Nabokov’s true love

When Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished book (not quite a novel, not quite a novella) The Original of Laura was posthumously released in 2009, consternation over whether it was right to publish the work at all — Nabokov had instructed that it be destroyed after his death — swiftly gave way to consternation over what the work contained. And what the work contained was yet more evidence that Nabokov’s interest in very young girls was, well, something rather more than an interest.
 
Here was a figure who was not so much possessed of the ability to send planets spinning (Nabokov’s definition of the real writer) as he was the ability to elicit from the literary world not very much more than a collective shake of the head. Even Martin Amis (‘I bow to no one in my love for this great and greatly inspiring genius’) was driven to conclude that Nabokov’s mind, ‘during his last period, insufficiently honoured the innocence – insufficiently honoured the honour – of 12-year-old girls,’ though Amis did point out that this was not strictly a moral problem (nobody gets hurt in fiction), but an aesthetic one.
 
‘Aesthetic’ really, I think, means moral-aesthetic, and if it doesn’t, it should: what Amis calls the faint scar on Nabokov’s body of work cannot and should not be ignored. But the publication this year of his complete works, in a new and beautiful series of hardbacks from Penguin Classics, does offer an agreeable opportunity to return to the part of Nabokov that really did know how to love — and that is the part that was in love with language.
 
Nabokov was explicit about this, and once, speaking of a critic who had suggested that ‘Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel’, stated that: &”The substitution ‘English language’ for ‘romantic novel’ would make this elegant formula more correct.” Characteristically terse, characteristically amusing. And characteristically right. But what did this love affair amount to?
 
In some ways it meant being faithful to the attempt to give pleasure through freshness and potency of perception: to arrange words so as to effect what Nabokov called &”the telltale tingle” in the reader’s spine, and to do so through the ineffable magic of the beautiful sentence. &”In order to bask in that magic”, Nabokov says in his Lectures on Literature, &”a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine,” and when we read and re-read his own novels (&”one cannot read a book: one can only re-read it”), the tingles come in wild and hysterical profusion.
 
Of darkness, light, the momentary atmospheres of a fecund world, he could write like almost no other. ‘The darkness inside the taxi slid and swayed as quarters and halves and whole squares of ashen light passed from window to window across it,’ he says in Laughter in the Dark; and in Bend Sinister, he describes the close of a journey, at which point ‘The car vanished while the square echo of its slammed door was still suspended in mid-air like an empty picture frame of ebony.’
 
Elsewhere, we encounter the poetry of awkwardness and joy, with Albert Albinus ‘Gazing through a moist haze at the toe of his shoe and trying to fit it into the trembling pattern of the carpet’, and finding after a romantic meeting that ‘The fire of this kiss was still around him like a coloured glory when he returned home’. And we encounter, too, exquisite renderings of the ‘lucidity of grief’; the music of extinction (‘Krug continued to sink into the heart rending softness, into the black dazzling depths of a belated but – never mind – eternal caress’); and the forlorn humility that can be induced by love: ‘he kept avoiding her brave kind eyes to which he felt he could not live up, and listened to his own voice stringing trivial sounds in the silence of a shrivelled world.’
 
Dolorous, plangent, and stirringly beautiful. Yet Nabokov was also supreme at capturing the burlesque: the comic and painful rhythms that visit the sensitive, the ill-at-ease, the maladroit and the thwarted. Here is the lovely Pnin, in the novel of the same name, descending into the world of The Clementses:

‘The Clementses were playing Chinese chequers among the reflections of a comfortable fire when Pnin came clattering downstairs, slipped, and almost fell at their feet like a supplicant in some ancient city full of injustice, but retrieved his balance – only to crash into the poker and tongs.’

The delicate fusion of the tender and the slapstick owes everything, here, to Nabokov’s sense of restraint, and to his understanding that a fundamental and ineluctable element of similitude is difference: Pnin does not fall but almost falls; he is almost like the supplicant in the ancient city; and when he finally does ‘crash into the poker and tongs’, the restraint and suspense of the foregoing sentences give way to a clatter that is funnier, more moving, for having so nearly been avoided (in the same novel, Pnin has a favourite glass dish that he drops in the sink — and it doesn’t smash), just as it is Pnin’s distinction from the ancient supplicant that gives the comparison its pathos, its humour, its power.
 
And its decorum, too. Nabokov understood with near perfect clarity, as he puts it in the hauntingly anti-tyrannical Bend Sinister, that ‘We speak of one thing being like some other thing when what we are really craving to do is to describe something that is like nothing on earth.’ It is for this reason that Krug, the hero of the novel, describes himself not just as the slave of a terrible regime, but also as ‘a slave of images’. Language itself can be a form of imprisonment, particularly in this novel. But, at its best, it can also allow us to move with autonomy and dignity; to wander, as it is phrased in Laughter in the Dark, in ‘the free city of the mind.’
 
That is part, but only part, of Nabokov’s achievement: he is the celebrant, the awakener, of &”conscioussnes, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all.” And if, as he said, the theme of Bend Sinister is not a political tyranny but ‘the beating of Krug’s loving heart, the torture an intense tenderness is subjected to’, we can only know that tenderness, can only know that heart, by virtue of the power of words, and the extraordinary way in which Nabokov uses them.
 
Very occasionally, the prose can slacken. He is capable of redundancy, pleonasm, tautology (these things are not the same), as in the introduction to Bend Sinister, where we encounter the phrase ‘linked up with’, when ‘linked with’ would be more economical and more accurate(not to mention more elegant); and as in the foregoing quotation, in which ‘what we are really craving is to describe something’ would do rather better than the crowded ‘what we are really craving to do is to describe something.’
 
But the Nabokov we remember is the Nabokov who, on seeing a bottle hurled at a wall, does not see it smash or shatter or break or fragment. No. He sees ‘the bottle burst like a star.’ (Part of the genius of this is that it sounds easy: you try coming up with a simile like that.) And re-reading his wonderful and bewitching fictions, and doing so in these lovely new editions, we see before us that rare combination of qualities that Nabokov himself believed defined the real writer.
 
These are the qualities of the storyteller, the teacher, the enchanter (&”A great writer is always a great enchanter”); of the writer who can model a man asleep, create new worlds; and who, in magic phrase after magic phrase, reminds us that he really does have the power to send all the planets spinning.