HUNGRY FOR EDMUND WHITE'S NEW YORK

Edmund White city boy I first discovered Edmund White in Paris when I was 17. Talk about the ideal reader. I was staying with chic family friends in a modern glass house in the 6th arrondissement, and "A Boy’s Own Story", White’s semi-autobiographical novel, was the only English book in the house. I remember gobbling it up in a day and returning home to California to subsequently buy and read all his other fictional work. Only in college did I get to his correspondences with Nabokov and his biographies of Genet and Proust. (The only book of his that I have neglected to devour is "The Joy of Gay Sex", which White coauthored with Charles Silverstein in 1972.) This is all to say that I’ve been waiting for "City Boy" for quite a while.

Subtitled, "My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s", Edmund White's memoir is a paean to both youth and New York City. It's common to conflate place and time, to retroactively colour the setting of youth with youth itself. With the nostalgia and romanticism typical of his influences (Proust, Nabokov, Genet), White convincingly renders a time and place that is forever gone, a Manhattan where social and intellectual life intersected, where young artists could afford to live, where a 21-year-old paid only $175 per month for a place on the Upper West Side.

White may be the ideal New Yorker. Originally from the midwest, he remains devoted to, and possessive of, the city in a way that only a non-native can be. In "City Boy" he describes a vibrant place—a playground, even—full of artists and writers, and recounts his first hungry efforts at literary immortality. Occasionally his prose is cringe-worthy in its vulnerability. As an elder statesman at once nostalgic for and embarrassed of his younger self, White knowingly confesses his obsessions with fame, prestige and personal mythology.

His accounts of gay life in the 1970s and 1980s feature historical detail and political awareness. But White hits his stride with his smaller, less serious observations. A rich anecdotalist, he dishes up unforgettable moments among his friends (an impossibly impressive rolodex): Susan Sontag, Michel Foucault, John Ashbury, Robert Mapplethorpe, etc. He tells of visits to Venice in which he witnesses Peggy Guggenheim counting apples to make sure her servants were not eating more than one each per day. Though White admits to his liminal position in this world—as usually the youngest, the least famous and with the most belated career—he is also plainly an insider. In the 1980s White decides to leave New York for Paris after so many friends and lovers succumbed to AIDS. The city, he writes, "was turning into a morgue."

Reading his wide-eyed observations of his adopted city, I found myself wistful, even envious. Forty years later, what was once a concentrated world of young, creative people who seemingly ran into each other on every downtown corner is now spread thinly across almost all of Brooklyn. Chance encounters are rare; an extra 1,000 square feet of loft space for a friend to crash an impossibility. And established writers, bombarded with e-mails from aspiring bloggers, are less inclined to take on mentorship roles than they once were. White writes, "I remember thinking how strange it was that all the writers of the past seemed to know each other but that 'we' didn't." I couldn’t have said it better myself.

"City Boy" (Bloomsbury) by Edmund White, out now

~ ALICE GREGORY