The novelists Edmund White, who died on 3 June, and John Irving, 82, might not seem an obvious match, but their decades-long friendship is rooted in a shared interest in challenging America’s puritanical attitudes. In one book after another, these literary lions have explored sexuality and identity in ways that challenge readers to examine their own prejudices.
White’s debut, Forgetting Elena — a mystery set on an island that thrums with Fire Island’s all-too-familiar rituals — was published in 1973. But it was his 1982 novel, A Boy’s Own Story, that cemented his place as America’s preeminent chronicler of the gay experience.
For Irving, international success arrived in 1978 with The World According to Garp, now published as a Modern Library edition, along with three of his other celebrated works — The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and A Widow for One Year. His 2012 novel, In One Person, tells the story of a bisexual man attracted to men, women, and transgender women. This exerpt is from an interview was originally published in Out in 2012, to mark their near-simultaneous publications of Jack Holmes and His Friend (White), and In One Person (Irving), which the story of a bisexual man attracted to men, women, and transgender women. Here, the two great writers discuss sex, gender, and why breasts separate gay men from straight.
JOHN IRVING: I was writing Cider House Rules when I first read your novel A Boy’s Own Story. There was a line near the end of the fourth chapter; I remember how it seized my attention, and I went back and took a longer look at it when I was beginning In One Person — 27 years later! “Would I become a queer and never, never be like other people?”
You’ve heard me say — I’ve been saying it for years — that A Boy’s Own Story is the novel kids in boarding school should be required to read, instead of The Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace, which are routinely fed to teenagers who are “coming of age.” I say this because the fear in your sentence, which resonated with me, has stayed with me for 30 years.
When I was a boy, I was confusingly attracted to just about everyone: in lieu of having much in the way of actual sex (this was the ’50s), I imagined having sex all the time — with a disturbing variety of people. I was attracted to my friends’ mothers, to girls my own age, and — at the all-boys’ school, where I was on the wrestling team — to certain older boys among my teammates. Easily two-thirds of my sexual fantasies frightened me; the fear (as you wrote, that I would “never, never be like other people”) was constant. My first girlfriend was so afraid of getting pregnant that she permitted only anal intercourse. I liked it, thus adding to my terror that I must be gay!
It turned out that I liked girls, but the memory of my attractions to the “wrong” people never left me. The impulse to bisexuality was very strong; my earliest sexual experiences — more important, my earliest sexual imaginings — taught me that sexual desire is mutable. In fact, in my case — at a most formative age — sexual mutability was the norm.
We’ve both written novels about novelists before One Person and Jack Holmes. Now we’re at it again: Billy Abbott and Will Wright are novelists. We’ve both written novels about novelists before One Person and Jack Holmes. Now we’re at it again: Billy Abbott and Will Wright are novelists. I don’t say much about Billy’s writing; the quotations I attribute to Billy are from various novels and screenplays of mine. From what my other characters say to Billy about his novels, we get the idea that sexual outsiders, or sexual misfits, are his characters — certainly there’s a lot of sex, and anger, in his work. (Billy sounds like me, doesn’t he?)
But Will doesn’t sound like you — I mean as a writer. Will says, “After that Times review I became ill every time I thought of working on a new novel.” You and I aren’t that thin-skinned! What did you want us to feel about Will as a writer, and am I wrong to think that you feel some disdain for Will’s relationship with Alex?
EDMUND WHITE: In your novel Last Night in Twisted River, Danny is a world-famous novelist like you, just as in this novel Billy Abbott is a writer who in some ways resembles you. Perhaps one reason readers like you so much is that they know where you stand in a book — who and what you approve of and disapprove of. My Will Wright is not a version of me and it’s clear that Jack, who is not a novelist, is based on parts of me. We’re supposed to think of Will as a failed novelist, heavily influenced by Boris Vian and Thomas Pynchon. In Amsterdam, Ian McEwan got it right that the thought processes of a bad composer and a good composer would be very similar — separated only by a miniscule knack called talent. In the same way I suggest that Will’s ideas about writing are similar to those of a good novelist — he just lacks talent.
Is Jack really just a version of Edmund White? Like me, Jack studies at the University of Michigan and comes to New York in 1962 and becomes a journalist, but unlike me, Jack is not at all ambitious, not a novelist, rather passive, massively endowed, and not much of a take-charge kind of guy. Whereas I came out in my early teens, Jack has to wait until his early twenties. I was never in love with a straight guy for long, whereas Jack is besotted with Will — and so on.
JI: I have created many not-very-good writers among my stable of characters. Dr. Larch, who keeps a journal at the orphanage in The Cider House Rules, begins every polemical diatribe with, “Here in St. Cloud’s…” In A Son of the Circus, I made Dr. Daruwalla a hack screenwriter — not to mention that every other character in A Widow for One Year is a writer (Ruth is the only good one). What’s funny is that we also write a lot about sex, albeit differently. It hasn’t happened frequently, but occasionally someone has asked me why you and I are friends, and I begin by saying that we like each other, and each other’s writing, and that we both write about sex, and we’re both “political,” but whoever has asked me the question has already drifted off and looks utterly disappointed by what I’m saying; I don’t know what the expectations of someone asking this question really are. Now I can say: “For starters, Ed and I aren’t ‘massively endowed,’ notwithstanding what rumors you’ve heard to the contrary.” That ought to have greater effect.
EW: I think that breasts are the things that separate the straights from the gays. Straight friends are always noticing tits, whereas, to my shame, I scarcely notice them. The narrator of One Person notices Miss Frost’s tits right away, which are suspiciously girlish for a broad-shouldered woman her age — our first clue that she might be a transsexual. Some straight guys are attracted to “chicks with dicks” if they have big boobs. I’ve always found that strange.
JI: I was conscious of making Billy interested in breasts, but he’s very particular in his interest — he likes small ones. Not only Miss Frost, but Mrs. Hadley and Elaine — and he doesn’t want Donna to have breast-enhancement surgery. (It’s one of the things Donna says isn’t “normal” about Billy — namely, that he doesn’t want her to have bigger breasts.)
I thought a bi guy would more believably be interested in “chicks with dicks” (and in women) with small boobs. And Miss Frost, and Mrs. Hadley, are also described as very masculine-looking. Billy likes good-looking men and women who look a little bit like men. He is relieved that Esmeralda, his first girlfriend, doesn’t have big breasts. And in his half-sleep, when he touches her vagina, he is actually reaching for her nonexistent penis; whomever Billy’s with, he’ll be missing one or the other.
EW: You mentioned that you want your protagonist, Billy, to look sexually ambiguous — that Billy wants both straight women and gay men to wonder about him. Then you said that you and your editor were walking up Sixth Avenue on a warm night, and at least four or five times you asked each other (about someone passing by), “Boy or girl?” Do you think this gender confusion is more common now than when we were young?
JI: Billy says: “I wanted to look like a gay boy — or enough like one to make other gay boys, and men, look twice at me. But I wanted the girls and women to wonder about me — to make them look twice at me, too. I wanted to retain something provocatively masculine in my appearance.” Billy remembers when he is cast as Ariel in The Tempest, and Richard (the director) tells him that Ariel’s gender is “mutable.” Billy later says: “I suppose I was trying to look sexually mutable, to capture something of Ariel’s unresolved sexuality.”
Gender was certainly mutable in Shakespeare. I agree with you that the desire — at least in young people — to look androgynous, or sexually ambiguous, is more common now than when we were young. It suggests to me that the absolute tyranny of gender is changing, becoming more flexible.
