Nabokov's Artistry

...To shift gears abruptly, we may note that two extremely good na-tured books about life on Madison Avenue have lately been published...

...This is what Nabokov does to his lost, bewildered, but somehow indomitable people...

...Here you may test him on your literary palate without the intervention of hot pepper seeds...

...It is this quality in the work of Gogol which Nabokov admired so much in his fine little study of the Russian, published in 1944 by New Directions...

...The quotations indicate another of Nabokov's characteristics—his preoccupation with the significance of minutiae...

...The other stories, all of them, deal with remembrances of things past...

...Behind every nostalgic reflection there is a sardonic laugh at the posturing involved in the recollection...

...Now they have been rescued from newspaper files and turned into a volume of warm, vivid, and ever-human stories...

...Many artists have had his word-skill without his vision...

...It is merely the reminiscences of an old man written at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century...

...But if you mean the pathetic, the human condition, if you mean all such things that in less weird worlds are linked up with the loftiest aspirations, the deepest sufferings, the strongest passions— then of course the necessary breach is there, and a pathetic human, lost in the midst of [a] nightmarish, irresponsible world would be 'absurd' by a kind of secondary contrast...

...He has written: "The absurd has as many shades and degrees as the tragic has . . . You cannot place a man in an absurd situation if the whole world he lives in is absurd...

...He does not note detail with the dull, dogged persistence of the realist...

...Neither is distinguished, and neither contributes any new knowledge about the wearers of the gray flannel...

...It is this recognition of nostalgia's absurdity which keeps Nabokov from falling into the bottomless pit of sentimentality...

...He has been among us for years, his talents gaining increasing recognition from the small minority of literate readers—who will now, no doubt, summarily drop him for the sin of popularity...

...Briefly Noted The Mark by Charles Israel (Simon and Schuster...

...It is easy to write a book about boredom which is itself boring, but Phelps has avoided that trap, along with a good many others which beset the first novelist...

...Indeed, the books perpetuate most of the mythology which has grown up about the breed, but both represent innocuous ways to spend the evening if there's nothing good oh television.fx...

...3.95 owTfim Was A Mrby John Steinbeck what was—insofar as words have sense—the equivalent of 'beloved master' and prefaced a theoretically immortal signature with a mumble expressing idiotic devotion to a person whose very existence was to the writer a matter of complete unconcern...

...The first thing to note about the stories is that most of them are more plotless than anything of Chekov's...

...That in Alleppo Once" purports to be the letter of an emigre describing how his young wife went mad and was lost in the Nazi invasion (there is much mourning in Nabokov's work for people, places, things now lost forever...

...First Love" is another autobiographical recollection of the sort the title describes...

...He too, as Turgenev once said of himself and his contemporaries, "crawled out from under Gogol's overcoat...

...For example: "Mademoiselle O" is a sad, funny, oddly touching recollection of a grotesque governess Nabokov had in pre-revolutionary Russia...

...No, his story is about the effect of the trip on the explorer's parents whose chief concern is, more or less, that their son remember to wear his rubbers...

...3.95) and Shepherd Mead's The Admen (Simon and Schuster...

...Doubleday has kindly provided us with Nabokov's Dozen (f 3.50) a collection of 13 short stories by the master...

...Many writers have had visions as sensitive as his...

...Their reaction is a complex of simplicities, achingly human and sensitively rendered by Nabokov...

...It is obvious that Nabokov, in his own way, in a purely modern idiom, is following Gogol's lead...

...And his passion for little girls based on the aborted love of his childhood is obviously a bit of nostalgia carried to absurd lengths...

...But he is not concerned with the adventures of the explorer...

...But there is nothing original here, and what good there is is buried in a mass of fashionable fictional cliches...

...I leave to your imagination how he lets his business go to ruin while all this transpires...

...Pnin, that delightful collection of short stories masquerading as a novel, is a quintessential Nabokovian piece...

...For, whatever the meaning of his work, his vision, we must always bear in mind the skill, the attention to meaning, the conscious skill with which he manipulates stubborn words...

...Of course, the Hitler youth forcibly drag him from his place of enchantment and it is lost...

...Humbert Humbert is obviously withdrawn from the world that threatens him...

...Perhaps only he can know the full meaning of a nostalgia which is not merely, as I previously suggested, for times and places gone by, but for a world, and a place, which has never existed, and never can exist, in our world of men...

...For those who wish to test that point of view and that style, for those who are a little timid about the subject of Lolita, for those who shun literary controversy, there is, happily, an alternative...

...But when a bit of it strikes his fancy he worries it about, digging the last morsel of meaning (in terms of his characters and in relation to the aesthetic niceties of his story...

...But don't think for a moment that "plotless" means pointless...

...That is its odd mingling of humor and sadness—something which is found in much Russian writing (Nabokov is a Russian emigre who now writes in English...

...As those who picked up Lolita looking for a pornagraphic thrill have by now discovered, Nabokov's style is the very antithesis of that usually demanded in the cruel marts of best-sellerdom, as is his point of view...

...Robert Phelps' first novel, Heroes and Orators (McDowell-Obolensky...

...The restlessness, the eagerness for distraction, the boredom that the good youthful mind must, paradoxically, fight, are all caught in Phelps' net...

...In their letters they addressed perfect strangers by Some of the most sensitive and illuminating ^ writings out of World War II were John Steinbeck's memorable dispatches...

...This device enables Nabokov to give an odd, brilliant insight into our own times: "They had their meals at large tables around which they grouped themselves in a stiff, sitting position on hard wooden chairs . . . Clothes consisted of a number of parts, each of which, moreover, contained the reduced and useless remnants of this or that older fashion...

...This too is a "sincere" book, done with some sensitivity and with some knowledge of what good style is...

...Vladimir Nabokov is a genius—one of the handful of major talents alive in our time...

...They go far beyond—most of them— the New Yorker school of plotless-ness...

...3.50), might, like The Mark, have been titled By Sex Possessed...

...This is one of those fast-moving, readable, and routine realistic novels which are of little concern to those interested in the possibilities of fiction, but which do to pass an evening...

...This is an enormously delicate, probing work, dealing with the interlocking relationships of a rather arty group...

...Above all, I believe, Nabokov is a poet of the absurd...

...They are Robert Foreman's The Hot Half Hour (Criterion...

...3.95) is a humane, sincere, conventional case history sort of novel about a young man who commits Humbert Humbert's crime—he rapes a child...

...He has a passionate desire for the right word, the right sound, the right rendering of color...

...3.75), also deals with love, or, if you prefer, sex...

...Take, for example, "Time and Ebb," a story which has absolutely no plot at all...

...His adventure is, to them, simply too big to conceive in any other terms...

...you cannot do this if you mean by 'absurd' something provoking a chuckle or a shrug...

...Let me finally suggest that it is this vision of a higher reality which gives his work such importance, which transforms his memory-laden works into high art...

...Cloud, Castle, Lake" is the story of a sad, permanently displaced little Russian who wins a vacation hike with a group of Nazis and is made miserable by them for his inability to cope with the trip (so many of Nabokov's characters cannot cope with the people, places, things of the world) but who at last finds a scene of perfect beauty, a place he may recall from childhood, or, more likely, from the memories of childhood dreams...

...But high art is always a product of a combination of the two—vision and skill—in the mind of a genius...

...Phelps has captured one of youth's most difficult problems—ennui— with excellent fidelity and his "hero" (who is really an orator), attempting to find a self amidst all the distractions around him, is drawn with a fine sensibility...

...It is the story of an emigrant Russian professor teaching in America, funny in his ineffectual attempts to deal with the modern American world, sad in his wistfulness for times and places gone by...

...I risk that word with full consciousness of its dangers, with horrible examples of critics who have used it, and rued it, dancing before me...

...It is the story of the downfall of Michael Far-rish, a respectable banker, scion of an old family, who discovers his wife is cheating on him, passes through an abortive affair with an old flame, descends into the pit in an affair with his step-daughter, then commits suicide...

...It even contains some slight insights into the power of sex (something which our sex-bemused novelists seem usually not to want to come to grips with) and into the structure of our society...

...Reading Nabokov is a marvelously creative experience, leading the receptive mind down dozens of delightful byways where, once the writer has pointed the way, it can find its own paths...

...You can see it in Pnin, in Lolita, in the stories in Nabokov's Dozen...

...The theme of youth finding itself is a hoary one, but Phelps has found new truths to communicate...

...Perhaps only an emigre like Nabokov, who has at least twice had to flee the works of the madmen who inhabit our "nightmarish, irresponsible" world, can fully apprehend the full horror—and comedy—of the human condition's absurdity...

...Typical is "Lance," in which he projects an as yet unborn descendant of the story's narrator into the position of being the first human to rocket to, and explore, another planet...

...might be well to take stock of the strange, brilliant talents of its author, Vladimir Nabokov...

...I found the book a bit leisurely, but felt also that I was in the presence of a real talent...

...It is similar in mood to the section in Lolita dealing with the affair that first caused Humbert Humbert's passion for nymphets...

...We meet him after he has been discharged from jail, his mental ills cured by psychiatry, and see him attempt to pick up the threads of his life—good job, good woman, that sort of thing—and then see him almost destroyed by an expose printed in a scandal sheet...

...There is another, obvious quality in Nabokov's work which cannot go unremarked...

...And Lolita is, in a sense, made up of the same ingredients...

...Another novel, Venus in Sparta by Louis Auchinclos (Houghton-Mifflin...