Subject
Time & Ebb: Johnson-Wendel
Date
Body
EDITOR's NOTE. Recent postings about Roy Johnson's 1995 series on VN's
short stories have led a number of newer subscribers to read these old
pieces and comment. Just below, Sylvia Wendel offers her thoughts on
Roy Johnson's discussion of VN's "Time and Ebb." For the convenience of
all, I have appended both Johnson's original sketch and a comment by
Willam Vesterman who, like Sylvia Wendel, took strong exception to
Johnson's interpretation at the time it was first run. To get the story in
order, one should first read VN's Time & Ebb,"Roy Johnson's critique and
the Vesterman response, followed by Sylvia's comments.
-------------------------------------------
From ValSyl@aol.com Fri May 9 12:50:35 1997
Subject: Roy Johnson- Thanks but no thanks?
Dear friends, I'm indebted to Don Johnson for making Roy Johnson's
comments easily accessible. However, I am bewildered by his hostility
toward my favorite story, "Time and Ebb", and to a lesser degree toward
"Conversation Piece, 1945." Yo, Royster -- you can cut the PC b.s., we're
among friends here. Words like "misogyny" belong in, I don't know, a
discussion group for Erica Jong fans or something at that level.
Pu-leeeze! Don't don't don't insult our collective intelligences.
As far as "Time and Ebb" not being a "story," there are times when I think
"stories" are the most boring things in the world (and I write 'em myself).
If you want "story", I suggest you consult your local TV Guide. Every
grocery bagger where I live knows all about "story". You want your first arc
30 pages into the script, your second arc 2/3 of the way through, and your
ending -- wow! -- should refer back to the arcs and, you know, try to like
sum everything up'n stuff. Does Roy Johnson actually believe this is what VN
readers seek? Has he spent too many hours around headsetted undergraduates?
Whuh happ'n -- library funding cut again? I sympathize, but his comments
read like the peevish, myopic complaints of an Allan Bloom or similarly
deadbolt-minded fogey. I know this sounds as if I am veering dangerously
close to personal attack, but I intend no such rude act -- I am just
wondering how a professional scholar, who doubtless knows much more than I
ever will about VN and twentieth-cent. lit. as a whole, could with such
ruthlessness attempt to destroy the incredible, delicate, funny, fabulously
nuanced, apotheosis of Nabokovian art which I believe "Time and Ebb" to be.
I have loved this story for longer than most "story editors" have been
alive, and nobody who drinks warm beer is ever going to change my mind. :)
I will attempt in my crude and brutish way to disprove
RJ's hypothesis.
What I see here is a story about the unreliability of history - a story
which, while ostensibly written by a scientist, succeeds in flattening the
significance of technical discovery, when compared to human memory.
Mnemosyne, not Ms. Plot-Line, is the operative muse here. Oh sure,
revelation of "the true nature" of electricity has obsolesced the airplane
and so on -- Barrett is a genius, Professor Andrews is a broken man -- but
what is happening here is that an elderly man [perhaps a mask for VN, in
midlife, imagining himself as he might become], who has been wildly
successful, reexamines his greatest work and wonders: did I do the right
thing? Aren't we all perhaps a little poorer as a result of our "advances"?
Where are the bicycles of yesteryear?
In his seeming acquiescence to the world of cheerful mediocrity -- so
resoundingly embodied in this story by the chipper columnist "Mr.
Sasketchawanov" and his disciple, the narrator's apparently pre-pubescent
great-granddaughter -- the narrator is really showing us how apart he remains
from such poshlusterie. By presenting us with these shriveled perspectives,
the narr. only makes himself, and his genuine thought, appear to be larger
and to possess more meaning. It's a nice trick of perspective, worthy of a
Victor Wind. It also is another way to "flatten" the temporal, the
received-historical, the [in our day] media spew which most people believes
constitutes the real, and advance in its stead the solidity of memory and
art, "which is the only immortality you and I shall ever know ... " [fill in
the blank].
This is what VN has always been about, in the most nutshellish way. "Time
and Ebb" provides, to this reader, a marvelous encapsulation of these very
important points.
There is so much more that could be said in defense of "Time & Ebb," by
people with more time and greater objectivity. I noticed that after RJ's
puzzling attack, William Vesterman (VESTERMAN@zodiac.rutgers.edu) provided a
vigorous and sensible response. Anybody else out there, pro or con?
Perhaps I'll go down in history as the woman who once threw an apple at
Johnson.
Sylvia
Sylvia Weiser Wendel
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> Posting number 972, dated 16 Feb 1996 20:17:39
EDITOR'S NOTE. Roy Johnson <Roy@mantex.demon.co.uk> continues his
discussion series on VN's short stories. Your comments are invited.
------------------------------------------
This week's stories - TIME AND EBB
CONVERSATION PIECE
--------------------------------------------
'Time and Ebb' (August 1944) reflects Nabokov's enthusiasm for
his newly adopted America in a manner similar to that which his
earliest stories of the 1920s showed his enjoyment of the
material world of Berlin, his first place of permanent exile. The
piece toys with his long term interest in time and memory, but
hardly even pretends to be a story: it is not much more than an
exercise in his increasingly complex prose style dressed up as
a memoir.
In it an unnamed ninety year old narrator thinks back from some
time in the twenty-first century to his arrival in America from
Europe in the mid 1940s. His topics are soda parlours, trains,
aeroplanes, skyscrapers, and anything which presents a novelty
to the European. (This positive appreciation of what is new is
undoubtedly one of the characteristics which helped Nabokov to
survive an entire adult life spent in exile.) But the lack of any
narrative impulse is reflected in some of the extreme contortions
of syntax and prose rhythm:
"The trees had their latin binomials displayed upon
their trunks, just as the drivers of the squat, gaudy,
scaraboid motor-cabs (generically allied in my mind to
certain equally gaudy automatic machines upon the
musical constipation of which the insertion of a small
coin used to act as a miraculous laxative) had their
stale photographic pictures affixed to their backs"
(ND,p.163)
This has all the hallmarks of the style which would eventually
produce the rococo constructions of *Look at the Harlequins!* and
*Ada* - the insistent use of alliteration and assonance, the
complex syntax, long periods with huge subordinate clauses and
parentheses, the rich vocabulary dotted with recondite and semi-
technical terms, and the twinning and parallelism. When these
devices were held in restraint by the structural and narrational
demands of a story-to-be-told, the result could be the creation
of masterpieces such as *Lolita*, but even his warmest supporters
would probably concede that at times this mannerism can become
inflated and tiresome.
Nabokov believed that literature should not be made to serve as
political propaganda, since in doing so it would become
aesthetically damaged. He seems to forget that his own works
which speak against tyranny and in favour of liberal humanism
(*Invitation to a Beheading*, 'Tyrants Destroyed') are propaganda
of a kind - but his belief is justified in the eyes of those who
believe that these are amongst his weakest works. Certainly his
last story of this type, 'Conversation Piece' (April 1945) falls
into this category, since the purpose at its centre is to send
out a political warning. It is interesting to note in this
context of overt didactics [strong opinions!] damaging
aesthetics, that the story features two elements which rate
highly amongst Nabokov's own prejudices - Germans, and women.
The story begins with what looks like a return to the double
theme. The narrator informs us that he has an exact namesake -
"complete from nickname to surname" (ND,p.125) - with whom he has
sometimes been confused. But this strategy is used only as a plot
device to get the narrator to a gathering in Boston to which he
has been invited by mistake. There, a group of gullible and
elderly American women are being addressed by a German professor,
Dr Shoe. In his speech he seeks to reconcile America and Germany
immediately after the end of the war by pouring suspicion onto
Britain, claiming that Nazi atrocities are just allied propaganda
lies, that German soldiers were clean, decent, and honourable,
and that people should not be misled by "the vivid Semitic
imagination which controls the American press" (p.136). The
narrator complains to the hostess about Dr Shoe and leaves in
disgust, but then a week later he receives a letter from his
namesake reproaching him for his bad behaviour at the meeting and
ending with a demand for money.
The problems here are that the story is little more than a
synopsis of Dr Shoe's reactionary propaganda; none of the
characters are developed; and there is almost no connection
between the double device and what happens at the meeting -
except to underscore the reactionary company the narrator's
double keeps, which we already know at the beginning of the
story.
It is difficult to find a sympathetically portrayed German in the
whole of Nabokov's fiction, and as Andrew Field points out in
confronting this phenomenon "Were it not for the events of this
century, Nabokov's attitude towards things German might be
regarded as whimsically as Dr Johnson's attitude towards
Scotsmen" (LA,p.206).
But the same might also be said about women - using Dr Johnson
as a parallel in this case too. Some of his female characters are
idealised love objects, but more often they are adulteresses
(Martha in *King Queen Knave*) tormentors-of-men (Margot in
*Laughter in the Dark*) or dim-witted vulgarians (Lydia in
*Despair*). The problem for the humanist reader is that Nabokov
covers his prejudices with very witty presentation:
"None of the women were pretty; all had reached or
over-reached forty-five...All looked cheerfully
sterile. Possibly some of them had had children, but
how they had produced them was a forgotten mystery;
many had found substitutes for creative power in
various aesthetic pursuits, such as, for instance, the
beautifying of committee rooms" (p.131)
It is fortunate for admirers of Nabokov's work that such overt
misogyny is rare - and that such wit is ubiquitous.
------------------------------------------------
Next week's story - SIGNS AND SYMBOLS
------------------------------------------------
--
PO Box 100 | Tel +44 0161 432 5811
Manchester UK | Fax +44 0161 443 2766
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 1996 14:25:46 -0800
Subject: Re: RJ:"Time & Ebb" & "Conversations Piece" (fwd)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: VESTERMAN@zodiac.rutgers.edu
I disagree with Roy Johnson's assessemnt of Time and Ebb
and with his assessment of VN on women. T&E not a "story?" Why
not--a story of time, a time capsule only now open for us. The
narrator sees not what is "new" but what is ordinary in America
of the 40s with "the stark lucidity of a future recollection--
you know, trying to see things as you will remember having
seen them?" (Lolita). Today, almost in the 21st century
the soda parlors and the scarab cabs and the labeled trees--
everything but the skyscrapers are gone, and we can see them
easily through the eyes of nostalgia rendered in advance by
a feat of imagination. The ordinary is now like what Borges
says of La Mancha. Cervantes used it as the epitome of
dullness to contrast with DQ's chivalric fantasies; now it
has itself romantic associations because of the Quixote.
As to "prejudices" against women, I don't see
how "the same thing" can be said as about Dr Johnson and
Scotsmen. What comes to my mind is what he said to objections
that the Senators in Julius Caesar weren't senatorial enough--
"he went to the Senate for what the Senate would supply him."
Further, I don't see that the (ugh) "love objects" in VN
are "idealized." They seem portrayed with all the tenderness
of individual endearment to me. As to sympathetic portrayals
of Germans, what about Kurt Dryer and Orlovius for starters.
As to supposing that the terrible events of this century
modified VN's view of Germany, whose views have they not
modified? Andrew Field's?
William Vesterman
short stories have led a number of newer subscribers to read these old
pieces and comment. Just below, Sylvia Wendel offers her thoughts on
Roy Johnson's discussion of VN's "Time and Ebb." For the convenience of
all, I have appended both Johnson's original sketch and a comment by
Willam Vesterman who, like Sylvia Wendel, took strong exception to
Johnson's interpretation at the time it was first run. To get the story in
order, one should first read VN's Time & Ebb,"Roy Johnson's critique and
the Vesterman response, followed by Sylvia's comments.
-------------------------------------------
From ValSyl@aol.com Fri May 9 12:50:35 1997
Subject: Roy Johnson- Thanks but no thanks?
Dear friends, I'm indebted to Don Johnson for making Roy Johnson's
comments easily accessible. However, I am bewildered by his hostility
toward my favorite story, "Time and Ebb", and to a lesser degree toward
"Conversation Piece, 1945." Yo, Royster -- you can cut the PC b.s., we're
among friends here. Words like "misogyny" belong in, I don't know, a
discussion group for Erica Jong fans or something at that level.
Pu-leeeze! Don't don't don't insult our collective intelligences.
As far as "Time and Ebb" not being a "story," there are times when I think
"stories" are the most boring things in the world (and I write 'em myself).
If you want "story", I suggest you consult your local TV Guide. Every
grocery bagger where I live knows all about "story". You want your first arc
30 pages into the script, your second arc 2/3 of the way through, and your
ending -- wow! -- should refer back to the arcs and, you know, try to like
sum everything up'n stuff. Does Roy Johnson actually believe this is what VN
readers seek? Has he spent too many hours around headsetted undergraduates?
Whuh happ'n -- library funding cut again? I sympathize, but his comments
read like the peevish, myopic complaints of an Allan Bloom or similarly
deadbolt-minded fogey. I know this sounds as if I am veering dangerously
close to personal attack, but I intend no such rude act -- I am just
wondering how a professional scholar, who doubtless knows much more than I
ever will about VN and twentieth-cent. lit. as a whole, could with such
ruthlessness attempt to destroy the incredible, delicate, funny, fabulously
nuanced, apotheosis of Nabokovian art which I believe "Time and Ebb" to be.
I have loved this story for longer than most "story editors" have been
alive, and nobody who drinks warm beer is ever going to change my mind. :)
I will attempt in my crude and brutish way to disprove
RJ's hypothesis.
What I see here is a story about the unreliability of history - a story
which, while ostensibly written by a scientist, succeeds in flattening the
significance of technical discovery, when compared to human memory.
Mnemosyne, not Ms. Plot-Line, is the operative muse here. Oh sure,
revelation of "the true nature" of electricity has obsolesced the airplane
and so on -- Barrett is a genius, Professor Andrews is a broken man -- but
what is happening here is that an elderly man [perhaps a mask for VN, in
midlife, imagining himself as he might become], who has been wildly
successful, reexamines his greatest work and wonders: did I do the right
thing? Aren't we all perhaps a little poorer as a result of our "advances"?
Where are the bicycles of yesteryear?
In his seeming acquiescence to the world of cheerful mediocrity -- so
resoundingly embodied in this story by the chipper columnist "Mr.
Sasketchawanov" and his disciple, the narrator's apparently pre-pubescent
great-granddaughter -- the narrator is really showing us how apart he remains
from such poshlusterie. By presenting us with these shriveled perspectives,
the narr. only makes himself, and his genuine thought, appear to be larger
and to possess more meaning. It's a nice trick of perspective, worthy of a
Victor Wind. It also is another way to "flatten" the temporal, the
received-historical, the [in our day] media spew which most people believes
constitutes the real, and advance in its stead the solidity of memory and
art, "which is the only immortality you and I shall ever know ... " [fill in
the blank].
This is what VN has always been about, in the most nutshellish way. "Time
and Ebb" provides, to this reader, a marvelous encapsulation of these very
important points.
There is so much more that could be said in defense of "Time & Ebb," by
people with more time and greater objectivity. I noticed that after RJ's
puzzling attack, William Vesterman (VESTERMAN@zodiac.rutgers.edu) provided a
vigorous and sensible response. Anybody else out there, pro or con?
Perhaps I'll go down in history as the woman who once threw an apple at
Johnson.
Sylvia
Sylvia Weiser Wendel
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> Posting number 972, dated 16 Feb 1996 20:17:39
EDITOR'S NOTE. Roy Johnson <Roy@mantex.demon.co.uk> continues his
discussion series on VN's short stories. Your comments are invited.
------------------------------------------
This week's stories - TIME AND EBB
CONVERSATION PIECE
--------------------------------------------
'Time and Ebb' (August 1944) reflects Nabokov's enthusiasm for
his newly adopted America in a manner similar to that which his
earliest stories of the 1920s showed his enjoyment of the
material world of Berlin, his first place of permanent exile. The
piece toys with his long term interest in time and memory, but
hardly even pretends to be a story: it is not much more than an
exercise in his increasingly complex prose style dressed up as
a memoir.
In it an unnamed ninety year old narrator thinks back from some
time in the twenty-first century to his arrival in America from
Europe in the mid 1940s. His topics are soda parlours, trains,
aeroplanes, skyscrapers, and anything which presents a novelty
to the European. (This positive appreciation of what is new is
undoubtedly one of the characteristics which helped Nabokov to
survive an entire adult life spent in exile.) But the lack of any
narrative impulse is reflected in some of the extreme contortions
of syntax and prose rhythm:
"The trees had their latin binomials displayed upon
their trunks, just as the drivers of the squat, gaudy,
scaraboid motor-cabs (generically allied in my mind to
certain equally gaudy automatic machines upon the
musical constipation of which the insertion of a small
coin used to act as a miraculous laxative) had their
stale photographic pictures affixed to their backs"
(ND,p.163)
This has all the hallmarks of the style which would eventually
produce the rococo constructions of *Look at the Harlequins!* and
*Ada* - the insistent use of alliteration and assonance, the
complex syntax, long periods with huge subordinate clauses and
parentheses, the rich vocabulary dotted with recondite and semi-
technical terms, and the twinning and parallelism. When these
devices were held in restraint by the structural and narrational
demands of a story-to-be-told, the result could be the creation
of masterpieces such as *Lolita*, but even his warmest supporters
would probably concede that at times this mannerism can become
inflated and tiresome.
Nabokov believed that literature should not be made to serve as
political propaganda, since in doing so it would become
aesthetically damaged. He seems to forget that his own works
which speak against tyranny and in favour of liberal humanism
(*Invitation to a Beheading*, 'Tyrants Destroyed') are propaganda
of a kind - but his belief is justified in the eyes of those who
believe that these are amongst his weakest works. Certainly his
last story of this type, 'Conversation Piece' (April 1945) falls
into this category, since the purpose at its centre is to send
out a political warning. It is interesting to note in this
context of overt didactics [strong opinions!] damaging
aesthetics, that the story features two elements which rate
highly amongst Nabokov's own prejudices - Germans, and women.
The story begins with what looks like a return to the double
theme. The narrator informs us that he has an exact namesake -
"complete from nickname to surname" (ND,p.125) - with whom he has
sometimes been confused. But this strategy is used only as a plot
device to get the narrator to a gathering in Boston to which he
has been invited by mistake. There, a group of gullible and
elderly American women are being addressed by a German professor,
Dr Shoe. In his speech he seeks to reconcile America and Germany
immediately after the end of the war by pouring suspicion onto
Britain, claiming that Nazi atrocities are just allied propaganda
lies, that German soldiers were clean, decent, and honourable,
and that people should not be misled by "the vivid Semitic
imagination which controls the American press" (p.136). The
narrator complains to the hostess about Dr Shoe and leaves in
disgust, but then a week later he receives a letter from his
namesake reproaching him for his bad behaviour at the meeting and
ending with a demand for money.
The problems here are that the story is little more than a
synopsis of Dr Shoe's reactionary propaganda; none of the
characters are developed; and there is almost no connection
between the double device and what happens at the meeting -
except to underscore the reactionary company the narrator's
double keeps, which we already know at the beginning of the
story.
It is difficult to find a sympathetically portrayed German in the
whole of Nabokov's fiction, and as Andrew Field points out in
confronting this phenomenon "Were it not for the events of this
century, Nabokov's attitude towards things German might be
regarded as whimsically as Dr Johnson's attitude towards
Scotsmen" (LA,p.206).
But the same might also be said about women - using Dr Johnson
as a parallel in this case too. Some of his female characters are
idealised love objects, but more often they are adulteresses
(Martha in *King Queen Knave*) tormentors-of-men (Margot in
*Laughter in the Dark*) or dim-witted vulgarians (Lydia in
*Despair*). The problem for the humanist reader is that Nabokov
covers his prejudices with very witty presentation:
"None of the women were pretty; all had reached or
over-reached forty-five...All looked cheerfully
sterile. Possibly some of them had had children, but
how they had produced them was a forgotten mystery;
many had found substitutes for creative power in
various aesthetic pursuits, such as, for instance, the
beautifying of committee rooms" (p.131)
It is fortunate for admirers of Nabokov's work that such overt
misogyny is rare - and that such wit is ubiquitous.
------------------------------------------------
Next week's story - SIGNS AND SYMBOLS
------------------------------------------------
--
PO Box 100 | Tel +44 0161 432 5811
Manchester UK | Fax +44 0161 443 2766
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 1996 14:25:46 -0800
Subject: Re: RJ:"Time & Ebb" & "Conversations Piece" (fwd)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: VESTERMAN@zodiac.rutgers.edu
I disagree with Roy Johnson's assessemnt of Time and Ebb
and with his assessment of VN on women. T&E not a "story?" Why
not--a story of time, a time capsule only now open for us. The
narrator sees not what is "new" but what is ordinary in America
of the 40s with "the stark lucidity of a future recollection--
you know, trying to see things as you will remember having
seen them?" (Lolita). Today, almost in the 21st century
the soda parlors and the scarab cabs and the labeled trees--
everything but the skyscrapers are gone, and we can see them
easily through the eyes of nostalgia rendered in advance by
a feat of imagination. The ordinary is now like what Borges
says of La Mancha. Cervantes used it as the epitome of
dullness to contrast with DQ's chivalric fantasies; now it
has itself romantic associations because of the Quixote.
As to "prejudices" against women, I don't see
how "the same thing" can be said as about Dr Johnson and
Scotsmen. What comes to my mind is what he said to objections
that the Senators in Julius Caesar weren't senatorial enough--
"he went to the Senate for what the Senate would supply him."
Further, I don't see that the (ugh) "love objects" in VN
are "idealized." They seem portrayed with all the tenderness
of individual endearment to me. As to sympathetic portrayals
of Germans, what about Kurt Dryer and Orlovius for starters.
As to supposing that the terrible events of this century
modified VN's view of Germany, whose views have they not
modified? Andrew Field's?
William Vesterman