HG- E. M.
Forster speaks of his major characters sometimes taking over and dictating the
course of his novels. Has this ever been a problem for you, or are you in
complete command?
VN- My knowledge of Mr.
Forster's works is limited to one novel, which I dislike; and anyway, it was not
he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand*;
it is as old as the quills, although of course one sympathizes with his people
if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My
characters are galley slaves.
I wonder what novel by E M
Forster Nabokov read and, if "limited to one novel.," "A
Passage to India" is the most obvious choice. However,
there's another novel that might fit the bill. Sexually charged
bathing scenes were not uncommon in England during the early days
of the twentieth century and there's one particular scene in "The Real Life
of Sebastian Knight" in which a passing reference to this bucolic practice
could have been made, with more irony than eroticism. In this scene
Sebastian seems as surprised as the ladies pictured by E M
Forster in his novel "A Room with a View.," when they accidentaly saw
a naked trio - that included a wet frolicsome priest, a Mr.
Beebe. Another similar scene surfaces a few years later in D
H Lawrence's "The White Peacock" (1911). The naiad that turned into a
long-haired naked priest in connection to Sebastian's "last dark love," if
related to Forster's and Lawrence's homoerotic scenes, may be quite a
revelation! (Should V stop to "chercher la
femme"?).
"...I collected one of the most precious pages of
Sebastian's life [...] There seems to have been a law of some strange harmony in
the placing of a meeting relating to Sebastian's first adolescent romance in
such close proximity to the echoes of his last dark love. Two modes of his life
question each other and the answer is his life itself, and that is the nearest
one ever can approach a human truth. He was sixteen and so was she...a Russian
summer landscape is disclosed; the bend of a river half in the shade
...Sebastian is lustily rowing in a boat ...A girl is sitting at the helm.[...]
The picture changes: another bend of that river...Sebastian is sitting upon the
bench and reading aloud some English verse from a black copybook. Then he stops
suddenly: a little to the left a naiad's head with auburn hair is seen just
above the water, receding slowly, the long tresses floating behind. Then the
nude bather emerges on the opposite bank, blowing his nose with the aid of his
thumb; it is the long-haired village priest. Sebastian goes on reading to the
girl beside him." (RLSK,Ch.14)
There's another similarity bt. Lawrence (thru Forster,rainbows and nude
bathers) and RLSK. It's equally slight but still
rather significant in my eyes: it's a masculine image of
blossoming chestnut candles set close to fluvial
adventures:
Cf.ch.VIII "A poem of friendship" (The white peacock
by DHLawrence)
"The horse-chestnuts bravely kept their white candles erect in the
socket of every bough, though no sun came to light them. Drearily a cold
swan swept up the water, trailing its black feet, clacking its great hollow
wings, rocking the frightened water-hens, and insulting the staid black-necked
geese. What did I want that I turned thus from one thing to another?"
RLSK: Ch 4. "...In those days, he wrote far better
than he spoke, but still there was something vaguely un-English about his poems.
None of them have reached me. True, his friend thought that perhaps one or
two....'By the way,' I said, 'the past you recall seems dismally wet
meteorologically speaking — as dismal, in fact, as today's weather [it was a
bleak day in February]. Tell me, was it never warm and sunny? Does not Sebastian
himself refer somewhere to the "pink candlesticks of great chestnut
trees" along the bank of some beautiful little river?'...Yes, I was right,
spring and summer did happen in Cambridge almost every year (that mysterious
'almost' was singularly pleasing). Yes, Sebastian quite liked to loll in a punt
on the Cam."
..............................................................
* - VN's words on this "trite little whimsy" may be
profitably contrasted to a character's destiny in the reader's
world, with the "literary hero losing gradually contact
with the book that bore him; leaving his fatherland, leaving his creator's desk
and roaming space after roaming Spain. ...He has ridden for three hundred and
fifty years through the jungles and tundras of human thought—and he has gained
in vitality and stature" (Lectures on Don Quixote, recently quoted in a
N-List posting)
.