Arts and Letters by Edmund White

Some years ago, at the only literary dinner I've ever attended, I was seated next to Edmund White. I found Mr White in person a charming, warm, twinkly-eyed, funny dinner companion who held my attention with his relentless name-dropping and recounting of entertaining anecdotes.

Some years ago, at the only literary dinner I've ever attended, I was seated next to Edmund White. I found Mr White in person a charming, warm, twinkly-eyed, funny dinner companion who held my attention with his relentless name-dropping and recounting of entertaining anecdotes.

For some reason, the only one I recall now is a story of how Foucault fell madly in love with a boy at school whom he helped with his schoolwork for years, but never laid a hand on him because he was straight. Years later the greatest philosopher of sexuality ran into some old school friends. Asked if they recalled his unconsummated, ever-chaste first great love, they chorused: "Oh, Jacques? The school tart? We all had her!"

The back-jacket blurb to his latest non-fiction offering, the rather preciously titled Arts and Letters (be careful to pronounce all the consonants), informs us that "Reading Edmund White is like sharing a café table with a witty professor, a clove-smoking aesthete, and a boy of 15. You never know who will speak the next line, but you know it will turn your head ..." Certainly Mr White is all three people in person, and my head was turned his way all evening, but I'm not entirely convinced this is an accurate description of this book which, behind the publisher's careful café smoke-screen, inevitably turns out to be reprinted journalism from the late 1970s to the present day. Arts and Letters certainly has its moments, but there are so many courses (around 40 essays) and so many rich, congealing sauces of self-importance that I'm not sure that you would want to stay for an entrée, let alone coffee, 15-year-old high on cloves or no.

In his introduction he writes about how he was drawn to one of the subjects in this collection "because he or she actually was or is a friend and belonged to the same clan (Dowell, Rorem, Foucault, Chatwin, Brainard, Isherwood, Mapplethorpe)" or "because they count as inspiring antecedents (Proust, Nabokov, Gide, Genet, George Eliot)" - in other words, his idols. This self-aggrandising insecurity of White's is really quite endearing, not least because his aspirations are so touchingly dated. The cover of the book shows White photographed in sepia-tinted fin-de- siècle Proustian drag, a little bit like Robbie Williams posing as Frank Sinatra on the cover of Swing When You're Winning, though (even) plumper.

I remember vividly that at that literary dinner Mr White also told me that a fan of his who had written to him was shortly to be moving in with him - or was it him moving in with his fan? I replied that I couldn't imagine having sex with someone who read, let alone who read me. "Oh, don't worry, that attitude will change as you get older," he said with a self-deprecating twinkle. (He was mistaken: as I approach 40 I find myself wanting more than ever to be loved for my body and not my mind.)

Fans of writers, especially "gay writers", can be very problematic. As Edmund White reminds us himself in his piece on Oscar Wilde, taken from his introduction to the OUP 1999 edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Alfred Douglas was Wilde's most avid fan. He read the book nine times and begged to be introduced to the author - an encounter that would lead four years later to Wilde's trial and imprisonment.

But whatever the perils of their fans, these are nothing compared to those of "gay writers" themselves. White begins this essay by telling us that "a careless or naïve reader... could have entirely missed that The Picture of Dorian Gray is a gay book." Well, yes, they could - because it isn't. Wilde's only novel, by far his greatest work, with its wonderfully doom-laden storyline and deeply moralistic tone, is clearly not a "gay" book. It isn't even a homosexual book, in the sense of being pre-gay. The book's namesake, Dorian, is carefully constructed to be neither homosexual nor heterosexual, but rather someone who has taken himself as his own love-object. This sophisticated, attractive, ageless and literally ambiguous man about town, taking his pleasures where he cares and breaking the hearts and laying waste to the reputations of young women and men alike, is an early sighting of the metrosexual.

True, Basil Hallward, who paints his portrait, is carefully coded as being in love with Dorian (and he initially refuses to exhibit the painting because it threatens to give away his "secret"). However, his love is miserably unrequited and Basil is murdered by Dorian, precisely because Basil's irksome and persistent attachment to him threatens to come between him and his portrait.

But then even White doesn't seem to think it's a "gay book". Later in the same piece he writes about Dorian's "homosexual subtext", but as we've already been told that it is a "gay text", how can it have a homosexual subtext? Who is being "careless" or "naïve" here? Perhaps you think me pedantic, or needlessly cruel towards a veteran of gay-lib politics, but apart from the fact that Wilde himself was probably bisexual, and The Picture of Dorian Gray is a Victorian updating of the Narcissus myth rather than an early Edmund White novella, it is characteristic of the writing of this "witty professor" that he presents himself as a sophisticated and objective observer and critic of sexuality, but too often mistakes his own portly reflection at the bottom of the well for truth.

To be sure, White has tried to revise his gayist ideology a little, though it is not always easy to work out how or when his point of view has changed as the pieces are not in chronological order, and you have to keep turning to the back of the book to find out when and where they appeared. Apparently openly dating and placing them would be too vulgar. In a 1995 review of Vice Versa, Marjorie Garber's book on bisexuality, for The New Yorker he "comes out" as someone who in his early life had love affairs with three different women. "After the Stonewall Uprising in 1969, however, I revised my thinking entirely; I decided I was completely gay and was only making the women in my life miserable... I denied the validity of my earlier heterosexual feelings in the light of my later homosexual identity. After reading Vice Versa I'm willing to give more credence to my earlier impulses."

But what on earth is this "Stonewall Uprising" that White refers to here and elsewhere? Some riots started when a few homos and drag queens high on drugs and upset at the recent death of Judy Garland threw some bottles at the NYPD when they raided a fag bar called the Stonewall Inn. To my knowledge, neither the National Guard nor the US Marines were called in. Clearly White regards this as something in the same league as Fallujah, the Intifada, or the Warsaw Ghetto.

Elsewhere, in a piece on Mapplethorpe written in the same year, he complains that Bruce Weber's nakedly homoerotic photographs of frequently undressed, friendly, all-American boys are "homophobic". In a piece written in 2000, he repeats the same whinge. Apparently Weber's crime is that he "usually hires handsome, heterosexual males and parades them in playful, old-fashioned, all-American action poses before the abashed, self-hating but hungry gaze of his excited but ashamed gay customers." No, Edmund, that's just you.

This kind of sulky gayist subjectivity blinds White to the much more interesting and relevant questions, such as who is really looking at Weber's enormously popular, barely-dressed smiling young men with their arms thrown around each other's necks, and whether homoeroticism is in fact the exclusive property of homosexuals or something more universal.

It also blinds him to his own hypocrisy. Later, in the same essay, he complains that whereas viewers of female nudes (whether painted or photographed by men or women) do not automatically begin to speculate about the sexual orientation of the artist, "male nudes are so unusual and still so taboo that viewers and critics even today, assume the male artists are homosexual." Apparently though it's OK to assume that the viewers of them are also homosexual, or accuse the artist/photographer of "homophobia" if they aren't openly gay themselves.

White can certainly turn out a good sentence. In an interview with fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, he writes: "Again and again he would utter the words marvellous, interesting and beautiful, the spare change of enthusiasm handed out liberally with a hope that it might do instead of the real currency of thought and evaluation."

Trouble is, Edmund White all too often fails to offer the real currency of thought and evaluation. For all his attempts to present himself as sophisticated and French, the plump Proust of Princeton University, he himself is one of those Americans. Gayism - an American invention and export - is not the antithesis of the American quest for self-revelation and perfection but the gym-buffed embodiment of it. White also realises that sexual identity has replaced sexuality, that gayness has, if you like, replaced sodomy; he doesn't always quite realise though how much he has contributed to that process, or cheered it on.

The collection begins with an essay called "Writing Gay" in which White talks about how he began writing in the era of the self-hating "bitchy queen" as a way of fighting this attitude. "After gay liberation we were able as people and as writers to redefine ourselves as members of a minority group who could mount campaigns for our rights and against societal stereotyping, but back then, 40 years ago, such a programme would have caused us to puff on our cigarettes and to say, 'Get you, Mary.' "

Funnily enough, that is largely my ungrateful response today to Arts and Letters. Perhaps this is merely because I'm self-loathing, in a pre-gay rather than a post-gay fashion. But then, even self-regarding people have to have standards.