by Martin Amis
One of the most audacious essays in the book is a seemingly modest little piece called “Wit Irony Fun Games” (2003, and quite possibly the last thing he ever wrote). Elsewhere describing his own novels, or many of them, as “comedies of wide reading,” Bellow here insists that by a very considerable margin “most novels have been written by ironists, satirists, and comedians.” I have been thinking that for years. Look at Russian fiction, reputedly so gaunt and grown-up: Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic—Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act); and also because fiction, unlike poetry and unlike all the other arts, is a fundamentally rational form. This latter point is not the paradox it may appear to be. In the words of the artist-critic Clive James:
Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humor are without judgment and should be trusted with nothing.
The New York Times Book Review 2015
Nabokov’s Natural Selection
Brian Boyd Stalking Nabokov
Jake Balokowsky, my biographer,
Has this page microfilmed. Sitting inside
His air-conditioned cell at Kennedy
In jeans and sneakers, he’s no call to hide
Some slight impatience with his destiny…
Philip Larkin intends that last line as an understatement. For Jake, the Larkin project is merely a path to tenure and a couple of semesters’ leave, freeing him up to concentrate on something more interesting—i.e., “Protest Theater” (the poem, “Posterity,” is dated 1968). So Professor Balokowsky’s Philip Larkin, if he ever finishes it, will probably be nothing worse than an exercise in cynical toil, with the author’s hostile condescension (“this old fart,” “this bastard”) kept manfully in check. We may incidentally note, nevertheless, that in the course of eighteen lines the poet gives Jake considerable insight into his subject—far more than was shown by the critics who lined up to savage Larkin’s reputation in the early 1990s, after the publication of the Life and the Letters. “What’s he like?” says Jake:
“Christ, I just told you. Oh, you know the thing,
That crummy textbook stuff from Freshman Psych,
Not out of kicks or something happening—
One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys.”
Jake will be detained by Larkin for only a year, so the chances are that he won’t be decisively embittered by the experience. Nowadays, in the real literary world, biographers typically immure themselves for a significant fraction of a lifetime, and the “slight impatience” is given the leisure to metastasize (into “pathography,” as Joyce Carol Oates called it). Also, in a culturally egalitarian era, feelings of emulousness become harder to resist. Would-be Boswells start to wonder whether their particular Dr. Johnson is really worthy of such protracted labor, and, being writers themselves, with writers’ ambitions and anxieties, they start to whimper with neglect. To this tendency we can offer a straightforward corrective: Dr. Johnson did not write the monumental Life of James Boswell, and for obvious reasons. A similar thought-experiment reveals the impossibility of Andrew Motion: A Writer’s Life by Philip Larkin (or, say, James Atlas: A Biography by Saul Bellow). Jake Balokowsky merited a poem; he would not merit a monograph.
Vladimir Nabokov died on July 2, 1977. Before the month was out Andrew Field finally published Nabokov: His Life in Part. The book had been gestating since the mid-1960s; Nabokov first saw it in typescript in 1971, and responded with no fewer than two hundred pages of corrections. Although Field is an interesting writer (why else would Nabokov have given him so much of his time?), we can safely say that he is not one of nature’s bridesmaids. As it turned out, his biography became mildly famous for the tonnage of its inaccuracies (Field offers 1916 as the date of the Russian Revolution, and seems to think that Nabokov climbed trees when he hunted butterflies); but what concerns us here is its murky presumptuousness—and the depth of the affront it managed to cause. “I cannot tell you how upset I am by the whole matter,” wrote Nabokov (to his lawyer); and a sense of waste and violation did much to becloud the last decade of his life.
Nabokov: His Life in Part opens with Field and Nabokov engaging in a stylized dialogue on the matter of methodology. Then, after nine pages of unfathomable tension, we come to what Field calls “our little difference” (a revealing phrase, though the contretemps remains obscure):
Neither Nabokov nor I said a cross word to one another….I was upset. There are, I must confess at the outset, ways (and I am not thinking now of his many virtues and attributes) in which I am too much like Vladimir Nabokov to judge him. I threw pieces of stale bread to the sea-gulls from the fourteenth-floor balcony.
Et cetera, et cetera (it takes him a further half a paragraph to calm down). How do we respond to this? With a compliant reverie about the foibles supposedly shared by a senior Russian-American novelist (pictured on the front cover) and an exceptionally shaggy Australian academic (pictured on the back flap)? No, of course not: we just rub our eyes at Field’s attempt to claim a kind of parity of ego. The biographer is evidently unhappy with his station; and a part of his mind simply cannot understand why Nabokov will never write a book called Andrew Field. Actually, one can imagine such a text: it would take the form of a merciless novella. But why should the aged eagle stretch its wings? Extreme and florid literary delusion was an area that Nabokov had already mapped and colonized—with Hermann Hermann in Despair, with the (real-life) Nikolai Chernyshevsky in The Gift, and most raucously with Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire.
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The nonexistence of Nabokov’s Stalking Boyd has clearly never troubled the author of Stalking Nabokov. It was Brian Boyd who, in the late 1980s, put the Nabokov Life (and archive) in order, duly producing Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990) and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991). These two volumes are thorough, vigorous, and, of course, pressingly readable: the flight of the nineteen-year-old poet and princeling from revolutionary Russia; the murder of his father, the liberal statesman V. D. Nabokov, in 1922; courtship, marriage, and parenthood in the flatlets and boardinghouses of Berlin; the rise of another “nauseous dictatorship”; the flight from France in 1940, with the Wehrmacht bearing down on Paris; heroic self-reinvention in America; world fame in the late 1950s, after forty years of uncomplaining penury; and then the hugely industrious twilight in the Montreux Palace hotel, on Lake Geneva. It is a story that seems more and more fantastic as it recedes from us in time.
Boyd is impeccable on points of fact and tact. We can be quite certain of this, because his biography survived the scrutiny of Nabokov’s widow. Although Véra Evseevna Nabokov was a beautiful, charming, and highly accomplished woman, her spousal protectiveness could justly (and admiringly) be described as barbaric. Even more to the point, Boyd’s comportment is exemplary, and his prose is energized by an impassioned lectorial love. Here is a writer who has heeded Auden’s requiem for Yeats, which ends: “In the prison of his days /Teach the free man how to praise.”
In Stalking Nabokov Boyd attempts something fairly ambitious: he takes the titanic Nabokov and seeks to revise him upward. As Boyd sees it, Nabokov is not only the greatest novelist of the twentieth century; he is also a considerable poet, an important scientist, a controversially original translator, a fearless and liberating critic, a learned psychologist (and not just a Freudophobe), a prolific playwright, an inimitable memoirist, and a humblingly tireless and eloquent literary correspondent. After this cannonade of accomplishments, it feels almost bathetic to be reminded that the chess problems Nabokov devised are widely considered to be “world-class” (the chess problem, Nabokov writes in Speak, Memory, is “a beautiful, complex and sterile art�
�—but then so is chess, as he showed in his brilliant early novel The Defense). Stalking Nabokov, in the end, is a tribute not just to an extraordinary literary animal but also to the size, force, and stamina of an extraordinary brain.
The Nabokovians among us now face a future more or less blotted out by the prospect of keeping pace with the master’s scandalous fecundity—for Boyd gives us warning that there is much, much more to come. Future publications will include eight hundred pages of dramatic writings (including the two screenplays for Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita); two thick volumes of notes to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin; three thick volumes of translations of Russian verse; an imminent Collected Poems; an expanded edition of the already sizable Stories; the letters to Véra (and the letters to his mother, his father, his sister, his brother, and a wide circle of Russian friends), to go with the Selected Letters and Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters; “two or three volumes of new lectures,” to go with Lectures on Literature, Lectures on Russian Literature, and Lectures on Don Quixote; and Think, Write, Speak, a compendium of prose pieces and interviews to go with the glittering critical apologia, Strong Opinions.
This epic of hard graft should close with a whispered footnote. After the perfectly understandable nervous breakdown suffered by the French translator of Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (the longest and most tortuous of the novels), Nabokov was getting up at five o’clock every morning in order to do the job himself. He had a year to live. He was seventy-six.
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It must be admitted that Stalking Nabokov gets off to a decidedly shaky start. “Since completing my biography,” Boyd writes, rather blithely, in his introduction, “I have explored new fields, but Nabokov keeps pulling me back. By now I have published a pile of my own on him, some of it well known, some not. When recently I had reason to consult one of my less well-known efforts, I decided others might like to see this stuff.” And for some reason (it is not a chronological reason) he puts all the lightest and slightest stuff first—a toast he gave at a centennial dinner, a speech he gave at an award ceremony, and so on. Boyd’s air of chummy informality leads to vulgarisms (“offers I cannot refuse,” “I kid you not”), ugly locutions like “feedback” and “inexhaustibleness,” the odd unaccountable error (a Russian speaker ought to be doubly sure that there is no such thing as “a gulag”), and a fair amount of shameless repetition. Some passages read as if they were knocked together in the conference minibus (“for the rights to Nabokov’s butterfly papers for a volume for which”), others as if they were long pondered, under a hot lamp, back at the airport hotel:
Does [Nabokov’s] passion for papillons indicate that he is insufficiently interested in people? Or should we argue the opposite, that the way he used the butterfly net of his boyhood has no bearing on the way he flourished his pen? After all, Humbert pursued nymphets, not Nymphalids; Luzhin captured chessmen, not Checkerspots; Pnin accumulated sorrows, not Sulphurs.
And when, in one of his ill-advised asides, Boyd reveals that during “the last eight of my nine years as a student, I had worn nothing but purple, tangerine, lime green, or scarlet overalls,” we start wondering what we have let ourselves in for. At this point—page 18—Boyd is sprucing himself up for his first meeting with Mrs. Nabokov (you will be relieved to learn that he wore his only suit). As it happened, Véra Evseevna soon came to value him and to trust him; and we should follow her lead.
For much of the 1940s Nabokov worked at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, spending up to fourteen hours a day at the microscope, and writing several key papers (one of them a “ninety-page monograph on the Nearctic members of the genus Lycaeides”). Professor Boyd, as the author of books on evolution and cognition, is well equipped to give us a real sense of Nabokov’s scientific weight. Lepidopterists, he tells us,
have recently reinstated Nabokov’s Cyclargus after cladistic analysis of many anatomical features revealed that Cyclargus and Hemiargus are not even immediate sister genera….Johnson and Balint announce that they “follow the methods of NABOKOV (1945) (the first reviser of the Neotropical polyommatines), who underlined the taxonomic importance of the genitalic armatures in lycaenid systematics….Kurt Jonson commented that the results confirm “that Nabokov’s contribution was significant, historic, and displayed remarkable, uncanny biological intuition.”
This is impressive, and not just incidentally impressive: it leads us to a Nabokovian difficulty that is (at least) two-ply, like a chess problem. Although he acknowledged the beauty and brilliance of Darwin’s theory, Nabokov was incurably attached to a personal version of what we would now call intelligent design; and the basis of that attachment was the question of mimicry. In The Gift the young poet Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev ponders
the incredible artistic wit of mimetic design which was not explainable by the struggle for existence (the rough haste of evolution’s unskilled forces), was too refined for the mere deceiving of accidental predators…and seemed to have been invented by some waggish artist precisely for the intelligent eyes of man.
Boyd assures us that “experimental work on the survival rates of camouflaged animals…confirmed that even elaborate mimicry could be perfectly explained by natural selection,” and goes on to wonder if Nabokov, or his ghost, would have capitulated to these findings. He thinks not—probably rightly. And Nabokov, after all, was a professional scientist. How do we account for the depth of his intransigence? Perhaps a naïvely “biographical” explanation is for once in order. Nabokov lived in Berlin from 1923 to 1937. He witnessed “social” Darwinism; the ideology of the “struggle for existence” was what he heard from the rooftop loudspeakers.
The Third Reich would have been impossibly disgusting to him in any case; but we must bear in mind that he watched the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in the company of his Jüdin wife and their Mischling child (who was then aged one). Nabokov very seldom addresses the German question in his fictional prose—a single unforgettable paragraph in Pnin, an excoriating sentence in the five-page “Signs and Symbols,” and these lines from another story, “That in Aleppo Once…” (1943):
Crushed and jolted amid the apocalyptic exodus [from Paris], waiting for unscheduled trains that were bound for unknown destinations, walking through the stale stage setting of abstract towns, living in a permanent twilight of physical exhaustion, we fled; and the farther we fled, the clearer it became that what was driving us on was something more than a booted and buckled fool with his assortment of variously propelled junk—something of which he was a mere symbol, something monstrous and impalpable, a timeless and faceless mass of immemorial horror that still keeps coming at me from behind even here, in the green vacuum of Central Park.
And the narrator’s gravamen is definingly Nabokovian: “with all her many black sins, Germany was still bound to remain forever and ever the laughingstock of the world.”
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It is possible to be a pretty strenuous Nabokov enthusiast while remaining almost entirely ignorant of his verse. Poems and Problems (1969) comprised fifty-three poems and eighteen chess problems; and this playful-seeming configuration led many of us to assume that poetry, for Nabokov, was something of a sideline or even a hobby. But isn’t that the assumption we made about his entomology? Boyd convinces us that Nabokov was incapable of the perfunctory: he went at everything he did with everything he had.
Still, there is one verse epic (it is a single pentameter short of a thousand lines) that all Nabokov’s admirers will have read at least twice—namely “Pale Fire.” The novel of that name requires us to leapfrog back and forth between John Shade’s heroic couplets and Charles Kinbote’s crazed “Commentary” (which is a distraction in all three senses). The long and fervent essay in Stalking Nabokov and Boyd’s new edition of an unencumbered “Pale Fire,” compel us to reexamine the poem as something autonomous. And the exercise is epiphanic. “Pale Fire” glows with fresh pathos and vibrancy—and so does Pale Fire. For the first
time we see the poem in all its innocence, and register the vandalism of Kinbote’s desperate travesty.
So at last the true dimensions of Pale Fire are more clearly revealed to us. And this feat of late-acting reinvigoration qualifies as one of Nabokov’s most audacious gambles on greatness. In Lolita we are told of the heroine’s fate in the “editor’s” Foreword:
“Louise” is by now a college sophomore. “Mona Dahl” is a student in Paris. “Rita” has recently married the proprietor of a hotel in Florida. Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. “Vivian Darkbloom” [anag.] has written a biography…
Lolita does not appear under the guise of her married name until page 266. Any other writer would have hedged the bet with something like “Mrs. ‘Richard F. “Dolly” Schiller.’ ” But not Nabokov. Future readers, he intuited, would come to know that Lolita is dead before the story even begins. In 1958 he added an Afterword, “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” in which he stressed that “Gray Star” (mentioned only once) is “the capital town of the book.” Dolores Haze, the obliterated heroine, only had to wait three years for her tragedy to be fully acknowledged. John Shade, the murdered hero, was obliged to wait half a century.