Stalking Nabokov (26 page)
The intensity and variety of Nabokov’s humor have always been among his chief appeals for me, as for others, but humor does not yield easily to academic analysis. Nevertheless I was supervising an Auckland doctoral dissertation on Nabokov’s humor when I was invited to speak at the Mercantile Library in New York on November 19, 1996. The main reason for that trip to New York was to launch the three Library of America volumes of Nabokov’s English-language novels and memoirs that I had edited. The launch was celebrated by a reading of
Lolita
from start to finish. When Dmitri Nabokov, despite elaborate planning and precautions, could not find his limousine in time to arrive for the unpostponable start of the reading, Stanley Crouch opened, reciting part 1, chapter 1 of the novel from memory. I chose to read the chapter of the
Enchanted Hunters
scene from which I quote here.
I tend to want to connect everything with everything else, and hence, here, to connect Nabokov’s humor with his personality, his thought, and his art. I hope that doesn’t detract from the fun. A few years later I investigated laughter from an evolutionary perspective, and later still, in
On the Origin of Stories
, made play central to my explanation of art and storytelling.
“Van,” said Lucette, “it will make you smile” (it did not: that prediction is seldom fulfilled)… .
—Ada, 371
I’ve written the odd thing about Nabokov, but there are times when I don’t get to read him for a long stretch. Some chance circumstance or stray impulse will send my hand toward a page of Nabokov—I have a number of his books in my study—and I dip in and purr and chuckle and wonder: Why does he write so well? Why is he so funny, line for line? Why are his humor and his style so inextricable when he is not simply a “humorist”? Why is the magic of his work so inseparable from its humor?
Nabokov stressed that we should remember that the difference between the comic and the cosmic depends on just one little sibilant (
NG
142). In one story, which was to have been part of his last, unfinished, Russian novel,
Solus Rex
, he has his narrator write in a letter to his dead wife—and already we’re very much in Nabokov’s world:
My angel, oh my angel, perhaps our whole earthly existence is now but a pun to you, or a grotesque rhyme, something like “dental” and “transcendental” (remember?), and the true meaning of reality, of that piercing term, purged of all our strange, dreamy, masquerade interpretations, now sounds so pure and sweet that you, angel, find it amusing that we could have taken the dream seriously (although you and I did have an inkling of why everything disintegrated at one furtive touch—words, conventions of everyday life, systems, persons—so, you know, I think laughter is some chance little ape of truth astray in our world).
(
SoVN
499)
That sentence seems to me a key to Nabokov’s sense of humor and to the
sense
in his humor. Sineusov, the narrator, has recently met someone from his past, a man named Falter, who has perhaps become insane, or at least somehow utterly remote from “conventions of everyday life, systems, persons,” after he has had a mental explosion in which the truth of things was revealed to him (within the story, Nabokov makes this seem quite plausible). Because Falter happens to be physically strong, this explosion of truth didn’t quite shatter him completely, but when he passed on to someone else the solution to the riddle of life, the other person died of insight or fright. In the bothersome aftermath of that death, Falter won’t pass on his secret to anyone else, especially not to Sineusov, who’s desperate to find out if there is something beyond mortal existence, something that will suggest he isn’t forever separated from his dead wife.
When Sineusov writes to his wife, then, about their shared inkling that laughter “is some chance little ape of truth astray in our world,” it seems a kind of analogy to the experience of Falter, who seems himself a chance
big
ape of truth astray in our world. Laughter, Nabokov suggests along with Sineusov, is something let loose in our world that bespeaks a much richer but inarticulate truth about things than our little understandings can have within this world. What could that mean?
Nabokov wanted to be funny at every level, and in every way. That doesn’t mean he was a standup comedian, or an Oscar Wilde, who has to get in a certain number of
similar
laughs or of precious paradoxes per minute or per page. He once said “All writers that are worth anything are humorists. I’m not P. G. Wodehouse. I’m not a funny man, but give me an example of a great writer who is not a humorist… . Dostoevsky’s slapstick is wonderful, but in his tragedy he is a journalist” (Meras interview).
What Nabokov tried for in his own fiction was to mingle laughter and its opposites: humor and horror, laughter and loss. He insisted that “genuine art mixes categories.” He also tried to find as many different
kinds
of humor as possible, some fast, some slow-release, some local, some global, some verbal, some situational, some sympathetic, some barbed.
He never thought much of his spontaneous powers because he felt he could do so much better if he had time to prepare. But his spontaneity had its own moments. When Alfred Appel Jr. was visiting in the late sixties, he told Nabokov about a nun who complained to him after class that a couple in the back of the lecture theater wouldn’t stop spooning. Pleased with his response, Appel told Nabokov he had had replied: “In this day and age you’re lucky that’s all they were doing.” Nabokov let out a mock groan: “What an opportunity you missed: you should have said ‘You’re lucky they weren’t forking!’ ” Or when Lionel Trilling interviewed him in New York for a live television broadcast—in the days before he began to insist on only written questions submitted in advance, to which he would supply written answers he would read from during the “interview”—he was talking about
Lolita
and used the word “philistine.” Trilling asked him to explain what he meant by philistines. He shot back: “Readymade souls in plastic bags.”
But it’s the humor of his
art
, his
planned
play, that really deserves our attention. Humor runs all through his work. Nabokov was a respected composer of chess problems, and his problems are famous not for their difficulty—the usual measure of a good chess problem—but for their wit, their startling novelty of conception. So, for instance, he devised a problem in which the queen was the obstacle to the successful solution—“such a powerful piece—and in the way!” (
Glory
xiii), as he himself commented. Or another that seems to have an obvious solution but that the sophisticated solver is invited to doubt because there’s the shadow of a fashionable chess theme planted—but it’s an exotic wild goose chase, ultimately sending the “by now ultrasophisticated solver” back to something like the original solution (
SM
291).
The same playful originality of overall conception characterizes all his novels. His first,
Mary
, rests on one simple joke: the heroine of the novel, whose arrival the whole book builds toward, doesn’t appear after all. His second,
King, Queen, Knave
, already a good deal more complex, leads up to a murder, but the victim survives. One of the murderers dies instead, and her death paradoxically brings the other would-be murderer back to life.
His longest and greatest Russian novel,
The Gift
, starts on April Fool’s Day (and that turns out to be a joke with several false bottoms) and ends with a marvelous situational joke half-hidden for the good reader to find. And it takes a Nabokov to invent a novel in the wildly unnovelistic form of poem and line-by-line commentary and then to have the commentary bear no relation to the poem, or to write a long lyrical novel about a long-lasting, lyrically happy incestuous love.
Nabokov offers humor at every level from the pun (Humbert’s “pin,” his name for gin and pineapple, or “Parkington,” one of those nondescript American towns whose center and soul is a parking lot), to the allusion (in
Ada
, Antiterra’s randy nineteenth-century King Victor replaces our history’s prim Queen Victoria), to character (pseudo-seductive Charlotte Haze, mishappy Pnin, Kinbote frantically spying on his neighbor and force-feeding him the story of Zembla), to situation (Humbert stuffing Lolita with sleeping pills, which don’t work, or stuffing Quilty with bullets, which also don’t seem to work), to structure and social satire.
Why so much humor? To show he’s funny, to impress others? Some read Nabokov’s compulsion to be original—which he certainly had—as a compulsion to demonstrate his superiority to others. This kind of reader responds to Nabokov’s deliberateness, to his
display
of style, as evidence that he has no substance. It was to combat this response to Nabokov, more than any other misconception, that I was motivated to write his biography, to reach the wide audience a biography could command.
To me—I’m a simple man—it seems fairer to say that Nabokov is funny because he wants to amuse us, just as he’s stylish because he wants to excite our imaginations and to make us realize what the imagination can do.
One of his characters refers to “knight moves of the mind.” That’s just what Nabokov offers again and again: “I guess it’s your father under that oak, isn’t it?” Greg Erminin asks Ada. “No, it’s an elm,” she answers (
Ada
92). “I was born in 1910, in Paris” Humbert tells us. “My father was a gentle, easygoing person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera… . My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three” (
Lolita
11–12; the greatest parenthesis in all of literature, Tom Stoppard has said).
Nabokov makes these and other knight moves of the mind because he wants to wean us from the habitual and to show us the room for surprise everywhere in our world. One character in
Look at the Harlequins!
tells the hero, a kind of mock Nabokov, when he’s still just a boy: “Stop moping! … Look at the harlequins!” “What harlequins! Where?” “Oh, everywhere. All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together—jokes, images—and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!” (
LATH
8–9). Since Nabokov has called the image or the figure of speech “the main, sacred quiddity and eye-spot of a poet’s genius” (
SO
234), the juxtaposition here of “jokes, images” proves it’s no mean role he assigns to humor.
In both imagery and humor we bring things together in unexpected ways. Now, it’s possible to do that quietly, and Nabokov can be stealthy indeed. But it’s also possible to foreground what is being done, to stress the power of the mind behind an image or a joke. Like the metaphysical poets, Nabokov often displays the power of his own artifice, in images often deliberately playful and far-fetched.
Let me give just one instance of the overlap of joke and image in Nabokov. Charles II of Zembla, not yet crowned, is homosexual and misogynistic but under half-hearted amorous siege from the wonderfully named Fleur de Fyler, the daughter of the ambitious Countess de Fyler, who has set her daughter on the king.
She wore on the second day of their ridiculous cohabitation nothing except a kind of buttonless and sleeveless pajama top.
The sight of her four bare limbs and three mousepits (Zemblan anatomy) irritated him.
(
PF
110)
By foregrounding themselves, Nabokov’s images often suggest the presence of the mind behind them, and often, curiously enough, the presence of the mind—or the possibility of its presence—in things themselves: “The rain would stop one moment and the next start pouring again, as if practicing” (
KQK
248).
Nabokov highlights presence of mind and contrasts it with absence of mind, what he calls
poshlost’
: a taking things for granted, an unquestioned acceptance of things, ideas, judgments, especially when they pretend to mental distinction, to classiness. Both his imagery and his jokes stress the activity of mind, in himself as their inventor, in his audience, and often in what he writes about, whether animate or a playfully personified inanimate.
He stresses the unruly freedom and power of the mind, as opposed to the glossy parade of
poshlost’
. For that reason, he is pointedly original in his imagery and his humor. He once suggested, “Perhaps humor is simply seeing things in a singular, unique, extraordinary way. This almost always sounds funny to the average person” (Meras interview). He is also compulsively disconcerting: and he once defined humor as “loss of balance—and appreciation of losing it” (
Newsweek
interview).
His refusal to accept the way things have commonly been perceived, his urge to see new juxtapositions, no matter how incongruous, unites his sense of humor to something that might not seem to fit with the humorist: his rigorous, painstaking scholarship, whether devoting a year to his hilarious but meticulously researched
Life of Chernyshevsky
in
The Gift
, or a decade and his eyesight to the laboratory study of butterflies, or another decade to translating and annotating
Eugene Onegin
.
He refuses to accept fixed categories. For that reason he confounds the distinction between humor and horror in the nightmare of
Bend Sinister
or the sick fairytale of
Lolita
. Humor saturates what ought to be tragic scenes. Humbert has lusted after Lolita but left her untouched until the morning after the night at the Enchanted Hunters when she enters Humbert’s “world, umber and black Humberland” (
Lolita
168). It’s a scene of great tension and disastrous consequence, but because of Nabokov’s humor and Humbert’s we are tense on Humbert’s behalf more than Lolita’s. The sleeping pills
haven’t
put Lolita to sleep; the loud noises in the hotel make ironic comments from the wings on Humbert poised over his prey,
