VN COLLATION #8
by Suellen Stringer-Hye
Jean and Alexander Heard Library
Vanderbilt University
stringers@library.vanderbilt.edu

Several books, recently published and reviewed in September, refer or in some way relate to the life and/or works of Vladimir Nabokov.

The Good Ship Venus, the Erotic Voyage of the Olympia Press by John de St. Jorre, follows the career of Maurice Girodias, publisher of titles such as White Thighs, Bottoms Up, The Loins of Amon, The Whipping Club or Heaven, Hell and the Whore, and, of course, Lolita. One reviewer called it "an intriguing (and tasteful) yarn ..of a publishing company battling the censors and its own waywardness." There have been many reviews of this book, all of them commenting on the importance of Lolita and Nabokov to the erratic fortunes of Girodias and the Olympia Press. Another and related book Paris Interzone: Richard Wright, Lolita, Boris Vian and others on the Left Bank, 1946-60 by James Campbell is favorably reviewed in the September 6 Guardian by the poet Christopher Logue, who under the alias Count Palmiro Vicarion was one of those struggling Parisian writers who in the early Fifities was willing to supply Girodias with the erotic drivel that was to drive the engine of his publishing activities until Nabokov and others such as J.P. Donleavy redirected its course. Logue writes:

...in many respects Maurice was the most intriguing of us, Beckett, Wright, Gardiner-Smith, Plimpton, Seaver, Wainhouse, et.al. He was a constant thief (of royalties) sly, vainglorious, nettled to hear sex described as the most popular form of light entertainment, anxious to be accepted by his fellow (French) publishers, a brave brilliant publisher himself who mocked the absurdly overrated Nabokov - I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the sceptre of my passion (well really)....

After the publication of Lolita, Girodias set up, using the royalties from the sale of the book, a theatre-restaurant complex called "Chez Lolita". The restaurant was gutted by fire and the theater was closed down by gendarmes.

Another review of Saul Bellow's book of non-fiction essays It All Adds Up which I have quoted from in earlier columns, again points to Bellow's love for Nabokov. James Wood in the September 6 Guardian observes:

Bellow's Jewish mysticism, his ancestral sensitivity is ...only heretical or cranky in an age ruled by an Inquisition of the literal. Though Bellow does not seek to bolster himself in this way, most great artists have been both literalists and mystics.

"...who, in The Gift, beautifully imagines that life is perhaps ' only pocket money, farthings clinking in the dark, and that somewhere is stocked the real wealth, from which life should know how to get the dividends...and one wants to offer thanks but there is no one to thank. ...Perhaps Nabokov represents the last moment [for Bellow] at which apologies were not requested."

Wood, Michael.The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction London: Chatto & Windus. 1994

Described in what Gerry Dukes of the Irish Times calls a "fine and subtle study", Nabokov appears in The Magician's Doubts as a " connoisseur of loss." Two reviews, one in the August 31 Irish Times and another in the August 28 London Times are notable. From the Dukes' review:

"Time degrades us all forcing us to jack it all in. Nabokov"s fiction furnishes merry tunes for whistling as we pass the graveyard, and part of the import of the tunes is that their merriment is both necessary and futile."

"Wood's readings of the English novels are provocative and rewarding, painstakingly and wittily exploring the finesses of Nabokov's style and the problematics of his readers' responses. This is a work of criticism to set beside Rick's on Beckett and Citati's on Kafka.

"...doing his utmost to avoid the word "symbolic", opting instead for "implicitely represents", "is associated with" and (my favorite) "is delicately, metonymically connected to" which to me at least, sounds like a symbol on its best behaviour, shuffling its feet and hoping nobody notices it."

"Nabokov has more sympathy for these dupes than is commonly supposed...It takes a booby to fall into his traps, but there is often a booby-prize waiting for them . Wood puts it better, and makes an interesting pairing in the process: 'Even paranoids have enemies, as the old joke goes, and Nabokov and Hitchcock make art out of this joke.' Wood has fashioned a demanding work of criticism from this insight."

More pleas for better books using Nabokov as the standard, Alan Massie in the September 10, Daily Telegraph agrees with the chairman of the Booker Prize judges who a week before publication of the Booker Prize short list complained of the shortage of novels that might be described as a "good read". Massie writes:

"All art is seductive and every worthwhile artist a seducer setting out to persuade the reader that his life may be enriched by the experience the artist offers. Nabokov wrote that every great novelist was "a great enchanter" and to call a novel " a good read" may seem a tepid response to this demand yet, unless it is first of all a "a good read", unless that is, the story entrances, the characters interest, delight and force themselves upon us, the seduction cannot take place; the enchantment will fail.

Harold Bloom's Western Canon due out in October is a list of authors in Western Civilization worthy of preservation, protection and study. Leaks from the press indicate that:

"Saul Bellow has made his list with three works, but odd character Gertrude Stein has four. Don DeLillo made it with four, but Vladimir Nabokov just two. Phillip Roth is cited for six works, but John Updike for just The Witches of Eastwick."

Lolita continues to haunt the runways of designers and hover around the debate about women and the politics of fashion. From an article examining the negative influence of the so called "baby doll"

"Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is the key text for understanding the intellectual games which paedophiles play, a novel of startling ambiguity in which Humbert Humbert's self-flagellation for his uncontrollable desires is also a form of self-exculpation. ...Lolita and its fashion counterpart Kinderwhore, involves a special kind of dishonesty which allows men to indulge a fantasy not just of defloration but of defilement.

"in Vladimir Nabokov's inimitable words, 'an insignificant, shifty and pugnacious prince'."

who was known for, again in Nabokov's,

"deliberately archaic English, 'entoiling the falconet by means of a fair maiden'."

Governor Bill Weld, as incumbent candidate for the governor of Massachusetts, escapes no profile in which his esteem for Nabokov does not help to color the contours of his personality. Nabokov is trotted out to defend a journalist's taste for Rush Limbaugh's vulgarity and to condemn what John Banville , the Literary Editor of the Irish Times calls the "neo-fascism" of the leader of the IRA and Sinn Fein.

"Gerry Adams is obviously a clever and able man, but as a writer I think it behoves (sic) those people dealing with him to read his short stories, where one sees the streak of sentimentality that marks the totalitarian mind: the kind of thing that Nabokov called poshlost."