Charles
Baudelaire's posthumously published note-cards
under the title "Mon Coeur Mis à Nu" were translated to Portuguese in
2009 by Tomaz Tadeu as "Meu Coração Desnudado." In the note [21] headed by
"Deliver oneself to Satan: what does this mean?" we read:
"To begin a novel, start with a
theme, at any point and, to wish to finish it over, begin using very beautiful
sentences." (sorry for my faulty re-translation into
English)*
In his letter 209 ( May 9, 1950)
Edmund Wilson wrote to Volodya:
"I've just been examining the early text of Madame Bovary that was
published last year. It is impressive and to me a little surprising to see how
Flaubert worked. The most marvellous passages in the finished version are often
quite flat in this one, and even rather inept... It is as if he first assembled
his data and then at a given point turned on the music and magic. I am
especially interested in this because it is more or less my own method. You, I
imagine, are more likely to start with the words themselves."
(DB-DV,University of California Press, p.270)
Nabokov
answered (May, 15, 1950) in his letter, n.210: "My method of composing is quite different from Flaubert's. I shall
explain it to you at lenght some day. Now I must go to room 178 to analyse ("The
Lady with the Dog", Chekov)..."
JM: What a pity that the letter to EW, the one in
which Nabokov would fulfill his promise about his method of composing has,
apparently, not been written.
We may suppose that certain qualms, as
they've been expressed by Sebastian Knight (according to V.)
represent, in part, VN's difficulties to tame divergent lines of
associations. There are more explicit clues in "Strong Opinions," but these
point in a different direction.
Wilson thought VN was likely to start with
the words, whereas Nabokov (in SO) always insisted that he would
first get the entire novel ready in his mind, before he started to set it
down on paper in "a tumble of words." When Nabokov referred to TOoL he used the same model
that starts with the abstract project that is waiting to gain verbal shape
but, from the recently published cards, it is difficult to get
the complete image which VN suggests he already kept (nor the
finished novel he recited for a select-audience of pines, avians, one
doctor and several nurse-attendants).
Words are doubtlessly important to
him ( cf. notes from OED,Webster's, a list of synonims, schematic word
plays, rewritten sentences), as much as verbalized recollections and
thoughts. However I disagree (in part) from Wilson's
hypothesis. I wonder at which "given point' Nabokov would "turn on the
music and magic." Wouldn't he have started exactly by "turning them
on" in the first place? It would correspond to what EW described as being Flaubert's second
creative move : first Nabokov intuited the music and magic, then he
intuited how they'd been set into an overall pattern, then the novel was
formed like a chess-game or following the idea of a plot.
Finally enter the words ( Leonardo da Vinci's painting procedure by
"via de ponere"). Nevertheless Nabokov's power over words is so astounding that, most
probably, my artificial amateurish schema is all wrong: he could have
intuited the music and magic from a set of words, everything coming to him
at once, to be worked off, like in da Vinci's "via de
levare" method, as in sculpture.
Perhaps only those who are writers by
profession can join together Nabokov's different descriptions about plot,
game, image and beautiful/ecstatic sentences and proffer a reasoned
hypothesis. My rough attemps are intended as a stimulus for those who are
better equipped to answer, or who can indicate a bibliography related to
"methods of composing in Nabokov," as I'm certain there
are.
.......................................................................................................................................................................
* The edition and numbering of the translation
is different from the French edition I found in [PDF]
MON CŒUR MIS À NU - ... elg0001.free.fr/pub/pdf/baudelaire_mon_coeur_mis_a_nu.pdf