'Aberrations of Homo Sap and Homo Sapiens'

One lives in dread of close encounters with bores, who constitute not a species but a genus. Many have evolved cunning modes of camouflage enabling them to approach their prey closely before pouncing. We have the sports bore. He will ask what you thought of the Big Game. When you reply that you have never been interested in sports he proceeds to proselytize for the sublime delights of basketball or golf. And the rock bore: “Clapton? Not a blues bone in his body.” I had an editor who started every lunch in the newspaper cafeteria with the same prologue: “I don’t watch much television, but . . .”, and went on to synopsize the previous night’s sitcom in detail. Political bores, of course, reproduce like cockroaches.

 

The supreme taxonomist of bores was Myles na gCopaleen (né Brian Ó Nualláin, né Brian O'Nolan, dba Flann O'Brien) in his Irish Times column “Cruiskeen Lawn.” See his chapter titled “Bores” in The Best of Myles (Walker and Co., 1968), including this: “I come back to this problem because I have since encountered a pretty bad specimen. He is a monster to be avoided like the pledge, a colossal imposition who will make you very angry and cause your heart to beat like a sludge-hammer (stet). I refer to The Man Who Does His Own Carpentry and Talks About It.” Myles details the behavior of this mutant and concludes: “This man also makes all his own coffins. The bought ones aren’t a job, he avers.”

 

Even the most experienced field biologist can be fooled. You think you have identified another specimen of Odiosis hominem by its behavior – solitary, furtive, humorless, earnest – but find yourself pleasantly mistaken, in the company of an interesting fellow, one who mimics the appearance of a bore, perhaps out of shyness. In a letter Vladimir Nabokov wrote to Edmund Wilson on Nov. 24, 1942, he describes some “aberrations of Homo sap and Homo sapiens” he collected during his recent travel. He gives Wilson six brief character sketches that remind us of Nabokov’s Gogolian gift for portraiture, his eye for physical attributes that reveal something of a subject’s character. His description of a “celebrated Negro scholar and activist” turns out to be W.E.B. DuBois. The most interesting encounter is with a man in shirtsleeves one evening in his hotel in Valdosta, Ga. The man invites him into his room for a night-cap:

 

“He had evidently been bored to death and was now making much out of my skimpy company. Began telling me, with copious details, all about his sugar business in Florida, his reasons for coming to Valdosta (to hire colored labor) and lots of extravagant particularities about his factory. My whole body felt like one big yawn.”

 

Waiting for a polite opportunity to leave, Nabokov reached into his pocket for matches and accidentally drops a small pillbox he uses for capturing moths. The other man picks it up and says, “might be mine: I use these for collecting moths.” Nabokov writes:

 

“He turned out to be an entomologist who had at one time been in touch with the Am. Mus. Nat. History, where I had worked. I did not look at my watch any more.”          

 

I remember a passage in John Shade’s “Pale Fire”:

 

“Now I shall speak of evil as none has

Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;

The white-hosed moron torturing a black

Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;

Primitivist folk masks, progressive schools;

Music in supermarkets, swimming pools;

Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,

Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.”

 

[For the complete letter see Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971; (ed. Simon Karlinsky, 2001).]