Except as Smut

Like many former teenagers, I was once a great admirer of Nabokov. No twentieth-century novelist, with the possible exception of Thomas Wolfe, comes closer to a fifteen-year-old’s idea of a great man of letters. He used alliteration, you see, and knew lots of fancy synonyms for “green.” He lived in luxury hotels and claimed to have a condition (apparently shared with Wagner, Madame Blavatsky, and Kayne West) which allowed him to experience letters as colors—or was it the other way around? He also hated Camus, Faulkner, “Mr. Pound, that total fake,” and many other writers I instinctively despised.

That was quand j’etais enfant (as the man himself might have put it). By my mid-twenties I found the whole V.N. ethos—seaside resorts, white suits, pink champagne, thin black moustaches, cabinets particulier—irredeemably seedy. Now the idea of reading Lolita in public brings acute feelings of anxiety, and whenever I see that old Vintage paperback (with its zoomed-in photograph of what are hopefully adult female lips) covering someone’s face in a park bench or on airplane, I get a strong whiff of second-hand embarrassment. “No extract,” Kingsley Amis complained in his review, “could do justice to the sustained din of pun, allusion, neologism, alliteration, cynghanedd, apostrophe, parenthesis, rhetorical question, French, Latin, anent, perchance, would fain, for the nonce.” Evelyn Waugh spoke for millions of Book of the Month Club readers when he told Nancy Mitford that he had not enjoyed the novel “except as smut.” (He was distinctly less impressed with the “very high-brow allusions,” which he believed had been inserted exclusively for the American edition.) I don’t think it’s absurd to suggest that if it had not become a bestseller, Nabokov might have been one of those curious minor writers occasionally dug up by the editors of New York Review Classics.

Most of the books certainly read that way now, especially the Russian ones. If you came across The Defense in a second-hand book shop without its title page, you would think you had stumbled upon a somewhat interesting pastiche of Joyce’s Portrait and wonder whether you should email the Dalkey Archive Press. Ditto Invitation to a Beheading, which, despite the author’s protests that he had not then read Kafka, is a diverting retread of The Trial. (He also claimed not to have encountered T.S. Eliot until the Forties, a lunatic assertion that does not survive even a surface-level reading of the early poems, much less the knowledge that he was at Cambridge from 1919 until 1922.) Only in The Gift, with its brilliant interposed Life of Chernyshevsky and rather jolly O. Henry-like ending, do you get the sense that you are dealing with something that resembles a major talent.

Meanwhile the American novels are mostly of a piece: plenty of solid material held together by the thin glue of Nabokov’s various obsessions (adolescent romance, exile, mistaken identities, untranslated French). Pnin stands out not, as is sometimes asserted, because it is the least formally experimental but because it is outrageously funny without being cruel. Otherwise I am inclined to think that Pale Fire works only because the heroic couplets are very accomplished. Not even Martin Amis could finish Ada.

Part of the problem with answering Nabokov’s defenders is that when his plots are unworkable or non-existent and his characters are ciphers, we are supposed to be awed by the writing. This would seem more reasonable if the writing in question were not full of things like “persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.” Even his best-regarded books are full of gibberish like that, and those of us with a somewhat less than unusual persistence of cerebration, diurnal or otherwise, find ourselves asking whether we are being taken for a ride.

For all that, I find that on balance I still like the old gentleman. There is something very agreeable about the idea of him spending the last decades of life in Switzerland, scribbling on index cards, writing outrageous letters to the New York Times, endlessly baiting progressive scolds, convincing publishers to bring out his unreadable translation of Pushkin and absurd books like Poems and Problems, in which his juvenilia is padded out with some of his favorite chess puzzles, and Look at the Harlequins!, a joke novel about a Russian emigré novelist with the initials V.V. who travels the United States living in hotels with his teenaged daughter.

Besides, even if the novels are a mixed bag, the small body of literary criticism is probably the most underrated of the last century. Lectures on Literature, with its charming diagrams of Mansfield Park, its digressions and quizzes, is full of sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo, especially his insistence that if punctuation were introduced in the last chapter of Ulysses, “Molly’s musings would not really become less amusing or musical.” As far as I am aware, Nabokov was the first critic to point out that Cervantes wrote a one-joke book and that this joke is not especially funny unless you relish the idea of “a veritable encyclopedia of cruelty” directed largely at old people.

In his later years Nabokov gave a large number of interviews, for which he prepared his answers in advance. You have to admire the way he casually dismisses Hemingway as “bells, balls and bulls” and Conrad as “bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist clichés,” his indifference to Dostoevsky (“a prophet, a claptrap journalist, and a slapdash comedian”) and Henry James (“a complete fake”), and his observation in a letter to his erstwhile friend Edmund Wilson that T.S. Eliot was an anagram of toilets. “I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted as ‘great literature’ by critics and fellow authors Lady Chatterley’s copulations,” he told the Paris Review in 1967. I will never forget the clip of him telling a straight-faced Lionel Trilling to “leave the field of ideas to Dr. Schweitzer and Dr. Zhivago.” (He clarified his feelings in another a few years later: “I detest not one but four doctors: Dr. Freud, Dr. Zhivago, Dr. Schweitzer, and Dr. Castro.”) It is wonderful to have this supplemented in Think, Write, Speak by things like the following exchange:

What is your opinion of the hippies and the student revolts?

I feel nothing but contemptuous pity for the illiterate drug-dazed hoodlums I have happened to observe, but I do not assume that all hippies are violent cretins. Many of them are young conformists following an American fad, and some are intelligent political agents disguised as students.

Have you read Marcuse?

I have seen excerpts. I wonder if anywhere—perhaps in some African or Asiatic tongue—“Marcuse” is a diminutive of “Marx.” Perhaps the youngest Marx brother. What I read was intolerably trivial.

As these and other extracts suggest, Nabokov was equally amusing about politics. James Mason once gave him an Uncle Sam tie emblazoned with the legend “F— Communism!” which he wore proudly. “We are not with you on Vietnam,” his indefatigable wife Vera would coldly inform various Sixties literary bores who came to visit them in Montreux. Asked to explain how he arrived at his opinions, he explained that he used “the simple method of choosing that line of conduct which may be the most displeasing to the Reds and the Russells.”

One subject about which I have never read anything entirely satisfactory is his religious views. To an interviewer from Playboy who asked whether he believed in God, he replied: “I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.” While his verse is full of imagery drawn from Russian Orthodoxy, there is no evidence that he attended religious services at any point during his adult life. It is also difficult to escape the feeling that what some readers hope to identify as pantheism or even a lapsed Eastern Christian sensibility is really microwaved fin de siècle spiritualism. One thing we do know is that he loathed the higher criticism, which he rightly dismissed as a bourgeois pastime. It is a shame that he did not live long enough to take on Elaine Pagels.

I would be lying if I said that recent scholarship had done nothing to shore up Nabokov’s reputation with me. Opening Robert Alter’s Nabokov and the Real World at random intervals, I kept encountering phrases like “too ingenious by half” (why not just use the cliché?) and “particularly sordid moments beyond its intrinsic sordidness” and “Fortunately, the code-games and allusions in Ada are merely pointers to the peculiar nature of the novel’s imaginative richness.” No wonder Nabokov hated his critics.

Matthew Walther is editor of The Lamp.