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From: Suellen Stringer-Hye <Stringers@LIBRARY.Vanderbilt.edu>
Pornography, the First Amendment, and Lolita,---it all comes round
again...
On October 17, Joan E. Bertin, in a _Los Angeles Times_ op-ed piece
discussed the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 in its relation
to Adrian Lyne's now famously unreleased film version of Lolita.
Bertin denounces the Childhood Pornography Prevention Act stating that
this will not effectively stop sexual abuse and exploitation. She
complains that:
...even if a movie like "Lolita" was filmed with an adult body
double, it apparently would be prohibited if it contains
simulated sexual conduct that appears to involve a minor. If you
recall, that's what "Lolita" is about: a man's sexual obsession
with a pubescent girl.
Seconding this viewpoint , _The Economist_ ran an anonymous article
called "Self-appointed censors" in the October 11, issue. The author
uses "Lolita's" distribution woes to frame a discussion about
censorship.
IN MOST western democracies, state censorship of publishing and
the arts has, thankfully, more or less disappeared. But there is
a subtler threat to freedom of artistic expression that liberals,
in the old fashioned sense, ought to be worried about. This is
the claim heard more and more from shocked or offended groups to
a special say, even a veto, over what books are published or what
art is shown.
On the other side of the argument, a December 30, _New York Times_
article reported that a German group that campaigns against
pedophilia called for a ban on screenings of the new film version of
''Lolita".'' The group, Kim Initiative, denounced the film as ''an
attempt to promote pedophilia."
Norman Podhoretz , an early protege of Lionel Trilling, and a
champion of neo-conservativism in his long tenure as editor of
_Commentary_, in and April 1997 _Commentary_ article entitled
"Lolita, My mother-in-law, the Marquis de Sade, and Larry Flint"
blames Nabokov for positioning Lolita at the precipice of unbridled
pederasty. Excerpts from this article appear below. Full text can be
found at: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/9704/norman.html
NOT LONG ago, the Library of America put out a beautiful new
three-volume edition of the novels and memoirs of Vladimir
Nabokov, and I decided to seize upon it as a convenient occasion
for reacquainting myself with his work. Which explains why I
happened to be reading Lolita on the very day a story by Nina
Bernstein appeared on the front page of the New York Times that
cast a horrifying new light on Nabokov's masterpiece. It also
brought memories to the surface that had long been buried, and
simultaneously forced me into rethinking a number of questions I
had up till then considered fairly well resolved. As I was going
through this difficult process, I was given a few more pushes by
Milos Forman's movie, The People vs. Larry Flynt, and two
recently published books, Roger Shattuck's Forbidden Knowledge2
and Rochelle Gurstein's The Repeal of Reticence.3 By the time I
was through, my peace of mind had been so disturbed that I was
left wishing that those old memories and those settled questions
had been allowed to remain in their contentedly slumberous state.
Podhertz makes comments such as these:
But as I have now come to understand on rereading Nabokov in the
new Library of America edition, there was something less
admirable that went along with his linguistic genius and that he
also had in common with Joyce: a contempt for his audience. I
realize this is a very harsh charge, but how else can one
honestly describe the attitude implicit in a style so in love
with itself that it often loses sight of what it is supposed to
be conveying, and so aesthetically narcissistic that it
intransigently refuses to make any concessions whatsoever to the
reader, even to the point of often requiring an editor's
footnotes to decipher the pyrotechnical wordplay in which it so
mischievously indulges?
The very brilliance of his language, the very sharpness of his
wit, the very artfulness of his treatment all help to shatter the
taboo and thereby to rob pedophilia of its horror. In other words,
in aestheticizing the hideous, Nabokov as I can now clearly
see-comes very close to prettifying it.
Worse yet, he comes very close to excusing it.
However preposterous Podhoretz's accusations, many in the film
industry may be afraid that release of Lyne's film in the US will
trigger a wave of pedophilia for which they or their interests will be
considered responsible. And who can say this is not true? A casual
search on the internet for "Lolita" delivers two index screens of
hard-core porn sites before ever a mention of Nabokov or his novel
appears. The subtle indictment of the "Lolita" mentality that is a
part of the book's complexity is lost on the non-readers who traffic
these sites.
In the November 1996 interview I conducted with Stephen Schiff, the
sceenwriter for Lyne's "Lolita", we did not discuss the current
difficulties in finding a distributor. When I recently asked him
about the above situation, he commented,
What, precisely, do the fears of a movie's causing a "wave of
pedophilia" amount to? Does someone really believe that a
viewer of "Lolita" might sit in the movie theatre, watching the
deterioration of Humbert's life, and say to himself, "Huh!
Pedophilia! Never thought of that! Think I'll try it!"?
That, as absurd as it sounds, is nevertheless the tenor of the
public terror. It is not, of course, the tenor of the studios'
terror. What they fear is something more bottom-line:
picketers, boycotts, stockholder revolts, small-town sheriffs
confiscating prints and jailing everyone involved, etc. Those
fears seem infinitely more reasonable to me than the bogeyman
of a "wave of pedophilia," but they are still not reason enough
to keep this movie off American screens.
In the meantime, many articles discussing the film from both
"first amendment" and "artistic" viewpoints have surfaced. Below is a
quick list of some of the most notable appearing after 9/1/97.
(Recent articles mentioned on Nabokv-l not included)
Richard Covington, "'Lolita Makes The European Rounds"
_Los Angeles Times_, January 20, 1998, p. 1.
John Blades, "A Look at Lolita", _Chicago Tribune_, January 4, 1998,
p. 12,
Liz Smith,"The Woes of Lolita" _Newsday_, November 11, 1997, p.A15.
Anonymous,"Pedophilia is Taboo, but incest seems
accepted"Sun-Sentinel_ (Fort Lauderdale, FL), , October 2, 1997,
p.5E.
Derek Malcolm, "Pass The Popcorn; Bah! Humbert!" _The Guardian_
(London) September 25, 1997, p. T8.
Celestine Bohlen "A New 'Lolita' Stalls in Europe; Hollywood
Snubs Remake of the Tale of an Adolescent Siren", _New York
Times_ September 23, 1997, p. 1.
Derek Malcolm, "Lolita Back In The Limelight", _The Guardian_
(London), September 22, 1997, p.20.
Anonymous, "Babylon can be a hard sell", _Economist_
October 11, 1997, p.108
Jack Kroll, "Lolita's Fatal Attraction", _Newsweek_
October 6, 1997, p.72.
John Leonard, "The New Puritanism"; _ Nation_
Nov 24, 1997 p.11.
Rachel Abramowitz, "How do you solve a problem like Lolita?"
_Premiere_ p. 80.
*********************************************************************
SERGEI and HOMOSEXUALITY
In Berlin, Charting Gay Art's Struggle to Emerge
An August 3, 1997 article in the New York Times by Michael Ratcliffe
describes an exhibit held in Berlin at the Academy of Arts to
celebrate 100 years of the international gay movement. Comprised of
1,000 paintings, drawings, photographs, documents and books the
exhibit sought to express the exuberance of "...a homosexual culture
that has become global in the last years of this century."
Vladimir Nabokov's gay brother, Sergei, about whom he writes
with bewildered remorse in his memoirs, died of exhaustion in
the concentration camp at Neuengamme. We look with new eyes at
the 1918 photograph of five Nabokov siblings: not first, as
before, at the supercool, pale-browed genius of 19 on the left,
but at Sergei, an intense, owlish adolescent in Yalta school
uniform and pince-nez. They don't even look related. (Their
father had been a leading liberal campaigner for sexual reforms
in St. Petersburg in the 1890's.) The Gestapo warrant for
Sergei's arrest is also here; the Nazis kept everything.
*********************************************************************
JAKOB AND JEWEL: VN AND POPULAR CULTURE
Two musicians, Jewel and Jakob Dylan have recently been
characterized in the popular press by their taste for Nabokov.
Gerri Hirshey in a June 12, 1997 article called "Jakob's Ladder"
describes this scenario,
"Disco sucks!" bellows a husky partisan in a Bruins jersey. A
lacy, burgundy-colored bra floats onstage. Then - thunk! - a
yellowed, dogeared paperback of Lolita lands at the scuffed toes
of Jakob's black brogans. He looks puzzled, a bit concerned. How
could anyone out there guess his fondness for Nabokov ? Could
they possibly know that he can read a page of the old
reprobate's lush prose and see a half-dozen songs fly out of it?
Round midnight, sitting in the darkened back lounge of the
Wallflowers' rolling bus, Jakob Dylan will wonder aloud: "Where
are they getting their information? How?"
In "The Shaping of Jewel" which appeared on July 21,1997, in _Time _,
Howard Chua-Eoan depicts the rock singer as,
The street-smart optimism of pop's new goddess rises from a
life of near poverty in Alaska and San Diego Her metaphors can
be equine. She has said she is not a workhorse, not a racehorse,
but a show horse. She brings up a fictional character who looked
"impossibly sad, like a horse's eyes." It is a quote, she says,
from Nabokov, and she pronounces the novelist's name correctly,
with the stress on the second syllable, exactly as exacting old
Vladimir used to instruct his readers. He might have been able
to appreciate this latest of pop goddesses, this star of the
Lilith Fair. After all, it was a Nabokov character who said that
while he was capable of loving Eve, "it was Lilith he longed
for." Jewel's is a fey, insidious charm, equal parts worldly and
naive, where flaws-the crooked nose and crooked teeth she is so
proud of-only betray an uncommon beauty. Then there is the
improbable match of slender youth and that voice-an
astonishingly versatile instrument ranging from soul-shattering
yodels to the most eloquent of whispers to arch Cole Porter-ish
recitative.
KURT VONNEGUT
Kurt Vonnegut, recently in the news due to the novel
commonly publicized as his last, is compared to Nabokov in this
excerpt from an article "Vonnegut's last laugh: A talk with America's
greatest living Saab dealer" in the October 7, _Village Voice_ .
However unlikely it sounds-plenty, right?-I also think Vonnegut
and Nabokov have things in common. No, not everything: Vonnegut,
I love. Nabokov, I revere. But they're both the products of lost
paradises, which reverberate in their work with a nostalgia
unmarred by self-pity. Nabokov's idyllic, cushy Russian youth
has the advantage of sounding like paradise; Vonnegut's was
prewar Indianapolis, which doesn't. His parents didn't have a
happy adulthood: his mother finally killed herself not long
before Kurt was captured in the Battle of the Bulge. Even so,
he's one of the few American writers to have had a happy
childhood, which was also a privileged one, until his
prosperous family went bust in the Depression.
STOLEN BOOKS
As reported in the December 7, 1997 _New York Times_ p. 3,
in order to protect books that are regularly stolen, Tower Records
created a behind-the-counter placard that reads : ''Tower's Most
Wanted,'' and features sinister-looking photos and the names of
the authors of these books. Hot authors are Jack Keruoac,
Charles Bukowski, Albert Camus, Paul Auster, Raymond Carver,
Cormac McCarthy, Henry Miller and Jim Thompson. Keeping this good
company is, of course, Vladimir Nabokov.
Citywide, the hottest books are, ''Junkie'' by William S.
Burroughs, ''On the Road'' by Jack Kerouac and ''Lolita'' by
Vladimir Nabokov . In addition, anything by Charles Bukowski has
to be nailed down.
The article, far from denouncing thievery decides,
Perhaps people shouldn't be so concerned by all this theft.
There are those who say that the taste reflected by the thieves
is the taste not of Americans in general, but simply of those
who steal. And there is some good news. At least there are
people left who still want to read.
YOUNG GIRLS
In the March 1997 Los Angeles Magazine, Lawrence Weschler makes an
interesting comparison between Gidget and Lolita in an article called
"From Hitler to Hollywood". The article traces the fortunes and
fates of German emigres who landed in Hollywood after WWII.
IN THE MID 1950s, A GERMAN emigre writer named Frederick Kohner
watched, mystified, as his Americanized teenage daughter
learned to surf on Malibu Beach. Kohner decided to write a
fictionalized account of his daughter's exploits, deploying as
the book's title the nickname she had acquired at the beach:
Gidget. Around the same time, a Russian emigre named Nabokov
living in Ithaca, New York, published astory about another
American teenager called Lolita. Both books concerned girls
coming of age, both were quintessentially American, and both
were by emigres.
PSORIASIS
In the December 20 -27th _British Medical Journal_ Frans Meulenberg
profiles literary incidents of psoriasis along with the true life
occurences that inspired them. He discusses in detail John Updike's
bouts with the disease and the manifestation of them in several of
his works. He also states,
Vladimir Nabokov concealed his psoriasis. For example, in the
collection of interviews with Nabokov the term psoriasis is
never used." In February 1937 Nabokov suffered a bad attack.'2
On 15 May of that year he somewhat pathetically wrote to his
wife, Vera: "I continue with the radiation treatments every day
and am pretty much cured. You know-now I can tell you
frankly-the indescribable torments I endured in February, before
these treatments, drove me to the border of suicide-a border I
was not authorised to cross because I had you in my luggage."'"
His biographer mentions only one more exacerbation of psoriasis
after that, which occurred in the late 1960s when the strain of
writing the novel Ada fell from Nabokov's shoulders.
Whereas Updike has written about psoriasis at length, Nabokov
devotes one page to the disease, in the novel Ada.'8 He mentions
"a spectacular skin disease that had been portrayed recently by
a famous American novelist in his Chiron and described in
side-splitting style by a co-sufferer who wrote essays for a
London weekly." The two patients with psoriasis in Ada exchange
notes with tips: "Mercury!" or "Hohensonne works wonders." Other
pieces of advice are found in a one volume encyclopaedia, and
involve taking hot baths at least twice a month and avoiding
spices.
The article concludes with this insight.
Psoriasis functions as a metaphor for the creative process.
Psoriasis is the result of the implosion of the artist, and the
novels on psoriasis cultivate the idea that the psoriasis plaque
is the Achilles heel of the introvert individualist, the artist
who looks upon the world as a guardsman from the ivory tower of
his psoriasis. His salvation is a make believe world or an
entirely private world: the imagined past or the world of art.
*********************************************************************
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Letters
The Nation
New York
Dec 22, 1997
I was sad to see in John Leonard's sprightly article on
Lolita ["The New Puritanism," Nov. 24] that he picked up the
canard that William Styron floated (and apologized to me for
later) that Farrar Straus had turned down Lolita. The facts
are-and they are so stated in the Nabokov letters-that I
offered a contract to Nabokov for his book, and he said he
would accept it provided he could use a nom de plume, as he
feared he would lose his job at Cornell if he did not
disguise himself. All my dealings were directly with him, but
also via Elena Wilson, an old friend, and I showed the
manuscript to Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy and of course Edmund
Wilson. They had mixed reactions. Obviously I told Nabokov
that I couldn't do that as we would be asked to defend the
book and needed the author to stand with us. That's the story.
ROGER W STRAUS
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
LEONARD REPLIES
New York City
Canard perhaps, but picked up from Boyd's biography, Volume
II: "Meanwhile Edmund Wilson had suggested that Nabokov show
Lolita to his current publisher, Farrar Straus. Roger Straus
turned the book down and counseled Nabokov against publishing
it pseudonymously, for although that might at first safeguard
Cornell, it would weaken the book's chances in court." No
mention of Straus offering a contract. Similarly: "Viking,
Simon and Schuster New Directions, Farrar Straus, and now
Doubleday all thought it impossible to publish the book and
avoid prosecution. It was high time to look abroad." So much
for very long biographies and short selective memories. JOHN
LEONARD
*********************************************************************
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Two books of interest to Nabokophiles but not likely to be noted in
the usual channels of communication are abstracted below.
BETWEEN HEAVEN AND HELL: A Thousand Years of Russia's Artistic
Experience
W. Bruce Lincoln. Viking, $34.95 (544p) ISBN 0-679-87568-6
Lincoln investigates the psychological and aesthetic tensions
in artists like composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), whom he
views as suspended between East and West. Relying heavily on
primary sources, he gauges the impact of emigres like Tsvetaeva,
Nabokov , Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn, who developed new forms that
merged with artistic currents long suppressed in the Soviet
Union to create a new force in Russian life of the post-Soviet
era
DARWIN'S ORCHESTRA: An Almanac of Nature in History and the Arts
Michael Sims. Henry Holt 1997 508p ISBN 0-8050-4220-2
This book is a series of essays drawn from the literature of
Natural History and Popular Culture and adhering to a daybook
format --one essay for each day of the year. 12, June 1948 is
entitled "Nabokov's Butterflies" because of the fact that
Nabokov's own account of his lifelong fascination with
butterflies appeared in the June 12, 1948 issue of the _New
Yorker_ . Nabokov also figures in the 17, November 1912 essay,
"The Metamorphosis of Franz K". On this day Kafka began writing
Der Verwandlung. _Darwin's Orchestra_ is a quirky book of
facts and dates, well researched and a lot of fun.
Suellen Stringer-Hye
Jean and Alexander Heard Library
Vanderbilt University
stringers@library.vanderbilt.edu
Pornography, the First Amendment, and Lolita,---it all comes round
again...
On October 17, Joan E. Bertin, in a _Los Angeles Times_ op-ed piece
discussed the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 in its relation
to Adrian Lyne's now famously unreleased film version of Lolita.
Bertin denounces the Childhood Pornography Prevention Act stating that
this will not effectively stop sexual abuse and exploitation. She
complains that:
...even if a movie like "Lolita" was filmed with an adult body
double, it apparently would be prohibited if it contains
simulated sexual conduct that appears to involve a minor. If you
recall, that's what "Lolita" is about: a man's sexual obsession
with a pubescent girl.
Seconding this viewpoint , _The Economist_ ran an anonymous article
called "Self-appointed censors" in the October 11, issue. The author
uses "Lolita's" distribution woes to frame a discussion about
censorship.
IN MOST western democracies, state censorship of publishing and
the arts has, thankfully, more or less disappeared. But there is
a subtler threat to freedom of artistic expression that liberals,
in the old fashioned sense, ought to be worried about. This is
the claim heard more and more from shocked or offended groups to
a special say, even a veto, over what books are published or what
art is shown.
On the other side of the argument, a December 30, _New York Times_
article reported that a German group that campaigns against
pedophilia called for a ban on screenings of the new film version of
''Lolita".'' The group, Kim Initiative, denounced the film as ''an
attempt to promote pedophilia."
Norman Podhoretz , an early protege of Lionel Trilling, and a
champion of neo-conservativism in his long tenure as editor of
_Commentary_, in and April 1997 _Commentary_ article entitled
"Lolita, My mother-in-law, the Marquis de Sade, and Larry Flint"
blames Nabokov for positioning Lolita at the precipice of unbridled
pederasty. Excerpts from this article appear below. Full text can be
found at: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/9704/norman.html
NOT LONG ago, the Library of America put out a beautiful new
three-volume edition of the novels and memoirs of Vladimir
Nabokov, and I decided to seize upon it as a convenient occasion
for reacquainting myself with his work. Which explains why I
happened to be reading Lolita on the very day a story by Nina
Bernstein appeared on the front page of the New York Times that
cast a horrifying new light on Nabokov's masterpiece. It also
brought memories to the surface that had long been buried, and
simultaneously forced me into rethinking a number of questions I
had up till then considered fairly well resolved. As I was going
through this difficult process, I was given a few more pushes by
Milos Forman's movie, The People vs. Larry Flynt, and two
recently published books, Roger Shattuck's Forbidden Knowledge2
and Rochelle Gurstein's The Repeal of Reticence.3 By the time I
was through, my peace of mind had been so disturbed that I was
left wishing that those old memories and those settled questions
had been allowed to remain in their contentedly slumberous state.
Podhertz makes comments such as these:
But as I have now come to understand on rereading Nabokov in the
new Library of America edition, there was something less
admirable that went along with his linguistic genius and that he
also had in common with Joyce: a contempt for his audience. I
realize this is a very harsh charge, but how else can one
honestly describe the attitude implicit in a style so in love
with itself that it often loses sight of what it is supposed to
be conveying, and so aesthetically narcissistic that it
intransigently refuses to make any concessions whatsoever to the
reader, even to the point of often requiring an editor's
footnotes to decipher the pyrotechnical wordplay in which it so
mischievously indulges?
The very brilliance of his language, the very sharpness of his
wit, the very artfulness of his treatment all help to shatter the
taboo and thereby to rob pedophilia of its horror. In other words,
in aestheticizing the hideous, Nabokov as I can now clearly
see-comes very close to prettifying it.
Worse yet, he comes very close to excusing it.
However preposterous Podhoretz's accusations, many in the film
industry may be afraid that release of Lyne's film in the US will
trigger a wave of pedophilia for which they or their interests will be
considered responsible. And who can say this is not true? A casual
search on the internet for "Lolita" delivers two index screens of
hard-core porn sites before ever a mention of Nabokov or his novel
appears. The subtle indictment of the "Lolita" mentality that is a
part of the book's complexity is lost on the non-readers who traffic
these sites.
In the November 1996 interview I conducted with Stephen Schiff, the
sceenwriter for Lyne's "Lolita", we did not discuss the current
difficulties in finding a distributor. When I recently asked him
about the above situation, he commented,
What, precisely, do the fears of a movie's causing a "wave of
pedophilia" amount to? Does someone really believe that a
viewer of "Lolita" might sit in the movie theatre, watching the
deterioration of Humbert's life, and say to himself, "Huh!
Pedophilia! Never thought of that! Think I'll try it!"?
That, as absurd as it sounds, is nevertheless the tenor of the
public terror. It is not, of course, the tenor of the studios'
terror. What they fear is something more bottom-line:
picketers, boycotts, stockholder revolts, small-town sheriffs
confiscating prints and jailing everyone involved, etc. Those
fears seem infinitely more reasonable to me than the bogeyman
of a "wave of pedophilia," but they are still not reason enough
to keep this movie off American screens.
In the meantime, many articles discussing the film from both
"first amendment" and "artistic" viewpoints have surfaced. Below is a
quick list of some of the most notable appearing after 9/1/97.
(Recent articles mentioned on Nabokv-l not included)
Richard Covington, "'Lolita Makes The European Rounds"
_Los Angeles Times_, January 20, 1998, p. 1.
John Blades, "A Look at Lolita", _Chicago Tribune_, January 4, 1998,
p. 12,
Liz Smith,"The Woes of Lolita" _Newsday_, November 11, 1997, p.A15.
Anonymous,"Pedophilia is Taboo, but incest seems
accepted"Sun-Sentinel_ (Fort Lauderdale, FL), , October 2, 1997,
p.5E.
Derek Malcolm, "Pass The Popcorn; Bah! Humbert!" _The Guardian_
(London) September 25, 1997, p. T8.
Celestine Bohlen "A New 'Lolita' Stalls in Europe; Hollywood
Snubs Remake of the Tale of an Adolescent Siren", _New York
Times_ September 23, 1997, p. 1.
Derek Malcolm, "Lolita Back In The Limelight", _The Guardian_
(London), September 22, 1997, p.20.
Anonymous, "Babylon can be a hard sell", _Economist_
October 11, 1997, p.108
Jack Kroll, "Lolita's Fatal Attraction", _Newsweek_
October 6, 1997, p.72.
John Leonard, "The New Puritanism"; _ Nation_
Nov 24, 1997 p.11.
Rachel Abramowitz, "How do you solve a problem like Lolita?"
_Premiere_ p. 80.
*********************************************************************
SERGEI and HOMOSEXUALITY
In Berlin, Charting Gay Art's Struggle to Emerge
An August 3, 1997 article in the New York Times by Michael Ratcliffe
describes an exhibit held in Berlin at the Academy of Arts to
celebrate 100 years of the international gay movement. Comprised of
1,000 paintings, drawings, photographs, documents and books the
exhibit sought to express the exuberance of "...a homosexual culture
that has become global in the last years of this century."
Vladimir Nabokov's gay brother, Sergei, about whom he writes
with bewildered remorse in his memoirs, died of exhaustion in
the concentration camp at Neuengamme. We look with new eyes at
the 1918 photograph of five Nabokov siblings: not first, as
before, at the supercool, pale-browed genius of 19 on the left,
but at Sergei, an intense, owlish adolescent in Yalta school
uniform and pince-nez. They don't even look related. (Their
father had been a leading liberal campaigner for sexual reforms
in St. Petersburg in the 1890's.) The Gestapo warrant for
Sergei's arrest is also here; the Nazis kept everything.
*********************************************************************
JAKOB AND JEWEL: VN AND POPULAR CULTURE
Two musicians, Jewel and Jakob Dylan have recently been
characterized in the popular press by their taste for Nabokov.
Gerri Hirshey in a June 12, 1997 article called "Jakob's Ladder"
describes this scenario,
"Disco sucks!" bellows a husky partisan in a Bruins jersey. A
lacy, burgundy-colored bra floats onstage. Then - thunk! - a
yellowed, dogeared paperback of Lolita lands at the scuffed toes
of Jakob's black brogans. He looks puzzled, a bit concerned. How
could anyone out there guess his fondness for Nabokov ? Could
they possibly know that he can read a page of the old
reprobate's lush prose and see a half-dozen songs fly out of it?
Round midnight, sitting in the darkened back lounge of the
Wallflowers' rolling bus, Jakob Dylan will wonder aloud: "Where
are they getting their information? How?"
In "The Shaping of Jewel" which appeared on July 21,1997, in _Time _,
Howard Chua-Eoan depicts the rock singer as,
The street-smart optimism of pop's new goddess rises from a
life of near poverty in Alaska and San Diego Her metaphors can
be equine. She has said she is not a workhorse, not a racehorse,
but a show horse. She brings up a fictional character who looked
"impossibly sad, like a horse's eyes." It is a quote, she says,
from Nabokov, and she pronounces the novelist's name correctly,
with the stress on the second syllable, exactly as exacting old
Vladimir used to instruct his readers. He might have been able
to appreciate this latest of pop goddesses, this star of the
Lilith Fair. After all, it was a Nabokov character who said that
while he was capable of loving Eve, "it was Lilith he longed
for." Jewel's is a fey, insidious charm, equal parts worldly and
naive, where flaws-the crooked nose and crooked teeth she is so
proud of-only betray an uncommon beauty. Then there is the
improbable match of slender youth and that voice-an
astonishingly versatile instrument ranging from soul-shattering
yodels to the most eloquent of whispers to arch Cole Porter-ish
recitative.
KURT VONNEGUT
Kurt Vonnegut, recently in the news due to the novel
commonly publicized as his last, is compared to Nabokov in this
excerpt from an article "Vonnegut's last laugh: A talk with America's
greatest living Saab dealer" in the October 7, _Village Voice_ .
However unlikely it sounds-plenty, right?-I also think Vonnegut
and Nabokov have things in common. No, not everything: Vonnegut,
I love. Nabokov, I revere. But they're both the products of lost
paradises, which reverberate in their work with a nostalgia
unmarred by self-pity. Nabokov's idyllic, cushy Russian youth
has the advantage of sounding like paradise; Vonnegut's was
prewar Indianapolis, which doesn't. His parents didn't have a
happy adulthood: his mother finally killed herself not long
before Kurt was captured in the Battle of the Bulge. Even so,
he's one of the few American writers to have had a happy
childhood, which was also a privileged one, until his
prosperous family went bust in the Depression.
STOLEN BOOKS
As reported in the December 7, 1997 _New York Times_ p. 3,
in order to protect books that are regularly stolen, Tower Records
created a behind-the-counter placard that reads : ''Tower's Most
Wanted,'' and features sinister-looking photos and the names of
the authors of these books. Hot authors are Jack Keruoac,
Charles Bukowski, Albert Camus, Paul Auster, Raymond Carver,
Cormac McCarthy, Henry Miller and Jim Thompson. Keeping this good
company is, of course, Vladimir Nabokov.
Citywide, the hottest books are, ''Junkie'' by William S.
Burroughs, ''On the Road'' by Jack Kerouac and ''Lolita'' by
Vladimir Nabokov . In addition, anything by Charles Bukowski has
to be nailed down.
The article, far from denouncing thievery decides,
Perhaps people shouldn't be so concerned by all this theft.
There are those who say that the taste reflected by the thieves
is the taste not of Americans in general, but simply of those
who steal. And there is some good news. At least there are
people left who still want to read.
YOUNG GIRLS
In the March 1997 Los Angeles Magazine, Lawrence Weschler makes an
interesting comparison between Gidget and Lolita in an article called
"From Hitler to Hollywood". The article traces the fortunes and
fates of German emigres who landed in Hollywood after WWII.
IN THE MID 1950s, A GERMAN emigre writer named Frederick Kohner
watched, mystified, as his Americanized teenage daughter
learned to surf on Malibu Beach. Kohner decided to write a
fictionalized account of his daughter's exploits, deploying as
the book's title the nickname she had acquired at the beach:
Gidget. Around the same time, a Russian emigre named Nabokov
living in Ithaca, New York, published astory about another
American teenager called Lolita. Both books concerned girls
coming of age, both were quintessentially American, and both
were by emigres.
PSORIASIS
In the December 20 -27th _British Medical Journal_ Frans Meulenberg
profiles literary incidents of psoriasis along with the true life
occurences that inspired them. He discusses in detail John Updike's
bouts with the disease and the manifestation of them in several of
his works. He also states,
Vladimir Nabokov concealed his psoriasis. For example, in the
collection of interviews with Nabokov the term psoriasis is
never used." In February 1937 Nabokov suffered a bad attack.'2
On 15 May of that year he somewhat pathetically wrote to his
wife, Vera: "I continue with the radiation treatments every day
and am pretty much cured. You know-now I can tell you
frankly-the indescribable torments I endured in February, before
these treatments, drove me to the border of suicide-a border I
was not authorised to cross because I had you in my luggage."'"
His biographer mentions only one more exacerbation of psoriasis
after that, which occurred in the late 1960s when the strain of
writing the novel Ada fell from Nabokov's shoulders.
Whereas Updike has written about psoriasis at length, Nabokov
devotes one page to the disease, in the novel Ada.'8 He mentions
"a spectacular skin disease that had been portrayed recently by
a famous American novelist in his Chiron and described in
side-splitting style by a co-sufferer who wrote essays for a
London weekly." The two patients with psoriasis in Ada exchange
notes with tips: "Mercury!" or "Hohensonne works wonders." Other
pieces of advice are found in a one volume encyclopaedia, and
involve taking hot baths at least twice a month and avoiding
spices.
The article concludes with this insight.
Psoriasis functions as a metaphor for the creative process.
Psoriasis is the result of the implosion of the artist, and the
novels on psoriasis cultivate the idea that the psoriasis plaque
is the Achilles heel of the introvert individualist, the artist
who looks upon the world as a guardsman from the ivory tower of
his psoriasis. His salvation is a make believe world or an
entirely private world: the imagined past or the world of art.
*********************************************************************
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Letters
The Nation
New York
Dec 22, 1997
I was sad to see in John Leonard's sprightly article on
Lolita ["The New Puritanism," Nov. 24] that he picked up the
canard that William Styron floated (and apologized to me for
later) that Farrar Straus had turned down Lolita. The facts
are-and they are so stated in the Nabokov letters-that I
offered a contract to Nabokov for his book, and he said he
would accept it provided he could use a nom de plume, as he
feared he would lose his job at Cornell if he did not
disguise himself. All my dealings were directly with him, but
also via Elena Wilson, an old friend, and I showed the
manuscript to Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy and of course Edmund
Wilson. They had mixed reactions. Obviously I told Nabokov
that I couldn't do that as we would be asked to defend the
book and needed the author to stand with us. That's the story.
ROGER W STRAUS
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
LEONARD REPLIES
New York City
Canard perhaps, but picked up from Boyd's biography, Volume
II: "Meanwhile Edmund Wilson had suggested that Nabokov show
Lolita to his current publisher, Farrar Straus. Roger Straus
turned the book down and counseled Nabokov against publishing
it pseudonymously, for although that might at first safeguard
Cornell, it would weaken the book's chances in court." No
mention of Straus offering a contract. Similarly: "Viking,
Simon and Schuster New Directions, Farrar Straus, and now
Doubleday all thought it impossible to publish the book and
avoid prosecution. It was high time to look abroad." So much
for very long biographies and short selective memories. JOHN
LEONARD
*********************************************************************
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Two books of interest to Nabokophiles but not likely to be noted in
the usual channels of communication are abstracted below.
BETWEEN HEAVEN AND HELL: A Thousand Years of Russia's Artistic
Experience
W. Bruce Lincoln. Viking, $34.95 (544p) ISBN 0-679-87568-6
Lincoln investigates the psychological and aesthetic tensions
in artists like composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), whom he
views as suspended between East and West. Relying heavily on
primary sources, he gauges the impact of emigres like Tsvetaeva,
Nabokov , Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn, who developed new forms that
merged with artistic currents long suppressed in the Soviet
Union to create a new force in Russian life of the post-Soviet
era
DARWIN'S ORCHESTRA: An Almanac of Nature in History and the Arts
Michael Sims. Henry Holt 1997 508p ISBN 0-8050-4220-2
This book is a series of essays drawn from the literature of
Natural History and Popular Culture and adhering to a daybook
format --one essay for each day of the year. 12, June 1948 is
entitled "Nabokov's Butterflies" because of the fact that
Nabokov's own account of his lifelong fascination with
butterflies appeared in the June 12, 1948 issue of the _New
Yorker_ . Nabokov also figures in the 17, November 1912 essay,
"The Metamorphosis of Franz K". On this day Kafka began writing
Der Verwandlung. _Darwin's Orchestra_ is a quirky book of
facts and dates, well researched and a lot of fun.
Suellen Stringer-Hye
Jean and Alexander Heard Library
Vanderbilt University
stringers@library.vanderbilt.edu