by Martin Amis
Books and reputations have afterlives. But do human beings have them, too? John Shade strives to believe in some kind of resurrection, if only to assuage his grief for his lost daughter (“I’m reasonably sure that we survive / And that my darling somewhere is alive”). And Nabokov, from childhood on, was disposed to reject what Shade calls “the inadmissible abyss” of oblivion. Formal religious faith, with its docile communalities, he of course dismissed as hopelessly undignified.
“The search for God: the longing of any hound for a master,” notes Fyodor in The Gift. “I’m convinced that extraordinary surprises await us,” he says elsewhere: “It’s a pity one can’t imagine what one can’t compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.” There is something inexorable about Nabokov’s need to imagine African snow: it is an extension of his temperament, and of his supercharged sensorium. On the timbre of Nabokov’s artistic spirit Boyd is fundamentally right-headed:
He was a maximalist: someone who appreciated, as much as anyone has, the riches the world offers, in nature and art, in sensation, emotion, thought, and language, and the surprise of these riches, if we animate them with all our attention and imagination….And his generosity to his readers matches and reenacts and pays tribute to what he senses is the generosity of our world.
This is a necessary iteration. It is time to deemphasize the allegedly cold, cruel, dark, daunting Nabokov, who is very largely a creature of myth (one rigged up as a kind of defense mechanism, perhaps, by readers who feel menaced by the strength of his penetration). Nabokov was a celebrator; and the secret of his prose is its divine levity.
Boyd tells us that Mary (1926), Nabokov’s first novel, was provisionally entitled Happiness; similarly, the hero of The Gift (1963) wants to write “a practical handbook: How to Be Happy.” Several of the early short stories—“Gods,” “Beneficence,” “A Letter That Never Reached Russia”—are little more than dazed hymns to the bliss of existence. “In life and in my whole mental makeup I am quite indecently optimistic and buoyant”; gloom and dejection (as Boyd puts it) are only for “the ridiculously unobservant.” At the age of twenty-two Nabokov sent his mother a short poem—as proof “that my mood is as radiant as ever. If I live to be a hundred, my spirit will still go around in short trousers.” “This is ecstasy,” he writes in Speak, Memory (he is out hunting butterflies), “and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love.” Toward the end of that book he discourses on “the best things in life” (parenthood in a harmonious marriage, intelligent nature, and—surprisingly—inactivity), and concludes:
“Struggle for life” indeed! The curse of battle and toil leads man back to the boar, to the grunting beast’s crazy obsession with the search for food….Workers of the world, disband! Old books are wrong. The world was made on a Sunday.
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In case we forget: the lion’s share of what we inherit from Nabokov comes in the form of fiction. Here, naturally, Boyd has his own predilections. He gravitates toward the teacherly or teachable Nabokov, the allusive, the punsome, the highly wrought—the silver-age or, in a word, the self-indulgent. Furthermore, he is committed to the interpretational approach, claiming, for instance, to have “solved” the “puzzle” of Transparent Things, and confessing (likably enough) that he still doesn’t “understand” Lolita. Among nonspecialists, this kind of inductive reading has been dead for a generation; we no longer read novels to solve them or to understand them—if indeed we ever did.
Boyd is also something of an apologist for the only significant embarrassment in the Nabokov corpus. Of the nineteen fictions, no fewer than six wholly or partly concern themselves with the sexuality of prepubescent girls. In Stalking Nabokov the six are whittled down to three: Boyd ignores the pedophilia theme in Transparent Things, and accounts for its presence in Look at the Harlequins! and The Original of Laura by saying that Nabokov was merely trying “to subvert our expectations.” The argument fails on two counts. Clearly, it doesn’t make the two little girls go away (the pedophilia theme goes on being the theme). And it imputes a trivial and entirely implausible knowingness. Nabokov loved his readers; yet we may be sure that he never for a moment considered their “expectations.”
To be as clear as one can be: the unignorable infestation of nymphets in Nabokov is not a matter of morality; it is a matter of aesthetics. There are just too many of them.
A confessedly “artificial” but unusually helpful distinction is made in Boyd’s pages between Nabokov the stylist and Nabokov the storyteller. One could go at it slightly differently, and divide Nabokov’s endowment into (a) what derives from genius and (b) what derives from talent—genius being the God-given altitude of perception and articulacy, talent being technique, and all the skills that come under the heading of Craft. Sometimes talent predominates, as in those two melodic but fiercely focused black farces, The Enchanter and Laughter in the Dark. Sometimes, as in those two would-be magna opera, The Gift and Ada, genius engorges itself and talent shrivels and dies (the same thing happens in Finnegans Wake). Much depends on how you feel about those two dystopian satires, Bend Sinister and Invitation to a Beheading, but it would seem that in about a dozen Nabokov novels (and we include Transparent Things) talent and genius are in near-perfect equipoise.
The delightfully painful short story “Lips to Lips” (1932) opens with an aspirant novelist hunched over his desk:
The violins were still weeping, performing, it seemed, a hymn of passion and love, but already Irina and the deeply moved Dolinin were rapidly walking toward the exit…. Their two hearts were beating as one.
“Give me your cloakroom ticket,” uttered Dolinin (crossed out).
“Please, let me get your hat and manteau” (crossed out).
“Please,” uttered Dolinin, “let me get your things (“and my” inserted between “your” and “things”).
Dolinin went up to the cloakroom, and after producing his little ticket (corrected to “both little tickets”)—
Here Ilya Borisovich Tal grew pensive.
While Nabokov—very wittily and tenderly—gives his aging wordsmith an iota of genius (“descriptions of nature and emotions came to him with surprising facility”), he denies him even a lone neutrino of talent.
Poor Ilya Borisovich suffers hideously at the hands of his pronouns—“she,” for example, when there is another “she” in the room, forcing him into grueling variations like “that lady” or “her interlocutress.” He is all thumbs with the nuts and bolts of reality (doors, tickets, coats, “things”)—but “luxury items,” or so he fancies, appear “to be much more compliant”:
and now, having ponderously finished with the cloakroom fuss and being about to present his hero with an elegant cane, Ilya Borisovich naïvely delighted in the gleam of its rich knob, and did not foresee, alas, what claims that valuable article would make, how painfully it would demand mention, when Dolinin, his hands feeling the curves of a supple young body, would be carrying Irina across a vernal rill.
It is a commonplace to say that Nabokov was blessed with a superabundance of genius. Yes; and he was also blessed with a superabundance of talent. His transitions from scene to scene and from one point of view to another, his pacing, his modulations, his stage management, his ever-alerting shifts of perspective, his freedom from inadvertency, his security of rhythm: all this feels quite frictionless.
At first “Lips to Lips” strikes you as a scarcely credible feat of empathy: how did Nabokov, of all people, dream his way into the mind of a man who can’t write? But there are days when every writer feels like Ilya Borisovich. As Boyd reminds us, a single sentence in Lolita (the important but hardly crucial evocation of the barber in Kasbeam in Part 2, Chapter 16) cost the author a month of work. “My pencils outlast their erasers,” said Nabokov in Strong Opinions. “I have rewritten—often several times—every word I have ever published.”
Panegyric is
rightly regarded as the dullest and idlest of all literary forms. In our attempts to evaluate Nabokov’s feverish shimmer, with its “distant spasms of silent lightning,” we have nothing to adduce but our own helpless subjectivism; that, and quotation.
So here is a personal or “biographical” aside. The present writer (who as a young man worked for three years at the present periodical, and is archaically mindful of its conventions), the present writer, to resume, quite recently taught a course on First Novels (or Very Early Novels)—among them Waugh’s Decline and Fall, Bellow’s Dangling Man, Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, and Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Although each of these maiden voyages contained rumbles and quickenings of things to come, only one novel, out of eight, and only one sentence, out of scores of thousands, gave the impression that something otherworldly was announcing its approach. That novel was Mary, and that sentence (which, curiously, contains a technical error worthy of Ilya Borisovich—the repeated “shaking”) comes on page 113: “The black trains roared past, shaking the windows of the house; with a movement like ghostly shoulders shaking off a load, heaving mountains of smoke swept upward, blotting out the night sky.”
Vigilant Russian émigrés, in the shabby but dynamic literary circles of the German capital, would have been anxiously awaiting the second novel by the shadowy “V. Sirin.” Upon opening it, they would have seen at once that the “black train” had indeed arrived (and was again about to depart, exactly on time). King, Queen, Knave (1928), a tale of murder, madness, and dissolution, begins as follows:
The huge black clock hand is still at rest but is on the point of making its once-a-minute gesture; that resilient jolt will set a world in motion. The clock face will slowly turn away, full of despair, contempt, and boredom, as one by one the iron pillars will start walking past, bearing away the vault of the station like blind atlantes; the platform will begin to move past, carrying off on an unknown journey cigarette butts, used tickets, flecks of sunlight and spittle; a luggage handcart will glide by, its wheels motionless; it will be followed by a news stall hung with seductive magazine covers—photographs of naked, pearl-gray beauties; and people, people, people on the moving platform, themselves moving their feet, yet standing still, striding forward, yet retreating as in an agonizing dream full of incredible effort, nausea, a cottony weakness in one’s calves….The entire old burg in its rosy autumn morning mist moved as well: the great stone [statue] in the square, the dark cathedral, the shop signs—top hat, a fish, the copper basin of a barber. There was no stopping the world now.
And it was a world that Nabokov was determined to see—in the words of Mary, a first novel mainly remarkable for its serenity—“with a fresh, loving eye.”
The Times Literary Supplement 2011
Americana (Stepping Westward)
Losing in Las Vegas
If for some reason you were confined to a single adjective to describe Las Vegas, then you would have to settle for the following: un-Islamic. And soon I’ll return to that theme. But first I want to tell you what brought me to Sin City. I was here to compete in the annual World Series of Poker. All the intensive homework lay behind me, and I looked forward to the coming contest with unsmiling ambition.
Now I give you fair warning, I murmured as I deplaned into the walk-through casino that calls itself McCarran International Airport. Don’t figure me for dead money. Purged of tells, tilts, overbets, limp-ins, cry calls, gutshots, and long-odds suckouts, and purged, too, of all that defeatist and self-pitying “bad beat” bunkum (when you whine about the cards), my poker had moved on to a new level. I had recently read dozens of anecdotal how-to books written or dictated by the stars and tsars of the green felt; and I had mastered, at least in theory, the technique of “changing gears.” This was my strategy for the World Series: to kick off I’d go tight and leather-ass, and even on premium cards I’d sandbag and smooth-call; then I’d go loose and splash around and bump and bluff and bully; and then I’d go tight again—and so on. I hadn’t journeyed to Vegas just to make it to the last table and then walk to the rail with a mere $500,000. I was there for the $US 10 million (which would then be doubled by a lavish and adoring sponsor). I was there for the bracelet. I was going to the Amazon Room (as they say) to take the whole enchilada.
Soon I’ll be telling you about my bad beat with the three fives. But first, some observations on the Nevadan venue.
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Las Vegas is really tremendously un-Islamic. When, on the airport forecourt, I climbed into one of the motorized fridges known hereabouts as taxis, I was asked if I wanted “some music.” I said I didn’t want some music, because I surmised that I was going to get some music everywhere I went, whether I wanted any or not. This city is noisy. The whoops from the craps tables (all yea and ooo and ow), the continuous and cutely variegated birdsong of mobile phones (“What’s good, buddy?”), and the madhouse nursery jingles of the slot machines, horribly prolonged and as pleasing to the ear as a defective car alarm, and then the cataract of coins into the acoustically enhanced money trays.
And some music. Osama bin Laden advises us that music is “the flute of the devil.” Islam also deplores any visual representation of the human form. Las Vegas would not be one of bin Laden’s favorite towns. Pneumatic décolletages and oiled derrieres adorn the freeway billboards, to promote strip clubs, lap-dance parlors, topless cocktail bars, and all-nude harlequinades (this last, at least, being alcohol-free). At the Bellagio, where I put up, there are no half-nude girls dancing in the casinos—though every last waitress sports a gulch-like cleavage. At the Rio, home of the World Series of Poker (WSOP), on the other hand, half-nude girls are part of the furniture; and, in addition, at regular intervals a kind of railway track is lowered from the ceiling for a reenactment of the Rio carnival, with floats and steel bands and half-nude girls.
Prostitution is both illegal and ubiquitous in Clark County. The writer Marc Cooper called his book about Vegas The Last Honest Place in America because Sin City, by and large, is pretty light on hypocrisy. But anomalies remain, as the place evolves from Mob to nabob, from Little Italy to Wall Street, from Filthy Frank Giannatasio to Michael Milken. Vegas is supposedly down on sex, following its attempt to become a “family” destination; this was aborted (a fun palace or two later) when it was realized that children don’t gamble. Anyway, sex is all around you here, perhaps unavoidably, given its well-attested affinities with games of chance.
More than a hundred of the Las Vegas yellow pages are devoted to the exchange of sex for cash: Full Service Casino House Girls, Barely Legal College Cheerleaders, Full Service Barely Eighteen. The week I was there, all the waiters and fridgedrivers were talking about the guy who won big on the slots and then went upstairs with a swinger who doped his drink. She left him his passport, his car keys, and a single credit card. Las Vegans have a word for that kind of behavior: class. More normally, you’re lucky to be left with your underpants. As a fallback, there is pornography in every hotel room. Much of it is billed as “interactive”: viewers are granted something like editorial control over what they watch. This means that pointy-headed know-how has given serious thought to the needs of the interacting vacationer.
The Taliban stamped out sports and used the stadiums for public floggings and executions. The Taliban would have warm work to do in Las Vegas. Everywhere there are multiple screens showing basketballers, golfers, baseballers in their sateen jumpsuits, and, of course, the encaged faces of the Darth Vaders of the gridiron. The extent of the addiction becomes clear when you find yourself watching a televised tournament of Rock, Paper, Scissors; there is a bent and frowning referee, a clamorous crowd, and a barn-door-size check for $50,000. In the postplayoff interview, the grinning winner doesn’t find it at all easy to explain why he is so incredibly good at Rock, Paper, Scissors.
Then there is the gambling (or gaming, the term preferred by the industry), anathema to the Ayatollah Khomeini, for instance, who banned one of Islam’s great inve
ntions, chess, lest people put money on it. Gambling—and gambling spiced with profanity and free drinks. You have to queue for lots of things in Vegas, for restaurant tables, cups of coffee, Elton John, Cats, rhinestone-brassiere musicals, motorized fridges, stools at nontournament poker meets; but you never have to queue for those games of chance in which the odds favor the house. What is most startling about the casinos of Las Vegas is their scale and how populous they are. The numbers are Third World. As you enter a hotel the size of the Pentagon and start looking for the right queue, you realize that you are in a queue already—that the entire multitude is queuing to queue.
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To the poker wing of the Rio—for in-depth acclimatization. This will be necessary if I am to do a Chris Moneymaker and take the bracelet at my first attempt. I quote from the Pokerstars.com press release: “When [in 2003] twenty-seven-year-old Tennessee accountant Chris Moneymaker turned a $39 online satellite tournament win on www.Pokerstars.com into a $2.5 million windfall at the World Series of Poker, people around the world asked, ‘Why not me?’ ”
It seems a fair bet that the near-apocalyptic national upsurge in pokermania is at least partly due to Chris Moneymaker’s surname. What if he was called Chris Moneyloser or Chris Breadline or Chris Asshole? Pokerstars.com would have to rewrite some of its copy (“Pokerstars.com Launches Moneymaker Millionaire Tournament”), and PartyGaming, when it went into flotation last year, might not have turned out to be bigger than Disney or British Airways.