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BIB: 1974 TNR review of LATH
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Jansy Mello sends the following:
Look at the Harlequins!
by Vladimir Nabokov
THE NEW REPUBLIC, December 28, 1974, a review by Saul Maloff
Opening his review with a quote ( "I met...the first of my three or four
successive wives in somewhat odd circumstances,the development of which
resembled a clumsy conspiracy, with nonsensical details and a main
plotter who not only knew nothing of its real object but insisted on
making inept moves that seemed to preclude the slightest possibility of
success. Yet out of these very mistakes he unwittingly wove a web, in
which a set of reciprocal blunders on my part caused me to get involved
and fulfill a destiny that was the only aim of the plot.") Maloff
observes that "the maze, the mystery, the Nabokovian minefield, the
deadly games we're obliged to play by conflicting house-rules slyly
hinted at by the subtle, devious, somewhat sinister host who knows but
never unequivocally reveals. The point, if there is one, is to play
adroitly in the certain knowledge of final defeat."
A tale told along receding capricious lines and a teller who "in
susceptible childhood...has already harbored 'the secrets of a confined
madman', influenced by the "metaphysical counsel of a whimsical,
possibly daft great-aunt" who invites him to " 'Look at the harlequins!
All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are
situations and sums. Put two things together—jokes, images — and you get
a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!' "
demands a great deal from a reader's own imaginative capacities. But
Maloff goes on: "Imagine an invented life compounded in continuously
shifting proportions of known facts, dream, fantasy, illusion and
reality, in all their slippery relations, told by a lonely, old half-mad
'memoirist,' and you begin to see the magnitude of the game's odds,
tilted wholly in the house's favor, which is to say Nabokov is as
relentless and duplicitous a necromancer at 75 as ever he was in the
high period of his...youth."
Maloff outlines a few parallels, such as the similarities between
Vladimir Vladimirovitch Nabokov and Vadim Vadimovitch, both bom in St.
Petersburg
in 1899, their childhood developped in similar circumstances, was
educated at Cambridge, gained fame as emigré writers and moved to the
US. Both also taught at Cornell (in LATH, Quirn University), made a
transition from Russian to English... and, warns Maloff, to English or
"a language that misleadingly looks like English but is in essence quite
wholly created and one of the world's authentic miracles—"the
fata-morganic prose I had willed into being in the
desert of exile") and both became celebrated novelists. For Marloff
"between, beyond and beneath the discernible lines to his own life,
Nabokov imagines a correlative life and an imagination resembling but at
a remove from his own—invents, that is, a life that he might have lived
and a semblance of the imagination that absorbs from that life the
materials of his art. All of it he has transcribed in the forms,
language and imagined processes by which dreamed life and suffered
experience— from the glow of a lovely girl's skin and the set of her
chin, the down of her forearm to the familiar Nabokovian confusions of
time and duration, space and direction, memory and image, as well as his
nightmares and waking dreams, the symptoms of a recurring "madness" and
other fantasms of the mind, the processes by which the real and the
illusory life are re-created into Vadim's/Vladimir's fictions... A man
who's not sure of his name and must find the coordinates of his
existence somewhere, even if he must invent them, or discover them in
the iridescence of a butterfly, or in the rigors of art."
For Maloff "Nabokov's narratives unravel deep within the texture of his
work, and serve as reference points for the mind while the eye is
transfixed by the whirling sleight-of-hand; Russia, England, France,
America; three or four successive wives; the fitful, hectic processes of
creation. Iris, lyric love of his young manhood and first of his wives,
is killed by her mad, thwarted lover. Annette, first Vadim's inept
typist, then his inept wife, and between these states the occasion or
object of a small masterpiece of a defloration scene, disappears with a
lady friend who may or may not have designs on her—but not before
producing a daughter for him. That he has in the barren chill of their
marriage sought the brief consoiation of a lascivious graduate student
is the pretext but not the cause of her departure. Louise, number three,
the wicked stepmother and something of a tramp, vanishes with some lover
or other to Florida or
Florence or somewhere else—leaving Vadim, as the others have, to his
lonely devices and his consuming art, all of them become memory for the
old writer, lost in time and recoverable only through the endless
re-creation of his fluid self."
"The daughter, Bel, his Annabel Lee, his Lolita and melancholy
inspiration for that novel (as written by Vadim more evocatively,
suggestively entitled
A Kingdom By the Sea), his captive, enchanted princess denied him by
Annette throughout her childhood and forever after by that vilest of
despoliators, another man, in fact her husband — Bel is granted him only
for the butterfly years of her pubescence following Annette's violent,
happy death." The protagonist's years with Bel, "give rise to the
tenderest, loveliest, saddest fata-morganic prose in the novel: the two
of them alone in their kingdom by the sea, two beautiful children,
father and daughter, tremblingly innocent, delicately sexlessly lewd
lovers, joyously free during that brief reprieve to ramble the
'intelligent' trails of the far mountains inhabited only by other
butterflies and a magical, wondrous landscape out of time. Not of flesh
and the world but of the state of 'being in love': Nabokov is the
incomparable master of that trance, and here it is reserved only for the
brief doomed period when he is first enamored of Iris—and for Bel, for
the gift of time between childhood and adolescence, for her incipience,
before they are awakened from their dream and exiled from their kingdom.
Then the corruptors appear..."
The novel offers glimpses of this story "through the distortions of
memory,while we are mesmerized by the dazzling,blinding, multifaceted
surface."
Another trait shared by Vadim and Vladimir is their view of art as
"performance, a masque, a circus, a trapeze act conducted — as he says
of his shift from Russian to English—'without net.' A matter of life and
death, sanity and madness, every step is dangerous. One wants simply to
record those steps--those figures and figurations-- and regard them rapt
with admiration, as in a brief paragraph, a sentence, a phrase Nabokov
turns and circles, spins and whirls with arrogant perfection, superb
mastery." For Maloff, "if novels were composed of marvelous sentences
Nabokov would surely have to be judged the greatest
living writer; and it is certain he would be some kind of great writer
if he were writing travel brochures, field guides to lepidoptery,
technical manuals for the
automotive industry. But novels are not composed of beautiful sentences.
Occasionally...we long for a huge, lumbering, sweating, grunting
workhorse of a
sentence that will ploddingly perform the brute labor of bearing its
terrible,necessary burden from here to there.But of course getting
"there" is not the
point of Vadim's novel; the point lies in the elaboration of fantastic,
fugual designs,gorgeous patterns and textures,all with contemptuous
grace and virtuosity. Such art is in the essence and by disdainful
intention decadent..."
Marloff considers Nabokov "our great decadent, our reigning mandarin and
eccentric, a supreme, determinedly minor artist whom major ones might
well envy while criticules continue to carp and gnash the stubs of their
teeth."
Search archive with Google:
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Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
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Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/
Look at the Harlequins!
by Vladimir Nabokov
THE NEW REPUBLIC, December 28, 1974, a review by Saul Maloff
Opening his review with a quote ( "I met...the first of my three or four
successive wives in somewhat odd circumstances,the development of which
resembled a clumsy conspiracy, with nonsensical details and a main
plotter who not only knew nothing of its real object but insisted on
making inept moves that seemed to preclude the slightest possibility of
success. Yet out of these very mistakes he unwittingly wove a web, in
which a set of reciprocal blunders on my part caused me to get involved
and fulfill a destiny that was the only aim of the plot.") Maloff
observes that "the maze, the mystery, the Nabokovian minefield, the
deadly games we're obliged to play by conflicting house-rules slyly
hinted at by the subtle, devious, somewhat sinister host who knows but
never unequivocally reveals. The point, if there is one, is to play
adroitly in the certain knowledge of final defeat."
A tale told along receding capricious lines and a teller who "in
susceptible childhood...has already harbored 'the secrets of a confined
madman', influenced by the "metaphysical counsel of a whimsical,
possibly daft great-aunt" who invites him to " 'Look at the harlequins!
All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are
situations and sums. Put two things together—jokes, images — and you get
a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!' "
demands a great deal from a reader's own imaginative capacities. But
Maloff goes on: "Imagine an invented life compounded in continuously
shifting proportions of known facts, dream, fantasy, illusion and
reality, in all their slippery relations, told by a lonely, old half-mad
'memoirist,' and you begin to see the magnitude of the game's odds,
tilted wholly in the house's favor, which is to say Nabokov is as
relentless and duplicitous a necromancer at 75 as ever he was in the
high period of his...youth."
Maloff outlines a few parallels, such as the similarities between
Vladimir Vladimirovitch Nabokov and Vadim Vadimovitch, both bom in St.
Petersburg
in 1899, their childhood developped in similar circumstances, was
educated at Cambridge, gained fame as emigré writers and moved to the
US. Both also taught at Cornell (in LATH, Quirn University), made a
transition from Russian to English... and, warns Maloff, to English or
"a language that misleadingly looks like English but is in essence quite
wholly created and one of the world's authentic miracles—"the
fata-morganic prose I had willed into being in the
desert of exile") and both became celebrated novelists. For Marloff
"between, beyond and beneath the discernible lines to his own life,
Nabokov imagines a correlative life and an imagination resembling but at
a remove from his own—invents, that is, a life that he might have lived
and a semblance of the imagination that absorbs from that life the
materials of his art. All of it he has transcribed in the forms,
language and imagined processes by which dreamed life and suffered
experience— from the glow of a lovely girl's skin and the set of her
chin, the down of her forearm to the familiar Nabokovian confusions of
time and duration, space and direction, memory and image, as well as his
nightmares and waking dreams, the symptoms of a recurring "madness" and
other fantasms of the mind, the processes by which the real and the
illusory life are re-created into Vadim's/Vladimir's fictions... A man
who's not sure of his name and must find the coordinates of his
existence somewhere, even if he must invent them, or discover them in
the iridescence of a butterfly, or in the rigors of art."
For Maloff "Nabokov's narratives unravel deep within the texture of his
work, and serve as reference points for the mind while the eye is
transfixed by the whirling sleight-of-hand; Russia, England, France,
America; three or four successive wives; the fitful, hectic processes of
creation. Iris, lyric love of his young manhood and first of his wives,
is killed by her mad, thwarted lover. Annette, first Vadim's inept
typist, then his inept wife, and between these states the occasion or
object of a small masterpiece of a defloration scene, disappears with a
lady friend who may or may not have designs on her—but not before
producing a daughter for him. That he has in the barren chill of their
marriage sought the brief consoiation of a lascivious graduate student
is the pretext but not the cause of her departure. Louise, number three,
the wicked stepmother and something of a tramp, vanishes with some lover
or other to Florida or
Florence or somewhere else—leaving Vadim, as the others have, to his
lonely devices and his consuming art, all of them become memory for the
old writer, lost in time and recoverable only through the endless
re-creation of his fluid self."
"The daughter, Bel, his Annabel Lee, his Lolita and melancholy
inspiration for that novel (as written by Vadim more evocatively,
suggestively entitled
A Kingdom By the Sea), his captive, enchanted princess denied him by
Annette throughout her childhood and forever after by that vilest of
despoliators, another man, in fact her husband — Bel is granted him only
for the butterfly years of her pubescence following Annette's violent,
happy death." The protagonist's years with Bel, "give rise to the
tenderest, loveliest, saddest fata-morganic prose in the novel: the two
of them alone in their kingdom by the sea, two beautiful children,
father and daughter, tremblingly innocent, delicately sexlessly lewd
lovers, joyously free during that brief reprieve to ramble the
'intelligent' trails of the far mountains inhabited only by other
butterflies and a magical, wondrous landscape out of time. Not of flesh
and the world but of the state of 'being in love': Nabokov is the
incomparable master of that trance, and here it is reserved only for the
brief doomed period when he is first enamored of Iris—and for Bel, for
the gift of time between childhood and adolescence, for her incipience,
before they are awakened from their dream and exiled from their kingdom.
Then the corruptors appear..."
The novel offers glimpses of this story "through the distortions of
memory,while we are mesmerized by the dazzling,blinding, multifaceted
surface."
Another trait shared by Vadim and Vladimir is their view of art as
"performance, a masque, a circus, a trapeze act conducted — as he says
of his shift from Russian to English—'without net.' A matter of life and
death, sanity and madness, every step is dangerous. One wants simply to
record those steps--those figures and figurations-- and regard them rapt
with admiration, as in a brief paragraph, a sentence, a phrase Nabokov
turns and circles, spins and whirls with arrogant perfection, superb
mastery." For Maloff, "if novels were composed of marvelous sentences
Nabokov would surely have to be judged the greatest
living writer; and it is certain he would be some kind of great writer
if he were writing travel brochures, field guides to lepidoptery,
technical manuals for the
automotive industry. But novels are not composed of beautiful sentences.
Occasionally...we long for a huge, lumbering, sweating, grunting
workhorse of a
sentence that will ploddingly perform the brute labor of bearing its
terrible,necessary burden from here to there.But of course getting
"there" is not the
point of Vadim's novel; the point lies in the elaboration of fantastic,
fugual designs,gorgeous patterns and textures,all with contemptuous
grace and virtuosity. Such art is in the essence and by disdainful
intention decadent..."
Marloff considers Nabokov "our great decadent, our reigning mandarin and
eccentric, a supreme, determinedly minor artist whom major ones might
well envy while criticules continue to carp and gnash the stubs of their
teeth."
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/