City Boy

by Edmund White

  The issue came out with Nabokov glowering in black and white on the cover and the four-color illustration of Pygmalion glowing within. He was happy, he said, in a long and appreciative letter, with the entire issue and the visual elements. About then, in 1973, Forgetting Elena finally came out, and I sent Nabokov a copy. Some time later he mailed me a letter in which he said that this praise was not for publication but that he and his wife had liked my book, “in which everything is poised on the edge of everything.” A true enough (and flattering, of course) description of my novel, though later I read the same phrase, about this unstable “everything,” in a Nabokovian description of the visual experience of a passenger in a train just leaving the station.

  Three years later, after my book had sold six hundred copies and the other fourteen hundred had been pulped, a man from Time I didn’t know named Gerald Clarke called me and asked if I’d be willing to talk to him about my relationship with Nabokov. “I don’t have a relationship with him,” I said. “I’ve never met him.”

  “That’s strange because he talks about you very fondly. In fact he said that he loved your novel Forgetting Elena.”

  Would he have loved it, I wondered, if I hadn’t orchestrated a cover story on him? Clarke, later to be celebrated for his extraordinarily readable biography of Truman Capote, had gone to Montreux to do an interview with Nabokov for Esquire and followed the usual drill: he submitted his questions at the Montreux Palace Hotel every evening, and the answers, clever and a bit artificial, were neatly typed and placed in his box the next morning (Nabokov retaining the copyright). Clarke was an experienced journalist and felt that this author-approved method hadn’t produced much, so on his last evening in Switzerland he confronted Nabokov over drinks: “So whom do you like?” Clarke asked—since the great man had so far only listed his dislikes and aversions.

  “Edmund White,” Nabokov responded. “He wrote Forgetting Elena. It’s a marvelous book.” He’d then gone on to list titles by John Updike and Delmore Schwartz (particularly the short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”), as well as Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy among a few others. Clarke decided to break the rules and to publish these off-the-cuff comments.

  Nothing in my life changed right away, I was astonished to discover. No marching bands appeared outside my window. But I did feel that I was being acknowledged in some extraordinary way. I thought of Baudelaire’s “Les Phares,” in which writers down the ages signal each other like lighthouses through the dark. (In our innermost fantasies we have the right to be pretentious.) Later Nabokov even wrote his editor at McGraw-Hill and suggested he take a look at my next novel, which I called variously Woman Reading Pascal and Like People in History, but the recommendation seemed not to count for much. Maybe the editor realized Nabokov hadn’t actually read the manuscript; Nabokov merely knew that I’d written it and was looking for an editor. Later in the 1970s my shrink kept urging me to make a pilgrimage to Switzerland to meet Nabokov in person, but I was reluctant—maybe a bit frightened. Then in the mid-eighties, when I was living in Paris, I went with the French editor Gilles Barbedette to Montreux, where we had tea in the hotel lobby with the widowed Mrs. Nabokov. She had memorized a page from Forgetting Elena and recited it. Apparently she had a photographic memory and was able to recall anything she’d ever concentrated on. Treating a novelist to a page of his own work must be the most winning thing anyone can do. I was completely under her spell.

  I loved the humor of Nabokov’s fiction, his aristocratic mépris for morons and pedants, his lively if mocking appreciation of madmen. At the secret heart of his writing was a certain sentimentality: a doting on the couple; a belief in romantic love; a chivalric scorn for bullies and a consecrated respect for women who were as clever as they were beautiful; a hot, irrational cult of sex and of sexual passion, but not its mechanical replications. This dandified, Romantic code, so vulnerable to the world’s crude scorn, he protected by ringing it round with the magic fire of his humor, his aggressive dismissal of everyone else, his satirical stabs at Freud, academics, Marx, progressive education, and crass commercialism. For Nabokov everything not coherent with his own cool, elegant style was vulgar or kitsch, a kind of poshlust (his name for a special form of Russian romantic pomposity).

  In his interviews, he would attack sacred cows—Thomas Mann, William Faulkner, Conrad, Dostoyevsky. Why, I thought (scandalized), Mann and Faulkner won the Nobel! Conrad was a classic, even if deciphering his books was like undoing knots in a barrel of oil. And Dostoyevsky was a moral giant—even if his scenes went on too long and after they’d reached a rapturous climax and everyone was weeping with tears of reconciliation and relief, they’d start to slide queasily off in some new, horribly disappointing, anxiety-producing direction. Jean Genet had recognized this queasiness, this disquieting anticlimax, but approved of it as being lifelike buffoonery.

  Nabokov was a great hater and a rather meager lover. He liked Pushkin and Chekhov and parts of Tolstoy but not all, and nothing of Stendhal (Nabokov’s father had been an unquestioning fan). He liked Biely’s St. Petersburg and all of Khodasevich, whom he’d beautifully translated. He liked Genet but didn’t understand why he didn’t write about girls instead of boys. And he liked me. Was it a joke? After all, Nabokovian jokes were famous—and everyone was on the lookout for them, and afraid to be taken in by them.

  In preparing the Nabokov issue I’d contacted Simon Karlinsky, a professor of Russian at Berkeley. Earlier, Simon had tracked down all of the Russian sources for Ada for the New York Times Book Review, and now I wanted him to do the same for Transparent Things for the Saturday Review. He accepted and quickly wrote a brilliant exegesis we were delighted to use. I met him and we became friends. He was friendly with Nabokov, and for me to meet an acquaintance of the Master was thrilling. I sometimes wondered if Nabokov had based Pnin (the otherworldly, thoroughly Russian professor so at a loss in the America where he’d settled) on Simon, but the dates didn’t work out. Maybe Nabokov was making fun of his own absentmindedness.

  Simon was short and maybe twelve years older than I. He had a black beard and small, pudgy hands, a bald head, and intelligent eyes that constantly roamed over the objects around us, as if there was nothing in our conversation to absorb his attention, or as if he were plotting out an escape route. Or maybe he was afraid that actual eye contact would mean he’d have to stop and consider the opinions of his interlocutor, and he wasn’t disposed to do that. He had unshakable but subtle and refined opinions of his own. Usually those who hold to their ideas inflexibly don’t have very interesting thoughts, but Simon was wonderfully erudite and his articles of faith were highly nuanced, full of major and minor clauses and lots of codicils, but with all the fine print set in bronze.

  He’d been brought up in Mukden by Russian parents who’d fled the Revolution. His mother had a dress shop there. He remembered the deep snows of Manchurian winters and stepping over a frozen Burmese tiger in the street that had been delivered early in the morning in front of a Chinese pharmacy, which needed its whiskers for a highly prized medicine. He could also remember that when he’d met a foreign businessman’s son, little Billy from Ohio, that child’s origins and name had seemed to him unbelievably exotic.

  From there he and his family had moved to Los Angeles, where Simon as an adolescent fell in love with contemporary music. During the war years, Los Angeles, thanks to its refugees, was the cultural center of the world—the home of Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Kurt Weill, Isherwood and Aldous Huxley, not to mention all the glamorous stars in exile such as Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. Simon began to attend the avant-garde concerts held on the roof of a building in Los Angeles.

  When he was old enough, he was drafted and sent off to Europe during the years immediately following the war. His Russian came in handy, but he was more serious about being a composer than a spy. He entered a competition sponsored by Marie-Laure de Noailles, but her American friend and permanent houseguest Ned Rorem w
on. Simon felt that no one else had stood a chance against the handsome Ned, obviously the vicomtesse’s favorite. Then Simon was commissioned to write ballet music for a small German dance company. He was horrified when he heard the results and decided to abandon an artistic career.

  He returned to California and was driving through Berkeley when his car broke down. It would take several days to be repaired, and Simon decided during that time to investigate getting a degree in Russian. Soon he was accepted and dragooned into being a language teacher; within a few years he had his doctorate in Russian and was a professor in the same department.

  At the time I met him in the early 1970s Simon had two great arguments with me. He couldn’t understand why we young gays would camp and call each other she, not realizing that that sort of old-fashioned queeniness had died out and was now so out of fashion that we thought it was funny. For him it was merely a disgusting reminder of the bad old days when gay men hadn’t liked themselves, had seen themselves as pathetic stand-ins for women, and had considered their only charm to be their youth. Those of us who were one generation younger thought that we’d put all that safely behind us and that now we were free to joke about it—on the same principle, perhaps, that Richard Pryor used the word nigger over and over in his routines during the same period. I’m not sure that we gays were really so sure of our new identity (neither, as it turned out, were African-Americans).

  The bigger bone he picked with me was over socialism. I had routinely said in print and in conversation that I was a socialist, which made me no different from millions of American Leftists of that period. Simon would say, “If you only knew how misguided you are! You’re generous and worried about the sufferings of the poor and the marginalized, about what America is doing to the third world, but communism is the biggest scourge the world has ever known.”

  “But, Simon, I’m not a communist, I hate Stalin.”

  “But you think you can pick and choose, reject Stalin in favor of Lenin.”

  “Well, yeah…”

  “But Lenin was just as bad. There was no good period of communism. They were thugs and built into the system is an authoritarianism that crops up everywhere—in Cuba, China, Vietnam, the most different cultures.”

  “I can understand how you White Russians might be bitter. After all, you lost all your wealth—”

  “That’s an insulting argument. It has nothing to do with my family, which was always pretty poor in any event. No, this is just a terrible blind spot in Americans of your generation. You’re prepared to believe that Stalin was a tyrant, but you’ll see that Mao is even worse, that Ho Chi Minh will be as bad as he can be, that Castro—well. Just take gays. Castro has been running concentration camps for gays, or ‘work camps,’ if you prefer. In Russia the last public display of homosexuality was the funeral for Kuzmin in 1936. After that it was too dangerous to reveal to anyone that you were gay. And gays to this day have to get married to women and they dare not ever show—”

  I tuned out. Obviously poor Simon was brainwashed by his White Russian refugee parents. He was a right-winger, like Nabokov himself, who’d outraged his admirers by supporting the Vietnam War. And if gays had to suffer to promote the welfare of the masses, so what? One shouldn’t just endlessly promote one’s selfish interests. And anyway, we did believe that communists were wrong in thinking that homosexuality was a form of “bourgeois decadence,” since it seemed to be spread throughout the social classes.

  Only many years later did I understand that Simon was entirely right. That communism had been the worst scourge in history. That Mao and Stalin had slaughtered millions of their own people with a horrifying recklessness. That the abrogation of intellectuals’ rights and kulaks’ rights and gays’ rights and the mass incarceration of inconvenient minorities wasn’t due to the regrettable bigotry of an individual leader but rather was endemic to the whole system. These sickening excesses couldn’t be chalked up as necessary sacrifices for the benefit of the whole but were deeply wrong and were preludes to even worse and more general illegalities affecting nearly everyone. No regime in history had been as destructive or as cruel or as irrational as the Soviet Union, unless it was Red China.

  By the end of the 1970s I had figured that out, but that was very late in the day to come to such a realization. I had to read Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope, with its dry, undramatic recital of the agonies she and her husband suffered all because her husband wrote one short satirical poem about Stalin (though Mandelstam might just as easily have been subjected to even worse punishment for doing nothing “wrong” at all).

  In his pioneering gay-inspired biography of Gogol, Simon had struck out against the Orthodox Church and its treatment of Gogol’s homosexuality. Church fathers had taken advantage of Gogol’s self-hatred and guilt by subjecting him to endless and cruel penances. What the priests didn’t do, the doctors did—Gogol, already weakened toward the end, was repeatedly bled. Leeches were attached to his already infected nose. He was encouraged to turn the second part of Dead Souls, his funny social satire, into a serious religious drama. He worked on this impossible task for years and finally destroyed it just before he died.

  For a distinguished Russian academic, Simon was daring in his political positions. He wrote a whirlwind gay history of Russian literature for a popular gay publication. With Michael Henry Heim he annotated Chekhov’s letters and made of Chekhov an ecologist avant la lettre. In his biography of Gogol, Simon boldly demonstrated that the affection for another man revealed in Gogol’s letters surpassed the ardor of Romantic friendship. Simon marched. Simon signed manifestos. Simon taught gay courses.

  He was lonely until one day he answered a personal ad in the Berkeley Barb in which a much younger man said he was looking for an “interesting older partner.” Simon’s was one of dozens of responses. Peter met with them all but was most taken by Simon. Peter was considerably younger and well-to-do and interested both in psychology and conceptual art. Simon’s huge international culture and saturnine looks obviously fascinated him. Now they’ve been together some forty years.

  From the very beginning he and Peter fussed over each other’s health. They were hypochondriacs out of a nineteenth-century novel, endlessly worried about something too spicy or a draft or wet feet or tiredness, and they could be quite grumpy if they weren’t sufficiently comfortable. They could also be irritated by other people’s arrangements. I gave them a party in New York once and Simon literally threw up his hands when he realized that not only did he not know my guests, but that they didn’t know each other (unforgivable). Of course my guests were just ill-assorted recent tricks for the most part—not really the stuff out of which successful parties are made.

  When Forgetting Elena came out, it was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, which still counted for something in those days. The critic apparently thought he’d given me a glowing review since forty years later he tried to call in the debt and asked me for a blurb or a recommendation or a review (I forget which). Actually the review was pretty confused and lukewarm, though some phrases here and there could have been used in an ad had there been one. The review treated the novel as a mystery and it was often shelved in bookstores and libraries under Mysteries.

  The novel had taken so many years to be published that I was well into another one, called variously Like People in History and Woman Reading Pascal, a much more realistic novel than Forgetting Elena. In the long years before Elena was accepted, I’d thought I’d gone too far toward the difficult and that I should write something about real people leading their lives. Since Richard Howard was by far the most original and colorful person I knew, I decided I should base a character on him and put him into a three-way friendship with “Maria” (based on Marilyn Schaefer) and a young heterosexual woman based on Sigrid, my friend from Time-Life. In fact I made Sigrid the main character from whose point of view everything would be written.

  I must have had Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady in mind, because I wanted t
o write about an heiress who falls into the claws of a fortune hunter. Today, in the era of prenuptial agreements and especially of divorce, an unwise marriage no longer has the same lasting, tragic consequences. Nevertheless, my basic plot idea was that a striking, rich young woman comes to New York from Baltimore (I’d spent a weekend there among the fox hunting set, friends from school). In New York she becomes best friends with a gay man and a lesbian and lives their exciting but (for her) unfulfilling New York gay life. At last, at the advanced age of thirty, she realizes that she wants a husband and children. Seemingly by chance she runs into someone who used to attend the debutante parties in Baltimore, one of those “extra men” so badly needed to keep cutting in during the dances. In American high society, I’d discovered, anxious rich parents do not sufficiently guard against two figures—the extra man and, especially, the riding instructor. If one of them is well mannered and good-looking, he can seduce the seventeen-year-old daughter of the family, and sometimes the mother, even though he hasn’t a penny and his blood is red, not blue. For members of the “horsey set,” the riding instructor is the real Trojan horse, capable of penetrating even the best-defended walls.