The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump

by Martin Amis

  The really fit biography should duplicate and dramatize a process familiar to us all. You lose, let us say, a parent or a beloved mentor. Once the primary reactions, both universal and personal, begin to fade, you no longer see the reduced and simplified figure, compromised by time—and in Bellow’s case encrusted with secondhand “narratives,” platitudes, and approximations. You begin to see the whole being, in all its freshness and quiddity. That is what happens here.

  Right up to his death, in 1955, Abraham Bellow described Saul as a chronic worry to the family, the only son “not working only writing.” Not working? He should tell that to Augie March (for Augie, it turns out, is the author of his Adventures):

  All the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It’s internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself! Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.

  Vanity Fair 2015

  * As Simon (The Adventures of Augie March), Shura (Herzog), Philip (“Him with His Foot in His Mouth”), Julius (Humboldt’s Gift), and Albert (“Something to Remember Me By”).

  Véra and Vladimir: Letters to Véra

  Vladimir Nabokov Letters to Véra

  My sun, my soul, my song, my bird, my sweetheart, my pink sky, my sunny rainbow, my little music, my inexpressible delight, my softness, my tenderness, my lightness, my dear life, my dear eyes…

  These endearments and salutations (backed up by a crowded menagerie of surrogates: Goosikins, Poochums, Tigercubkin, Puppykin) suggest a sky-filling adoration and, more than that, a helpless dependency. As early as Vladimir Nabokov’s second letter to Véra Slonim, after a couple of months of chaste acquaintanceship, he lays it all before her:

  I cannot write a word without hearing how you will pronounce it—and can’t recall a single trifle I’ve lived through without regret—so sharp!—that we haven’t lived through it together….You came into my life…as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your steps.

  And so it goes on for over half a century, his ardor—at first sometimes skittishly insecure—gradually modulating into assurance and serenity. Warning: there is one seismic aberration (Paris, 1937), to which we will uneasily return.

  Vladimir (rhymes with “redeemer,” he has said) was born in 1899, Véra in 1902. They met at a charity ball in Berlin in 1923, an occasion organized by the Russian émigré community—400,000 strong, and notable for its cohesion, its material penury, and its intellectual wealth. Although very different in their origins (he was patrician-artistic, she professional middle class and Jewish), they were fair representatives of their high-minded and unworldly colony. That party was a masquerade; and, throughout, Véra’s mask stayed up.

  He immediately had to go off to work on a farm in the South of France. As a devotee of his published verse (much of it confessional), she would have known that he had recently and tormentedly broken up with a girl he hoped to marry. Showing unusual forwardness, she wrote to him until he replied. “I won’t hide it,” begins his opening letter, where she is already ensconced as “my strange joy, my tender night.” Once he was back in Berlin the romance proceeded, on his part at least, without a trace of inhibition. They were married in the spring of 1925.

  One of Nabokov’s most striking peculiarities was his near-pathological good cheer—he himself found it “indecent.” Young writers tend to cherish their sensitivity, and thus their alienation, but the only source of angst Nabokov admitted to was “the impossibility of assimilating, swallowing, all the beauty in the world.” Having a husband who was always so brimmingly full of fun might have involved a certain strain; still, the fact that Véra was not similarly blessed is just a reminder of the planetary norm. Indeed, their first long separation came in the spring and summer of 1926, when she decamped to a series of sanitariums in the Schwarzwald in the far southwest, suffering from weight loss, anxiety, and depression.

  Véra was gone for seven weeks, and Vladimir wrote to her every day. Spanning more than a hundred pages, the interlude is one of the summits in the mountain range of this book. He endeavored not only to raise her spirits (with puzzles, riddles, crosswords, which she almost invariably solved) but also to love her back to health—with punctual transfusions of his buoyant worship. Here one finds oneself submitting to the weird compulsion of the quotidian, because he tells her everything: about his writing, his tutoring, his tennis, his regular romps and swims in the Grunewald (for her the Black Forest, for him the Green); he tells her what he is reading, what he is eating (all his meals are itemized), what he is dreaming, even what he is wearing. Also, very casually, almost disdainfully (as befits the teenage millionaire he once was), he keeps noticing that they don’t seem to have any money.

  There was never any money, despite their frugality and thrift; they had to watch the pfennigs, then the centimes, then the nickels and dimes, all the way up to Lolita in the late 1950s—more than thirty years into their marriage. His first three novels, Mary (1926), King, Queen, Knave (1928), and The Defense (1930), were obvious masterpieces; he talked and read to ecstatic audiences in Berlin, Prague, Brussels, Paris, and London; everyone could tell he was a genius of outlandish size (Ivan Bunin, the first Russian Nobelist for literature, said soberly, “This kid has snatched a gun and done away with the whole older generation, myself included”). But there was never any money.

  Their only child, Dmitri, arrived in 1934, and was rapturously received (away from him Vladimir misses “the circuits of a current of happiness when he throws his arm across my shoulder”). It was no doubt a sense of sharpened responsibility that got Nabokov out of the house and on the road, in earnest. He trolled around Europe, juggling contacts and contracts, writing reviews, reports, translations (some of them grimly technical) into and out of Russian, English, and French. As late as the spring of 1939 he was in London, lobbying and angling for an academic post in Leeds—or possibly Sheffield. Nabokov in Yorkshire? This was among the multitude of human possibilities wiped out by the Second World War.

  Nabokov’s father, Vladimir Sr., was a distinguished liberal statesman (described with memorable bitterness in Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution); and he was semiaccidentally murdered by fascist thugs in Berlin in 1922. For all this, you get the sense that his son regarded political reality as a vulgar distraction, a series of what he called “bloated topicalities.” In Berlin the family sat through the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 (unmentioned here). Véra and Vladimir had independently fled the Bolsheviks; by 1936 he felt, with long-sublimated dread, that Nazi Germany was no place for his Jewish wife and their “half-breed” child. To prepare for their escape to France, Nabokov journeyed to Paris in early 1937—and this is when it happened, the lapse, the shocking solecism, or what Humbert described as the “lethal delectation.” She was an experienced handful named Irina Yurievna Guadanini.

  The Vladimir-Irina entanglement has been public knowledge since 1986, and Stacy Schiff has a perceptive section on it in her biography Véra (1999). But it is freshly and piercingly painful to follow the story from the point of view, so to speak, of Nabokov’s pen. That was a dreadful brew he cooked up for himself on the Avenue de Versailles: mortal fear for wife and son, a recklessly indiscreet affair, and a hideous attack of psoriasis, which, in coarse symbolism, bloodied his bed linen and his underwear. And there is the great man, the great soul, queasily teasing (“Don’t you dare be jealous”), sneering at all the “vile rumors,” and, in general, mellifluously lying his head
off. The old law has never struck me with such power: people are original and distinctive in their virtues; in their vices they are compromised, hackneyed, and stale. Here, there is a vertiginous swerve in the direction of the ordinary.

  And it didn’t end there. In July, in Cannes, he confessed to Véra—confessed to what he felt was an authentic amour fou (mitigating the offense for us, perhaps, if not for her). Rather coolly, it seems, Véra told him to decide, to choose. Irina herself palely appeared at the seashore; but Vladimir had chosen, and it was over. “You know, I have never trusted anyone as I trust you,” he had written to Véra in 1924: “In everything enchanted there’s an element of trust.” His confession and the Irina aftermath take place offstage. But in those Paris letters the corrosive side effects of the deception are everywhere apparent. Her sudden vague indecisiveness (about joining him); his querulous exasperation; a deficit in trust, and a deficit in enchantment.

  The Nabokovs appeared to get over it more quickly than this reader expects to do. Letters to Véra, arranged and annotated with terrifying assiduity by Brian Boyd (the world’s premier Nabokovian), is unavoidably bottom-heavy: 439 pages covering 1923–1939; then, after a gap, a mere 80 pages (many of them airy) covering 1941–1976. For the book to resemble a full record of their lives, the Nabokovs would have had to spend every other week apart. And they were now more or less inseparable. When he did travel without her, the daily rhythm of his correspondence immediately reasserts itself, and there is enough time and space for us to see that cloudless intimacy settle on them once again.

  It is the prose itself that provides the permanent affirmation. The unresting responsiveness; the exquisite evocations of animals and of children (wholly unsinister, though the prototype of Lolita, The Enchanter, dates from 1939); the way that everyone he comes across is minutely individualized (a butler, a bureaucrat, a conductor on the Métro); the detailed visualizations of soirees and street scenes; the raw-nerved susceptibility to weather (he is the supreme poet of the skyscape); and underlying it all the lavishness, the freely offered gift, of his sublime energy.

  The New York Times Book Review 2015

  Permissions

  Several pieces first appeared in the following publications:

  Areté: “Rabbit Angstrom Confronts Obamacare” (2009)

  The Atlantic Monthly: “Saul Bellow, As Opposed to Henry James” (2003)

  Esquire: “President Trump Orates in Ohio” (2017)

  The Guardian: “Deciding to Write Time’s Arrow” (2010), “Early Ballard: The Drowned World” (2012), “The Fourth Estate and the Puzzle of Heredity” (2010), “In Memory of Neda Soltan, 1983–2009: Iran” (2009), “In Search of Dieguito Maradona” (2004), “J. G. Ballard: From Outer Space to Inner Space” (2009), “John Updike’s Farewell Notes” (2009), “The King’s English” (2011), “Larkin’s Letters to Monica” (2011), “Vladimir Nabokov and the Problem from Hell” (2009)

  Harper’s: “The Republican Party in 2016: Trump” (2016)

  The Independent: “You Ask the Questions” (2001, 2007)

  The New Republic: “He’s Leaving Home” (2012)

  Newsweek: “The Republican Party in 2011: Iowa” (2011), “The Republican Party in 2012: Tampa, Florida” (2012)

  The New Yorker: “Don DeLillo: Laureate of Terror” (2011), “Jane Austen and the Dream Factory” (1997), “On the Road: The Multicity Book Tour” (1995), “Three Stabs at Tennis” (1994, 1996, 1997), “Travolta’s Second Act” (1995), “The Queen’s Speech, the Queen’s Heart” (2002)

  The New York Times: “Marty and Nick Jr. Sail to America” (2012)

  The New York Times Book Review: “Bellow’s Lettres” (2015), “The Shock of the New: A Clockwork Orange Turns Fifty” (2012), “Philip Roth Finds Himself” (2013), “Véra and Vladimir: Letters to Véra” (2015)

  The Observer: “The Champions League Final, 1999” (1999), “Christopher Hitchens” (2010)

  The Sunday Times: “The Crippled Murderers of Cali, Colombia” (2005), “Losing in Las Vegas” (2006), “On Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition” (2015)

  Talk: “In Pornoland: Pussies Are Bullshit” (2000), “Iris Murdoch: Age Will Win” (2001)

  Time: “Princess Diana: A Mirror, Not a Lamp” (1997)

  The Times Literary Supplement: “Ivan Is Introduced to the USSR” (2002), “Nabokov’s Natural Selection” (2011)

  The Wall Street Journal: “Is Terrorism ‘About Religion’?” (2008)

  Vanity Fair: “Bellow: Avoiding the Void” (2015)

  “Philip Larkin: His Work and Life” first appeared as the introduction to Philip Larkin Poems, published by Faber & Faber, London, in 2011

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