Edmund White Does Rimbaud – And Other Things

EW: I don’t think that idea was so popular then. I think he was one of the ones who invented it. I mean, Baudelaire had said you should be drunk all the time, so he was, but even he still clung to respectability more than Rimbaud. Rimbaud was about as extreme as you got. For one thing, Rimbaud’s always stabbing people – he was really into knives. And then he was this teen top who was terrorizing all these older men.

AB: You even refer to him as the “teen top terror” in the biography.

EW: [Laughs] And I think that homosexuality in all of its forms was considered deplorable by this time, in the 19th century. There was no good homosexual. But certainly the only one that would come close to being acceptable would be one who was completely discreet. Rimbaud was anything but discrete – he was always making a big fuss about his power over Verlaine. I think there’s a kind of repressed heterosexual side in him, too, because once he moves to Africa, there’s no real suggestion that he had an extended affair with a boy, but there are suggestions that he had at least one mistress who was very beautiful.

AB: So the “teen top terror” was maybe just part of the rebellion – not that he didn’t want to have sex with men, but…

EW: Yeah. I think he liked the idea that it was beyond the pale.

AB: You make a very interesting point in the beginning of the book, when you talk about gay people being seen as a sinner or a criminal back in Rimbaud’s day and then, in the fifties, in America, as being seen as sick.

EW: That’s right. For Rimbaud, the worst he could be would be a sinner who would be cast into hell upon death, and since he was an atheist, that didn’t bother him too much. Or he could be considered a criminal, and that’s what Jean Genet later embraced. I think to be seen as sick is in a way a lot more impairing. It’s very hard to be proud about being sick. It makes it sound like there’s something fundamentally wrong about you and that your instincts are wrong, even as an artist, and that everything is deplorable about you.

AB: It also introduces the idea of a cure. But, if in the Fifties, gay folk were sick, and in the 1800s we were criminals, what are we now? What are gay people? Are we anything?

EW: I think we’re kind of jesters. I think we’re considered funny. You know, the Will & Grace phenomenon. We sort of clown, we have smart quips; we impersonate women in funny ways. We have shallow values, which are funny, like all we care about are brand names. I mean, certainly you can see why someone like Jasper Johns doesn’t want to be considered gay. It’s kind of tacky now.

AB: It can be. And, politically speaking, we’re either jesters or we’re spoilers. I know that you are not really into the idea of marriage. Does that come more from your parents’ divorce, or something else?

EW: Actually, my position has maybe changed – I don’t want to get married myself. I’m the kind of old-fashioned bohemian who wouldn’t have married a woman even if I were straight, or had children. In other words, I always thought that we should all be bohemians, that we shouldn’t have children and that we couldn’t afford to have children and why would we want to play mama and papa? But that’s just me, and my own notion of what it is to be an artist. I do defend the right of gay people to get married, especially because it irritates people so much! It seems to me that if people hate it that much, it’s a good thing to fight for!

AB: Do you think the expansion of rights in the United States for black people, deaf people, and gay people, in some respects – do you think that shrank the left?

EW: That’s a very interesting question, I’ve never thought about it. I have thought about the fact that I think the green issues, ecology; often times are kind of fake issues. Not that they’re not real ones, but it does seem often times to take the place of a genuine battle for equality and for justice. There’s been an awful lot of energy poured into that. Whether political correctness has in general replaced these other issues – maybe, in the sense that it has splintered the left into all these little special interest groups.

AB: You’ve traveled quite extensively. Do you find that your writing style changes from place to place? How much does geography matter?

EW: In one great, big way it did matter when I moved to France – and I lived there for 16 years – I think that I was writing a much more complicated English before and a much simpler one afterwards. Partly it was because everyone was going minimalists in the eighties, but I think it’s also that there was such an effort for me to communicate with people, because I didn’t learn French until I was over 40, at the time I moved there, in 1983, but I’ve never been so irritated with people who have an elaborate and periphrastic way of talking. I would think, “Just spit it out!” I began to feel that way about my own writing. Plus, my own writing was almost instantly translated into French, and I would work with translators, because I was there, and so I could see their problems right away – and even when I was writing, I was aware of what their problems would be. And you could say that’s not a good way to write English, that it denatures it, that if you’re worried too much about this Esperanto approach. But I would say that there is one good thing that is, at least in my case, is that suddenly I became much more interested in a dramatic presentation of scenes and use of dialogue and a kind of simplifying of affect.

AB: Are you impressed with yourself – that sounds like could be patronizing, but it’s not.

EW: Well, I’m very aware of my limitations. I know, as a writer, exactly the things I can’t do. I’m no good at describing action, and I don’t have a big, wide sympathies for a whole cast of characters. There’s certain kinds of people I can do, but others I can’t – I’m no Dickens, I’m no Balzac. I’m not that kind of writer, but I think I’ve always written – I’ve never been cynical as a writer. I’ve never written below my own standards. Imperfect as my talents may be, at least I’ve tried very hard to do my best every time. Even now, when nobody would notice whether you were doing well or not. I feel like the standards have so gone out the window, but it doesn’t matter really, anymore – you might as well just dash something off, because who would notice? But still, you would notice, or half-a-dozen of your best readers would notice.