Impish secrets

Long ago, I interviewed Edmund White and found that the photographer assigned to the job was the incomparable Jane Bown — a bit like having Matisse turn up to decorate your kitchen. After we talked, Jane shot. She managed to convert a tiny hotel courtyard into a sort of antique Grecian glade. In her pictures, White peeped through the foliage with the smile of some demonic faun come to spread ribald chaos in the service of the great god Pan.

I remembered that look when, in this patchwork of pieces about his life as a reader, he discloses that a heart attack followed by surgery in 2014 had one weird outcome. Temporarily, he felt ‘no desire to read’. The prolific author, critic, memoirist, biographer and teacher who had first slipped through a ‘magical portal’ into books as a ‘fierce little autodidact’ in the postwar Midwest now shed all sceptical curiosity. Instead, he just told ‘tall tales’ prompted by florid post-operative dreams. One of these involved a naked dance audition for Rudolph Valentino, idol of the silent screen, in his ‘black sombrero and sideburns’. After the dance, hopefuls were required to ‘leave on the floor an inked impression of our anuses’. During this convalescent semi-delirium, White describes himself as ‘a sly imp of the perverse’.

Surely, that sly imp has always danced across his prose, in fiction and memoir alike. As a peerless chronicler and interpreter of gay American life before, during and after the age of Aids, as a connoisseur of French (and so much other) literature and as Princeton professor of creative writing, White never lost touch with that spirit of antic mischief. The strain of Bacchic merriment makes this loosely structured miscellany of reflections on beloved books and author friends much more fun — and more surprising — than a leisurely ramble through favourite works by a 78-year-old giant of letters has any right to be.