Learning From Nabokov
MERKIN, DAPHNE
Writers &Writing LEARNING FROM NABOKOV by daphne merkin the kingdom of words Vladmir Nabokov's "fancy prose style," as Humbert Humbert calls it in the opening paragraphs of Lolita, reigns...
...As befits a writer who was a lepidopterist by avocation, Nabokov is far more interested in adumbrating the details that make up a pattern than in the pattern itself...
...He admires her way with "the dimpled sentence, a delicately ironic dimple in the author's pale virgin cheek," but patronizingly dubs Mansfield Park, "her collection of eggshells in cotton wool...
...A little later in the same essay comes the parenthetical aside: "I repeat again and again it is no use reading a book at all if you do not read it with your back...
...It is harder to sustain a book's interest by this means, but if one fails it is the fault of style...
...Prior to reading it, 1 would not have thought Dickens, with his bluster and gesticulations of the pen, appealed to the finicky Nabokov...
...Dickens clearly created characters, especially children, who capture Nabokov's imaginative sympathy...
...Writers &Writing LEARNING FROM NABOKOV by daphne merkin the kingdom of words Vladmir Nabokov's "fancy prose style," as Humbert Humbert calls it in the opening paragraphs of Lolita, reigns supreme...
...but we say 'stop, thief,' to the critic who deliberately transforms an artist's subtle symbol into a pedant's stale allegory—a thousand and one nights into a convention of Shriners...
...Dicken's capacious heart has never been in doubt, despite occasional lapses and some gray areas...
...To strike them, though, you have to first earn his respect...
...This then is my story," concludes the defeated pursuer of "Lo-lee-ta," the budding American dream-girl...
...Nabokov is perhaps most swimmingly in his element with Proust, whose exquisite plumage stirs him in a way that the conundrums of Joyce and the rigors of Kafka do not...
...We are now ready to embrace Dickens...
...Nabokov begins his lecture on Bleak House with unbounded enthusiasm: "We are now ready to tackle Dickens...
...It would be foolish to deny the streak of cruelty running through his work—the same streak, incidentally, that gives his novels their uniquely glinting, hard-edged quality—but I do not believe Nabokov lacks any responsive chords...
...It has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies...
...I am not certain how Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr...
...These essays, which reveal his love of the capricious wedge that literature places before the tragic pressure of life, indicate how avidly Vladimir Nabokov's isolated spirit sought "the refuge of art...
...Finally, and above all, a great writer is always a great enchanter...
...But I maintain that images are action...
...The essay on Madame Bovary is fragrant with appreciation, a tip of the hat from one consummate practitioner to another...
...In the 1940s and '50s the recently-arrived Nabokov taught at Wellesley and Cornell...
...Perhaps this is because Nabokov shares with Proust, as with no other artist, an intense nostalgia for lost history, and an equally intense determination to reconstruct the past with his literary gift...
...Hyde got selected for inclusion in this exalted company, but I suspect that Nabokov was won over by its matey, fog-ridden atmosphere—the aspect of Britishness he had heard so much about in his childhood...
...I have reread it...
...Nabokov has decided prejudices in favor of the notion of art as flagrant creation rather than slavish imitation of reality, and he airs them so often that they take on axiomatic weight: "Literature is invention...
...For others, myself included, the work put into Nabokov's sentences is more than rewarded: One is invited into a magisterial presence, where the darkness of exile is outwitted by the cunning of art and a brilliant Russian refugee laughs at the fates by re-creating himself in a stepmother's tongue...
...Nabokov's vulnerability is so well-fortified it appears to be arrogance, but behind the indomitability of his intellect—the relentless superiority of narrators who dare the reader to know or feel as keenly as they do—is a displaced person...
...He quotes from Flaubert's letters on the torments of composition: "It has taken me five days to write one page . . . What troubles me in my book is the insufficiency of the so-called amusing element...
...He also relishes an original and curious theory of readerly physiology: "All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over...
...Although we read with our minds, the seal of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades...
...Novels are "fairy tales," pure and simple, and should be appraised in terms of imagery and style—how convincingly the wart is drawn on the witch's beaked nose—rather than verisimilitude: "An original author always invents an original world . . . There is no such thing as real life for an author of genius: he must create it himself and then create the consequences...
...I am not sure, for instance, that he knows what to do with a miniaturist like Austen, although he tries hard...
...at any rate, his rather long, labyrinthine essay on Austen is the least pleasing in the book, and it is a pity that it comes first...
...And he proceeds, in what is in many ways the most touching and unpredictable essay in the volume, to do just that...
...Nabokov addressed his students with utmost dignity, skimping on none of his insight or passion, or even the dubious jokes inspired by a mind that delighted in play: "If you read embargo backwards," he informs his students at the beginning of his lectures on Jane Austen's, Mansfield Park, "you get 'O grab me.'" The collection includes his lectures on Jane Austen, Dickens, Flaubert, Robert Louis Stevenson, Proust, Kafka, and Joyce, two thematic essays ("Good Readers and Good Writers," and "The Art of Literature and Commonsense...
...When Nabokov comments on this, it is no longer a lecture that we are privy to, it is a conversation between master writers passing the secrets of their craft along the centuries...
...if you are wily and piteous, as Humbert Humbert and Pale Fire's John Shade are, he will sing for you...
...The volume is handsomely designed, with wide margins, facsimiles of Nabokov's meticulous diagrams and maps, and pages reproduced from his heavily annotated copies of the assigned novels...
...What I think too few people recognize about Nabokov's language is the terribieness of its beauty, the profound sense of violation that his craft assuages...
...There are, as one would expect, many dazzling moments in these lectures, but the most striking point about them is the industry that went into their making...
...Whatever the case, it is an eccentric choice, although it does illuminate a rarely-glimpsed down-to-earth side of Nabokov...
...Indeed, he is eloquent in defending Dickens against charges of sentimentality: "Now here, in the passage about the little Necketts, Dickens' great art should not be mistaken for a cockney version of the seat of emotion—it is the real thing, keen, subtle specialized compassion [the use of the word specialized is crucial to Nabokov's vision], with a grading and merging of melting shades, with the very accent of profound pity in the words uttered, and with an artist's choice of the most visible, most audible, most tangible epithets...
...Lectures on Literature (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 385 pp., $19.95) has been culled from his typed and handwritten notes, gracefully edited by Fredson Bowers and introduced by John Updike...
...1 would have wondered, in addition, about the different sympathies of the two men—what is generally referred to as a writer's "humanity...
...If you are merely piteous, Nabokov will not be compassionate...
...Perhaps he is constrained by gallantry when speaking of female writers...
...and a short concluding lecture entitled "L'Envoi...
...For if to be a genius is to be always in some sense an exile, then as an emigre genius Nabokov was doubly lonely...
...In the essay on Ulysses Nabokov tells us that Stephen Dedalus is lonely not because he has quarreled with his family's beliefs . . . but because he has been created by the author as a budding genius, and genius, by necessity, is lonely...
...Nabokov, then, is a literary absolutist, most drawn to kindred novelists like Flaubert, Proust and Joyce...
...Jekyll and Mr...
...Humbert Humbert reminds us that magnificent obsessions, be they with nymphets or with prose styles, are costly...
...There is little action...
...Around Proust he grows less brittle, more susceptible, and esthetic rapture overtakes his cultivated scientific detachment...
...Nabokov's has always been suspect, with some critics contending that he had none at all...
...Nabokov is especially attentive to Flaubert's layering of imagery (and even uncovers an "equine theme" in the novel that is charming, if a bit zealous...
...Nabokov rants at mistranslated phrases in the 1948 Rinehart edition, taking misdemeanors against Flaubert very personally...
...For some readers, of course, his fiction is too rich, too full of elegant adjectives and arch puns demanding attention that borders on reverence...
...Nabokov is candid as well about his pet hates: "The Freudian denomination with its borrowed myths, shabby umbrellas, and dark backstairs," and the "pseudoscholarly bores" who devote themselves to pinning the tail on the symbolic donkey: "All art is in a sense symbolic...
...Dickens is another case entirely...
...He warns his students once again to avoid the fatal pitfall of asking "whether a poem or novel is true . . . The girl Emma Bovary never existed: the book Madame Bovary shall exist forever and ever...
...We are now ready to bask in Dickens...
...This observation is a sad reflection, I think, of Nabokov's feelings about his own situation...
...It would be painful to think of this erudite, debonair man carefully transcribing the lyrics of "The Croppy Boy," an 18th-century Irish ballad, into his teaching copy of Ulysses merely to quote a few lines in class if his enjoyment of such tasks were not evident on every page...
...He has little use for what he calls "the sociological side...
...The essays on Proust, Kafka and Joyce, however, are superb...
Vol. 63 • October 1980 • No. 19
