Lectures on Literature

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  In a very weak passage the author uses Miss Flite to tell Esther of the noble conduct of Dr. Woodcourt during a shipwreck in the East Indian seas. This does not come off well, although it is a brave attempt on the author's part to link up the mad little woman not only with Richard's tragic sickness but also with Esther's future happiness. The relation between Miss Flite and Richard becomes increasingly stressed until, at the last when Richard dies, Esther writes that "When all was still, at a late hour, poor crazed Miss Flite came weeping to me, and told me she had given her birds their liberty."

  Another Chancery-theme character is introduced when Esther and her friends on a visit to Miss Flite stop for a moment in front of Krook's shop, above which Miss Flite roomed: "a shop, over which was written KROOK, RAG AND BOTTLE WAREHOUSE. Also, in long thin letters, KROOK, DEALER IN MARINE STORES. In one part of the window was a picture of a red paper mill, at which a cart was unloading a quantity of sacks of old rags. In another, was the inscription, BONES BOUGHT. In another, KITCHEN-STUFF BOUGHT. In another, OLD IRON BOUGHT. In another, WASTE PAPER BOUGHT. In another, LADIES' AND GENTLEMEN'S WARDROBES BOUGHT. Everything seemed to be bought, and nothing to be sold there. In all parts of the window were quantities of dirty bottles: blacking bottles, medicine bottles, ginger-beer and soda-water bottles, pickle bottles, wine bottles, ink bottles: I am reminded by mentioning the latter, that the shop had, in several little particulars, the air of being in a legal neighbourhood, and of being, as it were, a dirty hanger-on and disowned relation of the law. There were a great many ink bottles. There was a little tottering bench of shabby old volumes, outside the door, labelled 'Law Books, all at 9d.' "

  Here the connection between Krook and the Chancery theme with its legal symbols and rotting laws is established. Please hold in juxtaposition the terms BONES BOUGHT and LADIES' AND GENTLEMEN'S WARDROBES BOUGHT. For what is a suitor in a Chancery case but bones and ragged clothes, and the rags of the robes of law—the rags of law—and the wastepaper that Krook also buys. This, indeed, is pointed out by Esther herself, with some assistance from Richard Carstone and Charles Dickens: "The litter of rags tumbled partly into and partly out of a one-legged wooden scale, hanging without any counterpoise from a beam, might have been counsellors' bands and gowns torn up. One had only to fancy, as Richard whispered to Ada and me while we all stood looking in, that yonder bones in a corner, piled together and picked very clean, were the bones of clients, to make the picture complete." Richard, who whispers this, is destined to be a victim of Chancery himself when a temperamental flaw in his nature leads him to drop one after another of the various professions he dabbles in before becoming entangled in the mad muddle and poisonous visions of the Chancery inheritance that will never come.

  Krook himself appears, emerging, as it were, from the very heart of the fog (remember his trick of calling the Lord Chancellor his brother—his brother in rust and dust, in madness and mud): "He was short, cadaverous, and withered; with his head sunk sideways between his shoulders, and the breath issuing in visible smoke from his mouth, as if he were on fire within. His throat, chin, and eyebrows were so frosted with white hairs, and so gnarled with veins and puckered skin, that he looked from his breast upward, like some old root in a fall of snow." There is Krook—crooked Krook. The gnarled-root-in-snow simile should be added to the growing collection of Dickensian comparisons to be discussed later. Another little theme which emerges here, and is going to breed, is the allusion to fire: "as if he were on fire within." As if—an ominous note.

  A later passage where Krook rattles off the names of Miss Flite's birds—symbols of Chancery and misery—has already been mentioned. Now his horrible cat is introduced, ripping at a bundle of rags with his tigerish claws, with a sound that sets Esther's pretty teeth on edge. Incidentally, old Smallweed, in the mystery-theme group, with his green eyes and sharp claws, is not only a brother-in-law of Krook's but also a kind of human representative of Krook's cat. The bird theme and the cat theme gradually meet—both Krook and his green-eyed, gray tiger are waiting for the birds to leave their cages. Here the symbolic skint depends on the idea that only death can liberate a Chancery suitor. Thus, Gridley dies and is free. Thus, Richard dies and is free. Krook horrifies his audience with an account of the suicide of a certain Tom Jarndyce, a Chancery suitor whom he quotes: "it's being ground to bits in a slow mill, it's being roasted at a slow fire." Mark this "slow fire." Krook himself in his crooked, cranky way is also a victim of Chancery—and he too will burn. Indeed, we get a definite hint of what is going to be his doom. The man was perpetually full of gin, which as dictionaries tell us is a strong liquor made by distilling grain mash, especially rye mash. Krook seems to carry with him wherever he goes a kind of portable hell. Portable hell—this is Mr. Nabokov, not Mr. Dickens.

  Krook is not only linked with the Chancery theme, but is also connected with the mystery theme. After Nemo's death, in order to get from Krook certain letters relating to Lady Dedlock's former love affair, Guppy, a lawyer's clerk in a dither of romance and blackmail, and his friend Tony Jobling (also called Weevle) visit Krook. They have his gin bottle refilled, which he receives "in his arms like a beloved grandchild." Alas, the grandchild might have been more aptly described as an internal parasite. Now we come to the marvelous pages in chapter 32 dealing with Krook's marvelous death, a tangible symbol of the slow fire and fog of Chancery. Recall the imagery in the first pages of the book—smog, the soft black drizzle, the flakes of soot—this is the keynote, the breeding spot of the gruesome theme which is now going to be developed to its logical end, with the addition of the gin.

  Guppy and Weevle are on their way to Weevle's room (the room in which Lady Dedlock's lover Hawdon had committed suicide, in the same house where Miss Flite and Krook dwell) to await midnight when Krook is to hand over the letters. On their way they run into a Mr. Snagsby, a law stationer. There is a curious smell and flavor about the thick foggy air.

  " 'Airing yourself, as I am doing, before you go to bed?' the stationer inquires.

  " 'Why, there's not much air to be got here; and what there is is not very refreshing,' Weevle answers, glancing up and down the court.

  " 'Very true, sir. Don't you observe,' says Mr. Snagsby, pausing to sniff and taste the air a little; 'don't you observe, Mr. Weevle, that you're—not to put too fine a point upon it—that you're rather greasy here, sir?'

  " 'Why, I have noticed myself that there is a queer kind of flavour in the place to-night,' Mr. Weevle rejoins. 'I suppose it's chops at the Sol's Arms.'

  " 'Chops, do you think? Oh!—Chops, eh?' Mr. Snagsby sniffs and tastes again. 'Well, sir, I suppose it is. But I should say their cook at the Sol wanted a little looking after. She has been burning 'em, sir? And I don't think,' Mr. Snagsby sniffs and tastes again, and then spits and wipes his mouth; 'I don't think—not to put too fine a point upon it—that they were quite fresh, when they were shown the gridiron.' "

  The two friends go up to Weevle's room and have a discussion of the mysterious Krook and the horrors that Weevle feels living in this room and in this house. Weevle complains to Guppy about the atmosphere—mental and physical—in that room. Mark the candle heavily burning with "a great cabbage head and a long winding-sheet." No use reading Dickens if one cannot visualize that.

  Guppy happens to look at his coat sleeve. " 'Why, Tony, what on earth is going on in this house to-night? Is there a chimney on fire?'

  " 'Chimney on fire!'

  " 'Ah!' returns Mr. Guppy. 'See how the soot's falling. See here, on my arm! See again on the table here! Confound the stuff, it won't blow off—smears, like black fat!' "

  Weevle investigates down the staircase but all seems quiet, and he quotes the remark he lately made to Mr. Snagsby, about their cooking chops at the Sol's Arms.

  " 'And it was then,' resumes Mr. Guppy, still glancing with remarkable aversion at the coat-sleeve, as they pursue their conversation before the fire, leaning on opposite sides of the table, with their heads very near together, '
that he told you of his having taken the bundle of letters from his lodger's portmanteau?' "

  The talk goes on a while, but when Weevle stirs the fire, it makes Guppy start. " 'Fah! Here's more of this hateful soot hanging about,' says he. 'Let us open the window a bit, and get a mouthful of air. It's too close.' " They continue the conversation, leaning on the windowsill, Guppy tapping his hand on the sill until he hastily draws his hand away. " 'What in the Devil's name,' he says, 'is this! Look at my fingers!'

  " A thick yellow liquor defiles them, which is offensive to the touch and sight and more offensive to the smell. A stagnant, sickening oil, with some natural repulsion in it that makes them both shudder.

  " 'What have you been doing here? What have you been pouring out of window?'

  " 'I pouring out of window? Nothing, I swear. Never, since I have been here!' cries the lodger.

  "And yet look here—and look here! When he brings the candle, here, from the corner of the window-sill, it slowly drips, and creeps away down the bricks; here, lies in a little thick nauseous pool.

  " 'This is a horrible house,' says Mr. Guppy, shutting down the window. 'Give me some water, or I shall cut my hand off.'

  "He so washes, and rubs, and scrubs, and smells and washes, that he has not long restored himself with a glass of brandy, and stood silently before the fire, when Saint Paul's bell strikes twelve, and all those other bells strike twelve from their towers of various heights in the dark air, and in many tones."

  Weevle goes down the stairs to keep the appointment and to secure the bundle of Nemo's papers promised him, but returns in terror. " 'I couldn't make him hear, and I softly opened the door and looked in. And the burning smell is there—and the soot is there, and the oil is there—and he is not there!'—Tony ends this with a groan.

  "Mr. Guppy takes the light. They go down, more dead than alive, and holding one another, push open the door of the back shop. The cat has retreated close to it, and stands snarling—not at them; at something on the ground, before the fire. There is a very little fire left in the grate, but there is a smouldering suffocating vapour in the room, and a dark greasy coating on the walls and ceiling." The old man's coat and cap hang on a chair. The red string that had tied the papers is on the floor, but no papers are to be seen: only a crumbled black thing on the floor. " 'What's the matter with the cat?' says Mr. Guppy. 'Look at her!'

  " 'Mad, I think. And no wonder in this evil place.'

  "They advance slowly, looking at all these things. The cat remains where they found her, still snarling at the something on the ground, before the fire and between the two chairs. What is it? Hold up the light.

  "Here is a small burnt patch of flooring; here is the tinder from a little bundle of burnt paper, but not so light as usual, seeming to be steeped in something; and here it is—is it the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinked with white ashes, or is it coal? O Horror, he is here! and this from which we run away, striking out the light and overturning one another into the street, is all that represents him.

  "Help, help, help! come into this house for Heaven's sake!

  "Plenty will come in, but none can help. The Lord Chancellor of that Court, true to his title in his last act, has died the death of all Lord Chancellors in all Courts, and of all authorities in all places under all names soever, where false pretences are made, and where injustice is done. Call the death by any name Your Highness will, attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally—inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only—Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died."

  And so the metaphor becomes a physical fact, and the evil within a man has destroyed the man. Old Krook is diffused and merged in the fog from which he emerged—fog to fog, mud to mud, madness to madness, black drizzle and greasy ointments of witchcraft. We feel it all physically, and it does not, of course, matter a jot whether or not a man burning down that way from the saturated gin inside him is a scientific possibility. Dickens with his eloquent tongue in his bearded cheek, Dickens, when introducing his book and also within the text, refers to what he lists as actual cases of spontaneous combustion, the gin and the sin catching fire and the man burning to the ground.

  There is something else here more important than the question, is this possible? Namely, we should contrast two styles here in this extended passage: the rapid, colloquial style of Guppy and Weevle, full of jerky movement, and the eloquent apostrophic tolling style of the end. The term apostrophic is from apostrophe, which in rhetoric means "a feigned turning from one's audience to address directly a person or thing, or an imaginary object." Now the question is: what author's style does this apostrophic, booming accent in Dickens recall? The answer is, Thomas Carlyle, (1795-1881), and I am especially thinking of his History of the French Revolution which appeared in 1837. It is fun to dip into that magnificent work and find therein that apostrophic accent, rolling and tolling around the idea of destiny, futility, and nemesis. Two examples may suffice: "Serene Highnesses, who sit there protocolling and manifestoing, and consoling mankind! how were it if, for once in the thousand years, your parchments, formularies and reasons of state were blown to the four winds ... and Mankind said for itself what the thing was that would console it" (chapter 4, "The Marseillaise").

  "Unhappy France; unhappy in King, Queen and Constitution; one knows not in which unhappiest. Was the meaning of our so glorious French Revolution this, and no other, that when Shams and Delusions, long soul-killing, had become body-killing ... a great People rose," etc, (chapter 9, "Varenne").

  We are now in a position to sum up our Chancery theme. It started with an account of the mental and natural fog attending the Chancery business. In the early pages "My Lord"was reduced to mud, and we heard the very sound of the mud, slippery and sly, in the trickery of Chancery. We discovered the symbolic meaning, the symbolic plight, the symbolic names. Crazy Miss Elite and her birds are linked with the plight of two other Chancery suitors, both of whom die in the course of the book. Then we came to Krook, a symbol of Chancery's slow fog and slow fire, mud and madness, which acquire a tangible quality in the horror of his prodigious fate. But what is the fate of the suit itself, of this Jarndyce and Jarndyce case that has been rolling on for years and years, breeding devils and destroying angels? Well, just as Krook's end was sound logic in the magic world of Dickens, so the Chancery case also has a logical end within the grotesque logic of that grotesque world.

  One day when the suit was to come up again, Esther and her friends were delayed so that "when we came to Westminster Hall, we found that the day's business was begun. Worse than that, we found such an unusual crowd in the Court of Chancery that it was full to the door, and we could neither see nor hear what was passing within. It appeared to be something droll, for occasionally there was a laugh, and a cry of 'Silence!' It appeared to be something interesting, for every one was pushing and striving to get nearer. It appeared to be something that made the professional gentlemen very merry, for there were several young counsellors in wigs and whiskers on the outside of the crowd, and when one of them told the others about it, they put their hands in their pockets, and quite doubled themselves up with laughter, and went stamping about the pavement of the hall.

  "We asked a gentleman by us, if he knew what cause was on? He told us Jarndyce and Jarndyce. We asked him if he knew what was doing in it? He said, really no he did not, nobody ever did; but as well as he could make out, it was over. Over for the day? we asked him. No, he said; over for good.

  "Over for good!

  "When we heard this unaccountable answer, we looked at one another quite lost in amazement. Could it be possible that the Will had set things right at last, and that Richard and Ada were going to be rich?[*] It seemed too good to be true. Alas, it was!

  "Our suspense was short; for a break up soon took place in the crowd, and the people came streaming out lookin
g flushed and hot, and bringing a quantity of bad air with them. Still they were all exceedingly amused, and were more like people coming out from a Farce or a Juggler than from a court of Justice. We stood aside, watching for any countenance we knew; and presently great bundles of paper began to be carried out—bundles in bags, bundles too large to be got into any bags, immense masses of papers of all shapes and no shapes, which the bearers staggered under, and threw down for the time being, anyhow, on the Hall pavement, while they went back to bring out more. Even these clerks were laughing. We glanced at the papers, and seeing Jarndyce and Jarndyce everywhere, asked an official-looking person who was standing in the midst of them, whether the cause was over. 'Yes,' he said; 'it was all up with it at last!' and burst out laughing too."

  The costs had absorbed the whole case, all the fortunes involved. And so the fantastic fog of Chancery is dispersed—and only the dead do not laugh.

  Before one comes to the real children in Dickens's important children's theme, the fraud Harold Skimpole must be looked at. Skimpole, a falsely brilliant fellow, is introduced to us by Jarndyce, in chapter 6, who says, "There's no one here [in my house] but the finest creature upon earth—a child." This definition of a child is important for the understanding of the novel, which deals in its inner essential part mainly with the misery of little ones, with the pathos of childhood—and Dickens is at his best in these platters. So the definition found by good and kind John Jarndyce is quite correct as it stands: a child was from the point of view of Dickens the finest creature upon earth. But now comes an interesting point: the definition "a child" cannot be really applied to the man Skimpole. Skimpole deceives the world, and he deceives Mr. Jarndyce into thinking that he, Skimpole, is as innocent, as naive, as carefree as a child. Actually he is nothing of the sort; but this false childishness of his throws into splendid relief the virtues of authentic childhood in other parts of the book.