La, la, la, la, la, la,
Tra, la, la, la,
La, la, la, la, la, la, la
or the thirty-four “again”s of “I’ll Black His Eyes” or the 184 “ha”s of “Riddle-Diddle Me This.” Without music, the simple lines of “I Love You” and “True Love” remain banal, daring parodies of banality, indeed; but alloyed with their enchanting tunes, and sung by Bing Crosby (in duet, for the sweet waltz of the second, with the delicate voice of Grace Kelly), the words become gold, affecting and unforgettable. The point scarcely needs making, least of all in the case of a composer like Porter who created his own melodies, that song lyrics are part of a whole, and that reading a book of them is a little like looking at an album of photographs of delicious food. The food looks good, but the proof is in the eating. The proof of Cole Porter’s genius was in the stage shows and movies he made his crucial contributions to, and in the dozen or more standards—“Just One of Those Things,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “Begin the Beguine,” “In the Still of the Night,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “It’s De-Lovely,” “From This Moment On,” “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” “It’s All Right with Me,” “Night and Day,” “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” “You’re the Top,” etc.—that are woven into the airwaves of these United States and familiar to all who have ears to hear.
Verse, including light verse, makes its own music. The tune is elusive but it requires no stage manager or electronic equipment; it hums and tingles up off the mute page. A light-verse writer is not constrained to extend his inspiration through enough refrains to exhaust the chorus, to shape his syllables toward easy vocalization by a possibly difficult star (Bert Lahr, Mr. Kimball tells us, refused to perform a song because it rhymed “cinema” and “enema”), or to appeal to any store of shared information less vast than the language of its accumulated treasury of allusions. No doubt Cole Porter could have been such a writer, had the immeasurably wider audience for musical comedy not beckoned. Without any orchestral egging-on, we smile at such lines as
Your effect would be fantastic
In that pistache Perfolastic
and
Digging in his fertile glen,
Goldwyn dug up Anna Sten
and
Some folks collect paintings,
Some folks collect stamps,
Some are amassers
Of antimacassars
And other Victorian camps
and
If a lass in Michigan can,
If an ass in Astrakhan can,
If a bass in the Saskatchewan can,
Baby, you can can-can too.
Porter’s transmogrification of Bob Fletcher’s original lyric for “Don’t Fence Me In” dramatically demonstrates his technical flair. Here is Fletcher’s refrain:
Don’t fence me in.
Give me land, lots of land,
Stretching miles across the West,
Let me ride where it’s wide,
For somehow I like it best,
Don’t fence me in.
I want to see the stars,
I want to feel the breeze,
I want to smell the sage
And hear the cottonwood trees.
Just turn me loose,
Let me straddle my old saddle
Where the shining mountains rise.
On my cayuse
I’ll go siftin’, I’ll go driftin’
Underneath those Western skies.
I’ve got to get where
The West commences,
I can’t stand hobbles,
I can’t stand fences,
Don’t fence me in.
And here is Porter’s rewrite:
Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,
Don’t fence me in.
Let me ride thru the wide-open country that I love,
Don’t fence me in.
Let me be by myself in the evening breeze,
Listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees,
Send me off forever, but I ask you, please,
Don’t fence me in.
Just turn me loose,
Let me straddle my old saddle underneath the Western skies.
On my cayuse,
Let me wander over yonder till I see the mountains rise.
I want to ride to the ridge where the West commences,
Gaze at the moon till I lose my senses,
Can’t look at hobbles and I can’t stand fences,
Don’t fence me in.
Almost every element in the rather staid, trite source is used in Porter’s revision, but wonderfully loosened up with internal rhymes and a certain surreal humor—“Gaze at the moon till I lose my senses” has no corresponding sentiment in the original. True, we can hear the music, jingling and trotting along, and this greatly helps. The more of the music you can hear, the more you are apt to enjoy perusing this monumental omnium-gatherum; but even where the silence of your lonely room remains obdurate, something magical is apt to creep
Like the beat beat beat of the tom-tom
When the jungle shadows fall,
Like the tick tick tock of the stately clock
As it stands against the wall,
Like the drip drip drip of the raindrops
When the sum’r show’r is through.
Afterword to The Luzhin Defense,
by Vladimir Nabokov
BACK IN THE EXHILARATING DAYS when Nabokov’s oeuvre in English, stimulated by the best-selling scandal of Lolita, was growing at both ends—old works in Russian being translated, new works in English being handed down by the living master from
his Swiss retirement—The New Yorker devoted a large part of two issues (May 9 and 16, 1964) to The Luzhin Defense, as translated by Michael Scammell in collaboration with the author.1 Such a serialization was an unprecedented and, as far as I know, unrepeated tribute by the editors of that choosy publication to a work of fiction. And indeed this novel, Nabokov’s third, shows him—after the youthful and wistful novella Mary and the rather bleak manipulations of King, Queen, Knave—entering into his full poetic birthright, that vision which violently combines an ardent nostalgia with an aloof ingenuity, a pale fire of the intellect with an appetite for particulars so fierce and intimate that nearly every sentence has a twist of extra animation.
As he wrote away at the novel in 1929, while living on the Passauer Strasse in Berlin and chasing butterflies in the south of France, he knew he had moved to new heights; he wrote his mother in August, “In three or four days I’ll add the last full stops. After that I won’t struggle again for a long time with such monstrously difficult themes, but will write something quiet and smooth-flowing. All the same I’m pleased with my Luzhin, but what a complicated, complicated thing!” His wife, Véra, wrote her mother-in-law, “Russian literature has not seen its like.” When Zashchita Luzhina appeared, in three long installments, in the most distinguished of Russian émigré literary journals, Sovremennye zapiski, “V. Sirin,” Nabokov’s pen name, became unignorable in the small but seething world of émigré letters. The writer Nina Berberova, in her 1969 memoir The Italics Are Mine, described her impression after reading the first installment: “A tremendous, mature, sophisticated modern writer was before me; a great Russian writer, like a Phoenix, was born from the fire and ashes of revolution and exile. Our existence from now on acquired a meaning. All my generation were justified. We were saved.” And the émigrés’ best-known writer, Ivan Bunin, reportedly commented, “This kid has snatched a gun and done away with the whole older generation, myself included.”
At the time of writing, Nabokov was thirty, as is Luzhin. Like his hero, the author seems older; few so young could write a novel wherein the autobiographical elements are so cunningly rearranged and transmuted by a fictional design, and the emotional content is so obedient to ingenious commands, and the characterization shows so little of indignation or the shock of discovery. On this last point, it needs to be said—so much has been pointlessly said about Nabokov’s “virtuosity,” as if he is an illusionist working with stuffed rabbits and hats nobody could wear—that Nabokov’s characters live. The humanity that came within his rather narrow field of vision was illuminated by a guarded but genuine compassion. Two characters come to mind, randomly and vividly: Charlotte Haze of Lolita, with her blatant bourgeois bohemianism, her ready cigarettes, her Mexican doodads, her touchingly clumsy sexuality, her utterly savage and believable war with her daughter; and Albinus Kretschmar of Laughter in the Dark, with his doll-like dignity, his bestial softness, his hobbies, his family feelings, his abject romanticism, his quaint competence. An American housewife and a German businessman, both observed, certainly, from well outside, yet animated from within. How much more, then, can Nabokov do with characters who are Russian, and whose concerns circle close to his own aloof passions!
His foreword, shameless and disdainful in his usual first-person style, specifies, for “hack reviewers” and “persons who move their lips when reading,” the forked appeal of “this attractive novel”—the intricate immanence in plot and imagery of chess as a prevailing metaphor, and the weird lovableness of the virtually inert hero. “Of all my Russian books, The [Luzhin] Defense contains and diffuses the greatest ‘warmth’—which may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract chess is supposed to be. In point of fact, Luzhin has been found lovable even by those who understand nothing about chess and/or detest all my other books.” What makes characters endearing does not admit to such analysis: I would divide Luzhin’s charm into (a) the delineation of his childhood, (b) the evocation of his chess prowess.
As to (a), Nabokov always warmed to the subject of children, precocious children—David Krug, Victor Wind, the all-seeing “I” of Conclusive Evidence (later entitled Speak, Memory), and, most precocious and childlike of all, Dolores Haze. The four chapters devoted to little Luzhin are pure gold, a fascinating extraction of the thread of genius from the tangle of a lonely boy’s existence. The child’s ominous lethargy; his father’s brooding ambitiousness for him; the hints of talent in his heredity; the first gropings, through mathematical and jigsaw puzzles, of his peculiar aptitude toward the light; the bizarre introduction, at the hands of a nameless violinist who tinges the game forever with a somehow cursed musicality, to the bare pieces; his instruction in the rules, ironically counterpointed against an amorous intrigue of which he is oblivious; his rapid climb through a hierarchy of adult opponents—all this is witty, tender, delicate, resonant. By abruptly switching to Luzhin as a chess-sodden adult, Nabokov islands the childhood, frames its naïve brightness, so that, superimposed upon the grown figure, it operates as a kind of heart, as an abruptly doused light reddens the subsequent darkness.
As to (b), Nabokov never shied from characters who excel. In Pale Fire he presumed to give us a long poem by an American poet second only to Frost; Adam Krug in Bend Sinister is the leading intellectual of his nation; no doubt is left that Fyodor Godunov-Cherdynstev of The Gift is truly gifted. Luzhin’s “recondite genius” is delineated as if by one who knows—though we know, from Chapter Fourteen of his autobiography, that Nabokov’s forte was not tournament play but the “beautiful, complex, and sterile art” of composing chess problems of a “poetico-mathematical type.” On its level as a work-epic of chess (as Moby-Dick is a work-epic of whaling) The Luzhin Defense is splendidly shaped toward the hero’s match with Turati, the dashing Italian grandmaster against whose unorthodox attack, “leaving the middle of the board unoccupied by Pawns but exercising a most dangerous influence on the center from the sides,” Luzhin’s defense is devised. Of Turati physically we are given the briefest glimpses, “rubbing his hands and deeply clearing his throat like a bass singer,” but his chess presence is surpassingly vivid. His name, chess experts have told me, echoes that of the famous Czech grandmaster Richard Réti. Turati’s opening, as described, resembles Réti’s favorite opening, which was called the Réti System. Curiously, the Czech also somewhat resembled Luzhin; he died in 1929, at the age of forty, and in 1926 had married a Russian girl much younger than himself. So, in the hall of mirrors which is chess thought, Luzhin is playing a reflection of himself; small wonder he thinks his way into a nervous breakdown during the tournament, while keen suspense mounts as to whether “the limpidity and lightness of Luzhin’s thought would prevail over the Italian’s tumultuous fantasy.”
Their game, a potential draw which is never completed, draws forth a display of metaphorical brilliance that turns pure thought heroic. Beneath the singing, quivering, trumpeting, humming battlefield of the chessboard, Turati and Luzhin become fabulous monsters groping through unthinkable tunnels:
Luzhin’s thought roamed through entrancing and terrible labyrinths, meeting there now and then the anxious thought of Turati, who sought the same thing as he.… Luzhin, preparing an attack for which it was first necessary to explore a maze of variations, where his every step aroused a perilous echo, began a long meditation: he needed, it seemed, to make one last prodigious effort and he would find the secret move leading to victory. Suddenly, something occurred outside his being, a scorching pain—and he let out a loud cry, shaking his hand stung by the flame of a match, which he had lit and forgotten to apply to his cigarette. The pain immediately passed, but in the fiery gap he had seen something unbearably awesome, the full horror of the abysmal depths of chess.
The game is adjourned, and after such an evocation we have no difficulty in feeling with Luzhin how the chess images that have haunted the fringes of his existence now move into the center and render the real world phantasmal. The metaphors have reversed the terms.
Chess imagery
has infiltrated the book from all sides. Nabokov in his foreword preens perhaps unduly on the tiled and parqueted floors, the Knight-like leaps of the plot. His hero’s monomania plays tricks with the objective world: “The urns that stood on stone pedestals at the four corners of the terrace threatened one another across their diagonals”; “He sat thinking … that with a Knight’s move of this lime tree standing on a sunlit slope one could take that telegraph pole over there”; “Luzhin involuntarily put out a hand to remove shadow’s King from the threat of light’s Pawn.” He warily watches the floor, “where a slight movement was taking place perceptible to him alone, an evil differentiation of shadows.” Throughout the book glimpses of black and white abound—tuxedos, raspberries and milk, “the white boat on the lake, black with the reflected conifers.” Many lamps are lit against the night; Luzhin’s father thinks it “strange and awesome … to sit on this bright veranda amid the black summer night, across from this boy whose tensed forehead seemed to expand and swell as soon as he bent over the pieces,” this boy for whom “the whole world suddenly went dark” when he learned chess and who is to glide, across the alternation of many nights and days, from the oblivion of breakdown into the whiteness of a hospital where the psychiatrist wears “a black Assyrian beard.”
The squares on the board can also be construed as chess versus sex. The child maneuvers his own initiation on the blind board of an illicit affair. His father, while he is poring over chess diagrams in the attic, fears that “his son might have been looking for pictures of naked women.” Valentinov (!), his sinister “chess father,” part manager and part pimp, “fearing lest Luzhin should squander his precious power in releasing by natural means the beneficial inner tension … kept him at a distance from women and rejoiced over his chaste moroseness.” His marriage, then, is a kind of defensive castling undertaken too late, for the black forces that have put him in check press on irresistibly, past his impotent Queen, toward certain mate. The Luzhin defense becomes abandonment of play. Such a design eminently satisfies Nabokov’s exacting criteria of artistic performance, which, in a memorable section in Conclusive Evidence concerning butterflies, he relates to the “mysteries of mimicry”: “I discovered in nature the non-utilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.”