Nocturnes for the King of Naples
Edmund White
A young man leans with one shoulder against the wall, and his slender body remains motionless against the huge open slab of night sky and night water behind him. He is facing the river. Little waves scuttling shoreward from a passing, passed scow slap against boards: perfunctory applause.
—Edmund White, Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978)
A lot can be made out of the appreciation for a famous novel’s first sentence. Years ago, the internet was inundated with think-pieces ranking or elaborating such rival openers drawn from the masterpieces of the English language. Ok fine. Tiring, yes. Even so, I was charmed to learn that while David Harvey struggled to teach all of volume one of Capital in a single semester, Derrida was devoting a whole seminar to the opening page. Reading and study as bourgeois fetish porn? I mean also why not. I guess certain close readings make others seem standoffish.
Still, beginnings matter.
I want to look at the first three sentences from the opening page of Nocturnes for the King of Naples by the newly deceased Edmund White. Which I know many people consider his best written book, or one of. I came to White through a summer in Paris, tramping around with mostly two books, a slim monograph by Levinas on existentialism (one of the densest texts I had ever read) and White’s own monumental biography of Jean Genet. I continued throughout the years to read White’s literary essays and bios (Rimbaud). Last night I bicycled to McNally Jackson and grabbed Nocturne for the King of Naples, introduced by Garth Greenwell (the foreword is majestic). This is how Stacey D’Erasmo blurbs said book: “The most gorgeous evocation I have ever read of the 1970s gay male nighttown at New York’s old rotting piers, a twisted, rusting, metallic ruin of anonymous sex and unexpectedly sublime tableaus.”
A young man leans with one shoulder against the wall, and his slender body remains motionless against the huge open slab of night sky and night water behind him.
This sentence does a lot of work. Isolated, we may not know yet Chapter 1 opens with the narrator trolling for dick in Manhattan. This is not an image of someone on their knees or a description of a murmuration of shadows under the piers, near the slapping sound of water and bodies (that comes later). Instead we have a rather statuesque image, something out of Keats (half-recumbent on its own might) or Scott Fitzgerald. Or maybe a more fay T.S. Eliot. There are many neat repetitions and parallels afoot. “Against” and “night” emphasize not only position but contact, not only setting and mood but envelopment. A nocturne, pointed to by the title, is a short piece of music known for its ambient, dreamy, melancholic or evocative atmospherics. The sentence has some supple symmetries: “shoulder” and “slender,” not to mention the contrapuntal force of “leans,” “remains,” “motionless.” The sentence points to movement yet seems to lack it. But it gets even better. Notice the telescopic shift in scale: from a mere wall where a lone boy perches, to the “huge open slab of night sky,” which is quite baroque, I’d say.
One thinks of Eliot’s Prufrock: those “lonely men in shirt-sleeves leaning out of windows” as well as, ala the night slab, the famed opening: “When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.” Eliot’s line is more iconic, sure, and original. But it’s also ghastly. Determined. White’s night is not just huge and slab, which is visceral and textured enough, but importantly: “open.” Why is something so large and heavy yet accepting and inviting? It might say something about gay sex, in general. But specific to this scene, I think there’s already hunger and expectation leaking through.
On a very good day I might have written “a huge open slab of night sky and water,” but White has me beat. I would not have thought to write “a huge open slab of night sky and night water,” because that repetition might seem redundant. Repetition is to modulate and emphasize, never to succumb to diminishing returns, right? But the double use of “night” so close together is not redundant. It’s brilliant.