The Farewell Symphony
(1997)
The
Farewell Symphony, named after the work by Haydn in
which the instrumentalists leave the stage one after another
until just a single violin is still playing, is the story
of a gay man who has outlived most of his friends. But this
novel is as funny as it is sad, as sexual as it is elegiac,
and it attains a resonant power as the self-portrait of
an artist, a writer learning his craft.
Starting in the late 1960s and
coming up to the present day, the action of The
Farewell Symphony takes place in New York, Rome, and
Paris and is as much about the Jamesian dilemma of the American
in Europe as it is about braving the elements of love and
loss. At its heart is the tale of a writer and his struggle
to survive as he and his friends hammer out a new gay aesthetic,
support themselves through odd jobs and fight for recognition.
The narrator also allies himself with an older, richer and
more established generation of gay men who are often uncomfortable
with the sexual frankness of his prose—and of his nightly
adventures. The novel brilliantly juxtaposes scenes of high
cultural discussion among men of the Manhattan mandarinate
with tough, gritty scenes of backroom sex and sadomasochism.
If the central theme is the coming-of-age
of a novelist, that subject is paralleled by two others:
family love and romantic love. The narrator’s sister undergoes
a skirmish with madness; his mother torments him; he adopts
his sister’s teenage son, and—poignantly, absurdly—goes
through a spell as a surrogate parent. At the same time,
we follow the narrator through a series of painful, occasionally
hilarious love affairs that culminate in a late and spiritually
transforming relationship with a dying man.
Time dilates and contracts as the
narrative flows like memory, moving between the present
and the past, and the compelling shape of The
Farewell Symphony grows to encompass both a generation
and an individual life in a wholly original way. Sublimely
funny and wise, written in a language of extraordinary elegance
and full of trenchant, witty observations about sex and
society, this is Edmund White’s greatest novel, a crowning
achievement by one of the finest writers in the language.
