GLR July-August 2023

E DMUND WHITE’S literary life has been guided by his preoccu pations. Everything he writes is animated by these subjects. He would be the first to admit that they are not hard to discern; indeed, he named the chap ters of his excellent memoir My Lives (2005) after each of them. They include, but are not limited to: his shrinks, his fa say, if you’re going to have an orgy, you should expect one or two of the guys to be a dud. The Humble Lover is not quite shooting blanks, but it struggles to reach the heights of artistry that he has set for his work. It is still characteristically White, with irreverent aphorisms and a luxuriant tone, but it feels like a hasty draft of something that could have been greater. Carr Harkrader, a writer and critic in Chicago , has written for Necessary Fiction , The Washington Independent Review of Books , and The Assembly. ther, his mother, his hustlers, his women, his Europe, his mas ters, and his blonds. The Humble Lover touches in some manner on each of these interests. The Humble Lover is White’s thirty-first published book. With an œuvre as vast as this, it feels a little beside the point to be disappointed by this new novel. As White himself might and the hospital’s chief of service, Dr. Nolan Lewis, gave his pronouncement: “The patient was a severe schizoid, who would probably go definitely schizophrenic someday, but was near ge nius level in creating.” In an interesting twist, Ginsberg appar ently was not informed of his prognosis. His time in a mental institution proved to be restorative, providing him with valu able material for “Howl,” his most famous poem. The title of Weine’s book comes from the first line of “Howl”: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.” With that memorable opening, Weine argues, Ginsberg “opened up a space for telling an entirely new story about the generation coming of age in postwar America. He had been gathering and digesting these stories for years, stories that spoke to many sides of madness. He had been making his way toward adopting the voice and per spective of a witness to madness.” Weine makes a similarly eloquent case for “Kaddish,” Gins berg’s masterpiece eulogizing his mother. Naomi Ginsberg died at Pilgrim State Hospital on June 9, 1956. Allen Ginsberg, by now launched as a poet and living in San Francisco with his boyfriend Peter Orlovsky, chose not to return East for the fu neral. Years later, he said he forgot why he didn’t go. For lack of sufficient mourners at her funeral, Naomi was not memori

alized with a Kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead. In “Kaddish,” he gave her his version of the prayer that she didn’t have at her funeral. The title poem of a collection he published in 1961, “Kaddish” offers a much darker, sadder view of the madness Ginsberg champions in “Howl” and con tains graphic descriptions of his desperately ill mother. As Weine observes: “‘Kaddish’ staked out harrowing new land scapes in imagining and engaging real-world suffering, con flict, injustice, traumas, and death, in an empowering narrative of witness.” BestMinds follows the poet through his rise to countercul tural stardom in the 1960s and after. It touches on Ginsberg’s close relationship with Orlovsky, who was addicted to drugs— a complicated bond that warrants more attention than it receives in the book. Weine acknowledges that Ginsberg was no saint (as the poet’s defiant membership in the North American Man/ Boy Love Association makes clear), but his faith in his mentor remains steadfast. Looking back on what he learned from Gins berg, he declares that the poet’s “radical acceptance of madness as a basic human capacity, which includes the potential for good, invites us to change how we understand madness and mental illness and is itself another powerful way of expanding consciousness for the benefit of humankind.”

Lust and Romance Are At It Again

The protagonist, Aldwych West, is a wealthy, elderly man; his riches come from “his family [having] invented the mi crowave, or maybe something older, like the kitchen stove.” Where his money goes matters much more to him. He maintains a luxurious Upper East Side apartment and spends every night at the ballet admiring the ample buttocks and crotches of the

C ARR H ARKRADER

THE HUMBLE LOVER: A Novel by Edmund White Bloomsbury Publishing. 272 pages, $27.99

male dancers. It’s on this stage where he first notices the “very pale, very young” August Dupond. A provincial French-Cana dian boy, August is trying to climb up the ranks of the New York City Ballet. Aldwych is obsessed with this waif with an ass of gold. He schemes to get closer and eventually offers August a room in

his apartment. August is never quite at tracted to him, but Aldwych’s sexual ob session is so consuming that it borders on courtly love. He’s satisfied just to have his dancer near. When August first visits Aldwych’s apartment, Aldwych becomes flustered: “Of course he felt frazzled, but he didn’t want this confusion to distract from the sacrament August was confer ring on him by his very presence.” White’s work at its most breathtaking has always fused the hormonal—needy, horny, grasping for more—with the tran scendent. But too often in The Humble Lover , the writing seems to be the equiva

Edmund White. Jacket photo, The Humble Lover.

July–August 2023

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