Nabokov's Distorting Mirrors
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
'EXACTLY TWENTY-FIVE HANDWRITINGS' Nabokov's Distorting Mirrors By Stanley Edgar Hyman With characteristic showmanship, Vladimir Nabokov is carefully bringing out his Russian novels in America...
...Hermann's flawed perfect crime is a misunderstood novel that fails, and the police of criticism are out for his head at the end...
...There is a running imagery of sleight of hand: palmed coins, stacked decks, and other "stagewizard's trickery...
...The foreword has a characteristic Nabokovian disclaimer: "Despair, in kinship with the rest of my books, has no social comment to make, no message to bring in its teeth...
...his recognition of his double "has a profound allegorical meaning" as "the promise of that ideal sameness which is to unite people in the classless society of the future...
...Hermann fears that when his story is published, the French will "discern mirages of sodomy" in it...
...Another disclaimer in the foreword warns us against the "Wiener-schnitzel dream that the eager Freudian may think he distinguishes" in the novel...
...I hope that he gets the next Nobel Prize...
...riddles are asked and unnoticeably answered...
...then a suicide's hand, every letter a noose, every comma a trigger...
...Hermann casually assumes "the cloudless blue of our wedlock," but it has been clear to the reader throughout the story that Lydia has been cuckolding her husband with her cousin Ardalion, and after Hermann thoughtfully removes himself from the scene, Lydia and Ardalion settle down happily together...
...Ardalion's property outside Berlin is a distorted reflection of a landscape Hermann remembers from Russia...
...The narrator-protagonist of Despair is Hermann, son of a German father and a Russian mother, living in Berlin with a simple and devoted Russian wife named Lydia...
...In the course of his plot he spends a night with Felix in a hotel room and studies his body...
...It is in fact the dullest of structures and the most stereotyped and worthless of plots...
...The latest is Despair (Putnam, 222 pp., $5.00), written in 1932, now revised, in a revised translation by the author...
...Here is a sample...
...but Hell shall never parole Hermann...
...thus might write the abstract hand in its superhuman cuff, which one finds figured on signposts and in textbooks of physics...
...Nabokov thus challenges Dostoevsky by writing a book that will be at once The Double and Crime and Punishment, but I am afraid that it is not a serious challenge, merely Hermann's Teutonic challenge, another joke...
...As Zembla is the land of semblance and Pale Fire all "mirrorplay and mirage shimmer," so the Germany of Despair is one giant distorting mirror...
...Hermann is, in short, with Pnin and Humbert, Godunov-Cherdyntsev and Botkin-Kinbote, one of Nabokov's gallery of grotesque monsters, distorted and comical self-portraits...
...In still another meaning, Despair is an allegory of art...
...at the end of the book the fatal stick that gave away Hermann's crime disintegrates into "Sick, tick, kit, it, is, ski, skit, sit...
...Petersburg...
...Where Humbert Humbert's affairs with nymphets are crypto-pederasty, and Charles Kinbote's affairs with boys are open pederasty, this is comic symbolic sodomy, and since the partners are doubles, the glorious fantasy of self-sodomy and auto-liebestod...
...all of Tarnitz eventually turns out to mirror St...
...He is not a favorite one, as the foreword makes clear in a comparison of Hermann with Humbert: "Both are neurotic scoundrels, yet there is a green lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a year...
...In ignoring the double's resemblance to Hermann (which may be entirely in Hermann's imagination) the police "behaved just as a literary critic does...
...The tramp, Felix, is Hermann's double, "a creature bodily identical with me," but from another social class...
...then the one I prize most: big, legible, firm and absolutely impersonal...
...How utterly he has surrendered himself to me," Hermann thinks...
...Hermann refers to "old Dusty's great book, Crime and Slime," and its hero "Rascalnikov...
...On first meeting Felix, Hermann shows him their resemblance in a mirror...
...Plain readers," Nabokov writes of his novel in a foreword to the American edition, "will welcome its plain structure and pleasing plot...
...Most centrally, Despair is about distorting mirrors...
...Heaven itself is a great curved minor...
...His night in the hotel room with Felix is an endless mirroring: while Hermann pretends to be asleep, Felix "listened to my listening to his listening...
...He writes of the varieties of distortion produced by "crooked ones, monsters among mirrors...
...At times even Hermann's lumpish style confiscates and shimmers...
...In the novel, Hermann not only preaches Soviet Communism, but he gives Marxist interpretations of his acts: his reluctance to mail the letter that will summon Felix to his doom is capitalist resistance to expropriation...
...In a monstrous scene, he dresses, shaves, manicures, and pedicures Felix...
...Lydia is similarly miscalculated...
...EXACTLY TWENTY-FIVE HANDWRITINGS' Nabokov's Distorting Mirrors By Stanley Edgar Hyman With characteristic showmanship, Vladimir Nabokov is carefully bringing out his Russian novels in America one by one...
...So, we translate, the book has a social message...
...After the murder, Hermann cannot bear to look in mirrors, and he stops shaving...
...when Hermann finally falls asleep, he has a triple nightmare as complex as the triptych cheval glass in Pale Fire...
...At one point Hermann thinks of Felix as "a woman whom one cannot possess...
...Things do not work out as planned...
...The perfect crime collapses when the police simply refuse to notice any resemblance between Hermann and his victim, announce that Hermann is a fugitive murderer, and discover his new identity because he flawed his perfect planning by leaving the tramp's stick, incised with his name and address, at the scene of the crime...
...There is ceaseless word play: jest appears in majesty and ass in passion...
...Post office blotters, crisscrossed with reverse images of all that they have blotted, are mirrors...
...In appearance they are "alike as two drops of blood,' but Hermann has a pocket comb of real tortoise shell, while Felix's is mock turtle...
...He thinks of calling his own book The Double, or Crime and Pun...
...When Hermann tells Lydia that Felix is his long lost brother, he explains that they used to share a bed in childhood, but that they had to be separated because Felix could not get to sleep without first sucking Hermann's big toe...
...Petersburg, to be "constructed of certain refuse particles of my past...
...Art at its greatest," Nabokov told a recent interviewer, "is fantastically deceitful and complex.' Nabokov's art, even at less than his greatest, is no less deceitful and complex...
...Hermann himself is a vast distorting mirror...
...Hermann boasts: "I have exactly twenty-five kinds of handwritings, the best (i.e., those I use the most readily) being as follows: a round diminutive one with a pleasant plumpness about its curves, so that every word looks like a newly baked fancy-cake...
...Hermann is nothing less than Soviet Communism (thus the mixed German and Russian ancestry), enticing and ruthlessly betraying the working class, although eventually thwarted and defeated by its own ineptness and the resilience of the Russian spirit (thus Lydia and Ardalion...
...It is not a towering masterpiece, like Pale Fire, nor even a modest masterpiece, like The Gift...
...Steinbeck and Sholokhov are an American pygmy and a Russian pygmy, but Nabokov is a RussianAmerican giant, linking two literatures in his colossal stride...
...then a fast cursive, sharp and nasty, the scribble of a hunchback in a hurry, with no dearth of abbreviations...
...Ultimately the book is brought to life by the language...
...He feels that he is now "all alone in a treacherous world of reflections...
...At 16, when he went to a "pleasantly informal bawdy house," it was staffed by the muses, and the one Hermann chose was fat Polymnia, the muse of sacred song...
...the equestrian statue in the Tarnitz square treads an imaginary snake in distorted reflection of the statue of Peter the Great in St...
...Ardalion's final letter to Hermann refers to "all the dark Dostoevskian stuff" of Hermann's plot...
...Hermann's motive, he says, is more the satisfaction of committing a perfect crime than greed, although he plans to escape to France disguised as the tramp, and there be reunited with Lydia after she has collected his life insurance...
...Even a lesser Nabokov work is inevitably the most interesting novel of the season...
...So, Despair is a deliberate Freudian allegory too, of homosexual courtship and seduction...
...No American writer since Wallace Stevens has had such an infatuation with words and Nabokov's "choleric turkeys with carbuncular caruncles" might be from "Bantams in PineWoods...
...When he sees him again in a restaurant, their dual image is "reflected by the misty and, to all appearances, sick mirror, with a freakish slant, a streak of madness...
...The story Hermann tells is of his stumbling on a tramp in the woods who turns out to be his perfect double, gradually corrupting the tramp until he agrees to dress up as Hermann, then promptly murdering him...
...in the morning he decides not to kill him, in the imagery of an adolescent deciding to give up masturbation (with its built-in comic prediction of lapse...
...Hermann and his crime are a Russian doll of allegorieswithin-allegories...
...A peddler seen through a hotel window in the German town of Tarnitz becomes a Tartar seen from a Russian window years before...
...It has, too, in one meaning, and a broadly funny one...
...In the murder, they exchange identities, and, looking at the corpse, Hermann thinks: "really I could not say who had been killed...
...then he shoots him, of course, in the back...
...he later recalls Felix, whom he has "to use the accepted word, plugged...
...One of the preoccupations of the book is a running battle with Dostoevsky, "that famous writer of Russian thrillers," "our national expert in soul ague...
...At school, when he synopsized Othello, he made "the Moor skeptical and Desdemona unfaithful.' In his one dramatic performance, announcing the entrance of a prince, he proclaimed: "The prince cannot come: he has cut his throat with a razor...
...But like John Shade's 999-line poem, these are not the novel but merely the text for a marvel of commentary and embellishment that constitutes the novel...
...It is a lesser work, with some of the cruelty and sourness of Laughter in the Dark, but it shows touches of the author's genius everywhere...
Vol. 49 • May 1966 • No. 10
