Speaking as a Reader – Vladimir Sirin

 

An author putting conditions on a reader’s appreciation is a pompous ass. The “good reader” (Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature), is the person who is buying my books. Period. Hopefully the reader is getting enough out of it to ask for more, yet a writer is better keeping his lips zipped when it comes to his own work. Because here is the thing: authors are unreliable judges when it comes to their own fiction.

A recent example is Stephen King. He believes in all honesty Lisey’s Story is the best thing he has ever written. Many of his most devoted readers say they 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 although it was meant to bring them closer; as far as I can tell the author had more fun here in the writing, than any of his readers will ever have in reading it. Give me Duma Key anytime. Some authors even teach classes on “creative writing” – as if creativity is something you could learn – or the critical appreciation of good fiction. Nabokov’s lectures at Cornell are accessible in print. It’s good stuff – notice how Vladimir is paying attention when Tolstoy observes a mother sponging her baby and tensing the muscles of the bare underarm while squeezing the sponge. 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 appreciate 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 the measure for his success with the project. What the heck does a critic know anyway? “If I wouldn’t write my novels, these ladies and germs – and have the thumb ticking 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 arrive for their shopping at Walmart in a brand-new BMW. Something here is very wrong). But we understand now, why the Invitation to a Beheading is taking such a high place in Nabokov’s esteem of his own work. An intense book, but leaving me with mixed feelings. A bit anemic for my tastes and too much of an insider joke. Sirin’s books seem to pay homage to the authors he valued highly – or not: some are parodies. I am not an expert, but the Beheading appears to me as the mirror of such a star somewhere in the universe of Russian literature – showing that Vladimir Sirin could do it too, but so much better. Bend Sinister has the distinct feel of Bely’s Petersburg, although, if I may say so as someone who reads Russian 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.” A bit loose on the evaluation, but I liked it. He mentioned a few more I’ve never heard of before, or ever since, but Aleksander Aleksandrovich Zinoviev I knew; I just had finished with Yawning Heights and was moving on to The Radiant Future. Anyway, 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: the setting in Lolita the novel is sprawling out over too many motels and betrays barely a sense of belonging not even of nostalgia, a sense that only comes with a close and knowledgeable link 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, if it is not the kind of story where the sheep vie with the shepherd for the price of naiveté. 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, Tokyo and Ihara Saikaku, New York and Frank O’Hara. Even ole Homer knew it. What would the Iliad be without the looming citadel of Troy? The emigrée Sirin, although torn up from his roots, was at least blessed with a thick layer of memories from his adolescence in Petrograd and later, while still young enough to feel the emotional impact of his immediate surrounding, dreaded the overpowering presence of Berlin. Dread is not love, but it is still an attachment.

When he finally got the necessary visas to expatriate himself and his family to Paris he ended his career as a Great Russian writer. The rest was 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. So what? Good editing is the key to successful writing. In this case, the editing is very good. 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) – but he also said in the preface 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. It is the best novel Chekhov could have written hadn’t he been spared to see the arrival of Lenin, 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). Now I know! That’s what went through the composer’s mind, when he wrote the soundtrack for Star Wars. No, seriously: I see Marcel Proust beaming in the background and give Tolstoy a nudge, and the old Jehovah with his customary scowl, suppresses a little nod.

But King, Queen, Knave is a very different proposition. 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 the position 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. 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 only for the sake of Henry James, Stephen Crane and Mark Twain, although not exactly in that order.)

For Nabokov the “bout” 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 a 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, while in Nabokov’s novel they are held 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 th 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). Only Tolstoy could have written this – if he had been a very different person with different interests. So he left it to Vladimir Sirin.

For the duration of a book, a 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 trying to tell you how to read. With the right book in your hand you are going to be carried along without my prompting. So don’t worry. I was just wondering about this inability of even the best novelists, to take their own measure. But from the author’s point of view, of course, it would be neat to know how things work, as to make it a reproducible effect.

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?

© – 5/25/2010 – by michael sympson, 3,350 words, all rights reserved