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[NABOKOV-L] [THOUGHTS] Martins Amis, Updike and Steffi Graff
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Young Nabokov readers have an exciting experience ahead of them since so much of the old world is slowly fading and Nabokov's contemporaries or quasi-contemporaries are aging away, along with an Epoch. Not having been bred on English-Lit. only this week did Martin Amis' "Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions" reach my eyes ( by courtesy of Jacob Wilkenfeld) and his critical essays, applying the words he used for Johyn Updike, are "littered with brilliancies". But comfortingly dated, although his essays ranged from 1984 to 1993.
His interview with Véra and Dmitri stands out from the rest because of its tenderness that adhered to their own fierce loyalties. He observed: " This kind of talk,like the Nabokovian indignation, is all of a piece with the nature of the family commitment. It bespeaks great self-belief, but there is no self-importance in it. It is selfless, indeed almost impersonal, in the same way that art is impersonal. It is also, I imagine, very Russian in its timbre."
(his essay on Mrs. Nabokov is immediately followed by a painful one on Bombay and Naipaul's India).
In the extract from his 1987 interview with John Updike he compared the latter's self-revelatory openness to Humbert Humbert's: "Updike tags along, not only into the bedroom but... Humbert, in Lolita, wishes that he could turn his symphet inside out and gorge himself on her very organs. Updike unpeels and vivisects his characteris in this way." A year later, writing about "Tennis: The Women's Game", he employed the word "nymphet": " In First Class you find the top ten ladies ( or bobbysoxers or nymphets), with footrests up, harassed by..." and later situated their nymphethood in a way similar to Humbert's: "Hence the money trap of the women's game, and one of its peculiar cruelties: as an earner, a girl can peak at puberty and be 'history' by the age of sixteen."
Fortunately we, as readers, are not nymphets romping in the literary courts but, perhaps, closer to the Olympic torch-bearers.
Jansy
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His interview with Véra and Dmitri stands out from the rest because of its tenderness that adhered to their own fierce loyalties. He observed: " This kind of talk,like the Nabokovian indignation, is all of a piece with the nature of the family commitment. It bespeaks great self-belief, but there is no self-importance in it. It is selfless, indeed almost impersonal, in the same way that art is impersonal. It is also, I imagine, very Russian in its timbre."
(his essay on Mrs. Nabokov is immediately followed by a painful one on Bombay and Naipaul's India).
In the extract from his 1987 interview with John Updike he compared the latter's self-revelatory openness to Humbert Humbert's: "Updike tags along, not only into the bedroom but... Humbert, in Lolita, wishes that he could turn his symphet inside out and gorge himself on her very organs. Updike unpeels and vivisects his characteris in this way." A year later, writing about "Tennis: The Women's Game", he employed the word "nymphet": " In First Class you find the top ten ladies ( or bobbysoxers or nymphets), with footrests up, harassed by..." and later situated their nymphethood in a way similar to Humbert's: "Hence the money trap of the women's game, and one of its peculiar cruelties: as an earner, a girl can peak at puberty and be 'history' by the age of sixteen."
Fortunately we, as readers, are not nymphets romping in the literary courts but, perhaps, closer to the Olympic torch-bearers.
Jansy
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/