‘It tingles with the excitement of sexual truth-telling’: Alan Hollinghurst on a gay classic

A Boy’s Own Story chronicles a teenager’s journey to adulthood in the 1950s midwest

A Boy’s Own Story is both a masterpiece in the literature of adolescence and a pivotal book in the history of gay writing, opening up the landscape of teenage homosexuality with revelatory frankness. “What if,” its narrator wonders, “I could write about my life exactly as it was? What if I could show it in all its density and tedium and its concealed passion, never divined or expressed?” The “realism” of the 19th-century fiction he devours seems to him a kind of fantasy, creating a “parallel life”, “tinglingly far-fetched”. Could there be a new realism that faithfully depicted the inner and outer worlds he actually lived in? In the midwest of the 1950s the growing-up of a young gay man is a vulnerable, marginal, barely visible thing, riven by confusion, self-hatred and doubt. Edmund White’s novel, doing justice to all this confusion, tingles none the less with its own excitement: the value, and novelty, the sheer teeming interest, of telling the truth. More than 30 years on, in a culture in which sexual truth-telling is ubiquitous, it retains its power to startle: in the tense insouciance with which it describes a 14-year-old’s lust for his father, or his earning money to pay for a hustler; or in the hair-raising betrayal that brings the novel to its close, a wilful act towards which we see the whole narrative has been moving with an awful logic.

If it changed the rules for what was possible in literary fiction, A Boy’s Own Story, a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, also marked a new direction for White, and confirmed the liberating potential of a closely autobiographical kind of novel, where the testamentary force of memoir is coupled with the artifice of fiction. The embrace of such a genre as a career-long practice was a surrender to adventure, undertaken with no knowledge of how the story would continue. It was bound to find its form less in the conventional architecture of plot than in the symmetries of the narrator’s inner world, the driving force of his desires, the selective harmonies of memory. White himself cannot have known, when he wrote A Boy’s Own Story, that he would write the sequels that were to join it in a kind of first-person trilogy, The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1998) – books telling a young man’s story, since youth, in the gay world of the 60s and 70s, which seemed magically extended until it was brutally curtailed. We see now that A Boy’s Own Story appeared at a turning point in the history that White’s later books would unfold, just before the Aids virus violently reconfigured the very world he was describing. The trilogy thus has a second personal thread running through it, and intimately connected, the growth not only of a gay man, but of a driven and ambitious writer, of extraordinary gifts, destined to define gay literature for a generation.

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