Books

Welcome to Gray Star

By Kevin Steel ⋅ March 5, 2003 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

A week or so ago, my colleague Kevin Michael Grace called me up and asked if I had a copy of Nabokov’s Lolita, annotated by Alfred Appel. He needed me to look up something. Kevin informed me at one time he had owned the annotated novel, but was forced to sell it along with his entire collection of books; a painful memory, no doubt.

As I obliged him, I recalled that I wanted to make a single observation about the book, somewhere, at some time. But I filed it in the back of my mind because I knew it would take more than a little work to find the appropriate quotes to make that point.

Then Mr. Grace shot up this post on his site The Ambler. In it, after noting Colby Cosh’s remarks on a TV production based on Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, Mr. Grace defends the novel in part by attacking one of its historical critics, Vladimir Nabokov. Mr. Grace makes the statement “I once adored Nabokov, but he strikes me now as a young man’s fancy.” (If you’d like to read why Nabokov didn’t admire Dr. Zhivago, I have copied an excerpt from Strong Opinions below this post. After reading A.N. Wilson’s piece–linked on The Ambler–it’s still not clear to me why he calls Dr. Zhivago the “great masterpiece of 20th-century Russian prose and poetry.” His angling for work at the end is an amusing twist. I actually hope he gets the job because I haven’t read the book myself and would be quite willing to fork over a few bucks to see what the fuss was about.)

In my experience, Nabokov is not just a “young man’s fancy.” I will allow that young men might fancy his books and be conceited enough–as I was as a young man–to believe they understand them, but doesn’t mean they will understand them. To demonstrate, I can only offer myself as an example. The following quotes from Nabokov, which I have arranged, will lead to the observation about Lolita I mentioned above, which in turn I hope will provide something of a rebuttal–albeit personal–to Mr. Grace’s comment:

“Actually, I’m a mild old gentleman who loaths cruelty.”

“In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebrand, I was a rigid moralist, kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel–and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride.”

“There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray’s assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states where art (curiousity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.”

“And when I think of Lolita, I seem to always pick out for special delectation such images as… pale, pregnant, beloved, irretreivable Dolly Schiller dying in Gray Star (the capital town of the book)… These are the nerves of the novel. These are the subliminal co-ordinates by means of which the book is plotted…”

“What exactly do these irrational standards mean? They mean the supremecy of the detail over the general, of the part that is more alive than the whole, of the little thing which a man observes and greets with a friendly nod of the spirit while the crowd around him is being driven by some common impulse to some common goal. I take my hat off to the hero who dashes into a burning house and saves his neighbor’s child; but I shake his hand if he has risked squandering a precious five seconds to find and save, together with the child, its favorite toy.”

“Once, in a sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as to almost touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than to hear Milton Pinski, some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked; ‘You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are so completely on your own’…”

“Mrs. ‘Richard F. Schiller’ died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest.”

What is this supposed to demonstrate? Well, in the last two quotes–from widely separated places in the novel–I have noticed a detail, an irrational standard, which I have greeted with “a friendly nod of the spirit.” Taken together, we see that Dolores/Lolita is granted a reprieve from her fear, the “dreadful” part “about dying”; she does not die alone.

The novel has been called, by Martin Amis for instance, a very cruel book. That is true. But in the end there is mercy, a state of kindness. It is very subtle. I don’t know of anyone else who has made this observation. Mr. Amis comes close, but doesn’t make it there, even though he quotes the sentence detailing Dolly’s death. Mr. Appel doesn’t mention it in his notes. Perhaps someone else has pointed this out, but I have yet to read it (I should state I don’t read much literary criticism, so if you know that I am wrong in claiming this to be an original observation, please feel free to write and bawl me out.)

Only someone who can see through the narrator’s mind and attune itself to care about the ultimate fate of the victim, will notice this reprieve or consider it important, will understand why it is one of the “nerves of the novel.” Take into consideration the quotes about cruelty and kindness above, and it seems a very important detail to me, especially if the crowd around me “is being driven by some common impulse to some common goal” and considers this subtle work of art a cruel book. As a young man I was not capable of this type of observation.

It took me four readings to pick it out. The first time I read it, in my early twenties, I was egged on by the murder mystery, the witty sarcastic tone of the narrator Humbert Humbert, and by the vague notion of there were salacious bits ahead. The second time I read it, a couple of years later, after having read just about every novel Nabokov had written, I began to admired the structure and, thematically, considered the whole book a monsterous love song. The third time I read it, some fourteen years later, it was to prepare myself to write a review of a dreadful movie based on the novel. I began to see great gaps in the narrator’s wit and reasoning, and through these gaps I began to see his victim more clearly. The fourth reading followed quickly, after seeing the movie, to assure myself that my assessment of the film I was writing about was sound. It was then that it dawned on me that Dolores’ profound fear of dying alone was overcome in Gray Star, the city in Alaska where she died with her baby. I understood why the author called it the capital town of the book.

I will go further in restating this fate of the heroine. The author, who takes the role of deity in regard to his creation–his book (see Bend Sinister)–seems to be saying to the reader, ‘Though you, mortal (reader), plagued by your need for eloquent art, by your hunger for adventure, mystery and entertainment, even by distracting desires, though you may not be able to perceive it, behind all the trash and abuse of this world, behind all the folly, even behind the art, there is indeed in the end–for the oppressed, for the innocent, for the abused–a merciful deity.’ I don’t consider this to be the moral of the story, it’s just a fact hidden in the structure.

Obviously, I am not a ‘quick study.’ For years, I mispronounced the author’s name, which would have disgusted Nabokov who stated that it was impossible to understand an author if you couldn’t even pronounce his name correctly. I am in fact a very slow reader. I admit to drawing something of a closed circle here. Still, based on this observation and other things I’ve gleaned on re-reading his books over time, I do not accept the notion that Nabokov is just a young man’s fancy. There is more for the older reader to discover. If that reappraiser Nabokov anticipated does come, I doubt he will be a young man.

—-

Following is most of the text of an October 1972 interview with Vladimir Nabokov, excerpted from Strong Opinions, 1973:

I understand you never wished to review [Dr. Zhivago]?

Some fifteen years ago, when the Soviets were hypocritically denouncing Pasternak’s novel (with the object of increasing sales, the results of which they would eventually pocket and spend on propaganda abroad); when the badgered and bewildered author was promoted by the American press to the rank of an iconic figure; and when his Zhivago vied with my Lalage for the top rungs of the best-seller’s list; I had occasion to answer a request for a review of the book from Robert Bingham of The Reporter, New York.

And you refused?

Oh, I did. The other day I found in my files a draft of that answer, dated at Goldwin Smith Hall, Ithaca, N.Y. November 8, 1958. I told Bingham that there were several reasons preventing me from freely expressing my opinion in print. The obvious one was the fear of harming the author. Although I never had much influence as a critic, I could well imagine a pack of writers emulating my “eccentric” outspokenness and causing, in the long run, sales to drop, thus thwarting the Bolshevists in their hopes and making their hostage more vulnerable than ever.

Did you tell Robert Bingham what you thought of Dr. Zhivago?

What I told him is what I think today. Any intelligent Russian would see at once that the book is pro-Bolshevist and historically false, if only because it ignores the Liberal Revolution of spring, 1917, while making the saintly doctor accept with delirious joy the Bolshevist coup d’etat seven months later–all of which is in keeping with the party line. Leaving out politics, I regard the book as a sorry thing, clumsy, trivial, and melodramatic, with stock situations, voluptuous lawyers, unbelievable girls, and trite coincidences.

Yet you have a high opinion of Pasternak as a lyrical poet?

Yes, I applauded his getting the Nobel Prize on the strength of his verse. In Dr. Zhivago, however, the prose does not live up to his poetry. Here and there, in a landscape or simile, one can distinguish, perhaps, faint echoes of his poetical voice, but those occasional fioriture are insufficient to save his novel from the provincial banality so typical of Soviet literature for the past fifty years. Precisely that link with Soviet tradition endeared the book to our progressive readers. I deeply sympathized with Pasternak’s predicament in a police state; yet neither the vulgarities of the Zhivago style nor a philosophy that sought refuge in a sickly sweet brand of Christianism could ever transform that sympathy into a fellow writer’s enthusiasm.

The book, however, has become something of a classic. How do you explain its reputation?

Well, all I know is that among Russian readers of today–readers, I mean, who represent that country’s intelligentsia and who manage to obtain and distribute works of dissident authors–Dr Zhivago is not prized as universally and unquestioningly as it is, or at least was, by Americans. When the novel appeared in America, her left-wing idealists were delighted to discover in it a proof that “a great book” could be produced after all under the Soviet rule. They were comforted by the fact that for better or worse its author remained on the side of the angelic Old Bolsheviks and that nothing in his book even remotely smacked of the true exile’s indomitable contempt for the beastly regime engendered by Lenin.