'Make Memory Speak so Volubly'

A reader shares with me her first reading of two books she knows I value highly. First, Kipling’s Kim: “I was twelve. I was very interested in ‘spiritual’ things. It was the Beatles and the Maharishi, you know. I got it from the library and it was love at first sight. I identified with Kim’s quest.” 

I first read it around the same age, strictly as an adventure story, which is probably closer to the way Kipling intended it. In his 1960 essay “Poets, Critics, and Readers,” Randall Jarrell describes an interview he read with “an unusually humane and intelligent critic,” whose life is “artless” except for the reading he is obligated to do for his jobs as writer and teacher. Jarrell finds a redeeming moment in the interview:

 

“The critic said that once a year he read Kim; and he read Kim, it was plain, at whim: not to teach, not to criticize, just for love—he read it, as Kipling wrote it, just because he liked to, wanted to, couldn’t help himself. To him it wasn’t a means to a lecture or article, it was an end; he read it not for anything he could get out of it, but for itself. And isn’t this what the work of art demands of us?”

 

I have no philosophy but Jarrell here formulates my philosophy of reading. Even books with difficult, painful subject matter – say, Paul Celan’s poems – I read “just for love.” Obviously, love is more than adolescent infatuation. Which brings us to my reader’s second book, Lolita:

 

“I looked for the dirty bits. I admit it. Hell, I was about 15. There weren’t any dirty bits. I was disappointed but I kept reading it that first time and something kept me coming back. Now it’s one of my favorite novels.”

 

Close to my first experience with Lolita. It wasn’t what I expected. I read it one summer, sitting on the front porch of our house, feet on the railing. It was 1968, that annus horribilis. The strongest emotional impact it had on me came near the end, the heartbreaking, densely written reunion of Lolita and Humbert. For pure sadness I associate it with that final dreadful scene in King Lear. Months later, Nabokov published Ada, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and I was smitten for life.

 

Brian Boyd is a New Zealander, a leading Nabokov scholar and author of a two-volume biography of the novelist. In 2007, in Ulbandus, a journal put out by the Slavic languages department at Columbia University, Boyd published a brief essay, “Who Is ‘My Nabokov?’” “We all have our unique associations,” Boyd writes, “with favorite writers that accumulate over a lifetime.” Boyd was born the same year, 1952, as me. He first read Lolita at age thirteen. He too was “tantalized” by Nabokov’s face on the cover of Time. Boyd concludes his essay: “We all have our unique associations with favorite authors. Strange how recalling them can make memory speak so volubly, when we sometimes fear it can only stammer or stumble.”