Conversations with Edmund White by Conversations & Edmund White

Author:Conversations & Edmund White [ed. Brantley & Roche] (Mississippi, 2017)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2017-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Edmund White in Conversation

Mark Ford / 1996

From PN Review 111 (September–October 1996): 22–25. Reprinted by permission.

Mark Ford: You’ve currently got two biographers on your trail. How does that feel?

Edmund White: Well, my nephew is one of my biographers, and he’s doing a fairly traditional biography, with a lot of emphasis on my childhood because he has access to my sister—who’s his mother—and to me, and I think he’s very interested in the family and the family background, so I find he’s rather disappointingly uninterested in my literary career—but in any event, he’s only half-way through the book. The other one is Stephen Barber, who’s doing a book for Picador; he’s English and he’s more interested in the European years, that is since 1983, and in my writing.

MF: Your own fiction often uses the forms and voice of autobiography. Are you worried lest your biographers’ versions of your life clash with autofictions—to use your own term—such as A Boy’s Own Story and The Beautiful Room Is Empty?

EW: I just hope they’ll be as fair with me as I feel I was with Genet. Genet was also somebody who wrote autofiction and he often departed wildly from the facts. In my biography of him I tried to show that he always had an artistic reason for doing so. I think my own main changes have been towards making myself more of a representative or normal kind of person, less of an egghead or weirdo, and less precociously sexual too.

MF: Do you feel autofiction is a particularly American genre?

EW: Yes, certainly the business of the discovery and avowal of the self is … Michel Foucault was a friend of mine, and I often think that if he’d really known my work he would have disapproved, because one of his ideas was of the construction of the self rather than the revelation of the self, and he was in favor of the idea of the self as an artifact rather than the self as an avowal. But on the other hand I think that dual aspect of both creating a new self and discovering an old one are both in my writing—all of which is very peculiar given the fact that I started off as a Buddhist, and not believing in the self at all.

MF: In what ways have your Buddhist beliefs affected your social views?

EW: Well, a lot of the thinking of this last twenty years about social constructionism—or whatever that word is—seemed to me almost overobvious. I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about, because I think that was very much my view from the beginning. And I think already in a book like Forgetting Elena, which came out in 1973, you see that as a totally worked-up view of things.

MF: John Ashbery described the society depicted in Forgetting Elena as “terminally sophisticated.” Would you agree with that?

EW: Sure, I think that’s such a funny phrase … Forgetting Elena was based on The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon—the diary of a

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