The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  “No. I don’t.”

  “Those small, dark, avid people.” When I looked blank he added, “Jews.”

  As a boy I’d always wanted to win acceptance from these very people, but my mother was a divorcee, my father a hermit and misanthrope. Whereas I’d wanted to attend Groton and Princeton I’d ended up staying in the Midwest among the children of the automobility. Now, here at last I’d penetrated, thanks to Ned, into the inner sanctum of these Brahmin families and I saw their conversation was as pointless and drifting, their prejudices as deep dyed, their values as fundamentally mercantile as those of people anywhere else in America.

  Whereas I’d once imagined I’d chosen a world of artists and homosexuals by default, I now saw I didn’t want to belong to the mandarinate even if I could. We paid a weekly visit to a famous old writer who lived close to the harbor. His eternally youthful wife went off to play tennis or retreated into her office to manage a surprisingly effective watchdog organization designed to protect the rights—and the lives—of endangered writers all over the world, while the great man himself, as heavy a drinker as I, slowly became genteely incoherent as the day wore on.

  When we returned to New York I stopped drinking forever one day after a night when I’d become so drunk I couldn’t climb the ladder to my loft bed. Ned was shocked and angry at my decision. “How dare you make a unilateral decision about something that obviously affects us both! Some of our best times together have been drinking.”

  “I know, but it’s something I just can’t moderate. You can live next to six half-empty bottles of booze and offer your guests a choice from your bar, but you saw how nervous it made me to have those bottles brought into the house. Butler is right—I’m a consumer of booze, food, money, men. I live off the fat of the land.”

  Ned asked me if I was going to join AA and I said only if I couldn’t stay sober on my own. My AA friends chided me for not joining up; they said I was on a “dry drunk.” But my mother had stopped on her own—or, as she would say, because she’d promised God. Even if I didn’t go to AA, I was armed with its principles. I decided to start living one day at a time.

  NED AND I moved to Paris, we thought for just a year; that move only dramatized the slow withdrawal I was undergoing. Since I no longer smoked or drank I never went to bars in France. Because Ned and I shared the same bed, even if chastely, I would never have dreamed of entertaining a boyfriend at our apartment; our sexless love, so sustaining to us, was brittle and easily cracked. Back in the 1970s along with the rest of my generation in New York I had hated couples; Butler and Philip even talked half-jokingly about starting a support group for the promiscuously challenged. The couple was deemed dowdy, mid-American, middle-class, mittel-stupid, and people apologized for their fidelity to a lover as though it were a reprehensible eccentricity. Gay couples, we decided, were shamelessly imitating heterosexual marriage, which itself seemed a primitive institution based on the exchange of cows for cowrie shells and clitoridectomies. Butler claimed it was difficult to socialize in the gay world if one was half of a couple.

  Now most of the people who’d promulgated such ideas were dead or dying and they’d been replaced by a new gay generation that blamed their threatened health on the randiness of their elders. Gay guys now dated several times before going to bed, and that’s just where they went—back rooms and baths had been shut down. Now people took workshops in safe sex. Couples had themselves tested repeatedly and even so took no risks.

  Not in France. In Paris AIDS was dismissed as an American phobia until French people started dying; then everyone said, “Well, you have to die someway or another.” If Americans were hysterical and pragmatic, the French were fatalistic, depressed but determined to keep the party going.

  I met a few people at the Alliance Française or at the gym, but no writers and few gays. The novel about my boyhood had been published to considerable acclaim and that success had even won me a couple of prizes, which improved my finances slightly while isolating me still further, even from my own ambition, for it turned out that now that I’d earned my modicum of celebrity I’d lost interest in my career, if not in my vocation. I still wanted to write novels but now out of a mild curiosity about what I’d invent rather than from a desperate need to impose myself on the world. Maria had always teased me for whoring after fame, but now I saw that I’d simply wanted to be on the map, not as Texas but as Rhode Island.

  Paris with its drizzle, as cool, grey and luxurious as chinchilla, comforted me. It was a middle-aged town, devoid of youth culture, youthful fashions and young people’s amusements, but ideally suited to someone “of a certain age,” as the French said with all the imprecision of good manners. (Sometimes, when they were even more gracious, they called the forties and fifties “the flower of age,” la fleur de l’âge.) It was a city of good restaurants, tolerable concerts and tradespeople who were polite but brisk. One out of every two Parisians lived alone; the city respected solitude. Friendships weren’t the searing, convulsive intimacies of New York; they were more decorous, sometimes even static, and they passed slowly from vous to tu. Or perhaps I was just getting older. My father had told me one didn’t make close friends after twenty; for me, thirty had been the equivalent of twenty for a heterosexual man of his generation, and even so I’d gone on calling up Josh or Maria or Butler at three in the morning if I was panicking. Now I wasn’t looking for that sort of violent love; now I was zoning out in the Paris fog, which was lit up around the newly illuminated Eiffel Tower or transected by the spots trained on the Gothic churches.

  The bookstores in Paris were wonderfully specialized, American literature or Catalan, historical, travel, African. There were even two bookstores devoted just to Jules Verne’s works. Baudelaire had praised the flâneur as the embodiment of the contemporary spirit; I did so much aimless wandering that he would have considered me thoroughly modern.

  Whereas Rome had been crowded with visual and social incident, an ancient forum cheek-to-jowl with a Baroque church and a Mussolini-era office building, Paris was remarkable only for its uniformity—its long vistas of leafless plane trees, vigorously pollarded, and the unbroken façades of its Haussmannian apartment blocks. The same few elements kept being rejuggled by a clever deceiver as the unsuspecting ruler made her way through the Potemkin city—the same round metal grilles at the bases of trees, the same cafés with their dark green awnings, the same Morris columns covered with posters, the same Wallace fountains with their maidens in cast iron, the same Art Nouveau subway entrances by Guimard, even the same repeated decorative details in all those miles and miles of bourgeois Second Republic apartment interiors. Even the parquet floors creaked in the same way no matter where I went.

  As an expatriate I lost touch with the news and advertising jingles and catchwords back home and when a visitor asked, “Where’s the beef?” I couldn’t pick up his allusion, though his knowing grin suggested I was in the presence of one. Without mastering French culture I was losing touch with American. The Americans I ran into seemed less and less concerned with what was happening “abroad.” Despite being an expatriate, I remained as American as tarte aux pommes.

  Max assumed I must be hobnobbing with all those intimidating Parisian intellectuals, and indeed I was invited everywhere by everyone—once. If I’d been paranoid I might have said that they found me dull, but I had the impression (which time and subsequent observation bore out) that the Parisians, those devotees of whatever is modish, like to be introduced to whoever is new and foreign but then, like people everywhere, settle back into their slovenly habits and see the same six friends.

  The one exception was Michel Foucault, whom I’d met in the United States and who’d even come to a reading I’d given at the old Three Lives Bookshop off Sheridan Square, where he’d sat on the floor upstairs with the kids and listened to pages from my novel about my boyhood. Afterwards he’d said—with his modesty that was as pure and demanded as much concentration as a flame held between hands on a windy night�
�that I was “a real writer,” unlike him.

  In Paris I saw him a few times at his big modern apartment on the rue de Vaugirard. Once or twice he gave me a rich dinner—without vegetables—that he scarcely touched. When I teased him about not eating enough vegetables, he said that the greengrocer was too far away whereas the pastry shop and caterer were just next door. Usually he had a whole band of young men around him, mostly the sort of elegant, intelligent ephebes he enjoyed as friends if not as sex partners. Inspired by the ancient Greeks, whom he was studying, he’d developed a cult of friendship. He thought that we had nothing else to value now; the death of God had resulted in the birth of friendship. If we could no longer enjoy an afterlife earned by our good deeds, we could at least leave behind a sense of our achievement, measured aesthetically, and the most beautiful art we could practice would be the art of self-realization through friendship. He became highly irritated when people tried to push the resemblances too far between the pagan world and ours; he was careful not to compare any two historical epochs, but if no emphasis at all was placed on the juxtaposition, he was willing to let the classical ideal of friendship dangle before our imagination, a glittering example that we might invent a way to emulate.

  But perhaps I misunderstood him. I read his last two books and reviewed them, but it was in his conversation, as reported to me by Gilles Barbedette, that he developed these notions about friendship, left deliberately vague, and I’m far from sure that at two removes I understood what he was getting at.

  Ned didn’t like long evenings around a dinner table, especially not with French-speaking people. He said he just wasn’t on their wavelength, and in fact couldn’t tolerate people who weren’t “sparkly” (one of his favorite if nearly unfathomable words). For Ned, “sparkly” didn’t, for instance, mean a brilliant conversationalist. I had one friend, an English writer, who was a dazzling, non-stop raconteur, but Ned found his monologues about Czech porcelain collectors or Nazi novelists tiresome. No, Ned liked people who made a real, sustained effort to draw him out and include him in the conversation and who were big drinkers and would become at the end of the evening either silly or sexual. It wasn’t easy for English or American academics to talk to him. They were used to the lecture hall or the common room and their conversation included lots of intellectual allusions and campus namedropping, both of which left Ned arctically cold. He looked like such a well brought-up New Englander that no one suspected what a rage he could get into if he had to sit through a meal where he was ignored or chided or during which people had the bad taste to speak French.

  Ned had learned only a horrible pidgin French that he picked up at the gay bars where he went almost every night ostensibly to cruise but actually to get drunk; I was even slower to master French conversation. What I did do was lie on my daybed and read the latest French novels and look up all the words. After I’d located a word in the dictionary on five separate occasions I was finally able to memorize it, though usually I was still incapable of recognizing it when someone else said it.

  Attitudes were as unrecognizable as words. For the Parisians, determined to appear unflappable, everything, no matter how grotesque or perverse, was declared “normale.” The only thing not “normale” was an unfair quality-price ratio, even though the French were willing to pay lots more than Americans for genuinely desirable things, which they could recognize in microscopic gradations more readily than we could; after all, the French had invented the idea of luxury.

  Ned was studying interior design at the Paris branch of an American university. Our apartment, which was just two overheated rooms on the Ile St.-Louis, was often crowded with his models of a Summer House by the Sea for a Retired Couple or a Manhattan Penthouse for a Fashionable Bachelor. Ned was dyslexic and looked at a book as though it were someone’s grandmother he respected but worried might trap him into a boring evening; he was quick to cast it aside and dash out to the bars, especially those where older men would buy him drinks and attempt to chat him up in English as broken as Ned’s French.

  Ned had a sidekick, Arturo, who came from Venezuela but had been educated in Florida; at least he spoke English and was always available even at the last moment to go bar-hopping. One could either believe his version, that he was from a rich family who gave him a big allowance to stay in Paris to avoid kidnappers and study, that the small but very bourgeois apartment near the Arc de Triomphe was his and he just happened to be lodging there a French lover twice his age because he liked older, chubby men but that he was contemplating moving to the vast family apartment overlooking Central Park West. Or, alternatively, one could say he was an ugly kid with a big dick from a poor family, that the Paris apartment belonged to the man who kept him and that the New York apartment was a figment that didn’t even exist.

  At first we never suspected him of lying but soon Ned discovered that half the men he was meeting were mythomanes claiming their mother was a countess whereas she was actually a concierge or haughtily asserting they were from a long line of scholars instead of, more truthfully, a short line of shepherds. I suppose we were easily fooled because, as Americans, we thought that everyone was on his own and could rise as high as his drive and abilities would carry him; as I kept trying to explain to French friends, arriviste didn’t exist as a word or concept in America and if it did it would be a compliment, since we admired people who’d arrived somewhere out of nowhere. We were even guilty of reverse snobbism; I loved to tell people my mother had been so poor she’d never worn shoes until she was sixteen, whereas the truth, I seem to recall, was that until her mother married Mr. Wentworth she never wore two shoes that matched (they were both the right size but, since they were hand-me-downs or pass-alongs, they were seldom two halves of the same pair).

  Although I was writing a novel and doing bits of journalism, it seemed to me I’d never had so much leisure. I’d go to the gym, dine with new friends from Paris or old friends from the States and, during the day, cross paths with Ned—cross and recross. Aside from Arturo he had few friends. He would have considered them to be impediments to his cruising and drinking. Until the previous year I would have seen those activities as proof of his independence but now I regarded them (privately) as signs of his addictions.

  I was on a French television show discussing my writing, and Arturo’s boyfriend—a mustachioed, fifty-year-old software salesman—became so excited by my fleeting celebrity that he arranged for a dinner at his (or, depending on which version we believed, Arturo’s) apartment; there he pretended to be the host of the literary chat show and interviewed me with a fake microphone. I was intensely embarrassed by this tomfoolery but went along with it because I knew how much Ned had suffered through evenings with my tedious friends.

  Ned’s real reason for disliking the French, I think, was that they wouldn’t listen to his long stories about how mistreated he’d been as a child, or if they did listen they didn’t say, “You poor kid,” but rather, “Et alors? Isn’t childhood always miserable?” Friendship for the French wasn’t the same exchange of horror stories as it was for Americans, those highly public “secrets” that had to be traded in the States as expensive bottles of Scotch have to be exchanged in Japan.

  Once in a while I’d say to Ned, “Please be careful about sex. We’ve got to be more careful.”

  “About what?”

  “AIDS—isn’t that what they’re calling it now?”

  “I am careful, Petes.” (We called each other “Petes.”) “I’m always very careful and clean.”

  I don’t think either of us realized how idiotic these reassurances were.

  One evening I told Michel Foucault and the writer Gilles Barbedette about AIDS and Foucault laughed at me and said, “Don’t you realize how puritanical you’re being? You’ve invented a disease aimed just at gays to punish them for having unnatural sex.”

  “Yes,” Gilles chimed in, “that’s a very American idea.”

  The French loved to discuss American “puritanism,” by which they
meant a phobia about pleasure, a hatred of the body and a fanatical prudishness. I became hot under the collar explaining that the actual Puritans had been the best thing that ever happened to America, responsible for abolitionism, prison reform and universal, free and compulsory education, and that America’s religious life, unfortunately, was dominated not by the somber, fatalistic, intellectual Puritans but by born-again nitwits who joined their small-minded bigotry to a convulsive but mercifully short-lived revivalism.

  Ironically, it was in Europe that I became puritanical or at least bourgeois. People who’d read my books assumed I must be a real bounder, always ready for a romp; I greeted their familiarity with a profound hauteur, if height can have depth. Old friends assumed I must be as ready for a good chin-wag as ever but I was now reserved, prudent, and the French had taught me if not to stop gossiping at least to deny my interest in it with icy hypocrisy. I’d always have scuffed shoes and a shirt-tail hanging out, but now I wore a coat and tie, not a T-shirt; cashmere, not denim. When I came back to visit Leonard in my old New York apartment building, on the stairs I passed one of my scruffy, sexy former neighbors and though we’d never really been on speaking terms he felt moved to say, “Ugh! Cologne! You never wore that sissy crap before. You stink like a French whore. Time to come home.” I looked at him impassively and thought that now he was past forty he’d do well to follow my example.

  Leonard was dying. He shed the massive body he’d earned through years of lifting weights and became once again the skinny blond boy I’d first met. All the easygoing warmth and relaxed generosity also melted away Now he was once again the despised creep he’d been as a boy when he’d been tormented by his alcoholic, bedridden father. Leonard hated himself and shouted angrily at his lover Billy and was always furious at something Billy had done or forgotten to do—he’d become both the tormentor and the tormented, the two halves of his childhood drama.