'The Absence of Her Voice From that Concord'

“There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three – storyteller, teacher, enchanter – but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.” 

Of course, Nabokov is describing himself in “Good Readers and Good Writers,” the introductory lecture he delivered to his students at Cornell University. I look for “enchantment” even among writers judged the most “realistic” – a word Nabokov said should always be written in quotes. I take enchantment to mean the creation of a convincing alternative world which may or may not resemble our own. A gifted stage magician performs a trick that inspires wonder. How did he do the impossible? we ask, and we’re blissfully, bafflingly seduced as surely as any lover.

 

No writer have I been reading for so long – almost sixty years -- who has reliably given me such pleasure. The first book, of course, was Lolita. I looked for the dirty bits and they weren’t there, but I was taken by the prose and the mingling of depravity and farce. I know I missed a lot but many subsequent readings have supplied clarity without taking away that original sense of delight. Soon, Nabokov was on the cover of Time magazine, when that still meant something. He had just turned seventy and published Ada (full nineteenth-century-sounding title: Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle), his seventeenth and longest novel. Nabokov was the only contemporary novelist I regularly bought in hardcover because I never had much money. Ada’s cover price: $8.95, a mint when I was sixteen.

 

Certain readers and critics dismiss Nabokov as haughty, disdainful or cold. He can be snobbish, his bearing is often aristocratic, it’s true, and some of his critical judgments are sure to offend gentle souls, but I know of few passages in all of literature so powerfully, dismally sad as the pedophile Humbert Humbert’s soliloquy at the close of Lolita:

 

“What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.”

 

As my late friend D.G. Myers wrote: “. . . Humbert finally acknowledges, in his last few moments as a free man, the sin he has committed against her—the sin of removing her voice from the chorus of children at play.”

 

As to Nabokov’s alleged emotional coldness, consider that Lolita isn’t the only child in jeopardy in his work. The emotional heart of Pale Fire is not the solipsistic madness of Charles Kinbote but the suicide of Hazel Shade. The only scenes in modern fiction comparably heartbreaking to the final meeting between Humbert and Lolita are Leopold Bloom’s vision of his dead son Rudy in the “Circe” chapter of Ulysses, and the death and afterlife of Hazel and her father's “longing of the living to be reunited with the dead.'”      

 

Nabokov was born on this date, April 22, in 1899 and died in 1977 at age seventy-eight.

 

[“Good Readers and Good Writers” is collected in Lectures on Literature (1980).]