Jolly Good Views

There are so many sparkling expressions in "first book of public prose" by Vladimir Nabokov that I have to give you some of them right away. Asked by an interviewer to comment on the recurrent linking of his name with those of Beckett and Borges: That play-wright and that essayist are regarded nowadays with such religous fervor that in the triptych you mention, I would feel like a robber between two Christs. Quite a cheerful robber, though. On Hemingway:...I read him for the first time in the early forties, something about bells, balls, bulls, and loathed, it. Comparing youthful expectations with elderly realities: At fifteen I visualized myself as a world-famous author of seventy with a mane of wavy white hair. Today I am practically bald. On his position "in the world of letters:" Jolly good view from up here.

"Up here" is not only the hotel in Switzerland where Nabokov makes his home, but the rarefied, almost Jamesian air of Meisterschaft which has grown up about him in the last few years. He is the one clear, current giant of our literature, I mean of American literature and English literature in general, and it is there, in language itself, that he has been most at home, since leaving Russia at 20, Western Europe at 40, and America for Europe again at 60.

That may be the reason why, as Nabokov explains in the preface to Strong Opinions, the interviews which make up the bulk of the book all consist of written answers to written questions. Suspicious of alterations in phrase or context, he refuses to give interviews "off the Nabocuff." He rejects the illusions of "bogus informality" and "colorful details." He has made sure that his words are bright and fresh, as crisp and carefully re-written, in the interviews, letters to the editor, and critical pieces assembled in Strong Opinions, as they always are in his novels.

Nabokov is a cultivator of vocabulary. And it will not seem too paradoxical--not, at least, to a reader of Nabokov--to say that a non-bogus, paraphrased, uncolorfully detailed Nabokov told me last summer on his Montreux veranda that he had always emphasized his status as an American writer because America has the richest vocabulary in history, graced with an unparalleled number of technical terms and vigorous, constantly changing slang. Even its cliches are at the highest level. That is why, in Nabokov's opinion, the best writing in progress today is being done by Americans.

Nabokov values such a vocabulary so much because he had to struggle so long without it. His story is a rich relative of that of the classic first-generation immigrant who loves America because he doesn't want to leave it. Nabokov has left it, still loves it. He feels very sensitive, he says in Strong Opinions, about his lack of a natural vocabulary. He echoes what he said in the afterword to Lolita: My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural language, my natural idiom, my rich, infinitely rich and docile Russian tongue, for a second-rate brand of English. He feels caught between Russian, for which he no longer has an audience, and English, which to him still feels "stiff and artificial," however brilliant his success with it.

But one of the most useful revelations of Strong Opinions is of the way Nabokov thinks in images, not words, during the first stage of writing. In his brilliant piece on "Inspiration," he describes how Ada took form from a single inspired, Iyric section that gave tone and texture to the whole book. Writing the book means approximating in the best words available something that already exists in a mental realm from which Nabokov rescues, recreates, excavates it. A subtle relation between levels of possibility--in thought and in vocabulary--participates in the creation of the words that firmly but transparently exist there on the page.

The range of literary and intellectual likes and dislikes Nabokov registers here is a similar kind of possibility, a source of material, a vocabulary of its own. Nabokov says that many popular writers "simply don't exist" for him. Nabokov has his own firm canon of tastes--for protection from all the books which come charging down from the past, reputations fixed, for cover under which to deploy his own literary formations and figures.

Nabokov's abhorrence of Freud, "the Viennese witch doctor," is famous. Freud's vocabulary is simply too crude--maybe because it's too useful. His words are ones we use and over-use--"ego," "repression"--for want of better ones. This is not good enough for someone whose whole business is the delicate shading of every sense and tone. Such horrors as the scene in The Magic Mountain when Thomas Mann has his heroine ask to borrow the hero's pencil are ample warning that novels ought to be sources for the psychologist and not vice versa. For Nabokov, art is more fundamental than sex. And even Freud, unlike many Freudians, realized, 1) that sex isn't the only form of Sex, and 2) that a cigar is sometimes just a cigar.

And then there is Dostoevsky, who, says Fyodor, the hero of Nabokov's The Gift, "turned Bedlam back into Bethlehem." Nabokov doesn't like old Fyodor because of his mysticism, his sentimentality, his journalese. There is a difference of type: Dostoevsky was a rough writer, who often scrawled or dictated under the burden of absurd deadlines, and Nabokov is a careful, multiple re-writer. Nabokov's condemnation must also be seen as the answer to a question forced especially on any Russian writer: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. It is a question of native sensibility.

What gives such a sense of the master about Nabokov is perhaps the feeling of common characters, common turns of phrase, common interests running through his long shelf of books. His novels span the gap between contemporary Switzerland and Russia before the Revolution. In between lie post-war America and Berlin between the wars, tea on the edge of Bloomsbury and dinner with Joyce in Paris. There are fantastic countries, like "Ultima Thule" published last spring in a A Russian Beauty and Other Stories.

There are solipistic worlds of totalitarian horror, as in the recently republished Bend Sinister. And the best thing is that there are still other creations to come: a novel in progress, a projected "history of butterflies in pictorial representation," another volume of autobiography--from a source that has proved so reliable.