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And the first line was: “This is not for publication.”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).