Stalking Nabokov (47 page)
Nabokov, by contrast, focuses squarely on suffering and evil but nevertheless sees grounds for optimism beyond. In the essay “The Art of Literature,” composed during World War II, Nabokov wrote that if we reject false common sense,
the irrational belief in the goodness of man … becomes something much more than the wobbly basis of idealistic philosophies. It becomes a solid and iridescent truth. . . . goodness becomes a central and tangible part of one’s world, which world at first sight seems hard to identify with the modern one of newspaper editors and other bright pessimists, who will tell you that it is, mildly speaking, illogical to applaud the supremacy of good at a time when the police state, or communism, is trying to turn the globe into five million square miles of terror, stupidity, and barbed wire.
(
LL
373)
Nabokov’s surface irony can sting but can also hide deeper positive ironies. The Nabokov character closest to his maker, John Shade, writes at the end of his poem “Pale Fire,” where he probes the question of death and an afterlife, and recounts the story of his daughter’s suicide:
And if my private universe scans right,
So does the verse of galaxies divine
Which I suspect is an iambic line.
I’m reasonably sure that we survive
And that my darling somewhere is alive,
As I am reasonably sure that I
980 Shall wake at six tomorrow, on July
The twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine.
Shade can read his world positively despite the raw pain of his daughter’s loss, but despite his confidence, he will be killed by a madman that very afternoon: he will
not
wake at six the next morning or ever again. Nabokov’s emphatic irony seems to deny that “the verse of galaxies divine” can scan right, or that Shade has any reason to suppose that his daughter, despite her suicide, is somewhere, somehow, in some sense alive. Yet Nabokov allows the curious reader to see a “second (main) story . . . woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one,” where both Shade’s daughter and Shade himself survive beyond death and contribute their creative energy to what from this side of death may look like a cruelly mocking world (see
NPFMAD
).
Again and again Nabokov sets up positives, counters them with ironic negatives, then allows still deeper positives to incorporate but reverse the negative. Although he had no time for organized religion and thought the very idea of God revealed the limitations of human thought, he suspected some creative consciousness behind the world. He also supposed that the world’s inexhaustible details offer human minds the chance to discover more and more and in that process of discovery to share much of the magic of creation. And while he felt strongly the limitations of human consciousness, the absurdity of our not being able to escape the prisons of the present and the self, he also felt that love, kindness, curiosity, imagination, and art offer intimations of a freer and ampler world beyond the confines of mortal consciousness.
Nabokov’s optimistic metaphysics supported not only an optimistic epistemology but also an optimistic ethics, a confidence that by dint of effort individuals and humanity could become more sensitive to their world, kinder, freer, more creative.
9
For him, the forces of good
do
converge, even if at a point beyond human sight. He ends his introduction to
The Eye
, whose hero tries to commit suicide: “The forces of imagination which, in the long run, are the forces of good remain steadfastly on Smurov’s side, and the very bitterness of tortured love proves to be as intoxicating and bracing as would be its most ecstatic requital” (
Eye
10).
Like all great artists, Nabokov constructed his imagined worlds to match his sense of the real world around him. He tried to make his fiction inexhaustible and to allow the curious and creative reader the chance of discovery after discovery, even to discover positive ironies that could encompass and repolarize earlier negatives and strike deeper into the heart of things.
Machado’s and Nabokov’s differences in outlook help highlight new differences in detail. In his delirium, Brás Cubas hears Nature tell him: “You’re alive: that’s the only torment I want” (
BC
17). Nabokov, by contrast, has one of his narrators describe death as “the wrench of relinquishing forever all one’s memories—that’s a commonplace, but what courage man must have had to go through that commonplace again and again and not give up the rigmarole of accumulating again and again the riches of consciousness that will be snatched away!” (
Ada
585). Nabokov acknowledges the pain and the loss in death, but he also stresses the magnitude of what consciousness amasses in the course of a life—and that very magnitude seems to him to intimate more.
Machado sees time as loss, as mishap: wasted by Brás Cubas; blighted, even after high good fortune, in Rubião’s fall; a seeming paradise that turns into its own hell for Bento Santiago. We squander even life’s best gifts or have them snatched from us by time and death. For Nabokov time also involves loss, but he sees our inability to reenter the rich reality every moment of our past once had as only more proof of the limitedness of human consciousness. Nevertheless, for Nabokov we can access the past, albeit indirectly, through the controlled power and precision of memory.
Emphasizing humanity as flawed, Machado appeals to his readers, too, as flawed creatures who may fail to remember or infer or to expect more than what convention prompts. Nabokov, by contrast, invites his good readers to become fellow artists who can help reconstitute the complex worlds of his fictions. Machado and Nabokov both famously compare the relationship of authors, characters, and readers to chess, but their differences are revealing. In
Esau and Jacob
, Machado writes, “There is an advantage in having the characters of my story collaborate in it, aiding the author in accordance with a law of solidarity, a kind of exchange of services between the chess-player and his men.”
10
Where Machado sees solidarity between the author and the characters he moves about on the board, Nabokov by contrast focuses on chess
problems
rather than chess games and locates the real drama not “between White and Black but between the composer and the hypothetical solver (just as in a first-rate work of fiction the real clash is not between the characters but between the author and the [reader])” (
SM
290).
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Machado interrupts his narratives in a jarring, wary engagement with his flawed characters, his flawed readers, and his flawed world. Nabokov sees his novels, like his chess problems, as enclosed worlds, like lives bracketed off by death, upon which we can look as if from outside life or beyond death, enjoying not only our empathetic engagement with the characters in their worlds but especially our creative engagement with the creator of these miniature worlds.
Machado frequently sounds notes of failure or undercuts outbursts of eloquence: “No, that’s not a good comparison” (
BC
24); “One of the ancients has said he loathed a guest with a good memory. Life is filled with such guests, and I perhaps am one of them, though proof of having a weak memory may be the very fact that the name of that ancient does not occur to me at the moment, but he was one of the ancients and that’s enough” (
DC
119); “bewitched at the feet of my Crippled Venus. Bewitched is just a way of enhancing style” (
BC
85). Nabokov, by contrast, tends to stretch language to its utmost, to maximize the mind’s motility in space, time or thought. The rare hints of failure will usually be recouped by proof of success. In his autobiography, he cannot recall the name of the dog of the girl he loved on the beach of Biarritz in the summer of 1907, when he was eight, but then, near the end of the chapter, “triumphantly, along those remote beaches, over the glossy evening sands of the past, where each footprint slowly fills up with sunset water, here it comes, here it comes, echoing and vibrating: Floss, Floss, Floss!” (
SM
151–52). Even the ineptitudes of Nabokov’s leading characters, like Pnin’s comically flawed English or Kinbote’s appalling verse, tend to be matched by aptitudes, Pnin’s precise and erudite Russian and Kinbote’s flamboyant prose.
Both Machado and Nabokov linger over love. Machado mocks the hopes that the intensity of love might testify to its permanence in stories like “Eternal!” or Brás Cubas’s passion for the fickle fortune hunter Marcella. He regularly exposes the vanity so often lurking in love. And if we do not cease to love, we cease to live, like Helena, Nhan-Lóló, or Flora. On the other hand, although Nabokov can show love as monstrous egotism or narcissism, in Humbert and in Van and Ada Veen, he can also show the joys of fulfilled and faithful love, in Fyodor and Zina or John and Sybil Shade. Machado focuses again and again on jealousy not only to show the pains that can complicate the pleasures of love but also as an emblem of the conflict between competing goods: Pedro and Paulo both have qualities that Flora loves, but she cannot have both of them; Flora has qualities that both Pedro and Paulo love, but each resents the other’s love; and ultimately the tension between competing positives leaves everyone unfulfilled. In Nabokov the bitter jealousy Van feels toward Ada’s infidelities destroys their early bliss, just as it destroys Bento’s feelings for Capitú in
Dom Casmurro
, but after many years apart Van and Ada resume their passionate amour for almost another half-century, where Bento and Capitú remain apart, and as if in separate worlds, for the rest of their lives.
Nabokov was a maximalist in a century of minimalism. Some of his most flawed characters have tried to maximize themselves, to transcend ordinary limits, in entirely wrong ways. Hermann tries to escape the prison of his self through stealing another’s identity and life. Humbert tries to retrieve the past even at the cost of the frail and delicate present. Kinbote seeks to impose his ego on the world and on his neighbor’s poetic work. Nabokov creates monsters of egotism, as he says, to show the demons that have been booted out of his private cathedral. Most memorably, he inverts his own positives, he tests them against their magnified negatives, but in ways that allow the positives to show through.
That leads me to a final cluster of questions. Is Machado as much of a peevish pessimist as Brás Cubas? Or is he more like Nabokov, ready to express or test his own positives by means of their negatives, or so committed to what he takes as good that he cannot help indignantly confronting the bad? Machado often depicts lives wasted (Brás Cubas, Quincas Borba, Rubião, Dom Casmurro). but his own life could hardly have been more resolutely without waste. When his heroes complain of life as an empty pageant, do they speak for him or does he indict them for not having made more of themselves? He depicts idleness, fickleness, greed, jealousy, envy, and vanity, but he also introduces characters who represent values he himself embodied: faithful love, committed and conscientious work, care for others, and creativity. Indeed, his positives can seem so strong, even in the acerbic
Quincas Borba
(“universal sympathy” is “the soul of” Dona Fernanda, [
QB
262]) or a late novel like
Counselor Ayres’ Memorial
, that they can come close to romantic idealizations. And if even the best of human achievements will erode in time, Machado cites writers like Homer, Virgil, and Lucian, whose contribution to human thought and life has lasted for millennia and whose names he is happy to pass on to readers to come—as readers and writers to come will no doubt pass on
his
name.
Both Machado and Nabokov can vividly portray human shortcomings, the transience of human lives, and the minuteness of our world in the perspectives beyond our own that human imaginations can readily adopt. Both had an independence of mind that made them resist the commonplaces of their time, but it was more than that, surely, that meant they had such different evaluations of the ultimate place of human life, even if they often used such similar means. Machado, without Nabokov’s metaphysical hopes and his confident maximalism, did live in a darker world, but both held onto values like love, kindness, work, play, and art, ordinary human values that both knew how to turn into very similar and very different works of extraordinary art.
19.
Speak, Memory:
The Life and the Art
When I wrote my biography of Nabokov, I had to deal with the Pegasus in the room: Nabokov’s own autobiography. I mined
Speak, Memory
as much as I could for inimitable evocations and for factual details (except in the rare cases where documentary evidence proved Nabokov’s attempt at fidelity to the facts had failed), but I also analyzed his artful shaping of his life in order to throw new light on his mind and art.
