VLADIMIR NABOKOV died at the age of 78 – a very reasonable age, one would think, for a writer to die at, his best works long behind him and the retrospective honours coming in. But Nabokov’s career as the finest novelist of the post-Joyce era began only when he was 60, with the publication of Lolita.
This book gave him the wrong sort of reputation, but only with the wrong audience, which converted anger at the lack of lubricity into moral indignation. Those who thought it pornographic knew only the title. If the book was ever shocking, it was stylistically so. People brought up on a sparer literary diet were appalled at the blend of pedantry and dandyism, the aristocratic chic which seemed unfitting in an age of plain prose and social commitment. The novels that followed – particularly Pale Fire and Ada – were animated by the same verbal passion, to an extent considered very indecent by lovers of a plain yarn. Indeed, it seemed that the only characters in Pale Fire were words, with a plot based on a typographical error.
His admirers, who felt they had a right to expect further outrageous rapes of traditional narrative form in the name of a passion for language, will not only grieve but feel frustrated. He and Raymond Queneau were the last of the literary dandies.
Literature in English has, in our century, owed most to foreigners, which includes Irishmen. The special task of the English-writing Slav has been to remind us of the gorgeousness of our language – gorgeousness repressed by puritans and pragmatists – and it is probably right to bracket Nabokov and Conrad. But whereas it was Conrad’s vocation to become an English writer, Nabokov became the author of Lolita only by accident. If it had not been for the Russian revolution, he would have been an internationally acclaimed glory of his own language. He never pretended that English was anything other than a second best to Russian. It was forced upon him by exile and awareness of producing a rarefied literature for émigrés only. The extent of his devotion to Russian literature is to be seen in his four-volume edition of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.
Nabokov’s father was one of the great Russian democrats, leader of the faction that tried to act as a reasonable buffer between the Tsar and the Bolshevists. Both sent him to prison; in exile he was apparently assassinated. Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory, which typically he wanted to call Speak, Mnemosyne, tells a shameful story of treachery and dispossession, but with not one grain of self-pity, rather with aristocratic hauteur, and a stoicism that defies the reader to suppose for one moment that he ever minded the loss of an inheritance of a huge estate and two million dollars.
Nabokov’s writings blessed the untidy richness of the world, but he had an instinct for scientific order. He was a great lepidopterist, expert at pinning flight and colour into categories. He was a magnificent chess player, publishing some of his invented problems along with his poems, as if they had much the same aesthetic value. The hero of The Defence (a worked-over version of a novel written 30 years earlier in Russian) is a chess player of the master class who can find only two approaches to life – that of the jigsaw, fitting shapeless scraps of experience together into a preordained pattern, and that of chess, the perverse self-absorption in closed-in skills. The way out of banality, Nabokov seems to say, is the way into perversity or madness: one or other of these categories encloses most of his heroes.
He was also a great player of word-games which, so say the unkind, are all his novels are. In his hotel suite at Montreux, whither he took his American passport into a final exile, he played much Russian Scrabble with his wife Vera. He created the first Russian crossword. These ludic obsessions are all to be found in his novels. In one of his poems he wonders if there is an ultimate reality corresponding to the fact that repaid is diaper spelt backwards.
To him words were literal magic. He was a philologist more than a linguist: the reality of language lay on the page, not in the ear or mouth. The villain of Lolita, Quilty, seems to be made out of the sentence: ‘Qu’il t’y mène’. But, on the first page of that novel, Humbert Humbert savours the very name of his beloved, bewitched to find that the two ‘l’s are two different allophones.
Nabokov got a good degree at Cambridge – through, he says, the carelessness of turning in good papers – but he distinguished himself there chiefly as a fine tennis player and a reliable goalkeeper. It seems only by chance that America claimed him. He taught at Cornell, but left academe behind when Lolita began to assure him of an income. Though he left America, he shows in his work a fascination with its culture, geography and language unequalled by most native-born Americans. His ear caught American speech exactly, but his mouth could never get round it. His spoken English remained heavily émigré, but was always human and charming.
He could be very intolerant, pig-headedly so, finding no virtue in Freud, the Viennese quack, who busied himself with the psyche. The soul was an overrated property, he thought, rather like money, and so he dismissed Dostoyevsky. As for post-Tsarist Russian literature, that, he maintained, did not exist: so much for Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn. Of his kindness, his students may speak, as also those of us young writers whom he believed to be on the right, word-obsessed track.
He did not invent the word nymphet, but he gave it a new meaning, not one well understood. Any nubile teenager is now a ‘proper little Lolita’, where he meant something far more subtle and magical. His approach to his art was of a Flaubertian or Joycean dedication. He received no international honours, nor did he need them. He did us all honour by electing to use, and transform, our language.
Observer, 10 July 1977