I drafted the message below before seeing John Morris’s and Jim Twiggs’ recent postings on Donald Harington, so the basic information that Harington pulled off a similar feat by presenting the work of a fictional poet within a novel has become less important, but just in case the rest of the message might pique some fellow Nabokovians’ interest in Harington’s work, I decided to send it anyway.  Harington actually died a couple months ago, in early November, at the age of 73, and as will be clear from what I say below, I’m a great admirer as well.

 

Brian Walter

bdwlecteur@mac.com

 

Actually, another novelist who pulled off more or less the same feat and who would probably be closer to home for many Nabokovians is Donald Harington, whose third novel, Some Other Place. The Right Place, not only blends together a variety of narrative voices and perspectives but also incorporates a collection of original poems by one of the main characters in the novel, Daniel Lyam Montross (who re-appears in several of Harington’s other books).  And in Montross’s case, there is no question: he’s primarily a New Englander whose work invokes Frost quite deliberately, especially “Directive.”

 

At least some Nabokovians will remember Harington for the NABOKV-L dialogue he participated in during the mid-90s with fellow novelist David Slavitt in which they discussed Nabokov’s influence on their work; at the time, Harington had recently published his ninth novel, Ekaterina, about a woman with a predilection for pubescent boys who also happens to be a Soviet dissenter who escapes from the KGB to America where she becomes (eventually and ingeniously) a rather improbably successful writer.  Some of you will also recall that Nabokov scholar Andrew Brown wrote a review celebrating Ekaterina less for its inversion of the nympholept-nymphet relationship than for its evocations of Pale Fire, Speak, Memory, and various elements of Nabokov’s own life-story. 

 

For my own experience, the first five chapters of Ekaterina excerpted at the time on NABOKV-L (and still available on Zembla, I believe) did not make much of an impression, but when I got around some months later to reading the whole book, it literally bowled me over.  This next statement will almost certainly get some list members up in arms, but I offer it as someone who has read, re-read, taught, and written about Pale Fire many times over the years and who loves, appreciates, and admires it (I daresay) probably as much as anyone on the list: in its extraordinarily deft, complex, and remarkably seamless layering of narrative voices, Ekaterina finally manages to match Pale Fire in its inexhaustibly suggestive innovation of the genre’s narrative possibilities.  (Those of you who have read it may recall the trenchancy and flexibility of the ride-and-tie motif for its masterful orchestration of narrative perspectives.)

 

If any Nabokovians are interested in following up on Harington, let me just mention that while Some Other Place and Ekaterina are both terrific novels, the one which, I suspect, Nabokov himself would most have liked and appreciated would be The Cockroaches of Stay More, an uproariously clever and aesthetically disciplined 1980’s Cold War re-setting of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles into a colony of cockroaches living in the almost deserted Ozarks town of Stay More, a setting at least in part for most of Harington’s books.  Harington is, in general, a much freer and less dense prose stylist than Nabokov, our extravagantly precise champion of le mot juste and the exuberantly interleaved sentence, but what I found, the more I read Harington’s books, is a remarkably successful Nabokovian sensibility for using the form of the novel to celebrate the extraordinary imaginative generosity of keenly felt sensual experience.  Like Nabokov, Harington manages to blend not only the cosmic with the cleverly comic but also with the fully comedic, finding in often remarkably inimical scenarios (including, yes, unflinchingly possessive middle-age inflicting itself deliberately, systematically, and cruelly on constrained innocence) a means to improbably indelible beauties, the written word as evidence for the existence of still more tender ghosts humoring us lucky mortals.

 

 

 

<S Gwynn: Other than VN, the only case that comes to mind in which a novelist has performed the not incosiderable feat of the former and provided the actual poetry is that of Anthony Burgess, who was, of course, as good a poet as he was a writer of prose.  There may be other examples, but none comes to mind.>

 

E.L. Doctorow's Loon Lake (1980) features a poet, Warren Penfield, and chunks of his poetry are liberally distributed over the novel.  I read this book too long ago, in fact in the mirabilic year of 1984, to pass any judgement, but I do recall that the poetry struck me as rather prosaic, very much like that of many poets of the second half of the 20th century.

 

A. Bouazza.

 

 

 

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