34
AIDS
and Melancholia in Paris: Edmund White's Textual Incorporation of His Dying
Lover
SAGE Publications, Inc.200410.1191/0967550704ab003oa
Monica B.Pearl
University of Manchester, UK, monica.pearl@man.ac.uk
Address
for correspondence: Monica B. Pearl, Department of English and American Studies,
University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK; Email: monica.pearl@
man.ac.uk
Edmund White's book Sketches
from memory, `a little book', written with accompanying drawings by White's
lover Hubert Sorin, is a departure for Edmund White, a pioneer of realist
gay literature. Unlike the writing that White is best known for - his autobiographical
fiction that makes up the trilogy of A boy's own story, The beautiful
room is empty and The farewell symphony sketches from memory is
a collection of anecdotal stories of his daily life with his lover Hubert
in Paris. In this paper I argue that the dialogic nature of White and Sorin's
text is a manifestation of the internalized ambivalence that is a component
of melancholia. When Sorin is dying, White (an American) increasingly incorporates
the French language and a Parisian lifestyle as a way to work through the
anticipated loss of his (French) lover. What distinguishes this effort of
incorporation (a psychoanalytic term that refers to the adoption of attributes
of the mourned other) is that it is the language and culture of the other
that is textually incorporated into a literary text. The internal dialogue
that White engages in that he can no longer pursue with his dying and then
dead lover, is manifested in White's negotiations in the text with expressing
in English a life that he lives with his French lover in a French-speaking
world. This internalization is a melancholic gesture that both attempts to
work through and refuses to accept the loss of his lover, and also allows
White to reconcile his life alone in Paris.
Edmund
White and Hubert Sorin's book Sketches from memory is a `funny-sad look around
our quartier that we finished just a week before [Sorin] died' (White, 1998:
1). It came out in 1994 and is in a very different format and style from the
autobiographical fiction that Edmund White is known for, even considering
his early more
35
abstract
novels, such as Forgetting Elena, Nocturnes for the King of Naples and Caracole,
his biography of Genet, and his more recent historical nove~ a fictionalized
nineteenth century memoi Fanny: a fiction (and other `departures', such as
his authoring most of the text for the popular The joy of gay sex, published
in 1977). White is best known for the trilogy of realist gay autobiographical
fiction made up of the books A boy's own story, The beautiful room is empty
and The farewell symphon and his later, more fictional than auto- biographical,
The married man. A boy's own story, particularly, is the most enduring of
a genre of pre-AIDS realist gay texts that fall under the rubric of the `coming
out story', which is thought of as `the gay equivalent of the Bildungsroman'
(Woods, 1998: 346). In the book, Sketches from memory, simple vignettes by
White are accompanied by illustrative drawings by Sorin. The book is made
heartrending by the introduction written by White, a week after the book was
com- pleted, and just two hours after Sorin's death from AIDS. Although it
has been remarked that `Sketches from memory is not a book about AIDS but
about the success with which two people wrest from the disease their sense
of purpose and their prematurely fragile memories' (Prout, 1995: 38), it seems
to me that Sketches from memory is very much about AIDS, about the sort of
fabrication of one's daily life that one might struggle to invent and hold
to when it is precisely that quotidian life that is unravelling. The fact
that they are sketches `from memory' and not from present life suggests that
this is not the way life is lived for them anymore, even while the anecdotes
are presented as textual incarnations of their current life together. There
is a kind of AIDS text, fragmented and of no particula or of man~ genres (of
which Sketches from memory is one), in which there is no familiar trajectory
of narrative order. White and Sorin's book most effectively illustrates this
in being a somewhat fragmented collection of anecdotes. There is no linearity
or apparent order to the short sketches: the first sketch describes a woman
singing beneath their window, the next describes shopping for food in the
Châtelet district of Paris, the following regards the clothes designer Azzedine
Alaïa, and yet the next addresses the concierge of their apartment building.
As White' s introduction to the book indicates that the ensu- ing sketches
take place during the time that Sorin is dying, one expects that the following
narrative will explain or at least lead up to the moment of his death, perhaps
serving as a chronicle of his wan- ing weeks and months. White and Sorin's
book is, however, held together by an understanding that although all the
anecdotes are illustrations of their life together, one story does not necessarily
fol- low another. There is no dramatic build up, no wondering what will
36
happen
to any one figure, no denouement into the agonies of illness or the tragedy
of death. The light and whimsical nature of the sketches disrupts our sense
of narrative order, intention and teleolog and most of all perhaps `disappoints'
us that we are not provided with any narrative insight about what happened
to Sorin. That he died is tragic; but the reader wants to know what happened.
White's introduction to Sketches from memory gives us some of this `story'
when White expounds on the provenance of their joint work and the development
of their collaborative sketches as Sorin's illness progressed: `He did the
cover and I completed all the texts just before we set off on a last trip
to Morocco' (White and Sorin, 1994: 4). In his text accompanying Sorin's drawings,
Edmund White's sense of his life with Sorin is constituted by the sketches
he creates of their life in Paris. The reality he evidently most want~ one
in which Sorin is not il is conjured throughout his writing and Sorin's illustrations.
For example, White admits in the introduction to their sketches that: [d]uring
the last three months we had to give Fred our basset hound to Hubert' s brother
in Nice because Hubert could no longer go down the five flights and I couldn'
t take care of both Hubert and Fred; but in our book we remain an eternal
trio, our silhouettes against the Tour St-Jacques. (White and Sorin, 1994:
8) Their sketches imagine and project (and remember) a Parisian life for them
in which Sorin is not ill. In the introduction, White exposes the ways that
White and Sorin agreed to, had trouble with, and finally succeeded in working
together in tandem, thus emphasizing the nature of their collabor- ation as
an ongoing discussion between them of sorts, rather than as a unitary vision
that they both shared. White writes that Sorin `always wanted us to work on
a book together, but I've never liked collaborations. Nor did I think I would
find a tone that would go with his drawings' (White and Sorin, 1994: 3). Though
eventually White finds a way to work with Sorin, sometimes trailing behind
him before he can find the `right tone': `At first he worked far ahead of
me, although in the last two months I caught up with him' (White and Sorin,
1994: 4). This interactio~ this involvement in a kind of `dialogue' in writing
and illustrating the text of Sketches from memory, as well as a sustained
projection of a life in which Sorin is alive and wel can be understood, in
its anticipation o~ and, I will argue, resistance t~ loss, as a melancholic
strategy to sustain, or keep present, the lost other. Melancholia, unlike
mourning, which is the process of working
37
through
loss, is a psychic resistance to working through loss. Melancholia is signalled
by a number of gestures or symptoms, one of which, in the theories of psychoanalysts
Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham, following Freud, is the incorporation of
the lost other. DIALOGUE AS INTERNALIZATION OF THE OTHER White and Sorin's
text is dialogi~ both in the planning of the book, its pages and its `story~
in a way that suggests a `running start' to the dialogue that is in effect,
the internalization of the other that melancholia mandates will follow the
death of an other whom one cannot bear to lose, and which is an indication
of the ambivalence one feels toward the other and toward the loss of the other.
The inter- nalized dialogue, as Freud characterizes it, is usually characteristic
of an altercation or dispute. When the object is ultimately lost, comments
Judith Butler in her account of melancholia, `the object is ``brought inside'
' the ego where the quarrel magically resumes as an interior dialogue between
two parts of the psyche' (Butler, 1990: 61). However, although there is ambivalence
detectable in the nature of the dialogue in White and Sorin's book, I do not
think here that dialogue manifests itself necessarily as a quarrel, but rather
as a way of sustaining the lost other by carrying on a conversation with him
that was begun before the other was gone, a way to refuse the loss of the
other. Freud remarks that the `conflict within the ego' is what melancholia
`substitutes for the struggle over the object' (Freud, 1991 [1917]: 268).
It is as if the internalized dialogue is another kind of totem standing in
the place of the other who can no longer speak because he is dead: a signifier
of, but also a substitute for, absence. The internalized dialogue is a way
both to sustain the lost other and to deny that he is gone. Internalizing
the lost object happens in the form of a sustained dialogue with that object:
`The melancholic ... begins to mime and incorporate the lost one, refusing
the loss through that incorporative strategy, ``continuing the quarrel' '
with the other' (Butler, 1997: 161). The dialogic nature of White and Sorin's
book allows the refusal of the other' s potential loss or demise; that is,
White is able to sustain his love the `other not within his own corporeal
body, as Abraham and Torok specify (see Abraham and Torok, 1986), but within
the corpus of the text. Although I am suggesting that the interlocution in
Sketches from memory is between White and Sorin in the way that text and illus-
tration interplay with each other, there is already an indication in the book
that the dialogue has moved from being one between the
38
two
men to one that exists within the text of White alone. This exemplifies the
dialogue with the other that has been internalized to form an interior dialogue
in anticipation of the loss of the other. White's text is written in conjunction
with Sorin's drawings. In fact, as I have mentioned, White's writing initially
lags behind Sorin's drawings, so White writes in response to Sorin's drawings; he indi- cates in the introduction that he `pitched the book to vibrate to
the tautness of [Hubert's] sensibility' (White and Sorin, 1994: 7). Although
the text and drawings are meant to go togethe to accompany each othe the text
at times departs from the illusion that Hubert is always well, while the drawings
do not. White com- ments on this in the introduction, that the `slightly childlike,
perhaps faux-naïf, certainly styled quality of words and images' contributed
to a collusion between them, `[a]lthough we never talked about it', that they
would not refer to Hubert' illness: ... this tone conjoined us to silence
about AIDS; it was our undoubt- edly absurd notion of gallantry that made
us pretend (in his drawings) that his body was not aging and wasting away
or (in my chapters) that we had nothing more serious to do than loaf in the
streets and give din- ner parties. All bluff, since towards the end we seldom
saw anyone or went anywhere. Hubert came to despise his emaciated body, but
in his drawings he remains as dapper and handsome and élancé as he was the
day I met him, five years ago. (White and Sorin, 1994: ~8) However, White
does not keep up his part completely in the collusion, because even outside
the introduction, in the words he writes to accompany Sorin's drawings, he
cannot help but mention the illness occasionally, and the daily life that
illness has actually be- come for them. Even the opening vignette suggests
that although it is unusual for them to be in bed in the daytime, it does
not establish why they are. The opening sketch shows Hubert in bed and White
stand- ing on the balcony overlooking the street below. It is their dog Fred
who `was wondering why we were already in bed when he hadn't had his late-night
walk and it was still light out' (White and Sorin, 1994: 11). There is no
suggestion that being in bed is about sex or about illness, two obvious reasons
why people might take to their bed out of the regular order of the day, but
there is still the intimation (through the dog's imagined bewilderment) that
it is unusual. Another example of White's inability not to mention the illness
is in a chapter on their concierge (who is herself frail and practically immobile; yet Hubert, who depicts himself throughout the book as healthy, even when
he is deteriorating, draws a series of sketches of
39
their
concierge dancing), White writes, offhandedly, that she `knows Hubert is ill
and when he's in a bad way she'll offer to shop or cook for us' (White and
Sorin, 1994: 34). Further, in a chapter that accom- panies a drawing that
shows Sorin and White, both looking robust, if only a little unbalanced by
the antics of their basset hound Fred and entangled in his leash, White admits
that as `Hubert becomes frailer and frailer and Fred even heftier, we keep
worrying that one day Fred will spot an alluring dog in the distance, go ballistic
and drag a hundred-and-twenty-pound Hubert along behind him' (White and Sorin,
1994: 70). And finally at the end of the book, concluding a chapter on the
decorations in their apartment, White comments that `Hubert has said from
the beginning that he's decorating it for me so I'll have a place to live
after he' s gone, though I can scarcely imagine rattling around it alone'
(White and Sorin, 1994: 118). It is only in this final chapter that the drawing
bears no obvious relation to the content of the chapter, that is all about
their apartment's objets d'art, though the drawing shows them both in silhouette
with Fred between them, gazing in the distance at the Tour St-Jacques. It
is at the end of the text that White cannot sustain the dialogue with the
living Hubert, and departs into his own reminiscence of the artifacts he and
Hubert have accumulated over the years that ends with him anticipating `rattling
around ... alone'. What White is straining to keep out of his whimsical representa-
tions of their daily life together, shopping in the neighbourhood for their
groceries, lingering in his favourite local cafe, perusing the nearby bookshops,
consorting with Claude and Paloma Picasso (White and Sorin, 1994: 5~57), attending
fashion shows with Julian Barnes (1994: 25), meeting Tina Turner (1994: 26),
is that his time is actually consumed with taking care of Hubert, `waking
up five times a night, holding his hand while he's vomiting or shitting, plugging
in the catheter, and ... [l]eading a very, very reduced life', in which they
actually `don' t see anyone ... don't go out ... don' t do anything' (White,
1994: 223). In Sketches from memory White only comments delicately that `I'm
sometimes worried he won't have enough time left to do the pictures' (White
and Sorin, 1994: 113). Although White' s and Sorin's respective `sketches'
are meant to act as comments and rejoinders to each other, in fact Sorin's
sketches are maintaining a fiction of their former life together, while White's
essays are unable to sustain that fiction absolutely, admitting into his text
the `reality' of Sorin's imminent demise. However, although some of these
examples of White's inability to sustain the illusion of a healthy Sorin suggest
that he is in fact coping with the loss rather than refusing it, there are
other more profoundly
40
indicative
ways that White' s writing exhibits an engagement with melancholia rather
than mourning. One is his `internalization' of Sorin's language; literally,
his internalization of the French language. HIS LOVER'S TONGUE The internal
dialogue that White engages in that he can no longer pursue with his dying
and then dead lover, is manifested in White' s negotiations in the text with
expressing in English a life that he lives with his French lover in a French-speaking
world. Throughout the book's stories White points out the subtle difference
that the French word brings, or he slips in a phrase in French without remarking
on it, giving it a better context for an anecdote or utterance. This occurs
in the first chapter in which White is describing what he and Hubert hear
outside the windows of their apartment in Paris: when he describes the pigeons
as `cooing' he immediately adds, parenthetically, that `roucoulement, the
French word, gives a better sense of the deep-throated, glottal contentment
of the sound' (White and Sorin, 1994: 11). In another chapter on the concierge
of their apartment building White comments on how `the French protect their
privacy with a sacred fury and prefer the permissiveness of sophisticated
silence to the pleasure of spicy gossip', and again adds parenthetically the
alternative, more resonant, French word: `or ``crusty' ' as the French sa
croustillant' (White and Sorin, 1994: 27). He also comments in a chapter describing
the food shopping he does everyday at the local neighbourhood `fish man' and
the `lovely expressions' he uses to convey fish recipes to White: ` ``a tear
of wine' ' (une larme de vin), ``a suspicion of ginger' ' (un soupçon de gingembre),
or ``a cloud of milk' ' (un nuage de lait) or ``a nut of butter' ' (une noix
de buerre)' (White and Sorin, 1994: 15). White' s text is so inflected with
Sorin's language, I am suggesting, as a way of internalizing the most obvious
aspect of differentiation between White and Sorin. While it is natural since
Hubert Sorin is French and Edmund White American that there is bound to be
some negotiation between and among languages, I would like to suggest that
this negotiation in the text is representative of the running start to the
interior dialogue that is an indication of melancholia. An anecdote in Chapter
3 of Sketches from memory concerns an amusing misunderstanding between `the
famous couturier Azzedine Alaïa and the American painter Julian Schnabel'
, whereby each man tells `conflicting versions' of their first encounter,
in response to White's query of how they had met, `each happily insulated
in his own language'. `Each man', White
41
reports,
`finished his answer with a big smile, sure he' d just confirmed what the
other had said' (White and Sorin, 1994: 2~21). This anecdote reveals not only
White's mastery of both languages, but is also an indication that at times
he is the sole master of both languages, that while others cannot communicate
successfully, he has all the communication within him. It is a chapter that
contains no mention of Sorin, already a suggestion that any possible com-
munication between French and English is within him alone. In other words,
White is exhibiting in this text a conversation that he is having with himself
in two languages: his own native language and that of his dying lover. However,
in the second to last chapter there is no illustration and Sorin does not
figure at all. There are no French words. This chapter anticipates the very
last vignette where, as I mentioned, Hubert is included but principally as
someone who is connected to the artifacts of the apartment that will serve
as memorials to the dead Hubert and as someone who is preparing the apartment
for White to live in after Hubert's death. The last vignette has an illustratio
the silhouette of Edmund, Hubert and Fred against the image of the Tour St-Jacque
though it does not, for the first time, match the story. The penulti- mate
vignette, however, has no illustration and no mention of Sorin. White mentions
their dog Fred, but not Sorin. White, in a gesture here perhaps more characteristic
of mourning than of melancholia, is already here preparing to let Sorin go,
give him up. It is a rehearsal for life without him. Like the first vignette,
where Edmund and Hubert, `lying in bed one evening after dinner' (White and
Sorin, 1994: 11), hear `a street singer's strong, even strident voice' (1994:
12), the penultimate story has White and a companion hearing `a young woman's
voice, pene- trating and perfectly pitched' (1994: 112) from the street outside
and below the window to his flat. However, it is not Hubert with him in this
story but a friend of White's, `Peter Kurth, the American biographer' (1994:
111). In fact, the singer at the start of the book is accompanied by street
musicians, `sketchy chords on an accordion and the half-hearted strumming
on a sadly-out-of-tune guitar' (1994: 12), while the singer near the end of
the book sings `free of all accompaniment' (1994: 112). `The instruments may
have been fee- ble' (1994: 12), writes White of the accompanists to the first
street singer, `but her voice rang off the old walls in the narrow rue des
Lombards with a sharp, ricocheting force' (1994: 12). White also is accompanied
at first by a frail, `feeble' Hubert, though White's writ- ing voice is sharp
and ricochet returns and reverberate it might be said, into print. Later in
the book Hubert no longer accompanies
42
White,
yet White is alive still and writing, having sustained Hubert in the book'
s pages. While `mourning impels the ego to give up the object by declaring
the object to be dead and offering the ego an inducement of continuing to
live' (Freud, 1991 [1917]: 267), in melan- cholia, when `the object can no
longer exist in the external world, it will then exist internally, and that
internalization will be a way to disavow the loss, to keep it at bay, to stay
or postpone the recognition and suffering of loss' (Butler, 1997: 134). `In
our book', White writes, he, Hubert and their basset hound Fred `remain an
eternal trio' (White and Sorin, 1994: 8). In losing the other, the melancholic,
rather than withdrawing `the libido from this object' and displacing it `on
to a new one' , internalizes the lost object; in other words, in melancholia,
writes Freud, `the free libido was not displaced onto another object; it was
withdrawn into the ego' (Freud, 1991 [1917]: 2558). Investment in the other
is internalized rather than sundered by separation. This dynamic is what is
expressed in White's negotiated articulation in two languages: he writes in
English but the text is riven with commentary in and slippages into the language
of his dying lover. Melancholia here is exposed by sutures in the language
of the text. CONCLUSION Although I have argued here for the melancholic mechanisms
at work in Edmund White's writing in White and Sorin's book Sketches from
memory, I also believe, as I have briefly mentioned, that the mech- anism
of mourning is functioning here as well. Although I do not mean to suggest
that melancholia, in literature, is necessarily a dismal thin~ indeed, it
gives us these delightful and sometimes anomalous text I do think that it
is not the only mechanism of coping with loss that can be detected within
these sketches. White's literal acknow- ledgement of Sorin's imminent demise
between and in the lines of the text, and his eloquent, if stunned, acknowledgement
of Sorin's very recent demise in the book's introduction, does suggest the
real possibility, for White, of mourning his beloved. Melancholia, therefor~
particularly in a literary tex~ is not incompatible with mourning. Indeed,
melancholia expressed in this way might precisely be the work that gives way
to mourning, and perhaps not only for the writer, but also for the similarly
afflicted reader. Perhaps it is literature's purpose to deny loss; to sustain
in print what one cannot bear to lose in life. There is a fine legacy of it:
Dante, Shakespeare, Keats. It is the hope, after all, of many writers to live
beyond their mortal lives in their written words, and often to keep
43
the
beloved other alive as well (`so long lives this, and this gives life to thee'
, ends Shakespeare's sonnet number 18). White rightly joins this pantheon
of agonized scribes, and in so doing enjoins us to find in literature both
solace for our grief and as well a constructive model for resisting loss greater
than we can imagine or endure.
REFERENCES
Abraham, N.
and Torok, M. 1986: The Wolf Man' s magic word: a cryptonomy. Trans.
N. Rand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Butler, J. 1990: Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity.
New York and London: Routledge.
—— 1997: The psychic life of power: theories in subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Freud, S. 1991 [1917]: Mourning and melancholia.
In Richards, A. editor, On metapsychology:
the theory of psychoanalysis , Volume 11 of the Penguin Freud Library. Trans.
J. Strachey. London: Penguin, 251-68.
Prout, R. 1995: `A book of laughter and remembering', review of Sketches
from memory. The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, 2, 38-40.
White, E. 1994: Interview. In Avena,
T., editor, Life sentences: writers, artists, and AIDS. San Francisco: Mercury House, 213-46.
—— 1998: Thinking positive. The Observer, Review
section, November 29, 1.
White, E.
and Sorin, H. 1994: Sketches from memory: people and places in the heart of
our Paris. London: Chatto & Windus and Picador.
Woods, G. 1998: A history of gay literature: the male tradition. New Haven,
CT and London: Yale University Press.
NOTE
ON CONTRIBUTOR MONICA B. PEARL is a lecturer in twentieth century American
litera- ture in the Department of English and American Studies at the University
of Manchester. Her research interests include literary and visual representations
of AIDS and twentieth century American letters.