Picked-Up Pieces (31 page)

M
ARY
, by Vladimir Nabokov, translated from the Russian by Michael Glenny in collaboration with the author. 114 pp. McGraw-Hill, 1970.

His first novel, written in 1925. Faithful Nabokovians have met Mary before; she sat for her portrait as Tamara in
Speak, Memory
, lurks near the heart of
Lolita
, and was deified in
Ada
. Here, artistically as well as chronologically young, she is the first love of the autobiographical hero, Ganin, for whom her wanton yet delicate Tartar beauty condenses into pure perfume the idyll of rural Russia and the enchantment of privileged youth. But Ganin remembers her from afar, when he is in a Berlin boarding house surrounded by other émigrés, comic and pathetic types of exile from reality—a race as of film extras, “flickering, shadowy doppelgangers, the casual Russian film extras, sold for ten marks apiece and still flitting, God knows where, across the white gleam of a screen.” Ganin wakes from the shadows, from dreaming of Mary, at the end, and slopes off to his future as, it may be, an internationally renowned poet/scholar/novelist.
Mary
not only adumbrates the future of a master, it shines by its own light. From the start, Nabokov had his sharp peripheral vision, an intent deftness at netting the gaudy phrase, and the knack (crucial to novelists and chess players) of setting up combinations. Though his materials are tender, his treatment shows the good-natured toughness that
gives an artist long life. Wisely, and nicely, he has spared this venerable text the—he admits—“high-handed revampments” to which his elder self is prone, and has supervised an exact, deferential translation.

G
LORY
, by Vladimir Nabokov, translated from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author. 205 pp. McGraw-Hill, 1971.

Here is a book that deserves not a review but a party. Let us all rejoice with Vladimir Nabokov. Before he was twenty, revolution deprived him of his Mother Russia and of an estate worth millions. When he was forty, Hitler deprived him of his second home, Europe, and of another fortune—the accumulated treasure of fiction and poetry that his pseudonym V. Sirin had composed in the Russian language, a precious
oeuvre
unpublishable in the Soviet Union and destined, it seemed, to fade into oblivion as the subnation of Russian émigrés was scattered and absorbed by the passage of time. When Nabokov landed here, in 1940, his genius had neither a visible past nor an imaginable future. However, he had known English since his boyhood, and in this second language he recast his aloofly original inspirations, reignited his singular verbal fire, and bestowed upon America a literary master it had done nothing to raise. This second career, crowned by the notorious and remunerative and splendid
Lolita
, has in its strength reached down and redeemed from limbo the substance of the first career—the novels composed by “Sirin” in Berlin between 1925 and 1937. Now, with Nabokov sailing nicely into his eighth decade, the last of these Russian novels to reach the safe haven of definitive English translation,
Glory
, has been published. The rainbow of romances (nine Russian, six American) now arches complete, from
Mary
to
Ada
, and though, along with some short stories and poems and feuilletons, a few fine vibrations have no doubt been left behind in the Russian—a fuzz of nuance and euphony as untransferable as the dust on a butterfly’s wing—Nabokov’s diligence and self-respect have essentially defied a cruel century’s blind attempt to silence his sensibility and disarray his shelf of work.

Why
Glory
(up to now translated on bibliographical lists as
The Exploit
) waited until last must be guessed at. It was written in 1930, immediately
after
The Eye;
if
The Eye
is discounted as a novella,
Glory
falls between two masterly novels—
The Defense
and
Laughter in the Dark
. By comparison, it is weak; the ending baffles, and what happens on the way to the ending occurs with a curious, rather ingratiating casualness.
Glory
never really awakens to its condition as a novel, its obligation to generate suspense. Its secondary characters—Darwin, the sanguine and gentlemanly Englishman, and Sonia, the sulky little émigrée—come into view elliptically, as if they were revolving around some other sun. The youthful hero, Martin Edelweiss, is a center of anti-gravity; we feel that things flee him. Though he is Russian, his name is Swiss, cluing some atomic split within. In one of those landlordly prefaces that slam shut the doors of unsightly closets, inveigh against the Freudian in the hall, and roughly nudge the prospective tenant toward the one window with a view, Nabokov likens the design of
Glory
to a chess problem whose crux is the impotence of the customarily high-powered Queen. The hint is helpful. In the backward look, the book’s two faults, if faults they be (sleepy development, stark conclusion), do combine into a single, intended quality—a weak strength, or sad joy.

Martin is led along some of the paths of Nabokov’s autobiography—the country house with its sandy
allées
, the numinous shadowy albums and tinted porch glass, the English biscuits and toothpaste imported from afar, the idyllic days in the warm Crimea while civil war rages, the improvised departure on a Black Sea freighter, the arrival in a Europe that will never shed the postcard brightness and carved-clock quaintness of a place visited, of a place that is not Russia and therefore not quite real. We have been here before, in Luzhin’s boyhood and in Van Veen’s private mythology and, above all, in
Speak
,
Memory
. Nabokov, in his role of over-solicitous proprietor, warns us away from seeking out “duplicate items or kindred scenery” in
Speak, Memory
, but who could miss the marvellous newspaper-phoenix, the sheet of the London
Times
held across the fireplace to make it draw?

When, a quarter of a century later, Nabokov set down in English his memories of Cambridge, this imagery returned, almost sentence by sentence: “Then the flaming sheet, with the whirr of a liberated phoenix, would fly up the chimney to join the stars. It cost one a fine of twelve shillings if that firebird was observed.” In that same Chapter Thirteen of
Speak, Memory
, Nabokov states, “The story of my college years in England is really the story of my trying to become a Russian writer.” Martin Edelweiss is an alter ego gutted of Nabokov’s artistic vocation; this deliberate lobotomy leaves an oddly hollow protagonist, a “travelling playboy” with dreams but no ambitions, graduating from college into tennis and vagabondage and, at the end, a suicidal return to Russia. But Martin has always, come to think of it, been close to death:

Not only his father but friends die—contemporaries fighting with the White armies—and in the Crimea, on a dark road, he is challenged by a drunk with a gun, and in the Alps he challenges himself to venture out onto a dizzying ledge. If in retrospect the reader finds that he has failed to take these dark hints seriously enough, the reason may be that Martin is Nabokov’s healthiest hero and
Glory
his sunniest book.

Page after page brims with glistening physical description:

By denying Martin any artistic or political passion while not denying him his own full complement of senses, Nabokov has released a genie rare in fiction—a robust sense of physical well-being. The sensations of vigorous tennis, of goal tending at soccer, of a bare-knuckled fistfight are in
Glory
given their due by an artist and meditator who was also an athlete; so, too, are the subtler but not less physical sensations of train travel, of pipe smoke and male companionship over tea, of “the fresh rough smell of earth and melting snow,” of agriculture—“the hollowed earth would fill with bubbling brown water and, feeling in it with a spade, he mercifully softened the soil, until something gave delightfully, and the percolating water sank away, washing the roots. He felt happy he knew how to satisfy a plant’s thirst.” Happiness, as with an earlier Russian author, is the fragile, somehow terrible theme. Martin’s sexual encounters tend to be felt in terms of the woman’s fragility:

Similarly rapt, the sentences seek to embrace, with the crunch of a superb adjective, the full and fainting body of a moment.

The author’s efforts to fix the sensations, the gestures—“he would compress his thin lips, take off his pince-nez as carefully as if it were a dragonfly”—so freshly and precisely become a means whereby the third-person hero accrues moral credit, or at least a certain scrupulous stubbornness. An old man dies, and “Martin felt sorry for the originality of the deceased, who was truly irreplaceable—his gestures, his beard, his sculpturesque wrinkles, the sudden shy smile, the jacket button that hung by a thread, and his way of licking a stamp with his entire tongue before sticking it on the envelope and banging it with his fist. In a certain sense this was all of greater value than the social merits for which there existed such easy little clichés.” Martin is credited with a “meditative
joie de vivre
” and a search for “scintilla,” but is declared untormented “by a writer’s covetousness (so akin to the fear of death), by that constant state of anxiety compelling one to fix indelibly this or that evanescent trifle”; the declaration is rather formal and does have about it the cruelty of some dissecting experiment that permits a creature to twitch without benefit of a head. Yet it is true, as our decade has again borne witness, that youth, in the sensitivity of its animal health, tends to be artistic, and that without the task of art before it the artistic temper wastes itself in symbolic actions, in “trips” that are meaningless self-tests and whose secret destination is death. This point is contained in
Glory
, but it is not the point of the book. The point, surely, lies in its rapturous evocations and the
frissons
they give us—what Martin terms “the unexpected, sunlit clearings, where you can stretch until your joints crunch, and remain entranced,” what Nabokov in his afterword to
Lolita
announces he “shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss.” In its residue of bliss experienced, and in its charge of bliss conveyed,
Glory
measures up as, though the last to arrive, far from the least of this happy man’s Russian novels.

A
DA
, by Vladimir Nabokov. 589 pp. McGraw-Hill, 1969.

When a book fails to agree with a reader, it is either because the author has failed to realize his intentions or because his intentions are disagreeable. Since Vladimir Nabokov is, all in all, the best-equipped writer in the English-speaking world (of which he inhabits a personal promontory
by the side of Lake Geneva), the opening chapters of his giant new novel,
Ada
, must be taken as intentionally repellent. His prose has never—not even in his haughty prefaces to works resurrected from the Russian, not even in Humbert Humbert’s maddest flights—menaced a cowering reader with more bristling erudition, garlicky puns, bearish parentheses, and ogreish winks. For example: