Edmund White recalls a night at the opera with Michel Foucault in 1981

Author Edmund White looks back at his friendship with the late Michel Foucault

Edmund White with Michel Foucault in Paris in 1981 Photo: Courtesy Edmund White

By Edmund White

 

By the time this photo was taken in Paris in 1981 I knew Foucault fairly well. In the late Seventies I had been director of the New York Institute – a think tank involved with the university – where Foucault had lectured. I had taken him out for dinner while he was there, which was a pretty terrifying prospect. Although I had a grand title, I was really just making the coffee. But he was very friendly. He didn’t like to talk about his ideas unless he was in seminars; he talked about everyday life as anyone else would.

He was attracted to tough guys and liked young and effeminate gay boys as friends. I was neither young nor especially effeminate but somehow he liked me. I remember on this occasion in Paris he was very gracious. That evening he took me to the opera – something by Rameau, I think, and a very modern production with a lot of rubber on stage. It was a pretty big deal for him to take me. Sitting in the orchestra at the Paris opera house was terribly expensive. I do recall I made rather a faux pas: during the intermission I ordered a white wine, and Foucault told me you could order a white wine anytime in France except at the Paris opera bar. It wasn’t the done thing.

Around this time of this picture I was warning Foucault about Aids. When I first told him about the disease he said: “Oh that's perfect Edmund: you American puritans, you’re always inventing diseases. And one that singles out blacks, drug users and gays – how perfect!” Gay rights had been so hard to fight for that Aids felt like a real reversal. It just seemed to be too perfect for him to believe in it. I tried to insist that it was real despite its ideological aspects.

Living in San Francisco in the Seventies he had been promiscuous. He loved the bath houses and all that. I think that might have been where he got infected. But he was very secretive about his illness and the doctors were very secretive about it with him. There used to be a cloak of silence over such things. The doctors were intimidated by Foucault’s anti-medicine stance. They didn’t want to be accused of having a paternalistic or an I’m-better-than-you attitude. He himself wasn’t sure what his illness was until the last few months (he died in 1984). He was horrified at the thought that he might have infected his partner but fortunately he hadn’t.

I was fairly well acquainted with his intellectual ideas – as far as I understood them. He saw tiny, minute influences on history and would put his magnifying glass on everything. He would take an ancient book of pagan dreams and read so much into it. He was a fabulous researcher who could study any topic no matter how remote. He had this omnivorous interest in everything. In 1985 I published a novel called Caracole, which was based on the theories found in his multi-volume History of Sexuality. Unfortunately I couldn’t make it work. But his writing remains profoundly influential on my own.

Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris by Edmund White
272pp, Bloomsbury, t £16.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) 0844 871 1515 (RRP £18.99, ebook £11.04)