'Not Flimsy Nonsense, But a Web of Sense'

Some deaths are primally impossible to accept, and I refer not to family members or other loved ones but public figures, people we have never known in person. Our emotional and intellectual reliance on them, the long acquaintance, their contributions to who we have become, make their loss inconceivable. In reveries we can forget they are dead. One such for me is Charles Mingus, composer, bass player and band leader. There was a time in my life when his music sustained me, as a friend would. Another is Guy Davenport, whom I did meet once. The most enduring and intense of these post-mortem relationships is with Vladimir Nabokov.

On a hot summer night in Youngstown, Ohio, I heard on the car radio that he had died in his Swiss exile at age seventy-eight. By then I had been reading hm then for more than a decade. Ada came out when I was a high-school junior and Time magazine put him on the cover. In 1971, one of my English professors assigned Invitation to a Beheading. With another professor I had a long talk about Pnin. My timing was good. Even the academy was catching up with him. He has always been a reliable pleasure-giver. Nabokov reminds us that the world contains wonders, that it is beautiful and mysterious. Life after death is among his recurrent themes, especially in Pale Fire, the novel I have read most often.

 

Its emotional core is the death by suicide of the poet’s daughter, Hazel Shade. In life she had been haunted by the suspicion that life goes on after death, and her father, John Shade, comes to share her obsession:

 

“There was a time in my demented youth

When somehow I suspected that the truth

About survival after death was known

To every human being: I alone

Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy

Of books and people hid the truth from me.”

 

And this, when Shade finds evidence of immortality in an unlikely place:

 

“Life Everlasting—based on a misprint!

I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint,

And stop investigating my abyss?

But all at once it dawned on me that this

Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme;

Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream

But topsy-turvical coincidence,

Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense.

Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find

Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind

Of correlated pattern in the game,

Plexed artistry, and something of the same

Pleasure in it as they who played it found.”

 

Born April 22, 1899, Nabokov died on July 2, 1977.