Nabokov judges Gregor’s world with great feeling, even with indignation. The Samsa relatives are “parasites” exploiting Gregor, eating him “out from the inside.” His beetle carapace is the “pathetic urge to find some protection from betrayal, cruelty.” But it is no protection and he remains as a beetle as vulnerable as his “sick human flesh and spirit had been.” Gregor’s sister, in the beginning the only one to acknowledge the metamorphosis and to act with kindness, becomes his worst enemy at last. Gregor is extinguished so that the family can go out in the sunlight once again. “The parasites have fattened themselves on Gregor,” Nabokov wrote in the margins of his copy.
If it were not the trade name of a commercial series, Nabokov’s lectures might be called “Monarch Notes,” in honor of their stately, unfatigued progress through the crowd of words, styles, and plots. What is most unexpected is the patience. Bleak House: “Now let us go back to the very first paragraph in the book.” Madame Bovary: “Let us go back to the time when Charles was still married to Héloïse Dubuc.” Ulysses: “Bloom’s breakfast that she is to make for him that morning continues to fill her thoughts. . . .”
Following these lectures with their determined clinging to detail, and with the insistent foot on each rung of the scaffolding of the plot, is to be asked to experience the novel itself in a kind of thoughtfully assisted rereading, without interpretation. There is very little ripe, plump appreciative language. “Beautiful” turns are acknowledged by “note” and “mark.” In Madame Bovary “note the long fine sunrays through the chinks in the closed shutters” and “mark the insidious daylight that made velvet of the soot at the back of the fireplace and touched with livid blue the cold cinders.” A novel is a rare object. Look at it with a magnifying glass and the earphones turned off. And curiously each work is alone, not milling about among its siblings, Emma, Our Mutual Friend, Portrait of an Artist, and so on and so on.
Novels are fairy tales; Madame Bovary yet another fairy tale. Of course, with Nabokov a thing is asserted to counter a repellent, philistine opposition. A novel becomes a fairy tale so that it will not be thought to be a sociological study or a bit of the author’s psycho-history, two ideas he may rightly have believed to be running like a low fever among the student body.
Nabokov’s own novels very often end, and no matter what the plot, in a rhapsodic call to literature itself. “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.” Also in his novels there are books within books and literature is almost a character. About The Gift, Nabokov said, “Its hero is not Zina, but Russian literature.” The brilliant Pale Fire is entirely a deranged annotation of a dreadful poem.
Perhaps in the end it is not surprising that this writer who has walked every step of the way in two languages should look upon style as the self in all its being and the novel as a slow, patient construction of a gleaming fairy tale. “Let us look at the web and not the spider,” he writes about Dickens. The web, the inimitable web, is what these lectures are about.
1980
ENGLISH VISITORS IN AMERICA
Englishman has hard eyes. He is great by the back of his head.
—EMERSON, Journals
O SHENANDOAH, O Niagara. In a text that bristles like the quills on a pestered porcupine, Peter Conrad, a young English critic of music and literature, fellow of Christ Church, Oxford, has written a book called Imagining America. It is easy to read, and yet a torture to unravel. This is not due to the absence of footnotes, bibliography, or to the very reduced index—that is the least of it. The most of it is a great fluency of style, a military confidence, an extraordinary range of intimidation that sweeps over the country, America, and a good many English writers, the two in collision being the subject of the book.
Imagining America follows a number of English persons on their journey here: Mrs. Trollope, Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Oscar Wilde, Rupert Brooke, Kipling, H. G. Wells, Stevenson, Lawrence. In the latter part of the book, Conrad “examines,” in the surgical sense, the deformities of the three gifted English authors who chose to remain: Auden, Huxley, and Isherwood.
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Unusual conjectures, connections that move from the text to interpretation with the speed and force of a bullet in transit, dazzle and brilliance that often exceed the fluency of the authors themselves: these uncommon gifts in alliance with a nervy vehemence of tone make Imagining America a daunting addition to “Anglo-American Studies.” We, it appears, have much to answer for, and they, especially the English writers in exile, have a great deal more.
The putative thesis of the book is not striking and, since the book is very striking, the thesis is only in part a suitable frame. The brief statement of intention at the beginning and end is rather like a bit of brown-paper wrapping that disguises the volatile materials within.
Before America could be discovered, it had to be imagined. . . . Geographically, America was imagined in advance of its discovery as an arboreal paradise, Europe’s dream of verdurous luxury. After that discovery, the political founders were its inventors.
The passage of time from the Victorians to the present does not find the country, America, in a condition more gratifying to the senses and the spirit; instead, the visitors themselves “re-imagine” our obscure or glaring deficiencies into amusements, curiosities, or personal escapes. “Americans tolerate and even abet this contradictory European fantasizing about them. Loyal to the ideal pretensions of their society, they’re as much prisoners of their millennial self-image as they are of the prejudicial images Europeans continue to inflict upon them.” Thus, the scene opens.
The ending, after the clash of text, person, and Conrad’s rhetoric, is a forgiving downfall.
America is ample and generous enough to tolerate all these impositions on it, and various enough to adapt to all these transformations of it. The moral of this book, like that of America, lies not in its unity but in its diversity.
This benign accommodation, so general in its application to history, would scarcely be worth the ticket. The book, freely speculative, does not have a moral, but is nevertheless rich in statements with a moralizing tone. It is not easy to separate tone and statement, paraphrase and text, opinion and illustration.
“At home [England] you are assigned a surrounding world by the circumstances of your birth; you don’t invent a reality for yourself but inherit one, and exist in a society which prides itself on having restricted the range of imaginative choices. A civilized society, according to Matthew Arnold, is one in which the center prevails, in which metropolitan standards constrain the regions, and artists club together in a clique at that center.” As for America, it is “centerless, not a claustrophobic, centripetal society. . . but a chaos of disparate realities.” The English writers, grinding their heels in the dust of Vermont, New York, New Mexico, California, and so on, are not experiencing a place fixed by history and tradition. They are caught instead in a sort of whirl and flow, which they identify and use as they will. “Lawrence’s New Mexico is not the same as Huxley’s, nor is Huxley’s California the same as Isherwood’s.”
Conrad’s America, as he extracts it from his literary texts, is hospitable to interpretation, exploitation, and finally to therapeutic manipulation, but its spacious indefiniteness is not hospitable to literature, and not to the novel in particular. The problem of the novel appears in the early pages that announce Peter Conrad’s themes and the direction of his thoughts. The refractory landscape and the people dwelling in it are not agreeable matter for the English novelists in their transformation of experience and idea concerning America—perhaps, perhaps, that is what Conrad meant. In any case:
The Victorians assume America to be slovenly and backward, unworthy of the novel’s social graces and subtleties of observation. Later writers admit the novel’s irrelevance to America, but they suggest alternatives. In Kipling’s case, the alternative is epic, in Robert Lou
is Stevenson’s it’s chivalric romance. . . . In Wells’s case as in Huxley’s the alternative is science fiction. . . .
“England prides itself on having restricted the range of imaginative choices”[1]—many impediments to agreement here, intensified by the accent of the self-evident. “Victorians assume America to be unworthy of the novel’s social graces and subtleties of observation. . . .” Mrs. Trollope and Dickens did not find America of the 1830s and 1840s a commendable accumulation of graces and subtleties, but there is no evidence that they considered the creation of Victorian novels, on the English
model, a task for the Republic or that they were mindful of the country’s unsuitability for fiction.
Mrs. Trollope’s Domestic Manners may be said to have squeezed the American lemon very profitably. Her book is a masterpiece of novelistic scenes, dialogues, and dramatic conflict between herself and her subject. She is the only writer in Imagining America to have discovered herself here. Mrs. Trollope, with her intrepid talents, her great ambition and need, transformed her chagrin and her frazzled nerves into a classic. She, more than any other of the travelers in Conrad’s book, confronted America in a gambler-emigrant frame of mind—that is, in a confused mood of hope and panic. Her failed Emporium in Cincinnati shows that for all her “refined taste,” she understood schlock and kitsch and was drawn in her commercial dream toward the outsized. (A premonition of the World’s Largest Drugstore in Los Angeles that Aldous Huxley is later scolded for tolerating.) The front of the Emporium, facing Third Street, was “taken in part from the Mosque of St. Athanase, in Egypt,” and the front facing south was an Egyptian colonnade formed with columns modeled after those “in the temple of Apollinopolis at Etfou, as exhibited in Devon’s Egypt.” The large rotunda was to be topped by a huge Turkish crescent.[2]
It is true that Dickens’s caricature of America in Martin Chuzzlewit testifies to the author’s loathing of the country, but it does not testify to Conrad’s idea of the Victorian novel’s “social graces.” Instead, the intrusion of the American theme indicates Dickens’s anarchic, daring, inventive practice of the possibilities of Victorian fiction.
Anthony Trollope’s North America, more studious and less journalistic than the other two Victorian accounts, is annoyed by much, but Trollope does not seem as a traveler to be in pursuit of an extension of his novelistic world. He had a tangled view of literature in America and knew something, if not much, about it. Both of the Trollopes were political conservatives. “I do not like them. I do not like their principles, I do not like their opinions,” Mrs. Trollope writes about Americans at the end. She laid these vivacious negatives at the door of Equality.
“Later writers admit the novel’s irrelevance to America. . . .” Here the example is Kipling’s Captains Courageous, which doesn’t admit anything since it is not a document by a literary critic but is instead a “worked up” creative act, which grew out of Kipling’s cold, litigious years in New England. Conrad’s verbs are an elastic—they stretch in order to confine.
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Niagara Falls, a phenomenon, is for Conrad an interesting measure of temperament, English, and tourist obligation, American. His chapter on the great resistant cataract is thoroughly original and diverting, but also, as it swims along, accusing, not to the waters, but to some of those who made the trip and, worse, to those who did not.
Dickens rendered Niagara in strenuous prose: “What voices spoke from out the thundering water; what faces, faded from the earth, looked out upon me from its gleaming depths; what Heavenly promise glistened in those angel’s tears. . . .” Oscar Wilde, observing the honeymooning couples, said: “The sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the first if not the keenest disappointments of American married life.” H. G. Wells was more interested in the dynamos of the power company than in the Cave of the Winds. Rupert Brooke wearied of the comparative statistics that established the supremacy of the Falls and wrote that the real interest was not to be found there but in “the feeling of colossal power and of unintelligible disaster caused by the plunge of the vast body of water.” But this acceptable sentiment, written in 1913, two years before Brooke died in the war, becomes the occasion for Conrad’s own leaping: “The eager self-sacrifice of the waters anticipates the reaction of Brooke and his generation to the war, which excited them not because they wanted to defend a cause but because it promised them heroic self-extinction.” Anticipates, excited, promised—not only the rushed young Brooke sending back his American dispatches, but his entire generation.
Still at Niagara: “Objects in America aren’t determined by history or enmeshed by association like those of Europe.” For the Victorians Niagara was a “prodigy of nature,” but for later writers “imagining the object comes to mean cancelling it out.” On it goes:
This is why the neglect of Niagara by the later writers in this book [Auden, Isherwood, and Huxley] is itself significant, because it is a consequence of the imagination’s meditative withdrawal from observation. The later subjects of this book don’t even bother to practice imaginative distortion of America’s physical reality, for they are simply incurious about it.
No matter that Niagara has suffered a drastic falling of its “ratings” and that the incuriosity of sophisticated travelers and American writers is too widespread for “significant” rebuke. In 1914, Bertrand Russell said, “Niagara gave me no emotion”—said “with priggish philosophical rectitude” in Conrad’s disposition of the remark.
In the ordering of the chapter there seems to be some sympathy for the sublimity of the accident of nature which America shares with Canada. Conrad seems to prod the visitors to take leave of themselves and offer an appropriate version or vision. Few are sufficient to it: Sarah Bernhardt wants to harness the Falls to her “capricious egotism.” No similar unspoiled challenge occurs again, for any of the writers. A “nightmarish” America, of “nonchalant vacancy” and “savagery” and “moral amateurism” lies ahead.
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Extraction of Conrad’s thought is outstandingly difficult. Nearly every sentence is a thorn of perplexity. First, there is his saturation in the texts, an absorbing so thorough that the texts have little life outside his own mind; they are expropriated. Assertions, declarations, an unbalancing use of the present tense: “America . . . promises death and a rending but salutary resurrection.” “Huxley lives in hell . . .” and the “awfulness of America is . . .” It is often Conrad’s practice to meet a phrase—his quotations are for the most part brief—and to pass swiftly to revisions, rephrasings, bewildering gifts to the originals of his own intensifications. Dickens, arriving in 1842 in Washington, “the headquarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva,” observed the unnaturalness of the city, its formality, its insufficiency as a living town, the ornamental thoroughfares and buildings without people to walk on them or to inhabit them. He thought few would wish to live there, who were not obliged to do so. This scene becomes in Conrad’s revision, “These vacant, haunted places, from which people have fled in fear and loathing. . . .”
Conrad on Anthony Trollope:
Trollope’s longing for a smallness of scale which guards privacy explains his furious resentment of a remark made in Dubuque, alleging that England has no vegetables. The aspersion infuriates Trollope, and he is prompted to a eulogy of his own abundant kitchen garden. He is enraged because the domesticity of England, for him its dearest quality, has been impugned.
Furious, infuriates, enraged have taken wing from Trollope’s exclamation mark. “No vegetables in England! I could not restrain myself altogether, and replied by a confession ‘that we “raised” no squash.’. . . No vegetables in England!”
On behalf of the Victorian writers Conrad asserts that they found America to be “the vast death-chamber of English individuality,” that the country was indifferent to the civilized separation of public and private life and unable to “validate individual existences.” During the thirty years that spanned the visits of Mrs. Trollope, Dickens, and the seco
nd visit of Anthony Trollope, roughly 1830–1860, Walden, Moby-Dick, and Leaves of Grass had been published. Lincoln was alive and Poe had lived and died.
The “aesthetes,” Oscar Wilde and Rupert Brooke, endure in Imagining America the bashing and battering endured by the country itself in the writing of the earlier visitors. Brooke’s felicitousness and Wilde’s epigrammatic genius are cut down by the power-saw of Conrad’s moral disapprobation. The curious and singular slide into the defective. Even with Mrs. Trollope and Dickens, little note is taken of the comic expressiveness, the texture of comic aggression, that give light to their dark detestation and make their records alive today.
Wilde’s genius, it appears, is a “pederastic precocity” he shares with his kind. No quarter is given to his lasting turns of phrase on America, such as, “The Atlantic is disappointing, the prairie is blotting paper, the Mormon Tabernacle is a soup kettle, and the vastness of America has a fatal influence on adjectives.” Conrad finds that Wilde’s “wit not only subverts morality, but subjugates America by diminishing it.” When Wilde holds forth on American marriage—“the men marry early, the women marry often”—he is “disestablishing marriage.” Why should Wilde on his vaudeville tour be guarding American morality and marriage. And what turn of mind insists that we disallow Wilde’s “act”? When he arrives, flamboyantly dressed for his part as a vivid and original self-promoter, he is wearing “a bottle green overcoat of otter fur, with a seal skin cap.” For this and other requests for his dress-props, he is denounced by Conrad because the fur coat “symbolizes nature sacrificed to art: seals and otters have been flayed merely to adorn his precious body.” The truculent language, the supererogatory precious, exceed the provocation of Wilde’s fur coat.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 36