White's Lives

 Edmund White 2005

The only moment when Moloney would truly pay attention to me was when I reported a dream to him. To remember a dream I had to write it down right away. On Sundays, when we were allowed to sleep in an extra hour, till eight, I had the greatest likelihood of awakening slowly, not to a bell, and of recalling the last episode or two of a dream. 

Moloney was Freudian, I suppose, in believing that a dream was ‘the royal road to the unconscious,’ although he had a different system of interpretation, more Jungian in that it traced the ponderous movements of an endlessly proliferating tribe of archetypes. Now I agree with an Italian doctor friend who ascribes the primacy of dreams in Freud’s system to the Viennese habit of eating cheese after dinner, and who says, ‘Cheese produces excessive neural transmitters; dreams are the downshifting of the brain’s gears.’ 

Like Freud, Moloney felt that one of the analyst’s main tools is picking through the transference. Freud, however, insists that the patient must know nothing concrete about the analyst, so that it will be clear even to him that he has invented everything and attributed it to the doctor. In the classic Freudian transference, the analysand re-creates with his analyst his damaging relationship with his parents; when he recognizes that the doctor has done nothing at all to justify such wrath, resentment or fear, he is forced to admit (and abandon) his habit of endlessly ‘projecting’ bad motives and harmful feelings onto everyone around him. With Moloney, however, the experiment was compromised because ours wasn’t a laboratory-pure isolate. Because he constantly chattered about himself I did know a lot about him, which I had the right to interpret as I saw fit. He might say, ‘Stop projecting!’ but only his authority lent credibility to such an objection. 

He was my first shrink, I had nothing to compare him to and he was my only chance of becoming a heterosexual, of ending the terrible suffering I was enduring as an outcast. He told me so himself; he was certain he was the only qualified doctor around. I contemplated suicide more than once. Never had I met or read anyone who defended homosexuality, although the Kinsey Report had recently done so (I just didn’t happen to know anything about it, since copies were kept out of kids’ hands). 

But even if someone had tried to refute my horror of homosexuality I would have instantly rejected his insinuating proposals, tempting me to settle for second best. I knew that only the most insulting pity and condescension could lead someone to recommend that I surrender to my disease. 

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Of course I had to confess I missed the fuss, the scrutiny, the accountability of being in therapy. My new shrink-free liberty was as disappointing as the silence and solitude that follows a definitive rupture with a fiendishly jealous lover. I couldn’t help but feel that all my juicy dreams were going to waste, that my most recent sidesplitting lapsus linguae was just one more neural or vocal blip, devoid of humor or even significance. All the wrong notes my brain struck on the high-strung keyboard of my psyche went unheard. I was alone with the suddenly pointless minutiae of my life. 

Two decades later, in the fall of 1993, I started seeing a shrink once again. My young French lover, Hubert Sorin, was dying. I found a gay American therapist, Rik Gitlin, who hailed from San Francisco. Although I had been living in Paris for a decade I didn’t want a French psychoanalyst. I despised Lacan, a double-talking charlatan who counted his money while his patients talked and who invented the twenty-minute ‘hour’ and felt authorized to reduce it to five minutes if the spirit moved him, probably so he could cram in one more lucrative turnover. Lacan had long since been dead, but his influence was felt everywhere for typically chauvinistic reasons — he was France’s answer to Freud. No matter that he wrote incomprehensible gibberish when he wasn’t spouting dangerous untruths or tricking truisms out in fancy words. (Entredeux-morts, it turns out, is a ‘technical term’ that refers to the period between someone’s death and the extinction of his memory among the living. That’s it, folks. Basta.) 

I wanted to talk to my own kind of funny, disabused American gay man, someone who’d laugh when I laughed and who developed his ideas by moving from anecdote to anecdote, like a longarmed ape brachiating from branch to branch. 

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(His grandmother) practiced her religion all by herself in Denton. Today people scorn Christian Science for its unconscionable rejection of modern medicine, but when I was a boy attending Sunday School it was a religion for the rich and ‘progressive’ — all those who didn’t want to be troubled by virgin births and an improbable trinity and who liked the up-todate idea of combining Christianity and science, who thought of Jesus as someone like Plato, and who enjoyed visits at home when they were ill from other perfumed, mono-bosomed ladies, the Christian Science ‘healers’ reading to them in cultured tones from Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health and Key to the Scriptures. It was a murmuring, matronly religion that published a top-notch national newspaper and opened a Reading Room in every major city (run by more matronly volunteers). Now Eddy is treated as a dangerous charlatan whose doctrine brought brain damage to countless children denied antibiotics and even aspirin, and gripped by high fevers that caused encephalitis. We all knew at least one woman who’d been eaten alive by a horridly painful and smelly breast cancer and whose friends would murmur over her closed coffin that now, at last, she was ‘healed.’ Back then Mrs. Eddy was perceived (at least by us) as advanced, intellectual, classy, Bostonian. Nonetheless my mother would always break down and call a doctor if we were seriously ill, but only then. To this day I tend to forget to take prescribed pills and, as Mrs. Eddy would have liked, I am blind to evil. If forced to stare it in the eye I dismiss it as she did as a manifestation of ignorance. 

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If my father regretted sharing his name with me, I was always worried about being confused with my grandfather, the author of three books of ‘nigger jokes.’ More respectably, he’d written Mental Arithmetic, hints about how to do sums in the head. But his real life’s work, or rather the ornament to his life, was composing his joke books, which he published at his own expense. He’d also written his memoirs. Even in his formal writings he enjoyed peppering his sentences with bits of Negro humor: ‘I have tried to keep in mind the philosophy of Uncle Solomon: “‘De littler de ideas a man have de louder he talks!”’ Or, in dismissing his own modest academic career and its shared duties, he would recollect, ‘The “Supreme Potentate” of the lodge, “Dat am one of the little: offices in de whole unscrupulous lodge!’ No, I have been only small cog in the giant wheels of progress.’ In speaking of a difficult period at his college, he wrote, ‘I would characterize the two-year period in the language of the Negro maid who quit her job, “There’s too much shiftin’ uv the dishes fuh de fewness uv dg vittles!”” ’ 

At one point in his short memoir my grandfather wrote: ‘Since I was reared in the West where there were comparatively few members of the colored race, I am often asked how I became interested in Negro stories. In the first place, I had a Southern background. My father used to tell amusing incidents about colored folks in Louisiana. Then about 1890, my father used to read to us the Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris, which were first published serially in the Atlanta Constitution, a paper that we read with great zeal. I was well prepared for the fun I was to have later.’ Dean White’s laws for a good Negro story included observing the ‘truths’ of Negro psychology and recounting them in Negro dialect, as outlined in his memoir. His collections, such as Senegambian Sizzles and Chocolate Drops from the South, were his homage to this ‘lovable and amusing race’ and their ‘antics.’ AS a child I learned that my grandfather was a member of the Ku Klux Klan only because on one occasion I had mispronounced the ‘Ku’ as ‘Cue’ instead of ‘Coo’ and Dean White corrected me with a big laugh. My father told me with a wink that Granddaddy should know. 

Granddaddy loved to hold forth for hours. I can remember sitting with him and my father on the veranda of the big hotel in Mineral Wells, Texas, where he’d gone to take a cure. For squirming, sweating, panicky hours he’d tell us his cursed nigger jokes, spitting tobacco into a cuspidor beside his rocking chair and drawing everything out at a snail’s pace: ‘Now, Eddie, did you ever hear the one about Old Sambo who wanted to go ce hunting?’ I’'d frown and squint into the sunlight and shake head no and he’d get lost in a brown study as he tried to resurret advance every twist and turn in his tale. Suddenly his eyes would light up, he’d lift his straw hat, then rescttle it farther back on his hair, which was slick and pressed down from the sweatband. He’d stagily slap his knce with his pnarled, liver-spotted hand — or maybe those spots were just the ghosts of freckles, for he’d told us he’d been a redhead as a lad and covered with big, overlapping freckles, his hair so bright that the boy behind him in school pretended to warm his hands above the fiery locks. The story ended with the first Edmund turning on the boy and knocking him flat. In all his stories there was violence. When he was still a teenager he began teaching in a one-room schoolhouse where there were three boys bigger and older than he. His superior worried about hiring so young a teacher because he wasn’t certain my grandfather could discipline the three boys, but he ended up birching them all, though first he had to box one into submission. He was a lifelong advocate of corporal punishment. 

My grandfather, my father and my Uncle Bill all had a cold selfsufficiency, something approaching smugness except there was no real joy in any form, no eagerness to communicate one’s own importance to anyone else. They were self-contained, distant men, though my father was given to towering, furniture-breaking rages and Uncle Bill was too crazily angry for his wife and two daughters to live with him. My father supported them all, none too grandly, Bill in a trailer where he menaced his neighbors by waving a loaded pistol at them. Twice he had to be hospitalized for getting out of control. Late in life he had brain surgery — was it a lobotomy? All three of them — Bill and the first two Edmunds — picked their teeth and told long, unfunny stories that gloried in other people’s ignorance or naiveté, often tales of happy but dim Negroes trying out big words or learned theories and getting them all mixed up. My grandfather told the one about the black recruit who nodded enthusiastically rather than looking to one side when his commanding officer called out, ‘Eyes right.’ When the officer said, ‘Solomon, I said eyes right,’ Solomon replied, ‘Yassuh, boss, you’s always right.’ 

When he wasn’t telling me funny stories my grandfather was asking me to solve mental arithmetic riddles or poking fun at me while digging an elbow into my father’s side. I'd been assured by my mother that I was a genius, but I couldn’t do the sums in my head. Nor could I laugh at his jokes, or respond to his taunts except by squirming in my seat and blushing with confusion and the desire to disappear. I was supposed to defend myself politely, standing up straight, throwing in lots of ‘sirs,’ but I was too much of a neurotic sissy and too much of a Yankee to know how to behave in the right way, like a manly cadet. My father, I could see, was ashamed of me ~ of my lack of feistiness, of my slovenly rudeness, of my babyish pouting. 

Sometimes I’ve feared that I was dying inside and becoming as gloomily self-regarding as my predecessors — those Roman numerals after our names seeming to denote doom. Once, in my thirties, ] dreamed that I was buried alive inside a mummiform coffin that resembled me exactly. The dream occurred during a period when my work was being rejected and I was living with a young man who didn’t love me - though I was besotted by him, both as a writer and as a human being. I feared the slow extinction of my feelings. I kept picturing my father asleep by day in his shuttered, air-conditioned room, as motionless as Dracula in his diurnal casket. 

Living up North, even in such a conservative, racist city as Cincinnati, my father had learned to keep his condescension toward blacks to himself. He was a misanthrope who slept all day and stayed up all night, working at his blond mahogany desk under a big, tacky painting of ocean waves in the moonlight. The whole time he listened to 78s and later LPs of classical music, everything from Bach to early Stravinsky (he often played a suite from The Nightingale). He disliked the human voice and avoided the opera, though he permitted me to attend the summer opera in the zoo and even volunteer there as a supernumerary. 

The janitor in his office (and in his warehouse) was an ageless black man named Charles, whom he enjoyed lightly chiding to his face and ridiculing behind his back. Charles was a deacon in his Baptist church who’d memorized much of the Bible, his only book but one he knew thoroughly. Whenever Charles quoted long passages from it to me my father would stand behind him winking at me, as if we were watching a performing monkey. Yankee intellectuals, spoon-fed on Freud, often asserted thth Southern whites were afraid of black male sexuality and that was the source of their racism. This supposition has been widely accepted, perhaps because it can’t be verified or disproved, since an entirely unconscious motive cludes study or introspection. Ascribing racism to sexual fear is both demeaning to the resentful whites and flattering to the erotically superior blacks; the matter is complicated by an ambiguity about whether such superiority is real or assigned. I suppose a cynic might say that whites are willing to concede excessive virility to black men as long as they can retain wealth and power; it’s an easy trade-off. 

But I who’ve lived among real racists believe that their condescension is far more withering than sexual envy. For them a black is shiftless and stupid, smells bad and is easily confused, childishly frightened by ghosts, boasting about chimerical victories, clever only in avoiding work or punishment, naturally musical and athletic, quickly deflated, and finally all too happy to obey a firm and fatherly white master. My nephew, who married a Japanese woman and lived with her in Tokyo, told me that his Japanese friends speak of American whites in the same terms — lazy workers, great dancers, undependable friends, good in bed, reeking of foul odors; his wife said it was torture to ride in a closed subway with whites smelling of fermented dairy products. 

Charles, standing in his old work clothes and smelling of sweat and labor, would cite biblical passages, demonstrating how the Old Testament prefigured the New, and my father would always be there behind him, smiling faintly through a cloud of cigar smoke and winking conspiratorially at me. After all, Dad was the boss man who paid Charles thirty dollars a week, with a twenty-dollar bonus at Christmas. 

Whereas Charles might lecture me vehemently when we were alone (one of my summer jobs was whitewashing Dad’s warehouse with him), the minute my father showed up, Charles would shift into a grinning, soft-shoe parody of his own erudition. My father, in his stained tailor-made trousers, his cast-off work clothes, would join in and whitewash with us, but despite his democratic ways Dad’s simple presence always reduced Charles to Steppin Fetchit. In the waning years of the twentieth century, fifty years later, I once happened to take a long taxi ride in St. Louis, and there, suddenly, I had Charles vividly re-created.

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Dad and Kay criticized everyone they came into contact with. Kay was a convinced if not very skillful mimic. All her impersonations of people sounded alike — a high, funny whine and a scrunched-up grimace. She'd seize on something someone had said ...anything — and repeat it in her high-pitched mimicry voice, even if the person in question had an abnormally low voice. 

She and Dad speculated about other people’s motives, invariably attributing to them the crassest, most venal ambitions. ‘Roy is just sticking around,’ Kay said, ‘because he thinks Margaret is a hairress’ (she mispronounced ‘heiress’ as if that were an example of Roy’s illiteracy, though in fact he did mumble an educated English). ‘Well,’ Dad said, ‘you can’t say I didn’t warn her.’ When she’d first announced she wanted to marry Roy, Dad had sent her on a month-long trip to Europe, hoping she’d meet someone more suitable. When she decided to go ahead with the marriage, Dad refused to give her away. Nor did he attend or pay for the wedding. 

Dad and Kay saw nothing but greed, envy and spite on every side, and their only way to think of other people was to patronize or snub them. Dad could be a bit more egalitarian if he was dealing with another engineer on the job or even a garage mechanic. Incompatible myths about society shifted violently about in his head like tectonic plates: some people were better than others, which you could tell by their wealth. A ‘good family’ or a ‘fine man’ or ‘lovely lady’ were always rich, though some rich people were climbers and upstarts and crooks (Jews). On the other hand, one man was as good as another, so long as he was white and Christian and didn’t wear brown shoes with blue suits or grow a mustache or affect a wristwatch or cigarettes or mumble or have a weak handshake. In fact the exact bandwidth of acceptability was extremely narrow. If a man strayed a fraction too far from the precise signal of masculine firmness and attractive modesty he’d reveal himself as a weakling or blowhard. My father was always judging people. Almost no one passed muster. 

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My first publication was a story I wrote about the Oakeses for the Stephenville newspaper when I was just nine. The article was published with a disturbing photo of me, looking like a timid sissy jn short pants, white shoes and with huge eyes, seated with both knees to one side, my head resting against the tawny flanks of our collie, Timmy, like a starlet nestling into a great fur ruff. I looked small and expensive to maintain. 

I remember I didn’t much want to write the article since it entailed asking all our relatives for their recollections of Ma and Pa Oakes. I was too self-absorbed and neurotic to do the research, and I didn’t want to dwell on our Texas past. I'd been born in Cincinnati and was attending grade school in Evanston, Illinois ~ a city I liked with its big Congregational and Episcopal churches no one seemed to take too seriously, since there religion was a pleasant social habit, not an occasion for red-faced fervor. In Evanston there were hundred-year-old elms shading wood houses behind their underclipped hedges. Plain girls straddled cellos at home and practiced for hours. Boys wrestled with one another after school in piles of autumn leaves. Everything smelled of quietly smoldering leaves. Fathers were professors of geography at Northwestern. Mothers got out the vote for liberal causes. But in Texas people were obese and talked with a country twang and laughed at Amos and Andy jokes. Their gardens turned to brown, burnedover patches by June. Those who weren’t violent drunks were Church of Christ, Baptist or teetotaling fanatics. 

My mother’s brother, Uncle Jack, seemed an exception. He avoided church with a quip (‘Hard to smoke in there’). A short little plump man, Uncle Jack was shaped like Tweedledum, with curly brown hair that grew low on his forehead and an unemphatic mutter people found killingly funny. He was the president of the Farmers’ First National Bank, a position he’d reached, it seemed, merely by murmuring wisecracks, which he delivered with just a pained pass at a smile. He never looked at the person he was addressing. His eyes always rolled here and there like a dented metal ball ricocheting its lazy way down through a pinball machine ~ though every time it collided with something it lit the machine up 

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 Certainly no japanese restaurant would have dreamed of serving raw fish back then. My mother and I were left in stocking feet alone at a table in a high-ceilinged tatami room of our own with smudged scrolls on the walls and rice paper glued to the windowpanes, filtering the already shadowy Chicago winter light. Beside us the vegetables and beef strips were cooking down in a thick, sweet-smelling sauce. 

Although we were alone my mother and I dared not speak to each other above a whisper. The waitress came back periodically to fool with the setting on the tabletop stove and to feed the iron skillet with more chopped cabbage. The bubbling, the filtered light, the rich smells, the sound of tires outside sluicing through the melting snow — all tranquilized us, though when we’d arrived we'd been nearly hysterical with United Nations pep. 

That meal had followed a disappointing service at the Chicago Buddhist Church on the South Side. Mother had encouraged Margaret and me to have our own religion, whatever it might be (perhaps this ecumenical spirit she’d acquired while writing her , thesis on children and religion). I’d gone every afternoon for weeks to the neo-Gothic library at Northwestern to read Max Miiller’s Sacred Books of the East. I'd dipped into the Torah, the Koran and the Upanishads. But I’d been gripped by the Buddhist sutras. No matter how pessimistic I might become, I could never begin to approach the extent of Gotama’s nihilism. He saw the self as an illusion, desire as the root of all evil, rebirth as the worst of fates and extinction as the only goal. In this world the most and the least one could expect was sickness, old age and death. Whereas the Hindus posited an irreducible soul, the atman, the Buddh, preached the doctrine of ‘no soul,’ anatta. In an unpeopled univers, full of nothing but illusion and suffering, not a single entity existe certainly no deity. 

This is realism, I thought with grim satisfaction. No interceding ranks of angels, no accountancy of sins and good deeds, no heavep nor hell, no nosy-parkering into other people’s bedroom hijinks The opposite of hateful, intolerant Christianity. 

But when we arrived at the Chicago Buddhist Church in g rundown South Side neighborhood nearly thirty miles from where we lived we encountered a group of smiling, waving Japanese men, women and children worshiping Amida, the Lord of the Western Paradise, a personage very much like a Catholic saint. He was a bodhisattva in the (to my eyes at least) ‘degraded’ form of Mahayana Buddhism, someone pledged to stave off the horrors of rebirth and the bleak solitude of nirvana by spiriting his followers away to a paradise where they could struggle toward enlightenment in comfort and in the busy, bustling society of likeminded souls. 

I was bitterly disappointed — by the organ and hymns that sounded suspiciously Methodist, by the flutter of arriving parishioners in big hats exchanging kisses, by the depressingly secular announcements of upcoming bingo games and covered-dish suppers. I fled. Where I’d expected a bald abbot stony with meditation, a trickle of sandalwood smoke and a superb indifference to all forms of striving, I'd found a congregation of ordinary folks besotted in the ordinary way with the little pains and little rewards of everyday life. 

‘I thought it was nice,’ Mother said, puzzled by my contempt. 

‘You liked it because it was just like some dismal Christian service,’ I said nastily. 

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Freud hypothesized that many of civilization’s greatest accomplishments, including acts of altruism, were powered by repressed homosexuality. I thought of that when I first resurfaced in Manhattan. Now that no one would dream of repressing anything, | said to myself, civilization is crumbling, kindness has vanished, and altruism has evaporated. Certainly greed had become more naked, hearts were harder and there was no repressed desire investing music, painting or the dance. To be sure my own interest in the arts struck me as evidence against the veracity of Freud’s theory, for! had never failed to act on my erotic impulses. Repression had played no role in my acquisition of culture or my accomplishments. Maybe gay life had just been dumbed down like the rest of American society. A duller cultural edge and the new Puritanism didn’t add up to an attractive combination for an aesthete and se¥ addict like me. 

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As a homosexual growing up in Cincinnati and Chicago and Texas and Michigan in the 1950s, ‘Europe’ represented a benign and mysterious alternative to the beastly oppression we knew at home, a time in the States when we were persecuted by shrinks on one side and priests on the other and deliberately entrapped by the police, the three institutions that corresponded to the three prevailing interpretations of homosexuality: as mental illness, as sin and as crime. | 

Although we ourselves had no other available model, we still could dimly hold out for ‘tolerance’ or even ‘decadence,’ and these qualities, piquant and somehow aristocratic, we located in ‘Europe.’ [ remember when I was fifteen discussing Julius Caesar with Fred Mitchell, an abstract expressionist painter who taught at the art academy next door to my boarding school. Mr. Mitchell, a Southerner in his thirties who thrived on ambiguity and the unspoken, told me with a little smile that Caesar had ‘married’ several of his soldiers and that ‘people in Rome are still talking about it.’ Imagine all that said in a nearly inaudible Tidewater drawl. 

I found his comment electrifying because a respected artist and teacher was referring to my most shameful vice lightly, and as if it were the most recent gossip. Even more extraordinary, he was suggesting that Caesar (the boring author of The Gallic Wars which I’d had to translate in class) had an off-color reputation that was being kept alive by the Romans of today. Europe, it seemed, was a place where homosexuality was joked about and rumors Were passed down from one millennium to the next.