Picked-Up Pieces (34 page)

If the critic attempts to consider
Transparent Things
as itself transparent, he can perceive several impulses pressing their faces against the glass. One is an impulse to make the most of language: a hearty impulse, even jolly, by no means above the coarse buffoonery of pun (“Giulia … wore a Doppler shift over her luminous body,” “An electric sign, DOPPLER, shifted to Violet”) and alliteration (“ruts, rocks, and roots,” “cracked that crooked cricoid”). The language bubbles, chortles, and in its abundance of simmering exactitude boils over into mad exhortation:

Transparent Things
’s hero, Hugh Person, is an editor of, among other authors, one “R.” (a mirroring of the Russian Я,
ya
, meaning “I”), who, though more corpulent and less uxorious than Nabokov himself, does live in Switzerland, composes “surrealistic novels of the poetic sort,” and regards the rest of the world as a grotesquely clumsy siege upon his artistic integrity. “Our Person, our reader, was not sure he entirely approved of R.’s luxuriant and bastard style; yet, at its best (‘the gray rainbow of a fog-dogged moon’), it was diabolically evocative.” Nabokov’s is really an amorous style—foreplay in the guise of horseplay. It yearns to clasp diaphanous exactitude into its hairy arms. To convey a child’s nocturnal unease, it can toss off the looming metaphor “Night is always a giant”; or with tender euphonic trippings it can limn a woman’s facial expression during intercourse as “the never deceived expectancy of the dazed ecstasy that gradually idiotized her dear features.” Such a yen to evoke, to use the full spectrum latent in the dictionary, would teach us how to read again. If not always a comfortable, it is surely a commendable impulse.

Less so, perhaps, the murderous impulse visible through the workings of
Transparent Things
. Since the book is something of a thriller, its plot should be left its secrets; but, needless to say, almost no character, major or minor, survives its last turn. Strangulation, conflagration, embolism,
cancer—these are some of the methods employed. Characters who barely appear onstage have their offstage demises dutifully reported: a detective who researched an incidental infidelity is “at present dying in a hot dirty hospital on Formosa,” a momentary lover of the heroine is smartly crushed under an avalanche in “Chute, Colorado.” A worse than Calvinist sense of rigor constricts the poor bright creatures into the narrowness of the killing bottle. When Muriel Spark, another deft dealer in fatality, conjures up a hotel fire, a building’s collapse, or a multiple murder, an implacable God is prefigured and the crime transcends the writer’s will. Not so with Nabokov. He proposes, he disposes. A design must be completed. The sometimes touchingly vivid characters exist as spots of color bounded on all sides by a shimmering nothingness; their deaths come as a rubbing out. And the reader, too, is put in his place, exterminated by the announcement that this is all an invention—
poof!
This announcement surfaces explicitly
^†
in
Transparent Things
, as it does in
Invitation to a Beheading
and
Bend Sinister
, but the gesture of withdrawal, of Prospero’s retirement, of termination and disavowal, closes even such relatively straight fiction as
Pnin
and
Laughter in the Dark
. Here, in a book that freely uses the second person and that calls its central figure (a professional reader) Hugh, the wish to personify in order to destroy carries well out into the reader’s lap. You (Hugh) person, whoever you are, are nobody (
personne
): vanish, die.

A third impulse is to formulate, at the highest level of intelligence and subtlety, some statement about space/time, death, and being. R., dying, writes to his publisher:

And Vladimir Nabokov writes, on the last page, “This is, I believe,
it:
not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another.” This at least helps explain this artificer’s compulsive revelations of artifice; in the moment of a fictional world’s collapse, one state of being yields to another. But are we to take this as an analogy for death? If death is total, is it a “state of being” at all? And—to examine the last sentence quoted—aren’t adjectives like “incomparable” and “mysterious” the refuge of an incommunicable mysticism?

The central impulse behind the novel remains obscure. At first, it seems that the “transparency” of things refers to their dimension in time—an ordinary pencil found in a drawer is taken back to its birth as a rod of agglutinated graphite and a splinter buried in the heart of a pine tree. Then it seems that the transparency has to do with an artful overlapping of beds, bureaus, carpets catching a slant of sunshine, shuttlecocks, dogs, and so on, as Hugh Person returns several times, between the ages of eight and forty, to the Swiss village of Trux. Other things are transparent, such as book titles “that shone through the book like a watermark,” and a loved one “whose image was stamped on the eye of his mind and shone through the show at various levels.” But the culminating image of transparency (“the incandescence of a book or a box grown completely transparent and hollow”), though the author presents it as if it were the crown of his life’s thought and passion, arrives as the answer to a conundrum that has not been posed. Alas, what we remember of
Transparent Things
are its agreeable opacities: the busy clots of choice adjectives (“frail, lax, merry America”), the erotic peculiarities of Person’s charming and difficult wife, Armande (she likes to make love as fully dressed as possible, while maintaining a flow of cocktail chatter), the delicious, glacial scene of a ski resort particularized by “the glaze of the upper runs, the blue herringbones lower down, the varicolored little figures outlined by the brush of chance against the brilliant white as if by a Flemish master’s hand.” We close the book guiltily, having licked the sugar coating but avoided, somehow, swallowing the pill.

If an artistic life so variously productive, so self-assured, so hermetically satisfactory to its perpetrator could be said to have a failing, Nabokov
has failed to get himself taken seriously enough. A sad shadow of modesty touches this narrative. “This part of our translucing is pretty boring.” “Mr. R., though perhaps not a master of the very first rank.…” Only “some of the less demanding reviewers in his adopted country” call R. a “master stylist.” The book abounds, indeed, in wry self-portraits. The heroine’s perverse sexual charades, in which her excitement derives “from the contrast between the fictitious and the factual,” parody Nabokov’s “
it
”—the “pangs” of the “maneuver” needed to pass from one state to another. A further “maneuver” with “pangs”: Armande’s Russian mother sits trapped by her own bulk in a chair, waiting for the “one precise little wiggle” that will “fool gravity” and, like “the miracle of a sneeze,” lift her. Nabokov’s own tricky legerity discourages solemn praise; he makes his acolytes and exegetes seem ridiculous as they compile their check lists of puns and chase his butterfly allusions. His aesthetic of gravity-fooling confronts us with a fiction that purposely undervalues its own humanistic content, that openly scorns the psychology and sociology that might bring with them an unfoolable gravity. Joyce also loved puns, and Proust was as lopsided an emotional monster as Humbert Humbert. But these older writers did submit their logomachy and their maimed private lives to a kind of historical commonalty; the Europe of the epics and the cathedrals spoke through them. The impression created by Nabokov’s works in Russian, I am told, differs from that given by his spectacular works in English; he can be compared to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in a way in which he cannot be compared with Thoreau and Twain. In his post-
Lolita
novels, especially, he seems more illusionist than seer. Though he offers us sensations never before verbally induced, and performs stunts that lift him right off the page, we are more amused than convinced. The failing may be ours; we are not ready, we are too dull of ear, too slow of eye, too much in love with the stubborn muteness of the earth to read the meaning behind his magic. He mutters from his sky, this comical comet, and hints, through his masks, of “a new bible.” His measure is that we hope for nothing less from him.

L
OOK AT THE
H
ARLEQUINS
!, by Vladimir Nabokov. 253 pp. McGraw-Hill, 1974.

Nabokov’s last three novels form, in the squinting retrospect of at least this surveyor, a trilogy of sorts: one,
Ada
, is remarkably long; another,
Transparent Things
, is remarkably short; and the third, the newly published
Look at the Harlequins!
, is, like Mama Bear’s bed, comfortably middle-sized. All three books feature on the jacket back (in three different tonalities, if you line them up) the same frontal, staring, intimidatingly cranial photograph of the author; and all three, composed in the sparkling and salubrious vacuum of Switzerland, are—in the nicest possible sense—narcissistic to a degree unprecedented in his other English-language fiction, where a distinct madness differentiates the narrator (Humbert Humbert, Charles Kinbote) from the author, or where at the end Nabokov himself breaks in, as if to establish that these unfortunate heroes (Krug, Pnin) are somebody else entirely. But no such disclaimer attaches to Van Veen of
Ada
or to R. of
Transparent Things
—creations that flagrantly flirt with our knowledge of their creator. And the main movement of
Look at the Harlequins!
, the core of its “combinational delight” (to quote
Pale Fire
), is the reduction to zero of the difference between the author and the apparently contrasting Russian émigré author, Vadim, whose last name we never learn, though he is nicknamed “MacNab” and receives by mistake the press clippings of a British politician called Nabarro.

Much of the fun of
Look at the Harlequins!
arises from Nabokov’s apparent invention of a contemporary and peer who is nevertheless conspicuously unlike him—oft-married where Nabokov’s monogamy is declared in every book’s dedication to his wife, anti-athletic where Nabokov was a soccer player and a tennis instructor, dipsomaniacal where wholesome, outdoorsy (“My own life is fresh bread with country butter and Alpine honey”—interview with James Mossman of the BBC) Nabokov is satisfied with “an occasional cup of wine or a triangular gulp of canned beer” (interview with Kurt Hoffman for the
Bayerischer Rundfunk
). Nabokov provides this alter ego with a list of works—but even at first glance the master’s
oeuvre
peeps through its mimotype:
Tamara
(1925) is surely
Mary
(1926);
Camera Lucida
(
Slaughter in the Sun
) replicates
Laughter in the Dark
(
Camera
Obscura
);
The Dare
mistranslates
The Gift
[Dar];
See under Real
and
Dr. Olga Repnin
openly conceal
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
and
Pnin;
and
Ardis
(1970) is scarcely even a pseudonym for
Ada, or Ardor
(1969). The persona of Vadim, too, is thin to translucence, and rubs thinner as the book goes on. Though he advertises himself as “a complete non-athlete,” he lapses into athletic imagery—“a crack player’s brio and chalk-biting serve”—and likens his literary prowess in two languages to being “World Champion of Lawn Tennis
and
Ski.” Vadim’s novels as he describes them are oneiric distortions of Nabokov’s own; he signs himself as “Dumbert Dumbert” in one nightmare episode of nymphetolatry, and his central psychological problem, an inability to imagine certain permutations of Space, transposes
Ada
’s elaborate speculations on Time. Rightly Vadim is haunted by “a dream feeling that my life was the non-identical twin, a parody, an inferior variant of another man’s life, somewhere on this or another earth.” When he comes to describe himself, his face is line for line the face on the back of the jacket. Even his three wives, so lovingly limned and so various—Iris, Annette, Louise—finally seem metamorphic phases of the nameless fourth mate, the “you” to whom this “autobiography” is addressed and who, when she enters Vadim’s hospital room, is saluted as “Reality”—“I emitted a bellow of joy, and Reality entered.”

Nabokov’s long joust and lovefeast with reality seems notably good-humored in this novel, the best, in
my
book, of his last three. If
Transparent Things
is a splintered hand-mirror, and
Ada
cotton-candy spun to the size of sunset cumulus,
Look at the Harlequins!
is a brown briefcase, as full of compartments as a magician’s sleeve and lovingly thumbed to a scuff-colored limpness. It holds, in sometimes crumpled form, all the Nabokovian themes, from ardor to Zembla, and shares with us more frankly than any book since
The Gift
his writer’s bliss, “the endless re-creation of my fluid self”: