Inspiring Older Readers
The Unpunished Vice: A life of reading by Edmund White
A new book from Edmund White is always a must buy – almost regardless of the subject matter, he demands to be read because he’s such an accessible, assured and consummate stylist. He writes prose that wraps itself around you and pulls you gently into the bubble he’s created. So when he produces a memoir of his reading landscape, that’s got to be unmissable. And so it proves to be although it’s not without its faults, its indulgencies and its occasional lack of focus.
The book is the literary equivalent of being taken into White’s cosy library room, seated in a well battered leather wing-chair, given a whiskey and soda and asked to settle back while White rambles delightfully over his reading history, dropping famous names as he goes and endearingly contradicting himself at almost every turn. It’s a wonderful ride.
What will strike you immediately is that, from the very beginning of his reading journey, he’s seen the activity as something essentially intimate and potentially sensual:
“The writer becomes your ideal companion—interesting, worldly, compassionate, energetic—but only if you stick with him or her for a while, long enough to throw off the chill of isolation and to hear the intelligent voice murmuring in your ear….When we’re young and impressionable, we’re led to embrace the books our first lovers love..”
As he maps out the journey of his reading discoveries, books and sex become closely related – his sexuality is inevitably informed and shaped by what he reads and vice versa. He is, as he always is, frank about his relationships and his desires and the way his emotional life plays out against the backdrop of his reading.
He can’t resist the chance to be playful – it’s as if the loose and baggy structure he’s adopted allows him to relax and amuse himself as well as his readers. So we get lots of self-deprecating stuff about how much better other writers are than he is and how comparatively poorly read he is. His mind, he tells us, is essentially incapable of discipline and on his imaginary mental pond he hops from one lily-pad to the next always looking for something new.
There must be some truth in this final claim because that very much mirrors the way he seems to have written the book but the idea that this means he’s shallow or not well-read is, of course, nonsense. It would be hard to imagine anyone who has read as widely or with such discrimination – and not only in English but also in his beloved French.
I think it would be fair to say that as the book goes on we get a little less of the memoir and a little more of the index of writers White wants us to read or, perhaps more accurately, wants to champion. In this process we get Proust, Mann, Joyce Carol Oates, Jean Cocteau, Ronald Firbank, Henry Green and lots and lots of others but he ends with what he believes to be the greatest novel ever – Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Novelist, Jane Smiley, reviewing the book for The New York Times notes that:
“..White makes the case for “Anna Karenina” as the greatest novel ever. The translation he prefers is the one produced in 2004 by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. “It is full of push and pull,” he remarks, “largely between Tolstoy’s reluctant allegiance to his social class and his severe criticism of it.” In the course of 10 pages, he almost convinces, and maybe I would believe him if I read it once a year (along with “Nothing,” by Henry Green) as he does.”
I tend to agree with Smiley that his case for Anna Karenina doesn’t quite convince me that it’s the greatest ever novel ( I’m for Ulysses myself) but the important thing is that it doesn’t really matter – White simply offers us his thoughts and we can take it or leave it without a hint of acrimony.
If you love a tour around the literary map of a great writer's mind you’ll love this – and you might also take away a few hints about where to go next on your own reading journey.
Terry Potter
September 2018