Between the hysterical Ada and the doddery Look at the Harlequins! comes the mysterious, sinister, and beautifully melancholic novella Transparent Things: Nabokov’s remission. Our hero, Hugh Person, a middle-grade American publisher, is an endearing misfit and sexual loser, like Timofey Pnin (who regularly dines at a shabby little restaurant called The Egg and We, which he frequents out of “sheer sympathy with failure”). Four visits to Switzerland provide the cornerstones of this expert little piece, as Hugh shyly courts the exasperating flirt Armande and also monitors an aged, portly, decadent, and forbiddingly highbrow novelist called Mr. R.
Mr. R. is said to have debauched his stepdaughter (a friend of Armande’s) when she was a child or at any rate a minor. The nympholeptic theme thus hovers over the story, and is reinforced, in one extraordinary scene, by the disclosure of Hugh’s latent yearnings. A pitiful bumbler, with a treacherous libido (wiltings and premature ejaculations mark his “mediocre potency”), Hugh calls at Armande’s villa, and her mother diverts him, while he waits, with some family snapshots. He comes across a photo of a naked Armande, aged ten:
The visitor constructed a pile of albums to screen the flame of his interest…and returned several times to the pictures of little Armande in her bath, pressing a proboscidate rubber toy to her shiny stomach or standing up, dimple-bottomed, to be lathered. Another revelation of impuberal softness (its middle line just distinguishable from the less vertical grass-blade next to it) was afforded by a photo of her in which she sat in the buff on the grass, combing her sun-shot hair and spreading wide, in false perspective, the lovely legs of a giantess.
He heard a toilet flush upstairs and with a guilty wince slapped the thick book shut. His retractile heart moodily withdrew, its throbs quietened…
At first this passage seems shockingly anomalous. But then we reflect that Hugh’s unconscious thoughts, his dreams, his insomnias (“night is always a giant”), are saturated with inarticulate dreads:
He could not believe that decent people had the sort of obscene and absurd nightmares which shattered his night and continued to tingle throughout the day. Neither the incidental accounts of bad dreams reported by friends nor the case histories in Freudian dream books, with their hilarious elucidations, presented anything like the complicated vileness of his almost nightly experience.
Hugh marries Armande and then, years later, strangles her in his sleep. So it may be that Nabokov identifies the pedophiliac prompting as an urge toward violence and self-obliteration. Hugh Person’s subliminal churning extracts a terrible revenge, in pathos and isolation (prison, madhouse), and demands the ultimate purgation: he is burnt to death in one of the most ravishing conflagrations in all literature. The torched hotel:
Now flames were mounting the stairs, in pairs, in trios, in redskin file, hand in hand, tongue after tongue, conversing and humming happily. It was not, though, the heat of their flicker, but the acrid dark smoke that caused Person to retreat back into the room; excuse me, said a polite flamelet holding open the door he was vainly trying to close. The window banged with such force that its panes broke into a torrent of rubies….At last suffocation made him try to get out by climbing out and down, but there were no ledges or balconies on that side of the roaring house. As he reached the window a long lavender-tipped flame danced up to stop him with a graceful gesture of its gloved hand. Crumbling partitions of plaster and wood allowed human cries to reach him, and one of his last wrong ideas was that those were the shouts of people anxious to help him, and not the howls of fellow men.
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Left to themselves, The Enchanter, Lolita, and Transparent Things might have formed a lustrous and utterly unnerving trilogy. But they are not left to themselves; by sheer weight of numbers, by sheer iteration, the nympholepsy novels begin to infect one another—they cross-contaminate. We gratefully take all we can from them; and yet…Where else in the canon do we find such wayward fixity? In the awful itch of Lawrence, maybe, or in the murky sexual transpositions of Proust? No: you would need to venture to the very fringes of literature—Lewis Carroll, William Burroughs, the Marquis de Sade—to find an equivalent emphasis: an emphasis on activities we rightly and eternally hold to be unforgivable.
In fiction, of course, nobody ever gets hurt; the flaw, as I said, is not moral but aesthetic. And I intend no innuendo by pointing out that Nabokov’s obsession with nymphets has a parallel: the ponderous intrusiveness of his obsession with Freud—“the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world” of “the Viennese quack,” with “its bitter little embryos, spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents.” Nabokov cherished the anarchy of the inner mind, and Freud is excoriated because he sought to systematize it. Is there something rivalrous in this hatred? Well, in the end it is Nabokov, and not Freud, who emerges (with Kafka) as our supreme poet of dreams, and our supreme poet of madness.
One commonsensical caveat persists, for all our literary-critical impartiality: writers like to write about the things they like to think about. And, to put it at its sternest, Nabokov’s mind, during his last period, insufficiently honored the innocence—insufficiently honored the honor—of twelve-year-old girls. In the three novels described above he prepotently defends the emphasis; in Ada (that incontinent splurge), in Look at the Harlequins!, and now in The Original of Laura, he does not defend it. This leaves a faint but visible scar on the leviathan of his corpus.
“Now, soyons raisonnable,” says Quilty, staring down the barrel of Humbert’s revolver. “You will only wound me hideously and then rot in jail while I recuperate in a tropical setting.” All right, let us be reasonable. In his book about Updike, Nicholson Baker refers to an order of literary achievement that he calls “Prousto-Nabokovian.” Yes, Prousto-Nabokovian, or Joyceo-Borgesian, or, for the Americans, Jameso-Bellovian. And it is at the highest table that Vladimir Nabokov coolly takes his place.
Lolita, Pnin, and Despair (1936; translated by the author in 1965), and four or five short stories, are immortal. King, Queen, Knave (1928, 1968), Laughter in the Dark (1933, 1938), The Enchanter (1939, 1985), The Eye (1930, 1965), Bend Sinister (1947), Pale Fire (1962), and Transparent Things (1962) are ferociously accomplished; and little Mary (1926, 1970), his first novel, is a little beauty. Lectures on Literature (1980), Lectures on Russian Literature (1981), and Lectures on Don Quixote (1983), together with Strong Opinions (1973), constitute the shining record of a preeminent artist-critic. And the Selected Letters (1989), the Nabokov-Wilson Letters (1979), and that marshlight of an autobiography, Speak, Memory (1951), give us a four-dimensional portrait of a delightful and honorable man. The vice Nabokov most frequently reviled was “cruelty.” And his gentleness of nature is most clearly seen in the loving attentiveness with which, in his fiction, he writes about animals. A minute’s thought gives me the cat in King, Queen, Knave (washing itself with one hind leg raised “like a shouldered club”), the charming dogs and monkeys in Lolita, the shadow-tailed squirrel and the unforgettable ant in Pnin, and the sick bat in Pale Fire—creeping past “like a cripple with a broken umbrella.”
They call it a “shimmer”—a glint, a glitter, a glisten. The Nabokovian essence is a miraculously fertile instability, where without warning the words detach themselves from the everyday and streak off like flares in a night sky, illuminating hidden versts of longing and terror. From Lolita, as the fateful cohabitation begins (nous connûmes, a Flaubertian intonation, means “we came to know”):
Nous connûmes the various types of motor court operators, the reformed criminal, the retired teacher, and the business flop, among the males; and the motherly, pseudoladylike, and madamic variants among the females. And sometimes trains would cry in the monstrously hot and humid night with heartrending and ominous plangency, mingling power and hysteria in one desperate scream.
The Guardian 2009
* To confine ourselves to English literature: Dickens died at fifty-eight, Chaucer at fifty-seven, Shakespeare at fifty-two, Fielding at forty-seven, Ja
ne Austen at forty-one, Charlotte Brontë at thirty-nine, Byron at thirty-six, Emily Brontë at thirty, Shelley at twenty-nine, Keats at twenty-five (and poor Thomas Chatterton at seventeen). Writers barely had time to assemble their powers, and had no time at all to mourn their passing.
Saul Bellow, as Opposed to Henry James
Whereas English poetry “fears no one,” E. M. Forster wrote in 1927, English fiction “is less triumphant”: there remained the little matter of the Russians and the French. Forster published his last novel, A Passage to India, in 1924, but he lived on until 1970—long enough to witness a profound rearrangement in the balance of power. Russian fiction, as dementedly robust as ever in the early years of the century (Bulgakov, Zamyatin, Bely, Bunin), had been wiped off the face of the earth; French fiction seemed to have strayed into philosophical and essayistic peripheries; and English fiction (which still awaited the crucial infusion from the “colonials”) felt, well, hopelessly English—hopelessly inert and inbred. Meanwhile, and as if in obedience to the political reality, American fiction was assuming its manifest destiny.
The American novel, having become dominant, was in turn dominated by the Jewish-American novel, and everybody knows who dominated that: Saul Bellow. His was and is a preeminence that rests not on sales figures and honorary degrees, not on rosettes and sashes, but on incontestable legitimacy. To hold otherwise is to waste your breath. Bellow sees more than we see—sees, hears, smells, tastes, touches. Compared to him, the rest of us are only fitfully sentient; and intellectually, too, his sentences simply weigh more than anybody else’s. John Updike and Philip Roth, the two writers in perhaps the strongest position to rival Bellow, or to succeed him, have both acknowledged that his seniority is not merely a question of anno Domini. Egomania is an ingredient of literary talent, and a burdensome one: the egomaniacal reverie is not, as many suppose, a stupor of self-satisfaction; it is more like a state of red alert. Yet American writers, in particular, are surprisingly level-headed about hierarchy. John Berryman claimed he was “comfortable” playing second fiddle to Robert Lowell; and when that old flagship Robert Frost sank to the bottom, in 1963, he said impulsively (and unsentimentally), “It’s scary. Who’s number one?” But that was just a rush of blood. Berryman knew his proper place.
Rather impertinently, perhaps, you could summarize the preoccupations of the Jewish-American novel in one word: shiksas (literally, “detested things”). It transpired that there was something uniquely riveting about the conflict between the Jewish sensibility and the temptations—the inevitabilities—of materialist America. As one Bellow narrator puts it, “At home, inside the house, an archaic rule; outside, the facts of life.” The archaic rule is somber, blood-bound, guilt-torn, renunciatory, and transcendental; the facts of life are atomized, unreflecting, and unclean. Of course, the Jewish-American novel subsumes the experience of the immigrant, with an “old country” at one remove; and the emphasis is on the anxiety of entitlement (marked in Roth, too, and in Malamud). It is not an anxiety about succeeding, about making good; it is an anxiety about the right to pronounce, the right to judge—about the right to write. And the consequence would seem to be that these novelists brought a new intensity to the act of authorial commitment, offering up the self entire, holding nothing back. Although Jewish-American fiction is often comic and deflationary, concerning itself with what Herzog called “high-minded mistakes,” something world historically dismal lies behind it—a terminal standard of human brutality. The dimensions of this brutality were barely graspable in 1944, the year that saw the beginning of Bellow’s serial epic. And America would subsequently be seen as “the land of historical redress,” a place where (as Bellow wrote with cold simplicity) “the Jews could not be put to death.”
Universalizingly, the Jewish-American novel poses a mind-body problem—and then goes ahead and solves it on the page. “When some new thought gripped his heart he went to the kitchen, his headquarters, to write it down,” says Bellow on page one of Herzog (1964). “When some new thought gripped his heart”: the voice is undisassociated; it responds to the world with passionate sensuality, and at a pitch of cerebration no less prodigious and unflagging. Bellow has presided over an efflorescence that clearly owes much to historical circumstances, and we must now elegiacally conclude that the phase is coming to an end. No replacements stand in line. Did “assimilation” do it, or was the process something flabbier and more diffuse? “Your history, too, became one of your options,” the narrator of The Bellarosa Connection (1989) notes dryly. “Whether or not having a history was a ‘consideration’ was entirely up to you.” Recalling Philip Rahv’s famous essay of 1939, we may say that the Palefaces have prevailed over the Redskins. Roth will maintain the tradition, for a while. Yet he is Uncas—last of the Mohicans.
Praise and dispraise play their part in the quality control of literary journalism, but when the value judgment is applied to the past its essential irrationality is sharply exposed. The practice of rearranging the canon on aesthetic or moralistic grounds (today such grounds would be political—that is, egalitarian) was unanswerably ridiculed by Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957). To imagine a literary “stock exchange” in which reputations “boom and crash,” he argued, is to reduce literary criticism to the sphere of “leisure-class gossip.” You can go on about it, you can labor the point, but you cannot demonstrate that Milton is a better poet than Macaulay—or, indeed, that Milton is a better poet than McGonagall. It is evident, it is obvious, but it cannot be proved.
Still, I propose to make an educated guess about literary futures, and I hereby trumpet the prediction that Bellow will emerge as the supreme American novelist. There is, hereabouts, no shortage of narrative genius, and it tends, as Bellow tends, toward the visionary—a quality needed for the interpretation of a New World. But when we look to the verbal surface, to the instrument, to the prose, Bellow is sui generis. What should he fear? The melodramatic formularies of Hawthorne? The multitudinous facetiousness of Melville? The murkily iterative menace of Faulkner? No. The only American who gives Bellow any serious trouble is Henry James.
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All writers enter into a platonic marriage with their readers, and in this respect James’s fiction follows a peculiar arc: courtship, honeymoon, vigorous cohabitation, and then growing disaffection and estrangement; separate beds, and then separate rooms. As with any marriage, the relationship is measured by the quality of its daily intercourse—by the quality of its language. And even at its most equable and beguiling (the androgynous delicacy, the wonderfully alien eye), James’s prose suffers from an acute behavioral flaw.
Students of usage have identified the habit as “elegant variation.” The phrase is intended ironically, because the elegance aspired to is really pseudoelegance, antielegance. For example: “She proceeded to the left, towards the Ponte Vecchio, and stopped in front of one of the hotels which overlook that delightful structure.” I can think of another variation on the Ponte Vecchio: how about that vulgar little pronoun “it”? Similarly, “breakfast,” later in its appointed sentence, becomes “this repast,” and “tea-pot” becomes “this receptacle”; “Lord Warburton” becomes “that nobleman” (or “the master of Lockleigh”); “letters” become “epistles”; “his arms” become “these members”; and so on.
Apart from causing the reader to groan out loud as often as three times in a single sentence, James’s variations suggest broader deficiencies: gentility, fastidiousness, and a lack of warmth, a lack of candor and engagement. All the instances quoted above come from The Portrait of a Lady (1881), from the generous and hospitable early-middle period. When we enter the arctic labyrinth known as Late James, the retreat from the reader, the embrace of introversion, is as emphatic as that of Joyce, and far more fiendishly prolonged.
The phantom marriage with the reader is the basis of the novelist’s creative equilibrium. Such a relationship needs to be unconscious, silent, tacit; and, naturally, it needs to be
informed by love. Bellow’s love for the reader has always been at once safely subliminal and thrillingly ardent. And it combines with another kind of love, to produce what may be the Bellovian quiddity. Looking again at the late short story “By the St. Lawrence,” I found I had marked a passage and written in the margin, “So is this it?” The passage runs:
She was not a lovable woman, but the boy loved her and she was aware of it. He loved them all. He even loved Albert. When he visited Lachine he shared Albert’s bed, and in the morning he would sometimes stroke Albert’s head, and not even when Albert fiercely threw off his hand did he stop loving him. The hair grew in close rows, row after row.
These observations, Rexler was to learn, were his whole life—his being—and love was what produced them. For each physical trait there was a corresponding feeling. Paired, pair by pair, they walked back and forth, in and out of his soul.
And this is it, I think. Love has always been celebrated for, among other things, its transformative powers; and it is with love, in concert with his overpowering need to commemorate and preserve (“I am the nemesis of the would-be forgotten”), that Bellow transforms the world:
Napoleon Street, rotten, toylike, crazy and filthy, riddled, flogged with harsh weather—the bootlegger’s boys reciting ancient prayers. To this Moses’ heart was attached with great power. Here was a wider range of human feelings than he had ever again been able to find. The children of the race, by a never-failing miracle, opened their eyes on one strange world after another, age after age, and uttered the same prayer in each, eagerly loving what they found. What was wrong with Napoleon Street? thought Herzog. All he ever wanted was there.