East by South: China in the Australasian Imagination Book

This book first came out in 1995 and I must have read it then, but I only remembered a few parts of it. It's a large book, almost four hundred pages, a real compendium of Edmund White's shorter non-fiction as of that time. And it includes some favorites of mine: his essay On Becoming a Model for Male Smut, Sweating Mirrors: A Conversation with Truman Capote, This is not a Mammal: A Visit with William Burroughs and Thoughts on White on Black On White: Coleman Dowell. Unfortunately White did what I as a writer expressly never did during all those years after Stonewall: he expressed his ideas and feelings about being gay, about gay life, about gay literature and all that to folks who were not gay and it is those essays that have aged pretty much the worst with their "explanatory" urge now feeling like some kind of incipient Uncle Tomism. He's best when reviewing books or writers; James Merrill, James Schuyler, Nabokov, Pasolini, Barthes, Isherwood and Tennessee Williams' letters, where he can just enjoy himself in the work he admires so much. But pieces like the Paris Review interview are too long by a great deal, as are several others here. And even when he's reviewing books it seems like someone is looking over White's shoulder and insisting he follow the Company Line; calling William Gass' "Omensetter's Luck" one of the few masterpieces of our time. Believe me I tried reading it yet again this year for the nth time and it is overwritten,overindulgent tripe. Sometimes one gets the feeling that White is sitting for his oral exam and hopeful to get it all just right with the proctors. There is not one totally off the wall author here that he has discovered or has a guilty pleasure in reading. The closest he comes to utter honesty is with Dowell: a curious figure when he was alive and even more curious since his death. But there is some loyalty here too, which is admirable, and one of the best pieces is a moving eulogy for White's friend, David Kalstone. David Bergman's introduction is curiously objective since in other works he loses all judgement about White's writing, so here he is really useful.