Subject
VN & Edmund White
Date
Body
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that he was careful to say was not for publication.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
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