Between fielding threats of lawsuits and calls from reporters, Edmund White tells Belinda McKeon, in New York, about his new historical novel
'Oh dear," says Edmund White, as we sit down over miniature china tea-cups and enormous pastel-coloured cupcakes in his Chelsea apartment on a blisteringly hot summer afternoon. "Oh god, let's hope I'm not sued by Gore Vidal."
We haven't even started the interview, and already White has had his fill of journalists and their questions. All day, the phone has been dancing with calls from newsdesks hungry for a quote on the controversy surrounding his new play, Terre Haute, which is based on a correspondence between Vidal and the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh. Enraged that the ageing writer in the play is portrayed as having a sexual attraction to the McVeigh-like character, Vidal has threatened to bring the wrath of his lawyers down on White's shoulders, decrying as "unethical and vicious" his depiction of "this old faggot writer".
In the face of Vidal's fury, White is professing bafflement; somewhere in the apartment, he says, is the fax from Vidal giving him the go-ahead for the play, in which, given that Vidal and McVeigh never actually met in real life, all the dialogue and plot are invented. Vidal must simply be frustrated at being infirm and unable to go out and about, White says to the reporter who calls as we are having tea. Hopefully, he says to me after he has ended the call, he can remember where he put that fax. Then, scattering crumbs, he bites into another sugared cupcake, and raises his eyebrows to let me know that he's ready to talk.
White, who is best known for his trilogy of autobiographical fiction (A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty and The Farewell Symphony), which chronicles the difficult stages of a gay narrator's life - and, by extension, of gay American life - is nothing if not ever-ready to talk. His writing has reclaimed the genre of confessionalism, every line charged with a frankness that is by turns striking, shocking and downright toe-curling, but also richly poignant and frequently hilarious. And, if he laces fiction with autobiography to subversive effect, he twists this dynamic in the opposite direction as well. His 2006 memoir, My Lives, raised eyebrows as much for the details it barely mentioned - the death from Aids of his partner in the mid-1990s, his own experience of living with HIV since 1985, his long-term relationship with his current partner - as for those it supplied with unabashed enthusiasm: his literary friendships, his dinner-party gossip, his S&M antics with the young lover he calls his Master. On the page, that is, he can craft his own life just as he crafts the lives of his characters, or he can explore it with the sharpness and the clarity with which, as a biographer, he explores the lives of Genet, of Proust, and currently - his latest project - of Rimbaud. Either way, as his audience at the Kilkenny Arts Festival next week will discover, White always has plenty to say, whether he's dealing with fact or fiction.
The line between these two worlds is murkier than ever - wilfully, gleefully so - in White's new novel, Hotel de Dream. The book, which imagines the last days and the last work of the American writer, Stephen Crane, has had publishers scrambling for ways to describe it - "biographical fantasia" seems to be the official line. White built the story on the strength of an anecdote about Crane encountering a gay hustler in downtown New York. As White has gleaned it, Crane immediately became obsessed with the boy, meeting and interviewing him as research for a novel which would be a companion piece to his notorious melodrama of female prostitution in the same streets, Maggie (1893).
Crane did, in fact, write several pages of the novel, but was advised by his friend, the lesser-known writer, Hamlin Garland, to destroy them before they destroyed him (it was 1895, the year of the Oscar Wilde trial).
There end the facts, dubious as they may be, and here begins White's fantasy of a fully-fledged relationship between such a man and such a boy, and of a whole novel, dictated from the writer's feverish deathbed to his understanding wife. The facts remain as shadows - Crane died of TB in 1900, aged just 28, and his wife was the madam of a Florida brothel - but the rest is imagination, with a healthy dose of what White refers to as "literary archaeology", the piecing together of a city, of a culture and of a consciousness from more than 100 years ago. The gay scene in which Crane places his character, a hapless banker who falls completely for his young hustler, is an eccentric carnival of types and tendencies, and one which, you sense, White thoroughly enjoyed creating.
"FOR ME, WHAT was interesting was to write about what homosexuality was before people knew what it was, including even homosexuals," says White. "I tried to show, without being didactic, how there were a lot of competing theories out there at the time. That one person might think they were androgyne, one person might have himself castrated in some early effort towards sex change . . . one of the theories seemed to be that there were men who could be the active partner, or that they're just men, and then there were these drag queens, basically, or transvestites, who had some kind of hormonal imbalance."
It's hardly necessary, of course, to go back to the 1890s to find such thinking on the causes of homosexuality. "Even when I was a boy in the 1950s, there were people who'd say, 'oh, he's a real glandular case'. And hermaphrodite was a word they'd use a lot. I'm from down South [White was born in Ohio in 1940] and they'd say 'morphrodite' - 'Oh, he's some old morphrodite . . ." White laughs.
"But, in any event, whatever became the theories, let's say post-Freud, or now, let's say, that people are so biologically or genetically oriented; those theories hadn't yet taken hold, there were all these different warring theories. So I found that very interesting."
Much of White's "archaeology" was carried out during his year as a fellow at the New York Public Library's Cullman Centre, where he had access to the library's archives and private collections - everything from letters and diaries to menu cards and tram specifications - to help him imagine both 1890s New York and the mind of Stephen Crane (Irish writers Joseph O'Connor and Mary Morrissy spent the same year researching their own new novels at the Cullman Centre).
"A lot of the plot twists in Hotel de Dream came out of the research," White explains. "I thought this character should hire a private eye to investigate his own boyfriend because he's so jealous, and began to read early detective magazines to research that, and found there were all these women detectives used early on, often in adultery cases. And that was irresistible, I couldn't resist having a woman detective. And then I wanted to have a sculptor, someone kind of mediocre but well-known, make a sculpture of the boy."
For this, it turned out, he had only to look outside his office window.
"The lions in front of the 42nd Street library were done by a guy called Piccirilli, so I started investigating him," says White. "He turned out to work with his four brothers up in the Bronx, at this huge studio. And the thing that was kind of interesting was that, though he had a wife, he seemed to be, over and over again, involved with things to do with gay scandals of the day."
ALL THE PARTS, then, seemed to be falling into place. But the historical novel - for White talks of Hotel de Dream as a historical novel, despite its heavy dependence on the speculative and the downright invented - needs more than just period detail and serendipitous possibility; it needs mood, atmosphere, and a psychological mindset which rings true in terms of place and time.
"I think that the typical historical novel - which I think has gotten the genre into a bad reputation, though people enjoy reading them - I think the problem is that they put modern sentiments into old drag," says White. "I mean, in other words, that they really take our emotions today, and our feelings today, without doing any archaeology of sentiments. They just find out what they were wearing and what they were eating and what their cars look like, or something, and just stick modern people into those situations. I suppose by the same token that a show like Dallas, for instance, would take middle-class people and put them in rich people's clothes or situations. Whereas in fact the rich are different from you and me, but you dare not show that on a TV show.
"What interested me was writing about the 1890s in New York and the beginnings of modern gay life. Because gay life depended on things which didn't really exist before: independent income, the anonymity of the modern city, the weakening of religion. Once you have those conditions, once people are away from their families, you see people coming out."
Stephen Crane never came out; and although White has him relating the bedroom activities of his imaginary character and his lover (the dictated novel is given as a book within a book in Hotel de Dream, with a new typeface indicating the place where White's writing ends and Crane's supposedly begins), he believes that the author best known for The Red Badge of Courage was resolutely straight.
"It just seemed so intriguing to me that a heterosexual so famous for a very macho war story could have written, out of his curiosity, a gay novel in the 1890s," White says. "It would have changed everything if it had actually been published. I think it would have launched everybody into this awareness of homosexuality. It would have been remarkable if it had ever actually appeared."
And now it has, at least in White's words. And luckily for him, Stephen Crane, at least, is unlikely to sue.
Edmund White reads at 6pm, Mon, in the Parade Tower, Kilkenny Castle, as part of Kilkenny Arts Festival. Admission: €12/€10. Booking: www.kilkennyarts.ie; 056-7752175