A SOMETIME MASTER
Bell, Gene H.
A SOMETIME MASTEB GENE H. BELL Look mi the Herlequins! VLADIMIR NABOKOV McGraw-Hill, $7.95 VLADIMIR NABOKOV McGraw-Hill, $8.95 Aside from erotic chases and emigre moods, Nabokov best likes...
...Vadim's four marriages make possible the only sustainedly good parts of the book- the droll erotic escapades, both in bed and out...
...It proceeds much the same way as all of Nabokov's for-ays into "politics," i.e...
...or LATH, Nabokov's abbreviation) casts off any erstwhile distancing de-vices...
...His wit is invariably at the expense of others...
...In "A Nursery Tale," a lustful German eyes the girls on the street, pacts with a she-Mephisto, and, thanks to her, his fantasies are almost realized-(hat "al-most" is precisely where Nabokov the card-sharper comes in...
...etc.- into Art...
...the spiritualist sub-plot gives it an added touch both eerie and light-hearted...
...An uneven crop, it gathers some of...
...Vadim employs the word, and his books clear-ly are skewed versions of Nabokov's...
...Nabokov's own marriage is fifty years strong...
...Perhaps to breathe some drama into this static exercise, Nabokov hounds Vadim with signs suggesting he might be but a shadow, an impersonation of a greater man whose initial is "N...
...This is jolly old Nabokov wink-ing at his followers, the devotees who like chuckling at that sort of thing...
...In "Music" a young Russian finds him-ffelf trapped when, during a concert, he spots his ex-wife a few seats off...
...Nabokov's father was a cul-tured liberal activist who won in a duel...
...Vadim's father is an uncultured, reactionary rake who dies in a duel...
...Nabokov is sufficiently naive- or 19th century--to believe tyranny springs into existence by the sheer will of one individual...
...LATH is a book of scant intrinsic interest...
...Such characterizations as "a particularly stupid baby-sitter" or ''Mrs...
...Who gets it next-double amputee grape-pickers...
...Here he ridicules "Neochomsk" and "the About-Nothing land of philosophic lin-guistics...
...It is also the crudest, most mechanical mirror-imaging, irony for beginners, a bare notch above growling, "Well, you're early today...
...People confuse Vadim's father with Nabokov's...
...Vadim somewhere snaps, "I thought Pound a fake...
...Nabokov repeatedly denies that the above fellow is himself...
...Blagovo was a half-witted cripple" are pointless cruelties, big guns for small prey...
...Earlier he' had attacked "Ein-stein's slick formulae" (sic), even when admitting to ignorance of physics...
...His eye for flora-fauna remains vivid, eidetic as ever, though some lush landscapes seem gratuitous, flourishes thrown in for virtuosity's sake...
...Nabokov's criticisms, as any visitor to Russia knows, are very true-and very obvious and easy...
...For full impact it depends ex-clusively on reader's initiation into a private cult...
...Publicist" fiction being his prime peeve, he bristles at any identi-fication between the ways and views of that character 'and those of V. Na-bokov...
...It rings fake...
...The Admiralty Spire" is masterful, a mini-Pafe Fire built around a bad novel-its plot un-der attack by the original of its pro-tagonist, its unknown author shifting in possible identity some four times, even briefly becoming the novel's herb's original's first love...
...have become too pronounced for com-fort...
...As novelist, he asserts, he is really recasting a casual fact of life-his being a Cambridgeeducated, emigre Russian aesthete who thumbs bis upper-class nose etc...
...Tyrants Destroyed is a selection of stories, twelve from the Russian, one originally in English...
...in 1942 (same date), 3) shift to writing, successfully, in English, 4) teach lit...
...But after Ada and LATH one can sympathize with E. M. Forster, who simply stopped writing novels when he felt he had said all he could say...
...Vadim twice pleads ignorance about butterflies...
...Najbokov can be touchingly nos-talgic, as in "The Vane Sisters," a wtatry recollection of two hurtful deaths by an emotionally involved pro-fessor...
...Hie title piece-a schoolteach-er's angered scribblings about an ex-schoolmate turned national dictator- is of the latter kind...
...VLADIMIR NABOKOV McGraw-Hill, $7.95 VLADIMIR NABOKOV McGraw-Hill, $8.95 Aside from erotic chases and emigre moods, Nabokov best likes writing about a breezy, Cambridge-educated, emigre Slavic aesthete, who knows butterflies, talks Fart pour tart, thumbs bis upper-class nose at social questions (never sniping at the woes of Russian refugees, though), and heaps scorn on Marx, Freud, Reds, thinkers, "politics," and several hundred major authors...
...As the Latin proverb says, even LATH isn't without strong points...
...Another piece, Terror," is compared by Nabokov to Nausea-he praising his story so as to pan Sartre...
...The remain-ing space is filled mostly by further Nabokoviana, personal tidbits waiting to be spotted by Nabokov-watchers- such as "Vadim's" Nansen passport, his composing books on 3 X 5 cards, his insomnia...
...Vadim marries four times...
...To vary the picture, Nabokov em-ploys a little trick-he gives his hero select facts the precise opposite of then- real-fife models...
...Vadim casually muses on "the texture of time"-tuned-in V.N...
...Paris in the 20s is nicely sum-med up for its seasonal hues, and there are a few quotable one-liners about brothels in France...
...A couple these pieces appeared in The New Yorker-understandably, for, while transcending the spruce neatness of that magazine, they also contain the right mixture of civilized grace and gaiety, of understated warmth and wit Several stories here are as good as anything in Chekhov or Joyce...
...LATH furthermore is heavy with a schoolboy-smartsy anti-Communism- this from a writer allegedly scornful of "political-publicist" fiction...
...This chap serves as hero to Glory, The Gift, and Sebastian Knight-, he bobs up in other books as well...
...at a college known for its Hotel School (see in 1958 Cornell directory), 5) use a peda-gogy identical to you-know-whose, 6) get rich from a book about an oldster-youngster love affair, and 7) produce excellent novels in both tongues, with titles and plots conspicuously resem-bling those of a real-life Russian nov-elist (a sampler: Tamara, Camera Lucida, and Dr...
...fans will thrill in recognizing a key phrase from Ada...
...There is a two-page attack on the idiocies of Soviet rhetoric...
...Whatever the uneasy logic of that disclaimer, Look at the Harlequins...
...His set characterizations still amuse...
...Parody, however, ideally elicits belly laughs, and so much self-allusion, whether "ironic" or straight, just isn't funny...
...everyone knows of V.N.'s entomolog-ical obsession...
...Read-ing them, you wonder what ever be-came of that Nabokov-something to do with life in the Alps, I suppose...
...in a 1968 interview Nabokov barked, "Pound, that incredible fake...
...What is most disturbing is that, save for Richard Poirier, no reviewer has, seen fit to discuss the book's grave flaws, disturbing indeed that such ona-mistic fluff, such bad books as Ada or LATH-books so querulous and mean, intellectually so vacuous and flat-can command floods of servile applause from learned literati...
...This system of self-reference serves as the scaffold of LATH...
...Nabokov's notorious quirks, moreover...
...I ponder that potshot, and wonder just how much of Chomsky Nabokov knows (and by extension how much Marx, how much Freud . . .) In addition, the snobby side of Nabo-kov, ever-addicted to easy derogation, here turns simply perverse, nasty...
...Olga Repnin in LATH correspond to Mary, Camera Obscura, and Pnin...
...Nabokov is the Andrei Zhda-nov of American litcrit...
...It has no outside referents, and its recurrent bouts of self-praise (see box) surpass any narcissism in Making It or Mailer...
...Virtually every sentence is admirably com-posed-Nabokov is after all a great cadenza artist, the Franz Liszt of Eng-lish prose...
...But these scattered strengths are vitiated by the hero's unrelieved re-semblance to his cranky creator...
...Nabo-kov's narrator even claims that, had he shot the future dictator during his schooldays, the country would now be free...
...This supposedly is meant as parody...
...As is also his bent, Nabokov exploits the humor in absurd situations...
...Nabokov's best and worst...
...Elsewhere, though, Nabokov does what he can do best-such as evoke the minute tensions arising between two persons Ul at ease with one another...
...Bolsheviks are referred to as "rats in ratholes"- a facile epithet, unsubtle, overstated, like war propaganda...
...It is the ultimate special-interest novel, serving the par-ticularist concern of one man-and of his academic acolytes, that obedient progeny who, after extolling LATH, will run off and track down the hotel allusions, the Slavic puns and quotes, the old scores settled by hidden sneers...
...in "Lik" a sad, small-time stage actor is fast-talked into a loan and otherwise set upon by a bumptious ex-playmate...
...Satirizing Soviet hotels and set phrases is like wisecracking about Twinky ads or Tricky Dick...
...Who can't hit the side of a barn...
...by ad hominen attack on the tyrant's figure, face, voice, -and personality, rather than on his actions, ideas, and context...
...From these little disturbances Nabokov consistently conjures up an ingenious way out, a luminous, serio-comic last twist...
...Indeed, parody implies a humor-ous, satirizing attitude toward its target, while Nabokov-who takes his art and ideas very seriously-is incapable of self-irony...
...They show a politically platitudinous mind at work...
...famed novelist and 6nigre aesthete, who, besides dis-playing the above Nabokovian traits, also manages to 1) take "Irisin" (Na-bokov's was "Sinn") as pen-name, 2) come to the VS...
...they mistakenly substitute Nabokov's book titles for his own...
...The book tells of Vadim Vadi-movich, B.A...
...Cantab...
...Unlike LATH, much of Tyrants Destroyed is quite likable...
...Never mind the Soviets...
...There is a visit to Leningrad where, like a Luce or a Buckley, Vadim strings bons mots about the slow, slow restaurant service...
...The two narratives do show striking parallels in plot and imagery, but where Sartre's portrayal of a dark spell of depression has a nervous, in-fectious horror, Nabokov's attempt is rather standoffish, the coolly controlled depression of a smooth aristocrat...
Vol. 103 • February 1976 • No. 4
