Arts and Letters

Rating:
Summary: A Treasure Trove
Review: In Arts and Letters veteran novelist Edmund White shows again why he is one of the most inventive English language writers. It's a salmagundi of commissioned pieces and articles that originally appeared in a variety of slick and gay magazines. Taken them all together, and you get a lot of insight into White's own irresistible personality, even more so than in some of his celebrated autobiographical novels and memoirs. Plus, it's like being at the same party with some of the most intriguing personalities in the world today, as well as some dead immortals. White's style when he profiles these luminaries is never fawning--well maybe once or twice, but he does it so well you forgive him anything. He's fearless, and asks the people in question exactly the kind of questions you think you'd ask yourself, if you were there on the scene and you had balls of brass. Cleis Press is to be commended for bringing out this jumbo volume. I only wish there were more.

There's just enough of a selection of White's writing about art to make you wish he'd jump in and write a whole book about the art and artists he admires. It's hard to find anything new to say about (for example) Jasper Johns or Robert Mapplethorpe, but after reading White's articles on both you will be viewing their work with new eyes. And he provides wonderful introductions to artists whose profiles may not be quite as high as these guys--Rebecca Horn, perhaps, or Steve Wolfe.

One after another of these articles are stunners--there's a fine piece on the half-forgotten French New Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, which takes you back to the day in which he was regarded as a wunderkind of depthless talent, and then shows today why he is still a writer worth studying.

White is not always Mr. Goody Two Shoes either. In one case, the Ned Rorem profile, you watch in helpless delight as Rorem gets skewered on the high kebab spears of White's erudition and wit. I also thought that printing a brief review of James Baldwin's "Just Above My Head" and labeling it "James Baldwin" leads the reader to think JB will be getting the full-blown profile treatment and instead it rebounds and just akes the review seem skimpy. And in some cases the reader will disagree, perhaps violently, with White's assessment of this or that subject, and you will still feel he has won the right to deliver it. I don't believe for an instant that James Merrill is the equivalent of Cavalcanti crossed with Noel Coward, but it's amusing to hear someone say so.

By and large these essays are compelling, entertaining, and wise. It's a book that deserves all the praise it will doubtless receive.