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VN DIALOG:S1a
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EDITOR's NOTE: In this first exchange Harring and Slavitt describe their
initial exposure to Nabokov. Below is David Slavitt's account.
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My meeting with VN I've described already for the group It was also my
introduction to his work. I read (frantically, rapidly) at LOLITA and
PNIN before I flew up to see him at Cornell. What I remember most
vividly, then, is my recognition of his immense authority, both on the
page and in person. His erudite playfulness in conversation was a model
for me of how to be a serious man. The big men at Yale in the early
fifties weren't suave and poised and relaxed in that way. Nabokov was
clearly a serious guy, but he wore his talent and learning and . . .
Force, I guess . . .with great ease. Some of the jokes were tests, but
one had the sense that he was delighted if the response was correct.
Now that I think back to this, 38 years ago I guess, I am struck by
his interest in jokes as cracks in the surface of experience through which
deeper truths could sometimes be glimpsed. In this, and in his interest in
childhood (or anyway nymphet) sexuality, he was much like Freud -- whom, of
course, he affected to detest. They were not compatible but were dealing
with the same kinds of issues.
I had always been something of a clown, a maker of puns and jokes,
but I'd assumed that this was a fault, a weakness of character. (It was
not the kind of thing my family or my education had endorsed as valuable:
quite the contrary.) So Nabokov's playfulness, his enjoyment even of
terrible puns, was what the touchy-feely types of our time would call an
empowerment. Max Jacob's babouinisme was another such authorization of my
own horse's-ass tendencies. (When they were dragging him off to his death
in a concentration camp, Jacob is said to have said something about "I have
your skin" which is J'ai ta peau -- or Gestapo, in the French
pronunciation. Nabokov, at the Old Dominion Foundation party for the
publication of his Onegin, told him about a man going into an English bar
where the bartender asks, "You gin?" and the patron replies, "One gin."
It's brilliantly dim and has allowed me to be shameless in indulging my
less well developed talents for paranomasia.)
Obviously, after having met the man, I read more, read away at most
of what I could get hold of. I attributed to him my getting hired at
Newsweek -- where I'd been on a kind of probationary trial. All I did with
the Nabokov -- all I had to do -- was write down what he'd said, and it was
a morceau de gateau.
The ways in which his work opened my eyes to the possibilities of
serious play in fiction are many and complicated, and that would be a whole
essay. But let me point out here that this was before I'd encountered
Calvino, or Borges, or Nooteboom or Queneau or that Irishman who wrote At
Swim Two Birds. . .
I was . . . 23! A child, really.
But that's the time to learn, isn't it?
David R. Slavitt-- Phone: (215) 382-3994; fax: (215) 382- 8837
initial exposure to Nabokov. Below is David Slavitt's account.
-----------------------------------------
My meeting with VN I've described already for the group It was also my
introduction to his work. I read (frantically, rapidly) at LOLITA and
PNIN before I flew up to see him at Cornell. What I remember most
vividly, then, is my recognition of his immense authority, both on the
page and in person. His erudite playfulness in conversation was a model
for me of how to be a serious man. The big men at Yale in the early
fifties weren't suave and poised and relaxed in that way. Nabokov was
clearly a serious guy, but he wore his talent and learning and . . .
Force, I guess . . .with great ease. Some of the jokes were tests, but
one had the sense that he was delighted if the response was correct.
Now that I think back to this, 38 years ago I guess, I am struck by
his interest in jokes as cracks in the surface of experience through which
deeper truths could sometimes be glimpsed. In this, and in his interest in
childhood (or anyway nymphet) sexuality, he was much like Freud -- whom, of
course, he affected to detest. They were not compatible but were dealing
with the same kinds of issues.
I had always been something of a clown, a maker of puns and jokes,
but I'd assumed that this was a fault, a weakness of character. (It was
not the kind of thing my family or my education had endorsed as valuable:
quite the contrary.) So Nabokov's playfulness, his enjoyment even of
terrible puns, was what the touchy-feely types of our time would call an
empowerment. Max Jacob's babouinisme was another such authorization of my
own horse's-ass tendencies. (When they were dragging him off to his death
in a concentration camp, Jacob is said to have said something about "I have
your skin" which is J'ai ta peau -- or Gestapo, in the French
pronunciation. Nabokov, at the Old Dominion Foundation party for the
publication of his Onegin, told him about a man going into an English bar
where the bartender asks, "You gin?" and the patron replies, "One gin."
It's brilliantly dim and has allowed me to be shameless in indulging my
less well developed talents for paranomasia.)
Obviously, after having met the man, I read more, read away at most
of what I could get hold of. I attributed to him my getting hired at
Newsweek -- where I'd been on a kind of probationary trial. All I did with
the Nabokov -- all I had to do -- was write down what he'd said, and it was
a morceau de gateau.
The ways in which his work opened my eyes to the possibilities of
serious play in fiction are many and complicated, and that would be a whole
essay. But let me point out here that this was before I'd encountered
Calvino, or Borges, or Nooteboom or Queneau or that Irishman who wrote At
Swim Two Birds. . .
I was . . . 23! A child, really.
But that's the time to learn, isn't it?
David R. Slavitt-- Phone: (215) 382-3994; fax: (215) 382- 8837