Nabokov and Homosexuality

From salon an excerpt from an article:

After Sergei’s death, Vladimir described him in a letter to Edmund Wilson as “a harmless, indolent, pathetic person who spent his life vaguely shuttling between the Quartier Latin and a castle in Austria.” Nabokov rarely mentioned Sergei in print — at least not by name. It wasn’t until the third published version of his “Speak, Memory” that Nabokov even felt able to include an account of Sergei’s life. In an early piece of autobiography, recently published in the New Yorker, Nabokov describes his brother “drifting in a hedonistic haze, among the cosmopolitan Montparnassian crowd that has been so often depicted by a certain type of American writer. His linguistic and musical gifts dissolved in the indolence of his nature.”
At no point did Nabokov, who in “Lolita” would wring pathos from the sufferings of a child molester, ever have the courage to publicly state that his brother was gay. “It may be a kind of prudery,” muses Michael Wood, author of a book on Nabokov, “The Magician’s Doubts,” and chairman of Princeton University’s English department. “He obviously had a terrific affection for his brother. He also had a fixed distaste for homosexuality.”
But however distasteful he found it as a person, Nabokov as a writer found homosexuality perversely irresistible, and gay characters turn up in almost every one of his 17 novels. There’s invariably something strangely wooden about them. Nabokov was the archenemy of clichi, a writer passionately committed to overturning tired literary conventions through careful observation of the real world, but his homosexual characters are as a rule egregiously stereotyped.
From the giggly ballet dancers of Nabokov’s first novel, “Mary,” to the ghastly Gaston Godin, Humbert Humbert’s neighbor in “Lolita,” to the egomaniacal narrator of “Pale Fire,” they are vain, silly, usually effeminate — he uses the word “mincing” a lot — shallow, intellectually trivial and ineffectual, and the narrator generally introduces them with a nudge and a wink and a snigger. Many of them are pedophiles. Not once did Nabokov, the master observer, describe an instance of mature love between adults of the same sex — even though a glowing example of that love was right before his eyes.
Although Nabokov’s gay characters are two-dimensional at best, Sergei found other, more interesting ways to haunt his brother’s fiction. In “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,” Nabokov’s fictional account of a man’s attempt to write the life of his mysterious half-brother, one finds uncanny references to Sergei everywhere, from the title character’s name, which alliterates with Sergei’s, to his foppishness and his failures at sports, to a series of uneasy meetings between the brothers in Paris that closely parallels those of the real-life Nabokov brothers. “The similarities of Sebastian and Sergei fit so well together, it’s an aspect of the work that you really have to consider,” says Michael Begnal, an English professor at Wesleyan University who writes on Nabokov. “My impression was that he had to put the whole Sergei situation to rest in his own mind, and in a way that’s what he’s trying to do.”
When he learned of Sergei’s death in 1945, Nabokov was in the middle of writing “Bend Sinister,” his most political novel. Like Sergei, the hero of “Bend Sinister” speaks out against a brutally repressive regime, and like Sergei, he would pay for his courage with his life. But Nabokov’s feelings about his brother were never simple: In “Bend Sinister” it’s not the hero who’s gay but the dictator who orders his death. In 1967, when he finally told the story of Sergei’s life, Nabokov’s writing conveys a sense of unspoken strain and remorse: “For various reasons,” he writes, “I find it inordinately hard to speak about my other brother.”
In “Ada,” his longest novel and one of his last, Nabokov made his best and final attempt to come to terms with his feelings about his brother in print. “Ada” is the story of an incestuous love affair between Van Veen and Ada Veen, brother and sister. Their younger sister, Lucette, is also passionately in love with Van, and she spends most of the novel trailing around after the couple, getting in the way and generally making a pest of herself. Van’s indifference drives Lucette to despair, and toward the end of the book she throws herself from a cruise ship in the middle of the Atlantic.

the rest of the article:
http://www.salon.com/2000/05/17/nabokov_5/singleton/

The last shall be first

Cleaning the cobwebs- after finishing a memoir of Faulkner by his brother John, I picked up a dusty stack that included a book on bees, John O'Hara (Appointment in Samarra) and Vita Sackville-West.
From "All Passion Spent":
Henry Lyulph Holland, first Earl of Slane, had existed for so long that the public had begun to regard him as immortal. The public, as a whole, finds reassurance in longevity, and, after the necessary interlude of reaction, is disposed to recognize old age as a sign of excellence. The long-liver has triumphed over at least one of man's initial handicaps: the breviity of life. To filch twenty years from eternal annhilation is to impose one's superiority on an allotted programme. So small is the scale upon which we arrange our values. It was thus with a start of real incredulity that City men, opening their papers in the train on a warm May morning, read that Lord Slane, at the age of 94, has passed away suddenly after dinner on the previous evening."

Streamers Waving

AT last Oxo gave place to Bovril, Bovril to
Pears' Soap. BUFFET faded and GENTLEMEN
waned. Alone, the telegraph wires kept pace,
lowering themselves as if in a caress, until with
a flash of vertical blackness they were recalled

. to the dignity of their first altitude. The com-
partment, which Miss Clame had to herself,
smelt of ectoplasm.

"Doctor," she would say, "I cannot sleep.

For three nights I have been sleepless. I am
overstrung. "

"Can you particularise your symptoms?

Shall I examine you? "

"My symptoms, doctor, are mental. They
are of the brain. Not, I mean, that my faculties
are impaired. I am still lucid. I can multiply,
divide, apportion the rent, read Scriabin at sight,
translate from the Russian, tell a genuine Gorgione
a furlong off. But I am listless, drowsy, spirit-
ually numb. My nerves are agog. The openings -
and shuttings of doors bewilder me. The sight
of a lady-bird makes me faint. The scent of a

rosebud puts me to shame. I am weary of life."

" A little saline of a morning, my dear lady ... "
"No, doctor. I am open to no facile cure.

Physically, I am a marvel. My plight is graver.
My repartees fail me. My gestures no longer
express me. My thoughts are turbulent and dis-
ordered, cohesive, clotted, no longer a calm
melodious flow of intelligence. My charm
dwindles. My wits are ageing, my deportment
that of a child."

" All this society life you ladies will lead tells
on you in the end. Rest and solitude will work
wonders. Cancel all engagements until August."

" That is the one month, doctor, when I have
no engagement. My pique would madden me.
In my sleep I should haunt the Berkeley, during
massage envisage Hurlingham.?"

"Bave you a worry, a millstone on' the
mind? "

" My independence, doctor, is complete. Un-
fitted by training and temperament for life's more
onerous duties, I am left free for the' cult of self-
enjoyment. I have a great capacity for pleasure.
Provided with (thanks to Hipswell & Boltby)
over five hundred a year, no relatives to whom I
must account, no occupation, no scruples, a com-
fortable home, charming companions, I should-

soar through existence, a veritable albatross of de-
light. Yet what am I ? A caged linnet, an ass in
the shafts, a glow-worm climbing up an arc-lamp."

" Dear lady, are you in love? "
It was a time for tears.

All the way from Slough past the Dolphin
signal-box and the Home Counties Bacon Factory
to Langley (Bucks) she wept, the sly tears rolling
out like little sins in a confessional. Miss Clame
in love! What would each one of them say?

" Such a frivolous little thing."
" Try bicycling."

" Come with me my next slumming-day."

" Again?" (That would be Ruth Gweller.)
"Give boldly. Be proud and open in your

passion." (Deevie.)

" Is she not past the age? "

At Langley (Bucks) she became more cerebral.

After all, determination knows no barriers.
(Office-boy to impressario, ice-man to rail-road
king.) The will was there already, but there
remained strategies to be considered, tactics
planned, technique mastered. Assuredly, she
must read Stendhal and La Vie Parisienne. Abler
than any of her acquaintances, why should she
fail ?

These overweening Green-Travers must be
humbled, Betty above all. With Princess Vaya-

dere, something might be done. A word in that
quarter would not stay there for long. The
Princess was a star, but have not stars their
perigees? Up and play the comet, the bold in-
truder. "Princess, my visit may surprise you.
. . . Unfortunately it is as obligatory for me as
it will be divertin~ to you. . . . One of your
friends, Princess, is worse than faithless. . . . I
mention no names, but in setting her cap ... "
Then would follow the story, a series of bold
brush-strokes till the canvas reeked. Or else a
Scribe-Legouve "Bataille des Dames." "My
intelligence and wit, my fragile charm against her
hoydenish healthiness. In cow-milking, maybe,
I am no match for her: at lacrosse, my lustre is
dimmed. But question me on Schopenhauer,
income-tax, counter-point or the price ofIam-
preys. Confront me with an electorate. No
fist will daunt me, no argument leave me tongue-
tied." And all this must be divined rather than
said. As an aroma it must irradiate (scent and
light mingled in a higher unity) her person, her
apartment,. her path through the world. A
strenuous course of before-breakfast exercises
seemed necessary.

Over the devoured line, the houses cast long
shadows. Every second, Beam Square with its

two or three backgrounds (foggy December
mornings, otiose and unending Sunday after-
noons, hot summer evenings of intolerable
tension) loomed more largely. In the living-
room (" our parlour," they called it), like love-
birds playing at nests, would be Deevie full
length on the mauve divan or even, cushioned
with pale blue and tete de ncgre, on the buff floor.
She would be looking upwards, as if a naughty
picture were set in the ceiling. Mavina might
well be on the window-sill, by her adventurous
pose giving it the look of a crag on the Matter-
horn. Her eyes, turned through the window,
would almost penetrate the soil of the square
garden-plot, as if inflamed with longing to up-
root the weeds that had not yet pierced the
surface. Her conversation (at least, in what it
left unspoken) was a clumsy version of the
Georgies. When it rained, her lips seemed
framed to utter" Rake and hoe," no less than
they enjoined sweepings of dead leaves, prunings
and transplantings, when autumn winds were
blowing. Frost on the ground was for her a
symbol of buttressed celery, June mellowness of
the adhesive pea. What with "lambings" and
" calvings " and her knowledge of poultry-yards
she would bring a blush to Chelsea Hospitalr

Miss Clame regarded both of them as tolerably

suitable for her. She was outshone by neither.
In Deevie there was a streak-more than a streak,
said some---of vulgarity, which alternately amused
and had to be discouraged. Miss Clame thanked
Heaven that she was free from that. When with
Lady Cecilia and other such, it would have been
perpetually to be repressed. It was something
to be the daughter of an army man and an army
woman-tor the late Mrs. Clame was the sixth
daughter of a brigadier-general-even if they
only left fourteen thousand between them. (Jane
Austen would tell her readers this with perfect
frankness. See the beginning of Mansfield Park.
Nothing is so bourgeois as to be afraid to speak
of money.)

Miss Clame was not ashamed of her small in-
come, though it thwarted her about eight times
a day. If she were wealthier she would probably
not know Deevie or Mavina. It was no reflec-
tion upon them. But the Queen of Sheba cannot
pose as a love-bird, or sprawl on a badly made
mauve divan. (Miss Clame had always been
against that divan, even if its absence meant the
loss of atmosphere.) The Queen of Sheba would
have real lion-skins and tiger-skins and ostrich
plumes, and orgies suitable to her trappings.
Poor Deevie never had orgies. It was hard for
her even to raise an intrigue. Mavina did not want either. She was a captive. When she
met a young man she would ask him about a new
variety of phlox or the rhododendron that grows
only on the Himalayas and in somebody's garden
near Torquay. Well, the Jack and Mrs. Sprat
principle was a very good one. It was a pity
that Deevie could not be made more sexless.
Perhaps by giving her special food the result
might be achieved. (It 'was Miss Clame's turn
to do the catering again.) Fortunately Deevie's
ideal was a common young man with a loose
mouth, cheekily familiar and physically forward.
To her Geoffrey would mean less than Plotinus.

"On the whole," Miss Clame decided, as
Paddington station swallowed up the train,
" Deevie had better know nothing. I may say
a little to Mavina, if the mood takes me. But
now that I have discovered that I really am in
love, I feel a healthy impulse to reticence. I was
a little free with my dream at Elfindale, I think.
But the Homfrays are of no account, and Ruth is
one of those people who can only fffid a needle
when ids in a haystack. Having persuaded her-
self that she is ' subtle '-for the implications of
that word see Gide's Les Caves du Vatican-
she has become a regular booby over the obvious.
Several problems confront me. I must not fall
between two stools. But I can hear Lady Browne

saying to Lady Cecilia, 'Who is she?' and the

reply, ' Oh, nobody at all.' What would Deevie
say if I demanded to have my father's portrait
over the mantelpiece? She might produce her
chocolate-boxy aunt. (Portrait of a woman of
the lower middle class, c. 1880.) No, as I am
living with them, I must be neat rather than
gaudy. There is nothing I hate so much as
snobbery. Perhaps because I have reason to
fear it .... "

She settled into a taxi, amazed at her bold self-
analysis. That was the style-a great advance
upon" Doctor, I am overstrung." "First realise
what you are,", she told herself, " then what you
wish to be. That is half the battle." . . . "Miss
Clame returned to London on Tuesday afternoon,
having spent a long week-end near Maidenhead.
. . . A marriage has been arranged and will
shortly take place .... Towards those in all
ranks of society she has the same charming
manner. . .. Your successes, Lydia, come with-
out effort. . . . My dear Duchess, you flatter

me. . . ."

Then came Beam Square, and another sleep-
less night.

Lillian Hellman

Emptying the cache of books stored in trunks in the garage- I have read, in rapid succession: Wake Up, Stupid by Mark Harris (the Boswell enthusiast), Paradise Postponed by John Mortimer, nearly half of Disraeli by Andre Maurois, a third of Tender Is The Night, half of Ian Fleming's Goldfinger. None of these were very well-suited to my tastes- I seem to be averaging one book I enjoy to three I do not.
My latest rediscovery is this marvelous bio on Lillian Hellman called "Lillian Hellman: The Image, The Woman" by William Wright
excerpts:

One of the most overworked devices of
the playwright is to fiU missing plot strands with servants telling
each other what has gone on before the curtain rises, describing
the characters we are about to meet, indicating which ones we
are to root for and which to beware of. Working on The Little
Faxes in the Tavern Island house, Hellman fell into this familiar
trap, and one night, after a long stretch at her typewriter, she
left a new draft of the first act for Hammett to read, then went
to bed. Among the play's characters were two Negro servants
who commented at length about the household.

The next morning Hellman awoke to find Hammett had left
for Manhattan, but had written a note that read:

Missy write blackamoor chit-chat.

Missy better stop writing blackamoor chit-chat."

The primary difference-and Hellman
stressed.this point in discussing North Star-was in the visual
aspects of the film, which were far from what she had envi-
sioned: the dirt-farmer realism she felt the subject matter de-
manded. The unwillingness to recreate meticulously a poor
Russian village was not surprising from a producer who once
complained to Wyler that his slum sets for Dead End "looked
dirty. " The prettified version of a Russian collective farm was
perhaps the most ludicrous aspect of the film and was best
summed up by the writer Irving Drutman, who was the film's
publicist; in a post-screening discussion of North Star's credits
he snapped, "And patches by Irene."