Nabokov in America (36 page)

I’ve been delighted
⁴⁵
to see all the fine notice of
Pnin
in the English newspapers and reviews… .
Lolita
I think is the most brilliant and extraordinary novel of this century. It has been very much commented upon I know in the reviews and quarterlies, and I add my bedazzled admiration and enormous pleasure to all that has been said. Why does anyone else even attempt to write in the face of work like this? It meets what I consider a primary test in that one wants to read it again and again.

Nabokov was supreme, and his courage to write as an exercise of arrogant self-awareness, in defiance of Bolsheviks and Nazis and any others who would subsume art to their purposes, made his example stirring. But particularity and
le mot juste
were just the beginning for him. In a letter to Wilson that has become famous, in which he speaks of “the
specific detail
⁴⁶
 … the unique image, without which … there can be no art,” he has not explained his aesthetic but only a
sine qua non
of good work. What follows from precision is large—is larger. Reality vibrates like an icicle tapped with a cane in passages of his characteristic descriptive prose. From
Laughter in the Dark
:

It really was blue: purple-blue in the distance, peacock-blue coming nearer, diamond-blue where the wave caught the light. The foam toppled over, ran, slowed down, then receded, leaving a smooth mirror on the wet sand, which the next wave flooded again. A hairy man in orange-red pants stood at the edge of the water wiping his glasses.

*   *   *

A
large bright ball was flung from somewhere and bounced on the sand with a ringing thud.

“The water is wet!” she cried, and ran into the surf. There she advanced swinging her hips and her outspread arms, pushing forward in knee-deep water.

From
Lolita
:

Under the flimsiest of pretexts … we escaped from the café to the beach, and found a desolate stretch of sand, and there, in the violet shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave, had a brief session of avid caresses, with somebody’s lost pair of sun-glasses for only witness. I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.

The vibration, to readers responsive to such things, occurs seemingly within the reader’s own mind. The author comes intimately close, saying just those words that cause an apprehension. The phrases please and may be comic but are not necessarily “aesthetic”—often they are very simple. They evoke a specific thought, and the whole process is attended by a feeling of
I knew that—I’ve seen such things before, I just never put them into words
.

A writer like Berkman—or like John Updike, Dmitri’s near classmate at Harvard and a great champion of Nabokov in the coming generation—practices precision, refines and furthers it, but does not necessarily take a step beyond, the step whereby the hyperreal begins to dissolve. Mary McCarthy, another realist writer, objected to that next step; writing to Wilson, when both were reading the
Lolita
manuscript, she praised “all the description of motels and other U.S. phenomenology” but felt the novel “escaped into some elaborate allegory or series of symbols… . You felt all the
characters had a kite of meaning
⁴⁷
tugging at them from above.” The writing was “terribly sloppy” as a result, “full of what teachers call
haziness
, and all Vladimir’s hollowest jokes and puns. I almost wondered whether this wasn’t … part of the idea.”

It was part. Reality showed itself to be ambiguous, self-undermining around the edges; it donned quotation marks and at that point became
more interesting for Nabokov, opened upon something magical, an encounter with the
primam causam
, with the author himself. In
Pale Fire
(1962), the reader learns that “
somehow Mind is involved
⁴⁸
as a main factor in the making of the universe,” and this capitalized Mind, possibly the mind of God, is, on the evidence of
Pale Fire
itself, a trickster consciousness besotted with puns, doublings, misperceptions, and literary texts that acknowledge one another.
Pale Fire
, like
Pnin
but unlike
Lolita
, is esoteric and spiritualistic; it does many things, but notably it makes a case for a higher realm. The existence of such a dimension is implied by anomalies of this world we inhabit; the Great Mind that decrees a world of doubles, riddling coincidences, and secret correspondences is, by a curious coincidence, the very model of the mind that can understand it.

This spiritual project is an old one in American letters. Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Dickinson, along with many lesser-known authors, make up one cohort of spirit seekers; others had come before them and others would come later, but by the end of the nineteenth century
metaphysical speculation
⁴⁹
had fallen somewhat out of favor, authors such as Twain, James, and Howells positing a world more or less without godly overtones. Some of Nabokov’s distaste for James may represent unease with the older writer’s ordinary epistemology. The world around us, especially in its social aspects, is complex and devious but
not unknowable
⁵⁰
for James, and knowledge consists in perceptions tested against those of other people. Nabokov, although he writes of the comedy of getting things horribly wrong—thinking yourself a king of a foreign land, for instance, while being in fact an obscure refugee academic, like the main narrator of
Pale Fire
—claims for himself such powers of clairvoyance as to remove any need to consult with other minds. That they are
his
metaphysical insights and riddles is supreme validation: the mind that can make worlds is the final fascination.

Like other of Nabokov’s best works,
Pale Fire
is a second attempt, a reboot. Important parts were already present in
Pnin
(and the character Pnin himself reappears in
Pale Fire
: readers troubled by his loss of a job find him securely placed in the later story). In the winter of 1939–40, after writing
The Enchanter
,
Lolita
’s precursor, Nabokov had written
two chapters of a never-to-be-completed novel
⁵¹
that prefigure
Pale Fire
. There is a fantasia on the theme of a lost kingdom; there is an artist grieving over a loss, hoping for personal contact beyond the grave. Now
he began to feel the stirrings of a new book, new but old, in those same miraculous few years when he completed
Lolita
but could not yet get it published as he wanted, when he wrote
Pnin
, when he dove ever deeper into the scholarship of
Eugene Onegin
and translated it several times, only by the painful process of rejecting his own work arriving at last at a version he felt did Pushkin honor. And now
something more
⁵²
: in October of ’56, Véra wrote Sylvia Berkman that Vladimir’s teaching was interfering “with his literary work, for apart from going ahead with the Pushkin book, he is trying to write a new novel.”

Pale Fire
brewed for a long while. Between the first stirrings and the actual writing (early sixties, when he was back in Europe) occurred what the Nabokovs referred to as “
Hurricane Lolita
⁵³
,” an enormous upheaval on all fronts. In March ’57 Vladimir sent Doubleday editor Jason Epstein a preview of a projected, post-
Lolita
novel: it would involve “some very
sophisticated spiritualism
⁵⁴
,” he wrote, adding, “My creature’s quest is centered in the problem of heretofore and hereafter, and it is I may say beautifully solved.”

Pale Fire
would be metaphysical although “completely divorced from so-called faith or religion.” There would be “an
insular kingdom
⁵⁵
” where “a dull and savage revolution” ousts a king, who escapes to America. Nabokov signals an intention to play with geography in a way hinted at in earlier books. The Hudson River will flow “
to Colorado
⁵⁶
,” and the border between upstate New York and “Montario” will be “a little blurry and unstable,” but overall, “the locus and life-color are what a real-estate mind would call ‘realistic.’ ”

The
novel’s central conceit
⁵⁷
—that a man called Charles Kinbote is annotating a poem by a man called John Shade—is not described in the Epstein letter. Brian Boyd, for whom
Pale Fire
may be “
the most perfect novel
⁵⁸
ever written,” wonderfully describes a reader first trying to enter the book:

Two pages into
⁵⁹
the foreword, Kinbote tells us that his poor friend Shade proclaimed to him on the last day of his life that he had reached the end of his labors [on the long poem]. Kinbote adds: “See my note to line 991.” At this point we can either continue with the foreword, and catch the note when we come to it, or trust the author enough to suppose there is some reason … and turn to the note. If we take the second course, we can witness at once Kinbote’s curious attachment to Shade. As he returns home, Kinbote … finds Shade on “the arborlike porch or veranda I have mentioned in my note
to lines 47–48.” Do we continue the note to line 991 … or do we divert to the earlier note? If we do, we are referred forward almost at once to the note to line 691, and though we are running out of fingers to insert as bookmarks … we may agree to one last try.

Nabokov works hard to entertain his reader. There is also a subtle humbling. Between 1956, when the book first stirred in him, and the early sixties,
novels of which Nabokov was aware
⁶⁰
, some of which he praised—for instance, works by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Raymond Queneau, stalwarts of, respectively, the
nouveau roman
and the French literary movement
Oulipo
—appeared and acknowledged, in some ways superseded, Nabokov’s formally most innovative work. He might have felt inspired to move further in an experimental direction.
The humbling
⁶¹
was of the common reader. As his follow-up to a smash bestseller, Nabokov was offering a novel with no certain way to be read. Kinbote tries, in his way, to be helpful:

Although these notes
⁶²
, in conformity with custom, come after the poem, the reader is advised to consult them first and then study the poem with their help, rereading them of course as he goes through its text, and perhaps, after having done with the poem, consulting them a third time so as to complete the picture.

No question which part the commentator hopes will not be missed! Possibly in a bid to double book sales—akin to the astute copywriter who first printed on a bottle of shampoo, “Rinse and Repeat”—he confesses that he finds it

wise in such cases
⁶³
as this to eliminate the bother of back-and-forth leafings by either cutting out and clipping together the pages with the text of the thing, or, even more simply, purchasing two copies of the same work which can then be placed in adjacent positions on a comfortable table.

The book’s focal text, Shade’s long poem “Pale Fire,” is old-fashioned: rhymed and metered. Boyd calls it “a
brilliant achievement
⁶⁴
in its own right,” adding that “English poetry has
few things better to offer
⁶⁵
than ‘Pale Fire.’ ” It derives its form from the verse of Alexander Pope, although
other writers
⁶⁶
are also echoed, among them Milton, Goethe, Wordsworth, Housman, and Yeats. John Shade, a college-dwelling
author of the fireside sort, is a medium-famous northeastern poet, or as he puts it in “Pale Fire,” “
my name / Was
⁶⁷
mentioned twice, as usual just behind / (one oozy footstep) Frost.” Nine hundred ninety-nine lines long, his poem is not frank doggerel, but it does have a wearying singsong quality, and the self-satisfied mastery of eighteenth-century heroic couplets—rhyming pairs of lines of iambic pentameter—produces an effect of contented neatness:

Maud Shade was eighty
⁶⁸
when a sudden hush

Fell on her life. We saw the angry flush

And torsion of paralysis assail

Her noble cheek. We moved her to Pinedale,

Famed for its sanitarium. There she’d sit

in the glassed sun and watch the fly that lit

Upon her dress and then upon her wrist.

Her mind kept fading in the growing mist.

The rhyme-and-meter-driven ordering of sense that Nabokov had weaned himself from in his translations of
Eugene Onegin
—sacrificing everything to strict literal fidelity—here wins out. Early on, Shade describes a strange episode of his youth:

One day,

When I’d just turned eleven
⁶⁹
, as I lay

Prone on the floor and watched a clockwork toy—

A tin wheelbarrow pushed by a tin boy—

Bypass chair legs and stray beneath the bed,

There was a sudden sunburst in my head.

And then black night. That blackness was sublime.

I felt distributed through space and time:

One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand

Under the pebbles of a panting strand,

One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain,

In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.

The episode recalls the hero’s heart trouble in
Pnin
, when he has visions of Mira Belochkin. The poem is
like Wordsworth’s
⁷⁰
The Prelude
, about “the growth of my own mind;” it is the story of a mental crisis with a spiritual dimension, in the manner of other works of the canon as well (Augustine’s
Confessions
, Dante’s
Divine Comedy
, Whitman’s “A Word Out of the Sea” and parts of “Song of Myself”). “Pale Fire” contains many of Nabokov’s own beliefs. As
he told an interviewer
⁷¹
in the sixties, “It is … true that some of my more responsible characters are given some of my own ideas. There is John Shade… . He does borrow some of my own opinions.”