Edmund White, ca. 2007. Photograph by David Shankbone

I first met Edmund White following his move from New York to Paris in 1983. His novel A Boy’s Own Story (1982) had been recommended to me by Odile Hellier, in whose American bookshop, The Village Voice, White was scheduled to read. On the evening of the reading, the upstairs wing of Hellier’s store was packed with curious newcomers. White’s generous and genial personality, as well as his affective reading of his autobiographical novel—the first in a tetralogy dealing with gay experience in America—won White many new readers and inspired me to ask him to sit for an interview for the International Herald Tribune in April, 1984.

Over the next four years, White and I ran into each other often at various Paris gatherings, or at Village Voice literary evenings, and I meanwhile followed his essays and reviews in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and American Vogue, where he is a contributing editor. White’s previous novels, Forgetting Elena and Nocturnes for the King of Naples, and States of Desire: Travels in Gay America, had already identified him as a fresh, original voice in American fiction as well as one of the country’s most eloquent representatives of the gay community, but it was with A Boy’s Own Story that he acquired a wide international readership. French critics praised his Proustian sensibility and compared his prose to that of Henry James; in England the novel sold well over one hundred thousand copies and began White’s regular contributions to the Times Literary Supplement and The Sunday Times, among others. His fourth novel, Caracole, was described by the British magazine Time Out as “something to revel in: elegant, fabulous, almost sublime.” Earlier this year, White’s second autobiographical novel in the tetralogy, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, appeared. At present, White is at work on a biography of Jean Genet.

Our interview took place on a Sunday afternoon in mid-April, 1988. We met in White’s apartment, a three-room walk-up in a seventeenth-century building that looks directly out onto the church of St.-Louis-en-L’Ile. Edmund White’s persona is very much that of his nameless autobiographical narrator in A Boy’s Own Story and The Beautiful Room Is Empty—a man who yearns for beauty and love, yet who often lives at the edge of the society he so painstakingly observes, his highest good is the truth of the imagination.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve been variously congratulated by your peers as one of America’s outstanding prose writers today, as a master of language and imagination. How does the kind of encouragement you need now differ from when you were just starting out?

EDMUND WHITE

I feel I’m getting all the encouragement I need. I almost feel spoiled. I wish I were more disciplined and taking better advantage of the time I have now.

INTERVIEWER

Are literature grants such as the Guggenheim, which enabled you to settle and write in Paris, healthy for an author’s sense of independence? Does the writer remain nonpartisan to the politics of the supporting institution?

WHITE

Oh yes, there are no strings attached. You don’t have to do anything but write and you don’t feel compromised in any way. And often one may have no idea what those politics are.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think there are enough grants available to writers who are just starting out?

WHITE

There ought to be more grants that go to people in their late twenties and early thirties. That’s a crucial age, although it’s very hard to judge who is worth supporting and who is not. Looking back on my own life, I see that was the period when I was closest to giving up as a novelist and when I most needed some encouragement. I didn’t get anything published until I was thirty-three and yet I’d written five novels and six or seven plays. The plays, I should point out, were dreadful.

INTERVIEWER

How were you making a living?

WHITE

I was working for Time-Life Books from 1962 to 1970, as a staff writer, and after that I was a journalist. Eventually I became an editor at The Saturday Review and Horizon.

INTERVIEWER

These positions didn’t allow you to think of yourself as a writer?

WHITE

No, because a journalist and novelist are not quite the same thing. I was writing all the time and I was considered a good journalist but I had no idea if I could write a novel. Part of my problem as a young writer was that I was too much a New Yorker, always second-guessing the “market.” I became so discouraged that I decided to write something that would please me alone—that became my sole criterion. And that was when I wrote Forgetting Elena, the first novel I got published. In my courses later I always forbade my writing students to discuss in class the commercial side of publishing. I wanted to save them the time I’d lost; I wanted them to be serious, artistic, free of all constraints. I believe it was Schiller who said that the only time a human being is free is when he or she makes a work of art; if that’s true, then art is sacred and shouldn’t be compromised by mere ambition.

INTERVIEWER

You taught writing at Yale, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins University. What do you, as a confirmed novelist, acquire from teaching experience?

WHITE

These are positions that are offered to you once you’ve already published a few books. I began teaching in 1977. In the beginning it served to clarify my thinking about my own methods. Then I used teaching to improve my work. For instance, I saw I was a weak plotter and so I would talk a lot in class about how to write strong plots, and how to analyze other peoples’ novels and stories from that angle. That helped me to some degree; I was teaching myself. After a point, however, you become too immersed in other people’s work to be able to think about your own, and it seems almost vulgar to write. You’re surrounded by all of these struggling egos and it seems sort of impertinent. And yet being able to work out some of my own ideas about fiction was admittedly a useful process. I estimate there is a period of seven or eight years when you can do it, but then you burn out and I think you should stop for a few years before starting again.

INTERVIEWER

Would you elaborate?

WHITE

When I was teaching, some of my students were much better educated than I, and so I felt I really had to struggle to keep up with them and be worthy of their level of seriousness. I was also aware of just how much money they were spending in tuition and felt I had to give them their money’s worth at every moment. I tended to overprepare, or let’s say to prepare very, very carefully, for which I think they were grateful. But it’s true that at the same time I was pursuing my own interests. Certain writers interested me, for instance Proust, whom I’d read many times in my life though never with enough care. I taught a course in Proust, which was a way of making myself read him with great attention. In the same way, I taught a course in Pynchon. Though I had admired Gravity’s Rainbow, I’d never been able to get through it. I think it is a great but boring book.

INTERVIEWER

In terms of lack of action?

WHITE

Of suspense.