'From the Caveman to Keats'

No writer’s death during my lifetime has so stunned me, left me unwilling to accept the news, as Vladimir Nabokov’s. On a muggy night in Youngstown, Ohio, while driving around the city, I learned from a radio report that “the controversial author of Lolita” (as newsman around the globe inevitably phrased it) had died in Swiss exile on July 2, 1977, age seventy-eight. No more Invitations to a Beheading, no more Pnins. The Original of Laura was still thirty-two years away and hardly worthy of our anticipation. Nabokov taught us to expect wonder in what we read. 

Nabokov was never a systematic critic of literature but his influence on my tastes was lasting. Dostoevsky remains “Dusty,” and Freud, more than ever, is the “Viennese quack.” The aim of reading and writing, he taught us, is “aesthetic bliss.” The day after his death I started rereading Ada, waiting for that passage about the shadows cast by leaves. Then I reread the sad, funny, tricky Pnin. Early on, the narrator tells us:

 

“I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelopes us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.”

 

Almost 20 years later, in the last novel published during his lifetime, Look at the Harlequins! Nabokov’s hero writes “Death is silly, death is degrading,” -- a rhythmic and thematic echo of “Death is divestment, death is communion.” Happily, Nabokov was prolific. Mad Charles Kinbote writes in his commentary to line 991 of “Pale Fire,” the poem that lends its name to Nabokov’s greatest novel:

 

“We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats.”