by John Updike
To be sure, the risks have been calculated. Some offenses are intentional. On the second page, Van disarmingly confesses his “ancestral strain of whimsical, and not seldom deplorable, taste.” And defensive jabs at “cretinic critics” abound. But is it intentional that the conversations between the two lovers so stiflingly reek of mutual congratulation, that the dialogue everywhere defuses itself with quibbles and pranks, and that the hero is such a brute? When the girl who relieves him of his virginity, courteously described as “a fubsy pig-pink whorlet,” tries to kiss him, Van “elbow[s] her face away.” When Lucette, Ada’s younger sister, falls in love with him, he drives her to suicide. When Kim, a servant boy at Ardis Hall, photographs Van and Ada making love and tries to blackmail them, Van arranges to have him blinded—“carried out of his cottage with one eye hanging on a red thread and the other drowned in its blood.” Ada, bless her, now and then rebukes him for his hard-heartedness, explaining that “not everybody is as happy as we are,” but Van holds aloof from “silly pity—a sentiment I rarely experience” and continues to nourish at the expense of others an ego “richer and prouder than anything those two poor worms could imagine,” the two worms being two lovers of Ada whom the author dispatches before duel-crazy Van can get to them. As to Kim: “ ‘Amends have been made,’ replied fat Van with a fat man’s chuckle. ‘I’m keeping Kim safe and snug in a nice Home for Disabled Professional People, where he gets from me loads of nicely brailled books on new processes in chromophotography.’ ” This useful therapy is cousin, presumably, to “those helpful hobbies which polio patients, lunatics, and convicts are taught by generous institutions, by enlightened administrators, by ingenious psychiatrists—such as bookbinding, or putting blue beads into the orbits of dolls made by other criminals, cripples, and madmen.”
It is not always easy, but it is necessary, to distinguish between the hero’s callousness and the author’s zest for describing deformity and pain. Gentle Professor Pnin, we remember, was going to give someday a course on “The History of Pain.” Throughout Nabokov’s work, pain appears as the twin, in the physical world, of madness in the psychical. Ada contains a cruel vision of the afterlife: “The only consciousness that persists in the hereafter is the consciousness of pain.” Little sensitive particles, a web of toothaches here, a bundle of nightmares there, cling to each other “like tiny groups of obsure refugees from some obliterated country huddling together for a little smelly warmth, for dingy charities or shared recollections of nameless tortures in Tartar camps.” The fragmentation of Lucette’s consciousness as she drowns (“she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes … that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude”) is monstrously well felt. Such sharp focus on pain, death, and madness incriminates not Van but the world. After Lucette’s death, he longs in a letter for “more deeply moral worlds than this pellet of muck.” Yet the phrase “pellet of muck” is a dandy’s dismissal, and as Van goes about the world swaddled in his millions, exposing himself to chambermaids, feasting off of adolescent prostitutes, squashing literary critics, despising his lecture audiences, and fiercely repelling all who would trespass upon his inviolate ego and his adoration of Ada, he bares, perhaps unintentionally, a moral deformity comparable to the physical deformities that fascinate him.
Nabokov was born and reared as an aristocrat. Rich, healthy, brilliant, physically successful, he lacks the neurasthenic infirmities that gave the modernism of Proust, Joyce, Kafka, and Mann its tender underside. Asked, in a recent Japanese magazine (The Umi, Volume 1, No. 1), the question “What authors or works have influenced you most?” Nabokov answered serenely, “None.” In truth, it is hard, in the ranks of literary genius, recruited as they are from the shabby-genteel and the bedridden, to find his aristocratic, vigorous peers. There is Tolstoy, and there is Chateaubriand. Tolstoy is much on Nabokov’s mind. Ada begins by inverting the opening sentence of Anna Karenina and closes by likening itself, “in pure joyousness, and Arcadian innocence,” to Tolstoy’s reminiscences. It contains a Vronsky, a Kitty, a Dolly; Levin’s code-word courtship of Kitty is parodied by Scrabble games between Van and Ada. The country-house atmosphere of Ardis Hall mimics yet partakes of the Tolstoyan idyll. Van’s father accuses him of belonging to “the Decadent School of writing, in company of naughty old Leo and consumptive Anton,” and Ada does a “clever pastiche … mimicking Tolstoy’s paragraph rhythm and chapter closings.” The list of concealed allusions and twittings could doubtless be lengthened. (Graduate student, go do it!)
But Chateaubriand, to whom the author tips his hat at half a dozen intersections, looms more fondly, as grandfathers will over fathers—and boorish, booted, crypto-Communist fathers at that. Ada shares with Atala its heroine’s vowels and the setting of a fantasized America, with René the theme of incest, and with Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe its posthumous posture and an affinity of tone. Even through the brown varnish of translation, certain colors and twists in Chateaubriand’s prose suggest Nabokov. In Atala, the Mississippi (which Chateaubriand probably never saw) is described in flood:
But in the scenes of nature grace and magnificence always go together: while the main current drags the corpses of pines and oaks to the sea, floating islands of lotus and water-lily, their yellow blooms raised like standards, are borne upstream along either bank. Green snakes, blue herons, red flamingoes, and young crocodiles travel as passengers on these flowering boats, and each colony, spreading its golden sails to the wind, will come to rest in its own quiet backwater.
The observation of the counter-current, the magical precision applied to a vision, the detection of an idyll at the heart of a tumult, have a kinship with the prose flights of our Russian; Chateaubriand, too, was a survivor of revolution and a naturalist:
The scene is no less picturesque in broad daylight; for a crowd of butterflies, dragonflies, humming-birds, green parakeets, blue jays, attach themselves to these mosses, which are then like a tapestry in white wool, upon which the European craftsman has worked insects and dazzling birds.
The habit of viewing nature as an artifact blends with a trick of seeing human personality as a mechanism, wherein certain rather sad inevitabilities produce jerky effects:
Apolline de Bedée [Chateaubriand’s mother] had large features and was dark, dainty, and ugly; her elegant manners and lively temperament contrasted with my father’s stiffness and equanimity. As fond of society as he was of solitude, and as high-spirited and cheerful as he was cold and unemotional, she did not have a single taste which was not at variance with those of her husband.… Obliged to keep silent when she would have liked to speak, she found consolation in a kind of noisy sadness broken by sighs which formed the only interruption to the mute sadness of my father. In matters of piety, my mother was an angel.
Later in the Mémoires, Chateaubriand evokes the imaginary woman that his solitude in the château at Combourg created:
A young queen would come to me, decked in diamonds and flowers (it was my sylph). She sought me out at midnight, through gardens of orange trees … beneath a sky of love bathed in the light of Endymion’s star; she moved forward, a living statue by Praxiteles, in the midst of motionless statues, pale pictures, and silent frescoes whitened by the moonlight … the silken tresses from her loosened diadem fell caressingly on my brow as she bent her sixteen-year-old head over my face, and her hands rested on my breast, throbbing with respect and desire.
This is Ada, to the diamonds and flowers, the respect and desire. Our sensation is confirmed that Ada is Van; that the duo is a single “A” of refracted solitude; that she is too ardent and intelligent, too respectful, to be external. She tells him, “All my thoughts, oh, my darling, are mimotypes of yours.”
Rape is the sexual sin of the mob, adultery of the bourgeoisie, and incest of the aristocracy. Romanticism, which made of every ego an aristocrat, spawned Wordsworth and Dorothy, Byron and Augusta, and Chateaubriand and Lucile, the sister who shared his Co
mbourg solitude, who took on the moonlit lineaments of his “sylph,” and who fled into a nunnery. “When we spoke of the world,” Chateaubriand recalls, “it was of that which we carried within ourselves, a world which bore little resemblance to the real world.” “Van,” Ada writes in the margin of Ada, “I trust your taste and your talent but are we quite sure we should keep reverting so zestfully to that wicked world which after all may have existed only oneirologically, Van?” The idyll of Ardis Hall has its roots in the childhood fictionalized in the early pages of The Gift and The Defense. The idyll concerns self-discovery, the discovery of poetry, of chess, of lepidoptery (Ada’s passion, not Van’s), of one’s own genius. Ada allegorizes self-love, self-respect; its spirituality (and it is a spiritual book) generates itself along the circular lines that to love one’s self under the guise of a sister is to feminize one’s soul, to make it other than the masculine ego, to externalize it—to give oneself, then, a soul.
The outward process is less pleasing, incestuous self-sufficiency plunging rapidly through world denigration into despair. Though Van sleeps with harlots and Ada with fools, only Lucette, their half sister, has enough precious substance to come between them; when she is drowned (as movingly as possible, from Van’s rather aerial point of view), the union of Ada and Van is only a matter of time, which we are told is a motionless “grayish gauze.” In a world without substance, the twinned genius-ego risks acrophobia.
CHATEAUBRIAND: I made progress in the study of languages; I became strong in mathematics, for which I have always had a pronounced leaning: I would have made a good naval officer or sapper.… I was good at chess, billiards, shooting, and fencing; I drew tolerably well; I would have sung well, too, if my voice had been trained.
VAN: He was ten. His father had lingered in the West where the many-colored mountains acted upon Van as they had on all young Russians of genius. He could solve an Euler-type problem or learn by heart Pushkin’s “Headless Horseman” poem in less than twenty minutes.
CHATEAUBRIAND: My imagination, kindled into flame and spreading in all directions, failed to find adequate nourishment anywhere and could have devoured heaven and earth.
VAN: He had to do it his own way, but the cognac was frightful, and the history of thought bristled with clichés, and it was that history he had to surmount.
CHATEAUBRIAND: In life weighed by its light weight, measured by its short measure, and stripped of all deception, there are only two things of real value: religion married with intelligence and love married with youth … the rest is not worth while.
VAN: … this pellet of muck.…
CHATEAUBRIAND: Finally, one thing completed my misery: the groundless despair which I carried in the depths of my heart.
VAN: He wondered what really kept him alive on terrible Antiterra, with Terra a myth and all art a game.…
Is art a game? Nabokov stakes his career on it, and there exist enterprising young critics who, in replacing Proust, Joyce, and Mann with the alliterative new trinity of Beckett, Borges, and naBokov,* imply that these wonderful old fellows make fine airtight boxes, like five-foot plastic cubes in a Minimal Art show, all inner reflection and shimmer, perfectly self-contained, detached from even the language of their composition. I think not. Art is part game, part grim erotic tussle with Things As They Are; the boxes must have holes where reality can look out and readers can look in. Beckett shows us the depraved rudiments of our mortal existence; Borges opens a window on the desolation of history’s maze and the tang of heroism that blows off the Argentine plain. And Ada, though aspiring to “an art now become pure and abstract, and therefore genuine,” is full of holes, stretches and pages and phrases whose life derives from life.
Oh? Such as? Your praise-space is cramped.
(1) Ada herself. Witty and convolute and kind in her marginal addenda, wanly feminine in her lapses and evasions, quite lovable as a pornographic heroine progressively engaged in fancier pranks. The frontier of sexual explicitness, where Lolita was once an outpost, has been rolled way back; Nabokov adds a charming page (page 141) to the rapidly expanding American anthology of fellatio, and the inventory of Ada’s charms beginning on page 215 is of Sapphic purity and Homeric grandeur.
(2) The essays, toward the end, on time and memory. Though his rebuttals of Freud and Einstein suggest the efforts of a very impressively costumed witch doctor to analyze an internal combustion engine in terms of mana and sympathetic magic, it is fun to watch; and his attempt, in droll lecturese, to pry open the innermost secrets of existence has the uncanny dignity of high blasphemy. Science fiction in the best sense.
(3) A thousand images and verbal moments where intelligence winks and wonder gleams. At random: the moment when Demon dorophones Marina from “a roadside booth of pure crystal still tear-stained after a tremendous thunderstorm” to beg her to come see “the daze of desert flowers that the rain had brought out.”
(4) All of Part V, which is “not meant as an epilogue; it is the true introduction of my ninety-seven percent true and three percent likely, Ada or Ardor, a family chronicle.” The author, “a crotchety gray old wordman on the edge of a hotel bed,” confides to us from the height of his ninety-seven years what it is like to be old, famous, impotent, and content. He describes his medicines, including “the delightful effect of a spoonful of sodium bicarbonate dissolved in water that was sure to release three or four belches as big as the speech balloons in the ‘funnies’ of his boyhood.” He faces death, and its preliminary pain: “A giant, with an effort-contorted face, clamping and twisting an engine of agony.” He reveals that Terra and Antiterra, rather casually, have merged. Ada and Van together translate into Russian some lines of John Shade, casting the last of many backward looks into Nabokov’s oeuvre. Then they die, “into Eden or Hades, into the prose of the book or the poetry of its blurb.” The blurb ends the book. It is strange but solid; sensations close to the edge of experience have been given equivalence in print. Would that such a marriage of lovely mind and surly matter had occurred earlier in Ada!
Wait a minute, une petite minute, pazhalsta—what sort of loose, not to say queasily quasi-mystical, talk is “sensations close to the edge of experience”?
Well, a man’s religious life is the last province of privacy these days, but it is clear from Ada and other evidences that Nabokov is a mystic. “You believe,” Ada asks Van, “you believe in the existence of Terra? Oh, you do!” And Nabokov, when asked by his Playboy interviewer if he believed in God, answered, “I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed had I not known more.” In the same interview, he describes his preparations for a novel, which consist of random jottings at the behest of a “force” like that which makes a bird collect bits of straw and fluff in preparation for a nest. Just as Chateaubriand found accommodation for his massive egotism and morbidity within Catholic orthodoxy, Nabokov has made a church for himself out of fanatic pedantry; the thousand pages of his Onegin footnotes are a cathedralic structure where even the capitals that face the wall are painstakingly carved. Chateaubriand’s morose and windy communion with nature at Combourg has its counterpart in Nabokov’s happier intimations at Vyra of natural intricacy, particularly that of mimetic patterns in lepidoptera, a mimicry whose extravagant ingenuity seems unaccountable in a mechanical scheme of evolution. His fiction, from its punning prose and its twinning of characters to the elegance of each tale’s deceptive design, re-presents his boyhood’s revelation of art-for-art’s-sake within Nature. If Nature is an artifact, however, there must be, if not an Artist, at least a kind of raw reality beneath or behind it, and the most daring and distressing quality of his novels is their attempt to rub themselves bare, to display their own vestments of artifice and then to remove them. Hence the recurrent device of the uncompleted, imperfect manuscript; this text embodies not only Ada’s marginal notes but various false paragraph starts and editor’s bracketed notes of the type frequent in proof sheets. Van says of a moment of semi-
recognition, “It was a queer feeling—as of something replayed by mistake, part of a sentence misplaced on the proof sheet, a scene run prematurely, a repeated blemish, a wrong turn of time.” This “queer feeling” is the sensation “close to the edge of experience” that Nabokov seeks to embody in Ada; this “queer feeling” is the heart of his artistic rapture and devotion, and also of his not always delicious mystification, his not invariably enlightening pursuit of nuancé inklings. In Pale Fire, John Shade showed a surprisingly literal interest in the afterlife; in Ada, Nabokov has sought to construct, with his Hades and Nirvana, an Otherlife. Art begins with magic. Though Nabokov operates, it seems to me, without the sanctions, the charity and humility, that makes a priest, he lays claim to the more ancient title of magician.
The Translucing of Hugh Person
TRANSPARENT THINGS, by Vladimir Nabokov. 104 pp. McGraw-Hill, 1972.
Confessions: I have never understood how they saw the woman in half. Any willful child can dumbfound me with card tricks learned from the back of a comic book. Mystery novelists find in me their ideal gull, obligingly misled by the fishiest red herring. In calculus, I never grasped the infinitesimal but utile distinction between dt and t. And I do not understand Vladimir Nabokov’s new novel, Transparent Things. This is a confession, not a complaint; the world abounds in excellent apparatuses, from automobile engines to digestive tracts, resistant to my understanding. So be it. I am grateful. I am grateful that Nabokov, at an age when most writers are content to rearrange their medals and bank their anthology royalties, rides his old hobby-horses with such tenacious mount and such jubilant tallyhos. A new book by him, any new book by him, serves as reminder that art is a holiday, however grim workdays grow in the sweatshops of reality. His exuberance is catching, as readers of this hyperbole-pocked paragraph can at a glance diagnose. Well, to work.