White’s Knights: Jack Holmes and His Friend as American Fairy Tale
Published in Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book, Itna Press (April 30, 2019), ed. Tom Cardamone
“I'd rather come back with a few transcendent memories than an album of snapshots.” ― Edmund White, Jack Holmes and His Friend
Like so many a protagonist of heroic fantasy, Edmund White’s Jack Holmes is endowed with a gift to face the trials of a perilous journey: in Jack’s case, it's an enormous penis.
This magical endowment, like a talisman, charms and awes those whom Jacks encounters—individuals who covet, flee or resent its power, providing more insight into themselves than into a protagonist who in some more childish fantasy might remain a cipher, undefined, for projections of readerly subjectivity. But the demands of survival in New York chastise an unformed character. As in any good adventure tale, this hero must confront situations in which his magic falters: “The guy didn’t seem unduly impressed by Jack’s huge penis, and Jack felt relieved but also slightly confused, like a movie star who finally finds a Caribbean island where no one recognizes him.”
There are two cultural realities, the sexual and the racial, one explicit, one implicit, Edmund White evokes in Jack Holmes, a fable of bracing authenticity and delicious wit—one of his most breezily readable, yet most psychologically resonant works. Many readers, myself included, regard White’s oeuvre as a national treasure. But here I confess. Overextended and exhausted, numbed by news media’s ubiquitous overtures and the steady noise of internet discourse, looking for a good read, I was first drawn in by Bloomsbury’s cover design: a pair of reclined male legs, crossed over a black and white cityscape background. While their air of sophisticated relaxation seemed to conjure strains of Gershwin to drift across these skyscrapers in grayscale, their indeterminate masculinity seemed evocative of a delicious tension between gay and straight sensuality (I had recently been re-savoring the angst of Guy Willard’s coming-out story Mirrors of Narcissus). As it turned out, given the book’s thematic arc, there was considerable irony in the allure of such surface attributes.
This novel seemed poised to reflect Us in some representative, teasingly erotic manner: Us being gay men, or men period, or just Americans still grappling with relatively recent political and cultural upheavals. The novel fulfills this air of promise, but one of the reasons to return to Jack Holmes is that it does so in unexpectedly topical ways. A gay man’s relationship to straight men is one negotiation which, like his own coming out, never truly ends, in spite of whatever stance he’s currently chosen. And like the work of Sylvia Plath, one of my favorite poets, White’s novel traces fault lines in the collective psyche of a period whose effects are still being felt, while engaging the timeless craving for fantasy in such a way as to deliver, as Ezra Pound called poetry, “the news that stays news.”
Here that craving involves what White in City Boy referred to as “race and sex, the two great American obsessions.” Sexual reality vies with sexual fantasy in the novel’s narrative spotlight, but that light limns a surrounding darkness where corresponding racial fantasies and realities grapple, and as we will see, this shadow narrative is not so indistinct as it may seem.
It’s the early Sixties as Jack Holmes emerges self-invented from his mysteriously eccentric Detroit origins into a bildungsroman shaped by his desire to please both men and women, accommodating himself to perceived immediate needs. Meanwhile the nation awakens, chafing within a corset of decorum and archetype. Around this time (1961) Plath, in an artistic breakthrough, composes “In Plaster,” describing a hairy yellow body yearning to break out of its cast:
I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now:
This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one,
And the white person is certainly the superior one (…)
I gave her a soul, I bloomed out of her as a rose
Blooms out of a vase of not very valuable porcelain,
And it was I who attracted everybody's attention,
Not her whiteness and beauty, as I had at first supposed. (…)
She may be a saint, and I may be ugly and hairy,
But she’ll soon find out that that doesn't matter a bit.
I'm collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her…
The divided self, the “colored” soul of America inside a spotless contour that conceals various physical, sexual, and racial realities, has already begun showing cracks. Having absorbed familiar tropes, Jack maintains a stable of personas for expedient rotation, but New York is another story: bringing reality’s firm hand to bear on his fairy-tale malleability. “Jack was stunned” during a job interview “that his character, which felt like Play-Doh in his own hands, could be firmed up into such a tidy biscuit.”
As in TV’s Mad Men, a crisp, starched wardrobe of patriarchal tradition now finds itself subject to some unavoidable and messily organic realities. Its spotless uniforms, like Jackie O.’s dress, are now being sullied with blood and tears, unavoidable bodily excretions; American archetypes, previously smooth and sculptural as statues, disclose their unexpected pimples and hairs. A dawning disillusionment begins to find vivid local expression. The heterosexual Will Wright, object of Jack’s decades-long infatuation, confesses after trimming his mistress’s pubic bush: “There was an essentialist in me that didn’t like the idea that I’d intervened and altered her toward a look I preferred. I had to squint morally and pretend that nature had trimmed her that way.” It’s as if one had expected a fanciful topiary to emerge perfectly shaped, without the disenchanting labor of pruning.
As social and sexual mores keep pace with the narrative’s forward stride into the Eighties, so that our protagonist navigates society as an acceptably “gay” figure rather than as an insidiously deviant “faggot,” early diagnoses of AIDS intrude on a vision of sexual recklessness that is itself revealed as unsustainable fantasy. The “venereal filth” that repels Will in the homosexual lifestyle taints his own marital bed in the form of pubic lice he picks up from Italian heiress Pia, with whom he conducts an affair that for once makes his existence, like a work of art, dramatic. Nature’s chaotic energy, White seems to suggest, is ever at odds with the human craving for clean Apollonian structures.
Rendering the cultural upheaval led by urban bohemia that allowed for gay visibility, White encapsulates a turning point in one killer line: “Befriending a gay was like knowing a Negro—you didn’t want too many, but one was chic.” And here a reader, before indulging in any retrospective amusement, might question just to what extent this dynamic has changed.
In Jack Holmes, White becomes our preeminent theater critic of cultural identities. As society shifts, archetypal roles must undergo investigation, and White’s omniscient narrator wields an unsparing spotlight. “Jack knew that Howard, as a New York Jew, was studying him with amusement as a type, a Midwestern WASP … Jack chuckled when he thought of how far he was from the conventional WASP of Howard’s imagination.” Alice, Jack’s Greenwich Village roommate, “was from an old Southern family, though there was nothing of the debutante about her”; elsewhere Jack engages in sexual hijinks with “a guy of forty who’d mastered the preppy look without having learned the manner.” Interrogation of artifice becomes the presiding motif as White shakes loose the dancers’ disguises at a superficial society masque. This skill at dismantling social pageantry is one of the abiding delights of his fiction.
When Jack Holmes unmasks to his friend as an infatuated homosexual, the revelation elicits sympathetic (and not empathetic) disgust. Will’s repulsion, made all the more painful to Jack by the gentility his friend’s upbringing enforces on the situation, compels Jack to realize: “Now he had to deal with the facts. In his fantasies he’d been playing with clouds; now he had to pick up solid boxes with sharp corners. Reality felt like a pitiful comedown.”
Yet Jack persists in ascending this or that beanstalk into high clouds of fancy, however bruising the inevitable tumble. Reality thwarts each desired story arc, sometimes in hallucinatory ways. In a typical incident, after giving a young lover the key to his apartment, having (at last!) met someone close to his ideal, Jack finds imperfection distorting the fabric of this enchanted tapestry:
Once Jack came in and found a little old crone with thick glasses and a hooked nose bent over a book, her nose almost touching the page. Jack drew back in alarm—but the crone turned out to be Rupert without his contacts in and without his head thrown back in his usual triumphant posture.
The transformation from butt-boy to witch was so dramatic that ever after Jack found something factitious about Rupert’s beauty.
With marvelous economy, White has sketched the essential dilemma of Jack’s engagement with the world, that of the ideal versus the real. “Once” leads us into its own warped and dubious “ever after.” Three sentences trace a darkly comic fairy tale arc, in which the hero can only live happily by embracing, like Rimbaud at the end of A Season in Hell, some “gnarled reality.” No fairy tale is without its crone, however much Jack—or we—may wish to extricate from its components the castle where a conventionally handsome prince will preside. Such delights are not easily won, and, in their very unlikelyness, are perhaps mirages. The mottled actuality Jack learns to accept in the form of a bald and portly older partner, embracing virtues that transcend the physical, is that of a tree—flexible, grounded, rooted and alive—versus that of a brittle architectural column, the stylized Platonic ideal, he must erect in thrall to Will Wright: a concept embodied in the phallus Jack hornily imagines as the “hard pure white bone of Will’s desire.” How telling that despite his own superlative endowment, over which countless bedmates salivate, Jack still craves this imagined avatar of masculine, and racialized, purity.
What is it precisely that draws Jack to Will, whose acne scars mar a patrician profile? Is it the promise of a securely untroubled manhood, an identity both fabulous and grounded? We find a clue in how deliberately White emphasizes the motif of “blue-bloodedness” in various descriptions of Will. Will’s prominent and sometimes blue nose, “blue-white stomach,” and even his (long-awaited) penis with its ropy blue vein, along with the typical blueness of his shirts, all evoke a supreme genetic inheritance unavailable to Jack, in flight from his own undistinguished status as a “Midwestern nobody.”
This aspect of Will’s magnetism finds voice in a lament made by the heiress Alex Newton, as her marriage to Will unravels. “I thought my husband might not have made Ivy, but that was okay; he was a modest, soft-spoken, true-blue knight, a knight of the Round Table, and I his Guinevere.” For Alex too, despite the fact that she belongs to Will’s own class (and in fact financially outranks him) Will represents the prince childhood that stories promise the princess: an emissary of that transcendent realm where entropy shall nevermore interfere with our desires.
Outside of fantasy, chaos will likely undo such fairy tales, as it undid the nation’s own version of Camelot. Acne outbreaks aside, this “scion of Charlottesville,” he of the horses and fox hunts, is lanky, untidy, emotionally withholding, at times underhanded and—crucially for his mirror-like relationship to Jack—in some core way incomplete. He envies Jack’s sexual license, and his inherently fascinating status as a sexual deviant; Jack envies Will’s unquestioned position in society as a masculine heterosexual of good breeding. About the same height, both good-looking and able to be mistaken for members of the same social class, Jack and Will project on one another their respective dreams of domesticity and rebellion. Only between them, they intuit, might they complete the circuit of a total personality: but this endeavor must fail, as neither one of them is entirely that which their typecasting implies. Hence the hilarity mingled with heartbreak that ensues, as though these two were running a three-legged race.
Relishing this dynamic, White christens his characters with an impish sense of irony. Jack, as his name implies, is sexual, priapic, the invitingly undefined protagonist of his own fairytale (wasting no time in climbing beanstalks all over town—or rather, alluring a parade of lascivious admirers to climb onto his). His name suggests a parallel with “Jack” Kennedy, making this tale of illusion and disillusion resonant within a larger historical context (in one beautifully ironic scene, Will, a Catholic, mourns Kennedy’s assassination while namesake Jack pretends to feel something). One could argue for the surname Holmes as an ironic echo of “homes,” as our restless Jack, estranged from his family, searches for his own secure station, in contrast to breadwinner Will, with his nuclear family unit and upstate homestead.
Alas, poor Will Wright perpetually “will write,” forever digesting his experiences into ideas for fiction, with a creative impulse that remains dejectedly dormant after a single unflattering review (White has a blast skewering Will’s premature preening as a feted man of letters). Will, his name so associatively chosen, is the ostensible Apollonian figure, with a desire for both stability and advancement, belied by the inability to urge himself into artistic production—or to finally resist base physical urges, despite a genteel persona circumscribed by family tradition. With all his first-world advantages, just how free is our Will? Then the novel’s title, suggestive in its simplicity of children’s literature (Frog and Toad are Friends come to mind), seems to evoke the tug-of-war between immature wish and adult resignation.
Regardless of whether these gestures—or jests—appeal to a given reader, only a writer brilliantly alert to associative echo could so skillfully walk the velvet tightrope between insinuation and outright camp. Edmund White walks such tightropes again and again. “A week later he had a brief meeting with an old Austrian who had carefully brushed gray hair like wings under which the egg of his baldness was nesting,” White observes, and hasn’t yet finished the sentence. To fold multiple images into an analogy that operates with both tactility and logic is a true feat; here, White makes it look effortless.
I savor too the novel’s forensic coolness, revealing now Will’s acne scars and now Pia’s overgrown pubic hairs. White’s overhead lamp swings a merciless halogen glow across his characters’ psyches and physiques. Into every unflattering crevice probes that trademark honesty, that serrating lack of sentiment. If, as Graham Greene said, there is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer, White’s writerly heart might just contain the full cube, amply sized for chilling a top-shelf narrative cocktail. He can be as pitiless as D.H. Lawrence in exposing primal animosities simmering beneath everyday interactions (and is certainly as merciless in depicting post-coital repulsion).
Back to Sylvia Plath for a moment, who could have used one of those cocktails, after spending a disastrous humid summer in New York sweating through her meticulously prepared wardrobe, in a sojourn that led to the breakdown depicted in The Bell Jar; and not long after describing the aforementioned white plaster cast, would go on to observe in “Berck-Plage”: “The nurses in their wing-caps are no longer so beautiful: they are browning, like touched gardenias.” Back to this idea of the Mad Men-era uniform, starched and stylized, finding itself sullied by sinister organic processes. Let’s now expose at higher contrast this imagery of mottling, this browning, as of the Platonic apple-flesh, of a flawless American whiteness.
White’s whites: are they racially offensive? With their casually voiced dismissals of various racialized Others, against a background of aspirational Eurocentrism? I suppose it depends on the view from where you’re sitting. And we know that when it comes to seats, historically, economically, socially, some may inherit thrones, others stools, and that a stool may well resemble a throne to somebody with no seat at all. Where I currently sit, surveying this post-Toni Morrison American literary landscape, I find less offense in White’s depictions than an intriguing, perhaps quite useful, dissection of Whiteness: its strategies of delineation, then of enforcement. The ruthless laser-eye with which White scans his characters’ physical imperfections, their at times sordid self-interest, their outdated notions of gender and sexuality, he also brings to bear on their racial attitudes. This merciless honesty is all of a piece.
Skewering his own racialized notions after an encounter with his lustful Italian mistress, Will Wright muses: “Idea for story: naïve white man thinks of all orgasmic women as Negro until he meets Italian heiress.” Yet a hundred pages later, when Jack Holmes questions whether women really like sex, Will readily answers: “Some do. Black women do, I think.” We wince with the recognition that, like so many other fantasy tropes, that of the Negro as illicitly sensual, as bestially uninhibited—as bodily, versus cognitive—dies unwillingly.
It’s then no surprise when Will’s mistress Pia concludes, despite having taken various lovers, that the source of a horrific public lice infestation must have been “that black delivery boy from Bloomie’s.” This culprit is presented in stark contrast to Will’s original suspect, Oliver, about whom Pia asserts: “Heavens, no. Poor Oliver, he’s so terribly British. He’d die with shame.” One wonders what the black boy (who is no longer named, for now his de-personalization is crucial) would be expected to feel, if not shame. But the answer is obvious. His feelings are irrelevant, not merely because he is a supporting player, but because he serves here as a necessary counterpoint. He symbolizes illicitness, a taint and mottle on the Platonic ideal of whiteness which these characters regard as sometimes oppressive, but to which they also aspire: a never-quite-attainable position of superiority, reinforced in the text’s references to blue-white physiques, like a gallery of gleaming Greek torsos.
Only psychotherapy might resolve such neuroses. Yet as his therapy session ends, Jack’s sardonic Dr. Adams is “once again forced to stand, like an English monarch dismissing an African prince who hasn’t quite grasped that his audience is over.” The idea of the African as relatively low status is important in animating this analogy of condescension, and as Westerners our familiarity with that role allows us to overlook its specificity. But a reader who pauses here might be struck by this tableau’s precise staging; see how deliberately far it has placed us from any scenario in which a British or American party might request an audience with African royalty. This little fairy tale is the underbelly of Camelot—debased blackness forming the necessary soil on which to build that castle gleaming just out of reach.
Such gestures are insistent enough in Jack Holmes, especially in Will’s first-person narration, to invite some comparison to The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway, with his uneasy complicity in notions of racial hierarchy, but here one particular passage unlocks this conflict’s ornate puzzle box. It does so with the same key unlocking the novel’s love triangle, and its members’ relation to their social milieu: the exposure of perilous pretense.
This passage describes the Serengeti excursion Will makes with his wife Alex, ostensibly to re-establish the domestic equilibrium upset by his infidelity. Indeed, F. Scott Fitzgerald explicitly enters the scene as the relative age of their fellow travelers restores Will and Alex, by contrast, to a state of glamorous youth:
We were once again the enviable young couple, American aristocrats [...] I allowed as to how I’d published a novel, and the people from Cleveland I’d confided in told the others, and soon their nicknames for us were Scott and Zelda. We tried to ignore the warning those names suggested of alcoholic defeat and madness and enjoy their more glamorous associations (…) Maybe because the other members of the safari saw us as so princely, so adorable, we tried to live up to their perceptions. Alex looked smart in her dark safari suit […] She bought an absurdly colonial pith helmet that everyone admired, though its associations made the progressive Cleveland lady uneasy. Alex was relaxed and warm with the black servants (…)
In their excursion to “Africa,” which is necessarily more a concept than an actual continent, Will and Alex are given license to masquerade, which has an aphrodisiac effect on them. Of course it does: they’ve now entered the very cradle of illicit black sensuality, of bestial instinct, in which they can only preserve their own status by commensurate signifiers of Whiteness. Will is no more interested in the darker implications of this racial masquerade than he is in those of the Scott and Zelda personas. That White describes the wardrobe at some length (Alex’s “carefully tailored jacket sporting huge external pockets she was careful to keep empty and flat”) signals its function as costume, carefully chosen, and that this pretense is as dangerous, and as flimsy, as any of the other identities whose masks suddenly slip in these pages. The message is clear: Whiteness—especially in its need for props of flattened, subordinate blackness—is one more precarious fairy tale, folks.
Unsavory as such passages may or may not be, they support Toni Morrison’s conception in Playing in the Dark of voiceless blackness as a crucial accessory to white identity, as enacted in American literature. Literary whiteness, so clearly exemplified in the classic works of such writers as Hemingway, Twain and Cather, seemingly can’t exist without it. Yet the anxious delineation of identity, whether in life or art, the impulse to define oneself against the other, the way straight adolescents call each another fag, is hardly restricted to Whiteness, though it has been manifested with gruesome familiarity to us in that particular vein. And so to fully answer the question of offensiveness is to ask—perhaps with a shudder—whether the denomination of any cultural identity, especially at the contested outer boundaries, is not always engaged in a somewhat de-humanizing process of othering.
How, then, could those perpendicularly positioned “others” of gay and straight masculinity align? How might they establish, and then sustain, any fellowship? In one sentence, late in Jack Holmes and His Friend, Edmund White articulates the essential dynamic of gay/straight male comradery: “There were so few safe ritual male topics available to us that we ended up saying things that were real and personal.”
In time, Will and Jack chafe inside their respective performances, as inside plaster casts, and it is the conversation each has with himself—when the ossified rituals fail—which seeks authentic voice. Having embraced (however imperfectly) the shadow aspects of themselves they once sought in each other, they become individuals of independent gravitation. Our last glimpse of Jack shows him smiling, nodding, “toward no one in particular.” Jack is finally freed from his need for an audience, having set aside that magic mirror of idealized reflection in others’ eyes. Pinocchio becomes a real boy. More to the point, Jack is no longer a protagonist, and he no longer needs us, his readers.
Meanwhile, out here in real life, construing such ungainly and unshapely experience, we all still need one other. If we desire soaring castles, somebody has to lay the bricks. If we desire whimsical topiaries, somebody has to trim them. As the apple of American idealism grew overripe, growing spots like that acne outbreak on Will Wright’s face, its consumers needed to ask what other fruits this tree might bear, what manner of soil might nurture such divergent roots. Now we’ve got to get ourselves, in Joni Mitchell’s phrase, back to the garden. As American identity further atomizes--as we become a nation of Others--there may be for us, as for Will and Jack, so few safe “ritual topics” that we end up saying things more real and personal than ever before.
Published in Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book, Itna Press (April 30, 2019), ed. Tom Cardamone
“I'd rather come back with a few transcendent memories than an album of snapshots.” ― Edmund White, Jack Holmes and His Friend
Like so many a protagonist of heroic fantasy, Edmund White’s Jack Holmes is endowed with a gift to face the trials of a perilous journey: in Jack’s case, it's an enormous penis.
This magical endowment, like a talisman, charms and awes those whom Jacks encounters—individuals who covet, flee or resent its power, providing more insight into themselves than into a protagonist who in some more childish fantasy might remain a cipher, undefined, for projections of readerly subjectivity. But the demands of survival in New York chastise an unformed character. As in any good adventure tale, this hero must confront situations in which his magic falters: “The guy didn’t seem unduly impressed by Jack’s huge penis, and Jack felt relieved but also slightly confused, like a movie star who finally finds a Caribbean island where no one recognizes him.”
There are two cultural realities, the sexual and the racial, one explicit, one implicit, Edmund White evokes in Jack Holmes, a fable of bracing authenticity and delicious wit—one of his most breezily readable, yet most psychologically resonant works. Many readers, myself included, regard White’s oeuvre as a national treasure. But here I confess. Overextended and exhausted, numbed by news media’s ubiquitous overtures and the steady noise of internet discourse, looking for a good read, I was first drawn in by Bloomsbury’s cover design: a pair of reclined male legs, crossed over a black and white cityscape background. While their air of sophisticated relaxation seemed to conjure strains of Gershwin to drift across these skyscrapers in grayscale, their indeterminate masculinity seemed evocative of a delicious tension between gay and straight sensuality (I had recently been re-savoring the angst of Guy Willard’s coming-out story Mirrors of Narcissus). As it turned out, given the book’s thematic arc, there was considerable irony in the allure of such surface attributes.
This novel seemed poised to reflect Us in some representative, teasingly erotic manner: Us being gay men, or men period, or just Americans still grappling with relatively recent political and cultural upheavals. The novel fulfills this air of promise, but one of the reasons to return to Jack Holmes is that it does so in unexpectedly topical ways. A gay man’s relationship to straight men is one negotiation which, like his own coming out, never truly ends, in spite of whatever stance he’s currently chosen. And like the work of Sylvia Plath, one of my favorite poets, White’s novel traces fault lines in the collective psyche of a period whose effects are still being felt, while engaging the timeless craving for fantasy in such a way as to deliver, as Ezra Pound called poetry, “the news that stays news.”
Here that craving involves what White in City Boy referred to as “race and sex, the two great American obsessions.” Sexual reality vies with sexual fantasy in the novel’s narrative spotlight, but that light limns a surrounding darkness where corresponding racial fantasies and realities grapple, and as we will see, this shadow narrative is not so indistinct as it may seem.
It’s the early Sixties as Jack Holmes emerges self-invented from his mysteriously eccentric Detroit origins into a bildungsroman shaped by his desire to please both men and women, accommodating himself to perceived immediate needs. Meanwhile the nation awakens, chafing within a corset of decorum and archetype. Around this time (1961) Plath, in an artistic breakthrough, composes “In Plaster,” describing a hairy yellow body yearning to break out of its cast:
I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now:
This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one,
And the white person is certainly the superior one (…)
I gave her a soul, I bloomed out of her as a rose
Blooms out of a vase of not very valuable porcelain,
And it was I who attracted everybody's attention,
Not her whiteness and beauty, as I had at first supposed. (…)
She may be a saint, and I may be ugly and hairy,
But she’ll soon find out that that doesn't matter a bit.
I'm collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her…
The divided self, the “colored” soul of America inside a spotless contour that conceals various physical, sexual, and racial realities, has already begun showing cracks. Having absorbed familiar tropes, Jack maintains a stable of personas for expedient rotation, but New York is another story: bringing reality’s firm hand to bear on his fairy-tale malleability. “Jack was stunned” during a job interview “that his character, which felt like Play-Doh in his own hands, could be firmed up into such a tidy biscuit.”
As in TV’s Mad Men, a crisp, starched wardrobe of patriarchal tradition now finds itself subject to some unavoidable and messily organic realities. Its spotless uniforms, like Jackie O.’s dress, are now being sullied with blood and tears, unavoidable bodily excretions; American archetypes, previously smooth and sculptural as statues, disclose their unexpected pimples and hairs. A dawning disillusionment begins to find vivid local expression. The heterosexual Will Wright, object of Jack’s decades-long infatuation, confesses after trimming his mistress’s pubic bush: “There was an essentialist in me that didn’t like the idea that I’d intervened and altered her toward a look I preferred. I had to squint morally and pretend that nature had trimmed her that way.” It’s as if one had expected a fanciful topiary to emerge perfectly shaped, without the disenchanting labor of pruning.
As social and sexual mores keep pace with the narrative’s forward stride into the Eighties, so that our protagonist navigates society as an acceptably “gay” figure rather than as an insidiously deviant “faggot,” early diagnoses of AIDS intrude on a vision of sexual recklessness that is itself revealed as unsustainable fantasy. The “venereal filth” that repels Will in the homosexual lifestyle taints his own marital bed in the form of pubic lice he picks up from Italian heiress Pia, with whom he conducts an affair that for once makes his existence, like a work of art, dramatic. Nature’s chaotic energy, White seems to suggest, is ever at odds with the human craving for clean Apollonian structures.
Rendering the cultural upheaval led by urban bohemia that allowed for gay visibility, White encapsulates a turning point in one killer line: “Befriending a gay was like knowing a Negro—you didn’t want too many, but one was chic.” And here a reader, before indulging in any retrospective amusement, might question just to what extent this dynamic has changed.
In Jack Holmes, White becomes our preeminent theater critic of cultural identities. As society shifts, archetypal roles must undergo investigation, and White’s omniscient narrator wields an unsparing spotlight. “Jack knew that Howard, as a New York Jew, was studying him with amusement as a type, a Midwestern WASP … Jack chuckled when he thought of how far he was from the conventional WASP of Howard’s imagination.” Alice, Jack’s Greenwich Village roommate, “was from an old Southern family, though there was nothing of the debutante about her”; elsewhere Jack engages in sexual hijinks with “a guy of forty who’d mastered the preppy look without having learned the manner.” Interrogation of artifice becomes the presiding motif as White shakes loose the dancers’ disguises at a superficial society masque. This skill at dismantling social pageantry is one of the abiding delights of his fiction.
When Jack Holmes unmasks to his friend as an infatuated homosexual, the revelation elicits sympathetic (and not empathetic) disgust. Will’s repulsion, made all the more painful to Jack by the gentility his friend’s upbringing enforces on the situation, compels Jack to realize: “Now he had to deal with the facts. In his fantasies he’d been playing with clouds; now he had to pick up solid boxes with sharp corners. Reality felt like a pitiful comedown.”
Yet Jack persists in ascending this or that beanstalk into high clouds of fancy, however bruising the inevitable tumble. Reality thwarts each desired story arc, sometimes in hallucinatory ways. In a typical incident, after giving a young lover the key to his apartment, having (at last!) met someone close to his ideal, Jack finds imperfection distorting the fabric of this enchanted tapestry:
Once Jack came in and found a little old crone with thick glasses and a hooked nose bent over a book, her nose almost touching the page. Jack drew back in alarm—but the crone turned out to be Rupert without his contacts in and without his head thrown back in his usual triumphant posture.
The transformation from butt-boy to witch was so dramatic that ever after Jack found something factitious about Rupert’s beauty.
With marvelous economy, White has sketched the essential dilemma of Jack’s engagement with the world, that of the ideal versus the real. “Once” leads us into its own warped and dubious “ever after.” Three sentences trace a darkly comic fairy tale arc, in which the hero can only live happily by embracing, like Rimbaud at the end of A Season in Hell, some “gnarled reality.” No fairy tale is without its crone, however much Jack—or we—may wish to extricate from its components the castle where a conventionally handsome prince will preside. Such delights are not easily won, and, in their very unlikelyness, are perhaps mirages. The mottled actuality Jack learns to accept in the form of a bald and portly older partner, embracing virtues that transcend the physical, is that of a tree—flexible, grounded, rooted and alive—versus that of a brittle architectural column, the stylized Platonic ideal, he must erect in thrall to Will Wright: a concept embodied in the phallus Jack hornily imagines as the “hard pure white bone of Will’s desire.” How telling that despite his own superlative endowment, over which countless bedmates salivate, Jack still craves this imagined avatar of masculine, and racialized, purity.
What is it precisely that draws Jack to Will, whose acne scars mar a patrician profile? Is it the promise of a securely untroubled manhood, an identity both fabulous and grounded? We find a clue in how deliberately White emphasizes the motif of “blue-bloodedness” in various descriptions of Will. Will’s prominent and sometimes blue nose, “blue-white stomach,” and even his (long-awaited) penis with its ropy blue vein, along with the typical blueness of his shirts, all evoke a supreme genetic inheritance unavailable to Jack, in flight from his own undistinguished status as a “Midwestern nobody.”
This aspect of Will’s magnetism finds voice in a lament made by the heiress Alex Newton, as her marriage to Will unravels. “I thought my husband might not have made Ivy, but that was okay; he was a modest, soft-spoken, true-blue knight, a knight of the Round Table, and I his Guinevere.” For Alex too, despite the fact that she belongs to Will’s own class (and in fact financially outranks him) Will represents the prince childhood that stories promise the princess: an emissary of that transcendent realm where entropy shall nevermore interfere with our desires.
Outside of fantasy, chaos will likely undo such fairy tales, as it undid the nation’s own version of Camelot. Acne outbreaks aside, this “scion of Charlottesville,” he of the horses and fox hunts, is lanky, untidy, emotionally withholding, at times underhanded and—crucially for his mirror-like relationship to Jack—in some core way incomplete. He envies Jack’s sexual license, and his inherently fascinating status as a sexual deviant; Jack envies Will’s unquestioned position in society as a masculine heterosexual of good breeding. About the same height, both good-looking and able to be mistaken for members of the same social class, Jack and Will project on one another their respective dreams of domesticity and rebellion. Only between them, they intuit, might they complete the circuit of a total personality: but this endeavor must fail, as neither one of them is entirely that which their typecasting implies. Hence the hilarity mingled with heartbreak that ensues, as though these two were running a three-legged race.
Relishing this dynamic, White christens his characters with an impish sense of irony. Jack, as his name implies, is sexual, priapic, the invitingly undefined protagonist of his own fairytale (wasting no time in climbing beanstalks all over town—or rather, alluring a parade of lascivious admirers to climb onto his). His name suggests a parallel with “Jack” Kennedy, making this tale of illusion and disillusion resonant within a larger historical context (in one beautifully ironic scene, Will, a Catholic, mourns Kennedy’s assassination while namesake Jack pretends to feel something). One could argue for the surname Holmes as an ironic echo of “homes,” as our restless Jack, estranged from his family, searches for his own secure station, in contrast to breadwinner Will, with his nuclear family unit and upstate homestead.
Alas, poor Will Wright perpetually “will write,” forever digesting his experiences into ideas for fiction, with a creative impulse that remains dejectedly dormant after a single unflattering review (White has a blast skewering Will’s premature preening as a feted man of letters). Will, his name so associatively chosen, is the ostensible Apollonian figure, with a desire for both stability and advancement, belied by the inability to urge himself into artistic production—or to finally resist base physical urges, despite a genteel persona circumscribed by family tradition. With all his first-world advantages, just how free is our Will? Then the novel’s title, suggestive in its simplicity of children’s literature (Frog and Toad are Friends come to mind), seems to evoke the tug-of-war between immature wish and adult resignation.
Regardless of whether these gestures—or jests—appeal to a given reader, only a writer brilliantly alert to associative echo could so skillfully walk the velvet tightrope between insinuation and outright camp. Edmund White walks such tightropes again and again. “A week later he had a brief meeting with an old Austrian who had carefully brushed gray hair like wings under which the egg of his baldness was nesting,” White observes, and hasn’t yet finished the sentence. To fold multiple images into an analogy that operates with both tactility and logic is a true feat; here, White makes it look effortless.
I savor too the novel’s forensic coolness, revealing now Will’s acne scars and now Pia’s overgrown pubic hairs. White’s overhead lamp swings a merciless halogen glow across his characters’ psyches and physiques. Into every unflattering crevice probes that trademark honesty, that serrating lack of sentiment. If, as Graham Greene said, there is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer, White’s writerly heart might just contain the full cube, amply sized for chilling a top-shelf narrative cocktail. He can be as pitiless as D.H. Lawrence in exposing primal animosities simmering beneath everyday interactions (and is certainly as merciless in depicting post-coital repulsion).
Back to Sylvia Plath for a moment, who could have used one of those cocktails, after spending a disastrous humid summer in New York sweating through her meticulously prepared wardrobe, in a sojourn that led to the breakdown depicted in The Bell Jar; and not long after describing the aforementioned white plaster cast, would go on to observe in “Berck-Plage”: “The nurses in their wing-caps are no longer so beautiful: they are browning, like touched gardenias.” Back to this idea of the Mad Men-era uniform, starched and stylized, finding itself sullied by sinister organic processes. Let’s now expose at higher contrast this imagery of mottling, this browning, as of the Platonic apple-flesh, of a flawless American whiteness.
White’s whites: are they racially offensive? With their casually voiced dismissals of various racialized Others, against a background of aspirational Eurocentrism? I suppose it depends on the view from where you’re sitting. And we know that when it comes to seats, historically, economically, socially, some may inherit thrones, others stools, and that a stool may well resemble a throne to somebody with no seat at all. Where I currently sit, surveying this post-Toni Morrison American literary landscape, I find less offense in White’s depictions than an intriguing, perhaps quite useful, dissection of Whiteness: its strategies of delineation, then of enforcement. The ruthless laser-eye with which White scans his characters’ physical imperfections, their at times sordid self-interest, their outdated notions of gender and sexuality, he also brings to bear on their racial attitudes. This merciless honesty is all of a piece.
Skewering his own racialized notions after an encounter with his lustful Italian mistress, Will Wright muses: “Idea for story: naïve white man thinks of all orgasmic women as Negro until he meets Italian heiress.” Yet a hundred pages later, when Jack Holmes questions whether women really like sex, Will readily answers: “Some do. Black women do, I think.” We wince with the recognition that, like so many other fantasy tropes, that of the Negro as illicitly sensual, as bestially uninhibited—as bodily, versus cognitive—dies unwillingly.
It’s then no surprise when Will’s mistress Pia concludes, despite having taken various lovers, that the source of a horrific public lice infestation must have been “that black delivery boy from Bloomie’s.” This culprit is presented in stark contrast to Will’s original suspect, Oliver, about whom Pia asserts: “Heavens, no. Poor Oliver, he’s so terribly British. He’d die with shame.” One wonders what the black boy (who is no longer named, for now his de-personalization is crucial) would be expected to feel, if not shame. But the answer is obvious. His feelings are irrelevant, not merely because he is a supporting player, but because he serves here as a necessary counterpoint. He symbolizes illicitness, a taint and mottle on the Platonic ideal of whiteness which these characters regard as sometimes oppressive, but to which they also aspire: a never-quite-attainable position of superiority, reinforced in the text’s references to blue-white physiques, like a gallery of gleaming Greek torsos.
Only psychotherapy might resolve such neuroses. Yet as his therapy session ends, Jack’s sardonic Dr. Adams is “once again forced to stand, like an English monarch dismissing an African prince who hasn’t quite grasped that his audience is over.” The idea of the African as relatively low status is important in animating this analogy of condescension, and as Westerners our familiarity with that role allows us to overlook its specificity. But a reader who pauses here might be struck by this tableau’s precise staging; see how deliberately far it has placed us from any scenario in which a British or American party might request an audience with African royalty. This little fairy tale is the underbelly of Camelot—debased blackness forming the necessary soil on which to build that castle gleaming just out of reach.
Such gestures are insistent enough in Jack Holmes, especially in Will’s first-person narration, to invite some comparison to The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway, with his uneasy complicity in notions of racial hierarchy, but here one particular passage unlocks this conflict’s ornate puzzle box. It does so with the same key unlocking the novel’s love triangle, and its members’ relation to their social milieu: the exposure of perilous pretense.
This passage describes the Serengeti excursion Will makes with his wife Alex, ostensibly to re-establish the domestic equilibrium upset by his infidelity. Indeed, F. Scott Fitzgerald explicitly enters the scene as the relative age of their fellow travelers restores Will and Alex, by contrast, to a state of glamorous youth:
We were once again the enviable young couple, American aristocrats [...] I allowed as to how I’d published a novel, and the people from Cleveland I’d confided in told the others, and soon their nicknames for us were Scott and Zelda. We tried to ignore the warning those names suggested of alcoholic defeat and madness and enjoy their more glamorous associations (…) Maybe because the other members of the safari saw us as so princely, so adorable, we tried to live up to their perceptions. Alex looked smart in her dark safari suit […] She bought an absurdly colonial pith helmet that everyone admired, though its associations made the progressive Cleveland lady uneasy. Alex was relaxed and warm with the black servants (…)
In their excursion to “Africa,” which is necessarily more a concept than an actual continent, Will and Alex are given license to masquerade, which has an aphrodisiac effect on them. Of course it does: they’ve now entered the very cradle of illicit black sensuality, of bestial instinct, in which they can only preserve their own status by commensurate signifiers of Whiteness. Will is no more interested in the darker implications of this racial masquerade than he is in those of the Scott and Zelda personas. That White describes the wardrobe at some length (Alex’s “carefully tailored jacket sporting huge external pockets she was careful to keep empty and flat”) signals its function as costume, carefully chosen, and that this pretense is as dangerous, and as flimsy, as any of the other identities whose masks suddenly slip in these pages. The message is clear: Whiteness—especially in its need for props of flattened, subordinate blackness—is one more precarious fairy tale, folks.
Unsavory as such passages may or may not be, they support Toni Morrison’s conception in Playing in the Dark of voiceless blackness as a crucial accessory to white identity, as enacted in American literature. Literary whiteness, so clearly exemplified in the classic works of such writers as Hemingway, Twain and Cather, seemingly can’t exist without it. Yet the anxious delineation of identity, whether in life or art, the impulse to define oneself against the other, the way straight adolescents call each another fag, is hardly restricted to Whiteness, though it has been manifested with gruesome familiarity to us in that particular vein. And so to fully answer the question of offensiveness is to ask—perhaps with a shudder—whether the denomination of any cultural identity, especially at the contested outer boundaries, is not always engaged in a somewhat de-humanizing process of othering.
How, then, could those perpendicularly positioned “others” of gay and straight masculinity align? How might they establish, and then sustain, any fellowship? In one sentence, late in Jack Holmes and His Friend, Edmund White articulates the essential dynamic of gay/straight male comradery: “There were so few safe ritual male topics available to us that we ended up saying things that were real and personal.”
In time, Will and Jack chafe inside their respective performances, as inside plaster casts, and it is the conversation each has with himself—when the ossified rituals fail—which seeks authentic voice. Having embraced (however imperfectly) the shadow aspects of themselves they once sought in each other, they become individuals of independent gravitation. Our last glimpse of Jack shows him smiling, nodding, “toward no one in particular.” Jack is finally freed from his need for an audience, having set aside that magic mirror of idealized reflection in others’ eyes. Pinocchio becomes a real boy. More to the point, Jack is no longer a protagonist, and he no longer needs us, his readers.
Meanwhile, out here in real life, construing such ungainly and unshapely experience, we all still need one other. If we desire soaring castles, somebody has to lay the bricks. If we desire whimsical topiaries, somebody has to trim them. As the apple of American idealism grew overripe, growing spots like that acne outbreak on Will Wright’s face, its consumers needed to ask what other fruits this tree might bear, what manner of soil might nurture such divergent roots. Now we’ve got to get ourselves, in Joni Mitchell’s phrase, back to the garden. As American identity further atomizes--as we become a nation of Others--there may be for us, as for Will and Jack, so few safe “ritual topics” that we end up saying things more real and personal than ever before.