LR/RL

Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 17.33 (Spring-Summer/printemps-été, 2000) 96-104

Charles Lock

University of Copenhagen

Nabokov=92s Centenary: A V-shaped Hereafter

Brian Boyd, Nabokov=92s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. Prince= ton: Princeton UP, 1999; xii+303 pp.; ISBN: 0691009597 (bk.); LC call no.: PS352= 7.A15P3334;

Julian W. Connolly, ed., Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives, Cambrid= ge: Cambridge UP, 1999; xiv+250 pp.; ISBN: 0521632838 (bk.); LC call no.: PG347= 6.N3Z776;

Neil Cornwell, Writers and Their Work: Vladimir Nabokov. Plymouth (U.K.): Northcote House (in association with the British Council), 1999; xvii+142 pp.; ISBN: 074630868x (bk.); LC call no.: in process;

Galya Diment, Pniniad: Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szeftel. Seattle & London: U of Washington P, 1997; xii+202 pp.; ISBN: 0295976349; LC call no.: PS3527.A15P5936<= /o:p>

The centenary of the birth of Vladimir Nabokov has seen the predictable emergen= ce of a number of monographs and collections of essays, and more must be expec= ted: three major conferences held in 1999, all on sites of Nabokovian resonance =96 Ithaca, Cambridge and St. Petersburg =96 will yield their proceedings.<= o:p>

Neil Cornwell=92s task is explicitly modest and introductory, for his volume bel= ongs to the revamped British Council series =93Writers and their Work=94: to what extent inclusion in this series marks a claim to Britishness, and is theref= ore in the present case an act of appropriation, is not clear. Happily, Cornwell is a Slavic specialist who gives due measure to each of the two conjured tongues, and who is particularly interesting on the topic of what George Steiner once (1972) defined as the =93extraterritorial=94: linguistic displ= acement as a distinctive feature of twentieth-century writing, from Conrad to Nabok= ov, Beckett, Borges and, more recently, Brodsky. Cornwell gives much more than one expects from such a volume as this: that Nabokov=92s trope of the =93kn= ight=92s move=94 is taken (without acknowledgement) from his contemporary, the Forma= list V.I. Shklovsky; that Nabokov=92s study of [end of page 96] Gogol, published in 1943, was =93seemingly the first book on Gogol to appear in English=94; that Zembla is invoked not only by Pope but also by Defoe and Hawthorne; that =93hazel shade=94 is a phrase that occurs frequently in Eng= lish poetry, and that Timon of Athens is not the unique source of the phrase =93pale fire.=94

In a slim book no apology need be made for omission, yet it seems an odd choice for Cornwell to devote a chapter each to Ada or Ardor and Look at the Harlequins! =96 neither text suitable for beginners =96and give no attention at all to Pnin. Here perhaps one detects a whiff of emulous wit, for it is of course Pnin=92s fate to be ignored, or =96his craft =96to elude attention. Not a= lways, however: Galya Diment=92s Pniniad is a strange double-focussed work, at once an attempt to illuminate Pnin through a claim to have identi= fied the so-called =93real-life=94 model, and a study of Marc Szeftel whose value and pathos are not exclusively reflected from Pnin: Szeftel was, as it may cruelly be said, a pale fire in his own right. As a portrait of an academic by default, of a Russian Jew who in emigration found univers= ity teaching the least uncongenial of options, this story has an ordinariness within which other lives may resonate. A Cornell colleague described Szeftel as Ain outlook a person far more strange =96foreign, shall I say, =96than anyone who had previously been a member of our department.=94 Galya Diment introduces a Pninian note of her own when she challenges this recollection with the observation that in 1945 there were =93at least three other foreigners=94 in Cornell=92s History Department: two Englishmen and a Dutchman.

Szeftel=92s hour should have arrived with the great scholarly project in which he was to collaborate with both Nabokov and Roman Jakobson: the translation of Slovo o polku Igoreve as The Song of Igor=92s Campaign, with historical commentary and philological apparatus devoted to the demonstrati= on that this poem was genuinely medieval and not a Romantic forgery in the manner of Ossian. The project made slow progress through the 1950=92s and was terminated in 1957 when Nabokov found out, from Harry Levin, that Jakob= son had sabotaged Nabokov=92s chance of being appointed to Harvard=92s Departme= nt of Modern Languages, as a teacher of Russian literature who was also a Russian writer, with the not-to-be-forgotten words: =93I do respect very much the elephant, but would you give him the chair of Zoology?=94 Nabokov ended the collaboration forthwith, and then brought out his =93plain text=94 translation in 1960, without the scholarly or editorial apparatus, and without even a mention of Jakobson or Szeftel as former collaborators. Szeftel was by then the leading authority on the historical background to The Song of Igor=92s Campaign: his life=92s scholarship had come to nothing, and the commentary was never to be published.

To what degree Szeftel may have served as a =93model=94 for Pnin is one of tho= se questions that would seem to belong to another age. The attempt to demonstr= ate the resemblance constitutes quite the least interesting aspect of this book. Yet without [end of page 97] that attempt, that alibi or apolo= gy, it is unlikely that this book would have found a publisher. The more we learn about Szeftel, of his wretched decline into self-pity and envy as, now =93exiled=94 once more, from Ithaca to Seattle, he realizes that he nev= er counted for much in Nabokov=92s life, the more we may come to admire Profes= sor Pnin. Naive readers of that novel =96 who include blurb-writers and other paratextual parasites =96accept the narrator=92s demeaning presentation of the protagonist; careful readers will admire the cunning and wit with which Pnin eludes his narrator and even, at the plot=92s necessary end, his author. Szeftel was apparently blest with little wit and less luck. Yet this modest biographical account has its interest: it exposes the mean pettinesses of quotidian academic life, not the awards and celebrations, the scandals and humiliations in the public domain, but the private miseries, unshared and unacknowledged. When Szeftel learns about the Festschrift presented to Jakobson on his seventieth birthd= ay, in three volumes with some two hundred contributors, he confides to his diary: =93The fact that no Festschrift has appeared to honor me is differen= t, but not to be asked to participate in honoring a fellow-scholar with whom I have been connected for so many years.... Forgetfulness, oversight?=94 This book is not easy reading, and it is a tribute to Diment=92s tact and circumspection that it is bearable at all. This work serves as a tribute not only to Szeftel but to the many other scholars whose lives have not even the tenuous link to a Nabokov to bring them into the light of our own mordant recognitions.

Towards the end of his life, when invited to lecture on medieval Russian history, Szeftel would instead propose a lecture on Nabokov. As a scholar he conside= red himself to have failed; his claim to attention would rest on his friendship with his erstwhile colleague and fellow-émigré. The reflectio= ns of Pale Fire are not so pale. The appearance of being a bit of a Kinbote is a risk to which anyone writing about Nabokov is exposed. And most exposed of all is Brian Boyd, whose monumental biography (1990-91) is impressively free of the sound of axes on this or the other shore. Hyper= bole, however, tends to grind, and one might be grateful that in his monograph devoted to Pale Fire, Boyd does not repeat his praise of the 999 line =93poem=94 contained in the novel: =93English poetry has few things be= tter to offer than Pale Fire=94 (Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991],440). There is now some moderation in the praise of Pale Fire but no =93co= ncession=94 that it should be treated as an =93image of a poem,=94 if not as a pastiche; and Boyd=92s line in hyperbole is unabashed. Nabokov is matched against var= ious writers =96Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Perec =96and each fails the test. (Only Shakespeare is a worthy rival). A by no means unusual insta= nce tells us that time is played with in Pale Fire =93in a way far more thrilling and inventive, far more skeptical and yet more magical, than in the postured probings of Eliot=92s Four Quartets=94 (206). Such e= xtremes of praise, and [end of page 98] such predictable reciprocities of condemnation, are enough to instil scepticism among Nabokov=92s most fervent admirers.

Nabokov=92s Pale Fire is a strange book, a monograph as long as its subject, yet rather more conventional in its layout. The layout of Pale Fire virtually prohib= its an annotated text, and Boyd=92s book will certainly serve as a useful guide, a compendium and synthesis of much of the annotation and elucidation that Pale Fire has elicited. Unfortunately Boyd also has a polemical purpose, to present nothing less than an interpretation, and one moreover that explains =93what really happens and what is really at stake in Pale Fire=94 (xii). There is a peculiar form of scholarly hubris by which an author seeks permission to cite and refute within his own text the comme= nts of the publisher=92s reader, who in this case is Michael Wood, author of The Magician=92s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994). Boyd=92s argument is that the entire construction of Pale Fire can be attributed neither to Shade =96 as Boyd had argued earlier =96 nor to Kinbote, but to Shade=92s daughter Hazel who, after her death, works as a benevolent ghostly influence, dropping hints for both Shade and Kinbote: it is she who orchestrates the two texts, who conjures their two tongues into a single story: =93Hazel=92s spirit somehow inspires Kinbote with the idea of Zembla=94 (173). Wood objects, and Boyd repeats the reader=92s report: =93Death itself is diminished, its horror is cancell= ed, and a desperate sentimentality beckons. It=92s as if Nahum Tate had decided to deal with Cordelia=92s death, not by removing it from his version of = King Lear, but by bringing her back as a helpful spirit=94 (257).=

This seems to me unanswerable and Boyd=92s attempt at refutation does nothing to mitigate the force of Wood=92s words: what belongs at most to the parate= xt has thus been incorporated into the text, and it has not been tamed. Boyd= =92s is a curious rhetorical strategy, unnervingly close to Kinbotism. The openi= ng sentence of Boyd=92s final paragraph epitomizes the nakedness of his approp= riation of the mind and intentions of Nabokov, shamelessly without the cover of logic: =93Pale Fire shows how wrongly so many read Nabokov=94 (261).=

I count myself among those many readers, in finding broad interpretations either frivolous or dull, or both. The fascination of Nabokov is entirely on the surface =96where all fascin= ation must be sought. And it is extraordinary how much of that surface can be ignored, overlooked or neglected even in a monograph as comprehensive and thorough as this. Boyd=92s argument begins with a statement of the obvious: =93Pale Fire consists of four parts,=94 and lists the four parts as they are given on the contents page of the novel: Foreword, Poem, Commentar= y, Index. There is, however, on the page before the contents page, an epigraph from Boswell in which Johnson speaks about a young man who was running about town shooting cats. =93And then in a kindly reverie, he bethought him= self of his own favourite cat, and said, =91But Hodge shan=92t be shot: no, no, Hodge shall not be [end of page 99] shot.=92=94 In Kinbote=92s comme= ntary on line 894 we learn that Shade has =93been said to resemble at least four people,=94 the first named of whom is Samuel Johnson. It is even hinted that the epigraph itself may have been selected and placed by Kinbote, who tells us (Commentary to line 172): =93In a black pocketbook that I fortunately have with me I find, jotted down, here and there, among various extracts that had happened to please me (a footnote from Boswell=92s Life of Dr. Johnson....) ....=94 An interpretation of Pale Fire that makes not one mention of Boswell, Johnson, or Hodge is surely not, Sir, to be taken seriously.

Thus one strikes an ungrateful note, quite inappropriate to much in Boyd=92s com= mentary. When Shade and Kinbote are on a walk, =93skirting Dulwich Forest,=94 Shade recalls the farmer=92s son who =93pointed and remarked informatively: =91He= re Papa pisses.=92=94 Not content merely to note the allusion to Browning=92s = =93Pippa Passes,=94 Boyd finds in Mrs. Sutherland Orr=92s Handbook of 1892 an account of the origin of that poem in a walk taken by Browning Ain a wood near Dulwich.=94 =93My friend,=94 Kinbote writes in the same paragraph, =93= sparkled with quips, and marrowskies, and anecdotes=94: Boyd omits to alert us here to the Index, where =93marrowsky=94 is explained as =93a rudimentary spoone= rism=94 =96e.g. Papa pisses =96=93from the name of a Russian diplomat of the early 19^th century, Count Komarovski, famous at foreign courts for mispronouncing his own name =96Makarovski, Macaronski, Skomorovski, etc.=94 (Spoonerism is itself derived from the pho= nemic transpositions of the Warden of New College Oxford named Spooner).

=93I find it staggering that readers can think someone as playfully generous as Nabokov is out to frustrate them,=94 writes Boyd in Kinbotic tones. Such aloofness from =93readers=94 certainly lends spice to the reader=92s pursuit of whatever Boyd fails to find. This reader finds it puzzling that Boyd does not appear to have recourse to the Oxford English Dictionary. Line 35 of the poem, =93Stilettos of a frozen stillicide,=94 receives this comment from Kinbote: =93My dictionary defines [stillicide] as =93a success= ion of drops falling from the eaves, eavesdrop, cavesdrop. I remember having encountered it for the first time in a poem by Thomas Hardy.=94 Boyd refers us to Webster=92s for a definition, pointing out that Kinbote does not recall the exact poem, and that Nabokov offers the reader no help. In a footnote Boyd acknowledges that Michael Long (Marvell, Nabokov: Childhood and Arcadia [Oxford: Clarendon; London; New York: Oxford UP], 1984) =93was the first to note the source=94 in Hardy=92s =93Friends B= eyond=94: =93In the muted, measured note/ Of a ripple under archways, or a lone cave= =92s stillicide.=94

One need not have waited till 1984. If, puzzled by the word =91stillicide,=92 o= ne had looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, one would have found the word described as =93now rare=94 =96 and Hardy=92s poem (from 189= 8) cited as the only example since the seventeenth century. This lends a certain uncanny focus to Robert Graves=92s not entirely reliable account of a conve= rsation with Hardy in [end of page 100] August 1920, in which the latter protested against the critics who complained about Hardy=92s use of extraor= dinary words not to be found in any dictionary: =93Hardy then laughed a little. Once or twice recently he had looked up a word in the dictionary for fear of being again accused of coining, and found it there right enough - only to read on and discover that the sole authority quoted was himself....!=94 (Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, 1929), ch. 28; the =93st-=94 fa= scicle of the OED had been published in 1919.) Boyd manages to come to his own rescue, or mitigation: Webster=92s was the dictionary always open on Nabokov=92s table =96 we even have a photograph (reproduced in A= merican Years). It was only in December 1973 that Nabokov acquired his own set of the thirteen volumes of the OED (American Years, 622); but one is well-advised to assume his familiarity with a library set.<= /o:p>

Boyd draws our attention to the =93consonne /D=92appui, Echo=92s fey chil= d=94 (lines 965-66), for which Shade declares a special partiality just after having rhymed =93meant=94 with =93cement.=94 As Boyd notes =96 and is the f= irst to note =96 the repetition of the poem=92s first line as its thousandth and la= st would close the whole with another consonne d=92appui:

Trundling an empty barrow up the lane.

[I was the shadow of the waxwing slain.]

In the earlier instance we have further reinforcement of the consonne d=92a= ppui(=93supporting consonant,=94 though =93intrusive consonant=94 gives a fairer sense of its = value, at least in English verse) with an internal rhyme in l. 965:

The brain is drained

And a brown ament, and the noun I meant

To use but did not, dry on the cement.

What is an ament, apart from being an unusual word that escapes entirely the notice of our interpreter? It means catkin, which links it to Kinbote, and to Gradus who hawks Cartesian devils =93during Catkin Week=94 (comment on line 171); and to the =93muscat grape=94 in the second line of Shade=92s= poem =93The Sacred Tree=94 cited by Kinbote in his comment on line 49, with the further remark: AI do not know if it is relevant or not but there is a cat-and-mouse game in the second line.=94 The noun he meant to use instead of ament must be catkin: the OED tells us that George Eliot=92s F= elix Holt contains the phrase =93catkined hazels=94: somewhere in this game, Hodge may be lurking.

=93Ament=94 from Latin amentum, tail or catkin; =93amental=94 can mean either = =93catkin-bearing=94 or, as a homonym from a different root, =93denying or lacking intelligence.= =94 According to the Supplement of the OED, the substantive =93ament=94 [end of page 101] in the twentieth century has been used clinically to denote those who lack intelligence; the only non-clinical instance cited is from Walter de la Mare, writing in 1935. In 1938 Beckett, in Murphy, uses the adjective =93amental.=94 Nabokov has =93ament=94 as =93catkin=94 i= n his early story =93Christmas=94 (1921), or at least in its English version: =93slippe= ry planks, flecked with aments.=94 This double sense of =93ament=94 creates a = tenuous link between Nabokov and de la Mare. In 1942 Nabokov confessed to Edmund Wilson that his early poems =93are strongly influenced by the Georgian poet= s, Rupert Brooke, De la Mare, etc., by whom I was much fascinated at the time.= =94 This is cited by D. Barton Johnson in =93Vladimir Nabokov and Rupert Brooke= ,=94 an essay in Nabokov and his Fiction. Barton Johnson sketches some of the links between Brooke and those poets most popular in Cambridge c. 1920, and is entirely persuasive in his claim that this formative time in Nabokov=92s life needs to be more thoroughly explored. Nabokov=92s famil= iarity with English Literature was acquired in three stages, of which we know much about the first =96 from Nabokov=92s father and tutors in Russia =96 a= nd the last =96in America, under the guidance of Edmund Wilson, Harry Levin and others. But of the Cambridge years we know very little; and in various ways Nabokov does his best to discourage enquiry. In 1922 Nabokov published an essay, =93Rupert Bruk,=94 which has not even yet been translated into English. This essay is concerned with one poem in particular, entitled =93Life Beyond=94 (its title not far from Hardy=92s =93Friends Beyond=94), and it is in this essay that Nabokov = first uses the word potustoronnost=92= (the hereafter, the beyond), a word that Nabokov will use over fifty years later in his last novel, Look at the Harlequins! (1974). In 1979, in a preface to a posthumous collection of Nabokov=92s poetry, Véra Nabok= ov claimed that potustoronnost=92 was the =93main theme=94 of all his w= ork. Cornwall laments the results of this intervention, pointing out that the theme had =93not gone completely unremarked [though] it had certainly not received the attention she felt to be its due. This shortfall has by now been made perhaps more than good, as something of an =91otherworld=92 bandw= agon has been rolling for some time in Nabokov scholarship=94 (Cornwell, 12). That bandwagon has been driven by Vladimir Alexandrov, author of Nabokov= =92s Otherworld (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991), and it has made possible, even plausible, Boyd=92s sentimental reading of Pale Fire.

One would like to think that Véra Nabokov was merely playing with the idea of posterity, that now, after Nabokov=92s death, one is in the beyond for which he was writing. The fundamentalist line has however prevailed, and provided a master-alibi for subordinating textual details to grand and hazy interpretations. Connolly=92s volume is full of local illuminations and happily devoid of postured [end of page 102] probings into the hereafter. As the master taught us: =93Only myopia condones the blurry gene= ralizations of ignorance=94 (Strong Opinions, 168). The first essay is so myopic as to pose a severe test of the reader=92s faith. Gavriel Shapiro argues that Nabokov leaves traces of his names all through his texts, not just in the anagrams =96 such as Vivian Darkbloom or Adam von Librikov =96 that any child could make out, but also in hypograms distributed throughout a paragraph. Saussure=92s pursuit of onomastic anagrams in Latin poetry pro= vides us with some sort of precursor for Shapiro=92s exercise. But Saussure did hold to the rule that sequence had to be maintained. Shapiro is subject to no such constraint, and is constantly amazed to discover, in what he regards as important sentences, all the characters that make up the name of Vladimir Nabokov, and sometimes Sirin as well. Such acronyms and lipogra= ms are valid =96 if that word can denote a contractual recognition between aut= hor, reader and other readers =96 if they operate according to some system that excludes random replication of results. I astonish myself to notice that the last five words of the previous sentence form an acronym of their verdi= ct on Shapiro=92s procedure; and that of the last six, the acronym expresses a likely consequence of hypogrammatic paranoia. On alphabetical iconicism, on the V and X and W that wing their way through the Nabokovian text, Shapi= ro is considerably more persuasive.

Maxim Shrayer=92s essay on Jewish questions in Nabokov=92s life and art treats a difficult subject with delicacy and tolerance; Leona Toker treats the dead without too much respect, and joins the opposition to the School of the Hereafter. Gennady Barabtarlo addresses with some success the problem that we always encounter: how to reconcile the fascination of details with any sort of schematic reading. An extremely suggestive paragraph on Nabokov=92s objections to Dostoevsky leads on to Julian Connolly=92s treatment of the topic. While Connolly=92s discussion is largely thematic, Barabtarlo outlin= es the possibilities of a generic resolution of the conflict: that, as Nabokov said in his lectures, Dostoevsky was in the wrong genre: =93He seems to have been chosen by the destiny of Russian letters to become Russia=92s greatest playwright, but he took the wrong turning and wrote novels.=94 This is not very different from Bakhtin=92s observation that Dostoevsky=92s novels are Menippean satires. Maurice Couturier tries altogether too hard to squeeze Pale Fire into the mould of a novel with a =93single authorial figur= e.=94 One realizes yet again the problematic nature of literary genres within the Russian tradition: that Eugene Onegin is subtitled =93a novel in verse,=94 while War and Peace is declared by its author not to be a novel at all.