by Martin Amis
This book is bound by parental love: the love between its author and its co-editor and part-translator, Dmitri Nabokov – Mitya, or Mityusha, or Mityenka, or Mityushenka, or Dmitrichko. Their love is very full and very open, and very Russian to our Western ears. Dmitri evolves from ‘the little one’, with his ‘forty-degree’ fevers, into a preposterously capable adult (racing driver, mountaineer, opera singer), but he is always the cause of patient concern: ‘It is very unhealthy for us to worry like this (we are 120 years old), and we simply cannot understand why you don’t understand this.’ Nabokov’s life, with its double exile, its obsessiveness, its integrity, has a romantic coloration to it, and there is something cleanly artistic in its shape. It is harrowingly appropriate, then, that the book should conclude with his last letter to his son, which begins ‘My dearest’, and itself concludes: ‘I hug you, I’m proud of you, be well, my beloved.’
Independent on Sunday February 1990
Lolita’s Little Sister
The Enchanter by Vladimir Nabokov. Translated by Dmitri Nabokov
Nabokov variously referred to Volshebnik (The Enchanter) as ‘a prototype’ of Lolita, ‘a kind of pre-Lolita novella’, ‘a dead scrap’ and ‘a beautiful piece of Russian prose’. The long short story had to wait twenty years before it fulminated into the famous novel, and another thirty before its triumphant resuscitation. The Enchanter is quite a discovery. After this, 1987 will be all downhill.*
What exactly do the two works share? Elements of the same obsession, one or two crucial joists in the plotting, a verbal surface of the highest tautness and burnish. But as reading experiences they remain sharply distinct. You read Lolita sprawling limply in your chair, ravished, overcome, nodding scandalized assent. You read The Enchanter on the edge of your seat, squirming with fearful admiration and constant resistance; you are always saying no, no, no. Lolita is comedy, subversive yet divine: somehow, it describes an ascent. Whereas The Enchanter is a moral horror story, the last twching of a dead soul.
The man is fortyish, like Humbert. He is a jeweller: ‘There were numbers here, and colors, and entire crystal systems.’ At the outset, some pathos accrues to his shadowy presence – an inert haunter of public parks, dodging little thunderbolts, as the girls play: ‘and tomorrow a different one would flash by, and thus, in a succession of disappearances, his life would pass’.
Like Lolita, the girl is twelve. Her effect on him is immediate: ‘suddenly you are traveling through the dust on your back, banging the back of your head, on your way to being strung up by your insides’. But it is not passion that emboldens him, only circumstance, a glimpse of the possible laxity of future events. The world will have to let it happen. He befriends the girl’s mother (a widow), who is promisingly sickly and may have only a year to live. He forms a plan, or he lets it form, or it forms itself.
In Lolita, however inadvertently, Lolita is the enchantress. Here, the ravisher assumes that role – or he tries. In fact he enchants nobody except himself. For all its lucidity, the world of The Enchanter is affectless, morally dead. The main characters are nameless (though this is done so artfully that you scarcely notice); the settings of time and place (the Thirties, Paris and Provence) are unimportant, indeed drearily incidental. Lolita is, among other things, a landscape novel, satirically fixed in its period. The turpitude of The Enchanter, it seems, can happen anywhere, at any time. Unlike Humbert, with his crooner’s mug, his ‘ad-eyebrows’, his ‘striking if somewhat brutal good looks’, the enchanter is quite faceless, except when he leers; he is just subtly sub-human. And the girl has nothing but her ordinary innocence, her freshness, her brandnewness.
Grimly the enchanter courts the girl’s ailing mother. He listens ‘to the epic of her malady’; he makes ‘mooing sounds of consolation’ and false tenderness; he ‘wordlessly compresses or applies to his tense jowl her ominously obedient hand’. Ironically, in the fairytale scheme of the story, she is the ‘monster’, with her hairless wart, her cold brow, her surgeons’ scars, seemingly pregnant ‘with her own death’. On their wedding night, the enchanter bluffs and stalls; yet ‘in the middle of his farewell speeches about his migraine’ he suddenly finds himself next to ‘the corpse of the miraculously vanquished giantess’. The successful copulation, with its dire presentiment, occurs only once. Soon, the wife is dead for real, and the enchanter is heading south for the union with his little princess.
Only at this point does he fully immerse himself in his sexual plans for the girl. ‘The lone wolf was getting ready to don Granny’s nightcap.’ These four pages of drooling reverie – and they have a radiant ghastliness – constitute the enchanter’s inexpiable moral trespass: salacious, savage and sentimental. And it is for this, rather than for the actual molestation, that the enchanter is so roundly punished. The sexual spasm is still cooling on his mackintosh when he receives his spectacular and sanguinary retribution. Thrice-orphaned, the girl is left behind, as she was always left behind, humanly unregarded.
Many readers may find the moral starkness of The Enchanter somewhat Russian Orthodox, when set against the decadent complexity of Lolita. Certainly it belongs to Nabokov’s Berlin period, more specifically to the line of antic cruelty which runs from King, Queen, Knave to Despair. In any event it is a little masterpiece, witheringly precise and genuinely shocking. Special praise must go to the translator. It may be that Nabokov’s death has paradoxically liberated his sometime collaborator, for The Enchanter is seamlessly Nabokovian.
The evident persistence of the nympholepsy theme is striking, but only because the theme is striking. It is no more persistent than Nabokov’s interest in doubles, mirrors, chess, paranoia – and much less persistent than his interest in the artiste manqué, with which, however, it is importantly connected. Lolita has a redemptive shape. As narrator, Humbert gives us something, in propitiation: he gives us the damned book. He also gives us the full moral accounting of this sombre theme. The crime is great; the invoice of guilt is detailed; and it took the later, ‘older’ book to make a final balance of the figures. As in an American hospital, every tear-stained pillowslip, every scrap of soiled paper tissue, has eventually to be answered for.
Observer January 1987
* This review appeared on 4 January. See, in due course, the essay on Lolita, pp. 471–90.
Some American Prose
Mailer’s Lows and Highs
The Essential Mailer by Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer’s new book bears all the signs – all the watermarks, all the heraldry – of a writer faced with an alimony bill of $500,000 a year. Two separate and elderly chunks of Mailer’s oeuvre have been whittled down and stuck together, then entrusted to NEL, one of our less-exalted hardback dealerships. The book incorporates stories, essays, verse translations, letters (to and from the author), reviews (by and of same), interviews, speeches, extracts, oddments, and lots of misprints. The front cover features the second-worst photograph of Mailer ever published: in a V-necked singlet, Mailer stares sweatily out over the top rope of a boxing ring. The worst photograph of Mailer ever published appeared on the front cover of the American edition of Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967): it showed Mailer sporting a big black eye.
Certainly, Mailer can be made to look ridiculous without recourse to visual aids – and without recourse to his busy history of high-profile fiasco (his sponsorship of the murderer and wordsmith Jack Henry Abbott is the latest in a long line). No one in the history of the written word, not even William MacGonagall or Spike Milligan or D.H. Lawrence, is so wide open to damaging quotation. Try this, more or less at random: ‘A murderer in the moment of his murder could feel a sense of beauty and perfection as complete as the transport of a saint.’ Or this: ‘Film is a phenomenon whose resemblance to death has been ignored for too long.’ His italics.
On every page Mailer will come up with a formulation both grandiose and crass. This is expected of him. It is also expected of the reviewer to introduce a lingering ‘yet’ or ‘however’ at some point,
and say that ‘somehow’ Mailer’s ‘fearless honesty’ redeems his notorious excesses. He isn’t frightened of sounding outrageous; he isn’t frightened of making a fool of himself; and, above all, he isn’t frightened of being boring. Well, fear has its uses. Perhaps he ought to be a little less frightened of being frightened.
Mailer thinks on his feet and writes off the top of his head. His prose is dotted with gear-changes, premise-shifts, rallying-cries from the ringside: no, yes, okay, strike it like this, see here, look further, good, wrong, say it better. If every writer has a private mental thesaurus, a slim volume of key word-clusters, then Mailer’s would read as follows: ego, bitch, blood, obscenity, psyche, hip, soul, tears, risk, dare, danger, death. Especially death. Film reminds Mailer of death because everything reminds Mailer of death, danger, dare, etc. ‘One kissed the devil indeed,’ says Mailer. What is he writing about? Prizefighting? Crossing the road? ‘Brutal-coarse, intimate, snide, grasping, groping, slavering …’ It turns out that Mailer is writing about book-reviewing. But then he does tend to take things personally.
He writes scathingly about the New York theatre, and the average Broadway audience: ‘This liberal complacent materialistic greedy pill-ridden anxiety-laden bored miserable and powerless jumble of suburban couples … dying to be manipulated.’ There is some rough justice in this snarl; but really Mailer is in a vengeful frazzle about his own play, The Deer Park, which is busy failing downtown. (His movie ‘evolved into the foulest-mouthed movie ever made, and is thus vastly contemporary and profoundly underground’.)
It is the same with poetry. It is the same with politics, and everything else our ‘Renaissance man’ dabbles in. The devastating paradox of Mailer’s life and work is that this pampered superbrat, this primal-scream specialist and tantrum expert, this brawler, loudmouth and much-televised headline-grabber, suffers from a piercing sense of neglect. When running for mayor of New York in the late Sixties (on a platform resembling a gallows, or a stocks), Mailer contended that ‘literary men … would know how to talk to the people – they would be forced to govern by the fine art of the voice’. On the next page we are offered one of Mailer’s mayoralty speeches, an example of the lulling accents of suasion:
You’re not my friend if you interrupt me when I am talking ’cause it just breaks into the mood in my mind. So fuck you, too. All right, I said you’re all a bunch of spoiled kids … I’ll tell you that, I’ll tell you that. You’ve been sittin’ around jerkin’ off, havin’ your jokes for twenty-two years. Yeah!
And he still can’t understand why he came nowhere in the race.
‘For every lion of our human species there is … a trough of pigs, and the pigs root up everything good.’ Or, in ‘verse’: ‘You pic the bull back / far back along his spine … You will saw the horns off / and murmur / … ah, the bulls are not / what once they were.’ The lone lion, the wounded, goaded bull – why should the aged eagle stretch its wings? In a Playboy interview featured here, Mailer is invited to give his views on God: ‘I can see Him as someone who is like other men except more noble, more tortured, more desirous of a good that He wishes to receive and give to others – a tortuous ethical activity at which He may fail.’ Now wait a minute: doesn’t He remind you of somebody?
One’s interest naturally focuses on the essays, the ‘Existential Errands’ which have crossed the Atlantic for the first time; but it should be stressed that The Essential Mailer contains a generous selection of the author’s short fiction. Mailer, astonishingly, declines to make high claims for his stories (some of the work is practically juvenilia). Here, though, Mailer’s strengths are constantly visible: raw nerves and peeled senses, an intense identification with every form of physical extremity, above all an ear that precisely renders the wistfulness and humour of ordinary American voices. It is an exceptional talent. What became of it?
Mailer has published no fiction for fifteen years. During that time he has apparently been searching for ‘the biggest mine of them all’. There have been plenty of rumours about Mailer’s magnum opus; promises have been made, advances eaten up. It is, at least in outline, an omniscient, architectonic 3,000-pager: part one is set in the ancient world; part two traces an American family from Independence to the present day, and part three is set on a spaceship.* Bits have been read out by the author to select gatherings in New York. People say it is stunning, magical, divine. Perhaps that book will give us the essential Mailer. Or perhaps not. Let us pray.
Observer August 1982
Tough Guys Don’t Dance by Norman Mailer
Just over halfway through Tough Guys Don’t Dance narrator Tim Madden is jumped by a pair of cut-throats off a back road on Cape Cod. They wield a knife and a tyre iron, yet Tim has good reason to show what he’s made of: ‘I had the heads of two blonde ladies to guard in the trunk of my car.’ That’s right: not one but two severed heads, two slain vamps. Tim’s dog takes out one attacker, while Tim himself handles the other, felling his man with a ‘thunder-bolt’ of a right. ‘Then I made the mistake of kicking him in the head,’ the narrator growls. ‘That broke my big toe.’
At times like these the reader’s reaction (in my case one of spontaneous laughter) quietens into something more circumspect. Is this just exorbitance, or is it caricature? Certainly, from the title onwards, the book seems to flirt pretty heavily with lampoon. Tim Madden, ex-con, stalled writer, alcoholic and blackout-artist; his wife Patty Lareine, sneering blonde, half angel, half witch; Bolo, her big black ex-boxer boyfriend; Regency, the well-hung psychocop; Meeks Wardley Hiby III, the snivelling Wasp faggot: all are caught up in a seething and sanguinary thriller written very fast by Mr Mailer for a well-known reason. When, oh when, will all the kids grow up, all the wives remarry?
Still, Mailer may be capable of mischief, flippancy and haste, but he is not capable of broad comic design. For all his wit, irony and high spirits he is essentially humourless: laughs in Mailer derive from the close observation of things that are, so to speak, funny already. The humour can never turn inward. Besides, one smile in the mirror at this stage in his career and the whole corpus would corpse. Self-parody is not Mailer’s style. What is Mailer’s style?
The new novel has clear affinities with An American Dream, also written fast, also concerning itself with murdered wives, pistol-whipping cops, forensic subtleties, daredevil steeplejacking. The earlier book, however, was composed on a genuine high (some of it chemically induced), emboldened by various Lawrentian/Sartrean ideas about the fundamental purity of very bad behaviour. Despite its subject-matter, Tough Guys is a return to a more hesitant and delicate mode, that of Barbary Shore and The Deer Park. Those two novels followed The Naked and the Dead, preceding Advertisements for Myself and the process of mythologization which that book inaugurated.
His voice is sadder and wiser than it once was. Here is someone (you’re meant to feel) who has taken his share of beatings, torments, skunk hours; someone who has pondered deeply on the workings of the world; someone, above all, who understands the ways of a man with a woman. Yet the style is often awkward, self-conscious – and stilted. It relishes pallid qualifiers (‘barely’, ‘hardly’, ‘somewhat’), bookish archaisms (‘of other ilk’, ‘wont to do’, ‘drear’, ‘bodeful’) and fastidious double-negatives (‘not unlike’, ‘not unanalogous to’ and – my personal favourite – ‘not wholly un-macho’). Mulling over his own prose, Tim makes ‘small sounds of appreciation at some felicity of syntax’: a fancifully ‘writerly’ notion if ever there was one, like savouring a subjunctive. None the less, for all the squalor and gore, felicities of syntax are what the book aspires to be full of.
It is, then, a highly contorted performance, containing much trapped energy. Perhaps Tough Guys is simply a brief and lurid vacation after the great girdings and flexings of its predecessor. One admires the ambition of Ancient Evenings because that’s all there is to admire. That’s all the book is: 700 pages of ambition. The new book settles for talent rather than genius, and brings homelier plea
sures: a natural sensitivity to place and to weather, and an eloquent awareness of the human vicissitudes, the raw edges of even the most ordinary day.
As indicated earlier, some readers will find Tough Guys merely preposterous, and others will find it bracingly comic. In the end the humour arises from the humourlessness, the vitreous fixity, the loyalty to the old obsessions and drives. These now seem impossibly dated: all that butch spiritual anarchism, solemnly endorsed, all the booze, the brawls, and the bull. The ideal of manhood is seen as a weird union of, say, Søren Kierkegaard and Oliver Reed. The ideal of womanhood is even stranger: the bitch-goddess, an object of terror and desire who must, even so, be given her sentimental due. Since the bitch-goddess is invariably engaged on bitch-goddess activities (taunting, pouting, packing pistols, fellating strangers, and whatnot), the author is obliged to attempt the most unlikely feats of lyrical transcendence: ‘as tender as the stem of honeysuckle on a child’s mouth’, ‘emotions that were close to sunlight’, ‘the velvets of her loving heart’. Tough guys don’t dance. But they’re not afraid to cry.