The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘Old, impotent, fat… with a tiny penis’
Veteran novelist Edmund White paints a masochistic portrait of himself in the tale of a bisexual aristocrat
273pp, Bloomsbury, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £18.99, ebook £9.04 ÌÌÌÌÌ
Towards the end of his new novel, the 82-yearold Edmund White tells us that elderly writers tend to repeat themselves. In the context, it’s a remark that falls somewhere between charmingly self-deprecating and cunningly self-protective – as A Previous Life has essentially the same theme as much of his previous fiction: that a man should follow his loins, wherever they may lead.
Strange as it might sound (especially to younger readers), not so long ago this belief was shared by most of the authors acknowledged as giants of contemporary American literature – Saul Bellow, John Updike and Philip Roth. More recently, it has fallen conspicuously out of fashion, as the great penisprioritisers of the late 20th century have been reassessed/cast into the outer darkness. Granted, White has the political advantage that his priapic protagonists are gay. Even so, this is still a book that seems rather out of time – sometimes defiantly, but often quite awkwardly.
The main character is a Sicilian aristocrat called Ruggero, whose name translates as “famous spear”.
Sure enough, he’s possessed of an uncommonly large penis (in his case, known as Bruce). He also takes White’s starry-eyed American view of European sophistication to new heights. Not only is he a worldfamous harpsichordist with impeccable taste and an IQ of 200; but, approaching 70, he looks like “a Greek god”, remains an energetic (daily) lover and has “breath like the abrasion of the finest cloth-backed diamond sandpaper on wood that was already smooth”.
When we first meet him, in 2050, Ruggero is married to the beautiful Constance, 40 years his junior. She is duly obsessed with Bruce’s magnificence, but nonetheless worried that her husband might run off with someone younger, prettier, and possibly less female. That’s because, in another mark of his European sophistication, Ruggero is a genuine bisexual (something, White observes sniffily, most Americans don’t believe in).
Or at least that’s what we keep being told he is. In fact, Ruggero shares White’s idea – again, as laid out in several earlier works – that gay sex is both more enjoyable and more authentic: unencumbered as it is by the need for men to “abnegate the fulfilment of their desires in favour of their duties to their children and their wives”. In consequence, it’s Ruggero’s many gay relationships that always seem closer to his heart, as
well as to White’s. They are also described in a lot more detail.
Most detailed of all is the affair Ruggero had in 2018 with the “ridiculously prolific… gay novelist” Edmund White (who in his 80s wrote a work of “old-fashioned metafiction” entitled A Previous Life). The sex scenes that follow confirm White’s fondness for lurid masochism, which we know about from many of his novels and from what this one calls “his countless autobiographies”. Such masochism perhaps extends to White’s description of his 78-year-old self as “old, impotent, fat, feeble”, with an “overly inflected ‘gay’ voice” and a “tiny penis”.
So what, you may be wondering, did Ruggero see in him? The answer is never clear. Then again, it’s by no means the only question that this strange and perplexing novel leaves dangling. Naturally, it wouldn’t matter so much – or at all – if the book’s many uncertainties and contradictions came across as a deliberate acknowledgment of the many uncertainties and contradictions involved in looking back on a long life. The trouble is that A Previous Life feels far more unfinished, even careless, than that. Its 2050 setting, for instance, is something that White seems to remember only intermittently. (And often the timelines don’t quite work, anyway.) Certainly, there appear to have been no advances in either technology or world politics.
When Constance reads White’s books long after his death, we do get one obvious nudge as to what he’s striving after. In his 80s, she decides, he heroically reinvented himself, with his fiction finally evolving “out of the ‘gay’ swamps into the terra firma of polyamory”. Yet, while there’s undeniably more heterosexual content than usual here, the penis remains king. Meanwhile, as Constance obligingly points out, “after thirty… a woman lost her dew and was just brown petals curling in the heat”. In short, as reinventions go, A Previous Life proves a pretty minor one.