Edmund’s White’s The Unpunished Vice is a serendipitous journey through a lifetime of reading. It begins with a lyrical, almost mystical discovery:
I remember toddling into my mother’s room, where she was taking a perfumed bubble bath in the late afternoon. I announced (or maybe thought), “I’m free. I can read.”
It is an announcement so simple, beautiful and profound that Mr. White seems almost to question its veracity.
Could I really have a had such an improbable thought at age six? Or have I just told myself that that occurred to me then? And yet I remember my mother’s sweetness, the good smell, the afternoon sunlight, and my very real feeling of joyful liberation.
To paraphrase Allan Gurganus, the best parts of journeys often are detours. And this is certainly true with The Unpunished Vice. The books that come into Mr. White’s life are generally recommended by friends and acquaintances over the years. These people don’t seem to linger for long, but their literary impact lasts a lifetime. By far the most intriguing–the most round character to use E.M. Forster’s lingo–is Mr. White’s mother, although her favorite author, Mary Baker Eddy, doesn’t much interest him. Mr. White’s description of his mother is both amusing and insightful. And yet, with the the benefit of hindsight, he seemingly questions his own response to her.
My mother read daily from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which she found as soothing as a highball after a hard day’s work. Ideas were not scrutinized and debated but relaxed into like a hot bath When I asked her if she believed in free will or determinism, she replied, “A little of both, dear,” which doesn’t seem so inane to me now.
One of the most amusing “detours” in this literary journey is a gay faculty party at the University of Michigan in the nineteen sixties.
I was delighted by the witticisms that were bandied about, by the look of all those adult men in Brooks Brothers suits, the haze of alcoholic sweat bathing their faces. They were heavy drinking and smoking, all slender and campy, for once not afraid of laughing too loud, lisping or making exuberant gestures. In those days, as I was discovering, gays discussed authors on familiar terms–and as if all of them were gay or female. “Oh Norma Mailer, she’s too much in Advertisements for Myself, going on about anal sex. How come she knows so much about it?” The remarks were mostly idiotic, but it was so exhilarating to see the whole world of the arts as gay. We all laughed in complicity. “Miss Hemingway with her butch lesbian act shooting tigers. She’s fooling no one. She’s a big bull dagger, nothing more.”
The reader will also find the reading of this book exhilarating. It is the exhilaration of viewing the world of literature through the lens of one of America’s great writers. And it is an unmistakably queer lens. His take on Melville, and in particular his relationship with Hawthorne, is both amusing and intelligent. Perhaps it’s not surprising that Mr. White is a passionate devotee of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina–which he’s read ten times. He offers numerous original insights into this Russian classic. Nor is is it surprising to find himself moved by the prose of Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald and, of course Vladimir Nabokov–whom he corresponded with. What is surprising–and no less intriguing–is the passion he shows for lesser known authors such as: Ivan Morris, Ronald Firbank, Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, Jean Giono, and Penelope Fitzgerald among many others. It all adds up to, quite simply, a bibliophile’s delight.
Edmund White’s The Unpunished Vice is published by Bloomsbury Press.
12/24/2018