Edmund White has always struggled between appeasing the gods of his art and paying off the princelings of politics. Endearingly, and sometimes infuriatingly, he insists on doing both, and the result often leaves his pockets rather empty. Thus in his book of selected journalism, The Burning Library, he can move from a sublime celebration of Nabokov's 'greatness' to a demand that 'even the hierarchy inherent in the concept of a canon must be jettisoned.' It is how he is able, in a piece about Robert Mapplethorpe, to argue that 'passion, like art, is always irresponsible, useless, an end in itself, regulated by its own impulses and nothing else' and to propose in another that the best gay writing should be a combination of confession, reportage and witness.

LRB 24 August 1995 | PDF Download