Butterfly minded

Colin Wilson

Strong Opinions Vladimir Nabokov (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £3.50) Literary reputations are sometimes made in a curiously accidental manner. One mild day towards the end of 1955, the Sunday Express journalist Robert Pitman was sitting on a park bench in Kensington Gardens. The only other person on the bench was a slim young man with a D. H. Lawrence beard. They fell into conversation. The young man was an American, who introduced himself as Mike Donleavy. He was a writer, and his first novel The Ginger Man had recently been brought out in Paris by Olympia Press which — as everyone now knows — specialised in pornography for American tourists. When Donleavy learned that Pitman was a book reviewer, he naturally sent him a copy of his novel, together with a number of other books published by Olympia Press. These included a two volume work by Vladimir Nabokov called Lolita. Pitman liked The Ginger Man, but he found Lolita shocking (he was the father of a five year old daughter). Shortly afterwards, the Sunday newspapers brought out their usual list of the best books of the year, selected by various public figures. Graham Greene had selected Lolita.

The choice caused no raised eyebrows, for no one in England had read it — except Bob Pitman. That evening, Pitman and his wife went to have dinner down in Croydon with the veteran Beaverbrook. journalist John Gordon, who had a regular column in the Sunday Express. Pitman told him about Lolita and lent him a copy. The result was that Gordon's column on the following Sunday contained a violent denunciation of Graham Greene for trying to publicise the worst kind of pornography. Interviewed by journalists, Greene was impenitent. He insisted that Lolita was a comic masterpiece, even if it was about the seduction of a middle aged man by a ten year old girl. The controversy thundered on. Smuggled 'copies of Lolita were suddenly worth five pounds a volume around Soho. Nabokov found himself notorious. When an enterprising American publisher brought out Lolita, it immediately became a best-seller. The fifty-seven year old Russian emigre who had been magic-carpeted to fame by Mr Gordon's moral fervour found himself in a strange position. His first volume of poems had appeared — in Russian — when he was nineteen. Since then he had published a dozen novels and a volume of autobiography. He had a small but sound reputation in literary circles, was chiefly known as the author of an excellent (if idiosyncratic) book on Gogol, and was totally unknown to the general public. Now, suddenly, he was famous as the author of a book that was not merely dirty, but scandalously perverse. His next novel Pnin was a gentle comedy about a Russian emigre, with little sex and no perversions, and it aroused little interest. Earlier novels were reissued, and the public continued to find him disappointing. As if in a desperate attempt to finally destroy his reputation as a one-book pornographer, he wrote his next novel in the form of a long poem, with its story concealed in the scholarly introduction and the critical notes. In 1969 he produced his most ambitious novel, Ada, a vast and tortuous work that most people have found unreadable. Fortunately, by this time the American professors had discovered his earlier novels; the

scholarly studies began to appear, and Nabokov was gently and imperceptibly transformed into a Major Writer. In his seventies he is now feted and interviewed, biographised and bibliographed. In short, he seems to have made It.

It was a roundabout way to achieve the position that is undoubtedly his due — for he has written some of the most graceful and sparkling prose of the twentieth century — but it was all probably for the best. For although I count myself among Nabokov's admirers, I am firmly of the opinion that fame has ruined him.

Nabokov's new volume, Strong Opinions, begins: " I think like a genius, I write like a

distinguished author, and I speak like a child."

What he means is that he continues to express waspish or provocative opinions with a complacency that has more than a touch of Shavian conceit, but completely lacks Shaw's ability to annoy the reader into thinking for himself. It consists mainly of a series of in

terviews given to magazines like Playboy and Vogue. These will no doubt interest future

biographers and literary critics, but it is dif ficult to see why they should interest anyone else. Nabokov has decided to play the part of the representative of the old values and standards, defender of ' culture ' in Matthew Arnold's sense; he answers interviewers with a tone that implies that he is one of the Major Writers. And his prose is so excellent (he writes out all the answers to questions) that

he often has me almost convinced. Then I glance across at the row of his books on my shelf — Pnin, Bend Sinister, Pale Fire, Ada and the rest, and I know it is nonsense.

The truth is that Nabokov is a poet of nostalgia, a kind of literary counterpart of Delius. Most of his early books were about lonely, rather pathetic figures — chess players, lepidopterists, students of Russian poetry, political exiles — usually living in other people's houses. Yet Nabokov is basically a happy man — as he emphasises several times in this book — so the effect is anything but Beckett-like. His books are all about fantasy, and characters who live fan tasy lives, Russian Walter Mitties. He has created a world of his own, one step away from reality. The comparison that comes to my mind is P. G. Wodehouse.

Obscurity suited the creator of Sebastian Knight and Pnin. He was a moderately-known emigre writer who made a living by teaching

on American campuses. A book like Speak Memory (first published in 1951) is suffused

with the authentic Delian nostalgia. And I

strongly recommend The Portable Nabokov (published in America by Viking, but easily

obtainable in England) as a volume of un mixed delight. When I read this, I feel a kind of immense affection for Nabokov; he is un doubtedly a superb writer. He is also, essen tially, a private, rather lonely figure. The Nabokov who suddenly found himself in the

limelight with Lolita turned into a pseudoShavian monster, aggressively non-intellectual, yet full of assertive opinions that require intellectual justification.

I suspect Nabokov is one of those writers who was never intended to be too self-cons

cious. Charm is his forte, but charm must be

natural. The prose of Ada is consciously charming, and finally in some way unsatisfy

ing, like a meal consisting of delicious spices, but with no roast beef and potatoes. It was fortunate for Nabokov — and his readers — that fame arrived so late. Dr Jekyll had ac complished most of his life's work before Mr Hyde came and took over. I shall stow away

Strong Opinions on the shelf I keep for used review copies, and go back to Speak Memory, and those happy days before Nabokov thought he ought to have opinions on everything. Cohn Wilson's latest book is a detective novel, The Schoolgirl Murder Case, published by Hart-Davis.