Mrs Dalloway’s a shaky old dear, burdened by her creator’s sense of the dithery redundant language a brain like hers might kick up (perpetual, always; out, out, out; very, very); but after all she comes by her sense of debility and peril honestly, living as she does in still-traumatized and death-haunted post-war London. Aunt Rosa, in Nabokov’s short story “Signs and Symbols,” shares the same dangerous world, though she doesn’t yet know the half of it:
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.
Philip Larkin, in “The Old Fools,” describes the elderly
crouching below
Extinction’s alp, the old fools, never perceiving
How near it is …
Yet both of these women register, in one way or another, precisely that perception; they simply differ in the ways they cope. Dalloway buys flowers and throws a party, not as death-evasion but as death-defiance; Rosa, like so many people, responds to the unassimilable, appalling fact of the avalanche (see also this recent post about Julian Barnes) with paralyzing anxiety and despair. So does Moses Herzog’s stepmother, in Herzog:
[Tante] Taube, a veteran survivor, … had fought the grave to a standstill, balking death itself by her slowness.
As in, maybe if you don’t live, you won’t die.
********************
With death very much in the spring air, UD returns to the essay “Aes Triplex” (1878), by Robert Louis Stevenson. (It’s short – read the whole thing.) Stevenson begins by noting, drily, that death is the bummer di tutti bummers: The thing stands alone in man’s experience. We propitiate it and the dead by dressing it up in all manner of funerary custom:
The poorest persons have a bit of pageant going towards the
tomb; memorial stones are set up over the least memorable; and, in
order to preserve some show of respect for what remains of our old
loves and friendships, we must accompany it with much grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and the hired undertaker parades before the door.
Lovely writing, no? Playfully alliterative (poorest persons pageant preserve parades) in a tonal – and maybe philosophical – counterpoint to the deadly serious subject… And there are other hints here that the author himself takes a lighter (counsels taking a lighter?) approach to this ultimate heaviness: a bit is gently slangy; memorials for the least memorable is funny; the oxymoron grimly ludicrous captures beautifully the tragicomic nature of many final rituals.
His next paragraph expresses his amazement, given this terror of death, that so many human settlements happily locate themselves right next to volcanoes and earthquake zones, with the people living there having no care in the world:
There are serenades and suppers and much gallantry among the myrtles overhead; and meanwhile the foundation shudders underfoot, the bowels of the mountain growl, and at any moment living ruin may leap sky-high into the moonlight, and tumble man and his merry-making in the dust.
The same playful alliteration (here mainly about the letter M); some wonderful rhyme (bowels/growl); some assonance (sky-high into the moonlight) – this writer is enjoying himself, bringing detached wit and amusement to the strange denialist ways of human beings. Inviting us to laugh at ourselves for our contradictions.
He then deepens the denialist point, noting that catastrophe-adjacent living is only the most dramatic instance of what we all in any case experience – the awareness of/repression of how dangerous it is to live even one day.
And what, pathologically looked at, is the human body with all its organs, but a mere bagful of petards?
Strange indeed how we, with “unconcern and gaiety… prick on along the Valley of the Shadow of Death.” This is not because we have some developed philosophy or theology on the subject of Life; on the contrary, we just enjoy the business of living, of sensate existence, and we enjoy keeping it going.
[W]e are so fond of life that we have no leisure to entertain the terror of death… [We give our whole hearts to] the appetites, to honour, to the hungry curiosity of the mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature, and the pride of our own nimble bodies.
Stevenson concludes that this is for the best; we should “stop [our] ears against paralyzing terror, and run the race that is set before [us] with a single mind.” Here his essay’s title comes into play – we need enormous mental strength – triple brass strength – to ignore our fear of death and live a full life. “Intelligence… recognize[s] our precarious estate in life, and the first part of courage [is] to be not at all abashed before the fact.” Don’t reach for philosophies, clarifications, consolations – just live. Dig in. Be engrossed. And then:
In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the highest point of being, [one] passes at a bound on to the other side. The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing … clouds of glory, this happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.
It’s Julian Barnes’ Nothing to be Frightened of.
The grammarian Pere Bouhours [on his deathbed] said: Je vas, ou je vais mourir: l’un ou l’autre se dit. (Loosely, ‘Soon I shall, or soon I will die: both are correct.’)
***************
[L]ife is a matter of cosmic hazard, its fundamental purpose mere self-perpetuation… it unfolds in emptiness… our planet will one day drift in frozen silence… the human species, as it has developed in all its frenzied and over-engineered complexity, will completely disappear and not be missed, because there is nobody and nothing out there to miss us.
**************
[A friend] consolingly quotes a study showing that fear of death drops off after the age of sixty. Well, I have got there before him, and can report that I am still waiting for the benefit. Only a couple of nights ago, there came again that alarmed and alarming moment, of being pitchforked back into consciousness, awake, alone, utterly alone, beating pillow with fist and shouting ‘Oh no Oh No OH NO’ in an endless wail, the horror of the moment – the minutes – overwhelming what might, to an objective witness, appear a shocking display of exhibitionist self-pity. An inarticulate one, too: for what sometimes shames me is the extraordinary lack of descriptive, or responsive, words that come out of my mouth. For God’s sake, you’re a writer, I say to myself…
“There’s something about [the] society [of other people] and useful short-term distractions that takes your mind off [the fear of death],” remarks Julian Barnes, author of a whole book about the fear of death.
UD thinks that the people of Allen, Texas have much to teach us in this regard, having produced a gigantic, expensive, communal, engrossing distraction in their sixty million dollar high school football stadium that, two years after construction, has had to be shut down because of structural flaws.
One needs to look past the cruel verdict by one observer (see my headline) in this article’s comment thread and instead appreciate – even marvel at – the way an entire town has figured out how to do an end run around the whole timor mortis conturbat me thing by creating a massive unsound edifice around which the town will be able to rally and fight and pray for decades to come.
************
Centuries from now The Allen Stadium will have become the state’s sphinx, its obelisk, its omphalos, its ultima thule, around which, in seasonal rituals, people will gather and chant Who built this? Why?
**************
UD thanks John.
I have read at least half a dozen Nabokov novels at least half a dozen times. [A novelist reading a novelist is a marvelous thing. Bellow reading Joyce, Amis reading Nabokov, Foster Wallace reading DeLillo… You know they’re not really reading; they’re grazing. Slowly, repeatedly, they’re nourishing themselves, they’re ruminating, chewing on this phrase and that figure. The Amis essay is terrific in part because it’s all about this special sensibility: The hyper-receptive writer working a verbal field. Nobody knows another writer as well as another writer.] And at least half a dozen times I have tried, and promptly failed, to read Ada (“Or Ardor: A Family Chronicle“). My first attempt took place about three decades ago. I put it down after the first chapter, with a curious sensation, a kind of negative tingle. [For what it’s worth, our own UD, mad lover of Nabokov, bought, when she was an undergrad, the black hardback of this novel and opened it all agog. Fifty pages later, weary and vaguely embarrassed, she closed it.] Every five years or so (this became the pattern), I picked it up again; and after a while I began to articulate the difficulty: “But this is dead,” I said to myself. The curious sensation, the negative tingle, is of course miserably familiar to me now: it is the reader’s response to what seems to happen to all writers as they overstep the biblical span. The radiance, the life-giving power, begins to fade. Last summer I went away with Ada and locked myself up with it. And I was right. At 600 pages, two or three times Nabokov’s usual fighting-weight, the novel is what homicide detectives call “a burster”. It is a waterlogged corpse at the stage of maximal bloat. [First, there’s the reader’s purely visceral rejection response. Then — and this is what’s so good about Amis — there’s the explanation. Listen up.]
When Finnegans Wake appeared, in 1939, it was greeted with wary respect – or with “terror-stricken praise”, in the words of Jorge Luis Borges. Ada garnered plenty of terror-stricken praise; and the similarities between the two magna opera are in fact profound. Nabokov nominated Ulysses as his novel of the century, but he described Finnegans Wake as, variously, “formless and dull”, “a cold pudding of a book”, “a tragic failure” and “a frightful bore”. Both novels seek to make a virtue of unbounded self-indulgence; they turn away, so to speak, and fold in on themselves. [Old people – and old, venerated writers, tend to do this, no? Withdraw from the world, indulge more and more deeply in their own fantasies, give themselves license to do any old thing because they’re don’t care about or can’t deal with the world outside themselves anymore.] Literary talent has several ways of dying. With Joyce and Nabokov, we see a decisive loss of love for the reader – a loss of comity, of courtesy. The pleasures of writing, Nabokov said, “correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading”; and the two activities are in some sense indivisible. In Ada, that bond loosens and frays. [This is crucial, I think. Julian Barnes writes that there’s a “strange, unwitnessed, yet deeply intimate relationship between writer and reader,” and it’s just that delicate and profound transaction that gets betrayed when writers fold in on themselves. The writer no longer makes the courteous effort to conceive, as he writes, the existence of a creature, a consciousness, separate from his own. Perhaps he tells himself he’s so powerful a writer that he’s creating a new consciousness in the reader, bringing the reader to greater heights of awareness, to a form of understanding analogous to the writer’s own, in forcing the reader to enter the writer’s hermeticism. But every careful reader instinctively senses the difference between a jarring aesthetic sensibility that changes her as she makes the effort to enter into it, and a sort of plugged-up verbal belligerency.]
There is a weakness in Nabokov for “partricianism”, as Saul Bellow called it (Nabokov the classic émigré, Bellow the classic immigrant). In the former’s purely “Russian” novels (I mean the novels written in Russian that Nabokov did not himself translate), the male characters, in particular, have a self-magnifying quality: they are larger and louder than life. They don’t walk – they “march” or “stride”; they don’t eat and drink – they “munch” and “gulp”; they don’t laugh – they “roar”. They are very far from being the furtive, hesitant neurasthenics of mainstream anglophone fiction: they are brawny (and gifted) heart-throbs, who win all the fights and win all the girls. Pride, for them, is not a deadly sin but a cardinal virtue. Of course, we cannot do without this vein in Nabokov: it gives us, elsewhere, his magnificently comic hauteur. In Lolita, the superbity is meant to be funny; elsewhere, it is a trait that irony does not protect.
In Ada nabobism disastrously combines with a nympholepsy that is lavishly, monotonously, and frictionlessly gratified. Ada herself, at the outset, is 12; and Van Veen, her cousin (and half-sibling) is 14. As Ada starts to age, in adolescence, her tiny sister Lucette is also on hand to enliven their “strenuous trysts”. On top of this, there is a running quasi-fantasy about an international chain of elite bordellos where girls as young as 11 can be “fondled and fouled”. And Van’s 60-year-old father (incidentally but typically) has a mistress who is barely out of single figures: she is 10. This interminable book is written in dense, erudite, alliterative, punsome, pore-clogging prose; and every character, without exception, sounds like late Henry James.
In common with Finnegans Wake, Ada probably does “work out” and “measure up” – the multilingual decoder, given enough time and nothing better to do, might eventually disentangle its toiling systems and symmetries, its lonely and comfortless labyrinths, and its glutinous nostalgies. [Lovely writing from Amis here in this list of items — and at this point, who could miss the alliterative sweetness of each? The letters T and S played out in the first; L in the second, G in the third — along with the devil-may-care making of neologisms — nostalgies… Sounds a bit French, which does nicely for Nabokov… Or, okay, not so much a neologism as the opposite: nostalgies is archaic.] What both novels signally lack, however, is any hint of narrative traction: they slip and they slide; they just can’t hold the road. And then, too, with Ada, there is something altogether alien – a sense of monstrous entitlement, of unbridled, head-in-air seigneurism. Morally, this is the world for which the twisted Humbert thirsts: a world where “nothing matters”, and “everything is allowed”.
But again, as Amis notes, Lolita will condemn everything is allowed, while the self-important convolution of Ada will appear to endorse it.
UD‘s back at the beach.
She got the book and the film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as holiday gifts, and last night for hours she did the whole multimedia thing.
First she lay in bed and read the book, the sound of her American Atlantic waves echoing the sound of the author’s French Atlantic as he lay in a hospital bed in 1995 — he died the following year — entirely paralyzed after a stroke. He listened to the water from the balcony of the Naval Hospital on the northern coast; UD listened from an apartment balcony in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
Julian Barnes says there’s a “strange, unwitnessed, yet deeply intimate relationship between writer and reader,” and this intimacy is particularly intense when the writer has been reduced to consciousness alone, and when he is writing quickly and honestly, in the face of death.
Of course Jean-Dominique Bauby didn’t write the book at all; he dictated — oculated? –his final thoughts via blinks from one good eye.
The result of this painstaking process is a thin reflective volume, 132 pages of staccato prose… A bit of regret here, a burst of agony there. Stabbing prose.
Ashamed as nurses bathe him, Bauby recalls “the protracted immersions that were the joy of my previous life. Armed with a cup of tea or a Scotch, a good book or a pile of newspapers, I would soak for hours, maneuvering the taps with my toes.” He imagines summer vacationers “boating around [an] island, the small outboards laboring against the current. Someone will be stretched out in the bow, eyes closed, arm trailing in the cool water.” He’s a universe away from them, among “broken-winged birds, voiceless parrots, ravens of doom, who have made our nest in a dead-end corridor of the neurology department.”
The only unshattered things he has left are consciousness and emotion. “I need to feel strongly, to love and to admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe. A letter from a friend, a Balthus painting on a postcard, a page of Saint-Simon, give meaning to the passing hours.” On Sundays, everything dies. “I contemplate my books, piled up on the windowsill to constitute a small library: a rather useless one, for today no one will come to read them for me. Seneca, Zola, Chateaubriand, and Valéry Larbaud are right there, three feet away, just out of reach.” Alone, he falls into “regret for a vanished past, and above, all, remorse for lost opportunities. … [T]he women [I was] unable to love, the chances [I] failed to seize, the moments of happiness [I] allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that my whole life was nothing but a string of … small near misses…”
On the very last page, he suddenly looks at the open purse of his speech therapist:
…I see a hotel room key, a metro ticket, and a hundred-franc note folded in four, like objects brought back by a space probe sent to earth to study how earthlings live, travel, and trade with one another. The sight leaves me pensive and confused. Does the cosmos contain keys for opening up my diving bell? A subway line with no terminus? A currency strong enough to buy my freedom back?
And then I watched the film – in that hunched and solitary way you watch when you watch on your laptop, with its little sounds and images shedding their little circle of light… But I felt far less intimate with Bauby than I did reading his prose – even his translated prose. To read his book is to be encased with him in his consciousness; the film’s about too many other things besides his morbid subjectivity. The other things are moving and true — the intensely loving desire of other people to help him, in particular — but you only get the truth head-on, UD thinks, in the grain of the prose, in consciousness unbound contemplating unspeakable boundedness.
And then I got online and read all about the controversy over the film’s distortion of Bauby’s ex-partner and the girlfriend he left her for …