The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)

by Martin Amis

  Observer August 1977

  Lectures

  Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov. Edited by Fredson Bowers

  Reading is a skill: you have to be taught how to do it. Here is some fatherly Nabokovian advice.

  You must not ‘identify’ with Stephen Dedalus or Fanny Price; you must not regard Madame Bovary as a denunciation of the bourgeoisie or Bleak House as an attack on the legal system; you must not ransack novels in search of those bloated topicalities, ‘ideas’. The only things that a good reader needs are imagination, memory, a dictionary and some artistic sense. At this point the good teacher will lean forward and remind his students that he is using the word reader very loosely. ‘Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it.’

  Reading is an art, and Vladimir Nabokov did it to perfection. Collected here are roughly half the lectures which Nabokov delivered to his fortunate students at Wellesley and Cornell from 1941 to 1958. They have been cobbled together by Fredson Bowers – a task calling for fanatical meticulousness, if the reproductions of Nabokov’s frenzied lecture notes are anything to go by. Professor Bowers also reproduces such enjoyable teaching aids as Nabokov’s groundplan of Mansfield Park, his map of Joyce’s Dublin, and his drawing of Charles Bovary’s layered cap Ca pathetic and tasteless affair’). The present volume contains two general pieces and seven long discourses on masterworks of European fiction; a subsequent volume, it is hoped, will show how Nabokov tackled the Russians. In every sense, the project is a delightful monument to literary rediscovery.

  One would call Nabokov’s teaching method idiosyncratic if it weren’t so unswervingly true to its models. Not surprisingly, Nabokov treats with contempt the schools-and-movements, myth-decoding, fallacy-mongering constructs of the Eng-Lit racket. He negotiates his chosen books with the confidence, coolness and superlegitimacy of the fellow practitioner. The professorial impulse is to pontificate or generalize. Nabokov never does this. He is, above all, robustly unacademic.

  At first, Nabokov’s approach seems crude and old-fashioned, even perfunctory. He certainly had a patronizing way with him, no doubt for sound reasons. According to John Updike’s introduction, which does much to establish the air of pedagogic raillery that wafts through the lectures, Nabokov would open his course with the words: ‘All satisfied with their seats? Okay. No talking, no smoking, no knitting, no newspaper reading, no sleeping, and for God’s sake take notes.’ He would then proceed to startle and goad the earnest and morose, briskly crushing their fashionable and half-baked preconceptions. Similarly, his end-of-term exam-questions merely prompt the pupils to regurgitate the master’s ideas (‘Discuss Flaubert’s use of the word “and” ’).

  As an explicator, Nabokov used the Granville-Barker method – i.e., the most dramatic and least sophisticated. It is the linear approach. Nabokov marches us through the text, often doing no more than telling us the story, quoting at great length, sometimes hating off on strange errands, asides, whimsies. ‘Jefferson in this country had just passed the Embargo Act … (If you read embargo backwards, you get “O grab me”).’ Or, in his essay on Swann’s Way: ‘Incidentally, the first homosexuals in modern literature are described in Anna Karenina, namely in chapter nineteen, part two.’ The manner is relaxed, amused, coltish – and apparently very narrow. There is no standing back from the novels under discussion.

  One comes to realize, however, that Nabokov’s plot-summaries, with their emphasis on patterning and local effects, have in their way an immaculate decorum: they perfectly recreate the tone and ironic distance of the original. Nabokov is hilariously damning about Homais in Madame Bovary, humouringly protective about sickly Fanny in Mansfield Park; his summary of Kafka’s Metamorphosis is almost unbearably inward, with Nabokov the lepidopterist indulging a special tenderness for the tranformed Gregor:

  Curiously enough, Gregor the beetle never found out that he had wings under the hard covering of his back … Gregor, though now a very sick beettle – the apple wound is festering, and he is starving – finds some beetle pleasure in crawling among all that dusty rubbish.

  Nabokov makes the same kind of pure and unfastidious response when he defends the death scene of Jo the Roadsweeper in Bleak House against the charge of sentimentality: ‘I want to submit that people who denounce the sentimental are generally unaware of what sentiment is.’ As Nabokov has explained earlier, the fit reader does not read with his brain or his heart but with his back, waiting for ‘the telltale tingle between the shoulder-blades’.

  Most literary criticism tends to point beyond literature towards something else. It points towards marxism, or sociology, or philosophy, or semiotics – or even life, that curious commodity to which Dr Leavis always stressed his commitment. Nabokov points to the thing itself, the art itself, trying to make us ‘share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author’. He wanted to teach people how to read. In addition, and perhaps unconsciously, he attempted to instil a love of literature by the simple means of revealing his own love. Nabokov’s remark about Emma Bovary’s reading habits has the right cadence of grateful solemnity:

  Flaubert uses the same artistic trick when listing Homais’s vulgarities. The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.

  Observer January 1981

  Plays

  The Man from the USSR and Other Plays by Vladimir Nabokov. Translated and introduced by Dmitri Nabokov

  I detest the theatre as being a primitive and putrid form, historically speaking; a form that smacks of stone-age rites and communal nonsense despite those individual injections of genius, such as, say, Elizabethan poetry, which a closeted reader automatically pumps out of the stuff.

  This is not Nabokov speaking: it is Humbert Humbert, in Lolita, and Humbert has special reasons for despising the drama. His young girlfriend wants to perform in the school play (The Enchanted Hunters), thus bringing her into close contact with boys her own age, an activity classed by Humbert as ‘absolutely forbidden’ as opposed to ‘reluctantly allowed’. And, of course, it is the author of The Enchanted Hunters, Clare Quilty, who deprives Humbert of his own enchantress, little Lo. Humbert, then, is a special case. But I think that he would have despised the drama anyway – with Nabokov’s unqualified approval.

  The Man from the USSR is essentially a collection of fascinating juvenilia, or rather marginalia. Like the childish home-carpentry of a major sculptor, the book shows an artist dabbling in an inferior and limited form, before going on to find his proper niche elsewhere. Satisfyingly, the volume closes with two fierce and brilliant essays on the paltriness of dramatic art, written around 1940 (i.e., fifteen years before Lolita). At this stage, Nabokov’s contempt for the theatre is coming along very healthily.

  Of the four plays collected here, the title piece is by far the most successful, partly because it is set in a living milieu: émigré Berlin in the Twenties, a world of crummy boarding-houses, straitened gentility, of titled barmen and landowners turned pub landlords. Through the action saunters Kuznetsoff, the man from the USSR, a splendidly unattractive creation. Ugly, brusque, mean and charmless, a man without qualities, he is none the less mystically revered by the entire dramatis personae, cowing the men and causing hot flushes of arousal in the women.

  Why? Because the featureless, cheerfully blaspheming Kuznetsoff is an Evolved Being, a man of the twentieth century, while the huddled émigrés – with all their emotion and delicacy – feel themselves to be meaningless remnants of a vanished age. Kuznetsoff’s position vis-à-vis the new regime is ambiguous, but he has certainly come to terms with the faceless USSR, and is free to return to it when he pleases. The pining exiles in Berlin would give anything to set foot on Russian soil, if only to dig their own graves there. Kuznetsoff is their Messiah – a false one, needless to say. ‘I am a very busy man,’ as he characteristically points out. ‘To tell you the
truth, I don’t even have the time to say I am a busy man.’

  ‘The Man from the USSR’ is suggestive and neatly arranged, and impressively coolly handled by a writer still in his twenties. That said, the only bit of writing in the entire play appears in the stage directions. ‘To the left … a wide passageway crowded with movie props, creating an effect reminiscent simultaneously of a photographer’s waiting room, the jumble of an amusement-park booth, and the motley corner of a futurist’s canvas.’ The reader suddenly thinks: now you’re writing. Now you’re writing prose. Nabokov is indeed a loving set-dresser, but only at moments such as this can he dress the page with literature.

  Two of the other three pieces are fragmentary attempts to escape, by traditional means, the pokiness and gloom of the prose drama: they are verse dramas, one an elegy for Scott’s quest in the Antarctic, one a tranced fable set in post-revolutionary France, in which an aristocrat encounters his thwarted guillotinist. These are ‘adjective’ plays as opposed to ‘verb’ plays (in the terminology with which Nabokov later acquaints us), florid-static as opposed to slender-mobile. They proceed restfully enough, and show the dormant traces of later themes – as Dmitri Nabokov notes in his typically affectionate yet rigorous introduction. But they are cloudy trophies, with little real affect. After all, we have Eliot’s example to prove that a play’s unplayability is no guarantee that it will be any fun to read.

  The longest and proportionately least enjoyable effort is called ‘The Event’ and is strictly speaking a non-event, since the villain never appears. But it’s a very verbal affair none the less, in the coming-and-going, fetching-and-carrying sense that passes for dramatic action. Nabokov composed or at any rate completed ‘The Event’ rather later on, in 1938, by which time he had such masterful novels as The Defence and Laughter in the Dark well behind him. It is pretty much his last entanglement with the drama; in its cacophony and chaos we see his final exhaustion with – and of – the theatrical form.

  In a spirit of shared relief, then, we come to the two essays that round off the book. Here Nabokov flatly states the obvious truth: ‘The most popular plays of yesterday are on the level of the worst novels of yesterday. The best plays of today are on the level of magazine stories and fat bestsellers.’ And the reasons for this are obvious too – the fatigue and artificiality of dramatic conventions, together with the insidious reliance on market forces (and just look at those market forces, out on Broadway and Shaftesbury Avenue). Kicking off with Aeschylus, Nabokov conducts a murderous parade from which very few individuals escape summary court martial. Chekhov, Gogol maybe, some Shaw, a little Ibsen, and that’s about it.

  Oh yes. And Shakespeare. The fact that Shakespeare should have been, of all things, a dramatist is one of the great cosmic jokes of all time – as if Mozart has spent his entire career as second wash-board or string-twanger in some Salzburg skiffle group. (It is also a deft confirmation that Shakespeare is an exception to every conceivable rule.) The bottom line, as impresarios say, is as follows. In submitting a play for production or publication the writer relinquishes his artefact in the equivalent of note form. All he has done is finished the dialogue; and, as any novelist knows, compared to the other exertions of fiction, the demands of dialogue are negligible. The drama duly failed to detain Nabokov for more than a fraction of his creative life. He had better things to do: dreaming up Humbert Humbert, for example, and all his sound and strong opinions.

  Observer 24 February 1985

  Letters

  Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940–1977 edited by Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli

  I assume we all have more or less shameful fantasies about our best-loved writers. We meet them, in our heads – and everything works out fine. Indeed, we become our favourites’ favourites. These mental thank-you notes are, of course, composed entirely of clichés. For instance, the sightless eyes of Borges brim with tears as we entrance him with our readings from Kipling; we out-drink Joyce in the bars of Paris; after an hour with us, J.D. Salinger is rueing his reclusive ways. The dream day with Vladimir Nabokov would include successful butterfly-hunts and doughty tussles at the chessboard, and so on. But here, even fantasy quails Even in the daydream, we are speechless with humility and nerves. For the snorting wizard of Montreux is perhaps the most personally intimidating of our modern masters. As a distinguished Jewish writer said of V.S. Naipaul: ‘One glance from him, and I reckoned I could skip Yom Kippur.’

  It is clear from this delightful book that Nabokov was a delightful man: loyal, generous, affectionate, and wonderfully funny. I am obliged to claim, however, that this was clear already, and not only from the three earlier books in which he addresses us without the formal indirection of art. Speak, Memory, the volume of autobiography, is in fact the least revealing, because the most artistic: it traces the formation of the talent, not the personality. In Strong Opinions, the collection of interviews and utterances, Nabokov is often at home but seldom out of uniform: the full-dress iconoclast. Vivid intimacy begins with The Nabokov–Wilson Letters, 1940–1971, a two-handed tragi-comedy in which Vladimir steadily outsoars the limited, custodial and fatally envious Edmund.

  The new Selected Letters brings depth and detail to the human picture. Those who are generally unsympathetic to the Nabokovian voice will succeed in finding plenty to be unsympathetic to here: some preciosity, some ferocity, much superbity, awkward political views, and cordial relations with Playboy. He was proud, and proudly private; the getting-to-know-him period was evidently lengthy, and he relied on family, not friendship. But the true fan will experience this book as a massive and triumphant confirmation: a confirmation of the virtues and powers that shine through every page Nabokov wrote. Every page, even the most devastating, the cruellest, the saddest.

  As in Nabokov–Wilson, the narrative begins with the family’s dazed arrival in America. After the panic and lawlessness of Europe, ‘Our normal everyday existence, in contrast, seems the height of luxury, like some millionaire’s coarse dream … it is embarrassing to repose – as I do now – on a blanket in a meadow amid tall grass and flowers …’ Memories of Europe – where, for example, Nabokov lost his brother Sergei (‘Poor, poor Seryozha …!’) – must be left to ferment, as this very distinguished and entirely anonymous re-émigré sets about assembling a second career, in a second language. The process proved to be far from effortless.

  The second language, of course, advanced with thrilling rapidity. Even its exoticisms seem apropos: ‘involve me into difficulties’, ‘understand in what a ridiculous position I am’, ‘I do not have the gift of gab’. But the second career just kept on not coming. He was ‘absolutely pennyless [sic]’ in 1957, after seventeen years of fanatical labour. Although quite free of self-pity, or complaint, the letters give the odd hint of dissimulated desperation: ‘Have you tried to get any of the so-called “book clubs” interested …? I am told one can make quite a bit of money that way.’ Those groping inverted commas might as well have gone around the word ‘money’. Colossal, health-sapping expenditures of energy were repaid in dribs and drabs. Nabokov often – and brilliantly – compared his labour to a mother’s trials. After finishing Gogol: ‘I would like to see the Englishman who could write a book on Shakespeare in Russian. I am very weak, smiling a weak smile, as I lie in my private maternity ward, and expect roses.’ After finishing Bend Sinister: ‘I repose like a brand-new mother bathed in lace, with slightly damp skin, so tender and pale that all the freckles show, with a baby in a cradle beside me, his face the colour of an inner tube.’

  Nabokov’s critical, pivotal years came in the mid-1950s. Lolita, first mentioned here in 1951 (and to Wilson in 1947), seemed to be unpublishable; so did Pnin (perhaps his most accessible masterpiece); and so did his massive Eugene Onegin. He was still teaching, reviewing, translating (Lermontov into English, Speak, Memory into Russian). And he owed his bank $800. The vindication, when it came, was sudden and lasting. By 1959 he had given up academic life (and was exchanging telegra
ms with Stanley Kubrick); by 1961 he was a permanent resident of Switzerland and more particularly of the Montreux-Palace Hotel. ‘But all this ought to have happened thirty years ago,’ he notes, sparely. Nabokov was now liberated – for more focused labour. In 1975 he was, as always, ‘overwhelmed with work’, and remained ecstatically productive until his death. Intransigent dedication: this was his mission and his meaning. He gave it – and he gave us – everything he had.

  In these Letters too: the book contains hardly a sentence that isn’t droll, delicate, precise and alerting. Even the chores and quotidian of the literary life are freshly painted by Nabokov’s unwearying responsiveness. He comes across a publisher Can American millionaire with a splendid boil on his nape’), a literary agent Ca short, fearsome, bandy-legged woman, her hair dyed an indecent red’), an ingrate biographer (Dear Mr Field, Your ignoble letter of July 9 …’), an inept illustrator (‘the title-page butterfly … is as meaningless … as would be a picture of a tuna fish on the jacket of Moby Dick’), an editor angling for a puff: ‘Let me thank you, or not thank you, for Harry Matthews’ The Conversions. It is a shapeless little heap of pretentious nonsense.’ Mr Matthews is at least in good (and numerous) company, along with the ‘big fakes’ Thomas Mann (‘that quack’) and T.S. Eliot (‘disgusting and second-rate’), Pound (‘a venerable fraud’), Paul Bowles (‘devoid of talent’) and Saul Bellow (‘a miserable mediocrity’).

  Edmund Wilson thought Nabokov had a weakness for ‘malicious humor’. Later, in Upstate, the accusation hardened into one of ‘Schadenfreude’. Nabokov was calmly aware of the tendency. As he wrote to an editor: ‘The “unpleasant” quality of Chapter 2 is a special trait of my work in general; you just did not notice in Chapter 1 the same nastiness, the same “realism,” and the same pathos.’ These qualities are part of a unifying intensity and extravagance: an absolute trust in style (‘For me “style” is matter’). To his absent wife Véra: ‘The eastern side of every minute of mine is already colored by the light of our impending meeting. All the rest is dark, boring, you-less.’ To his sister Elena (the theme here is parental love, and how children seem to stay the same even as they grow): ‘See – you must grab and hold in the fist of your soul everything about Zhikochka today: that way it will all shine through him, too, for a long time.’