtlety, but also its historical weight.

The fault, as is often the case, lay with the reader. I was young, barely out of the closet, living away from home for the first time, bruised, and a little depressed, but also as daft, self-centred and inexperienced as any teenager is. Even so, my closeted youth, my rural upbringing, and my disastrous first relationship had all resulted in a depression and breakdown which left me, emotionally, a good few years behind my straight peers: good enough at the Cocktail 101 chatter to pass my English and other A-Level exams with flying colours, but with a patchy, incomplete sense of history; the only subjects I knew with any depth and intensity were those within my narrowband “neurospicy” interests (Cocteau Twins, Virginia Woolf, Brian Eno, the New York music scene). It didn’t occur to me that The Farewell Symphony, itself set in New York City, was not merely a personal narrative, but a record of a collective experience and trauma: the trajectory of a generation moving from repression to liberation to catastrophe within the space of a little over a decade. Nor did I yet have the patience for a prose style whose effects accumulate gradually rather than declaring themselves at once. 

I picked up The Farewell Symphony again in 2002. By that point, my whole life had changed. I had, since the year 2000, been living a life in Manchester that echoed, in some ways, Edmund White’s New York of the 1970s: a life of clubbing, drug-taking, and a loosely formed web of friends and sexual partners—sometimes the same thing—circling around Canal Street’s gay nightlife (a period I would later write about on my first album, Love Songs for the Chemical Generation). There were a handful of people on the scene known to be living with HIV, some of whom were friends or acquaintances; each year we attended Canal Street’s candlelit vigil, at the close of the annual Pride festival, commemorating those who had been lost to AIDS. Some of my friends—locals, unlike me—had, before the advent of combination therapies in 1996, lost loved ones to the disease; whereas in rural Devon, where I was from, gay people were rare enough, let alone those who were openly seropositive. 

Perhaps for a combination of all of these reasons, something about The Farewell Symphony stayed with me; nagged at me—even though I hadn’t particularly liked the book the first time I read it. I find that often happens with the great books—and with great music too. It doesn’t land the first time, but it lingers—sometimes for years—as if it’s waiting for you to grow, to change, to mature into an appreciation of it. 

That year, 2002, I read The Farewell Symphony 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 rich in startling metaphors, vivid imagery and fresh perspectives. White did not know how to write an inelegant sentence:

A sign in the tailor shop window off the Boulevard St.-Germain warned that customers would not be allowed more than three fittings after the purchase of a suit and my mind winced at this proof of shameless male vanity, so exotic to an American since Americans equated male vanity with effeminacy or Mafia creepiness. The year was 1968 and stylish young American men back home were wearing fringe and puffy-sleeved pirate shirts, headbands, mirrored vests and winklepicker boots, but the materials were synthetic, the colors garish, the fit very approximate and the mood one of dressing up. Orange and black were popular colors. The long Mardi Gras of that decade in the States was a mockery of traditional good taste, a send-up of adult propriety, the recklessness of a generation that would never settle down long enough to study the fine gradations with which quality, and especially beauty, begin. And if the mood was festive, the festivity seemed more a gesture defying parental drabness than an assertion of a new-born hedonism. A true search for pleasure is an exacting science and is born from a profound interest in raglan versus fitted sleeves and in the precise arc a weighted hem on the bias will describe.

That passage is from near the beginning of the novel, which opens in the late 1960s, at the end of a period characterised by widespread social stigma and the persecution of homosexuality. Edmund White is visiting Paris (where he will end up at the close of the novel) but even back home in New York City, gay men are forced to conceal their identities, and most live in fear of exposure. 

Then the Stonewall riots emerge as a pivotal moment in the struggle for rights, sparking a wave of resistance that reverberates throughout the 1970s. White captures with acuity the atmosphere of these “exalted” years: the heady sense of possibility and freedom that characterised the period; the proliferation of new forms of intimacy; the loosening of social constraints; the sense that a different kind of life had become possible. Characters in The Farewell Symphony find themselves emboldened to embrace their identities openly, and by the end of the 1970s, gay culture is experiencing an unprecedented wave of openness and celebration, with the triumph of clone culture (whose fashion was parodied by the Village People), and with gay men experimenting with new, non-adhesive forms of relationships (in the vanguard of what we’d now call ethical non-monogamy). Throughout this same period, Edmund White struggles to establish himself as a writer, and his frustratingly slow path to publication—along with his growing renown, in the 1970s, for works that become ever more explicitly queer in subject matter—mirrors, in miniature, the broader trajectory of gay liberation.

The majority of The Farewell Symphony is dedicated to this rendering of the 1970s; it is precisely the fullness of this depiction that gives the novel’s final section its force. Because, as we know now, beneath the surface of gay liberation lurked the spectre of AIDS; as the narrative moves into the 1980s, time speeds up, as White’s losses accumulate exponentially. The 1980s are dispatched in a brief, brutal chapter in which, one after another, White’s close friends and former lovers pass away:

After he died, I remembered I’d told him that I was sure he was going to beat this disease. My reputation as a writer, even my age, now lent my words a weight they hadn’t had in the past. I realized that reluctantly, hopefully, Marston had believed me. 

He shouldn’t have. I was wrong. He did die, as did the writers from my literary club, the guys in advertising I knew, the lawyers, the fellows at the gym, the men I’d shared houses with on Fire Island—they were all dying, even though they’d all been told they wouldn’t… I heard of men who’d spent all their money having their “chakras” tuned by a charlatan with a flute, of those who ate apricot pits in Mexico, cucumbers in China, macrobiotic food in Japan. They all died.

The novel is named after Haydn’s Symphony No. 45, sometimes known as the “Farewell” symphony: at its end, one musician after another leaves the stage until a solo violinist remains (in reality, the symphony ends with two players, but we forgive White his poetic licence). As the novel closes, White is in Paris—the sole survivor of his circle, self-exiled from the ghost-town of New York City, and emptied out by the recent death of his lover Brice, whose story he comes tantalisingly close to telling several times without ever quite achieving it. It is Brice’s passing that serves as the novel’s Madeleine moment; their histoire (based upon White’s relationship with Hubert Sorin in the early 1990s; the first truly satisfying love affair of White’s life) is all the more powerful for being untold:

Everything I'd lived through in the last five years had changed me—whitened my hair, made me a fat, sleepy old man, matured me, finally, but also emptied me out. I met Brice five years before he died—but I wonder whether I'll have the courage to tell his story in this book. The French call a love affair a “story”, “une histoire”, and I see getting to it, putting it down, exploring it, narrating it as a challenge I may well fail. If I do fail, don't blame me. Understand that even writers, those professional exhibitionists, have their moments of reticence.

Like Proust, White is drawn towards a moment of revelation that remains just out of reach—what matters is not its completion but the pressure it exerts on the narrative, allowing White to employ a non-linear narrative structure that moves fluidly between past and present, mimicking memory in its manner of operation.

Over the past three years, I have worked my way through the entirety of White’s oeuvre, returning in the process to The Farewell Symphony for, perhaps, the tenth time. The passage of time—more than twenty-five years since I first read it, and more than two decades since I warmed to it—has done nothing to alter my view that it is his masterpiece: clearly the most ambitious of his works, and far superior, in my opinion, to the sketchier A Boy’s Own Story. Everything readers love (or loathe) about White is present here in its most confident form: that sense of a witty, gossipy voice confiding in you sotto voce; the sudden bursts of Proustian lyricism; the eye for physical detail; the knack for summing up characters in a few epigrammatic lines. This is a novel that contains multitudes (almost literally: try counting the number of characters), that rewards close attention, and which places at its centre White’s frank, often humorous view of sex, along with his characteristic pragmatism about matters of the heart. 

It is this latter quality that I have found most transformative: the flexible, unsentimental moral perspective he brings to relationships. Note, for example, this paragraph:

My friend Tom, the poet, died, bitter and angry. He’d discovered that Daniel, his handsome young lover, had for years been seeing somebody his own age on the side. Instead of being grateful about a young man’s needs and tastes, and grateful for his love, no matter how partial, Tom had broken off with Daniel in a fit of wounded pique—and died six months later of self-pity and an early heart attack. I thought no Frenchman “of a certain age” would have made such a blunder. France instructed its men and women early and thoroughly in the cold, unblinking art of realism.

When I was younger, I think I held an essentialist view of love: that it could cure everything; that a truly satisfying relationship should be entirely self-contained; that there would be no need to look beyond it—a function, of course, of the same emotional immaturity I noted earlier. Passages like the above shocked me to my core. But after they unsettled me, they changed me. Again and again, throughout his works—and particularly in The Farewell Symphony—White returns to a moral outlook that resists both sentimentality and cynicism, employing a clear-eyed realism about desire, compromise, and human limitation. That sensibility changed how I understood relationships and intimacy, since it widened the aperture of my understanding. Or, to say it another way: I would be a different person had I not encountered The Farewell Symphony—which is not something I can say about many other books.

So, why is this book not better known? White worked on it for well over five years (longer than any other of his books, with the exception of his behemoth biography of Jean Genet), and it’s more complicated, layered, and better constructed than anything else he wrote. Why did it not have its moment in the sun? White himself suggested a possible explanation: its publication coincided with the death of Diana, Princess of Wales; much of the planned publicity was abandoned. It is a plausible account, though it may also be that the book’s very qualities—its refusal of a single, easily summarised arc; its mingling of sex, gossip, gay history and writerly development—make it resistant to straightforward canonisation.

White says in The Farewell Symphony, of gay history, that “Never had a group been placed on such a rapid cycle: oppressed in the Fifties, freed in the Sixties, exalted in the Seventies, and wiped out in the Eighties”. But if The Farewell Symphony ends with the worst disaster to have ever faced gay people, it is worth noting—as obvious as this sounds—that gay history did not end with AIDS, and nor did White. The novel’s publication more or less coincided with the advent of the triple combination therapies, allowing many of those whose immune systems had been completely destroyed by HIV to be restored to robust health (the “Lazarus Effect”) and to live to see, as White notes in his swansong The Loves of My Life, “The granting of gay marriage equal rights in the states in 2015, the parallel rights to adopt children, the brewing storm in the 2020s against everything labelled 'woke' (trans people, drag, books, puberty-delaying drugs)”. 

Gay life not only survived, but thrived, and diversified: “Now we have daddies, chubbies, chasers, twinks, twink tops, feeders, gamers, spankers, voyeurs, and exhibitionists, not to mention asexuals and males whose genitals are kept in chastity cages or who themselves are kept naked in real cages and fed from a dog bowl”. And in this new, exalted, digital post-AIDS era, White blossomed, remaining sexually active into his eighties, and able—through the auspices of websites like SilverDaddies—connect with the often far-flung admirers of his age of Jovian girth.

“Whenever I've felt”, he writes, “That I was no longer attractive and had crossed the line into invisibility, the sudden redemption of a bon coup (a 'fine fuck' as the French say), the largesse of a Welsh waiter I met in Los Angeles or the generosity of a professional baseball player in Florida—the unexpected kindness of these guys restored me to another decade or two of self-respect in this endless life of mine”.

That endless life finally ended in New York City, on 3 June 2025. White died in Pride Month, aged 85. Through his husband, Michael Carroll (with whom I am connected on social media) I understand that two further novels, and a volume of poems, are to be published posthumously. 

It remains to be seen what will become of his legacy in the long term. Literary fame is a capricious business, as White well knew; what one generation prizes, another discards. By rights he should, in fifty years, be seen to stand alongside the giants of twentieth-century literature, like Updike and DeLillo—but he may lapse into obscurity, as do so many writers of fiction. 

My old English lecturer, James Bloom (a relative of the legendary critic Harold Bloom), once read out, in a literature class, a list of all the “celebrities” who had died the previous year, and asked us to count how many names we recognised—it was about 10 per cent. His point was simple: popular culture dies fast. White himself remarked, in City Boy, that if one peruses the bestseller lists from the 1930s or 1940s, one won’t recognise a single title or author. The larger the initial success, the steeper and often sadder the decline; nobody will be reading The Da Vinci Code in two hundred years. Whereas the obscure contemporary writer, working in a supermarket, or as a teacher, receiving minuscule royalties for a literary novel that sold two hundred copies—that’s the person worth betting on for posterity (this is, of course, the secret hope of all artists destined to be unsuccessful in their lifetimes, myself included).

In that respect, White’s relative obscurity may prove to be the long-term saving grace of his work, as it is sifted, reviewed and reappraised by later generations. Retrospective appraisals often prioritise maturer work, if only because it makes sense that an artist becomes a better, not worse, craftsman through time—or at least until the infirmities of age intervene. 

I’ll advance a controversial opinion: that when the dust settles, The Farewell Symphony will be recognised as White’s crowning achievement, not A Boy’s Own Story, and that the consensus will shift such that even this statement—at the moment a highly doubtful proposition—will come to seem comically redundant. 

Having spent more than half of my life reading White’s work, and having read his oeuvre many times over, it is clear to me that in The Farewell Symphony, all of White’s characteristics and preoccupations find their most complete form: the interplay of memory and desire, the importance (and the sad realism) of sex, the social texture of a vanished world, and the attempt to register the scale of what was gained and lost in twentieth-century queer life. Whether his reputation will endure is an open question, but seeing The Farewell Symphony as the nexus of his themes and concerns is, at least, a way of reading him that takes seriously the ambition, as well as the intimacy, of his work.