As most will have heard, the novelist, essayist, biographer and Nabokov admirer Edmund White has died at 85, on June 3, 2025 (see New York Times obituary).
In 1972, as a senior editor of the new Saturday Review of the Arts White organised a Nabokov special issue for the inaugural number, with contributions from William Gass, Joyce Carol Oates, Joseph McElroy, and himself. In October he cabled Nabokov asking would he contribute a 2000-word essay. Flattered by the attention, and touched by White’s mention of mutual friends Simon Karlinsky, Peter Kemeny, and William F. Buckley, and in the throes of gathering material for Strong Opinions, Nabokov agreed, and wrote the essay “On Inspiration.” As I add in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years:
Several months later, Nabokov would read Edmund White's own first novel, Forgetting Elena, and think it an example of inspiration. Asked in a 1975 interview whom he most admired among current American writers, he answered Edmund White (and Updike, and Salinger). By that comment alone, this notoriously severe reader— who until this point had promoted to American audiences only three unfamiliar writers, two Russian (Andrey Bely and Vladislav Khodasevich) and one Belgian (Franz Hellens)—would do more than anyone else to launch White's career—
as White told me in 1988 when he visited Auckland on a book tour.
When I introduced him for a reading at the University of Auckland, I compared the scene in Forgetting Elena where the hero rakes leaves all day long with the scene of Lyovin helping with the hay-mowing in Anna Karenina. His first response was to say how pleased he was that his audience was not almost exclusively young mustachioed men—mustaches were very much a gay badge at the time—because he considered himself a novelist and not a gay novelist. He then added that the Lyovin passage was one of his favorite in fiction, and that its counterpart in Forgetting Elena in fact echoed the punishment his father had imposed on him—raking leaves all day—when he found out his son was gay, as if this would somehow cure him of his aberrant inclination.
White also told me that when inspiration for fiction flagged, he picked up some Nabokov, especially Ada, to recharge his imaginative batteries (I think I recall he was particularly talking of the writing of Caracole, 1985).
Simon Karlinsky once told me that he met White, I think for the first time, just after conducting a PhD comprehensive oral examination in Russian literature, and was impressed by the fact that White, who had majored in Chinese, knew far more about Russian literature than the Berkeley doctoral candidate.
Karlinsky also told me that he was surprised and impressed by Nabokov’s acumen when I reported that Nabokov was perfectly aware that he, Karlinsky, was gay, because in the pre gay-liberation days when they had met he had been, he thought, rather good at hiding his own sexual orientation when he needed to. Forgetting Elena (unlike The Joy of Gay Sex and most of White’s later work) was not overtly gay, but, as Wikipedia has it, “can be read as commenting on gay culture in a coded manner.” It is set on what a reader on the New York or the gay scene could recognise as Fire Island, but not being part of those scenes, I did not crack its code—although Nabokov, I presume, did, and (again, I presume) liked its hauntingly original evocation of the pressure of social conformity despite recognising that it was reporting on gay rituals (he may or may not have known about Fire Island culture) “in a coded manner.” White in turn very highly admired Pale Fire despite the grotesqueness of Kinbote, not least the uncoded nature of his homosexuality.
Brian Boyd
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