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By Root 1227 0

but which at that time was still a highly debatable gambit. It was as though I had preferred European dandyism to the raw nerve of America, an Old World beauty to a New World ugly. Even then still, the United States was divided between cultural elitists (supposedly located on the East Coast) and the great unwashed. Richard Howard wrote me that he and James Merrill had just been at a conference in Minnesota where the audience hissed at them for their elitist opinions. As they left the stage, Merrill said loudly, “See what happens when the Great Plains meet the Great Fancies?”

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 Some time later he mailed me a letter in which he said that this praise was not for publication but that he and his wife had liked my book, “in which everything is poised on the edge of everything.”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