'Curiosity, Tenderness, Kindness, Ecstasy'

Pleasure comes in many forms, from fleshy to mathematically abstract, but every great writer and even some of the merely good ones are pleasure-givers. Let’s limit the exemplars to prose and think of Rudyard Kipling and Isaac Bashevis Singer and the pleasures of sheer story telling. Or the musicality of Sir Thomas Browne and John Ruskin. Or the historical gravitas of Edward Gibbon and Raul Hilberg. Or the philosophical grace of Spinoza and Santayana. Or the comedy of Max Beerbohm and P.G. Wodehouse. When a writer combines elements of even a few of these virtues, one can only celebrate the gift of literacy. Such a writer is Vladimir Nabokov, for whom pleasure – creating it, appreciating it – is a moral obligation. In “Good Readers and Good Writers,” his introduction to Lectures on Literature (1980), he writes:

“It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure that is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass."

English professors, for all their personal hedonism, find little pleasure in books and reading. This wasn’t always the case. The first of Nabokov’s books I read, like so many other readers with similar mixed motives, was Lolita. It was a smudged paperback without covers. That was in 1969, the year he published Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle and showed up on the cover of Time. In the fall of the following year, when I was a freshman, a professor put Pnin on the reading list. In the following spring, another prof assigned Invitation to a Beheading. On my own I was catching up with earlier Russian and English titles, and I received a copy of Transparent Things as a Christmas gift in 1972. Even his lesser efforts (The Eye, Look at the Harlequins!) never let me down. Always I find pleasure in his work. No other writer so formed the way I read. He wrote in his afterword to Lolita:

“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 of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.”

Is he speaking here as a reader or writer? Both, I suspect. Nabokov was born on this date, April 22, in St. Petersburg and died July 2, 1977 in Montreux, Switzerland, having lived in exile for fifty-eight years.