Dave Haan: Adam Roberts, author
of, most recently, _Yellow Blue Tibia_ (a transparent allusion), on
_Glory_:
"The novel as a whole makes a salutary counterexample to those who
think Nabakov’s schitck was an ‘aesthetics of cruelty’; for it is a novel
about goodness, and beauty, and quite deliberately lacks melodramatic tension,
although it is actually brimming with Nabokov’s trademark rapturous
gorgeousness. "
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/podvig/
JM: A
salutary counterexample to Nabokov's "aesthetics of cruelty"? Why "salutary"?
Andrewm
Field wrote about the relationship between
Vladimir and Irina Guadanini :
"Nabokov instructed her to write poste
restante addressing the letters to Korf. He said he was living in fear and
told Guadinini* that she must remain faithful to him. Then suddenly, in August,
a seventh letter asked Irina to return the previous letters "which, anyway, have
much writer's exaggeration in them." [...] She went to Cannes but, according to
Véra, was rebuffed by Nabokov.[...]When she returned to Paris she lived in near
poverty...A mutual acquaintance of Guadinini and Nabokov approached him with a
request for some financial help to ease her poverty. He gave money but very
little, explaining, "Yes, I've grown miserly in my old age."
(Andrew Field: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov,page
178)**.
By tortuous
associations I related Nabokov's cruel indifference to the woman he
thought he'd been in love with (similar to developments in "Sounds"?
Or, rather, in "Benevolence"?), to an event that was described to him
by Edmund Wilson, in a letter dated June 3, 1945:
"...Parny hasn't a trace of Pushkin's feeling or
humanity or color. There is a wonderful biographical notice about him written
not long after his death. It seems that he fell in love and had a brief affair
with a young girl who was made to marry some richer or nobler man, and he
addressed to her the four books of elegies which caused him to be knowm as "Le
Tibulle français." Later the lady's husband died, and she wrote to Parny
offering to spend with him "ler derniers jours qui lui seraint comptés sur la
terre;" but the poet, though "sensible à ce souvenier de sa maîtressem s'écria,
"Ce n'est plus Eléonore!" et ne repondit point (isn't that point perfect?) à la
femme tendre et dévouée qui revenait a lui."
Nabokov's life-story is one of his long-lasting loyalty
to Véra, but it also includes his
verbal mnemonic visitations to adolescent, or even
later, loves. These represent a totally different kind of faithfulness
- and they should remain under the control of his memory, safely
"past," instead of reappearing in real life to shock him
into "chronophobia." They would then turn into false "Eléonores"... ( a
name that often pops up, related to the stage and fakes, in
"Ada").
I was
reminded of Nabokov's story-telling talents about such extended
long lost loves, as they are recovered by the offices of
Mnemosyne, while I watched an Argentinian thriller cum love-story. There's
a play in it with a missing letter, a typewriter's broken "Aa,"
that appears at regular intervals; a dream that induces the word
"temo" ("I fear"), which the protagonist, fully awake,
slowly realizes to mean "te amo" (the "Aa" in now inserted in it); two
obsessed soccer-fans, a criminal who unconsciously leaves clues
about his whereabouts by the letters he writes to his mother and forces the
investigators into a compressed 'paper-chase,' after they recognize
indications about specific soccer games and players by the missivist
and his favorite soccer team.( The guy was chased in an
awesome plane-sequence, with a swooping-camera descending onto a
crowded football-stadium that would thrill Stan Kelly-Bootle and
Sklyarenko). Juan Jose Campanella, the director and co-scriptwriter
of "The Secret in
Their Eyes's," ( El Secreto de Sus Ojos) "is one of Argentina's most
communicative storytellers" and his movie won the 2010 Academy award for
foreign movies.
It took me sometime before I
realized the particular kind of "beauty" that made me connect this movie to
Nabokov. It has a baudelairian touch: it is a broken beauty. Instead of making
the loved woman immortal through "Art," it is her murdered
raped body in cruel display, it is her loss and her
effacement that which leaves the unforgetful register (the
widower cannot recall if, on their last breakfast together, she'd prepared
him tea with drops of lemmon or honey, he complains about the superposition of
recollections that falsify his remembrance, he despairs about the
evanescing of his wife's contours and smile...)
There is something strange, human and true
which arises by relating "beauty and cruelty," a damaged beauty,
like the destruction of Lolita's childhood by HH's pursuit of a
delusional "nymphethood," and
spoiled loves. I
don't think that I should recommend this movie for its link to Nabokov,
though. This association may make sense only to me, groping along the
mysteries of everyday "cruelty" in connection to "immortal art." ( HH
somewhere recognizes that he has "only words to play with" - but his readers can
go a step further than he can by reading his
words ...) .
...........................................................................................
* - B.Boyd
writes "Guadanini" and A.Field "Guadinini." ( also Korff/Korf).
Cp. the same
story in Brian Boyd: V.Nabokov The
Russian Years version (excerpts):
"In the emigration Irina had been briefly
married to a Russian she met in Belgium...An animal lover, she earned a skimpy
living as a poodle trimmer. Ten years earlier Nabokov had introduced himself and
his wife into King,Queen, Knave as a contrast to the novel's sordid adulterous
triangle...in February the nervous tension the affair (VN/Irina Guadanini)
caused him brought on a severe attack of psoriasis..." (RY,pg.437) "one cause of both the psoriasis and the
shortage of time was still there: Irina Guadanini. Nabokov was never a person
who knew how to love lightly..."(RY,pg.438) "In Czechoslovakia Irina Guadanini's image glowed
brightly beyond the horizon, while the immediate foreground was darkened by
Nabokov's unease and fuilt at the need for deceit... "The inevitable vulgarity
of deceit," he wrote to Irina... At the same time he could not stop: he
asked her to write poste restante to "V.Korff" in Prague. (RY,440)
"Nabokov told her they would soon meet again, but she felt it would not happen.
She was right." (RY,443) "A day later Irina Guadanini arrived in Cannes...when
he and Dmitri settled on the beach she sat down some distance off...Later,
Nabokov told Véra about Irina's vigil. It was the last time he and Irina ever
met."
** - The words Field quoted (he was an unreliable
biographer) about Nabokov having grown "miserly in old
age," stimulated me to search for a notice I read a few weeks ago. It
relates to one of Nabokov's translators whom, apparently, Nabokov had
underpaid. In the note it was affirmed that, some time later,
Nabokov decided to add one more check to round up the total of what
he'd considered as a just payment. The second check, though, had very little
substance too, and the translator
prefered to keep and frame it, to possess Nabokov's autograph. At
the time I read this information, I remembered the three checks which were
sent to VN, at intervals, to pay for the publication of his poem in the
"New Yorker" ("An Evening of Russian Poetry"). Cf. letter 118 (March
12,1945) Edmund Wilson writes: "When I first brought the matter of
payment up, both Ross and Mrs.White said that they thought you had not been paid
enough, and Ross told me that he would send you sixty some dollars more. Then it
turned out that they had sent you only thirty, and an additional check had to be
made to you."