Forgetting Elena

by Edmund White

Combining glittering wit, an atmosphere dense in social paranoia, and a breathtaking elegance and precision of language, White's first novel suggests a hilarious apotheosis of the comedy of manners. For, on the privileged island community where Forgetting Elena takes place, manners are everything. Or so it seems to White's excruciatingly self-conscious young narrator who desperately wants to be accepted in this world where everything from one's bathroom habits to the composition of "spontaneous" poetry is subject to rigid conventions.

Genres: Fiction, Queer, LGBT, Novels, Gay, American, Literary Fiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Edmund Valentine White III was an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer, and essayist. He was the recipient of Lambda Literary's Visionary Award, the National Book Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. France made him Chevalier (and later Officier) de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993.
White was known as a groundbreaking writer of gay literature and a major influence on gay American literature and has been called "the first major queer novelist to champion a new generation of writers."

Reviews

[William2 · Rating 3 out of 5]

The novel is structurally and thematically interesting—there’s a brilliant patterning of motifs—but these things can’t thread the component parts together. It’s a novel of manners. The narrator has no apparent backstory and an almost pathologically selective memory. He wakes on an island in a cottage shared with other men, all of whom are subject to some unwritten code of behavior. Consequently everyone is dissembling and false. It’s strange. It doesn’t surprise me that Vladimir Nabokov and his wife liked the book. It has the same sort of absurdist underpinnings as, say, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. There’s also some discussion of poetic form which would have pleased the painstaking translator of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and other Russian poets. I mean, this guy is in a serious fugue state. He doesn’t know what his precise relationship is to other people. He doesn’t know his last name—is it Valentine? He doesn’t know if the woman he’s dealing with is his lover or his sister. Lying in her cottage naked, he’s unsure of what to do. When she sucks his limp cock, he thinks of it as a kind of “dumbshow.” (p. 92) The ensuing sex is amusing. It’s what a virgin might think on his first experience of sex, having never heard of it before. It was for me a slog. I was thinking that, fortunately, because it’s short, it’s a slog I can afford, since I admire White’s other work so. But if it’s 184 pages it reads like 368. I don’t think it’s the best book to start with if you’re new to the author. My favorites by Edmund White include Hotel de Dream, The Beautiful Room is Empty and The Farewell Symphony.

[Bloodorange · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Forgetting Elena because a student wished to write a paper on this book, and because I knew completely nothing about White. When I mentioned some features typical of queer literature she looked at me, puzzled, and said: “But this is his debut! He wasn’t writing about homosexuality at the time.”

Forgetting Elena is a very queer book disguised as a parable. It is set in a mysterious, mostly male, island community (New England meets the Caribbean), with elaborate, but unclear, dress code (one of the characters is criticized for choosing outfits that are “misguided and primitive… [ignoring] any sort of look we might want to achieve as a group”). The main focus of the community, apart from sunbathing by day and dancing in the nearby hotel by night, is the study of forms; earnestness is the least desirable trait, sprezzatura - the most desired one.

This community seems to be partly influenced by the 19th century dandy culture (gardenias and all), partly by the courtly tradition (‘spontaneous’ poems), partly by Chinese/ Japanese Culture (the Old Code, peony bowls at Elena’s house), and partly by Ronald Firbank.

”This soup has a very delicate flavor…”
”I would tell you its odd ingredients,” the woman replies, slipping a hand under Maria’s dress and fondling her small breast, “but you’d think I was being pretentious. I suppose it’s good we avoid all ostentation –“
Maria licks the woman’s forearm with her delicate pink tongue.

We enter this world with the unnamed narrator, who suffers from memory loss, but of a peculiar, unrealistic (as in ‘symbolic’, not ‘poorly conceived’) kind. He does not remember his name, or age, or place within the community, and tries to establish his position in relation to other men in every interaction; he is extremely self-conscious, and wants to blend in. His desire to measure himself against the others - Herbert, the leader, in particular, but also other influential men - does seem to have homosexual undertones (“[when] I’m with Herbert again, I’ll attune my harmonies to his. I’ll forget the woman (….)” He forgets cultural constructs of masculine and feminine beauty; he does not know whether he is attractive, and Elena’s looks are equally a puzzle.

Do these men think that the woman is beautiful? Her eyebrows are curved and thin; that must be desirable, for surely she plucked them to look that way. Her mouth is small. Should it be large? Do they adore her for her wit, in spite of her looks? I like her looks.

More than that, he forgets about sex. The description of his genitals and masturbation early in the book is very curious; it’s not defamiliarization per se, but description of something that seems barely familiar to the narrator. The same applies to heterosexual sex, when the narrator draws conclusions from the placement on genitals on his lover’s body.

The only thing for me to do is experiment. I only want to please. (...) I put my hands around her waist and lock them.

Yet this is more than a pointless exercise, more than a parallel for searching one’s place in a society that wasn’t made to accommodate you (but then, maybe it was?). When one realizes rules are arbitrary, one may start to rebel, negotiate, rewrite the ‘code’.

”….Do you imagine it’s always been like this?”
“Like what?”
“That no one has ever followed the rules. Perhaps all those noble people in history had no sense of propriety and did just as they pleased.”

***

White is very perceptive. Let me leave you with two quotations:

...I do catch a charming inflection in her voice, the sort of story-book tone adopted when addressing children. Yet there is nothing condescending or false in the voice. It's simply the way a mature woman speaks to an adolescent when she feels comfortable with him and realizes that for her comfort to continue she must go insisting, in every intonation, that she is much older, he much younger.
…

If he's feeling guilty, put on a fast record and start dancing by yourself in the dark. Or turn on a dim light, be very matter-of-fact ("Do you want some water? An aspirin? What time should I set the alarm for?" That will show him you expect no more sweet nothings. (...) Or if he's feeling too crowded and possessed, too married, then tell him you need your sleep, would he please leave, you've got a rendezvous with another man tomorrow at lunch. Or if the tristesse is simply what every animal feels, then there's always scrabble, or a rubber of bridge.

[Cody · Rating 3 out of 5]

Everything you need to know about E White was said better than I ever could by David M elsewhere. To paraphrase, his earliest works demonstrate that he could have been a modern Proust had he chose to stick to this path. Whether that is our loss or not, be thankful that what exists in his baroque style is out there. I am.

Off to Fire Island! (pssst...I think the book is, like, a metaphor...sssshhhhhh)

[Larry Massaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the third time I've read Forgetting Elena, the first time possibly three decades ago. Its originality still thrills me. Not quite a fantasy, and certainly not realistic, it reads like an account of a dream. As if you woke up and remembered precise shards of what might just have been a nightmare, and you know exactly what elements from your waking life it dramatized, but all weirdly transformed by the fluid and hilarious illogic of dreams.

This is how I've always understood Forgetting Elena: Suppose you're a naive, sensitive, and fabulously observant young man, and you find yourself all of a sudden on Fire Island. And you're desperately and self consciously trying to make sense of the place, and of your position in it. Because it's a culture all its own, ridiculously sophisticated, constantly theatrical, and ruthlessly satirical. And you want to belong. It is Byzantine & full of contradictions. Ostensibly casual, egalitarian, and permissive (simple, unadorned rustic cabins on the dunes), in reality the local culture is marked by rigid and mysterious standards and conventions. Taste, wit, irony, & manners are everything, and excruciatingly observed and critiqued. There is also considerable extravagance and tastelessness, lifestyles at once too decorous and too gross. But as a newcomer to the island, you have absolutely no idea what the rules are or how to behave. Or what to wear, or how you're perceived. Or what the prevailing toilet conventions are. You're paranoid--you haven't moved your bowels in days--and alert to every casual remark, trying to model your emotions and reactions and facial expressions by mimicking all the good people. But who are the good people? You try to make out the politics of the place, understand the gangs and cliques, deduce who's in favor and who's in disgrace, and where you might possibly belong. You're not quite sure who your allies are, or who are your friends, or whom you should be seen with. You become analytical and completely inauthentic, hollow, amnesiac. You would gladly be whoever they want you to be, if you could only figure out what that is. Above all things, you don't want to appear ridiculous.

And then suppose, in the throes of this existential and anthropological dilemma, you fell asleep and dreamt about the place. That dream would be Forgetting Elena.

[Inderjit Sanghera · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a strange, almost hypnagogic cadence to Edmund White’s prose; the reader becomes slowly embedded in his shadowy and sable world, coalesced with the grey, bleak atmosphere which pervades his novel are explosions of light and brightness, as he prose fulminates into a series of incandescent images ;

“A wind said incantations and hypnotised a match flame up and out of someone’s cupped hands. Now the flame went out and only the cigarette pulsed, each draw molding gold lead to cheekbones. There are qualities of darkness, the darkness of grey silk stretched taut to form the sky, watered by city lights, the darkness of black quartz boiling to make a river…”

If there is more poetry in ‘Nocturnes for the King of Naples’, there is greater emotional resonance in ‘Forgetting Elena’; whereas the narrator of ‘Noctures’ seems detached and indifferent, a streak of tragedy flows through the pages of ‘Forgetting Elena’, as the adolescent narrator explores his feelings for the title character, a brazen, beautiful and troubled woman. However, one of White’s shortcomings-in his early novels at least, is that his characters seem to self-absorbed and selfish to be fully realised; they adhere to tired caricatures of WASP characters, from their superficial and meaningless dalliance with culture and art, to their egotism and self-absorption it is hard for the reader to fully empathise a cast of characters who are not well fleshed out and instead act as the conduit for White to create his bleak, if unique and at times dazzlingly beautiful world view, where the narrator, although heavily involved in the world around him, often seems detached and insensate.

The central theme of both novels is love and sex, especially the budding of adolescent desire ; in ‘Forgetting Elena’ the narrator is having an affair with Elena, yet the narrator seems more curious than emotionally engaged, although he is able to explore the inner life of Elena, who beneath the mask of confidence hides a sea of insecurities and her relationships with the other men on a mysterious, unnamed island. ‘Nocturnes for the King of Naples’ is the promiscuous reminisces. Hidden beneath this is one single paean to a lost lover, who the narrator treated with cruelty and contempt. If this all sounds a bit like pulp fiction then that is because it is-but pulp fiction raised to art via White’s wonderful style and beautiful, incandescent imagery.

[Kristen · Rating 5 out of 5]

like bizarre and just barely audible music. totally original--to my ear. utterly loved it.

[ambyr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Genre: surrealism, but I don't have a tag for that.

Did I like this book? I have no idea. But did I fall head-first into the prose and find myself reading compulsively, setting it aside to attend to life tasks only to find it creeping back into my hand again and again? Yes. It's like a dream you drowsily rouse from and fall back into, over and over again.

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite novels - very haunting.

[Dan Beliveau · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were words. They were in English. Sometimes, they are strung together in such a way as to create a beautiful image.

I have no idea what this book was about. Perhaps I'm too young for when this takes place, but apparently being gay in the 70s was a nightmare.

[Kostas Kanellopoulos · Rating 1 out of 5]

so forgettable in every way...

[James Payne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perplexing, sterile, crystallized. There are aspects that feel well seen: anxiety, social climbing, descriptions of poetry. And then there's everything else. I began to think of it as some caricature of an European art house film, but in text, on Fire Island, and queer. Largely opaque. I considered rereading it, as I've read and enjoyed so much of White's work that it seems odd to come away from his first novel like this, but I just don't think I can.

[Brady Hamed · Rating 2 out of 5]

People will expect a poem!

Pitched in Edmund White’s NYT obit as his well-reviewed debut and Fire Island novel, I picked it up before my end of season week out there. Immediately the social satire felt sharp. Moving through a house of acquaintances, feeling out your place in the hierarchy. And of course, the poems! I guess now an analogue to that would be - quick! What’s a cute caption for our instagram story? Need to post it so everyone knows we were at the pines party and had more fun than them!

Then the book… loses itself. I thought I was digging the dystopia elements - is he a slave? What is this society? But it never clarifies. Only muddies and darkens. And the stakes disappear and the prose gets jumbled. Who are we talking to? When? Why? By the end… it appears the relationship with Elena has been going on forever, but as a reader you know nothing of the depth or of Herbert’s intervention. And the satire is all but gone.

Perhaps reading this as a Fire Island novel put unfair expectations on it. On the other hand, while there, a friend of mine helped a frantic acquaintance look for something he lost. They were unsuccessful and days later the acquaintance found it in their own suitcase. As a thank you for the help, without a hint of irony, they wrote a thank you poem. Perhaps this isn’t satire at all…

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

""But of course there were snickers about my hair, my dresses, my hats, my ideas, my speech, I decided to save some of my Old Code eccentricities, to become 'an original.' In a society made for novelty, I knew I could become something of a fad by clinging to bits of the past, but I also recognized that the strange is acceptable only if it fits people's familiar notions of it. An oddity that suits everyone's preconceptions must be nothing more than a slight variation on the ordinary. If a dancer turns left instead of right, or shrugs after the fourth beat instead of the third, then her daring will be endlessly discussed; but if she insists that dancing itself is absurd, forget it"" (72).

"'Everything's very complicated tonight.' I rejoice over my happy choice of words, the general 'everything' and the concrete 'tonight,' composing a phrase too vague to question but too specific to doubt" (152).

[Apolon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Na początku całkiem intrygująca, kiedy wprowadzeni zostajemy w niezrozumiałą rzeczywistość wyspy rządzącej się absurdalnymi zasadami. Główny bohater nie pamięta prawie niczego ze swojego życia, ale myślę, że przez trwanie całej historii to jednak ja, jako czytelnik, byłem bardziej skonfundowany niż on. Zadawałem sobie pytanie, o czym jest ta książka i dalej nie mam pojęcia. Oniryczna i pisana barwnym językiem, ale tak bardzo senna, że jakiekolwiek znaczenie, z którym czytelnik mógłby się utożsamić albo które poozwoliłoby na zbliżenie się do trudów postaci, staje się bez znaczenia. Jakoś mnie kłuło opisanie koloru skóry postaci tylko dwa razy i oba przypadki były bardzo dziwne, ponadto opisy związane z seksem były wybitnie niezręczne.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collision of The Crying of Lot 49, I Love Dick, Lord of the Flies, and My Death (with a hint of F. Scott Fitzgerald). The experience of having no idea where a story is going to go, namely how dark it will get — that is a literary experience I most enjoy!

Picked this up at a used bookstore mostly out of curiosity… Stayed for the queerness… Stayed extra for the looming promise of death and violence.

[Tora]

“if my mood’s as mechanically determined as that, then why can’t i discount the fluctuations? it would be absurd to say these shifts of mood don’t matter, for what could matter more to me? yet, granting their supreme importance, can’t i average out the extremes and enjoy a mildly pleasant or at least comfortable mean? can’t i gather enough momentum from the gay periods to carry me through the grim?”

[Seweryn Grenc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poleciłbym tą książkę wszytkim co podążają za trendami (tymi ogólnymi jak i niszowymj) i sami nadają sobie formę "modnych" w społeczności ludzi "normalnych" jak i "oryginalnych".
Książka napisana pięknym językiem. Jest w niektórych momentach przezemnie niezrozumiała ale ogólny przekaz jest bardzo dobrze widziany. Warte przeczytania ,pomaga znaleść siebie w sobie (?)

[JJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

hazy to the point of being bewildering but still crystal clear somehow. seems to be of the opinion the best way to satirize etiquette and conformity is to invent its own etiquette, the same way the narrator knew most about himself when he knew nothing at all

[Myles · Rating 2 out of 5]

A big gay thought experiment. Reminded me of Jared French's painting, "State Park."

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is reminiscent of teenage/college years angst of an overly self aware and severely self critical person.

[Vagelis Stasinopoulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant book, it should be read carefully and symbolically

[Sandy Press · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have no words. Somewhere in there is literary value ,I obviously couldn't find it .
DNF

[Lisa Pepdjonovic · Rating 1 out of 5]

Boring, all over the place, and not as poetic as it thinks it is. Halfway in I got lost and I still don’t know what happened. A short book but felt so long

[James Oliveira · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strange, confusing, lovely, poetic. As a gay man there are moments that I’ve seen happen out in the scene. Everyone must go pee together, move together, dress alike etc.

[Elena Fernández · Rating 3 out of 5]

pf pues sin más la vd

[Derick · Rating 4 out of 5]

"everything seems as static as a tapestry that keeps becoming abstract"

[Heather · Rating 2 out of 5]

Forgetting Elena starts out slow and strange; it's unsettling and apt, the way it unfolds. It's narrated by a man staying in a summer cottage with a group of other men. He seems new to the group and pathologically unsure of his place in it, or his place in the world, or just himself: he worries about being the first one awake, the first one using the bathroom: will anyone care? Do they have a set order of who gets to go first and next and next? He despairs after dinner: should he clear the table, or not? He is tentative in conversation. He tries to figure out the social hierarchy: one man might "quite possibly be an important official"; another is that man's "houseboy, or perhaps secretary, valet, or younger brother" (pp 5-6). The group of men does seem to have its own strange social codes and customs, and also seems prone to fault-finding, but this doesn't seem quite enough to account for the narrator's intense anxiety. In the bathroom, as he shaves and gets ready for an evening out, he's unsettled by having his things in this shared room: "what if I forgot something?," he worries, and then it becomes clear that this worry, in a general sense, is the whole issue (p 11).

I like this book best when it's like some of the passages describing scenes on the beach, sandpipers and waves and foam, or the moments of affection or connection between characters: descriptive, realistic, recognizably this world and not some other. But this book is also enduringly odd. Stacey D'Erasmo, writing in the New York Times Book Review, calls this book "finely wrought and peculiar," and says that White's first two novels (of which this is one) "seem to take place in elaborately embroidered floating worlds not quite our own." Alan Friedman, also writing in the New York Times Book Review, three and a half decades earlier, calls the book "a Chinese puzzle," and "uncannily beautiful." Friedman also says, though, that it is "often difficult to be receptive to the book's genuine wonders," and I think I agree.

[Dusty Myers · Rating 2 out of 5]

Amnesia stories fall into two camps, I think. One is the case where the person gets amnesia and knows it, and everyone else knows it, and so the drama is whether or not the amnesiac can be teased or lured back into full awareness. This is the romantic-comedy camp of the genre, though maybe The Bourne Identity could fit in here, too. The other camp is the one where the amnesiac wakes to a world where he knows no one (including himself) and no one seems to know him (or they don't let on that they do). This is a horror/suspense camp of, like, Memento and Dark City and the like.

The one interesting thing about White's first novel is that it fits into neither of these camps. The narrator wakes up not knowing who or where he is, but that to announce such an affliction would be a very big mistake (why? unclear), so he hides his amnesia from everyone around him. As a result, everyone treats him as they always have, and he must use these clues to figure out who he is.

I suppose one reason he can't let on he's amnesiac is the setting of the novel. This is an island culture (it's post-Stonewall Fire Island, really) where decorum is everything and people are judged by their social position. It opens room for some comedy, though not much for those who were born right around the time Fire Island's heyday was winding down.

[Катерина Сергеивна · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm giving it four stars because the novel definitely fostered a lot of side conversations (with myself). This novel has a whole bunch of mystery such that even when you've read it you're not sure if you've missed chunks of it because somehow the ending still hasn't disclosed anything. But that is kind of where much of the glamour of this book lies. I wouldn't say it is a must read but for people who are currently surveying their social surroundings and are interesting in delving themselves into philosophical questions regarding social interaction then it is an interesting and recommended text. It sitll took me a very long time to get through it, unfortunately, and I'm not sure if its because the text is dense content-wise or because I kept forgetting it at work.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

I noticed my library had this one as an ebook, so I downloaded it. The book reminded me quite a bit of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, in the sense that there's a beautiful sense of place and characters ... plot ... not so much. I suppose, in thinking about it, this book is some sort of fable about conformity, but it says something that I had to actually consciously address the issue of "Okay, what the hell were all those (pretty) words actually saying?"