Bombs Bursting in Air

Edmund White´s irrepressible libido has helped craft one of the more varied and interesting careers of the last half-century.White has alternated between steamy memoirs (My Lives) and intellectually rigorous novels (Hotel de Dream), and now, thanks to a former lover, White has written Terre Haute, a play about an imagined meeting on death row between Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and a journalist who bears more than a passing resemblance to Gore Vidal.

Settling down with a cup of tea in his Chelsea apartment,White recently opened up about the play,Vidal and those trashy In Cold Blood murderers.

New York Press: I understand that you wrote the play for a lover? Edmund White:

I had a very cute boyfriend who looked like Timothy McVeigh, and he asked me to write it for him. He eventually did it on the radio on the BBC with Ian McKellan, and then he dropped me and never played it again! But when he asked me, I said, ‘OK, I’ll do whatever you want me to do.’ But the problem was I had no way to write McVeigh from the inside. And then I thought, ‘Wasn’t he involved with Gore Vidal?’That I could figure out. I’ve known Gore since 1974, and over the years, he’s tried to pick a few fights with me in print, but they never went anywhere because I don’t like to fight, [though] it’s probably the way you get to be famous.Then when the BBC did it, the BBC wanted to announce that it was about Gore Vidal. And I said, ‘Please don’t do that.They never actually met, and it’s not based on their correspondence because no one’s ever read it. If it’s based on anything, it’s based on a few fairly abstract articles that Gore Vidal wrote.’

Since Vidal has a reputation as a provocateur, do you think he meant what he wrote in “The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh,” that McVeigh had valid reasons for what he did?

I think he does.When he turned out to be a homegrown terrorist, I think Gore got very interested in him. And McVeigh is a very interesting terrorist, if that’s what he is, in that he had no criminal record, he was a war hero, but he was not a racist or anti- Semite. In other words, he doesn’t fit the profile. He’s a little bit like those suicide terrorists in the Muslim world. He’s totally seized by his sense of mission, with very little interest in what will happen to him afterward.Vidal must have been very interested in that whole aspect of him, and was quite articulate in talking about the principles of freedom and the Bill of Rights.

A lot of Vidal’s essay is taken up with laying out the possibility of a conspiracy, purporting that McVeigh didn’t work alone.

For the purposes of my play, I was more interested in what it means to be an American, to be a man, about both of them facing a death sentence, the writer because of his age. All of that would get dissipated if people started scratching their heads over a possible conspiracy! Anyway, Gore wanted to sue me when this play was in London, but I think he wanted me to elaborately present his point of view about this event.That would have taken up the whole play! And I think he was irritated by two things: One was that he was worried that someone might think I was comparing him to Truman Capote. But I don’t think he can be compared at all to those trashy In Cold Blood people.When he was sentenced, he quoted a line from Justice Brandeis about the importance of defending civil liberty! And the second was that the character was attracted to Timothy McVeigh.Would he have been attracted? Probably not. I don’t think that’s his style.

The character’s feelings are much closer to my own. Gore’s anti-romantic. He’s not much interested in falling in love. He lived with this really nice man his whole life, and he never even calls him his lover! The only one he talks about in [his memoir] Palimpsest is that boy—who conveniently died.

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Terre Haute
Jan. 18 through Feb. 15, 59E59 Theaters, 59 E. 59th St. (betw. Madison & Park Aves.), 212-279-4200; times vary, $35.