The Unpunished Vice by Edmund White

Author:Edmund White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Under Giono’s Hill is Frederic Tuten’s novel The Green Hour, a heterosexual love story set in Paris. Once I received from the New York Times Book Review a Tuten novel to review without recognizing that the characters were all named after those in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (which I’d never read). Almost as wince-making is an editorial I ghostwrote for the new owners of Saturday Review. I made two serious mistakes: I misattributed (I think) T. E. Hulme’s comment that Romanticism was “spilt religion,” and I referred to the southern novelist Walker Percy as “Percy Walker.” That was in the early 1970s, long before Google; the new owners were excoriated as “philistines” by enraged readers. It was all my fault.

Next in the pile is Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. I had my class in memoir at Princeton read the second chapter; they were unimpressed. They liked the language but deplored the lack of feeling (I must say I’ve come to agree with them). The first person I ever heard express such a heretical view was the great Russian novelist Nina Berberova, who disliked all that doting on a vanished aristocratic past.

Then there are two books being read by my husband, Michael Carroll: Wolfgang Koeppen’s Death in Rome, about postwar Germans in Italy, including a former Nazi, and The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon (Michael has a bipolar young lover with a beautiful body and often a mood that is dangerously depressed).

Then How to Survive a Plague, the definitive book on the social history of AIDS by David France, which I will blurb; and gosh—so many others!

And yet like most old people, I spend time watching TV news rather than reading. What are we old folks hoping to see and learn from the little screen? That the world is in decline, as we suspect? Or that our opinion (vote) is still relevant? Or is it for that overview we seek in conversation with contemporaries (though we rarely obtain it) that will make sense of everything, add it all up to a huge, rounded-off sum?

Reading, of course, is a melancholy project. You don’t smile at the characters’ witticisms as I find myself idiotically smiling back at my favorite TV newscasters. I do sometimes smile while reading—Henry Green makes me smile with his batty, I’m-so-helpless ladies who are champion strategists; Colette makes me smile with her rosy, lush bedroom interiors, all lace and embroidered linen, against which a naked young man, black when contre-jour, prances about like a thin, fit devil, wearing a heavy necklace of thirty-nine pearls. Elizabeth Bowen makes me smile with her ruthless, rich heroine Eva Trout, driving her powerful Jaguar and living in a tacky, rotting house named Cathay on the bleak coast of England.

Speaking of bleak coastal England, I love that novel by W. G. Sebald in which he’s in some ghastly English resort eating a bad fish and looking out at the shingle in the rain. Really horrible scenes always make me laugh. The grisly operation in The Makioka Sisters; Tolstoy’s battle scenes and wounds.

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