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Irish Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Edmund White: ‘He never broke faith with the nobility of a literary life'
One of the reasons it is difficult to write about Edmund White is that he himself frequently speculated about what people would say about him after he died. Would he be a Genet, a Bowen, an Isherwood? Most artists nurse this vain anxiety somewhere, but generally they try and hide it. It was typical of Edmund to trumpet a vice: it was of a piece with the sometimes-alarming honesty and taste for shamelessness with which he approached his work (and sometimes wounded those who found themselves revealed or distorted in its pages). Entertaining conjectures about his posthumous legacy sprang, paradoxically, from Edmund's ferocious attachment to life, a result of his relentless, forever-unsatisfied curiosity. He could not abide the thought that there was this one piece of literary news he would never receive. Survival was, of course, a fundamental principle in Edmund's life. One of the very few of his generation of gay men in New York to survive Aids, he found himself in the role of witness, one of a handful of voices able to recount the rules, habits and customs of a world that had had only a brief flicker of existence before it was extinguished. READ MORE Being a surviving witness was a job thrust upon Edmund by accident, and he rose to it magnificently. But in any circumstances, he would have been a chronicler of lost ways of life. He had a passion for intergenerational transmission of many kinds, and took great pleasure in details and ideas, both obsolete and useful, passing between one generation and another. I first met him in the late 1990s. Edmund had just moved to Princeton to teach creative writing; I had come there from Ireland to study comparative literature. I already knew his fiction well – so well that meeting him at a party in Princeton felt almost like an encounter with a part of myself. A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room is Empty treated shameful, private longings as noble, universal feelings. They dealt with homosexuality not as a life sentence, but as a predicament that was exciting and filled with possibility. All the gay men in our small, fearful circle in Dublin had passed those novels back and forth. More than anything any of us read or heard or said to each other, those books gave us a vocabulary of feeling, furnished an emotional grammar for our inner lives. I was in Princeton to do a PhD, but I was also working on what would become my first novel. Edmund invited me to dinner in the house he and Michael were renting and suggested I bring some of my manuscript. I thought he was asking me to leave the pages with him, but after dinner, he had me read it aloud while he and Michael sat and listened, and Edmund read from the notebooks that would become his novel The Married Man . Later, it was partly thanks to Edmund's help that my novel found a publisher. Over the years that followed, we dined together regularly, sometimes with his friends in Princeton or with Michael at home in New York. As a student of French literature, I was an especially useful guest on the many occasions Edmund was hosting a visitor from France. He loved speaking French. It energised him, as though he had been plugged into a different power source. As he read French literature, he greedily stockpiled proverbs, idioms and turns of phrase, which he would then use to decorate his conversation. Edmund had learnt French only when he moved to Paris in his 40s, and mastering it, I think, appealed to his passion for self-reinvention. His news was always new: a new boyfriend, a new book, a new obsession with a hitherto overlooked literary figure from the past. He was a person always in the process of becoming, and his fascination with this process, with how his own plot might thicken, was endless. People often compare him to Henry James, because of his interest in the theme of Americans in Paris, or to Proust because of his meticulous observation of the gay underworld and its codes. He and I talked about the characters in Proust as though they were friends we had in common. But in my view, the writer whose sensibility was the most formative for Edmund was Balzac. Like the French novelists, Edmund had a horror of emptiness (the title The Beautiful Room is Empty , taken from Kafka, registered, I always thought, one of his fundamental fears). Humour, as for Balzac, was always immediately available to Edmund, no matter the circumstance. When recounting tales of his lovers, friends or literary activities, he spoke as though we were living in 19th-century Paris. His world was populated with faded 'famous beauties', dastardly but irresistible schemers, conniving dowagers, young men from the provinces with literary ambitions being corrupted by the city, respectable ladies with unspeakable sexual secrets. In Edmund's conception, the social world had a limited repertoire of fixed roles, but one could get to play many of them in one's lifetime. He was capable of translating everything he did himself into these slightly cartoonish Balzacian categories. It gave him a distance and colour that he needed, and it imbued his life with both irony and dignity. This Balzacian world he pretended we all lived in was one of the tools in Edmund's kit of survival smarts. He knew very well that the idea of a literary society where 'everyone' might know your book was a fiction, but he also understood the necessity of acting as though it existed. He saw many things collapse around him over the course of his life, including the old New York publishing world he had made his own career in. But as a survivor himself he expected survival as well as decline. He never broke faith with the truth and resilience of literature, with the nobility of a literary life, and with the solemn, enduring reality of writing as a vocation. These things too, as much as anything else, he made sure to pass on. Barry McCrea is author of The First Verse (2005) ; In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce and Proust (2011) ; and Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in 20th-Century Ireland and Europe (2015)
Jordan News
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Jordan News
Video - In Classical Arabic: "My Mother" Brings Together Kadim Al-Sahir and Genet to Celebrate Mother's Day
The legendary singer Kadim Al-Sahir and the talented singer Genet made sure to participate in this year's Mother's Day celebrations with a new song titled "My Mother," which was released just hours ago on the global video platform YouTube in classical Arabic. اضافة اعلان The new song was performed by the Arabic music duo, with lyrics, music, and composition by the "Caesar of Arabic Singing" Kadim Al-Sahir, and the distribution and mixing by Hisham Niaz. The song quickly gained widespread popularity on social media within the first few hours of its release. **Lyrics of "My Mother"** *My mother, my mother, my mother, my mother Who is like her, my mother, I I sacrificed for her, who is like her A soul and a heart of gold I love her, I love her After my Lord, I love her To my heart, the closest The candle of my life, the inspirer Despite the dark nights And the painful years She remains content and smiling She stayed with me, my beloved My friend, my doctor With her patience, she's amazing, amazing She doesn't complain, she doesn't blame.* This heartfelt tribute to mothers is a beautiful expression of love and admiration for the endless devotion and sacrifice of mothers, making it a perfect celebration for Mother's Day.
