'A Glimpse of the Permanently True'

“The bolt of inspiration strikes invariably: you observe the flash in this or that piece of great writing, be it a stretch of fine verse, or a passage in Joyce or Tolstoy, or a phrase in a short story, or a spurt of genius in the paper of a naturalist, of a scholar, or even in a book reviewer's article.” 

Nearly half a century ago, that sentence gave this twenty-year-old reader permission to be precisely who I am. The moment was sufficiently memorable for me to recall the time and place I first read it: a Sunday afternoon in January, in the back seat of a car traveling westbound on the Ohio Turnpike, somewhere between Youngstown and Bowling Green. I was hitchhiking back to the state university where I was an English major in my junior year. The author was Vladimir Nabokov, whose photograph, taken by Lord Snowdon, was on the cover of the latest issue of The Saturday Review. The sentence is from “Inspiration,” the brief essay Nabokov published in the magazine, followed by appreciations from several writers and more photographs of the novelist, who had recently published his short novel Transparent Things.

 

I was already a relisher of Nabokov’s prose and of any artful arrangement of words. That was the first thing I noticed in poetry or prose: Is it well-written? Does it induce an aesthetic tingle? Sincerity and happy thoughts were irrelevant if the words remained inert on the page. How I came to these sentiments so early is a mystery of no importance. Early on they mingled with a nagging sense of guilt. Was I turning into that unlikeliest of creatures, a Midwestern decadent? Fat chance. Beauty isn’t always truth, nor is truth always beauty, but neither are they incompatible. Beware of anyone who dismisses either category. The late Terry Teachout described himself as “an aesthete—a person who is mainly interested in beauty,” and helped me put a finer point on what I’m trying to articulate:

 

“When making art or writing about it, the aesthete tries never to moralize. Nor will he look with favor upon artists who do so, no matter whether their particular brand of moralizing is religious or secular. But he can and must be fully, intensely alive to the moral force of art whose creators aspire merely to make the world around us more beautiful, and in so doing to pierce the veil of the visible and give us a glimpse of the permanently true. That is his job: to help make sense of the pandemonium amid which we live.”

 

Among writers, only Shakespeare has given me more sheer “aesthetic bliss” than Nabokov. I expect to go on rereading him forever. Nabokov was born on this date, April 22, in 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia, and died in Montreux, Switzerland, on July 2, 1977.