Here is
the
thing: authors are unreliable judges in matters of their
own fiction.
For example take Stephen King. He
believes in all honesty Lisey’s
Story is the best thing he has ever written; yet many of his
most devoted readers will disagree. They don’t like the extensive
recreation of private
language
and
inside jokes running over hundreds of pages – it keeps them at a
distance; as far as I can tell the
author had
more fun here in the writing, than any of his readers will ever have in
the reading. Give me Duma Key
anytime. Some
authors even teach classes on the critical
appreciation
of good fiction. Nabokov’s lectures at Cornell are accessible
in print. It’s good stuff – thanks to Vladimir we notice Tolstoy
observing a mother tensing
the
muscles
of
the
bare
underarm when she squeezes in the bath the sponge over her baby. This tanned underarm will
reappear
in King,
Queen, Knave. So how is it then that
even an author of stature seems
purblind when it comes to the merits of his own work?
Part
of
the
answer
lies
of
course
in
the
fact,
that
the
author
intensely
remembers
the
joys
and
pains
of
composition,
taking
this
as
a
measure.
We
understand
now, why the Invitation
to
a
Beheading is taking such a high place in Nabokov’s esteem of his
own work. What does a critic know
anyway? “If I wouldn’t write my
novels, these ... people – and tick the thumb over the
shoulder with such contempt –
wouldn’t even know how to pay for their
grocery.” (The author who said this, died in poverty, while his
critics indeed do their shopping in a brand-new BMW.
Something here is very wrong). Sirin’s
books pay homage to the authors he valued. Even his first American
book, Bend
Sinister has the distinct feel of Bely’s Petersburg,
although, if I
may say so as someone who reads Russian only in translations, it is far
more
sensual and
intimate
than the prototype. Pnin is the
most
Dickensian of Nabokov’s books, while Ada
elicits a shrug over the post-pubescent and beyond bounds inflated
fantasy of a dirty old man. Crébillon’s Sofa
gone berserk!
Come to think of it, the
more I read of him, the more
I appreciate that young “Vladimir Sirin”
was
a much
greater writer than his older alter ego could ever hope to become in
America. In
this sense Bend Sinister was already the last hurrah. After
test-running The True Life of Sebastian Knight, “Vladimir Sirin”
tried once more his hand in a foreign language and discovered it wasn’t
quite
up to his own standards and henceforth published under his pen name
“Vladimir
Nabokov.” Yes, I am kidding, but tell you what: I once had a Russian
student, a
journalist; he had grown up in Manhattan where his parents lived as
accredited
personal at the Soviet Embassy. He was already bi- or trilingual when
we met
and he wanted me to help him becoming quad-lingual – is that the word?
– before moving on and establish his own syndicalized news agency, meant to serve a free
association
of independent journalists. We talked about the future of Kazakhstan,
the
incident at Waco and Russian literature. I asked what Russians think of
Nabokov? “Our number three,” he said. Number three of what? “Oh
Pushkin,
Lermontov,
Turgenev,
Tolstoy,
Gogol,
Chekhov,
Bely,
Goncharov,
Pasternak, Bulgakov,
Mayakovski,
Dostoyevsky, Zinoviev – take your pick.” He mentioned a few more
names I’d never
heard of before – Russians do read and
appreciate
Nabokov’s Russian prose as a major accomplishment in their language.
That said, the author’s handicap as a writer in English
lies somewhere else:Lolita
suffers from a lack of belonging, a sense
that only comes with the attachment to an urban
ambience, and be it only as a mirage in the distance. There is no great
novel even possible without this urban undercurrent. Raymond Chandler
would be an obscure nobody without the
smog of Los Angeles hovering over the scene. Think of Dickens and
London, of Dublin and James Joyce – who recollected the details while
living in exile. Even
Homer knew it already. What would the Iliad be without the looming
citadel of
Troy? The emigrée Sirin, although torn from his roots,
was at least blessed with a thick layer of memories from his
adolescence in Petrograd and later was still young enough to absorb
the emotional impact of his immediate surrounding in Berlin, although
he dreaded it. Dread is not love, but it still is a form of
attachment.When he
finally got the necessary visas to
expatriate himself and his
family to
Paris his career as a great Russian writer came to an end. A personal
tragedy; the rest is cleverly
staged
nostalgia.
I can
understand that a writer may be dismissive of his own early attempts –
but not to see in King, Queen, Knave the originality, the rich
sensuality of detail and the fluid and seemingly effortless delivery of
just
the best book he was to write for a long time, is rather strange. In
the foreword, Nabokov says, that when he edited the translation, he
felt the
book
was “sagging”
and gave it an editorial overhaul. Good editing
is the
key to successful writing. Nabokov
published this book in the year 1927 – three years after Kafka’s death
and five years after the publication of the Ulysses by James
Joyce.
Nabokov always claimed that at the time he was oblivious of Kafka –
which
is very possible, if indeed his German was as bad as he wants us to
believe it
was. (However in his Cornell lectures I spotted in the footnotes some
rather
discerning remarks on the stylistic shortcomings in Kafka’s novels.)
Yet in the book’s preface
he also says that he “hardly knew” the Ulysses
by
James Joyce. That is not what Nabokov is telling us in his own
autobiography. What
Nabokov didn’t deny was his familiarity with Marcel Proust and of
course with
the finest of the Russian novelists: Turgenev, Chekhov and the mighty
Tolstoy. Mashenka, clearly, was
Nabokov’s homage to the
venerated Antonin Chekhov,
although
here and there we get
already a taste
of the Nabokovian
touch: “Only for a very short time
had he been genuinely in love –
in
that state of mind in which Lyudmila had seemed wreathed in a seductive
mist, a
state of questing, exalted, almost unearthly emotion, as when music
plays at
the very moment when one is doing something quite ordinary, such as
walking
from a table to pay at the bar, and gives an inward dancelike quality
to one’s
simple movement, transforming it into a significant and immortal gesture”(Nabokov,
Mashenka).
In Sirin’s second novel, King, Queen,
Knave, a very gifted author has found his own voice. The story
itself – well it has been told before: a
suburban but glamorous Madame Bovary from Berlin Pankow – “she was no Emma,
and no Anna”(Nabokov,
King,
Queen,
Knave) – is cuckolding
her husband, who will never know. Let that not spoil your appetite.
Art and life always rehearse from the same script, but every
rehearsal is different. On Sundays, on the elegant street in
the western section of the city, he would wear his new overcoat and
walk quite differently. Now however, was not the moment for that – the
cold was intense. That big-city Sunday walk had not been easy to copy.
It consisted of stretching the arms well down and crossing one’s hands
(good gloves were essential) below the last button of the overcoat as
if to keep it in place as one advanced at a very slow strut, with toes
pointing out at each step. Thus promenaded the Kurfürstendamm
dandies, sometimes in pairs, now and then looking around at a girl
without changing theposition of their hands but merely
giving a slight backward jerk of the shoulder. Despite the cold, Franz
felt multiplied and exaggerated as one does after a show, and he began
to whistle. “To hell with her husband. What was she doing now? She must
be home and undressing. That yellow-bristled pig. Pestering her, no
doubt. To hell with him! Now she is sitting on the bed, peeling off her stocking. Three or four houses more and she will
be naked. When I reach that street lamp she will lower her head on the
pillow. I cross the street, and she turns off the light. Wonderful
violinist – and so beautifully staged, there was really something
heavenly about it. The conjurer was good too. Simple tricks, no doubt:
make good money by deceiving people. Now she is sound asleep. She sees
my house in her dream and hears the divine violin. Damn this key.
Always behaving as if it had never been in this lock before”(Nabokov,
King,
Queen,
Knave). This was written in the age of
“modernism,” of
the monologue intérieur, of Andrei
Bely’s St Petersburg,
of
Stravinsky, Webern, and Prokofiev, of Gertrude Stein and the
Bauhaus, of the crackling radio and the rasping voice
of the rabble-rouser from Austria, of the first shadow games of what
was to become television. Charles Lindberg landed his airplane
in Le Bourget, Paris. My mother missed school because she stared all
morning at a giant zeppelin drifting over Berlin.
Vladimir Sirin
was a modernist without the ostentatious
attitude.
Hemingway
somewhere said that a writer should write his best against the
dead
writers and beat them one by one. However “I wouldn’t fight Count
Tolstoy, because I know he would knock my ears off” (Hemingway). When Hemingway
talked about other authors, he
spoke about Russians – most of the time. America seemed worth
mentioning to him only for
the sake of Henry James, Stephen Crane and Mark Twain, although not
exactly in
that order.
For Nabokov the “fight” was with the best
of Marcel
Proust’s perceptiveness and combining it with the penetrating
sensuality of Tolstoy and his remarkable technique of flying
transitions between the thoughts and perceptions of the characters; in the closing sequence of Anna
Karenina, Tolstoy
has given us even the first example for the interior
monologue. I am not an expert in
modernist Russian
literature from the period between 1905 and the May Revolution in 1918,
at least not beyond Roman Jacobson, Mayakovsky and the Futurists – I
did read Vladislav Chodasevic – yet be it
as it may, King, Queen, Knave
has a modernist feel. “The huge clock hand
is still at rest but is on the point of making its once-a-minute
gesture; that resilient jolt will set a whole world in motion. The
clock face will slowly turn away, full of despair, contempt, and
boredom, as one by one the iron pillars will start walking past,
bearing away the vault of the station like bland atlantes; the platform
will begin to move past, carrying off on an unknown journey cigarette
buts, used tickets, flecks of sunlight and spittle; a luggage handcart
will glide by, its wheels motionless; it will be followed by a news
stall hung with seductive magazine-cover-photographs of naked, pearl
grey beauties; and people, people, people on the moving platform,
themselves moving their feet, yet standing still, striding forward, yet
retreating as in an agonizing dream full of incredible effort, nausea,
a cottony weakness in one’s calves, will surge back, almost falling
supine. – There were more women than men as is always the case at
partings”(Nabokov,
King,
Queen,
Knave). The
transitions between third person
narrative and
interior monologue in the Ulysses are rather clumsy and abrupt;
in
Nabokov’s novel they are inconspicuous and elegant.
The reader is
left to drifting
in and out of “the
mist
of
small
talk
and
tinkle
–
that
particular
tinkle
half-glass,
half-metal,
peculiar
to
the
process
of
human
feeding”(Nabokov,
King,
Queen,
Knave). Franz, the protagonist, arrives in
Berlin on not exactly
the most auspicious note.
“He clucked his tongue and lay still. –
Complicated but familiar poverty (that cannot afford spare sets of
expensive articles) now resulted in primitive panic. Without these
glasses he was as good as blind, yet he must set out on a perilous
journey across a strange city.” ... “The
clean air whistled in his ears, and the horns called to each other in
celestial voices. He caught a whiff of dry leaves and a branch nearly
brushed against him.”(Apparently we sit on the open top
of an old roof-master.) “He
asked a neighbor where he should get off. He began counting the stops
so as not to have to ask again, and tried in vain to distinguish cross
streets.” ... “At last his
stop came. He clambered down the steep stairs and cautiously stepped on
the sidewalk. From receding heights a faceless traveler shouted to
him: on your right! First street on your – “ ... “The gate emitted an odd buzzing sound.
He waited a little and pressed the button again. Again the wicket
buzzed. No one came to open it. Beyond lay the greenish haze of a
garden with a house floating there like an indistinct reflection. He
tried to open the gate himself but found it unyielding. Biting his lips
he rang once more and held his finger on the button for a long time.
The
same monotonous buzzing. He suddenly realized what the trick was,
leaned against the gate as he rang once more” ... “Later when he remembered this meeting,
the mirage of the garden, that sun-melting dress, he marveled at the
length of time it had taken him to recognize her. In the unsubstantial
radiance of his myopia, Martha bore no resemblance at all to the lady
in the train who had glowed like a picture and yawned like a tigress –
for a ridiculous moment she thought this impetuous intruder was about
to take her head between his hands.” ... “On the lawn near the porch stood a
very tall beach umbrella and under it a small table and several wicker
armchairs. Martha sat down, and Franz, grinning and blinking, sat down
beside her. She decided that she had stunned him completely with the
sight of her small but expensive garden. – “It’s so quiet here,” said
Franz. “I thought Berlin would be so noisy.” – “Oh, but we live almost
in the country,” she answered” At this moment there appeared from
somewhere, as if in a token of sympathy, the specter of a dog which
turned out upon closer examination to be an Alsatian. Lowering his
head, the dog placed something at Franz’s feet. Then it retreated a
little, dissolved momentarily, and waited expectantly. – “That’s Tom,”
said Martha. “Tom won a prize at the show. Didn’t you Tom” (she spoke
to Tom only in the presence of guests). Out of respect for his hostess,
Franz picked up the object the dog was offering him. It proved to be a
wet wooden ball covered with tangible tooth marks. As soon as he took
up the ball, raising it up to his face, the specter of the dog emerged
with a bound from the sunny haze, becoming alive, warm, active, and
nearly knocking him off his chair. He quickly got rid of the ball. Tom
vanished. “Fine animal,” he observed with revulsion, as he wiped his
wet hand against the chintzed chair arm”(Nabokov,
King,
Queen,
Knave). At last, the predestined cuckold is
making his entry.
“Dreyer came at his fast bouncy walk.
He wore an ample white overcoat with a white scarf. Three rackets, each
in a differently colored cloth-case – maroon, blue, and mulberry –
protruded from under his arm; his face with its tawny mustache glowed
like an autumn leaf. His wife had come out to the porch. She gave him a
long cold glance, coldly nodded, and went back into the house. “That
hateful, undignified, genial tone he always must take with inferiors,”
she reflected as she passed through the ivory-white front hall where
the impeccable, hospitable white comb and white backed brush lay on the
doily under the pier glass. The entire villa, from whitewashed terrace
to radio antenna, was that way – neat, clean-cut, and on the whole
unloved and inane.” ... “On Monday Franz splurged: he
purchased what the optician assured him was an American article. The
rims were of tortoise shell – allowing no doubt for the well-known fact
that chelonians are frequently and variously mocked. The haze
dissolved. The unruly colors of the universe were confined once more to
their official compartments and cells”(Nabokov,
King,
Queen,
Knave).
The
visuals
are
absolutely
stunning.
“Only one thing
really told him he was in the metropolis: some strollers wore
marvelous clothes! For instance, plus-fours, very baggy below the
knee, so as to make the wool-stockinged shin look handsomely slender.
That style he had never seen before, though boys in his hometown also
wore knickerbockers” (Nabokov,
King,
Queen,
Knave).
For
the
duration
of
a
book,
the
reader
submits
himself
to
the
author,
to
his
instincts,
emotions,
his
intellect
and
knowledge.
We
succumb
to
the
spell,
suspend
our judgment and follow his
lead. But even the poorly equipped reader will sense the hollow
rhetoric, when an author fails to actually take this lead, when, to be
blunt, he fails to dominate. On reflection, you as the reader may not
like to be dominated, but that is the unavoidable dynamic behind the
process of reading good fiction. Deal with it and live in the moment!
King,
Queen,
Knave is the book where Vladimir Sirin not only experienced the
delirious
joys of
composition, but also did allow his instincts to run free; and they are
good
instincts.
This is
not a critique. I am not telling you how to read. With the right
book in
your hand you are going to be carried along without my prompting. I am
just wondering. What
makes us appreciating fiction? How is it
possible to
find escape and enchantment in a story even if in our sober moments the
subject
matter does
not really appeal to our tastes? From an author’s
point of view, of course, it would
be neat
to know how these things work, and make it a
reproducible
effect.
