ABlog

A teacher's intellectual life is often a lonely one. Over the last two weeks I've been teaching, or failing to teach, Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story to my undergraduate “Reading for Writers” class, The Queer Renaissance.

Failing to teach, I say, because it’s been a tough sell. This has happened before. Undergraduates, I complain to my teaching peers, tend to resemble Jack Sprat and his wife: there are those who can eat no fat and those who can eat no lean--where fat and lean equal, respectively, works heavy on “style,” including pyrotechnical flourishes and complex levels of irony, distance, and avowal…and works heavy on content, works that, however carefully constructed, make a more direct bid to be read for their ethical and emotional dimensions. For the eat-no-fat group, Edmund White gives far too many chances to simply dismiss his protagonist, the unnamed Boy, in the terms smugly if rather inarticulately offered up by one student, who found the adolescent who fellates and then betrays a heterosexual teacher a prime example of a “dickhead.” (I don’t think she intended the salacious pun.)

What I enjoy so much in A Boy’s Own Story is not, of course, simply style. I had a cordial argument about this with my friend Steve, who knows the book well, having reviewed it years ago, and reads it as the story of a young man for whom style is everything. Steve pointed to a scene in the final third of the book where the adult narrator mocks the pretensions of the Boy’s economically comfortable, white high school classmates who, in the early 60’s, could burble on about being made to “Questions [Their] Values” after attending a black musician’s “folk music” concert. Steve objected that at least those teenagers were questioning something. I think this gets at a significant aspect of how we have to end up reading the adult narrator: he is definitely not someone who has left behind the Boy’s preoccupation with style; perhaps even his criticism of those self-regarding teens is not so much about the ethical as the stylistic pitfalls of their theatrical "sincerity"—its sheer hokeyness (and having lived through the liberalism of the period, I can attest that much of it was incredibly hokey, especially the racial attitudes of liberal whites who were not activists but mere tourists of improved race relations). More problematic for me in that brief reference, and indeed through most of the novel, is White’s disinclination to have his adult narrator recognize a human and racial complexity in his black characters, his failure to grant them an implied existence above and beyond their symbolic function for the economically “sheltered” (and in other ways so insufficiently sheltered) Boy: “We were drawn to a club where a big, scarred Negro with lots of gold jewelry and liverish eyes ruminated over a half-improvised ballad under a spotlight before a breathless, thrilled audience of sheltered white teens” (121 in the Modern Library edition). This is a rather ugly Sambo cameo masquerading as an equal opportunity putdown.

Even if White had not allowed his adult narrator to comment that the final action of the book “was surely turning out to be tragic” (213), I would argue strenuously with anyone who thinks the novel’s final scene is intended as a celebration of the “dickhead’s” choices: “…I had at last drunk deep from the adult fountain of sex. I wiped my mouth with the back of an adult hand, smiled and walked up to the dining hall humming a little tune” (218). Even taken out of context, the repetition of “adult” gives the game way. It is precisely because the Boy protests so much about the “adultness” of his acts that we can recognize the naiveté underlying his assumed sophistication. Even if he has been correct in his analysis that the sex lives (indeed, the lives, period) of the adults around him are more about power than about pleasure, it’s precisely his preternatural awareness of their unconscious hypocrisy—and his resolve to imitate it—that constitutes his touching as well as appalling callowness. The effort, the calculation, of his “adult” betrayal show him still trying on identities and personae in the classic adolescent manner.

The extreme tentativeness with which the book’s tender moments are sketched in—their adumbration of a possible “other way,” some sort of mutuality—certainly does not encourage confidence that the narrator has solved the problem of intimacy versus power, emotion versus style, perceived and enacted by the Boy. Yet those tender moments are present and highlighted, however attenuated by the eerie freeze-frame technique that aestheticizes passion just as much as it aestheticizes disappointment: “The ugly, the old, the rich and the accomplished speak of invisible virtues…because they lack the visible ones, that ridiculous down under the lower lip that can’t decide to be a beard, those prehensile bare feet racing down the sleek deck…the windblown hair intricate as Velázquez’s rendering of lace” (124). I disagree at least in part with the argument Alan Gurganus makes in his introduction to the Modern Library’s 20th anniversary edition, that it is primarily the absence of the Boy’s father that hovers over the book. I think White has it both ways with respect to his perverted Freudian plot, satirizing while he mines the notion of the Ur-man-boy-love scenario (“I feel sorry for a man who never wanted to go to bed with his father…”[22]). (This father-plot was something my students had a great deal of difficulty with, several of them made as nervous by the notion that maybe Edmund White is saying the Boy’s gay because of his relationship with his dad as they might likely have been in 1982, the year the novel was first published.) In my reading, however, the salient absence is not that of a single man but of the Fathers, i.e. of Manly Men within patriarchy, of whom the Boy’s literal father is a powerful emblem. Those last lines about the “adult fountain of sex” carry a touching and uncanny echo of the feminist argument that patriarchy has posited adult manhood as a violent break with the original bond with the mother. Here, the Boy decides that adult manhood means a violent break with the original bond with the father, i.e. the possibility that, as he discovers in the opening scene with Kevin, a boy who’s actually slightly his junior, “sex [and feeling] between two men can please both of them at the same time” (29).