'A Box With No Tangible Lid, Sides or Bottom'

Frederick J. E. Woodbridge (1867-1940) was a Canadian-born American philosopher, a major figure in the school of thought associated with George Santayana known as American Naturalism. His final book, published shortly after his death, was An Essay on Nature (Columbia University Press). The timing was fortuitous. Just weeks ahead of the Germans, Vladimir Nabokov, his wife and son had sailed from St. Nazaire on May 19, 1940, and arrived in New York City eight days later – three days before Woodbridge’s death at age seventy-three. Eighty years ago today, the New York Sun published Nabokov’s review of An Essay on Nature – one of his first works to be written in the United States.

 

Nabokov says the principal charm of the book is its “verbal integrity, the author’s splendid determination to stand no nonsense from words.” He praises “a certain crisp dryness of expression” – high praise from the Russian-American prose enchanter. Nabokov qualifies Woodbridge’s rejection of dualism: “The human mind is a box with no tangible lid, sides or bottom, and still it is a box, and there is no earthly method of getting out of it and remaining in it at the same time.” He singles out for praise a phrase by Woodbridge: “optical structure of the universe.” Nabokov is one of literature’s great celebrators of the visible world. Four years later, in his monograph Nikolai Gogol, Nabokov describes the discovery of color (yellow, violet) by Gogol and subsequent Russian writers:

 

“[T]he development of the art of description throughout the centuries may be profitably treated in terms of vision, the faceted eye becoming a unified and prodigiously complex organ and the dead dim ‘accepted colors’ (in the sense of ‘idées reçues’) yielding gradually their subtle shades and allowing new wonders of application. I doubt whether any writer, and certainly not in Russia, had ever noticed before, to give the most striking instance, the moving pattern of light and shade on the ground under trees or the tricks of color played by sunlight with leaves.”

 

Nabokov is pleased that Woodbridge “finds the world so real and analyzes the reality with such masterful vigor that the question whether our knowledge of the world is real, too, has no time to interest the fascinated reader.” An echo of Invitation to a Beheading (1935), a precognitive vision of Transparent Things (1972).

 

[Nabokov’s review is collected in Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor (ed. Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, Knopf, 2019).]