Actually, this was the real reason I restarted the blog. In the long run, I can see this place getting a little busier with a few more posts, and a re-do of my back pages. But right now it’s just a nice spot for me to goof around adjusting css files and to make the occasional note on this and that, like, for instance; I enjoyed the latest Bond movie Casino Royale (official site here) which I saw the other night. I don’t know if I have anything to say that hasn’t already been said. We were presented with a more serious, less jokey lead character, more like Fleming’s original creation. I hope the franchise continues to pursue this return to roots. Next, let’s hope they get rid of Judy Dench as M–the producers’ cheesy mid-1990s nod to feminism thrown in to balance out the hot young babes. She worries so about James, oh my, oh mother. I’m glad others saw this. Fine, she’s tough, she’s in charge blah tee blah blah. Bond is not all about the hot young babes–that’s great for the movie business I suppose. Make Bond into what he really is, a man with a past, a man with walls, and you don’t need tough, in charge den mother Dench. M can return to being the George Smiley-like puppet master.

I still maintain after having seen this latest Bond adventure–as I have said to several friends though not in public–that some day the entire series will be redone, probably in for television, faithfully following the books, set in their period and accurately portraying the characters. It will be as good as the Sherlock Holmes series with Jeremy Brett as Holmes and David Burke as Watson (Brett is superlative, but it is the writing and portrayal of the Watson character NOT as a bumbling sidekick that really makes that series, along with its wonderful attention to all the small details that are in the stories).

Why will the Bond series be redone? That’s simple. There are just so many problems with a state, any state (a democracy?) giving somebody a licence to kill, there’s a lot to explore there. We saw a bit of that in Casino Royale and the response to the film should encourage more.

Trying to get the burglar—he’s a buff burglar, mind you—to make a commitment. Well, good luck with that. All he has to do is break in to have his way. “I seem to have forgotten my ummm… crowbar?” So why should he have to commit? Tsk tsk. Maybe Maggie should just stick to writing love letters to imprisoned serial killers.

In case you’re wondering where the above excerpt is from, it’s a description on Amazon of a book titled Bedding the Burglar by Gabriella Marcola, in The Black Lace series of erotic fiction for women, which is apparently one of the most successful series of this type going.

Why have I bothered to copy this book description? Well, I came across it last night as I was idly looking up The Black Lace series. And why was I interested in that? Because in a moment of narcissistic boredom, I Googled my name (something I do from time to time when I get to wondering where various things I have written have ended up). And in a Black Lace book titled Continuum by Portia Da Costa, first published in 1997 and being re-issued next month, there is a character named Kevin Steel. Amazon calls Continuum a “Black Lace classic” and the author “one of the most internationally renowned authors of erotica.” So with the book being a “classic” in a successful series by an internationally renowed author, I guess my namesake is in good hands. Despite all this success, the author remains humble and describes herself thusly on the Profile page of her blog; “I’m Wendy Wootton, a middle aged, middle sized author of romantic and erotic fiction with a middling amount of talent who’s also known as Portia Da Costa.” She likes TV, reading, writing, cats, film and chocolate, and has a webpage. On her blog it is explained that the first part of Kevin Steel’s name was taken from Kevin Bacon (how does that fit into the six degrees of separation? We are all connected, we are all one). Elsewhere, there is an excerpt of a scene from Continuum featuring the First Time With Kevin that ends like this;

In a moment or two, he was naked, and almost reluctantly, Joanna was impressed. Wearing clothes, Kevin was an appealing man, for all his unusual, pointed features; but without clothes he was something else entirely.

Pity Portia/Wendy cut it off there. I want to find out what this “something else entirely” is, though I guess it’s a safe assumption it is a naked Kevin, with an additional pointed feature.

In another place on the web, on this page about half way down, Continuum is reviewed by someone named Harriet Klausner, so we can get an idea of where the above scene fits in the bigger picture;

Joanna Darrell is bored with her office job at Perry McAfree, … having called the Vale Associates representative a “sad bastard” before slamming the phone down. As she waits for her boss Halloran to rip her apart and probably fire her, she fantasizes about having this hunk service her…

Freelance computer specialist Kevin Steel notices her ecstatic expression that he has once before placed on her face when they made love, but since that ecstatic interlude she has said no to his advances. Instead of sacking her, Halloran and the Human Resources Chief Davidson tell her she needs a vacation as she has worked too hard. They send Joanna to Whiteoaks, a place with the latest relaxation therapies. Joanna soon finds the place caters to her deepest erotic fantasies where pleasure and pain are part of the same CONTINUUM while several studs provide major appetizers but only a steely hunk can be her master.

[The author] keeps the erotic tale focused as it runs the gamut of bondage. With the exception of Kevin, the hunks are interchangeable though the protagonist can tell them apart by a look or feel of their one-eyed dripping plunger…

Now we know what the title Continuum means–go on holiday looking for something new only to discover it’s the same-old, same-old orgy everywhere; pain? pleasure? home? away? same stuff. But it’s nice to know my namesake is no interchangeable hunk. As for his pining for Joanna, my advice is let her go, Kevin Steel, you geeky hunk, let her go. Put your clothes back on and get back to your freelance ‘putering. Consider yourself a lucky man for not getting tangled up with some horny but no doubt sterile spa-going masochist. That’s my wish for you, so I’ll never read the book in order to maintain the fantasy. I fear Joanna might be looking for some kind of commitment while secretly waiting for a buff burglar.

Below is one of my favourite excerpts from the book. It demonstrates not only a lighter moment in this tragedy, but a good sense of the author’s well-paced style and way of revealing to the reader details as he learned them in time. The scene takes place in the author’s childhood. His mother has split from his doctor-father and has lapsed into destitute alcoholism, running from rented place to rented place, just a step ahead of mounting bills and irate landlords. One day Hodel’s mother decides to dress up the young boys–Steve, along with his older brother Michael and younger brother Kelvin–as best she can and sends them off in a taxi, along with their dog Koko, to the Beverly Hills Hotel to visit with her old flame and friend of her husband, director John Huston. The boys are to deliver a note begging for money. As the children arrive, Huston asks about the dog and upon learning her name, calls out it out twice. Our narrator tells us;

Excited by hearing her name called out so many times, Koko ran to the center of the suite, squatted on the plush white carpet as if it were high brush on a vacant lot, and took a dump. The three of us stood watching in disbelief, then a loud voice, roaring with laughter from the couch behind us, said, “I’ll get it.” The tall handsome dark-haired man, obviously in even better spirits than John, staggered to a bathroom and came back with a large roll of toilet paper. He dropped to his knees near where Koko had squatted and started to clean up the mess. John Huston said, “Boys, I want you to meet Greg Peck. When he’s not cleaning up dogshit, he acts,” and both roared with laughter. John took the envelope from my shirt, read its contents, walked over to a desk, wrote out a check and a note, placed them both back in the envelope, and returned it to me.

Rooted in what Hollander suggestively calls the “violence of higher purpose,” the misdeeds of Communism do indeed get something of a free pass in “advanced” intellectual circles. It is certainly the case that the record is available for all those who wish to know it. Many had hoped, and even expected, that a broader public and scholarly recognition of the Soviet Union as a practitioner of state violence and repression on a truly unprecedented scale would follow the fall of Communism and would lead to its permanent discrediting. This has not come to pass. Instead, in academic circles, Communist regimes are often presented as having engaged in flawed but legitimate attempts at promoting rapid economic modernization and greater social equity…

If this book has a single lesson, it is that “progress” justifies nothing. From the abstract “love of humanity” flows limitless contempt for actual human beings. In the powerful words of Yakovlev: “What gives one group of people the right to sentence to death civil society, or popular custom centuries in the making?”

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.