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Re: THOUGHT on Shade as poet
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I drafted the message below before seeing John Morris's and Jim Twiggs'
recent postings on Donald Harington, so the basic information that Harington
pulled off a similar feat by presenting the work of a fictional poet within
a novel has become less important, but just in case the rest of the message
might pique some fellow Nabokovians' interest in Harington's work, I decided
to send it anyway. Harington actually died a couple months ago, in early
November, at the age of 73, and as will be clear from what I say below, I'm
a great admirer as well.
Brian Walter
bdwlecteur@mac.com
Actually, another novelist who pulled off more or less the same feat and who
would probably be closer to home for many Nabokovians is Donald Harington,
whose third novel, Some Other Place. The Right Place, not only blends
together a variety of narrative voices and perspectives but also
incorporates a collection of original poems by one of the main characters in
the novel, Daniel Lyam Montross (who re-appears in several of Harington's
other books). And in Montross's case, there is no question: he's primarily
a New Englander whose work invokes Frost quite deliberately, especially
"Directive."
At least some Nabokovians will remember Harington for the NABOKV-L dialogue
he participated in during the mid-90s with fellow novelist David Slavitt in
which they discussed Nabokov's influence on their work; at the time,
Harington had recently published his ninth novel, Ekaterina, about a woman
with a predilection for pubescent boys who also happens to be a Soviet
dissenter who escapes from the KGB to America where she becomes (eventually
and ingeniously) a rather improbably successful writer. Some of you will
also recall that Nabokov scholar Andrew Brown wrote a review celebrating
Ekaterina less for its inversion of the nympholept-nymphet relationship than
for its evocations of Pale Fire, Speak, Memory, and various elements of
Nabokov's own life-story.
For my own experience, the first five chapters of Ekaterina excerpted at the
time on NABOKV-L (and still available on Zembla, I believe) did not make
much of an impression, but when I got around some months later to reading
the whole book, it literally bowled me over. This next statement will
almost certainly get some list members up in arms, but I offer it as someone
who has read, re-read, taught, and written about Pale Fire many times over
the years and who loves, appreciates, and admires it (I daresay) probably as
much as anyone on the list: in its extraordinarily deft, complex, and
remarkably seamless layering of narrative voices, Ekaterina finally manages
to match Pale Fire in its inexhaustibly suggestive innovation of the genre's
narrative possibilities. (Those of you who have read it may recall the
trenchancy and flexibility of the ride-and-tie motif for its masterful
orchestration of narrative perspectives.)
If any Nabokovians are interested in following up on Harington, let me just
mention that while Some Other Place and Ekaterina are both terrific novels,
the one which, I suspect, Nabokov himself would most have liked and
appreciated would be The Cockroaches of Stay More, an uproariously clever
and aesthetically disciplined 1980's Cold War re-setting of Hardy's Tess of
the D'Urbervilles into a colony of cockroaches living in the almost deserted
Ozarks town of Stay More, a setting at least in part for most of Harington's
books. Harington is, in general, a much freer and less dense prose stylist
than Nabokov, our extravagantly precise champion of le mot juste and the
exuberantly interleaved sentence, but what I found, the more I read
Harington's books, is a remarkably successful Nabokovian sensibility for
using the form of the novel to celebrate the extraordinary imaginative
generosity of keenly felt sensual experience. Like Nabokov, Harington
manages to blend not only the cosmic with the cleverly comic but also with
the fully comedic, finding in often remarkably inimical scenarios
(including, yes, unflinchingly possessive middle-age inflicting itself
deliberately, systematically, and cruelly on constrained innocence) a means
to improbably indelible beauties, the written word as evidence for the
existence of still more tender ghosts humoring us lucky mortals.
From: Vladimir Nabokov Forum [mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU] On Behalf
Of A. Bouazza
Sent: Saturday, January 23, 2010 6:08 AM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] THOUGHT on Shade as poet
<S Gwynn: Other than VN, the only case that comes to mind in which a
novelist has performed the not incosiderable feat of the former and provided
the actual poetry is that of Anthony Burgess, who was, of course, as good a
poet as he was a writer of prose. There may be other examples, but none
comes to mind.>
E.L. Doctorow's Loon Lake (1980) features a poet, Warren Penfield, and
chunks of his poetry are liberally distributed over the novel. I read this
book too long ago, in fact in the mirabilic year of 1984, to pass any
judgement, but I do recall that the poetry struck me as rather prosaic, very
much like that of many poets of the second half of the 20th century.
A. Bouazza.
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recent postings on Donald Harington, so the basic information that Harington
pulled off a similar feat by presenting the work of a fictional poet within
a novel has become less important, but just in case the rest of the message
might pique some fellow Nabokovians' interest in Harington's work, I decided
to send it anyway. Harington actually died a couple months ago, in early
November, at the age of 73, and as will be clear from what I say below, I'm
a great admirer as well.
Brian Walter
bdwlecteur@mac.com
Actually, another novelist who pulled off more or less the same feat and who
would probably be closer to home for many Nabokovians is Donald Harington,
whose third novel, Some Other Place. The Right Place, not only blends
together a variety of narrative voices and perspectives but also
incorporates a collection of original poems by one of the main characters in
the novel, Daniel Lyam Montross (who re-appears in several of Harington's
other books). And in Montross's case, there is no question: he's primarily
a New Englander whose work invokes Frost quite deliberately, especially
"Directive."
At least some Nabokovians will remember Harington for the NABOKV-L dialogue
he participated in during the mid-90s with fellow novelist David Slavitt in
which they discussed Nabokov's influence on their work; at the time,
Harington had recently published his ninth novel, Ekaterina, about a woman
with a predilection for pubescent boys who also happens to be a Soviet
dissenter who escapes from the KGB to America where she becomes (eventually
and ingeniously) a rather improbably successful writer. Some of you will
also recall that Nabokov scholar Andrew Brown wrote a review celebrating
Ekaterina less for its inversion of the nympholept-nymphet relationship than
for its evocations of Pale Fire, Speak, Memory, and various elements of
Nabokov's own life-story.
For my own experience, the first five chapters of Ekaterina excerpted at the
time on NABOKV-L (and still available on Zembla, I believe) did not make
much of an impression, but when I got around some months later to reading
the whole book, it literally bowled me over. This next statement will
almost certainly get some list members up in arms, but I offer it as someone
who has read, re-read, taught, and written about Pale Fire many times over
the years and who loves, appreciates, and admires it (I daresay) probably as
much as anyone on the list: in its extraordinarily deft, complex, and
remarkably seamless layering of narrative voices, Ekaterina finally manages
to match Pale Fire in its inexhaustibly suggestive innovation of the genre's
narrative possibilities. (Those of you who have read it may recall the
trenchancy and flexibility of the ride-and-tie motif for its masterful
orchestration of narrative perspectives.)
If any Nabokovians are interested in following up on Harington, let me just
mention that while Some Other Place and Ekaterina are both terrific novels,
the one which, I suspect, Nabokov himself would most have liked and
appreciated would be The Cockroaches of Stay More, an uproariously clever
and aesthetically disciplined 1980's Cold War re-setting of Hardy's Tess of
the D'Urbervilles into a colony of cockroaches living in the almost deserted
Ozarks town of Stay More, a setting at least in part for most of Harington's
books. Harington is, in general, a much freer and less dense prose stylist
than Nabokov, our extravagantly precise champion of le mot juste and the
exuberantly interleaved sentence, but what I found, the more I read
Harington's books, is a remarkably successful Nabokovian sensibility for
using the form of the novel to celebrate the extraordinary imaginative
generosity of keenly felt sensual experience. Like Nabokov, Harington
manages to blend not only the cosmic with the cleverly comic but also with
the fully comedic, finding in often remarkably inimical scenarios
(including, yes, unflinchingly possessive middle-age inflicting itself
deliberately, systematically, and cruelly on constrained innocence) a means
to improbably indelible beauties, the written word as evidence for the
existence of still more tender ghosts humoring us lucky mortals.
From: Vladimir Nabokov Forum [mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU] On Behalf
Of A. Bouazza
Sent: Saturday, January 23, 2010 6:08 AM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] THOUGHT on Shade as poet
<S Gwynn: Other than VN, the only case that comes to mind in which a
novelist has performed the not incosiderable feat of the former and provided
the actual poetry is that of Anthony Burgess, who was, of course, as good a
poet as he was a writer of prose. There may be other examples, but none
comes to mind.>
E.L. Doctorow's Loon Lake (1980) features a poet, Warren Penfield, and
chunks of his poetry are liberally distributed over the novel. I read this
book too long ago, in fact in the mirabilic year of 1984, to pass any
judgement, but I do recall that the poetry struck me as rather prosaic, very
much like that of many poets of the second half of the 20th century.
A. Bouazza.
Search the archive
<http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en%0d%0a>
Contact the Editors <mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu>
Visit <http://www.nabokovonline.com> "Nabokov Online Journal"
Visit <http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm> Zembla
View Nabokv-L <http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm> Policies
Manage subscription <http://listserv.ucsb.edu/> options
All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both
co-editors.
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/