by John Updike
Why Glory (up to now translated on bibliographical lists as The Exploit) waited until last must be guessed at. It was written in 1930, immediately after The Eye; if The Eye is discounted as a novella, Glory falls between two masterly novels—The Defense and Laughter in the Dark. By comparison, it is weak; the ending baffles, and what happens on the way to the ending occurs with a curious, rather ingratiating casualness. Glory never really awakens to its condition as a novel, its obligation to generate suspense. Its secondary characters—Darwin, the sanguine and gentlemanly Englishman, and Sonia, the sulky little émigrée—come into view elliptically, as if they were revolving around some other sun. The youthful hero, Martin Edelweiss, is a center of anti-gravity; we feel that things flee him. Though he is Russian, his name is Swiss, cluing some atomic split within. In one of those landlordly prefaces that slam shut the doors of unsightly closets, inveigh against the Freudian in the hall, and roughly nudge the prospective tenant toward the one window with a view, Nabokov likens the design of Glory to a chess problem whose crux is the impotence of the customarily high-powered Queen. The hint is helpful. In the backward look, the book’s two faults, if faults they be (sleepy development, stark conclusion), do combine into a single, intended quality—a weak strength, or sad joy.
Martin is led along some of the paths of Nabokov’s autobiography—the country house with its sandy allées, the numinous shadowy albums and tinted porch glass, the English biscuits and toothpaste imported from afar, the idyllic days in the warm Crimea while civil war rages, the improvised departure on a Black Sea freighter, the arrival in a Europe that will never shed the postcard brightness and carved-clock quaintness of a place visited, of a place that is not Russia and therefore not quite real. We have been here before, in Luzhin’s boyhood and in Van Veen’s private mythology and, above all, in Speak, Memory. Nabokov, in his role of over-solicitous proprietor, warns us away from seeking out “duplicate items or kindred scenery” in Speak, Memory, but who could miss the marvellous newspaper-phoenix, the sheet of the London Times held across the fireplace to make it draw?
The taut sheet would grow warm and transparent, and the lines of print, mingling with the lines showing through from the reverse side, looked like the bizarre lettering of some mumbo-jumbo language. Then, as the hum and tumult of the fire increased, a fox-red, darkening spot would appear on the paper and suddenly burst through. The whole sheet, now aflame, would be instantly sucked in and sent flying up. And a belated passerby, a gowned don, could observe, through the gloom of the gothic night, a fiery-haired witch emerge from the chimney into the starry sky. Next day Martin would pay a fine.
When, a quarter of a century later, Nabokov set down in English his memories of Cambridge, this imagery returned, almost sentence by sentence: “Then the flaming sheet, with the whirr of a liberated phoenix, would fly up the chimney to join the stars. It cost one a fine of twelve shillings if that firebird was observed.” In that same Chapter Thirteen of Speak, Memory, Nabokov states, “The story of my college years in England is really the story of my trying to become a Russian writer.” Martin Edelweiss is an alter ego gutted of Nabokov’s artistic vocation; this deliberate lobotomy leaves an oddly hollow protagonist, a “travelling playboy” with dreams but no ambitions, graduating from college into tennis and vagabondage and, at the end, a suicidal return to Russia. But Martin has always, come to think of it, been close to death:
Lying in the next room and feigning to snore so his mother would not think he was awake, Martin also recalled harrowing things, also tried to comprehend his father’s death and to catch a wisp of posthumous tenderness in the dark of the room.
Not only his father but friends die—contemporaries fighting with the White armies—and in the Crimea, on a dark road, he is challenged by a drunk with a gun, and in the Alps he challenges himself to venture out onto a dizzying ledge. If in retrospect the reader finds that he has failed to take these dark hints seriously enough, the reason may be that Martin is Nabokov’s healthiest hero and Glory his sunniest book.
Page after page brims with glistening physical description:
With the onset of summer the cross-marked sheep were herded higher into the mountains. A babbling metallic tinkling, of unknown origin and from an unknown direction, would gradually become audible. Floating nearer, it enveloped the listener, giving him an odd tickling sensation in the mouth. Then, in a cloud of dust, came flowing a gray, curly, tightly packed mass of sheep rubbing against each other, and the moist, hollow tinkle of the bells, which delighted all of one’s senses, mounted, swelled so mysteriously that the dust itself seemed to be ringing as it billowed above the moving backs of the sheep.
By denying Martin any artistic or political passion while not denying him his own full complement of senses, Nabokov has released a genie rare in fiction—a robust sense of physical well-being. The sensations of vigorous tennis, of goal tending at soccer, of a bare-knuckled fistfight are in Glory given their due by an artist and meditator who was also an athlete; so, too, are the subtler but not less physical sensations of train travel, of pipe smoke and male companionship over tea, of “the fresh rough smell of earth and melting snow,” of agriculture—“the hollowed earth would fill with bubbling brown water and, feeling in it with a spade, he mercifully softened the soil, until something gave delightfully, and the percolating water sank away, washing the roots. He felt happy he knew how to satisfy a plant’s thirst.” Happiness, as with an earlier Russian author, is the fragile, somehow terrible theme. Martin’s sexual encounters tend to be felt in terms of the woman’s fragility:
He thought with rapt nostalgia about that amiable woman, with the touchingly hollow chest and the clear eyes, and about the way her fragile frame crunched in his embrace, causing her to say softly, “Ouch, you’ll break me.”
Similarly rapt, the sentences seek to embrace, with the crunch of a superb adjective, the full and fainting body of a moment.
A wave would swell, boil with foam, and topple rotundly, spreading and running up on the shingle. Then, unable to hold fast, it would slip back to the grumbling of awakened pebbles.
… the country coolness of the rooms, so keenly perceptible after the outdoor heat; a fat bumblebee knocking against the ceiling with a chagrined droning; the paws of the fir trees against the blue of the sky.…
From that year on Martin developed a passion for trains, travels, distant lights, the heartrending wails of locomotives in the dark of night, and the waxworks vividness of local stations flashing by.
The author’s efforts to fix the sensations, the gestures—“he would compress his thin lips, take off his pince-nez as carefully as if it were a dragonfly”—so freshly and precisely become a means whereby the third-person hero accrues moral credit, or at least a certain scrupulous stubbornness. An old man dies, and “Martin felt sorry for the originality of the deceased, who was truly irreplaceable—his gestures, his beard, his sculpturesque wrinkles, the sudden shy smile, the jacket button that hung by a thread, and his way of licking a stamp with his entire tongue before sticking it on the envelope and banging it with his fist. In a certain sense this was all of greater value than the social merits for which there existed such easy little clichés.” Martin is credited with a “meditative joie de vivre” and a search for “scintilla,” but is declared untormented “by a writer’s covetousness (so akin to the fear of death), by that constant state of anxiety compelling one to fix indelibly this or that evanescent trifle”; the declaration is rather formal and does have about it the cruelty of some dissecting experiment that permits a creature to twitch without benefit of a head. Yet it is true, as our decade has again borne witness, that youth, in the sensitivity of its animal health, tends to be artistic, and that without the task of art before it the artistic temper wastes itself in symbolic actions, in “trips” that are meaningless self-tests and whose secret destination is death. This point is contained in Glory, but it is not the point of the book. The point, surely, lies in its rapturous evocations and the fri
ssons they give us—what Martin terms “the unexpected, sunlit clearings, where you can stretch until your joints crunch, and remain entranced,” what Nabokov in his afterword to Lolita announces he “shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss.” In its residue of bliss experienced, and in its charge of bliss conveyed, Glory measures up as, though the last to arrive, far from the least of this happy man’s Russian novels.
Van Loves Ada, Ada Loves Van
ADA, by Vladimir Nabokov. 589 pp. McGraw-Hill, 1969.
When a book fails to agree with a reader, it is either because the author has failed to realize his intentions or because his intentions are disagreeable. Since Vladimir Nabokov is, all in all, the best-equipped writer in the English-speaking world (of which he inhabits a personal promontory by the side of Lake Geneva), the opening chapters of his giant new novel, Ada, must be taken as intentionally repellent. His prose has never—not even in his haughty prefaces to works resurrected from the Russian, not even in Humbert Humbert’s maddest flights—menaced a cowering reader with more bristling erudition, garlicky puns, bearish parentheses, and ogreish winks. For example:
“I can add,” said the girl [Ada], “that the petal belongs to the common Butterfly Orchis; that my mother was even crazier than her sister; and that the paper flower so cavalierly dismissed is a perfectly recognizable reproduction of an early-spring sanicle that I saw in profusion on hills in coastal California last February. Dr. Krolik, our local naturalist, to whom you, Van, have referred, as Jane Austen might have phrased it, for the sake of rapid narrative information (you recall Brown, don’t you, Smith?), has determined the example I brought back from Sacramento to Ardis, as the Bear-Foot, B,E,A,R, my love, not my foot or yours, or the Stabian flower girl’s—an allusion, which your father, who, according to Blanche, is also mine, would understand like this (American fingersnap).”
Nor is the matter being thus roughly intruded into our consciousness of a compensating solidity or persuasive immediacy. Ada is subtitled “Or Ardor: A Family Chronicle,” and the central family matter, not easily grasped, concerns the marriage of the two Durmanov sisters, Marina and Aqua, to two men each called Walter D. Veen, first cousins differentiated by the nicknames Red (or Dan) and Demon. Demon has an extensive love affair with Marina but marries Aqua, who readily goes insane; this unhappy marriage has one apparent offspring, Ivan, who is not to be confused with Uncle Ivan, the Durmanov sisters’ short-lived brother. “Apparent,” I say, because young “Van’s” real mother is Marina, who, fertile as well as obliging, is also the mother of Demon’s other illegitimate child, Ada, and—by her own husband, Red Veen, the well-known art dealer—another daughter, Lucette. The very incestuous (“very” because besides being ostensible first cousins and actual siblings they are also third cousins, descended from Prince Vseslav Zemski) love affair between Van and Ada preoccupies nearly six hundred rollicking pages.
The genealogical maze rests upon the unquiet geography of the planet Demonia, or Antiterra, where our homely Terra is a disconnected rumor, pieced together from the visions of madmen and “believed in,” or not, like Heaven. On Antiterra, Canady and Estoty contain large French and Russian territories (much as Nabokov’s memory must) and surprising sights, like “the peasant-bare footprint of Tolstoy preserved in the clay of a motor court in Utah where he had written the tale of Murat, the Navajo chieftain, a French general’s bastard.” Most of Ada occurs in the second half of Antiterra’s 19th century, after the “L disaster” has caused electricity to be banned, leaving people to communicate with “dorophones,” which ring by making all the toilets in the house gurgle; one answers by saying “A l’eau!” The atmosphere of this “distortive glass of our distorted glebe” is dreamy with the stale air of classic novels and swarms with swattable little midges like “Mr. Eliot, a Jewish businessman,” “Dr. Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu,” “Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago,” “Collected Works of Falknermann,” “that dislikable Norbert von Miller,” and “James Jones, a formula whose complete lack of connotation made an ideal pseudonym despite its happening to be his real name.”
Now, why should an author not create a “nulliverse” to represent “oneirologically” the contents of his own mind? The “L disaster,” “which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of ‘Terra,’ ” is surely the Russian Revolution, which caused such a great dislocation in Nabokov’s life. The confusion of America (Estotiland) and Russia (Tartary) into one idyllic nation where everyone speaks French is, more than a joke upon Canada, a metaphor of personal history. Vain, venereal Van Veen verges on V.N.; Nabokov = Van + book. Ada (rhymes with Nevada) is ardor and art—but not, I think, the Americans for Democratic Action. She is also, in a dimension or two, Nabokov’s wife Véra, his constant collaboratrice and the invariable dedicatee of his works. Ada’s marginal comments on Van’s manuscript, reproduced in print, are among the liveliest bits in the book, and offer an occasional check upon the author’s rampaging genius. I suspect that many of the details in this novel double as personal communication between husband and wife; some of the bothersomely exact dates, for instance, must be, to use a favorite word of our author, “fatadic.” I am certain that trilingual puns crowd and crawl (“Je raffole de tout ce qui rampe”—“I’m crazy about everything that crawls”—Ada says) beneath the surface of this novel like wood lice under the bark of an old stump. Their patient explication, and the formal arrangement of the parallels and contraries that geometricize “our rambling romance,” the hurried reviewer may confidently leave to the graduate student who, between puffs of pot, while his wife strums the baby or dandles the guitar—by Log, this deadly style is infectious!—can spend many a pleasant and blameless hour unstitching the sequinned embroidery of Nabokov’s five years’ labor of love. He might begin with the prominently displayed anagram of “insect” (“incest,” “nicest,” “scient”), move on to the orchid-imitating butterflies and butterfly-imitating orchids, get his feet wet in the water imagery (Aqua, Marina, “A l’eau!” yourself), and then do something with “cruciform,” which crops up in several surprising connections, such as mounted moths, the hero’s feces, and the arrangement of a mature woman’s four patches of hair. Indeed, this book is Nabokov’s most religious—his Testament as well as his Tempest—and manages several oblique squints at the Christian religion, a previous sketch of a structured supernature. Ada is the feminine form of the Russian “Ad,” for Hades or Hell, and there is a Van in Nirvana and Heaven, for instance.
But, to answer the question posed above, one reason that an author should not create a nulliverse is that it is difficult to generate on an Antiterra the gravity that even the feeblest terrestrial tale appropriates. The details, the sometimes comical and sometimes waspish extensions of the author’s prejudices and fancy, distract us from the angels and demons, who are, it turns out, meant to be human. Specifically, Ada and Van adventure amid obstacles so automatic, so confessedly retrieved from the attics of Mme. de La Fayette and Count Tolstoy, that it is hard to care about their intermittences of copulation as much as they and their creator do. In a landscape of “Ladore, Ladoga, Laguna, Lugano, and Luga,” everything melts into foolery. I confess to a prejudice: fiction is earthbound, and while in decency the names of small towns and middling cities must be faked, metropolises and nations are unique and should be given their own names or none. I did not even like it when Nabokov, in Pale Fire, gave New York State the preëmpted appellation of Appalachia. He is, among other titles to our love, the foremost poet of Earth’s geography, who in his remarkable story “Lance” saw long before the actual astronauts “the praying woman of the Baltic, and … the elegant Americas caught in their trapeze act, and Australia like a baby Africa lying on its side.” His vision and flair are themselves so supermundane that to apply them to a fairyland is to put icing on icing. There is nothing in the landscapes of Ada to rank with the Russian scenery of Speak, Memory or the trans-American hegira of Lolita and Humbert Humbert.
As with place names, so with face
names; we never get over the playful twinning of Aqua and Marina, Demon and Dan, and though Aqua’s madness spins a few beautiful pages and Demon makes some noises approximating those of a flesh-and-blood father, the four remain animated anagrams, symmetrical appendages that want to be characters. To be sure, we are in a world of chrysalis and metamorphosis; as in Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister, the cardboard flats and gauze trappings collapse, and the author/hero, heavy with death, lumbers toward the lip of the stage. This does happen, and the last pages of Ada are the best, and rank with Nabokov’s best, but to get to them we traverse too wide a waste of facetious, airy, side-slipped semi-reality.
Define reality.
That which exists.
Don’t you mean merely that which is perceived? Can we divide the universe, of which you seem so wholly fond, from our perception of it? And can we, more to the point, divide the reality of a book from what the author says it is? Does a “dorophone” exist less on the paper than a “telephone” because a hundred million “real” telephones echo in coarse Bakelite the latter, while the former is a unique coinage of the writer’s imperious imagination? And isn’t an author entitled to applause and gratitude for daring to work not in dreary Zolaesque dredging of a swampy “external world” as hallucinatory as the next but along the living rainbow edge where writer’s mind meets reader’s in the mist of the retreating thunderstorms of “traditional” novels, a retreat most prettily signalled by the jovial iridescence of parody? Don’t you think that your plebeian cavils were anticipated and scornfully dismissed in advance by this towering, snorting wizard?