Martin Amis concludes his remarkable essay on Vladimir Nabokov with praise, and with the same uncanny clarity of understanding he’s shown throughout the essay. He expresses the essence of Nabokov’s miraculous genius.
They call it a “shimmer” – a glint, a glitter, a glisten. The Nabokovian essence is a miraculously fertile instability, where without warning the words detach themselves from the everyday and streak off like flares in a night sky, illuminating hidden versts of longing and terror. From Lolita, as the fateful cohabitation begins (nous connûmes, a Flaubertian intonation, means “we came to know”):
“Nous connûmes the various types of motor court operators, the reformed criminal, the retired teacher, and the business flop, among the males; and the motherly, pseudo-ladylike and madamic variants among the females. And sometimes trains would cry in the monstrously hot and humid night with heartrending and ominous plangency, mingling power and hysteria in one desperate scream.”
Isn’t this the same sort of sentence we saw here, in Part Two of my series of posts on the Amis essay? Recall the sentence from Nabokov’s short story, “Signs and Symbols,” the sentence Amis calls a “one-sentence demonstration of genius.”
Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths – until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.
Both sentences offer amusing lists of homely human attributes and homely human types. Then, either with a dash or with a new sentence, both suddenly shift to death, power, and hysteria. From the trivial to the thunderstruck, from ordinariness to extremity, from insipid to insane, these small sentences first settle us into the world and then shatter it.
They shatter it in the direction of truth. The plangency in the Lolita sentence is, by frightful implication, Lolita’s, in bed with Humbert. The power and hysteria is Humbert Humbert’s hideous self-imprisonment.
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Versts? A verst is a Russian unit of distance. The word is obsolete.