Loneliness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  It seemed impossible, though, with Charles’s hand coming to rest between his thighs, that he’d wake up tomorrow and be alone again. Yet it was true. That was what would happen. Charles twisted some of Lionel’s wiry pubic hair. The skin over his pelvis grew taut when Charles pulled. They were connected by that single fiber, that single black thread of hair. He imagined the place down far in his skin where the hair was rooted. He could graph in his mind the function that would perfectly describe the growth of hair over a period of time. And then he could see the derivative of that function. Nested inside each other, the calculus of his changing form. And, too, the function that would describe the application of a force at a radius the length of a public hair. It was a comfort to him, this math. This easy, direct calculus. All of life was shifting equations. But then Charles pulled so hard that the hair came free of Lionel with a burning jolt, and he yelped at the surprise of it. “There you are,” Charles said. “What do you mean?” “You kind of spaced on me. You were just zoned-out there.” “I was thinking about functions to describe biological processes,” Lionel said. “Was that your project? Before?” Lionel laughed and Charles pulled three more of his pubic hairs free. Lionel tried to get loose, but Charles pushed his shoulders flat and rolled on top of him. “Why’s that so funny, tough guy?” “I’m not much of a modeler,” Lionel said. “That stuff is so dry. It sounds cool, but it’s really tedious. Imagine spending your life picking nits out of eight million lines of code. Modeling is so awful.” Charles blinked at him slowly, and though they were physically touching, Lionel felt far away from him. It was not merely the difference in their chosen fields. It was a difference in the very constitution of their minds. Lionel felt lonely there under Charles. He had made a poor choice. He should have stayed with the host last night. There was some shared language there. “You should get back to Sophie, I guess.” “I don’t have to be there.” “Are you sure?” “Yes, I’m sure,” Charles said, mocking Lionel a little. “Do you want me to leave? I can.” “No,” Lionel said. “Good.” Charles sat back on Lionel’s legs, and Lionel gasped. It was the pathetic, involuntary sound of his body giving in without his permission, opening itself. “Oh, little baby wants.” “Yes,” Lionel said, because the light had come into Charles’s eyes again.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Ben Tovelson, nineteen, bearish, kind, green, winking eyes, showing Lionel how to write his name in the dust with piss. The damp wet of his mouth on Lionel, down there. No. Another way. Another memory. The vacations he had taken with his parents. The damp, chuffing sounds of their arguments trailing into throaty moans when they thought he was asleep. The soft rustle of the nylon sleeping bag. The cold enamel of the cups. The crack of the branches in the fire. Their car striking ruts in the road as they drove up the trail and then back out. The slow slope of the green hills, the vastness of the pine forest, the terrible distance, so far up, high above everything and everyone. That memory condensed, intensified—the rushing, clear air, the water, the call of animals, the emptiness of the perfect darkness that descends on a mountain where few people are living. “I don’t know,” he said. “Some mountain.” Charles reached for his hand. Lionel pivoted away. They passed again through the liberal arts building. Their steps echoed. Charles had parked near the campus. Lionel wished that he were as carefree as Sophie. He wished that he was the sort of person to run up the steep wall and wait to be drawn back down. He wished that he could manage some careless, easy gesture. But he was not. And Charles had noticed that he was avoiding contact. There was a distance between them. A quiet that grew bigger as they walked on. In the car, Lionel rolled down the window. Charles looked at him. “Are you nuts?” As they pulled out of the parking lot and into the street, Lionel closed his eyes. The cold air against his face seemed to open, leaving a cavity that was warm and hollow, deeper down in the flow of air. He pressed his face into it as if into a clear stream, and he could feel the cold rushing out and away, sliding past him. He opened his eyes, and the night was a gray smear of other lights, yellow and red and white, all of them blending until they were indistinct. He couldn’t breathe. He was drowning. He could feel the churning up of something, the movement of memory. His grandmother and his grandfather had lived on that mountain, far away from everyone and everything. They kept animals, chickens and goats, sometimes a cow. Back then, Lionel had eaten meat and thought nothing of it. Back then, his grandfather had given him big bowls of venison or fish that they had trapped and killed and cleaned themselves. His grandfather had not been tall or stocky. He had been a tracing of a man, his skin deep and black.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  She turned her head and his lips landed on her cheek, and she knotted her hand into a fist. “Thanks for the evening,” she said. “I enjoyed myself.” Lenny looked faintly stunned by what she had said. She opened the door and went into the dark of her apartment, and for a moment, just before the door closed completely, she was afraid he would stop it with his hand. She was afraid he’d push his way inside. She was afraid of him. “Yeah, see you around,” he said. And she heard his footsteps go down the walkway, thudding. The next day, Lenny was at her cubicle again. He asked her to come back to his place for a couple of beers, knock a few back. He lived not too far from her, he said, it turned out. He was close enough that she could walk back if she felt like it. It wasn’t far at all. Or, hey, if she got too drunk, she could stay over. Marta said that it wasn’t a good day, maybe. Lenny just put his thick arm on the top of her cubicle, stood there with his legs crossed and a look of sad, aspirational confidence. “Didn’t we have a good time last night? Didn’t we? Let’s do it again. Come over.” She said she’d think about it. But Lenny kept coming back, and so she went over there. Just for a few minutes. She went over there, and she brought a six-pack and she sat on his couch, which was so worn out that it almost swallowed her up the moment she sat on it. They watched a taped recording of the Daytona. They talked about the plant, about the boys. And Marta felt like she was in college again. She had not realized how few friends she had until that very moment. Or maybe she had realized it, in small bits here or there, but, sitting on Lenny’s couch, talking to him about things they both knew about, about the common matter that made up their lives, she was suddenly aware of how lonely she’d felt after college. Lenny caught her looking at him in that moment. She could see his face change. It opened. His eyes widened. He stopped talking. His smile turned shy. He leaned in and kissed her, and she bolted up from the couch. “No, Lenny. No. We can’t,” she said. Lenny’s face turned bright red. He looked like he was going to cry. Marta sat back down. He shook his head hard. “Why is it always like this,” he said. “Why don’t anybody want me back. Why don’t anyone ever want me.” Marta sat there clutching her beer can. Nobody had ever wanted her, either, except Peter. Except Lenny. “You get used to it,” she said. “After a while, you stop noticing.” Lenny chuckled bitterly. “Hell, I don’t know about that.” “You’re probably right,” she said. “You’re probably right.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  When my sister taught me ways to be popular she was teaching me something I hadn’t known about. She filled a need the instant she created it. Or perhaps I should say she taught me that the loneliness I felt like a bad burn could be soothed. I most certainly had been lonely. I had ached and writhed with loneliness, twisting around and smearing it on me as though it were a tissue of shame pouring out of my body: shameful, familiar, the fell of shame. And yet the company I longed for, the radiant face smiling down into mine, the arm around my shoulders (an arm so lean every vein could be read through it, as light can be seen between marks on vellum)—in my daydreams this company came to me unbidden. The notion that I might have been able to court friends, win attention, conjure it, would have spoiled it for me. Unbidden love was what I wanted. Under my sister’s tutelage I learned that love or at least friendship must be coaxed, that there are skills (listening, smiling, remembering, flattering) that lure it closer. Sometimes, as I learned, a friend is no more than someone to kill time with, a voice chattering into the receiver a litany of questions, all those lumpy sandbags—individually light but cumulatively heavy—that hang from the girdle around the balloon’s suspended car to slow its ascent into cold, unbreathable solitude. But the very act of enticing friendship, of managing and conducting it, the whole politics of sentiment—well, I didn’t despise it, for how could I despise what I needed so much? While I was growing up I had never glimpsed the underbrush of kid society that lay just behind the topiary of the classroom. Dumb me—I’d just assumed the kids knew only whoever happened to be in their home room. Nor did I suspect some kids saw each other every day after school, saw and saw each other strolling under a shifting leaf spray of social lights and sexual shadows, imprints of illumination that had nothing to do with the grid of adult arrangements. A popular boy named Butch was the son of a bone surgeon; his girl was the daughter of a delivery man.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I suffered now. I felt isolated to the point of craziness, but with a faint recourse to melodrama, to a potential audience and an attendant end to loneliness, for if I imagined complete despair I pictured it as an emptying of the theater, a feeling that the stalls and boxes would never be peopled again but would vacantly surround the stage on which the sole actor writhes and sobs, then sleeps, then wakes to speak in a voice he need no longer project. I hadn’t reached that point. I was conscious of the emblem of proud and tragic loneliness I was embroidering stitch by stitch before the eyes of the other boys. Every time I crossed the wintry quadrangle alone or sat alone in my room during free period (but with a door open to expose my solitude) I knew I was drawing another silk thread through the cloth. By day I gave myself over to a covert yearning for men. I’d linger in the locker room and study the brawny back of a senior, a body builder, a German with blond hair greased into symmetrical waves, with a faint dusting of brown hair on his shoulders and (he’s turning around, he drops his towel) with an almost pinkish-red puff of seemingly rootless pubic hair somehow floating in a cloud of smoke above his penis, as though the big gun had just been fired. In the shower room I’d linger as long as possible and watch the water turn wintry chalk into summer marble. Imprisoned under all our layers of long underwear, thick socks, shirts, vests, jackets, coats and hoods were these tropical bodies; the steam and hot water brought color back into the pallor, found the nacreous hollow in a hip, detected the subtly raised triceps, rinsed a sharp clavicle in a softening flood, swirled dull brown hair into a smooth black cap and pulled evening gloves of light over raw hands and skinny, blue-veined forearms. Just as each shell held to the ears roars with a different ocean timbre, each of these bodies spoke to me with a different music, though all sounded to me unlike my own and only with the greatest effort could I remember I was longing after my own sex. Indeed, each of these beings seemed to possess his very own sex: the Italian with the hairy butt, thick legs and jaw darkened by a four- if not yet five-o’clock shadow; or take the blond darling of the football team with the permanent blush in his full cheeks, the distrustful smile of someone hard of hearing and the smooth, fleshy body and incipient beer belly resplendent with quivering health, feminine on a Rubens scale were it not for the way he moved—pigeon-toed athlete’s walk and lordly rocking tilt from side to side, something stiff in the back and shoulders and floppy in the hands and arms, loose ribbons around the rigid maypole.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  “He stood me up again,” Dad says. It’s a chilly January evening, and we’re about to dive into the carry-out we just fetched home. It’s a running joke, that Sonic’s “our place.” I figure, if I’m gonna have me some edgy sex, I might as well live it up, throw the diet out the window and indulge a little, so, two times out of three, we hit Sonic for burgers, foot-long hot dogs, and tater tots before the beating begins. “The little bastard never showed.” “Which one?” “The ex-marine who wanted me to kidnap him. I sat in that motel parking lot for two hours, but he never showed.” Tonight, as we sit around the kitchen table, munching our greasy haul, Dad talks and I listen. He’s lonelier, more depressed than ever. He has good reasons to be grim. On top of a shit load of crap at work—most of his coworkers at the DMV sound like morons—his attempts to find a regular boy are going nowhere. He’s been chatting with single guys, guys who might be there for him all the time, as I can’t. They’re fucking flakes, every one. I’d like to break their heads. They flirt, they promise things, they get his hopes up, and then they don’t show up, or, if they do, they’re spoiled, ungrateful, selfish. One of them, after the lightest of floggings, ran out of the house hysterical, the crazy queen. One stole some money. One gave him crabs. As much as I love to suck Dad off, or take a load of his cum up my butt after a good beating, well, it’s harder and harder for him to get it up. Depression erodes his sex drive, he says, and antidepressants do the same. If he can manage to jack off after he tortures me, we’re both lucky. He hasn’t fucked me in over a year. One of these nights, he’s gonna be so sad he won’t want me anymore. But not tonight, thank god. When Dad finishes his last tater tot and I finish my dog and my glass of wine, he leads me into the playroom. I’m naked now, on my back on the padded bondage table, ankles tied to the legs, hands tied together beneath it. Dad’s tasty-rank briefs are crammed in my mouth again; layers of duct tape are plastered over my lips and wrapped around the bench, real snug so I can’t move my head. Dad’s in full leather, beating my chest and belly flush-red with a riding crop. We’re both relishing my muffled screams. We’re both still yet blessed. When his arm gets tired and he lets me loose, I fall to my knees and kiss his boots. “Lick,” Dad says, so I do, lapping the shiny leather shinier. “This helps, cub,” Dad says. “I’m glad you’re here.”

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Noise of an undifferentiated party variety drifted out into the deep blue cold, meeting Lionel under the sunroom window where he had stopped to peer inside. He felt powerfully anonymous out there in the dark, looking in on all of them. That he did not recognize anyone apart from the host felt at once a comfort and a warning. A rectangle of pale light unfurled down the stairs as the host pressed the door open on screeching hinges. “Shit, it’s cold out here. You walk all this way?” Lionel climbed the stairs and tried to arrange his stiff face into a friendly expression, the effort of which made his scalp tingle. He had walked only part of the way, about ten minutes in all. The bus had dropped him on the other side of Orton Park. When the host realized that Lionel wasn’t going to answer, he said, “Well, you’re right on time.” “I didn’t have a chance to go to the store—I just got back,” Lionel said. The several pairs of shoes in the front hall indicated to him that this was not the small gathering he had thought it would be. It also indicated that he was not right on time, but he knew that already. “Long trip?” The host wrapped his arm around Lionel’s lower back and pulled at him until they were very close, at the threshold of the apartment, but not yet inside. “Good?” “Couple weeks,” Lionel said. “Sorry for not being in touch more.” “It’s a busy time,” the host said in a way that wasn’t entirely not passive aggressive. Lionel turned his head a little out of reflexive guilt, and the host’s dry lips grazed the corner of his mouth. “Thank you,” Lionel said. “It’s good to see you. Let’s talk tonight. Catch up. It’s been forever.” “Yeah, let’s.” A few of the guests sat around on mismatched chairs and on the floor, holding plates of damp vegetables and grains. The improvised nature of the gathering diluted the strangeness he felt standing there alone, because although he was clearly a latecomer, the rest of them didn’t seem to belong to one another in the way that friends sometimes could. There was no operating logic to their association that he could see. They were all awkward, anxious strangers in the host’s living room. He waved to them, and they waved back. Their having seen him and his having seen them moved him. Lionel felt alive, in the world. The larger, noisier contingent of guests assembled their food in the kitchen. Lionel waited his turn, watching as they pirouetted and collided. They touched the smalls of each other’s backs and shoulders. Men and women. They hugged and kissed and pressed against each other.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Not exactly the perils of a stranded mountain expedition, but the consequences of exposure can prove as fatal. And this expedition seems more painful than any group trudge, since it is being endured so utterly alone. This book is crowded with a series of boy lovers, worthy if crazed teachers, shrinks who cannot listen, siblings incapable of anything beyond negative judgments and accusations of social sabotage. But any show of others’ sympathy or sweetness can draw from this solitary observant child outlandish love letters written on vellum then slid under doors. The slightest warmth seems, to this boy with his stacked books and unlimited allowance, a declaration of love at last. White’s first novel, Forgetting Elena , was as cryptic and intentionally oblique as this work seems narratively straightforward, autobiographically inspired. At some point, the author appears to have applied his preternatural descriptive gifts to a pampered if desolate boyhood. Our narrator seems determined to find some way to transform, as in Proust’s great organizing project, the ordinary pain and compromises of actual lived life into heightened and heightening prose. To himself in the present work, Edmund White proposes this very undertaking. The suggestion thrillingly reads like a top item on some artist’s cosmic “To Do” list, one that will occupy the author for countless books to come: I thought that to write of my own experiences would require a translation out of the crude patois of actual slow suffering—mean, scattered thoughts and transfusion-slow boredom—into the tidy couplets of brisk, beautiful sentiment, a way of at once elevating and lending momentum to what I felt. At the same time I was drawn to … What if I could write about my life exactly as it was? What if I could show it in all its density and tedium and its concealed passion, never divined or expressed, the dull brown geode that eats at itself with quartz teeth? How fascinating that the imagery of registration, that the picture of the self, should be merely mineral. Efficient, literally heartless, but exquisite in its clear chill geometry and, by implication, in its reason. Twenty years later, looking back on this enduring and delighting book, the miracle seems that—as De Gaulle first described then embodied the French people, who loved what he showed them of themselves—Edmund White seems to have enjoyed and then outstripped his own utility to the social movement that tried making a mere flag from his exquisitely dyed silk scarf. It is a pleasure to see the work regain itself, and with the added footnote pedigree of its Liberationist utility.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  He hated that vertiginous feeling of things ending. That sense of the world dropping off under his feet. It had been the same at math camp. Everyone rolling up their sleeping bags, putting away their clothes for one last time. Saying good-bye, or pointedly not saying good-bye. There was, too, something unsurprising in all that. After all, his father had left them suddenly. Or it had seemed sudden, at least to Lionel. One day, his dad had packed up for a trip the way he always did. But then weeks went by, and when he asked his mother where his father had gone, she turned to him and said, as if describing the weather forecast, that he wasn’t coming back and that Lionel should get used to it. It seemed impossible, though, with Charles’s hand coming to rest between his thighs, that he’d wake up tomorrow and be alone again. Yet it was true. That was what would happen. Charles twisted some of Lionel’s wiry pubic hair. The skin over his pelvis grew taut when Charles pulled. They were connected by that single fiber, that single black thread of hair. He imagined the place down far in his skin where the hair was rooted. He could graph in his mind the function that would perfectly describe the growth of hair over a period of time. And then he could see the derivative of that function. Nested inside each other, the calculus of his changing form. And, too, the function that would describe the application of a force at a radius the length of a public hair. It was a comfort to him, this math. This easy, direct calculus. All of life was shifting equations. But then Charles pulled so hard that the hair came free of Lionel with a burning jolt, and he yelped at the surprise of it. “There you are,” Charles said. “What do you mean?” “You kind of spaced on me. You were just zoned-out there.” “I was thinking about functions to describe biological processes,” Lionel said. “Was that your project? Before?” Lionel laughed and Charles pulled three more of his pubic hairs free. Lionel tried to get loose, but Charles pushed his shoulders flat and rolled on top of him. “Why’s that so funny, tough guy?” “I’m not much of a modeler,” Lionel said. “That stuff is so dry. It sounds cool, but it’s really tedious. Imagine spending your life picking nits out of eight million lines of code. Modeling is so awful.” Charles blinked at him slowly, and though they were physically touching, Lionel felt far away from him. It was not merely the difference in their chosen fields. It was a difference in the very constitution of their minds. Lionel felt lonely there under Charles.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  We gotta get you high,” Nolan says. Then, noticing Edie, he smiles. “Hello, Edie.” “Nolan,” she drawls. “How you been?” “Oh, you know.” She shrugs. “How’s your sister?” Nolan asks, and something mean catches the underside of his words. But Edie sighs, rises from the ground. Abe snickers to himself nearby. Edie turns her head subtly, her eyes ranging over all their faces. They are not alone. They are at the edge of the crowd. The holler and hoop of the others. The music pressing down on them all, percussive, driving in the way Nolan remembers church music to be. So solid in its presence that he had once asked his mother if it was the Holy Spirit, and she had laughed and said, No, boy, that’s just the drums. Edie’s shoulders open and she tilts her chin up stiffly. “Better every day,” she says firmly. “Glad to hear it,” Nolan says. “Praise the Lord.” “On high,” she says, her voice a wavering song. Then, with a glance at Milton, a failing smile, she slides between Nolan and Abe, and then she is gone. “What was that all about?” Milton asks, but Nolan has already turned away from him toward Abe. “You got it?” “Tate.” “Then I need to see Tate. Don’t go anywhere,” Nolan says directly to Milton, who nods. He, too, leaves. Abe leans against the tree and folds his arms behind his head. Milton’s digging in the ground with his shoe. “When are you going to get it over with?” Abe asks. “Get what over with?” Abe smiles. He comes away from the tree toward Milton, and Milton takes a step back, roots himself against the ground, bracing. Abe leans down and whispers, wet against Milton’s ear: “When are you going to suck his dick? It’s getting pathetic.” “Fuck you, Ahab,” Milton says, but he’s shaken by it. For a moment he worries that Abe’s voice has carried to Nolan, who is just a few feet away. “Oh, it’s not me you want to fuck,” he says, licking his lips. “I’m not the fag.” “I didn’t say you were,” Abe says, calmly, evenly. “I said you wanted to suck Nolan’s dick.” “Please shut up.” “There’s no shame,” he says. “I mean, I don’t blame you. It’s nice.” “Oh, and what do you know?” “Plenty,” he says, and then steps backward. There’s a small drop-off, where you slide down until you’re standing under the crest of the hill. Abe vanishes.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Ordinarily Cottage Cheese was a calm, sensible girl content to wander with me through the endless days as we surveyed our world and sententiously described it to ourselves: “Now here’s that slippery log, make sure you don’t slip on the slippery log, step over it, that’s right—oh, look, there are the poisonous red berries, don’t eat them, they’re poison.” She took my afternoon naps with me, a deflating heap of dry, hot organdy and drooping white stockings as she settled on the bed beside me, only the feeblest ectoplasm when I first awakened until I was able to pump life and body back into her. She was not a pretty girl. She had freckles, big black glasses and ears that kept poking their tips out through limp hanks of straight hair. She was something of a tomboy, not by being athletic (she was as afraid of sports as I) but by being straightforward, hearty, confiding. I prized her companionship and liked it when she told me to brush my teeth or flush the toilet. She liked to bathe with me but, I am pleased to say, never undressed to do so. And yet I didn’t really like my imaginary friends precisely because they were so irritatingly vague and unreal. My mother went to great lengths to respect my whim—in fact, she may have known how to deal with my imaginary playmates better than with some of my other more disturbing vagaries. And I might have held on to these friends longer than need be precisely because they earned me a certain deference. A place was laid at the table for Cottage Cheese and my parents inquired after her often. But the imaginary friends were almost, at times, less real to me than to my indulgent mother—the imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Tonight they’d stay at a Negro resort twenty miles away and dance and laugh far into the night, eat ribs, wear gowns, talk louder and laugh harder than they could the rest of the week in the staid houses where they served. Most of the time they were exiled, dispersed into the alien population; only once a week did the authorities allow the tribe to reconvene. They were exuberant people forced to douse their merry flames and maintain just the palest pilot light. At that moment I really believed I, too, was exuberant and merry by nature, had I the chance to show it. In the silence that ebbed in behind the departing car, the air was filled with the one-note chant of crickets. Their song seemed like the heartbeat of loneliness, a beat that sang up and down the wires of my veins. I was desolate. I toyed again with the idea of becoming a general. I wanted power so badly that I had convinced myself I already had too much of it, that I was an evil schemer who might destroy everyone around me through the poison seeping out of my pores. I was appalled by my own majesty. I wanted someone to betray. Kevin and his family stayed on three more days. Mr. Cork became incoherent with drink one night and cracked the banister as he reeled up to bed. Mrs. Cork exploded the next morning and told my stepmother she loathed eggs “swimming in grease.” Katy, the Hungarian cook, locked herself in her room and emerged red-eyed and sniffling two hours later. Kevin and Mrs. Cork argued with each other, or rather she nagged him and he ridiculed her; when they made up, their embrace was shockingly intimate—prolonged, wordless nuzzling. On a rainy afternoon the boys roughhoused until Peter overturned the table and smashed one of the hand-painted tiles set into the top; his parents seemed almost indifferent to the damage and allowed the pushing and shoving to continue. Mrs. Cork’s way of conspicuously ignoring the pandemonium was to vocalize, full voice. Each night Kevin came to my bed, though now I no longer elaborated daydreams of running away with him. I was a little bit afraid of him; now that he knew I was a sissy, he could make fun of me whenever he chose to. Who knew what he’d do? After witnessing his vituperation against his mother, followed by the weird nuzzling, I could not continue to think of him as the boy next door. The last night I tried kissing him again, but he turned his head away. On the afternoon they left, Mrs. Cork flushed a deep, indignant red and chased Kevin halfway up the stairs. He crouched and shouted, his face contorted, “You scumbag, you old scumbag,” and pushed her down the stairs. My father was furious. He lifted the woman from the floor and said to Kevin, “I think you’ve done enough for one day, young man.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  As in Buster Keaton’s films, the hero is forever being thrust into professional and social stances for which he has no training. —Picture Keaton trapped aboard a runaway locomotive headed downhill at terrifying speed, then retrofit this as Buster during his first bisexual three-way—a Buster flummoxed yet neutral-faced and, in the end, limber, ingenious, stoically accommodating. Both these protagonists somehow survive all such trials. Hilarity springs from their abrupt on-the-job training, their over-clever solutions to problems all too plain. We must pull for White’s young hero as he places himself in ever more perilous positions, going after one idealized new friend then the next. What he fails to admit about himself is this: No one alive can resist his campaign to win them. Once he decides, they are his. The sole figure divinely outfitted to withstand such armor-piercing charm? His own father, of course. Not exactly the perils of a stranded mountain expedition, but the consequences of exposure can prove as fatal. And this expedition seems more painful than any group trudge, since it is being endured so utterly alone. This book is crowded with a series of boy lovers, worthy if crazed teachers, shrinks who cannot listen, siblings incapable of anything beyond negative judgments and accusations of social sabotage. But any show of others’ sympathy or sweetness can draw from this solitary observant child outlandish love letters written on vellum then slid under doors. The slightest warmth seems, to this boy with his stacked books and unlimited allowance, a declaration of love at last. White’s first novel, Forgetting Elena, was as cryptic and intentionally oblique as this work seems narratively straightforward, autobiographically inspired. At some point, the author appears to have applied his preternatural descriptive gifts to a pampered if desolate boyhood. Our narrator seems determined to find some way to transform, as in Proust’s great organizing project, the ordinary pain and compromises of actual lived life into heightened and heightening prose. To himself in the present work, Edmund White proposes this very undertaking. The suggestion thrillingly reads like a top item on some artist’s cosmic “To Do” list, one that will occupy the author for countless books to come: I thought that to write of my own experiences would require a translation out of the crude patois of actual slow suffering—mean, scattered thoughts and transfusion-slow boredom—into the tidy couplets of brisk, beautiful sentiment, a way of at once elevating and lending momentum to what I felt. At the same time I was drawn to … What if I could write about my life exactly as it was? What if I could show it in all its density and tedium and its concealed passion, never divined or expressed, the dull brown geode that eats at itself with quartz teeth? How fascinating that the imagery of registration, that the picture of the self, should be merely mineral. Efficient, literally heartless, but exquisite in its clear chill geometry and, by implication, in its reason.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  After this we came to a faire Citie very populous, where our shepheards determined to continue, by reason that it seemed a place where they might live unknowne, far from such as should pursue them, and because it was a countrey very plentifull of corne and other victuals, where when we had remained the space of three dayes, and that I poore Asse and the other horses were fed and kept in the stable to the intent we might seeme more saleable, we were brought out at length to the market, and by and by a crier sounded with his horne to notifie that we were to be sold: all my companion horses were bought up by Gentlemen, but as for me I stood still forsaken of all men. And when many buiers came by and looked in my mouth to know mine age, I was so weary with opening my jawes that at length (unable to endure any longer) when one came with a stinking paire of hands and grated my gummes with his filthy fingers, I bit them cleane off, which thing caused the standers by to forsake me as being a fierce and cruell beast: the crier when he had gotten a hoarse voice with crying, and saw that no man would buy me, began to mocke me saying, To what end stand we here with this wilde Asse, this feeble beast, this slow jade with worne hooves, good for nothing but to make sives of his skin? Why do we not give him to some body for he earneth not his hay? In this manner he made all the standers by to laugh exceedingly, but my evill fortune which was ever so cruell against me, whom I by travell of so many countreys could in no wise escape, did more and more envie me, with invention of new meanes to afflict my poore body in giving me a new Master as spitefull as the rest.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Perhaps such a reversal of traditional roles shocked my bourgeois heart, or perhaps their truth came too close to my fondest if most dangerous fantasy, the one in which I’d no longer be the obliging youth but the harsh young lord, the prince with the pewter ornament stuck in his hat, my older lover helpless, betrayed.… Howard and I would fight and not speak to each other for a week, and then I was truly alone. Although I’d been popular for a moment back home, my suffering over Helen Paper and my bout of mononucleosis had caused me to lose my social nerve. I now looked back on those days at public school when I’d said hi to so many people as a fabulous era. I’d been rich and famous and young, before this long, bitter decline I’d entered, this threnody I’d become. Now I was living in shadow between two radiances, the mythic past and the mythic future, the past the dreamlike, confusing story of injured love, the future a cheerful, perfectly crisp fable of love about to be crowned, and this contrast, this partitioning of time into genres, articulated a sense of duration, of endured if not always endurable history. I suffered now. I felt isolated to the point of craziness, but with a faint recourse to melodrama, to a potential audience and an attendant end to loneliness, for if I imagined complete despair I pictured it as an emptying of the theater, a feeling that the stalls and boxes would never be peopled again but would vacantly surround the stage on which the sole actor writhes and sobs, then sleeps, then wakes to speak in a voice he need no longer project. I hadn’t reached that point. I was conscious of the emblem of proud and tragic loneliness I was embroidering stitch by stitch before the eyes of the other boys. Every time I crossed the wintry quadrangle alone or sat alone in my room during free period (but with a door open to expose my solitude) I knew I was drawing another silk thread through the cloth. By day I gave myself over to a covert yearning for men. I’d linger in the locker room and study the brawny back of a senior, a body builder, a German with blond hair greased into symmetrical waves, with a faint dusting of brown hair on his shoulders and (he’s turning around, he drops his towel) with an almost pinkish-red puff of seemingly rootless pubic hair somehow floating in a cloud of smoke above his penis, as though the big gun had just been fired.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Not exactly the perils of a stranded mountain expedition, but the consequences of exposure can prove as fatal. And this expedition seems more painful than any group trudge, since it is being endured so utterly alone. This book is crowded with a series of boy lovers, worthy if crazed teachers, shrinks who cannot listen, siblings incapable of anything beyond negative judgments and accusations of social sabotage. But any show of others’ sympathy or sweetness can draw from this solitary observant child outlandish love letters written on vellum then slid under doors. The slightest warmth seems, to this boy with his stacked books and unlimited allowance, a declaration of love at last. White’s first novel, Forgetting Elena , was as cryptic and intentionally oblique as this work seems narratively straightforward, autobiographically inspired. At some point, the author appears to have applied his preternatural descriptive gifts to a pampered if desolate boyhood. Our narrator seems determined to find some way to transform, as in Proust’s great organizing project, the ordinary pain and compromises of actual lived life into heightened and heightening prose. To himself in the present work, Edmund White proposes this very undertaking. The suggestion thrillingly reads like a top item on some artist’s cosmic “To Do” list, one that will occupy the author for countless books to come: I thought that to write of my own experiences would require a translation out of the crude patois of actual slow suffering—mean, scattered thoughts and transfusion-slow boredom—into the tidy couplets of brisk, beautiful sentiment, a way of at once elevating and lending momentum to what I felt. At the same time I was drawn to … What if I could write about my life exactly as it was? What if I could show it in all its density and tedium and its concealed passion, never divined or expressed, the dull brown geode that eats at itself with quartz teeth? How fascinating that the imagery of registration, that the picture of the self, should be merely mineral. Efficient, literally heartless, but exquisite in its clear chill geometry and, by implication, in its reason. Twenty years later, looking back on this enduring and delighting book, the miracle seems that—as De Gaulle first described then embodied the French people, who loved what he showed them of themselves—Edmund White seems to have enjoyed and then outstripped his own utility to the social movement that tried making a mere flag from his exquisitely dyed silk scarf. It is a pleasure to see the work regain itself, and with the added footnote pedigree of its Liberationist utility.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as VoidIt is hard to describe the space that yawns open in your life after she is gone. You have to make yourself leave your phone at home; you have to practice ignoring it. You keep reminding yourself that you are accountable to no one. You try to imagine sex with other people and struggle to visualize it; masturbation is near impossible.48 You wonder if you will ever be able to let someone touch you; if you will ever be able to reconnect your brain and body or if they will forever sit on opposite sides of this new and terrible ravine. [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 48. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C947, Magic power lost by breaking taboo.Dream House as Unexpected KindnessYou have this really Republican uncle, Nick. Like, really, really Republican. Ann Coulter books on his coffee table, Fox News spewing technicolor paranoia into his living room, and a huge collection of guns that he insists on showing you because he knows it makes you uncomfortable. (You’ve never been able to explain to him the utter terror you felt the only time you shot a gun: an older guy you were crushing on took you out to a range and you both used a Glock to send old hard drives spinning to the dirt. You tried it because he’d said, “Most women are too small and slight to deal with this kind of kickback, but you’re strong and solid, so here you go.” You took the gun—because you were flattered by this assessment, because you wanted to sleep with him, because feminism—but then regretted it immediately. You were terrified; you felt like the gun was going to explode in your hand, kill both of you, and afterward you swore you’d never pick one up again. For a long time, that hunk of metal sat on your windowsill, sunlight streaming through the bullet hole. But when you moved you threw it away.) Nick lives in Wisconsin, and being in the Midwest you see him from time to time. You like him, despite yourself. He might represent everything you loathe, politically speaking, but he’s a giant teddy bear and he always calls you his “favorite Democrat,” even though you haven’t identified that way since college.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Although Nabokov called attention to the elements of parody in his work, he repeatedly denied the relevance of satire. One can understand why he said, “I have neither the intent nor the temperament of a moral or social satirist” (Playboy interview), for he eschewed the overtly moral stance of the satirist who offers “to mend the world.” Humbert’s “satires” are too often effected with an almost loving care. Lolita is indeed an “ideal consumer,” but she herself is consumed, pitifully, and there is, as Nabokov said, “a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet.” Moreover, since Humbert’s desperate tourism is undertaken in order to distract and amuse Lolita and to outdistance his enemies, real and imagined, the “invented” American landscape also serves a quite functional thematic purpose in helping to dramatize Humbert’s total and terrible isolation. Humbert and Lolita, each is captive of the other, imprisoned together in a succession of bedrooms and cars, but so distant from one another that they can share nothing of what they see—making Humbert seem as alone during the first trip West as he will be on the second, when she has left him and the car is an empty cell.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  And in this novel, we watch as, one by one, such left-out figures step forward for their moment, attempting to either help or seduce the young leading man (or to help him by seducing him). To one and all, our boy usually proves a most apt pupil. As it is with bright only sons from “good” families, this narrator always knows which brand names (in art and consumer culture) will or will not do. His father’s boat is a Chris-Craft; his dad’s ties are Countess Mara. Dad’s favorite music is late Brahms, probably those recorded by Sviatoslav Richter. Here is a son who offers—as an incantation—all of Father’s favorite products. It’s one overliteral surefire way of describing a man so otherwise elusive. The boy recalls his dad with a strangely familiar combination of respect, contempt, unalloyed longing. This wish for a true connection comes to seem the book’s greatest undertow, its deepest emotional riptide, its finally dubious goal. Though the story might appear that of a boy with two surviving parents, if divorced ones, White’s novel really belongs in the literature of Orphanhood. A boy’s “own” story. The possessive pronoun boasts self-reliance even as it admits to solitary confinement. See Huck Finn . This gifted child appears the perfect product of his private German lessons, prep school, haberdashery, and analysis. And yet, though any Ivy League college’s admissions officer would see him as a likely candidate, as the son of evident privilege, he is really Oliver Twist’s first cousin. Erotically and emotionally, his request usually runs “More, sir, please.” And the very act of asking this aloud brings worse punishment down upon him. The boy is surrounded by so much space. Even in his crowded telling, amid his colorful toylike succession of eccentrics and pals, he usually feels singularly alone. He always seems to be planning his next romantic “accidental” meeting, writing some outsized letter of admiration. Part of our sense of his isolation must derive from the amazing acuity of his adult-scaled observations. We note how these differ in scope from his boyish features, his outward insecurity, the lapses we picture as he bumbles and strives. White is never afraid to let his young hero’s plaints veer toward the poignant; he knows that the very wit of their admission somewhat countermands their pathos: Unlike my idols I couldn’t play tennis or baseball or swim freestyle. My sports were volleyball and Ping-Pong, my only stroke the sidestroke.… My hands were always in the air. In eighth grade I had appeared in the class pageant. We all wore togas and marched solemnly in to a record of Schubert’s “Unfinished.” My sister couldn’t wait to tell me I had been the only boy who’d not sat cross-legged on the gym floor but resting one hand on a hip like the White Rock girl.… A man never gushes; men are either silent or loud. I didn’t know how to swear: I always said the final “g” in “fucking.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Howie didn’t want to be liked, or if he did, then only after I’d passed tests calculated to eliminate anyone with the least bit of pride. Despite my fears and my aching loneliness, I believed without a doubt in a better world, which was adulthood or New York or Paris or love. But Howie just as stubbornly knew things wouldn’t work out. He was convinced he’d die before he was twenty. He knew people weren’t equal, that they were wired for hatred, that they were glandularly incapable of decency and that any semblance of goodness had to be attributed to the last vestiges of hypocrisy that fools were tearing away, like gauze from a mummy—not, as we’d been assured, perfectly preserved but rather compounded of dust and rot. He had put on his large pale green officer’s hat with the mirror-shiny black visor and the pewter swastika and now he was striding about the dorm room slapping his boots with a crop. Everything in sight—the single cot, the piles of books on the desk, the mirror above the dresser, the rugless floor, the simple muslin cloth on big wood rungs that concealed the narrow opening to the walk-in closet—everything was spotless as it had to be for morning inspections, but everything smelled of a sulfurous acne cream. Howard was striding back and forth, his glasses slipping down his nose, his pale, pudgy knuckles dimpling and paling still whiter where he grasped the crop. He was laughing in short, metallic bursts. And yet he was someone I could talk to about Rimbaud, the poet who’d conquered Paris or at least Verlaine by age sixteen (I was fifteen—a year to go). I’d sneak into the bathroom after lights-out and sit on the toilet behind a locked stall door and read “The Drunken Boat” or “The Poet at Age Seven” or best of all “A Season in Hell” and I’d glance back and forth in my bilingual edition from the smooth French gallop to the jarring English trot, every night hoping to change magically our bony native nag for the sleek back of that Gallic charger but always falling off in midstream, unseated—or rather seated on that hardwood toilet seat, my eyes burning from the strain of reading by the light of a single dim ceiling bulb, my bare chest covered with goose bumps from the night chill and my left leg asleep, a horrible slab of dead beef to be dragged down the corridor until life sparkled back into it. Then I’d lie under covers in the darkness and conspire to be great: I must run away tomorrow, to New York, poems in hand, scorn and genius in my heart, an amiable, infatuated older lover within my grasp … It always disturbed me that Rimbaud was the infernal bridegroom, Verlaine the foolish virgin.