Laurence Hochard on "Eichmann's moral
indignation", wrote: "You can always count on a murderer for self-righteous
moral indignation."and we know he is alluding to "Lolita"
and HH's words : Did she have a precursor? She
did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all
had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the
sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that
summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose
style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the
seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this
tangle of thorns.
Some time ago I received a translation with an
afterword by "L.V" of Nabokov's The Word,
a mystical short-story published in the "Rul'" ( 7
January 1923). "L.V" wrote that the
" theme of angels, too, is an important one in
the early poetry of Nabokov, including the very early cycle "Angels" (written
between 1918 and 1920) and the poem "On Angels" in 1924. [...] and in
the end he added, concerning VN's narrator in " The Word": "The
overwrought ornateness of the language belongs to the narrator, in much the same
way as "Lolita's" fancy prose style belongs to a murderer, not the
author. Narrator and author alike have begun to realise the limits of
language in breaking through to that world[...]
Recently, Sandy Klein sent us a review
of Joseph O'Neill, by Benjamin Kunkel (Complete review at following
URL: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n14/kunk01
.html ) where the latter writes:"Does the blank prose of L’Etranger summon
the affectless Meursault, or is it the other way around? Does Humbert
Humbert’s nympholepsy naturally produce such a fancy prose style, or is
it instead that his lust for Lolita furnishes Nabokov’s only means of rendering
psychologically plausible and important the mood of sinister exquisitism that
he, Nabokov, prefers to adopt? In these happy instances, the question is
undecidably chicken-and-egg. The question of priority – style or man? – is
moot."
I was reading today one of Ruth Rendell's
short-stories, Shreds and Slivers, that begins with " I love my love
with a ps because she is psychic; I hate her with a ps because she is psilotic.
I feed her on psalliota and psilotaceae[...] Forgive me. I am carried away by
words sometimes, especially those of Greek etymology that begin with a
combination of unlikely consonants." Her
narrator watched the estranged wife he intended to poison from a "sartorial
hideaway" and the first thing that came to my mind
was VN's sentence, in Lolita. And
yet what we may discern is not exactly a "fancy prose style",
but a peculiar fascination with fancy words hold the prose in thrall
and establish a "murderer's style".
While writing to Matt on "Housman in PF" I set
down a non-sequitur, since there is no link bt.
eighteenth-century writers and the great invented twentieth-century
poet, John Shade. It might have happened because I'd been busy
with VN's particularly religious Russian short-stories and his preoccupation
with death while puzzling over Kinbote's religiousness
and "Zemblan style". A week before I found an article
in which Nabokov had been situated side by side to Allen Ginsberg,
Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller, as a representative of the beat generation
with his sexy road-novel "Lolita".
I was wondering how to place John Shade's
style or the man's oscillating mood...