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Fw: Nabokov never stops astounding ...
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----- Original Message -----
From: Sandy P. Klein
TUESDAY, MAY 18, 2004
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/05/18/DDGL66M19T1.DTL
His prose is lovely, disturbing. Nabokov never stops astounding his readers. What was behind his genius?
David Kipen Tuesday, May 18, 2004
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You never see anybody reading on his deathbed. Presumably, the dying have better things to do. And yet, because death can cut in on life's waltz at any moment, we forever carry our deathbeds around on our backs, like phantom wings. Everyone runs the risk that death will find him mid-page. Some writers, of course, make better deathbed-side reading than others. But only a very few have the power to make us plead, at that first chilly tap on the shoulder, not "Why me? Why now?" but "Just one sentence more ..."
Vladimir Nabokov belongs in that select company. Nabokov seems much in the air these days, too. Maybe it's a side effect of living in a culture so nympholeptic that it makes Humbert Humbert look well-adjusted. Whatever the cause, any excuse to celebrate the triumph of Nabokov's lapidary, lepidopteran style is to be welcomed.
So it was when news recently broke that Nabokov's beloved son Dmitri was auctioning off about 100 books that his father had not only inscribed to his family but also festooned with freehand illustrations of imaginary butterflies. That item followed a typically exuberant column in the New York Observer by Ron Rosenbaum, America's foremost gonzo literary journalist, to the effect that Nabokov may have lifted the idea of a nymphet named Lolita from an obscure Mittel-European short story. This after the republication in January of the "Vintage Nabokov" reader, a collection of old short stories and excerpts, and just last month of "Pnin," the heartbreaking campus comedy that Nabokov wrote to tide himself over while waiting for "Lolita" to see print.
Thankfully, not only does Nabokov cry out to be shared, but to read him aloud is to recommend him. Unlike some other cherished writers, Nabokov makes his own converts. For proof, look no farther than "Pnin." Just 20 pages in, Nabokov describes a scene familiar from "Lolita," and his own life: that of a visiting exiled professor, sizing up a room to let. Nabokov's sweet, bumbling alter ego, Timofey Pnin, checks out the landlady's grown daughter's old room, where "it had suddenly begun to snow, though the sky was pure platinum, and the slow scintillant downcome got reflected in the silent looking glass." There's more to a phrase like "slow scintillant downcome" than simple delirious euphony. Beyond Nabokov's easy alliteration and his unhesitating coinage of new words, the phrase is beautiful -- and therefore funny -- in a way that no native English speaker would think to write.
Probably too much gets made of Nabokov as, along with Joseph Conrad, one of the two great ESL prodigies of English literature. As Herbert Gold points out in the introduction to the still-indispensable Paris Review interview, "Nabokov learned to read English before mastering Russian." Unlike Conrad, who spoke scarcely a word of English before leaving Poland, Nabokov didn't have to pick up the language from scratch.
Consequently, Nabokov's prose isn't the eerily polished marvel that Conrad's was. It's the playful, endlessly mutating hothouse bloom you'd expect from a brilliant student who knew English from lessons and books but rarely, if ever, from conversation. Aside from the three years he spent at Cambridge between 1919 and '22, Nabokov's arrival in the United States in 1940 may have marked his first real opportunity to hear English spoken badly. On the evidence of "Pnin" and "Lolita" and his other unquestioned masterwork, "Pale Fire," he found the sound intoxicating.
Nabokov's prose sometimes recalls the private language of identical twins, completely assured in its conspiratorial willingness to be strange. He makes every admiring reader into his twin, which may help explain why many feel so territorial about him. Always oblique yet never obscure, Nabokov's prose sounds like English on the morning of its birth, with every word equally available to him, and all the ruts of habit gone suddenly smooth.
As Californians, we're apt to picture Nabokov anywhere but here: in St. Petersburg, where he was born in 1899; or at Cornell, where he taught in the '50s; or in Switzerland, where he lived 15 more years with Vera, the wife who had made it all possible. But to Gold's question, whether he considered himself an American, Nabokov gave a fascinatingly ambivalent reply: "Yes, I do. I am as American as April in Arizona. The flora, the fauna, the air of the Western states, are my links with Asiatic and Arctic Russia."
Nabokov had two important sojourns in California. In 1941 he spent a term in Palo Alto at 230 Sequoia Ave., just across Camino Real from Stanford, teaching "Modern Russian Literature" and "The Art of Writing" -- specifically playwriting -- under the auspices of the Slavic department. His department head was a charming chess player who, according to Nabokov's biographer Brian Boyd, "would drive off on the weekends, neat and dapper in his blazer, to orgiastic parties with nymphets."
Before leaving, he also lectured at Berkeley's Slavic studies department, "in the hope that his performance would be remembered should a vacancy arise." How different recent California literary history might have been if Nabokov had gotten the job that was to be Czeslaw Milosz's 20 years later.
By 1960, Nabokov had returned to California on another errand. He took a rented villa at 2088 Mandeville Canyon in Los Angeles, to work on a screenplay of "Lolita" for the young director Stanley Kubrick. Not much remains of Nabokov's work in the finished film, but he liked the unorthodox screenplay he wrote enough to publish it later. Graciously, he also spoke well of Kubrick's version, but retained sole screen credit.
Let the record show that in 1963, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated Vladimir Nabokov in the best adapted screenplay category. (He lost to Horton Foote's "To Kill a Mockingbird.") There's no indication that he returned to Los Angeles for the Oscar ceremony, but, to quote one of his least-favorite writers, isn't it pretty to think so? According to Boyd, "He and Vera would have been ready to settle permanently in 'charming semitropical' California if their son had not been singing in Milan." Nabokov wrote to Edmund Wilson from Brentwood of their "charming house in a blooming canyon full of good butterflies."
Nabokov's love of butterflies is well documented. But there's at least one aspect of his work where critics may have been asleep at the switch. It concerns the staggeringly ingenious "Pale Fire," whose explicitly Shakespearean title scholars may have, to coin a phrase, misunderattributed.
Most agree that the title comes from Shakespeare's "Timon of Athens," which contains the lines
"The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun ..."
This citation only makes sense, considering that a translated copy of "Timon" is a recurrent symbol in "Pale Fire" and that the book is about the larcenous liberties critics take with literature.
But what if another source for the title has been hiding in plain sight all along? Just before the ghost of Hamlet's father exits near daybreak, he says to his son,
"The glowworm shows the matin to be near
And 'gins to pale his uneffectual fire.
Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me."
Obviously, not everybody did. Given Nabokov's fondness for all things entomological, couldn't just as good a case be made for these lines as the provenance of the title "Pale Fire"?
More plausibly, isn't either the "Hamlet" or the "Timon" quotation at best only half the answer? Both of them work thematically, allowing Nabokov to liken critics in the first place to thieves and, in the second, to tiny bioluminescent insects outshown by the radiant sunrise of the writer's art.
Wouldn't it be just like wily old Nabokov to leave all signs pointing to the arcane "Timon of Athens" while half the solution really lurks elsewhere, undiscovered in the first act of the most critically pored-over play of all time?
Does it really matter whether Nabokov got the title "Pale Fire" from "Timon" or "Hamlet," or both? Of course not.
Only deathbed readers will care. That's how you can always tell a Nabokov buff at the end: squinting over his oxygen mask, grinning around his feeding tube, pleading for one more hour, one more minute, one more page.
E-mail David Kipen at dkipen@sfchronicle.com.
David Kipen
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