Subject
Re: VN & Edmund White (fwd)
Date
Body
From: Rodney Welch <RWelch@scjob.sces.org>
All of this is most interesting, particularly in light of White's
review of the Collected Stories in the New Republic. White's piece struck
me as rather harsh -- considering the boost VN had given his career, it
almost seemed Oedipal. He was very good on the story "Perfection," much
less so on "The Vane Sisters" -- as I recall, he thought the final
acrostic had little bearing on the story, which is simply
incorrect.
Then again, maybe White had a point. I read and later reviewed the
stories myself for a small publication. I found them, as a whole, much
less satisfying than the novels. A handful are remarkable; they are the
ones collected in, I believe, Nabokov's Dozen. There were certain ones --
those mentioned, as well as "Cloud, Castle,Lake" and "Terra Incognita" --
that I simply could not stop re-reading; also, "La Veneziana" was a major
discovery from the early years. I think it is Nabokov's first great
story, and maybe the first -- with its gleeful reflections on art and
life, women and models, tennis balls and lemons -- that seems truly and
masterfully "Nabokovian." But a good many of the stories didn't really
seem to me to repay re-reading the way almost any of the novels do. And
of course there are certain ones, like "Lance" and "The Circle," that I
simply didn't get.
Rodney Welch
Barton Johnson wrote:
>
> 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 that he was careful to say was not for publication.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
All of this is most interesting, particularly in light of White's
review of the Collected Stories in the New Republic. White's piece struck
me as rather harsh -- considering the boost VN had given his career, it
almost seemed Oedipal. He was very good on the story "Perfection," much
less so on "The Vane Sisters" -- as I recall, he thought the final
acrostic had little bearing on the story, which is simply
incorrect.
Then again, maybe White had a point. I read and later reviewed the
stories myself for a small publication. I found them, as a whole, much
less satisfying than the novels. A handful are remarkable; they are the
ones collected in, I believe, Nabokov's Dozen. There were certain ones --
those mentioned, as well as "Cloud, Castle,Lake" and "Terra Incognita" --
that I simply could not stop re-reading; also, "La Veneziana" was a major
discovery from the early years. I think it is Nabokov's first great
story, and maybe the first -- with its gleeful reflections on art and
life, women and models, tennis balls and lemons -- that seems truly and
masterfully "Nabokovian." But a good many of the stories didn't really
seem to me to repay re-reading the way almost any of the novels do. And
of course there are certain ones, like "Lance" and "The Circle," that I
simply didn't get.
Rodney Welch
Barton Johnson wrote:
>
> 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