Don’t expect to read Edmund White’s The Loves of My Life with one hand. True, it is subtitled A Sex Memoir, and it hotly reminisces about a few dozen of the 3,000 partners White, who is 85 and still counting, has so far totted up. It does contain some glances at the more esoteric specialities of gay sex, including a scene in which White kneels in an abandoned Manhattan warehouse to imbibe six cans’ worth of warmly recycled beer “from the tap of my date’s microbrewery”. There is also a fortunately terse reference to what in medical shorthand is called a BM. But this coital anthology turns out to be about love and its dreamy spirituality, despite the risque and often risky rutting it describes.
Above all, White’s preoccupation is language, since for him sex initially ignites in the head and is consummated on the page, with bodily pleasure or pain as a merely intermediary stage. The itch of lust, in most of these encounters, soon turns into swooning poetic ardour. “Older queens”, as White says, tutor him in the technical skills that sex requires; to learn about the accompanying emotions, he returns to the Renaissance troubadours, who invented the idea of love in the songs and sonnets they addressed to an inaccessible mistress, “a remote, rather ball-shrinking stand-in for the Virgin Mary”.
Of course, White’s male muses do not remain on pedestals or in niches: he gets to grips with them in urban parks, rural cornfields, backroom bars, railway station toilets and sometimes even in bedrooms, but while bumping and grinding he exalts or even deifies them. A college crush named Stan is “a passive Greek god”; an Ecuadorian whom White imports to New York one summer has a face “as cold and inaccessible as a Central American god’s”, and when he spits obscenities or administers disciplinary slaps, he speaks “the true language of the great godlet Eros”.
Starting from courtly love, White’s marathon advances through the history of literature. He begins with a precious, naively idealistic lyricism: Stan’s skin glows “like light shining through the best Belgian linen”. Romance, however, is soon corrupted by realism. Living in bohemian poverty in New York, White still sees the world through a haze of imagery, but the metaphors are now nastier: he frequents a putrid bathhouse where the cots in private rooms are “covered with bare black fabric that looked as if worn away with vitiligo, the Michael Jackson skin disfigurement”. Comic anticlimaxes recur, with “the body failing to meet the acrobatic ambitions of the imagination”, but White never gives up his attempt to transfigure his grubby surroundings into symbols. For him, the derelict piers crumbling into the Hudson River are cathedrals, frequented by spiritual seekers, not men cruising for quickies.
As that act of consecration reveals, White is on the pull “not sexually but religiously”. Sometimes he retells Bible tales, with the snake that engineers the fall of man wriggling into his boxer shorts to rear upright on its tail. He also flagrantly restages Christian tableaux: a tumescent penis nested in blond pubes is “like the Christ Child in its hay creche”, and a kilted Scot raises the curtain on his erection “as Christ tears open his chest to display his red, red Sacred Heart”.
Titillated by his own blasphemies, White works out a personal version of Christ’s resurrection. Like Proust, he believes that memory can reawaken the dead. A lover from 60 years ago, now no more than a “faint neural scratch” on White’s brain, is brought back to the present by another of his verbal spells. The words act like “an electrode stimulating the right neurons” to retrieve Jim, who stands before him as a shimmering hologram, still equipped with his unforgettably “big curved penis”.
White’s “pagan worship of beauty” leads him back to classical myth, since “pre-Christian kink is built not on guilt but on caprice”. He compares one partner to a satyr in the Arcadian woods, anachronistically adding that he made love as if operating a pneumatic drill. Yet the religion that best explains his carnal cravings is Buddhism, even though it dismisses lust as a symptom of “our attachment to the world” and to “the wheel of endless rebirth”. In spasms of dismayed self-recognition, White moans about his abject masochism, attributes his self-dislike to his puny penis, and then takes a “bleak Buddhist view” of this grovelling, which he sees as “negative concentration on self, just more egotism”.
He goes on to wonder if his self-abasing adventures might just have been exercises in “literary daredevilry”. This passing scruple concedes a dissatisfaction that his relentless promiscuity can’t banish. White twice jokes that he resembles a vampire, rejuvenated by the bodily fluids of his prey, but he refuses to admit that the energies he summons up may be demonic, perhaps excitingly infernal. He rejects Susan Sontag’s claim that sadomasochism with its heavy-duty paraphernalia is fascism by other means; for White, the role-playing is purely theatrical. In a reverie about the costumed posturing in New York leather bars, he quips that SM is an acronym for “stand and model”. Then, with a camp intake of breath, he realises that this makes him “a wicked aesthete”, practising what he calls “autofiction” as he transcribes facts that are the enactment of his fantasies.
Sadly, White’s experience of love is “one-sided, aspirational and impossible”. Domestic mutuality does not appeal, and he slights married male couples with children for aping heterosexual respectability; White himself has a much younger husband, whose function apparently is to encourage him to continue writing. Communal solidarity at Pride parades is also disparaged, because corporate sponsorship has made those events “uninspired”: does he think that their purpose is to provide him with literary inspiration? Seen this way, sex dwindles to “a nuclear experiment”, confined for safety’s sake to “a small, remote island of the psyche”. Here the nucleus is the ego and the experiment’s aim is self-analytical fission, not fusion with another human being.
Near the end, White complains that octogenarian impotence has left him unable even to masturbate. Never mind: the climax for him comes in the writing, which in The Loves of My Life is as juicy, ebullient and ecstatic as in his best novels. In person, he may be undesirable, as he says in a grimace at his sagging body, unworthy of being loved by anyone except his readers, whom he will never meet – but that, for White, is the only form of reciprocation that matters.