A tyrant of art
Maloff, Saul
A tyrant of art SAUL MALOFF TEACHERS teach themselves; teachers, especially but by no means only teachers of literature and the lesser arts, teach themselves; teachers, for better or worse, teach...
...All art is deception," that he was interested not in "ideas" (for him the terms of abuse reserved for journalists hoping to pass for artists) but solely in "style and structure" as a teacher and as a writer, he espoused his views with an intensity others reserve for, well, ideas, ideas which change lives, animate and deepen, yes, novels, and drive the killing winds of history...
...Students generally refer to their courses by catalog designation, Victorian Lit, Metaphysical Poets, when they are not being simply churlish and foulmouthed...
...He can, he tells his auditors, never forgive that fool Joseph Conrad (only incidentally the other luminous instance, if one set aside the strange case of Samuel Beckett, of a great writer writing greatly in a "foreign" language) for congratulating' Constance Garnett on her translation of Anna Karenina (not Karenina, he sternly points out), which Nabokov regarded as despicably bad, while in the same breath Conrad aspersed the novel itself (regarded by Nabokov as among the principal monuments in the history of the novel, indeed of the human enterprise...
...This is style," he exclaims in the midst of some remarks about Bovary.' "This is art...
...Ideas which never really took root in the American frontier, these, not even in the graduate schools during the salad days of the New Criticism which though Formalist in its aesthetic still bore like a thorn in its side a counteracting native puritanism and pedantry, its handmaiden...
...Regarding style, such writers as Tolstoy, Gogol, and above all Chekhov, present subtle problems for the critic...
...Knowing Nabokov, one should not have been surprised except perhaps by the implacable finality of this strongest opinion...
...the barbarians are at the gates...
...This is the only thing that really matters in books...
...How startling and fine it must have been MWF 2-4 to hear Professor Nabokov remark casuajly, as a virtual aside and perhaps with a stifled yawn, that the Commandant of die Peter and Paul Fortress when this scurvy, scruffy bounder Fyodor Dostoevsky was a prisoner there was, as it happened, General Nabokov, "an ancestor of mine...
...Far from being Holy Writ literary masterpieces were "wonderful toys," and literature a "divine game...
...Art was not useful, it was of no use at all, he told his students in the concluding remarks to his course in the European Novel published last year as Lectures on Literature [Harcourt, Brace, $19.95, 416 pp...
...And unless you are so blessedly lucky as to have been there, you are never given the pure luxury, the shiver and thrill, of listening attentively while this original who was without ancestors and without descendants taught you how a novel might be read by demonstrating in painstaking detail how he read some of the great ones, while he was teaching Nabokov in the courses students called by that name.led by that name...
...We are so accustomed to the voice and manner of the acerbic autocrat (recall his vituperative dispute with Edmund Wilson), to his "strong opinions" (the title of a volume of his scattered occasional pronouncements on sundry literary matters [McGraw-Hill, $6.95, 352 pp...
...You don't often hear that in a lecture-hall...
...In art as in life he was an aristocrat, a Russian aristocrat of the old dispensation, a dandy and aesthete, acolyte of the true religion of art, unsullied purist and keeper of the flame...
...Don't invite him to the salon-he will embarrass you...
...The great novels they had just "imbibed" would not, he assured his students,'' teach you anything you can apply to any obvious problems of life...
...Nabokov is never really comfortable in dealing with "general ideas," but like it or not there they are and they require to be dealt with...
...balance and prudence-playing it safe-are the trademarks of pedagogues...
...We want him to be perversely Nabokovian...
...About Sartre, he can hardly bring himself to utter the loathsome name other than to refer to him as a' 'French journalist.'' Then, next to Crime and Punishment, Abbe Prevost's Manon Lescaut is ' 'far better written and therefore far more moving.'' This is far from being his oddest, most eccentric verdict...
...The New Criticism distanced itself from aestheticism by what it liked to think of as analytic procedures almost if not quite scientific in rigor and objectivity, and therefore verifiably true...
...But there are selves and selves...
...In their presence, impossible as it sounds, he can even be foolish, as in his olympian dismissal of Freud, Marx, whoever else strikes him as unsavory...
...the case against him has been made...
...In theory the formalist and aesthete cannot allow himself to be moved by "extraliterary" considerations (a vexed, vexing, treacherous, perennial question best evaded here-the case of Pound leaps to mind...
...Just as alongside Kafka, Mann and Rilke are not merely lesser figures, they are "dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison to him...
...Hatred at first sight, a judgment he never saw reason to reconsider...
...that it is all the more heartwarming to hear him speak lovingly and gratefully to his acknowledged masters...
...for Nabokov, as God is my witness, The Brothers Karamazov is "a riotous whodunit...
...There is a case to be made against Dostoevsky as a I believe, a strong case (as a man he is the major figure in world literature I'd least have wanted to spend an evening with, since you were good enough to ask...
...But above all Dostoevsky was vulgar (poshlost, Russian for vulgar and eighty related terms, is the harshest in Nabokov's rich lexicon of contempt), an indifferent or messy stylist, little more than a "writer of mystery stories" tainted by the worst conventions of the Western novel-Gothic, sentimental-for whom art was not the "elaborate and enchanting game" Nabokov required of true artists...
...And now the truth is out for all to know...
...Crime and Punishment-bad, bad, bad: little more than trash...
...His faults, if they are that, are sources of pleasure for auditor and reader...
...Art was not only not practical, he went on as if deliberately to assault the most sacred American beliefs and dreadful sense of wickedness, Art was "pure luxury," pure pleasure...
...on Austen, Dickens, Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka, Proust, Stevenson...
...And how the General's correspondence with the Tsar concerning the convict makes "amusing" reading...
...yet it's wonderful to behold how theory has a way of cracking under the pressure of high emotion...
...Nabokov, the sensualist of art, spoke to his creditors of "pure satisfaction" and invited them to experience the "shiver" and "thrill" of the "rarest and ripest fruit of art...
...Nabokov had wanted to teach his favorite American writers, Hawthorne and Melville, but the Cornell English Department distinguished itself, as academic principalities are wont to do, by denying' permission to this overbearing, condescending emigre who spoke English so very strangely and with a vaudeville accent and now, though he was a member of another department, and did not even hold a doctorate, not even a Russian ones dared to lay claim to our classical novelists...
...But except for a few words in passing this is hot the place or time to argue a question that takes us immediately to some of the more intransigent questions of modem aesthetics...
...Some felicitous, vivid stylistic flourish in Turgenev inspires a Nabokovian response...
...Especially when it comes to the literature of the mother tongue...
...Yet finally, none of this matters...
...his linen is grimy...
...he calls his students' attention to some masterly passage of landscape description-of self-conscious radiant proser-as Turgenev's "concern with the trouser-crease of his phrase...
...Even when he was teaching his esteemed and revered Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekov, Flaubert, Proust, Kafka, he was teaching Nabokov-his art, his aesthetic, his surprising turns of mind and twice thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird or a butterfly, his passionately held prejudices, scalding hatreds, and fervent loves...
...The Idiot-sentimental rubbish...
...Nabokov's very repudiation of "ideas" in a novel partly disqualifies him from going all the way down to the heart of such a novel as The Possessed, for one example, or (splendid though he is on other aspects of Turgenev's major work) Fathers and Sons, for another...
...And when Nabokov has occasion to make remarks about still lesser writers of whatever era or provenance, he turns the air blue...
...Heaven knows Dostoevsky gave abundant cause: his anti-Semitism, his "reactionary political slavophilism," his "neurotic Christianism," his harlots with hearts of gold, his ' 'pathological idealization of the simple Russian folk," his reprobates "sinning their way to Jesus," his sordid "excursions into sick souls," his hostility to all things Western, secular, humanist, anything which deviated in the smallest measure from his religious and political fixations...
...a false slip of the pen-the wrong word, some clumsy phrasing, coarseness of feeling, a certain vulgarity-and we are doomed...
...however deeply he cared about the literature of England, Germany, France (his other place of residence), and he cared fiercely (a foolish or careless lapse in translation from the Russian or French into English drove him mad with rage and contempt), Russian remained for him the language of the soul...
...Everything about Dostoevsky annoyed him, and worse...
...For what is a poem or novel if not to provide the elucidator with an occasion for disemboweling truths that lie too deep for tears...
...Squire Turgenev recoiled from his insufferable contemporary, called him, a trifle indelicately, a "pimple on the nose of Russian literature...
...MASTERPIECES may be wonderful toys but that doesn't mean literature is only a marvelous game: it was for him also a matter of life and death, signifying everything, like chasing butterflies or playing chess...
...considerations of space here require me to refer the interested reader to Nabokov's finely illuminating, tenderly revealing remarks...
...AND ON THE OTHER HAND there is the case of Dostoevsky...
...Just as so much for Freud...
...That this is clowning, not criticism, low farce, not considered appraisal, seldom gave him pause when he was seized by the throat by one of his strong opinions...
...Nabokov is a Russian Jew, Nabokov's illustrious father was a noble champion of the oppressed Jews of pre-revolutionary Russia and in awful fact his brother Sergei died in a Nazi concentration camp) to the time he returned to Europe for his final sojourn in Switzerland...
...Even if one concurs in general (as I myself do), surely there are other, gentler ways of establishing Kafka's preeminence...
...whether Nabokov makes it is another matter...
...Unerringly, he had thus listed the supply-side bookkeeper's redeeming motives for the purposeless idleness of reading mere make-believe, child's play...
...teachers of literature on the one hand and on the other Vladimir Nabokov who was, before his darling nymphet Lolita released him from bondage, a teacher, for most of two decades...
...For Magistrate Nabokov, literature may have been a "divine game...
...Nabokov, at the time unknown here though an established novelist in his native language and in 1944 the author of that wonderful little book on his beloved Gogol, brought an outlandish sensibility, an outlander's culture, to the American classroom and lecture-hall, precisely that of the tyrant of art, the unabashed aesthete who made no apologies, disdained all compromise, courted no popularity, brooked no dissent...
...whom you would think to be, listening to Nabokov, nothing more than an impostor, a charlatan, an astrologer perhaps...
...The Possessed-hysterical drivel...
...but not in hell, Volodya, not in hell, and that's where Dostoevsky suffered, kept his workshop, executed the devil's bidding...
...We are talking, after all, about Mann, about Rilke...
...to denounce him for making "excursions into sick souls"-to denounce him in effect for the nature and exigencies of his subjects, characters, situations, motifs-his givens as a writer-cannot be so argued...
...In his final examinations, which he graded meticulously, he could ask his students to discuss Flaubert's use of the word "and" and in his lectures he fastidiously recreated a novel's structure, brick by brick, strand by strand, echo by echo...
...Fairness is for lesser critics: Nabokov can even succumb to the evil temptation of mocking Dostoevsky by means of fast-and-loose plot summary-the means by which anything can be undone, from Genesis to Lolita and Pale Fire...
...teachers, for better or worse, teach themselves...
...By way of sending them out into the world he cautioned his charges, as he had done again and again throughout the lectures, never to read books "for the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters, and not for the adolescent purpose of learning to live, and not for the academic purpose of indulging in generalization...
...But it is not as a table companion, it is as a novelist, that he clamors for our attention...
...they called Nabokov's courses "Nabokov...
...First at Wellesley, then at Cornell, from the time he arrived in this country from Paris, to take up the American phase of his perpetual exile, one brief step ahead of the Nazis (Mme...
...Pure Nabokov: he was, of course, teaching himself...
...To charge Dostoevsky with lurid melodramatics, sentimentality running to bathos, histrionics, portraiture veering on caricature, staginess, Grand Guignol (Nabokov in fact thinks of him as a potentially great playwright who missed his true calling), his borderline madness-to charge him with his excess can, judiciously tempered, be argued as serious criticism...
...he is unclean...
...And so much for Dostoevsky...
...he crosses his legs with an eye upon the color of his socks...
...Civilization itself hangs in the balance...
...While he insisted that "great novels are great fairy tales," that "all fiction is fiction...
Vol. 108 • November 1981 • No. 20
