Following is the last chapter of
The Vagabond's Bookshelf.
“Some Unsuspected Author”
Just as I finished writing this
book, I learned—or thought I learned—that someone else had already written it.
For, while reading novelist Martin Amis’s collection of essays (which I’d
bought without knowing a thing about them, except that the volume was light
enough to carry on a long train trip), I came across his review of Vladimir
Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, a
collection of the writer’s posthumously published university lectures on works
by Austen, Dickens, Flaubert, Proust, Kafka, Joyce, and Stevenson. According to
Amis, Nabokov’s goal in these lectures was “to instil a love of literature by
the simple means of revealing his own love.” He devised these talks because “he
wanted to teach people how to read.”
One of the novels
under discussion was Austen’s Mansfield Park; and as soon as I began to imagine what Nabokov might have to say about
Fanny Price, I was seized with both fear and delight, in near equal
proportions—a confused reaction that was also well salted with embarrassment. I
doubt I would have dared to write about Mansfield Park myself if I’d known beforehand that Nabokov was a
specialist on it, for he is one of those writers who intimidates me even at the
level of his adjectives. Whatever he might have to say about Fanny would surely
render my own words moot.
Oddly, at the
moment I stumbled into Amis’s review, I was already enmeshed in Nabokov’s
toils; for I’d just finished my tenth or so rereading of Lolita, a book I’d first encountered as a young teenager,
when my mother, who was working on her master's degree in English, was assigned
it in a course. The novel appalled her, for reasons she declined to explicate.
I gathered, however, that sex had something to do with her creased brow, so I
promptly read the book as soon as she wasn't looking. I was disappointed: it
was less prurient than I’d hoped it would be, even for a girl with such modest
expectations of prurience, mostly because . . . I mean, really, come on, be
realistic: when the chief seducer’s name is Humbert Humbert, the X-rated factor
instantly assumes an entirely new algebraic significance.
Over the years, as
I’ve returned to Lolita, my sympathies
have shifted back and forth among the central comedic tragedies: poor stupid
awkward romantic H.H.; poor grubby rude shallow Lo; poor boring infatuated
Charlotte. Clare Quilty is really the only character I can wholeheartedly
dislike at every reading. If anyone deserves to be murdered by a gun named
Chum, it’s him. But during this season’s pass through the book, I found myself,
for the first time, almost entirely distracted by Nabokov’s idiosyncratic
control of the English language, especially as he superimposes it onto the
1940s American landscape of movie magazines, midwestern motels, suburban home
decor, and educational philistinism:
We climbed long
grades and rolled downhill again, and heeded speed limits, and spared slow
children, and reproduced in sweeping terms the black wiggles of curves on their
yellow shields, and no matter how and where we drove, the enchanted interspace
slid on intact, mathematical, mirage-like, the viatic counterpart of a magic
carpet.
This is English,
certainly, and beautifully grammatical to boot, but it’s a strange, comic,
terrible version of the language. When Humbert says, “I stopped [my car] in the
shelter of the trees and abolished my lights to ponder the next move quietly,”
the verb abolished is both absolutely
accurate and absolutely wrong; and this, I think, is why I find it so
difficult, when reading the novel, to come to any settled conclusion about
right and wrong, love and perversion: because the sentences themselves
reinforce the conundrum of ambiguity with such exactness.
Thus, with the
rhythms of Lolita pounding in my
grammatical synapses, I opened Lectures on Literature, burdened by my overcharged awe, pop-eyed and
prepared for illumination. And what happened (at first) was more gratifying
than I’d expected: I was flattered. “Curiously enough,” declared Nabokov, “one
cannot read a book: one can only
reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a
rereader.”
But despite this
delightful opening gambit, my star turned out to be a meteor, and fell. “There
are . . . at least two varieties of imagination in the reader’s case,”
announced N. “So let us see which one of the two is the right one to use in
reading a book.”
First, there is
the comparatively lowly kind which turns for support to the simple emotions and
is of a definitely personal nature. . . . A situation in a book is intensely felt
because it reminds us of something that happened to us or to someone we know or
knew. Or, again, a reader treasures a book mainly because it evokes a country,
a landscape, a mode of living which he nostalgically recalls as part of his own
past. Or, and this is the worst thing a reader can do, he identifies himself
with a character in the book.
Well.
What can I say?
What can anyone possibly say? Either I decide to agree with him, or I don’t.
There is nothing, at this stage of my life, that I can do. For far too long, I’ve identified myself with
Natasha Rostov and Pierre Bezukhov, with Fanny Price and David Copperfield. I
can’t read like Nabokov: I don’t have the slightest interest in drawing maps of
the settings in Mansfield Park,
nor do I revel in his plot-summary descriptions of the novel’s structural
elements. Possibly such an approach would be invaluable for a fiction writer .
. . but I am merely a fiction rereader, and I don’t want to change my ways.
My friend Thomas
Rayfiel reminds me that Nabokov’s lectures were never meant for publication and
that his teaching gigs were mostly a way to pay the bills. As soon as Lolita hit the big time, he quit his job. It’s also true
that these lectures can be very funny, often inadvertently. As Tom remarks, Nabokov
talks about Mansfield Park “as if
he’d never heard of Jane Austen before.” Consider, for instance,
comments such as this one:
We had to find an
approach to Jane Austen and her Mansfield Park. I think we did find it and did have some degree of fun with her
delicate patterns, with her collection of eggshells in cotton wool. But the fun
was forced. We had to slip into a certain mood; we had to focus our eyes in a
certain way. Personally I dislike porcelain and the minor arts, but I have
often forced myself to see some bit of precious translucent china through the
eyes of an expert and have discovered a vicarious bliss in the process. Let us
not forget that there are people who have devoted to Jane all their lives,
their ivy-clad lives. I am sure that some readers have a better ear for Miss
Austen than I have. However, I have tried to be very objective.
The dingbat jocularity of this
passage is so funny and touching that I suppose I can forgive the writer for
lambasting my brain. Really, the very idea that I have just used the word dingbat to describe a writer as skilled as Vladimir Nabokov
is enough to make me forgive him almost anything.
And
this is the essence of my point. When Nabokov claims, “It is clear that
[Austen] disapproves of” the family’s play-acting venture in Mansfield Park, I can shout, “No, no! It’s only clear that Fanny disapproves.” And when he blunders on to aver that
“there is no reason to suppose that Jane Austen’s sentiments do not parallel
Fanny’s,” I can snap his book shut in disgust and go outside to hang laundry. But I can’t deny my lurking pleasure in his humanity. Yes, he was a real
reader, and though he was tone-deaf to Austen, he considered her earnestly and
with a cogitating joy in his own discoveries. So what if he’s wrong? So what,
for that matter, if I’m wrong? We rereaders go back, and back again, to these
books because they challenge us—not as students but as human beings splashing
boisterously in the shallows of our own brilliance, and our own blinkered
ignorance.
I sit at my desk now and wonder how
to end this book. Who, of all the writers on my shelves, requires the last
word? I lean back in my chair and look up, and there stands Walt Whitman,
leaning against his doorway, waiting for me . . . dear striding, loud-mouthed Walt,
who soaks up the world like ink—its stories and music halls, its farms and
harbors, its sermons and whispers and shouts: who fearlessly turns the world
into the palette of himself. And Walt does have something to say to me, and to
you, as I should have known he would:
I doubt it not—then more, far more;
In each old song bequeath’d—in
every noble page or text,
(Different—something unreck’d
before—some unsuspected author,)
In every object, mountain, tree,
and star—in every birth and life,
As part of each—evolv’d from
each—meaning, behind the ostent,
A mystic cipher waits infolded.
