Sandy Klein sends
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1966/nov/03/nabokovs-way/?pagination=false
(November 3, 1966, by D.J. Enright) a critical review of Escape Into
Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov by Page Stegner, with
the title "Nabokov's way."
excerpts: "in a slightly uneasy way
Mr. Stegner offers to justify Nabokov, to show that he possesses not only a
brilliant style but also a deeply compassionate nature... Nabokov loves
memories, chiefly memories of his family, feels a large and fairly comprehensive
distaste for the real...with the practically illimitable scope he offers for
pattern-tracing, the pursuit of maybe allusions and might-be correspondences,
which in the work of Nabokov amounts to a rich and welcome substitute for the
old bone of symbolology that time and scholarly dentures have worn
away..."
JM: As the editor
of "The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse 1945-1980 (
Oxford University Press, 1980), we find that D.J.Enright
did not include either Nabokov or Shade in his anthology (but his
particular selection of poets and poems remains a fine one, and a
pleasure to read). Judging from
what I could read in his article, it would seem that Page
Stegner ranks among those that feel the urge to "justify Nabokov" and
extoll his "deeply compassionate nature." And yet, Enright's
comments must have over-emphasized P.S's moralistic or
sentimental quandaries. I
must have mislaid my copy of "Escape into Aesthetics" but Page
Stegner's, later, "The Portable Nabokov"(1968) carries no whiff of
what D.J. Enright criticized in his attitute towards Nabokov. On the
contrary, his "critical Introduction" strikes me, for all its brevity, as a
very encompassing view of Nabokov's aims and achievements.
Stegner writes, qua "Lolita":"To
recognize that Humbert is hopelessly yearning for an intangible element in the
private universe of children, an ideal state beyond space and time, is not to
excuse his destruction of a young girl or the murder of his "double," Quilty.
..If he is a monster (and he would be the last to deny it), he is a very lonely
and rootless monster... a man who stands outside life without hope of
re-entry... His only redemption...is through art, and quite consciously in
the telling of his tale,in the choice of his language and the selection of his
metaphors, he perverts the sordid reality of his relationship with Lolita (just
as in an opposite way he once perverted the real creature) and transforms her
life and his into art.[...] "
Although his
actual phrasing, as presented here, is rather curious (if we
must conclude from it that, for Stegner, the transformation of
HH's and Lolita's life into art is achieved by the narrator's "perverting" the
sordid reality of their relationship), later on, though, he will praise Pnin's
awareness of the "disparity between art and life."
What I do appreciate in Stegner is his
emphasis on Nabokov's (through Pnin's) total absence of self-pity:"His
response (Pnin's) is not a self-destructive howl at past horrors, but a
legitimate and admirable refure in the antithesis of nightmare...the aesthetics
of art." ... "For Nabokov the escape from the impossible suffering and
vulgarity that prevail in this world is through art, through irony, parody,
and the intrincacies of composition... he transcends his finite existence
through art".
This observation, by Stegner,
concerning Nabokov's lack of self-pity illumines the spirit of
Speak, Memory and of every piece of Nabokovian writing (with the
exception of TOoL), his humor, parodies, poetry, science, art. In it I
encounter Nabokov (the human being) and the artist co-existing in
perfect harmony.