Here’s this spectacular essay about Vladimir Nabokov by Martin Amis. Way better than any literary essay I’ve seen in a long time. And now that I’m back from my Saturday walk with Mr UD (Brookside Gardens. They were moody on a mid-November day. Burnished late fall leaves. Decorative lights laced through the trees. The sky was all gray and wavy and if gaunt branches weren’t a cliché I’d report gaunt branches.), maybe we should walk through this wondrous prose. So wondrous that we will forgive its multiple misspellings.
Language leads a double life – and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs (LOOK LEFT), and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form – as the stuff of patterned artifice. Most writers, I think, would want to go along with Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), when he reminisced in 1974:
“. . . I regarded Paris, with its gray-toned days and charcoal nights, merely as the chance setting for the most authentic and faithful joys of my life: the coloured phrase in my mind under the drizzle, the white page under the desk lamp awaiting me in my humble home.”
Well, the creative joy is authentic; and yet it isn’t faithful (in common with pretty well the entire cast of Nabokov’s fictional women, creative joy, in the end, is sadistically fickle). Writing remains a very interesting job, but destiny, or “fat Fate”, as Humbert Humbert calls it, has arranged a very interesting retribution. Writers lead a double life. And they die doubly, too. This is modern literature’s dirty little secret. Writers die twice: once when the body dies, and once when the talent dies.
What do you see, from the outset?
I see confidence — the strong initial assertion about language, an assertion whose meaning we don’t yet know. Yet precisely the confidence of assertion coupled with the mystery of the assertion’s meaning draws us forward. He’s put it in second person – you – and that makes sense, because he’s a novelist, like Nabokov, and he gets what novelists are about. They spend much of their time in the same utilitarian language world the rest of us inhabit; but they also inhabit a private world rich with the “stuff of patterned artifice.” (Note the poetic phrase here – the repeated sound of the letter T: sTuff / paTTerned / arTifice. The very idea of artful writing – its patterned artifice – is exemplified, brought to linguistic life, in the lilting words Amis has chosen.)
After the lovely praise of writerly inspiration he quotes from Nabokov, Amis begs to differ from it a bit. In fact inspiration isn’t faithful; as a writer ages, he can’t rely on it at all. Talent dies. Think of Philip Larkin, arguably the greatest English-language poet after the modernists, who stopped writing poetry years and years before his death because whatever power had been inspiring him to write poetry withdrew.
Notice how from the start Amis lightly, easily seeds his essay with exactly pertinent quotations from Nabokov, a practice that both deepens our understanding of Nabokov and reassures us that we are in the hands of an essayist who knows his work intimately.
Nabokov composed The Original of Laura, or what we have of it, against the clock of doom (a series of sickening falls, then hospital infections, then bronchial collapse). It is not “A novel in fragments”, as the cover states; it is immediately recognisable as a longish short story struggling to become a novella. In this palatial edition, every left-hand page is blank, and every right-hand page reproduces Nabokov’s manuscript (with its robust handwriting and fragile spelling – “bycycle”, “stomack”, “suprize”), plus the text in typed print (and infested with square brackets). It is nice, I dare say, to see those world-famous index cards up close; but in truth there is little in Laura that reverberates in the mind. “Auroral rumbles and bangs had begun jolting the cold misty city”: in this we hear an echo of the Nabokovian music. And in the following we glimpse the funny and fearless Nabokovian disdain for our “abject physicality”:
“I loathe my belly, that trunkful of bowels, which I have to carry around, and everything connected with it – the wrong food, heartburn, constipation’s leaden load, or else indigestion with a first installment of hot filth pouring out of me in a public toilet . . .”
Otherwise and in general Laura is somewhere between larva and pupa (to use a lepidopteral metaphor), and very far from the finished imago.
Even as he’s writing in sorrow (he reveres Nabokov, but this last unfinished work is terrible), Amis is linguistically playful, echoing Nabokov’s twisted, antic ways. This is lively, fun prose, with its butterfly homages and alliterations (following, funny, fearless).
Apart from a welcome flurry of interest in the work, the only thing this relic will effect, I fear, is the slight exacerbation of what is already a problem from hell. It is infernal, for me, because I bow to no one in my love for this great and greatly inspiring genius. And yet Nabokov, in his decline, imposes on even the keenest reader a horrible brew of piety, literal-mindedness, vulgarity and philistinism. Nothing much, in Laura, qualifies as a theme (ie, as a structural or at least a recurring motif). But we do notice the appearance of a certain Hubert H Hubert (a reeking Englishman who slobbers over a pre-teen’s bed), we do notice the 24-year-old vamp with 12-year-old breasts (“pale squinty nipples and firm form”), and we do notice the fevered dream about a juvenile love (“her little bottom, so smooth, so moonlit”). In other words, Laura joins The Enchanter (1939), Lolita (1955), Ada (1970), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins! (1974) in unignorably concerning itself with the sexual despoiliation of very young girls.
Six fictions: six fictions, two or perhaps three of which are spectacular masterpieces. You will, I hope, admit that the hellish problem is at least Nabokovian in its complexity and ticklishness. For no human being in the history of the world has done more to vivify the cruelty, the violence, and the dismal squalor of this particular crime. The problem, which turns out to be an aesthetic problem, and not quite a moral one, has to do with the intimate malice of age.
That should be despoliation, by the way.
But now we have Amis gradually shifting from his general point about the failure of talent as even the greatest writers age (there are exceptions – Bellow wrote Ravelstein in his eighties), to his particular point about the form that failure took in Nabokov. And again, via his subtle, knowing extraction of just the right bits from Nabokov, Amis establishes that writer’s deeply unpleasant obsessive recurrence to the theme of sex with very young girls.
An aesthetic, but not quite a moral, problem, he says. What does that mean? As with his initial provocative assertion, one wants to know more.
The word we want is not the legalistic “paedophilia”, which in any case deceitfully translates as “fondness for children”. The word we want is “nympholepsy”, which doesn’t quite mean what you think it means. It means “frenzy caused by desire for the unattainable”, and is rightly characterised by my COD as literary. As such, nympholepsy is a legitimate, indeed an almost inevitable subject for this very singular talent. “Nabokov’s is really an amorous style,” John Updike lucidly observed: “It yearns to clasp diaphonous exactitude into its hairy arms.” With the later Nabokov, though, nympholepsy crumbles into its etymology – “from Gk numpholeptos ‘caught by nymphs’, on the pattern of EPILEPSY”; “from Gk epilepsia, from epilambanein ‘seize, attack'”.
doesn’t quite mean what you think it means. This is sassy writing, taking liberties with the reader — You think it means this, but it doesn’t. And note how his use of the second person has sort of shifted from being about himself and other writers — as if he were writing this to himself as a sort of exhibitionist meditation — to being a direct address to you out there. You, me, the lot of us reading this essay… The use of the second person is always a touch insolent, with its implicit presumption — you think this, you’re wrong about that — but I think we rather like that insolence. It perks us up, makes us consider whether we want to be defensively at odds with it, or uneasily okay with it, etc.
Amis quotes from another spectacular writer, John Updike, to get at the underlying reason for Nabokov’s nympholepsy; he was a messy, compromised, and corrupted animal searching always for the uncorrupted “diaphonous exactitude” (diaphanous is spelled incorrectly) of youth. But at some point he lost control of the hunt and became the hunted; he fell into a nymphetic frenzy.
More later. Dinner break.