Edmund White: Alive, kicking and still engaging

Author Edmund White is alive and well and kicking vigorously. This is surprising, not merely because he’s 78 and has been HIV-positive since 1985, but because he’s racked up two strokes and undergone open heart surgery in recent years.

None of this seems to have diminished his spirits.

White, who is gay and the author of “A Boy’s Own Story” and “The Farewell Symphony,” is back with a new book-crazy memoir, “The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading.” It finds him seductively “rambling” (his word) through boyhood memories of library-stack escapades, both bibliophilic and erotic; his literary friendships with John Irving, Alison Lurie, Joyce Carol Oates and others; and his marriage to writer Michael Carroll, which he makes sound like a union between a social butterfly (himself ) and a soberly devoted apostle of literature (Carroll).

There’s also brilliant commentary on novelists Colette and Penelope Fitzgerald, cult author Curzio Malaparte, playwright-filmmaker Jean Cocteau and Britain’s greatest literary eccentric, Henry Green.

Still, this is a memoir, not a work of literary criticism, and the delightful thing about it is the way White’s adventures and omnivorous reading habits intersect. “Vice” is funny, sexy and continually informed by White’s eagerness to drink down physical and cultural worlds in entirety.

The teenaged White lived with his divorced mother on Chicago’s Near North Side before heading to college in Michigan. As he puts it, he was “a midwestern public library aesthete and wouldbe

‘The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading’ By Edmund White, Bloomsbury, 225 pages, $28

intellectual.”

At 16, his sexual yearnings were mixed up with his social ambitions. He has vivid memories of frequenting a bookstore on Rush Street during the ’50s.

“I was fascinated by the owner,” he recalls, “not because I found him attractive but because I knew he was gay. I told him I was looking for a rich older lover, and he said, ‘They go for each other — why would a millionaire want you, a simple girl of the people?’ ”

“Learning to be gay felt not unrelated to learning to be cultured,” White adds. “I wanted to be urbane more than erudite.”

Striving to become urbane in your teens and 20s can lead to some absurd posturing, and White is ruefully humorous about his politics in his youth.

“In ‘progressive’ circles in the 1960s,” he writes, “we were accustomed to taking positions exactly contrary to our own interests.” He also, lately, is reconsidering what he once saw as his mother’s intellectual fuzziness: “When I asked her if she believed in free will or determinism, she replied, ‘A little bit of both, dear,’ which doesn’t seem so inane to me now.”

As “Vice” jumps from person to person and topic to topic, White keeps returning to the question of what makes fiction masterpieces work.

“Critics always praise precision in writing,” he says, “but one of the great (and seldom mentioned) resources of fiction is vagueness. … The moralized vague, the unspecific, has the advantage of being incontestable. If you say, ‘She owned a beautiful painting,’ no one can challenge you. If you say, ‘She owned a Modigliani,’ half your readers will say ‘Ick.’ ”

There’s one notable error in “Vice.” White misidentifies a short-story collection he co-wrote with Adam Mars-Jones as “Skinned Alive” (it was “The Darker Proof ”). There are repetitions, too, as he dismisses “American coffee-cup realism” or recalls his worry as a young writer that his homosexuality would exclude him from “all the key Tolstoyan literary occasions such as marriage and childbirth.” But give the guy a break. He’s had two strokes and a heart attack!

It makes more sense just to savor his wisdom on reading and writing.

“People interested in putting together a very restricted canon of great books don’t really like reading,” he advises. On a more philosophical note: “We never read the same book twice. But each time it is our book, locked in our innermost heart as we move and change through time.”