James Twiggs sends another
review of Bend Sinister (the list received the abstract of Diana
Trilling's a few days ago). The title is "Comic-Strip Dictator" by
Richard Watts, Jr.(The New Republic Published: July 7, 1947).
Excerpts: "The story of the free man under the totalitarian
state is still the classic tragedy of our age, and in Bend
Sinister it is given striking and original treatment, at once
impressive, powerful and oddly exasperating. This second novel in
English by Vladimir Nabokov... has an eerie, nightmare quality and savage
humor. They combine to make it considerably more than the warmed over
Arthur Koestler it occasionally seems on the verge of becoming. Bend
Sinister['s] chief fault is that an apparent fascination with his own
linguistic achievement sometimes causes Nabokov to go in for verbal
fanciness...It is simple in its tragic story, which is merely that of
a world-famous philosopher--and it is one of the novel's successes
that Nabokov has drawn, in Professor Krug, an intellectual hero whose
status as an intellectual is completely credible...It is elaborate both in
much of its style and in the manner in which Nabokov has constructed an
abstract, totalitarian land which is both Russian and German in its
language but decidedly more National Socialist than Communist in its
history, theory and practice. Ekwilism was probably the only triumphant fascist movement that
[employs the] comic strip as one of its chief inspirations. This was a
daily cartoon dealing with the adventures of a Mr. and Mrs. Etermon, a name
which the language of Paduk's country meant Everyman. "With conventional human and sympathy bordering upon the
obscene," says Nabokov, "Mr Etermon and the
little woman were follow from parlor to kitchen and from the garden to
garret through all the mentionable stages of their daily existence which,
despite the presence of comfortable armchairs and all sorts of electric
thingumbobs and one thing-in-itself (a car) did not differ essentially
from the life of a Neanderthal couple" Not only did Etermon
come to be regarded as man representing the proper sort of existence for a
loyal member of Paduk's Ekwilism Party, but the Leader himself decided to dress,
wear his hair and adopt a "sort of cartoon
angularity" in the fashion of the comic strip...Ekwilism had its
drama as well as its comic strip...In the immortal words of Professor Hamm,
Ekwilist author of The Real Plot of Hamlet, Fortinbras' status as a
hero is thus made irrefutable.* Nabokov is at his best in his bitterly humorous
thrusts at the narrowness and stupidity of totalitarian thought and action
and in his flights of satirical scorn. His scenes of horror, with their
eerily distorted lights and shadows, can also be powerful, and his account
of the slow, inexorable pressure exerted on Krug captures the terror of the
police state in a manner not easy to forget...It is because
Nabokov can achieve some of the ominous and comic effects he manages in
Bend Sinister that his puckish weakness for affectation seems so
outrageous."
JM: Here we find a direct
reference to Nabokov's appreciation of comic strips. Also, like in Trilling's, a
bitter criticism related to Nabokov's writing. R.Watts mentions that this novel
is "oddly exasperating," because of "its apparent fascination with its
own linguistic achievement" which leads Nabokov towards "verbal fanciness."
For him, the author's "puckish weakness for affectation seems...outrageous"
because it accompanies a kind of writing that is both "ominous and comic."
The summary of the plot Watts has offered
highlighted elements I'd forgotten and could link to our recent
postings about "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight": Bend Sinister
was written not long after this first novel in English and it
contains a satirical view of Hamm, an Ekwilist author who wrote "The Real
Plot of Hamlet."#
Watts mentions the novel's setting as
being closer to Nazi-Germany than to Stalin's Russia and references Arthur
Koestler's novel "Darkness At Noon" (wiki: "a seminal work of twentieth-century literature, Darkness At Noon is
a penetrating exploration of the moral danger inherent in a system that is
willing to enforce its beliefs by any means necessary...Originally published in
1941... it is a powerful and haunting portrait of a Communist revolutionary
caught in the vicious fray of the Moscow show trials of the late
1930s.") Koestler's
autobiography details a mystic experience while he awaited to be executed in
Spain ("The invisible writing")**. Wiki informs that Koetler addressed
"a major speech at the CIA-front Congress for Cultural Freedom held in
Berlin,"*** an artistic movement to which Nabokov's musician cousin
Nikolas belonged, among an impressive list of other
artists.
I've been impressed by other works by
Koestler in the past ( "The Sleepwalkers" and "The Reasons of Coincidence" are
among those that I remember best), but I'd never seen any connection
between his writings and Nabokov's. Rumors describe Koestler as a "serial
rapist" and a misogynist (does anyone in the List know anything that could
suggest that Humbert Humbert could carry traces of Koestler?) and Julian Barnes
expressed doubts concerning Koestler's incluence on his wife (Koestler and
his wife died together after having ingested
barbiturates).
(Edmund Wilson's criticism of Bend
Sinister has already been posted this
year).
..........................................................................................................................
* "In this production the famous Elsinore
ghost is not the phantom of Hamlet's father but of Fortinbras' father, and
the idea of one ghost going about pretending to be another is a fine piece
of Ekwilist strategy, since the ghostly imposter was spreading untrue
rumors to soften the Danish morale [ and] it is clear that Osric
was really Fortinbras' most brilliant spy, bent on creating trouble between
two of his Leader's most dangerous foes."
**- Today Alexey Sklyarenko mentioned
"Chekhov's story "Ночь перед судом"
(The Night before the Trial,
1886) that I discuss in my soon-to-be-published article "Nabokov's
Antropomorphic Zoo: The Leporine Family of Doctors in
Ada". In its turn, the title of Chekhov's
story reminds one of Blok's inspired poem "Перед судом" (Before
the Judgment Day,
1915) addressed to the poet's wife.
A.S makes a fascinating connection bt.
Blok's most famous poem and lines in ADA related to Krolik and a servant who,
later, helped Van to put out Kim's eyes.
***- Wiki-link: "The Congress for Cultural
Freedom (CCF) was an anti-communist advocacy group founded in 1950. In 1967, it
was revealed that the United States Central Intelligence Agency was instrumental
in the establishment of the group, and it was subsequently renamed the
International Association for Cultural Freedom (IACF). At its height, the
CCF/IACF was active in some thirty-five countries and also received significant
funding from the Ford Foundation."
# - Watts adds: "I cannot, by the
way, resist quoting just one sentence to show the author's prose at its
worst, after warning you that he is not often guilty of such
things: 'They separated and he caught a glimpse of her
pale, dark-eyed, not very pretty face with its glistening lips as she
slipped under his door-holding arm and after one backward glance from the
first landing ran upstairs trailing her wrap with all its
constellations--Cepheus and Cassiopeia in their eternal bliss, and the
dazzling tear of Capella, and Polaris the snowflake on the grizzly fur of
the Cub, and the swooning galaxies--those mirrors of infinite space qui
m'efjrayent, Btaise, as they did you, and where Olga is not, but where
mythology stretches strong circus nets, lest thought, in its ill fitting
tights, should break its old neck instead of rebouncing with a hep and a
hop--hopping down again into this urine-soaked dust to take that short run
with the half pirouette in the middle and display the extreme simplicity
of heaven in the acrobat's amphiphorical gesture, the candidly open hands
that start a brief shower of applause while he walks backwards and then,
reverting to virile manners, catches the little blue handkerchief, which
his muscular flying mate, after her own exertions, takes from Her heaving
hot bosom-leaving more than her smile suggests-and tosses to him, so that
he may wipe the palms of his aching weakening
hands'."
Actually, I kinda like this of "prose at
its worst," for it serves to weave stunning alusions into his
other novels ( "Pale Fire","Ada"...)
Our Ed, Sweeney, once
mentioned "the acrobat's amphiphorical gesture"in one of her articles. It
would be interesting to recover it and see it brought up in the list.