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Re: [NABOKOV-L] [Query] Edmund White
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Fran Assa: "Nabokov thought highly enough of White's Forgetting Elena, to recommend it to Frederick Hill of McGraw Hill, since White was having trouble getting it published ..See his letter to Hill towards the end of the Bruccoli and D. Nabokov collection."
R.S::"Forgetting Elena, his first novel." (off-list)
JM: From Edmund White's words in the interview reproduced in the link sent by J.Twiggs ("...my first novel to be published, Forgetting Elena, came out. And I sent it to him, and he sent me a charming letter. Two lines: "Dear Mr. White, My wife and I both enjoyed your book very much. Everything is teetering on the edge of everything." And the first line was: "This is not for publication." ... maybe three years later, 1976, Gerald Clarke...blurted out a question like: "Who are your favorite writers?" And Nabokov said, "Edmund White, he wrote Forgetting Elena." And so Gerald Clarke put all that down...Clarke called me up and said, "Will you talk to me about your friendship with Nabokov?" And I said, "Well, I don't really know him. I only talked to him on the phone once when I was doing this issue." And that's the whole story." Cf. http://www.bookslut.com/features/2007_02_010621.php), I'd not have guessed that Nabokov had recommended "Forgetting Elena"to Frederick Hill ( did E.White?).
From my brief (first) encounter E.White I learned a lot of "technical terms" related to British-American vocabulary (gay-queer; curtain-drape;rug-carpet,etc), and other expressive words, but my overall feeling was one of having entered into a very "men only" realm - like, in contrast, Uncle Rukka's and VN's, "young girls only," La Bibliothèque Rose (Freud read "Les Malheurs de Sophie" by the Comtesse de Ségur ie: Sophie Rostopchine), with their selective "exclusions." Perhaps Nabokov's fun, wearing a poncho and blind glasses fits into this same kind of pastiche (if that's the word for it). I wonder where we can gain access to these images.
Alexey Skylark: "Speaking of Zoshchenko ("Retrieved Youthfulness", 1933) ...an ageing professor who marries a young woman only to be struck down by paralysis soon afterwards...reminded me of Vadim, the hero of VN's LATH, who gets paralyzed soon after marrying his last love...Nearly all his life Vadim Vadimovich suffered from a mysterious mental illness. Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko (1895-1958), the writer famous for his humorous stories (who is mentioned in Chapter Four of The Gift)...[in] "Before the Sunrise" (1944, 1972) tells how he once spent 24 hours lying supine on the floor of his hotel room in Tuapse (a spa on the Caucasian Black sea coast). Tuapse is mentioned in LATH when the hero nearly drowns during a moonlight swim: "I was too upset in all senses to tell whether I was heading for Yalta or Tuapse" (Part One, 7). Cf. Nochnaya panika plovtsa (a swimmer's panic in the night), a line from Vadim's poem Vlyublyonnost'."
JM: Great links, Alexey, truly complex and wonderful unraveling. In RLSK we find Sebastian Knight lying supine on the floor like a resting biblical God after having created the world.Until then I'd only associated this dramatic posture with Nabokov's poignant description of Uncle Rukka's similar posture and his lonely death from heart failure (S,M).
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R.S::"Forgetting Elena, his first novel." (off-list)
JM: From Edmund White's words in the interview reproduced in the link sent by J.Twiggs ("...my first novel to be published, Forgetting Elena, came out. And I sent it to him, and he sent me a charming letter. Two lines: "Dear Mr. White, My wife and I both enjoyed your book very much. Everything is teetering on the edge of everything." And the first line was: "This is not for publication." ... maybe three years later, 1976, Gerald Clarke...blurted out a question like: "Who are your favorite writers?" And Nabokov said, "Edmund White, he wrote Forgetting Elena." And so Gerald Clarke put all that down...Clarke called me up and said, "Will you talk to me about your friendship with Nabokov?" And I said, "Well, I don't really know him. I only talked to him on the phone once when I was doing this issue." And that's the whole story." Cf. http://www.bookslut.com/features/2007_02_010621.php), I'd not have guessed that Nabokov had recommended "Forgetting Elena"to Frederick Hill ( did E.White?).
From my brief (first) encounter E.White I learned a lot of "technical terms" related to British-American vocabulary (gay-queer; curtain-drape;rug-carpet,etc), and other expressive words, but my overall feeling was one of having entered into a very "men only" realm - like, in contrast, Uncle Rukka's and VN's, "young girls only," La Bibliothèque Rose (Freud read "Les Malheurs de Sophie" by the Comtesse de Ségur ie: Sophie Rostopchine), with their selective "exclusions." Perhaps Nabokov's fun, wearing a poncho and blind glasses fits into this same kind of pastiche (if that's the word for it). I wonder where we can gain access to these images.
Alexey Skylark: "Speaking of Zoshchenko ("Retrieved Youthfulness", 1933) ...an ageing professor who marries a young woman only to be struck down by paralysis soon afterwards...reminded me of Vadim, the hero of VN's LATH, who gets paralyzed soon after marrying his last love...Nearly all his life Vadim Vadimovich suffered from a mysterious mental illness. Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko (1895-1958), the writer famous for his humorous stories (who is mentioned in Chapter Four of The Gift)...[in] "Before the Sunrise" (1944, 1972) tells how he once spent 24 hours lying supine on the floor of his hotel room in Tuapse (a spa on the Caucasian Black sea coast). Tuapse is mentioned in LATH when the hero nearly drowns during a moonlight swim: "I was too upset in all senses to tell whether I was heading for Yalta or Tuapse" (Part One, 7). Cf. Nochnaya panika plovtsa (a swimmer's panic in the night), a line from Vadim's poem Vlyublyonnost'."
JM: Great links, Alexey, truly complex and wonderful unraveling. In RLSK we find Sebastian Knight lying supine on the floor like a resting biblical God after having created the world.Until then I'd only associated this dramatic posture with Nabokov's poignant description of Uncle Rukka's similar posture and his lonely death from heart failure (S,M).
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/