Edmund White, who lived in Paris for sixteen years, wanders through the streets and avenues and along the quays, into parts of Paris virtually unknown to visitors and indeed to many Parisians. In the hands of the learned White, a walk through Paris is both a tour of its lush, sometimes prurient history, and an evocation of the city's spirit. Edmund White, ca.
2007. Photograph by David Shankbone I first met Edmund White following his move from New York to Paris in 1983. His novel A Boy's Own Story (1982) had been recommended to me by Odile Hellier, in whose American bookshop, The Village Voice, White was scheduled to read.
On the evening of the reading, the upstairs wing of Hellier's store was packed with curious newcomers. PARIS IS A BIG CITY, in the sense that London and New York are big cities and that Rome is a village, Los Angeles a collection of villages and Zürich a backwater. A reckless friend defines a big city as a place where there are blacks, tall buildings and you can stay up all night.
By that definition Paris is deficient in tall buildings; although President Pompidou had a scheme in the sixties. As a result of the explosion of the AIDS epidemic, the life and work of Edmund White, who is often considered as the foremost gay author of his generation, have undergone a significant shift. The chapter focuses on Our Paris: Sketches from Memory (1994), a nonfiction.
Edmund White, who lived in Paris for sixteen years, wanders through the streets and avenues and along the quays, taking us into parts of Paris virtually unknown to visitors and indeed to many Parisians. By ANGELINE GOREAU THE FLÂNEUR A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris. By Edmund White.
211 pp. New York: Bloomsbury. $16.95.
t first glance, Edmund White's encounter with Paris looks rather like a journey without a map -- the nonfiction equivalent of the kind of novels Henry James rather slightingly referred to as ''loose baggy monsters. A flaneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through a city without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to history of the place and in covert search of adventure, aesthetic or erotic. Edmund White, who lived in Paris for sixteen years, wanders through the streets and avenues and along the quays, into parts of Paris virtually unknown to visitors and indeed to many Parisians.
When Edmund White moved to Paris in 1983, leaving New York City in the midst of the AIDS crisis, he was forty-three years old, couldn't speak French, and only knew two people in the entire city. But in middle age, he discovered the new anxieties and pleasures of mastering a new culture. When he left fifteen years later to take a teaching position in the U.S., he was fluent enough to broadcast.