My Lives: A Memoir Book

Edmund White may be the most undislikable man on Planet Earth but as this curious book concluded in a weltering wall-covering ejaculation of thick creamy-textured name-dropping the like of which has hardly ever been attempted before…


I could have written a chapter called My Celebrities. Over the years I've met everyone from Christopher Isherwood to Iris Murdoch, from Joan Didion to John Updike, from Jose Saramago to Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott to Nadime Gordimer (just to stay with the Nobel Prize Winners). I have met the Queen of England and the King and Queen of Sweden. I have met Elton John and attended his 50th birthday party. I have slept over at Jasper John's country house in Connecticut and run into Cy Twombly in Crete and at Luxor. I went to three Christmas parties at the 5th Avenue apartment of Charles Mingus. I have eaten a box lunch with Andy Warhol at the Factory.I've had a private tour of the library at Eton and held one of its two Gutenberg Bibles in my hands. I've eaten dinner between Garrison Keillor and Arthur Schlesinger. I interviewed Truman Capote while Robert Mapplethorpe took our picture.

…I began to feel a little queasy and pretty glad it was over. Edmund is truly the Marco Polo of fame.( But - he says - "I don't have much to say about them". Possibly because he's too eager to talk about himself again. )

I closed the book, made myself a cup of tea and met nobody famous that whole evening. And thought that Edmund is indeed the reincarnation of Truman Capote except Truman wrote about everything except himself and then stopped writing and couldn't get started again and Edmund always writes about himself and never stops, ever.
Ed's 5th novel, The Beautiful Room is Empty, is one of my favourite things after raindrops on kittens and bright woolly landrovers and every now and then I think I'll read something else by this splendid writer but each time I stumble away thinking my god… my god… have you seen the size of his ego? It's… HUGE! All his novels are novelisations of his own life and then because that's not enough he writes memoirs - this autobiography My Lives was followed four years later by City Boy which is parts of his life examined in much more detail than the 356 pages of My Lives afforded.

Oh and then he mentions a guy called Stephen Barber whom he calls "my biographer" and this made me burst out laughing - it could be the easiest job in the world, being the biographer of Edmund White. But yes, it exists, "Edmund White : The Burning World" by Stephen Barber.

Well I really liked parts of this book which I read all out of order - My Hustlers and My Master are the best chapters & I think you should read those plus My Shrinks, My Father and My Genet and skip the rest. But please note My Hustlers and My Master are a little racy and contain descriptions of certain activities which widened my understanding of what people have found to be recreational.

And always, and forever, Edmund will reward your attention to his self-fascination with great offhand demolition jobs such as

I despised Lacan, a double-talking charlatan who counted his money while his patients talked and who invented the twenty-minute hour and felt authorised to reduce it to five minutes if the spirit moved him

And sometimes he's just a little too mean

Not only was my mother impulsive, she often sounded stupid to me : self-contradictory, imprecise, or just plain wrong. She stuck close to the nearest cliché, and smiled triumphantly whenever she could locate it. Her egotism and incessant chatter could be truly punishing.

Whew.

My Genet is a fascinating chapter where for the only time EW is completely fascinated by somebody else. He lands the gig of writing the big bio of Jean Genet and he spends 7 years on it. And there are problems :

some of (Genet's) friends had been jailbirds who didn't live long, who if they survived were hard to find, who if found wouldn't talk, or if they talked had to be paid, and weren't to be believed.

After two years of research I'd made almost no progress on the biography. I had no strategy, no goals, no procedures. I had no skills for dismissing hearsay and evaluating competing versions of an event. I lied and told my editors that I was a third of the way done.

There was an elderly guy who was a friend of Genet but who refused to be interviewed. So Edmund made friends with this old guy's friends, then got them to invite the old guy and Edmund to a dinner, then turned the conversation round to Genet and kept the questions & recollections flowing, and all the time Edmund was secretly taping the old guy. Ha! Gotcha. And a little later the guy dies and Edmund thinks now "at least no one else will interview him"!

Mean, haughty, self-loathing, self-satisfied, humiliatingly concupiscient, murderously , terminally cultured, generous, celebratory, incisive, endearing, exasperating, all these things are Edmund, and many other things too, one could go on, and if one was Edmund himself, one would.