Subject
RJ: The Assistant Producer (fwd)
Date
Body
EDITORIAL NOTE. The British Nabokovian Roy Johnson presents another in his
series of analyses of VN's short stories. Having covered almost all of the
stories translated from the Russian, we now come to those written in
English. Your comments are invited.
------------------------------------------------
This week's story - THE ASSISTANT PRODUCER
------------------------------------------------
Following Nabokov's emigration to the United States in 1940, he
was faced with three major difficulties as far as being a writer
was concerned. He was forced to earn his living as a teacher; he
had lost the small audience and reputation he had established in
the emigre circles of Paris and Berlin; and he realised that he
would have to abandon his mother tongue and start writing in
another language. He chose English - having briefly toyed with
the idea of French.
It is also obvious, looking at his publications record for the
1930s, that he had come to regard himself principally primarily
as a novelist. His relationship with the short story in the next
two phases of his life therefore is understandably more tenuous.
Whilst living in America between 1940 and 1960 he wrote only ten
more stories, and following his return to Europe until his death
in 1977 he appears to have written none at all. The last two
decades of his life were devoted to writing his later novels and
to translating into English the bulk of his earlier work produced
between 1924 and 1940 which had been written in Russian.
It is interesting to note that for his first story in English,
Nabokov did not invent a fiction, but re-told a well known
incident from emigre life in Europe - but in doing so presented
it as a cheap B-movie scenario, reflecting his long-term interest
in the cinema and his acquaintance with emigres who had earned
their livings as film extras in Berlin during the 1920s and
1930s.
'The Assistant Producer' (January 1943) is both a character
sketch of the Russian singer Plevitskaya (La Slavska) and an
account of an incident in 1938 amongst the emigre Whites in which
she was involved. The first part of the story gives details of
her career and how she came to be kidnapped by then married to
General Golubkov, an officer in the White Army. All this is done
in a manner which mockingly imitates cinematic cliches:
"A White soldier's dead hand is still clutching a
medallion with his mother's face. A Red soldier near
by has on his shattered breast a letter from home with
the same old woman blinking through the dissolving
lines" (ND,p.74)
During the period of emigration, Golubkov becomes a triple agent,
and La Slavska keeps patriotic feelings alive with recitals of
tasteless songs. The latter part of the story recounts the
details of Golubkov's plot to kidnap in Paris the leader of the
Whites-in-exile and his own subsequent disappearance when
exposed. The story ends with La Slavska in jail, dying during the
German occupation.
This is another good example illustrating the difference between
a tale and a short story. As Ian Reid observes in his definition
of the differences, the tale abandons the compactness of the
short story proper and offers instead "a fairly straightforward,
loose-knit account of strange happenings" (Reid,p.32). There is
far too much heterogeneous material in 'The Assistant Producer'
for the demands of tonal and thematic consistency made by the
story. The subject hovers uncertainly between character sketches
of the two principals and the plot in which they are both
involved. There is also too much historical and political
information given on the Whites for the demands of restraint and
under- rather than over-statement made by the genre in its modern
form. This information may be necessary to explain the plot:
indeed Nabokov is conscious of the fact - "I want your attention
now, for it would be a pity to miss the subtleties of the
situation" (p.77) - but the background details are further
excrescences inhibiting the unity of the piece. There is also a
sense in which the story seems to have been written as a memoir
of the place and period - Nabokov putting on record the double-
dealings of this doomed right-wing group in Paris of the late
1930s, dealings which as he mentions in the story itself had been
largely misunderstood or ignored at the time:
"The French police displayed a queer listlessness in
dealing with possible clues as if it assumed that the
disappearance of Russian generals was a kind of
curious local custom, an Oriental phenomenon, a
dissolving process which perhaps ought not to occur
but which could not be prevented" (p.90)
This sort of explanatory note brings the story closer to
journalism than to fiction.
But in terms of Nabokov's development as a writer there is a
point of interest here in that the story shows a moment of
transition between his Russian and his English periods. He has
switched over to writing in English with a confidence and a
flourish which rivals Conrad's similar feat made sixty years
earlier, though there are one or two small uncertainties - "a
central-heated Hall" (p.72) "her magic appearance" (p.73) - which
indicate that he was still not completely at ease with his
adopted language. But what the story does show is the further
advances he had made in the chatty virtuosity of his first person
narrative mode - the fluent switches between story and addresses
to the reader or character, the ellipses and changes of topic
which are like a word-conjurer constructing his narrative from
a number of juggled modes. The story after its title begins with
an immediate interrogative:
"Meaning? Well, because life is merely that - an
Assistant Producer. Tonight we shall go to the movies.
Back to the Thirties, and down the Twenties, and round
the corner to the old Europe Picture Palace. She was
a celebrated singer" (p.71)
The first sentence he imputes as a query on the reader's part;
the second, with its conversational "Well", offers an authorial
response and explanation; the third speaks directly to the reader
and offers an accompanying hand in the first person "we"; the
fourth speaks *from* the New World (USA) and points back to the
old (Europe) and its culture; and the fifth, with no warning or
transition, abruptly switches to the principal character of the
story. This is the sort of narrative mode of rapidly switching
forms of address and points of view which Nabokov would work on
until it reached the amusing heights of Humbert Humbert in
*Lolita* - "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose
style" (L,p.1) - and ended in the rococo self-indulgence of Ada.
--
Dr Roy Johnson | Roy@mantex.demon.co.uk
PO Box 100 | Tel +44 0161 432 5811
Manchester | Fax +44 0161 443 2766
UK M20 6GZ
series of analyses of VN's short stories. Having covered almost all of the
stories translated from the Russian, we now come to those written in
English. Your comments are invited.
------------------------------------------------
This week's story - THE ASSISTANT PRODUCER
------------------------------------------------
Following Nabokov's emigration to the United States in 1940, he
was faced with three major difficulties as far as being a writer
was concerned. He was forced to earn his living as a teacher; he
had lost the small audience and reputation he had established in
the emigre circles of Paris and Berlin; and he realised that he
would have to abandon his mother tongue and start writing in
another language. He chose English - having briefly toyed with
the idea of French.
It is also obvious, looking at his publications record for the
1930s, that he had come to regard himself principally primarily
as a novelist. His relationship with the short story in the next
two phases of his life therefore is understandably more tenuous.
Whilst living in America between 1940 and 1960 he wrote only ten
more stories, and following his return to Europe until his death
in 1977 he appears to have written none at all. The last two
decades of his life were devoted to writing his later novels and
to translating into English the bulk of his earlier work produced
between 1924 and 1940 which had been written in Russian.
It is interesting to note that for his first story in English,
Nabokov did not invent a fiction, but re-told a well known
incident from emigre life in Europe - but in doing so presented
it as a cheap B-movie scenario, reflecting his long-term interest
in the cinema and his acquaintance with emigres who had earned
their livings as film extras in Berlin during the 1920s and
1930s.
'The Assistant Producer' (January 1943) is both a character
sketch of the Russian singer Plevitskaya (La Slavska) and an
account of an incident in 1938 amongst the emigre Whites in which
she was involved. The first part of the story gives details of
her career and how she came to be kidnapped by then married to
General Golubkov, an officer in the White Army. All this is done
in a manner which mockingly imitates cinematic cliches:
"A White soldier's dead hand is still clutching a
medallion with his mother's face. A Red soldier near
by has on his shattered breast a letter from home with
the same old woman blinking through the dissolving
lines" (ND,p.74)
During the period of emigration, Golubkov becomes a triple agent,
and La Slavska keeps patriotic feelings alive with recitals of
tasteless songs. The latter part of the story recounts the
details of Golubkov's plot to kidnap in Paris the leader of the
Whites-in-exile and his own subsequent disappearance when
exposed. The story ends with La Slavska in jail, dying during the
German occupation.
This is another good example illustrating the difference between
a tale and a short story. As Ian Reid observes in his definition
of the differences, the tale abandons the compactness of the
short story proper and offers instead "a fairly straightforward,
loose-knit account of strange happenings" (Reid,p.32). There is
far too much heterogeneous material in 'The Assistant Producer'
for the demands of tonal and thematic consistency made by the
story. The subject hovers uncertainly between character sketches
of the two principals and the plot in which they are both
involved. There is also too much historical and political
information given on the Whites for the demands of restraint and
under- rather than over-statement made by the genre in its modern
form. This information may be necessary to explain the plot:
indeed Nabokov is conscious of the fact - "I want your attention
now, for it would be a pity to miss the subtleties of the
situation" (p.77) - but the background details are further
excrescences inhibiting the unity of the piece. There is also a
sense in which the story seems to have been written as a memoir
of the place and period - Nabokov putting on record the double-
dealings of this doomed right-wing group in Paris of the late
1930s, dealings which as he mentions in the story itself had been
largely misunderstood or ignored at the time:
"The French police displayed a queer listlessness in
dealing with possible clues as if it assumed that the
disappearance of Russian generals was a kind of
curious local custom, an Oriental phenomenon, a
dissolving process which perhaps ought not to occur
but which could not be prevented" (p.90)
This sort of explanatory note brings the story closer to
journalism than to fiction.
But in terms of Nabokov's development as a writer there is a
point of interest here in that the story shows a moment of
transition between his Russian and his English periods. He has
switched over to writing in English with a confidence and a
flourish which rivals Conrad's similar feat made sixty years
earlier, though there are one or two small uncertainties - "a
central-heated Hall" (p.72) "her magic appearance" (p.73) - which
indicate that he was still not completely at ease with his
adopted language. But what the story does show is the further
advances he had made in the chatty virtuosity of his first person
narrative mode - the fluent switches between story and addresses
to the reader or character, the ellipses and changes of topic
which are like a word-conjurer constructing his narrative from
a number of juggled modes. The story after its title begins with
an immediate interrogative:
"Meaning? Well, because life is merely that - an
Assistant Producer. Tonight we shall go to the movies.
Back to the Thirties, and down the Twenties, and round
the corner to the old Europe Picture Palace. She was
a celebrated singer" (p.71)
The first sentence he imputes as a query on the reader's part;
the second, with its conversational "Well", offers an authorial
response and explanation; the third speaks directly to the reader
and offers an accompanying hand in the first person "we"; the
fourth speaks *from* the New World (USA) and points back to the
old (Europe) and its culture; and the fifth, with no warning or
transition, abruptly switches to the principal character of the
story. This is the sort of narrative mode of rapidly switching
forms of address and points of view which Nabokov would work on
until it reached the amusing heights of Humbert Humbert in
*Lolita* - "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose
style" (L,p.1) - and ended in the rococo self-indulgence of Ada.
--
Dr Roy Johnson | Roy@mantex.demon.co.uk
PO Box 100 | Tel +44 0161 432 5811
Manchester | Fax +44 0161 443 2766
UK M20 6GZ