The Farewell Symphony by Edmund White Read Free Book Online

a homosexual. I liked reading minor writers more than major ones—Henry Green more than George Eliot, Ronald Firbank more than Hemingway, Ivy Compton-Burnett more than Tolstoy.
    But for the moment even the status of the minor writer seemed unattainable. My oldest friend, Maria, was surprised that I was so driven by the desire to publish; she was a painter who seldom painted and seemed just as happy "putzing around" her apartment, redecorating the bathroom or tending to her minuscule garden as she was standing in front of a canvas and brooding. Because painting was, as a genre, more resolutely avant-garde than fiction and directed to a much smaller audience, the freedom demanded of her was even more worrying than the combination of entertainment and art required of me. Yet even this "easy assignment" I'd failed to fulfill. Somehow I'd bungled the proportions. I loved to read my manuscripts out loud to Maria or my first lover, Lou, over the phone by the hour; perhaps my urge to please or the emotion I injected into my recitals with my voice made up for the blanks or faults on the page. But editors—all these people I didn't know—rejected those same manuscripts, often jotting a note, saying they found my writing "cold."
    And yet my longest and most recent unpublished manuscript was a blow-by-blow description of the most passionate moments I'd ever known, my one-sided love for Sean, whom I'd pined after for the last four

    The Farewell Symphony
    years. How could this book be "cold" when it was about my most tormented feelings? Had the people in my group therapy been right when they said I "over-intellectualized" things and consequendy felt nothing? For one time in my life I, who thought of myself as ugly or, worse, corrupt, like a piece of meat that has gone off but still looks edible, had been briefly desired by a tall swimmer with a hairless body, dirts-blond hair, small blue eyes that looked too fragile for sunlight or direct address, a man who knew Latin and Greek, who'd made love to me before a candle and a mirror.
    In those first few months together, four years previously, our faces had swum toward the mirror like those of the shepherds gaping down at the Christ child. We'd gone to a sentimental movie that had moved us because we had an excess of strong feelings longing for an occasion. Lightning looking for a rod—and after the movie let out, we'd run over a metal footbridge across the East Side Highway to the quay. Beside us the East River flowed quickly, half-industrial, half-wild, as though a mountain lion had wandered through city' streets. It was a spring night and the superficial warmth of the previous day glided on the cold depths of winter air. Mist hung in the air before the street lamps. We ran and ran past late-night strollers. There we were, two fme young men, one dark, one blond, Sean's face drained pale except for a dark red rose in each cheek just above the beard line, small dark roses the color of life.
    If I was fine it was because I was with him. OrdinarUv everything seemed to me so drab, so arbitrary, as dry and yellow as sun-faded schoolroom blinds, and walking out into the world, away from a book or conversation, seemed a venture into dissolution. Entropy was my enemy, and as the world collapsed its music slurred and went sickenmgly sour, Vic-trola running dowTi.
    But not tonight as we showered out into space with our owm explosive force. We sang the song from the movie, we turned the searchlights of our faces toward each other as we ran and the beams crossed at a point in space where the doubled light was neither his nor mine but an intensity that constituted us.
    As a teenager at my father's Michigan summer house I'd looked longingly, shamefully, at all those sharp-toothed scions standing up in their speedboats as they pulled into the dock, their torsos twisting as they fiddled with the line, or as they laughed and looked back to see how badly they'd splashed their passengers. Sean had been my