The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Farewell Syphony by Edmund White
Kent D. Wolf

Edmund White. The Farewell Symphony. Knopf, 1997. 413 pp. $25.00.

With The Farewell Symphony, Edmund White’s final entry in his autobiographical trilogy, I was left wondering when White ever had the time to write a book about his climb up the literary ladder in 1970s Greenwich Village. Although my memories of the ’70s involve diapers and “Sesame Street,” I am well aware of the hedonistic frenzy that gripped the urban gay community in the post-Stonewall years. However, White’s apparent nonstop sexfest (sex in clubs, sex in the park, sex on the loading docks, sex under semis, sex in Italy, etc.) seems to defy logic: at one point the narrator does some math and figures he had over 3,000 sex partners between 1962 and 1982 (according to my calculations, that’s three partners a week for twenty years!).
Putting all calculators (and envy) aside, amidst all this kissing is plenty of telling. On one level The Farewell Symphony reads like a gossip rag, but the name-dropping proves to be problematic. In a disclaimer, White describes the book as an “autobiographical novel,” and “not a literal transcription of my experience. The characters are stylized versions, often composites, of people I knew in those years.” Along with partially fictionalized artistic figures, there are a number of thinly veiled characters—James Merrill included—and others whose identities White does not even attempt to conceal—like Michel Foucault. At times it is difficult to determine where facts give way to White’s creative substitutions.
After playing the name game I arrived at the novel’s most revealing moments, which do not take place in the microcosm of the New York literary world but rather in Chicago. Visiting his mother, who is scheduled to undergo surgery for breast cancer, he analyzes their relationship and concludes he had “fought free of her gravitational pull but now, like a dark lodestone, she was drawing me back to her.” At home he also encounters his manic-depressive lesbian-in-denial sister as he descends through memory into the Freudian cesspool of their childhood. In just a few chapters, White achieves a genuineness that forms the core of his novel, something that pages and pages of sex (although titilating) seem to lack. [Kent D. Wolf]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction The Farewell Syphony by Edmund White Kent D. Wolf Edmund White. The Farewell Symphony. Knopf, 1997. 413 pp. $25.00. With The Farewell Symphony, Edmund White’s final entry in his autobiographical trilogy, I was left wondering when White ever had the time to write a book about his climb up the literary ladder in 1970s Greenwich Village. Although my memories of the ’70s involve diapers and “Sesame Street,” I am well aware of the hedonistic frenzy that gripped the urban gay community in the post-Stonewall years. However, White’s apparent nonstop sexfest (sex in clubs, sex in the park, sex on the loading docks, sex under semis, sex in Italy, etc.) seems to defy logic: at one point the narrator does some math and figures he had over 3,000 sex partners between 1962 and 1982 (according to my calculations, that’s three partners a week for twenty years!). Putting all calculators (and envy) aside, amidst all this kissing is plenty of telling. On one level The Farewell Symphony reads like a gossip rag, but the name-dropping proves to be problematic. In a disclaimer, White describes the book as an “autobiographical novel,” and “not a literal transcription of my experience. The characters are stylized versions, often composites, of people I knew in those years.” Along with partially fictionalized artistic figures, there are a number of thinly veiled characters—James Merrill included—and others whose identities White does not even attempt to conceal—like Michel Foucault. At times it is difficult to determine where facts give way to White’s creative substitutions. After playing the name game I arrived at the novel’s most revealing moments, which do not take place in the microcosm of the New York literary world but rather in Chicago. Visiting his mother, who is scheduled to undergo surgery for breast cancer, he analyzes their relationship and concludes he had “fought free of her gravitational pull but now, like a dark lodestone, she was drawing me back to her.” At home he also encounters his manic-depressive lesbian-in-denial sister as he descends through memory into the Freudian cesspool of their childhood. In just a few chapters, White achieves a genuineness that forms the core of his novel, something that pages and pages of sex (although titilating) seem to lack. [Kent D. Wolf]

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