City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [46]
While I was still at Saturday Review in San Francisco, Nabokov’s Transparent Things was about to be published. He was my favorite living writer along with Christopher Isherwood. Different as Nabokov and Isherwood were from each other, both inspired me with a respect bordering on reverence and an excited anticipation for each new title. Nabokov was funny and wicked, baroque and heterosexual; Isherwood was sober and good and classical and gay.
I thought that Nabokov’s new novel would be a good occasion for devoting a cover story to him. Although John Poppy would have preferred something on redwood furniture or local dancers, he thought it might be wise to throw a sop to those few “literary” subscribers to the Saturday Review of Literature still hanging on. And I think he could see how thrilled I was at the prospect, and … well, he was a kind man.
I approached a number of writers—William Gass, Joyce Carol Oates, Joseph McElroy (Women and Men)—and asked them to write short essays about Nabokov’s oeuvre. I intended to contribute something myself, especially after Mr. Poppy generously urged me to do so. He could see that I longed to write about my idol.
Who would take Nabokov’s photos? People around the office suggested a true artist such as Cartier-Bresson, but I insisted (yet in truth knowing nothing) that Nabokov was more a social than artistic snob and would respond more favorably to Lord Snowdon, Princess Margaret’s husband, the former Antony Armstrong-Jones. My hunch turned out to be right. Nabokov spent a week clowning around with Snowdon, chasing butterflies, of course, but even posing as Borges with a serape over his head. No matter that they weren’t terribly good photos; more important for our needs, they were intimate and funny and highly original.
Of course I wanted something from Nabokov’s own pen. After the relative failure of his preceding book, Ada, something he’d worked on for years and that recycled more autobiographical elements than any preceding book except possibly his much earlier The Gift, I thought he’d be open to the full treatment we were offering him. He told me over the phone (I had to get up early to reach him in Switzerland at the cocktail hour) that he’d write me a short piece on inspiration. He was genial over the phone and at that moment was having a drink with Alfred Appel Jr., the editor and commentator of The Annotated Lolita. Nabokov had a strong Russian accent, stronger than I’d anticipated; his voice was a high baritone. His a’s were long and English, his r’s rolled and Russian, his accent more French than anything else, at least to my untrained ears. He had an odd way of punching certain syllables, like an old-fashioned orator.
When his excellent piece came in, I decided to illustrate it with the charming and kitsch painting of Pygmalion and Galatea by the pompier French artist Gérôme. In the painting the white marble statue of the beautiful young woman is just beginning to turn to delicious pink flesh, shoulders first, the sculptor stepping back in delighted alarm. Nabokov wrote later that he loved the whole presentation, especially the painting.
But I had a problem. Nabokov’s mini-essay had minor mistakes in punctuation and even in diction. How did one edit Nabokov? My solution was to have the essay set exactly as he’d written it, mistakes and all, then to reset it in my corrected version. I messengered both versions to him with a short but polite letter explaining what I’d done. He wired back your version perfect.
When the essays by various writers came in, they were mostly a bit bored with Nabokov, as if everyone had praised him long enough and now it was more interesting to be critical. Of course as an idolator I was scandalized by the measured tone of my contributors, and so my own page became all the more dithyrambic. I compared Norman Mailer unfavorably to Nabokov, which would today be so obvious as to seem comical, absurd,