BY TIM MILLER

February 2001 | Out in the Mountains |15

  Loss Within Loss: An Interview with
Edmund White and Patrick Moore

The new book Loss Within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS is an extraordinary

achievement of witness, memory and love. Edited by noted novelist Edmund White and created

in cooperation with the Estate Project for Artists With AIDS, Loss Within Loss has brought some of.America’s most
eloquent writers together, from Maya Angelou to Brad Gooch, to remember the lives and the art that were stolen from us by AIDS. Amid the cultural

zeitgeist that would have us sweep HIV/AIDS under
the carpet as old business from the end of the last
century, I was struck by the pride and sorrow I felt for
those fierce lives that were lived with such heat and
joy. Raphael Kadushin of University of Wisconsin
Press said of Loss Within Loss, “What struck me
about the book was the fact that it was never depress-
ing or maudlin. It’s not really about death and dying.
In the end it’s about the act of living, and how exhil-
arating it was (and is) to be a truly gifted artist as a
young man.”

The variety of the lives remembered — as well as

the powerful and varied approaches each of the writ-_

ers employed to mark the loss of one individual —
made reading the book a memorable journey of great
depth. Searing in their honesty, these essays uncover
new truths about one of the horrific events of the 20th
century. The writing is endlessly surprising and is a
huge contribution to acknowledging the psychic and
emotional scars of the last two decades.

Though there have been a number of AIDS mem-
oirs in the last fifteen years, many of them among the

' most powerful writing done on any subject in recent

memory, Loss Within Loss invites us anew to ponder

A the swath of genius and creativity that were taken
I from us so early. The book accumulates great force

from the breathtaking variety among the pieces. The
reader is pulled from a stately and deeply felt funer-

' al oration by Alan Gurganus on James Merrill to the

angry and irreverent missile that Craig Lucas’
launches on our complacency as he ponders the men

in his life that have been ripped from him. In his.

deeply felt and eloquent introduction to the book
Edmund White details the hot pain of that love and
loss that fills these memories in Loss within Loss:
“When I hold these essays in my hand I can feel the
heat rise off of them - the intense, baked terra-cotta
heat of longing and desire, or the headachy, sobbing
heat of grief writhing on the mattress, pounding it
like a defeated wrestler. And I can feel the simple,
blunt fact of the heat of human presence - of eye-
lashes brushing the pillowcase, of breath held, heart
bursting, of another head on the pillow, drinking it all
in, a bit stunned by such voluminous and cruel infor-
mation but observant nonetheless, memorizing the
moment.”

I had conversations recently with Edmund White,
editor of Loss Within Loss, and Patrick Moore, direc-
tor of The Estate Project for Artists With AIDS who
planted the seeds of this inspiring collection.

Tim Miller: How did loss within Loss come to
be?

Edmund White: Patrick Moore had the title and
the whole project and approached me to edit the col-
lection. I suggested about half the people and the
Estate Project already had picked about half. I was
brought in to write an introduction and to edit the
pieces. People were eager and excited to do it. Some
of the writers, Alex Chee for example, brought lots of
unresolved feelings of passion and love for painter
Peter Kelloran. He was also worried that the painter
might be completely unknown otherwise. That was
really part of the thrill for people was to have a
chance to write about friends and lovers who had

LOSS WITHIN LOSS

ARTISTS

   

 ~ EDMUND WHITE

In coopanuion wish the Estate Projm for Artist: with All):

A proper 9! III Alliance in Ill An:

I think one thing
that is due to the
dead is absolute
honesty. There is
such a tendency to
have a kind of piety
that sets in almost
automatically when
someone dies.

meant so much to them. That was the excitement of
this project, to have a forum for discussing all these
richly lived lives that might have gone unnoticed oth-
erwise. '

Patrick Moore: I had hoped that these essays
would be deeply personal and subjective discussions
of both the artists lost and their work. We worked
together for nearly two years to solicit the essays and
present them to publishers. Whether we have

reached a new period of hope with AIDS or are just
experiencing a lull, it is the right time to look back at
the impact of what happened during the first wave.
We Americans seem: not to be very interested in
remembering and learning from crisis. It is my hope
that the book will help us see just what we’ve already
lost. Loss Within Loss was a title I came up with to
acknowledge that, with the death of these artists, we
face a loss not only of the person but their work as
well.

TM: The enormous ongoing mourning of this
event can be overwhelming. It hit me as I read
the book how much unfinished business there is
with marking the huge losses we have faced
from HIV/AIDS. What did you discover or learn
about the ongoing process of mourning and
memory through putting the book together?
What's ourjob right now? The book sets a strong
challenge to acknowledge what has gone on.

EW: I think that people have become quite will-
fully blasé about HIV-AIDS. With my own last novel
The Married Man, I had an awful lot of gay journal-
ists, no straight ones, who said_to me “How can you
write about this tired old material? Why did you
choose to write about AIDS when it’s over?” I think
that anything that dealt such a huge wound as the
AIDS epidemic has, has to be acknowledged for
another fifty years at least. The book is some link to
a future consciousness. What do we need to be doing
right now? The Estate Project for Artists with AIDS
is doing a great thing because they are digitalizing all
the art work of artists that died of AIDS. That’s a
tremendously useful thing, because especially those
who haven’t achieved fame are terrified that their
work would be dispersed, destroyed, sold off, paint-
ed over after their deaths. The idea of total erasure is
one of the most frightening ideas for an artist. The
only reason to make all these sacrifices is that maybe
your artwork will linger on for a while. This book is
in a tiny, minor way preserving a lot of these lives
and hope it will suggest that people do other books
that are similar. I dothink their stories show some of
the range of gay life and the experiences that the
AIDS epidemic inflicted on people.

PM: I discovered that mourning and time are
enormously healing, but I also discovered that we are
almost all willing to speak ill of the dead. I think that
AIDS deaths carry with them an enormous amount of
unresolved emotions that are pretty clearly seen in
these essays.

TM: That complexity moved me powerfully in
the book - the honesty the writers express
about how layered, even contradictory, their
feelings are about the dead. Ramsey McPhillips’
piece on enfant terrible artist Mark Morrisroe is
so unflinching and tough on this multi-faceted
person.

‘ EW: We were all thinking of cutting that one and
actually my boyfriend Michael Carroll read it and

said, “Are you kidding this is the most lively and

honest piece in the whole book”. Thank God he spot-
ted it and we all came around to his way of thinking.

~.

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