'Play! Invent the World! Invent Reality!'

N. John Hall’s biographies of Anthony Trollope and Max Beerbohm make excellent reading but only recently did I learn he has published two novels, including Bibliophilia: A Novel (Godine, 2016). It’s epistolary in form, an exchange of emails between a newly wealthy newcomer to book collecting, Larry Dickerson, and various book dealers and friends. 

Dickerson starts by collecting the great Victorian novelists – Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Eliot, Hardy and others – and moves on to writers associated with The New Yorker, including Salinger, Updike and Joseph Mitchell. At the suggestion of Irving Gross, a friend who teaches English at the New School, Dickerson begins collecting another writer who published frequently in the magazine but was too exotically aloof to be pigeonholed as a “New Yorker writer” – Vladimir Nabokov. Gross starts with Nabokov 101:

 

“[He] is an amazing figure, completely literate (and literary) in his native Russian, in French and in English (which he learned to read as a child – even before he could read Russian). He was also a distinguished authority on butterflies and on chess. Americans know him only for Lolita, but he published – I don’t know – fifteen or twenty other novels, including Pale Fire, a kind of spoofy literary joke [and my favorite among his novels]. As I recall, it also landed on the Random House list of 100 best novels of the 20^th century. You could look it up.”

       

Dickerson promptly buys the first edition of Lolita – the 1955, two-volume Olympia Press printing in less than mint condition, for $2,200. Gross then recommends Speak, Memory and advises Dickerson to “immerse yourself in his ripe, flowery prose.” Dickerson replies:

 

“I have never read anything like Speak, Memory. (I know I say this about a lot of books.) I’m not saying it is the greatest thing I’ve read, at all, I’m just saying how really different it is from other kinds of writing that I’ve read.”

 

Dickerson speaks for many of us when describing his first taste of Nabokov. As a teenager reading Lolita, I was smitten and confused. I had nothing to compare it to. The verbal texture was intoxicating; the moral texture, baffling. Even Joyce didn’t seem quite right as an orienting comparison – Nabokov was infinitely more playful. Lesser writers started seeming drab. My timing was fortunate. Nabokov and his son Dmitri were translating his Russian work, lending my first reading of those books a sense of time inversion, temporal vertigo. Here is Nabokov in “To A Future Reader,” a poem he wrote in Russian in 1930. Nabokov seems to anticipate you and me and our reaction to the novels he wouldn’t write for another twenty or thirty years. The poem is translated by Eugene Dubnov and John Heath-Stubbs, and was published in 1987 in the Chicago Reader:

 

“Bright dweller in a future age, who love

antiquity, one day you'll chance upon

a book of verses that have been consigned

to undeserved but sure oblivion.

 

“And you’ll be like a clown dressed in the taste

of my coat-tails and waistcoat time, a swell.

Lean back and mark how resonant it is,

an epoch that’s long gone -- the Muses’ shell.

 

“The sixteen lines crowned with the oval frame

of a blurred photograph. Dare, then, to scorn

my neatness and my parsimoniousness,

my exercises in a mode outworn.

 

“I’m with you here. Now in the gloom I spring

upon your breast. You are not free to hide.

You feel a chilliness -- a wind that blows

out of the past. Farewell. I’m satisfied.”

 

In an interview, Nabokov once described himself as “a one-man multitude,” which might serve to characterize any good writer. He imaginatively projects himself into a thousand characters, the past and future, alternative universes. In one of his finest stories, “A Guide to Berlin” (Russian, 1925; English, 1976), he speculates about the creation of memories and the possibility of willing ourselves into the memories of others. The narrator says of a little boy he sees eating soup in the kitchen of a café: “How can I demonstrate to him that I have glimpsed somebody’s future recollection?”

 

Only Proust ponders time and memory so profoundly, with such sadness and delight. I’m reminded of what Philip Larkin wrote in 1955 at the request of D.J. Enright (“Statement,” Required Writing, 1983), who was compiling an anthology and wanted brief statements about poetry from the contributors:

 

“I write poems to preserve things I have seen/thought/felt (if I may so indicate a composite and complex experience) both for myself and for others, though I feel that my prime responsibility is to the experience itself, which I am trying to keep from oblivion for its own sake. Why I should do this I have no idea, but I think the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art.”

 

Those who dismiss Nabokov as a literary fop or pornographer are priggish dullards. He combines the pleasures found in traditional novels – Jane Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy – with a new delight in artifice, moral reckoning and philosophical depth. He supplies enough literary delight to last a lifetime.   

 

In the last novel he published during his lifetime, Look at the Harlequins! (1974), the main character’s parents are divorced and he goes to live with his aunt who realizes the boy is depressed. She tells him: “Stop moping! . . . Look at the harlequins!” and he asks, “What harlequins? Where?” and she replies: “Oh, everywhere. All around you. Trees are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together -- jokes, images --  and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!”

 

That’s what Nabokov did, consistently. He was born on this date, April 22, in 1899 in St. Petersburg, Russia.