This is the third novel in a trilogy which began with A Boy’s Own Story and continued with The Beautiful Room Is Empty. Indeed, although he takes his title from Haydn’s Farewell Symphony, he could equally have appropriated Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata, so haunted is his narrative by his past. As a long-term survivor, he feels that he owes a duty to the dead.
White – or his narrator (the boundaries are blurred) – describes the process as ‘oppressed in the Fifties, freed in the Sixties, enthralled in the Seventies and wiped out in the Eighties’. The autobiographical impulse has become increasingly urgent now that the cycle of gay life moves at the speed of time-lapse photography. Along with fellow members of the Lavender Quill group, Andrew Holleran and Felice Picano, he endorsed autobiographical fiction as a means of validating gay experience. The impetus behind White’s own writing has always been to combine the narrative and the sexual. Recalling Manhattan in the late Sixties, the narrator of Edmund White’s new novel writes that ‘more and more gay men were telling me their stories as though the main pressure behind cruising were narrative rather than sexual’.
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