Subject
Edmund White on VN (fwd)
Date
Body
From: Jerry Goodenough <J.Goodenough@uea.ac.uk>
The British newspaper *The Guardian* publishes a little column each week in its
books section entitled "I Wish I'd Written" in which writers describe the piece
of work they most wish they had written. In view of the recent exchange
concerning whether certain of VN's characterisations should be seen as
homophobic, this weeks's column by the gay novelist Edmund White may be of
interest (though I leave his description of VN's Pushkin project to the
experts!).
Jery Goodenough
University of East Anglia
Norwich
England
-------------------------
EDMUND WHITE ON 'PALE FIRE' BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Maybe I like Charles Kinbote because he's gay and insane. Nabokov certainly
likes to poke fun at his crazy narrator in this hilarious novel, which is also
extremely touching. Some gay critics object to the satire, but I find it
good-natured - and accurate.
Kinbote, a mad European scholar who has found his way to a quiet American
campus, tells his own tale obsessively to his neighbour, a famous poet who is a
sort of milder-mannered, more Georgian version of Robert Frost. His purpose is
to convince the poet to write an epic about his, Kinbote's, magical kingdom of
Zembla, the tragic loss of his throne, his marriage to a sisterly queen, his
harrowing escape over the mountains. Along the way Kinbote hopes the poet will
dwell on the king's flirtations with willing young male subjects, whom his
imagination tricks out in lip-smacking costumes (clinging swimsuits,
off-the-shoulder leopardskins).
The form of the book is one of the first examples, and by far the most
successful invention, of the postmodernist imagination. The text of the
poem, which is all about the poet's beloved daughter and her death, is
given in full. But no sooner has Kinbote presented the lines of verse
than he begins his lunatic "annotations". For he has discovered that
though at first glance the poem seems, disappointingly, to have nothing to
do with Zembla and the royal travails, a closer examination reveals that
almost every word in the poem is a coded reference to Kinbote. The
resulting commentary is not only a paradigm of paranoia, which imposes
system on life's chaos, but also the ultimate send-up of pedantry.
(Incidentally, Nabokov wrote it after years of working on an almost
equally fanciful commentary on Pushkin.)
I suppose writing any novel requires bifocal vision - a long shot of the
overall form of the book and an extreme close-up of the characters' most
fleeting thoughts and elusive feelings. Most novelists err in one
direction or the other, but in Pale Fire Nabokov achieved the perfect
equilibrium, like those trick photographers who manage to hold both the
background and the foreground in immaculate focus, something the human eye
could never manage to do. In the same way, Nabokov simultaneously provides
us with an imperious aerial view of his novelistic structures - and zooms
in to show us Kinbote's slightest tic. I think my best pages capture
character effectively, but I'm so immersed in observation that I'm not so
sure that at the same time I could ever be so playful with form. I wish
I'd written Pale Fire - or were capable of a similarly agile achievement.
[Edmund White's latest novel is *The Farewell Symphony*]
-----------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 9 Mar 1997 17:23:34 -0800
The current (Mar-Apr 97) [vol. 25, #2] issue of _Poets & Writers
Magazine_ has a profile "An American Still in Paris: Edmund White" by
Stanley E. Ely (pp. 44-49). Most hard-core Nabokovians will recall that
White was one of the very few "new" writers that VN spoke well of. (Sasha
Sokolov was another.) White, much later, was to write two excellent essays
on Nabokov's work. White details their brief contact in the excerpt below:
----------------------------------------
"White's first published novel was _Forgetting Elena_,
...published ..[in] 1973 by Random House. ....The first edition, White
recalls, was in a quantity of 2,000, about half of which got pulped soon
after publication.
"However, Vladimir Nabokov, one of the two authors who White
claims to have most influenced him, praised _Forgetting Elena_ three years
later. 'I had never met Nabokokv,' say White, 'but when _Forgetting Elena_
came out in 1973, I sent him a copy and he wrote me a complimentary letter
that he was careful to say was not for publication. Then in 1976, Gerald
Clark...interviewed Nabokov for an _Esquire_ article and hearing him
ridicule other authors, asked him who he did like. Nabokov, Clarke wrote,
replied right away: 'Edmund White. He wrote Forgetting Elena. It's a
brilliant book.'"
"Of his devotion to Nabokov, White says, "I loved him for his
sensuality and playfulness and burnished language, and I continue to
regard _Lolita_ as the best novel of the century."
"Christopher Isherwood is the other author who has had the
greatest influence on White. Of Isherwood's novel _A Single Man_ (Avon,
1964), White says: "It strikes me as the first gay novel to be utterly
unapologetic, ordinary, middle-class and quite sophisticated in its
apparent freedom from all ideological baggaage about homosexuality as a
topic, a curse, a condition."
"In the introduction to _The Burning Library_, a collection of
White's essays, reviews, andspeeches published in 1994 by Knopf, David
Bergman, editor and professor at Towson State University in Baltimore,
writes, "It is hard to imagine how a writer could be influenced by
two such extremely different sensibilities (Nabokov and Isherwood). Yet,
in White they come together. Both find in the erotic the key to
imaginativeenergy and the most alluring obstacle to understanding.
Finally, they both serve as a bridge between American culture and European
culture--a transatlantic sensibility that seems to be White's destiny."
D. Barton Johnson
Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies
Phelps Hall
University of California at Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
Phone and Fax: (805) 687-1825
Home Phone: (805) 682-4618
The British newspaper *The Guardian* publishes a little column each week in its
books section entitled "I Wish I'd Written" in which writers describe the piece
of work they most wish they had written. In view of the recent exchange
concerning whether certain of VN's characterisations should be seen as
homophobic, this weeks's column by the gay novelist Edmund White may be of
interest (though I leave his description of VN's Pushkin project to the
experts!).
Jery Goodenough
University of East Anglia
Norwich
England
-------------------------
EDMUND WHITE ON 'PALE FIRE' BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Maybe I like Charles Kinbote because he's gay and insane. Nabokov certainly
likes to poke fun at his crazy narrator in this hilarious novel, which is also
extremely touching. Some gay critics object to the satire, but I find it
good-natured - and accurate.
Kinbote, a mad European scholar who has found his way to a quiet American
campus, tells his own tale obsessively to his neighbour, a famous poet who is a
sort of milder-mannered, more Georgian version of Robert Frost. His purpose is
to convince the poet to write an epic about his, Kinbote's, magical kingdom of
Zembla, the tragic loss of his throne, his marriage to a sisterly queen, his
harrowing escape over the mountains. Along the way Kinbote hopes the poet will
dwell on the king's flirtations with willing young male subjects, whom his
imagination tricks out in lip-smacking costumes (clinging swimsuits,
off-the-shoulder leopardskins).
The form of the book is one of the first examples, and by far the most
successful invention, of the postmodernist imagination. The text of the
poem, which is all about the poet's beloved daughter and her death, is
given in full. But no sooner has Kinbote presented the lines of verse
than he begins his lunatic "annotations". For he has discovered that
though at first glance the poem seems, disappointingly, to have nothing to
do with Zembla and the royal travails, a closer examination reveals that
almost every word in the poem is a coded reference to Kinbote. The
resulting commentary is not only a paradigm of paranoia, which imposes
system on life's chaos, but also the ultimate send-up of pedantry.
(Incidentally, Nabokov wrote it after years of working on an almost
equally fanciful commentary on Pushkin.)
I suppose writing any novel requires bifocal vision - a long shot of the
overall form of the book and an extreme close-up of the characters' most
fleeting thoughts and elusive feelings. Most novelists err in one
direction or the other, but in Pale Fire Nabokov achieved the perfect
equilibrium, like those trick photographers who manage to hold both the
background and the foreground in immaculate focus, something the human eye
could never manage to do. In the same way, Nabokov simultaneously provides
us with an imperious aerial view of his novelistic structures - and zooms
in to show us Kinbote's slightest tic. I think my best pages capture
character effectively, but I'm so immersed in observation that I'm not so
sure that at the same time I could ever be so playful with form. I wish
I'd written Pale Fire - or were capable of a similarly agile achievement.
[Edmund White's latest novel is *The Farewell Symphony*]
-----------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 9 Mar 1997 17:23:34 -0800
The current (Mar-Apr 97) [vol. 25, #2] issue of _Poets & Writers
Magazine_ has a profile "An American Still in Paris: Edmund White" by
Stanley E. Ely (pp. 44-49). Most hard-core Nabokovians will recall that
White was one of the very few "new" writers that VN spoke well of. (Sasha
Sokolov was another.) White, much later, was to write two excellent essays
on Nabokov's work. White details their brief contact in the excerpt below:
----------------------------------------
"White's first published novel was _Forgetting Elena_,
...published ..[in] 1973 by Random House. ....The first edition, White
recalls, was in a quantity of 2,000, about half of which got pulped soon
after publication.
"However, Vladimir Nabokov, one of the two authors who White
claims to have most influenced him, praised _Forgetting Elena_ three years
later. 'I had never met Nabokokv,' say White, 'but when _Forgetting Elena_
came out in 1973, I sent him a copy and he wrote me a complimentary letter
that he was careful to say was not for publication. Then in 1976, Gerald
Clark...interviewed Nabokov for an _Esquire_ article and hearing him
ridicule other authors, asked him who he did like. Nabokov, Clarke wrote,
replied right away: 'Edmund White. He wrote Forgetting Elena. It's a
brilliant book.'"
"Of his devotion to Nabokov, White says, "I loved him for his
sensuality and playfulness and burnished language, and I continue to
regard _Lolita_ as the best novel of the century."
"Christopher Isherwood is the other author who has had the
greatest influence on White. Of Isherwood's novel _A Single Man_ (Avon,
1964), White says: "It strikes me as the first gay novel to be utterly
unapologetic, ordinary, middle-class and quite sophisticated in its
apparent freedom from all ideological baggaage about homosexuality as a
topic, a curse, a condition."
"In the introduction to _The Burning Library_, a collection of
White's essays, reviews, andspeeches published in 1994 by Knopf, David
Bergman, editor and professor at Towson State University in Baltimore,
writes, "It is hard to imagine how a writer could be influenced by
two such extremely different sensibilities (Nabokov and Isherwood). Yet,
in White they come together. Both find in the erotic the key to
imaginativeenergy and the most alluring obstacle to understanding.
Finally, they both serve as a bridge between American culture and European
culture--a transatlantic sensibility that seems to be White's destiny."
D. Barton Johnson
Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies
Phelps Hall
University of California at Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
Phone and Fax: (805) 687-1825
Home Phone: (805) 682-4618