Edmund White had the most beautiful blush. I recall watching him at a celebration of his work while one of his most sexually explicit essays (which is saying a lot) was read aloud—my mind had to perform its own gymnastics just to picture all the right organs in the right receptacles. Ed’s blush somehow managed to overlap his cheeks and spread across his chin, his forehead, his ears, and into his greatest receptacle of all: his kindly, contemplative soul.

No one blushed like Ed. And when you saw him blush, you saw a midwestern child still agog at the wide world and the fact that it would accept him. The path between his homeland of Cincinnati and the salons of New York and Europe seemed smoother than it had been, just like the ease and unaffected nature of Ed’s prose hid the great artistry

See Full Page