GLR November-December 2025

ESSAY

Remembering Elena , and Ed White

E DMUND WHITE AND I met at a gay party in Greenwich Village in 1966. Ed had brought his friend Marilyn Schaefer, and I was with my soon-to-be-wife Ann Jones, both of us doing graduate work at Columbia. We exchanged con tact info, and within a week Ed and I met again—just me, not Ann. There was a not-too-serious effort at bedding down together, and once that was out of the way, we settled into a nonsexual friendship that lasted (with interrup tions) for nearly sixty years. Apart from Ann, I felt that Ed was the most amusing and fas cinating person I’d ever known—quick-witted, campy, learned, with a streak of seriousness that would surface at unforeseen mo ments. He was from the Midwest (Ohio and Illinois) and had a Midwesterner’s no-nonsense perspective concerning people, places, and things. He disliked pretension and fakery, a trait that explains one of his persistent strategies as a writer: the merciless exposure of human vanity, hypocrisy, avarice, and delusion. His

A LFRED C ORN

Books as a researcher. It was cleanly written, and I enjoyed it, but I had my upstart grad-student prejudices about what was great in contemporary literature and told him that, though en grossing, his novel was a little too obvious. In French literature of that era, the vogue was for the nouveau roman , pioneered by Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, and Nathalie Sarraute. For me, any new novel, if it wanted to be considered serious literature, had to be experimental and innovative. A contemporary author shouldn’t give us narrative productions that could have been written in the 19th century. In the decades since, I’ve lost interest in the nouveau roman and experimental fiction in general, but the con victions I held at the time were strong. I believe Ed was at least temporarily persuaded by them. He put aside that novel and did n’t attempt to publish it. In 1967, I was awarded a Fulbright grant to do research for my dissertation in Paris. Even though neither of us had much re gard for conventional wedlock, Ann and I decided to marry so that she could suspend her graduate program and come with me.

social style was never suave and fil tered, but direct and unguarded, fronting an apparent interest in every person encountered, no matter how ordinary they might be. That ban on pretension extended to the few let ters he sent, which were always flat, informational, unadorned. He didn’t want to be accused of writing per sonal letters “for posterity’s sake.” Over the years I came to see that only a half dozen people qual ified as fully truthful and admirable in his eyes. Also, that I was not one of them. He had ways of informing me of my failings, ways not always gentle. I think he continued the friendship because of my extensive

Early during our year abroad, she and I had stayed at a cheap hotel on the Île Saint-Louis called, reason ably enough, the Hôtel Saint-Louis. It was the hotel’s location that inter ested me. Readers of Proust will re call that his character Swann lived on the island, even though it wasn’t a fashionable address like the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. I mentioned this to Ed, who found it interesting. On our return from Paris, Ann and I took a very ordinary apartment on West 113th St. Ed came up sev eral times that year to enjoy the French cuisine Ann had mastered (with Julia Child’s help). A feature of these evenings was Ed’s reading

Alfred Corn and Edmund White in 1974 (detail).

education and passion for the arts, which equaled his. He did n’t need to explain who Stendhal was, or George Eliot, or Kafka, and that saved time. Then, too, I had the semi-secret goal of becoming a writer, a quixotic ambition that always kindled his interest in people. Throughout his life he encouraged hun dreds of novices suffering from that aspiration, as several who succeeded have reported in print. The first novel of Ed’s that I read (in draft) was transpar ently autobiographical, the story of a young gay man from the provinces who came to New York and got work at Time-Life Alfred Corn has published eleven books of poems, two novels, and three volumes of critical essays. His new collection of short stories, Hosts , is being published by MadHat Press .

to us, chapter by chapter, the draft of his new novel. It was a mixture of realism and inventive fantasy, drawing on his expe rience of gay life on Fire Island and blending that with the ex quisite sensibility of the Heian-period Japanese diarist Sei Shonagon. Her terminally refined The Pillow Book had been translated a few years earlier and read by Marilyn Schaefer, who recommended it to Ed. Both Ann and I found Ed’s new work amazingly good—for me a welcome shift from the bald natu ralism of his earlier novel. We cheered him on, with the result that when it was published five years later under the title For getting Elena , he dedicated it to us. More generally, the novel dramatizes a shift away from, a “forgetting” of, heterosexuality in favor of gay orientation, and the guilt feelings that go with that shift. It will sound implausible

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