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[NABOKOV-L] More arch archeology: transnationality,language
renewal, kind reviewers
renewal, kind reviewers
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Two links a propos "adults imigrants" (Steinberg, Forman, Nabokov) and America's "great prose stylist" (Updike):
I - In John Updike on Comics: a dream anthology « sans everything 9 Dec 2007, from the memoir Self-Consciousness (1989), sanseverything.wordpress.com/.../john-updike-on-comics-a-dream-anthology, Jeet Heer writes: "Years ago while doing some research at Boston University...I came across a fan letter that was unusually eloquent:... it was a missive sent in 1948 by John Updike, then an aspiring cartoonist, when he was 15 years old... I've put together a mini-anthology ...to bring together some of the more obscure and wayward remarks that often appeared as marginal asides in novels or memoirs.
Excerpt On Saul Steinberg: "Like Nabokov and Milos Forman, to name just two other affectionate adult immigrants, Steinberg saw America afresh, with details to which natives had grown blind or numb. America parades, American cowboys, American mountains of Art Deco, New York taxis in their screaming, bulbous décor, the quaint gingerbread pomp of suburban mansions and railroad stations - these visual events were mixed, not so paradoxically, with the emblems of intended Utopia, the Latinate slogans involving Lex and Lux and Pax and Tax and Vox Populi, the Statue of Liberty enjoying her deadpan marriage with Uncle Sam, the practical partnership of S. Freud and S. Claus." From an obituary in the New York Review of Books (February 24, 1999) which I think is reprinted in the new book Due Considerations (2007).
II - "Updike's most enduring legacy exists at the level of the sentence. If you count swinging Saul Bellow as a Canadian...and also class Vladimir Nabokov as a transnational, all-transcending anomaly, then Updike is, line for line, without peer, the finest American prose stylist of the postwar era: meticulous, crystalline, and luminously hyperrealist, his opulent language hanging on austere forms...The precision is painterly in the way of photorealism, except when it's cinematic. (Updike once said that he imagined Rabbit, Run as a movie, with the present-tense narration intended to catch the fluidity of filmic motion and the opening basketball-court scene "visualized to be taking place under the titles and credits.") The grace of the style is such that the felt ecstasy of composition renders even descriptions of physical desolation and emotional grief intoxicating. Martin Amis, Updike's only rival as a post-Nabokov virtuoso, wrote that "having read him once, you admit to yourself, almost with a sigh, that you will have to read everything he writes."...Do writers as inimitable as Updike leave heirs? Or just addicts?
It also must be said that, on the subject of sex, Updike could be the worst writer Knopf has ever known. Last month, Updike justly earned a lifetime-achievment prize in the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Awards...The same refinement of sensibility that kept Updike marvelously attuned to the motions of a mind in heat could have a way of aestheticizing sexual experience to awkward effect." Rabbit at Rest: The best of Updike, the worst of Updike, and why the two are connected.
By Troy PattersonPosted Jan. 27, 2009, All contents © 2011 The Slate Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
Two more curiosities, linking Updike and Nabokov:
I - On a Spree With Updike by Anatole Broyard (December 2, 1975 )Books of the Times (on Picked-Up Pieces by John Updike)
"It is a tricky business for writers of fiction to review other people's work. One can hardly be committed to the novel or short story without also embracing a set of idiosyncratic attitudes toward them. Sometimes, as in the case of Vladimir Nabokov, these idiosyncrasies are so strong and pervasive as to make his criticism more an examination of himself than of the authors in question. Other writers seem too private to wish to share their views: I find it difficult to imagine Bernard Malamud, for example, turning his hand to criticism.One feels that Saul Bellow is too impatient with other writers' imperfections... Philip Roth is a good critic because he is still rummaging through the possibilities of fiction...Norman Mailer...too little room in his ego for other characters. John Updike is such a conscious craftsman, such a deliberate conjurer with words, rhythms, forms and ideas, that one would expect him to be more disdainful, less generous, toward the cruder gropings of most of his contemporaries. However, "Picked-Up Pieces" contradicts this impression. In fact, in his major essays, those on Jorge Luis Borges, Kierkegaard and Nabokov, he strikes me, at least, as being too kind ...As I see it, the relationship between Updike and Nabokov might be described as "there but for the grace of God go I." The implacable archness, the gratuitous word games, the lepidopterous frivolity, the sense of the author's ego breathing down your neck, in Mr. Nabokov's fiction are potential faults that John Updike has increasingly repressed or brought under control in his own work. It must be nostalgia for his avoided vices that impels Mr. Updike to call the author of "Ada" and "Pale Fire" "the best-equipped writer in the English-speaking world." His reading of "Ada" is so ingeniously convoluted as to be almost indistinguishable from parody. The same is true of a sentence like this one: "If 'Transparent Things' is a splintered hand-mirror, and 'Ada' cotton-candy spun to the size of sunset cumulus, 'Look at the Harlequins!' is a brown briefcase, as full of compartments as a magician's sleeve and lovingly thumbed to a scuff-colored limpness." In treating Borges, Mr. Updike is only slightly less indulgent. While he concedes that "discouragingly large areas of truth seem excluded from his vision," he forgives Mr. Borges by remarking that "his driest paragraph is somehow compelling." That uncharacteristic "somehow" is a confession of Mr.Updike's inability to justify Borges's bibliomanic sereneness, those pages that make you feel you are locked in a library during an earthquake, in danger of being buried under the weight of books....The daily reviewer, who has to eat the plat du jour and gulp it down at that, may feel a pang of envy on reading the luxurious lubrications of Picked-Up Pieces." After this, he ought to be grateful, for John Updike is an unassailable refutation of the old saw that those who can, do, while those who cannot, criticize. Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company
II - Numéro Cinq: Updike on Nabokov in Guernica, a formerly unpublished interview with John Updike which circles around through various topics, some not so interesting anymore, but mainly keeps coming back to Nabokov.
John Updike: "I first encountered his prose, and I think the stories as they appeared in The New Yorker. Not all of them appeared. But I'd never seen writing quite like this before, writing so precise and witty, and full of little surprises. And it was those surprises that gave me a kind of ecstatic feeling. I think there is a rapture in Nabokov, which you can take to be a love of life, and also a love of consciousness; a love of the motions of the mind as it deals with whatever-chess is an example. He was a contriver of chess puzzles. And that kind of joy and manipulation is there in a lot of the prose. I don't really feel the darkness, much-it's true there's a lot of
dying, a lot of death in Nabokov. The end of Lolita, almost every character in it is either dead or going to die. But I take dying to be for a lepidopterist like him a kind of entry into immortality, just the way a butterfly on its pin, becomes deathless, in a sense, and is preserved. There's a novel I reckon called The Eye, in which he describes the transition from life to death. And it's a kind of metamorphosis rather than a termination."( Tagged with Guernica, John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov / 2010 Numéro Cinq Rondeau ).
Raging feuds?
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I - In John Updike on Comics: a dream anthology « sans everything 9 Dec 2007, from the memoir Self-Consciousness (1989), sanseverything.wordpress.com/.../john-updike-on-comics-a-dream-anthology, Jeet Heer writes: "Years ago while doing some research at Boston University...I came across a fan letter that was unusually eloquent:... it was a missive sent in 1948 by John Updike, then an aspiring cartoonist, when he was 15 years old... I've put together a mini-anthology ...to bring together some of the more obscure and wayward remarks that often appeared as marginal asides in novels or memoirs.
Excerpt On Saul Steinberg: "Like Nabokov and Milos Forman, to name just two other affectionate adult immigrants, Steinberg saw America afresh, with details to which natives had grown blind or numb. America parades, American cowboys, American mountains of Art Deco, New York taxis in their screaming, bulbous décor, the quaint gingerbread pomp of suburban mansions and railroad stations - these visual events were mixed, not so paradoxically, with the emblems of intended Utopia, the Latinate slogans involving Lex and Lux and Pax and Tax and Vox Populi, the Statue of Liberty enjoying her deadpan marriage with Uncle Sam, the practical partnership of S. Freud and S. Claus." From an obituary in the New York Review of Books (February 24, 1999) which I think is reprinted in the new book Due Considerations (2007).
II - "Updike's most enduring legacy exists at the level of the sentence. If you count swinging Saul Bellow as a Canadian...and also class Vladimir Nabokov as a transnational, all-transcending anomaly, then Updike is, line for line, without peer, the finest American prose stylist of the postwar era: meticulous, crystalline, and luminously hyperrealist, his opulent language hanging on austere forms...The precision is painterly in the way of photorealism, except when it's cinematic. (Updike once said that he imagined Rabbit, Run as a movie, with the present-tense narration intended to catch the fluidity of filmic motion and the opening basketball-court scene "visualized to be taking place under the titles and credits.") The grace of the style is such that the felt ecstasy of composition renders even descriptions of physical desolation and emotional grief intoxicating. Martin Amis, Updike's only rival as a post-Nabokov virtuoso, wrote that "having read him once, you admit to yourself, almost with a sigh, that you will have to read everything he writes."...Do writers as inimitable as Updike leave heirs? Or just addicts?
It also must be said that, on the subject of sex, Updike could be the worst writer Knopf has ever known. Last month, Updike justly earned a lifetime-achievment prize in the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Awards...The same refinement of sensibility that kept Updike marvelously attuned to the motions of a mind in heat could have a way of aestheticizing sexual experience to awkward effect." Rabbit at Rest: The best of Updike, the worst of Updike, and why the two are connected.
By Troy PattersonPosted Jan. 27, 2009, All contents © 2011 The Slate Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
Two more curiosities, linking Updike and Nabokov:
I - On a Spree With Updike by Anatole Broyard (December 2, 1975 )Books of the Times (on Picked-Up Pieces by John Updike)
"It is a tricky business for writers of fiction to review other people's work. One can hardly be committed to the novel or short story without also embracing a set of idiosyncratic attitudes toward them. Sometimes, as in the case of Vladimir Nabokov, these idiosyncrasies are so strong and pervasive as to make his criticism more an examination of himself than of the authors in question. Other writers seem too private to wish to share their views: I find it difficult to imagine Bernard Malamud, for example, turning his hand to criticism.One feels that Saul Bellow is too impatient with other writers' imperfections... Philip Roth is a good critic because he is still rummaging through the possibilities of fiction...Norman Mailer...too little room in his ego for other characters. John Updike is such a conscious craftsman, such a deliberate conjurer with words, rhythms, forms and ideas, that one would expect him to be more disdainful, less generous, toward the cruder gropings of most of his contemporaries. However, "Picked-Up Pieces" contradicts this impression. In fact, in his major essays, those on Jorge Luis Borges, Kierkegaard and Nabokov, he strikes me, at least, as being too kind ...As I see it, the relationship between Updike and Nabokov might be described as "there but for the grace of God go I." The implacable archness, the gratuitous word games, the lepidopterous frivolity, the sense of the author's ego breathing down your neck, in Mr. Nabokov's fiction are potential faults that John Updike has increasingly repressed or brought under control in his own work. It must be nostalgia for his avoided vices that impels Mr. Updike to call the author of "Ada" and "Pale Fire" "the best-equipped writer in the English-speaking world." His reading of "Ada" is so ingeniously convoluted as to be almost indistinguishable from parody. The same is true of a sentence like this one: "If 'Transparent Things' is a splintered hand-mirror, and 'Ada' cotton-candy spun to the size of sunset cumulus, 'Look at the Harlequins!' is a brown briefcase, as full of compartments as a magician's sleeve and lovingly thumbed to a scuff-colored limpness." In treating Borges, Mr. Updike is only slightly less indulgent. While he concedes that "discouragingly large areas of truth seem excluded from his vision," he forgives Mr. Borges by remarking that "his driest paragraph is somehow compelling." That uncharacteristic "somehow" is a confession of Mr.Updike's inability to justify Borges's bibliomanic sereneness, those pages that make you feel you are locked in a library during an earthquake, in danger of being buried under the weight of books....The daily reviewer, who has to eat the plat du jour and gulp it down at that, may feel a pang of envy on reading the luxurious lubrications of Picked-Up Pieces." After this, he ought to be grateful, for John Updike is an unassailable refutation of the old saw that those who can, do, while those who cannot, criticize. Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company
II - Numéro Cinq: Updike on Nabokov in Guernica, a formerly unpublished interview with John Updike which circles around through various topics, some not so interesting anymore, but mainly keeps coming back to Nabokov.
John Updike: "I first encountered his prose, and I think the stories as they appeared in The New Yorker. Not all of them appeared. But I'd never seen writing quite like this before, writing so precise and witty, and full of little surprises. And it was those surprises that gave me a kind of ecstatic feeling. I think there is a rapture in Nabokov, which you can take to be a love of life, and also a love of consciousness; a love of the motions of the mind as it deals with whatever-chess is an example. He was a contriver of chess puzzles. And that kind of joy and manipulation is there in a lot of the prose. I don't really feel the darkness, much-it's true there's a lot of
dying, a lot of death in Nabokov. The end of Lolita, almost every character in it is either dead or going to die. But I take dying to be for a lepidopterist like him a kind of entry into immortality, just the way a butterfly on its pin, becomes deathless, in a sense, and is preserved. There's a novel I reckon called The Eye, in which he describes the transition from life to death. And it's a kind of metamorphosis rather than a termination."( Tagged with Guernica, John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov / 2010 Numéro Cinq Rondeau ).
Raging feuds?
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/