Beyond the bounds
HENRY TUBE
King Queen Knave Vladimir Nabokov trans- lated by DmiIri Nabokov in collaboration with the author (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 30s) Hebdomeros Giorgio de Chirico translated by Margaret Crosland (Peter Owen 35s) There are those—I think of them more in sorrow than anger—who deny Vladimir Nabo- kov his place as a monument of our time. The author, fortunately, is not among them. As Henry James in his old age reissued and genially di4ussed with himself the virtues of his 'accumulated good stuff,' so Mr Nabokov, now in his seventieth year, 'while working on a new novel that has now obsessed him for five years' has been 'thriftily and imperturb- ably resuraecting all his old works one after the other.' But Henry James's contemporary devotees could hardly have experienced quite the same feelings of suspense and amazement with which Mr Nabokov's ditto—at least those who do not read Russian—receive the seemingly endless flow from his European and Russian-writing past. It is so much a matter of the widow's cruse that the suspicious reader begins to wonder whether the author of that elaborate subterfuge Pale Fire is not writing books into his past. Be that as it may, in the foreword to King Queen Knave he tells us that it was his second novel, published in 1928 by the Russian émigré house `Slovo,' and that from a literal translation prepared by his son he made the present revised version early in 1967.
The case against Mr Nabokov can be of no conceivable interest to the author; and to us only in so far as it helps to clarify the case for him. It seems to rest, as it did back in the 'fifties, when Kingsley Ainis launched an attack on Lolita from the pages of this journal, on two counts : -his elabo- rate style (which used to be considered a particularly bad thing in the 'fifties and which Mr Amis, in characteristically period style, termed 'a high idiosyncratic noise-level in the writing') and his 'morally bad' subject- matter. The result of the one, for Mr Amis, was to invoke 'a Charles Atlas muscle-man of language as opposed to the healthy and useful adult' and of the other, 'the atrophy of moral sense,' to lead to 'dullness, fatuity and unreality.' It will be apparent that Mr Amis's criticisms were not a thousand miles apart; as he himself said, 'this style is involved with the entire moral tenor of the book.'
And according to his lights, which were the dominant lights of his school of writing, Mr Amis was righ,t, the best novels are to be equated with 'the healthy and useful adult,' if 'dullness, fatuity and unreality' are to be inevitably consequent on 'self-absorption,' a a 'human circuit' which 'is suffocatingly narrow,' then Mr Nabokov has sinned exceed- ingly and will sin, let us hope, unregenerate to the end of his days. But the unreality, not to say the fatuity, adheres all to Mr Amis. Who and where are these healthy and useful adults, these beings who are not self-absorbed, these broad human circuits? They exist only, I submit, in various brands of wishful think- ing and specifically in that popular mirage, the Civic Age. We may (I do not) long for such a world, but we do not live in it, either physically or mentally, and Mr Nabokov takes leave to write about the world we live in.
He writes about it—as all monuments do— in an extraordinary way, and King Queen Knave, in the version now published, is among the most sustained and successful examples of his art. One cannot—as Mr Amis recog- nised—separate the elements that go to make a Nabokov novel, without destroying what one is trying to understand—his peculiarity. The words, the tone of voice, the 'moral tenor,' the story, the characters, are, as railway tickets have it, 'not transferable.' This, I suspect, is one of the difficulties people have with him, that they cannot extract their addictive resin, their 'moral meaning,' in the way they are accustomed to extract it.
He works by means of 'pictures.' Equipped with what is known as a 'painter's eye,' that is a looking and seeing eye, Mr Nabokov has also a tongue which goes beyond the mere description of what he has seen, expressing the thing itself in a new mode: 'He would alternately puff on his cigarette, or hold it next to his knee, drawing the card- board tip across the fabric of his trouser leg. The smoke like a flow of spectral milk crept along the clingy nap. Martha extended her hand and with a smile touched his knee as if playing with this phantom larva of smoke.'
Though there is a story told in the con- ventional way, as a development from begin- ning to end of the book, the real story, the 'meaning,' appears reflected in these ravishing pictures, as a whole street or a room is reflec- ted in a drop of water. To read a Nabokov novel is not so much to charge from chapter to chapter in haste to discover the outcome, as to linger one's • way round a gallery - of related paintings.
But Mr Nabokov's talent for painting 'word- pictures' is not his whole secret. By chance there is also published this week for the first time in English the only novel of the painter Giorgio de Chirico, Hebdomeros, which first appeared in France the year after King Queen Knave in Germany. It is a tolerably direct translation of a surrealist painting into words. De Chirico juxtaposes images from Greek legend with images from his own world of 1929 and views the whole through the eyes of his hero Hebdomeros, a somewhat complacent and self-consciously Bohemian painter. The book is a curiosity rather than a pleasure. The fetching limpidity of many of the images, in- formed only by the trite sensibility, the trivial emotional apparatus of the painter-hero, palls with repetition. The thing strikes one as a reproduction of a painting, not as the paint- ing itself.
Mr Nabokov's secret, then; lies tin,the semi- bility that informs his 'pictures,' in ihe emotions that these pictures arouse, in—irs, certainly—the 'moral tenor.' His subject-mater, I would suggest, is cruelty, viewed—and tbis is what hurts those sentimentalists of the 'mss —with such fervent dispassion that it amounts to a kind of passion. Mr Nabokov is, Olie gathers, a noted lepidopterist. To observe the behaviour of a group of human beings as one would that of a group of butterflies is indeed a little too realistic for comfort; but not to hide the gaudy colours of the shameless creatures' wings, nay to revel in them, this is to go beYond the bounds.
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