VN

...It is a word about seven letters long and with the tail or hat of Nabokov's Russian t often showing clearly below or above the cut-out space...

...His will provided that his private papers not be published until fifty years after the deaths of his wife and son...

...He apparently carried on several involvements simultaneously...

...Lolita, surely...

...In the book Field suggested that he and Nabokov were somehow very much alike, and his identification with the author tended to turn his biography into a meditationon how the relationship went wrong...

...The nickname was Lolya...

...There is some merit to this argument, but one cannot help suspect that this unsympathetic portrait of Nabokov's final works and days is still colored by Nabokov's earlier rejection of Field himself...

...as the result of Field's twenty-five years of research, it has substantial value...

...Field makes some interesting references to the novels, but it is certainly debatable whether, even if Nabokov used Ellis's notion in his works, the same label can be extended to Nabokov himself...

...What exactly is supposed to be Nabokov's secret life...

...His most sensational—and sensationally wrong—connection between life and art is his argument that when Nabokov wrote letters to his mother (she died in the 1930s), he addressed her as Lolita: What sort of brazen compulsion, the ultimate gesture of contempt for everything Freudian, brought Nabokov to use a version of his mother's nickname for the heroine of his greatest novel...

...To the extent that this is a psychological biography, Field neatly sidesteps the Freudian issue by suggesting a psychological pattern for Nabokov and his writings that antedates Freud, the label of "narcissism" drawn from Havelock Ellis, Nabokov's own favorite author of case studies...

...Above all, he deflected questions relating his life to his art...

...The struggle hurt Field's 1977 biography...

...When Field describes Nabokov as a narcissist, he means, apparently, that Nabokov was always the center of an admiring universe at home, and grew up "with an invincible aura of confidence not only in himself but in his ability to re-create reality at will...

...T he present study, drawing heavily on the two earlier books, combines biography with literary criticism, mixing genres with mixed results...

...he also persists in discussing homosexuality among Nabokov's relatives, especially his brother and uncle (but this was not exactly a secret, since descriptions of those relatives in Nabokov's autobiography elliptically refer to it...

...Unfortunately, Field's summaries of literary battles tend to slide into back-fence chatter, and at his worst, Field lapses into whispers of tabloid scandal: "There are grounds to suppose that Nabokov never intended for the details of his life to be known...

...He claims that Nabokov drank heavily in his last years, and also that he had several affairs in Europe some years after becoming a married man—contentions disputed by Nabokov's son VN: THE LIFE AND ART OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV Andrew Field/Crown Publishers/$19.95 Charles Nicol THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1987 47 and executor, Dmitri...

...It is not surprising that his initial cooperation with Andrew Field's attempts to write his biography ended in acid disagreement...

...Nabokov's concerns for his privacy were elsewhere—and turned out to be justified...

...Field's most dubious moments are his unlikely revelations about the relationships of Nabokov's writings and his life...

...To the extent that this statement smacks of the sensational it can be dismissed, but the book cannot be dismissed as easily...

...Field spectacularly achieves this confusion...

...The photo on the dust jacket of the 1968 study had shown a young man, crew-cut and clean-cut, tentatively smiling in his new suit...

...Nabokov wanted his works to be the only concern of their critics, and he frequently commented that an author's only real biography is in his writings...

...Thus Nabokov went to great lengths Charles Nicol, professor of English at-Indiana State University, edited Nabokov's Fifth Arc...

...Beneath the brilliant surface of its language lay deep combinations of passion and detachment, of lively parodies and painful memories, of closely observed detail, psychological intensity, and leaps into fantasy...

...As the author of a best seller that was in danger of being banned on its initial publication, Nabokov became the target of leering speculation and gross misunderstanding, and doubtless of some unsavory fan mail...

...In 1968 he brought out Nabokov: His Life in Art, an important literary study detailing for the first time the significance of Nabokov's writings in Russian, including a vast hoard of then-untranslated material...

...Field's analysis of what Nabokov learned at the Tenishev School, for instance, combines background and literary assumptions in an exemplary way (this description appeared in similar form in his earlier book...

...W hat worried Nabokov was the possible confusion of life and art...

...Then something happened—an argument, or a struggle for control of the future book—and the Nabokov family tried to shut the door on their privacy again, denying access to materials, even attempting to block publication...

...Field, who very much admires most of the novels up through Pale Fire (to which he devotes a chapter), dislikes the last three, starting with Ada, which he finds verbose and self-indulgent...

...His privacy had always been sacred, and his autobiography, written in 1951 (Speak, Memory, one of his best books), told remarkably little about himself...

...As in his earlier biography, Field is rather comically concerned with discussing rumors that royal bastardy occurred in the Nabokov family two generations prior to Vladimir...

...Still, true or false, such foibles would not constitute, to my mind, much of a secret life...

...Scholars have picked holes in the study (and in a book-length bibliography that followed), but nothing has yet replaced it...

...Of course, the novel Lolita is, among other things, "the ultimate gesture of contempt for everything Freudian," but Field is unable to see the kinds of lines Nabokov drew between his privacy and his work...

...Photocopies of the letters by Nabokov to his mother that were given to me have one word cut out: the salutation...

...He had access to Nabokov's papers, and to Nabokov himself...

...As might have been suspected (the argument about the nickname doesn't even sound convincing), Field is wrong...

...Dmitri Nabokov has not only disputed this particular item, but totally destroyed it: the actual correspondence merely includes a Russian term of endearment, not a name at all...

...Between then and his death in 1977, the world caught up with his work...

...Mercifully, Field does not suggest that Nabokov needed to prove he was the straightest of the straight to compensate for homosexuals in the family tree...

...The Nabokov family made their distaste known...

...But Field does aim some new pot shots...

...Name (please print) 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1987...

...VN is Field's third book on Nabokov...

...A generation of writers was awed by his ability to transform the novel into a self-referential, lucid maze...

...Field became the logical choice to write an authoritative, authorized biography...

...Nabokov's skittishness about publicity was understandable...

...Further, Field has now produced what he and Nabokov had apparently referred to as his Don Juan List, brief mentions of many women with whom VN had affairs as a young man, which hardly seems a secret either...

...Even his method of composition was protected: he did not wish unfinished manuscripts published...

...It is the purpose of this book to describe that secret life...

...Reading this literary biography is like digging for clams in the sand and then washing more sand out of the clams...

...the 1977 biography showed Field as a Dostoevskian character in a wrinkled wool shirt, long-haired, bearded, hairy-chested, sucking a ball-point pen, his dark eyes looking with suspicion from behind granny glasses...

...The primary focus, however, is biographical, and most of Field's notes are to taped interviews with Nabokov's friends, acquaintances, enemies, and relatives, as well as Nabokov himself...

...His elucidation of literary quarrels among the emigres in the 1920s and 1930s is also valuable and more relevant to Nabokov's novels, where echoes of old wars can still be heard...

...The real "secrets" in this book turn out to be scandals only in the literary sense...

...Best are Field's background descriptions, especially valuable because Nabokov's generation is fast disappearing...

...to control his biography—his unreal life...

...His most extraordinary attempt to maintain biographical control was his unique method of granting interviews: He answered only written questions, in writing, ignoring those questions he disliked and often answering the others in a teasing and elliptical way...

...The kindest thing one could say about this particular mistake is that it exhibits a wild audacity...

...Further, his long-standing objections to Freud and Freudian criticism left him hesitant to reveal anything about himself unless it was triple-locked in irony, for all biographical materials are treated as fair game in psychological analyses of an author's works, and the works suddenly become of secondary concern to their relation to their author...

...he had been, he wrote, more interested in the patterns of events...

...Notice that Field is reading what actually couldn't be read—and then assuming that the one word he wasn't supposed to see was therefore of incredible importance...

...As fame invaded his privacy, Nabokov exercised that same control over the public side of his life, carefully affecting an amused, Olympian detachment while privately attempting to control everything written about his personal life...

...For him they are too self-reflective, as though the novelist had finally become trapped in himself, unable to distinguish his real life from his fame...

...What's left is fresh and slippery—if you can keep the grit out of your teeth...