Subject
[NABOKOV-L] Wood's part II on Brian Boyd's biography "Vladimir
Nabokov: The American Years."
Nabokov: The American Years."
From
Date
Body
One more article sent by James Twiggs: Michael Wood on "Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years" by Brian Boyd; Elusive Butterfly, New Republic, 00286583, 1/20/92, Vol. 206, Issue 3.
Here are excerpts from paragraphs, selected at random.
Once again, I excuse myself for any gross distortion by my attempt to comply with the restrictions of its copy-rights, in order to offer it to the Nabokov-L readers (I hope I managed to compress it correctly) .
Writes Wood: "One of the great pleasures of Boyd's two volumes is their critical chapters...Boyd is astute, and attentive to the text.[he] offers a shrewd and close assessment of Nabokov's monumental and much-disputed translation of Eugene Onegin.finding in it a useful key to Nabokov's passion for 'bright particulars'." He states that although Boyd mentions that "Nabokov thought that Lolita and Ada were his most significant novels.and his work on Eugene Onegin", the biographer also "makes great claims for Pale Fire" when he considers that "In sheer beauty of form, Pale Fire may well be the most perfect novel ever written."
Wood clearly values the information that "Nabokov's father was killed .by bullets intended for someone else, and Shade is killed on the elder Nabokov's birthday." For him, although such a link is not necessary, "it is pretty powerful information if we have it." He judges Boyd's reading of Pale Fire as being "intricately fascinating". There is something that has remained unclear to me in his assessment of Brian Boyd's analysis of Pale Fire, for I don't think that he accepted Boyd's interpretation of this novel ( ie: that Shade created Kinbote) although he praised it lavishly, nor its reverse (Kinbote created Shade).
Wood surveys Boyd's interpretation: "He argues that Shade does not die, but only writes his death, turning himself into the manic Kinbote/Botkin as a way of escaping the prison of the self." and he adds that for Boyd it is "Shade who concocts Kinbote." For Wood, Boyd's theory is "certainly a more persuasive interpretation than the inverse one, popular among Nabokov scholars: that Kinbote has concocted Shade and his poem"and, not content with this appraisal, he adds that he is "even half-convinced that Boyd's interpretation is the one to which Nabokov himself secretly clung, that Boyd is speaking for Nabokov here." Nevertheless Wood, as he proceeds, will prefer this more straightforward reading before he adds a psychological spice to it. He notes that a work "in which a sane American imagines his own death and a crazed European who makes off with his poem is certainly worth attending to. But it conceals a curious complacency in its structure." Therefore the most moving way to read Pale Fire would be "to consider it as a work in which a crazed exile, unable to reach happiness for himself, clutches at the happiness that he finds in the life of another, builds his grand fantasy between the lines of a modest poem, and saves and loves the poem even as he tries to steal it and make it over.The great virtue of the ghastly Kinbote/Botkin is that he knows he is not Shade: not a poet, not sane, not lovable. He sees the difference that we are tempted to deny." (btw: Wood judges Pale Fire "a modest poem").
Wood contrasts Nabokov's biography written by Andrew Field and Boyd's. He sees Field as someone who wanted to "find scandal in old Russia" and wrote "erratic and willful" texts. He adds that Boyd's way of dealing with Field's mistakes entails in an exercise in "a kind of dazed patience, unable to understand why anyone would wish to scramble the correct dates offered in his own earlier bibliography."
For Wood "Field succumbed to the lexical madness that bags most Nabokovians sooner or later." If Nabokov's taunting erasure of an innocent salutation from a letter he'd allowed Field to examine was explained by Boyd as resulting from Nabokov's "sense of privacy," for him it implicates a "rather complicated game," one in which Nabokov tries to sidetrack his biographer because he "went around collecting mere gossip." For Wood, "Field was on to something.in his belief that perspectives other than Nabokov's own could be important."
The fact that Nabokov has written his own autobiography, Speak, Memory, will pose "a formidable problem for any biographer. One could hardly compete with the master, and one could hardly ignore him," but Wood sees that this problem was "solved by Boyd...with great scruple and subtlety in the first volume of his life of Nabokov (The Russian Years)" because Boyd was able to take 'his cue from his subject, but making up his own mind; borrowing Nabokov's shaping of his life, but offering his own interpretation of it, supplemented by an immense amount of archival research" However, there was "no mountain of that kind to negotiate" when it came to writing the second part (Nabokov's American Years). For Wood, the "new difficulty, also elegantly overcome, is that nothing much seemed to happen to Nabokov in the second part of his life." However, this is the time when Lolita brings international fame (and fortune) to Nabokov. He notes that Brian Boyd will also describe another "high point of Nabokov's fame.the moment of publication of Ada in 1969: his face on the cover of Time, his words in the pages of Playboy."
For him the implication "that a writer cannot have two languages (is) a view that makes Nabokov quite different, say, from Beckett, and perhaps from most bilingual writers...Perhaps one cannot love two languages." Wood cites a passage in Speak, Memory, quoted by Boyd, "that constructs memory and understanding as a function of loss rather than a redemption of it. Nabokov wonders whether he had missed something in his French governess, namely 'something . that I could appreciate only after the things and beings that I had most loved in the security of my childhood had been turned to ashes or shot through the heart'." Wood considers that "it may have been also that Nabokov could appreciate language itself, appreciate it incomparably as he did, only after he had lost a language, or made himself lose it, and had found another in the ashes of his loss."
Concernng the biographical elements, Wood thinks that" Boyd tells the story of Nabokov's works and days in great detail, with all their illnesses and friendships, lectures and lecture trips, regular summers in the Rockies looking for butterflies, travels .Only occasionally does he lapse into the desultoriness that lurks in all big biographies. to tell us something just because it was there, because he found it. But I'm not sure I need to know that . the Nabokovs went to visit Wilson.and returned 'invigorated and refreshed by the mental sea breeze.' I'm glad they had a good time, but the biographer seems to be turning the pages of his calendar...Fortunately, there, is very little of this.What Boyd mainly offers us, apart from his intelligent critical comment, is not a record even of mild adventures, but the carefully reconstructed context of a writer's work.No one before Boyd has made Nabokov's butterfly collecting seem so compelling and so ordinary, so intimately part of a vision of a world of particulars.From Boyd, we learn where and how Nabokov worked, his shifts of house at Cornell, the motels and the hotels of his travels in America and Europe. We learn how he took to fame, how he weathered adversity." According to Wood the reader will "learn almost, nothing, however, about, his relation with his wife, which appears as cloudless mutual love. Boyd writes very well indeed about Véra Nabokov's importance to her husband.but that is not quite the same as exploring a relationship. There is a besetting (and appealing) discretion in Boyd's approach.In fact, we don't learn a whole lot about Nabokov himself in this book, if we think of "Nabokov" as a psychological entity rather than as a public face or a series of performances. This is not a failure on Boyd's part, it is an aspect of his triumph. It's not that Nabokov didn't have a psychology, it's that he seems to have made it disappear into style, even in his private life. But then the "real Nabokov," as Boyd calls him in an unguarded phrase, seems to be yet another performance, only much nicer, the man of "warmth and simple friendliness".The hero of Boyd's book, the real "real" Nabokov, is finally a man whose life is already a form of writing, an awesome figure whose textual career has swallowed up all but a few small segments of his self. VLADIMIR NABOKOV ÉCRIVAIN*."
..............................
* "I am almost exclusively a writer, ...and my style is all I have." For Wood, Nabokov's affection goes to the many "things that one always hopes might survive captivity in the zoo of words [...] The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style."
................................................................................................................................................................................
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Here are excerpts from paragraphs, selected at random.
Once again, I excuse myself for any gross distortion by my attempt to comply with the restrictions of its copy-rights, in order to offer it to the Nabokov-L readers (I hope I managed to compress it correctly) .
Writes Wood: "One of the great pleasures of Boyd's two volumes is their critical chapters...Boyd is astute, and attentive to the text.[he] offers a shrewd and close assessment of Nabokov's monumental and much-disputed translation of Eugene Onegin.finding in it a useful key to Nabokov's passion for 'bright particulars'." He states that although Boyd mentions that "Nabokov thought that Lolita and Ada were his most significant novels.and his work on Eugene Onegin", the biographer also "makes great claims for Pale Fire" when he considers that "In sheer beauty of form, Pale Fire may well be the most perfect novel ever written."
Wood clearly values the information that "Nabokov's father was killed .by bullets intended for someone else, and Shade is killed on the elder Nabokov's birthday." For him, although such a link is not necessary, "it is pretty powerful information if we have it." He judges Boyd's reading of Pale Fire as being "intricately fascinating". There is something that has remained unclear to me in his assessment of Brian Boyd's analysis of Pale Fire, for I don't think that he accepted Boyd's interpretation of this novel ( ie: that Shade created Kinbote) although he praised it lavishly, nor its reverse (Kinbote created Shade).
Wood surveys Boyd's interpretation: "He argues that Shade does not die, but only writes his death, turning himself into the manic Kinbote/Botkin as a way of escaping the prison of the self." and he adds that for Boyd it is "Shade who concocts Kinbote." For Wood, Boyd's theory is "certainly a more persuasive interpretation than the inverse one, popular among Nabokov scholars: that Kinbote has concocted Shade and his poem"and, not content with this appraisal, he adds that he is "even half-convinced that Boyd's interpretation is the one to which Nabokov himself secretly clung, that Boyd is speaking for Nabokov here." Nevertheless Wood, as he proceeds, will prefer this more straightforward reading before he adds a psychological spice to it. He notes that a work "in which a sane American imagines his own death and a crazed European who makes off with his poem is certainly worth attending to. But it conceals a curious complacency in its structure." Therefore the most moving way to read Pale Fire would be "to consider it as a work in which a crazed exile, unable to reach happiness for himself, clutches at the happiness that he finds in the life of another, builds his grand fantasy between the lines of a modest poem, and saves and loves the poem even as he tries to steal it and make it over.The great virtue of the ghastly Kinbote/Botkin is that he knows he is not Shade: not a poet, not sane, not lovable. He sees the difference that we are tempted to deny." (btw: Wood judges Pale Fire "a modest poem").
Wood contrasts Nabokov's biography written by Andrew Field and Boyd's. He sees Field as someone who wanted to "find scandal in old Russia" and wrote "erratic and willful" texts. He adds that Boyd's way of dealing with Field's mistakes entails in an exercise in "a kind of dazed patience, unable to understand why anyone would wish to scramble the correct dates offered in his own earlier bibliography."
For Wood "Field succumbed to the lexical madness that bags most Nabokovians sooner or later." If Nabokov's taunting erasure of an innocent salutation from a letter he'd allowed Field to examine was explained by Boyd as resulting from Nabokov's "sense of privacy," for him it implicates a "rather complicated game," one in which Nabokov tries to sidetrack his biographer because he "went around collecting mere gossip." For Wood, "Field was on to something.in his belief that perspectives other than Nabokov's own could be important."
The fact that Nabokov has written his own autobiography, Speak, Memory, will pose "a formidable problem for any biographer. One could hardly compete with the master, and one could hardly ignore him," but Wood sees that this problem was "solved by Boyd...with great scruple and subtlety in the first volume of his life of Nabokov (The Russian Years)" because Boyd was able to take 'his cue from his subject, but making up his own mind; borrowing Nabokov's shaping of his life, but offering his own interpretation of it, supplemented by an immense amount of archival research" However, there was "no mountain of that kind to negotiate" when it came to writing the second part (Nabokov's American Years). For Wood, the "new difficulty, also elegantly overcome, is that nothing much seemed to happen to Nabokov in the second part of his life." However, this is the time when Lolita brings international fame (and fortune) to Nabokov. He notes that Brian Boyd will also describe another "high point of Nabokov's fame.the moment of publication of Ada in 1969: his face on the cover of Time, his words in the pages of Playboy."
For him the implication "that a writer cannot have two languages (is) a view that makes Nabokov quite different, say, from Beckett, and perhaps from most bilingual writers...Perhaps one cannot love two languages." Wood cites a passage in Speak, Memory, quoted by Boyd, "that constructs memory and understanding as a function of loss rather than a redemption of it. Nabokov wonders whether he had missed something in his French governess, namely 'something . that I could appreciate only after the things and beings that I had most loved in the security of my childhood had been turned to ashes or shot through the heart'." Wood considers that "it may have been also that Nabokov could appreciate language itself, appreciate it incomparably as he did, only after he had lost a language, or made himself lose it, and had found another in the ashes of his loss."
Concernng the biographical elements, Wood thinks that" Boyd tells the story of Nabokov's works and days in great detail, with all their illnesses and friendships, lectures and lecture trips, regular summers in the Rockies looking for butterflies, travels .Only occasionally does he lapse into the desultoriness that lurks in all big biographies. to tell us something just because it was there, because he found it. But I'm not sure I need to know that . the Nabokovs went to visit Wilson.and returned 'invigorated and refreshed by the mental sea breeze.' I'm glad they had a good time, but the biographer seems to be turning the pages of his calendar...Fortunately, there, is very little of this.What Boyd mainly offers us, apart from his intelligent critical comment, is not a record even of mild adventures, but the carefully reconstructed context of a writer's work.No one before Boyd has made Nabokov's butterfly collecting seem so compelling and so ordinary, so intimately part of a vision of a world of particulars.From Boyd, we learn where and how Nabokov worked, his shifts of house at Cornell, the motels and the hotels of his travels in America and Europe. We learn how he took to fame, how he weathered adversity." According to Wood the reader will "learn almost, nothing, however, about, his relation with his wife, which appears as cloudless mutual love. Boyd writes very well indeed about Véra Nabokov's importance to her husband.but that is not quite the same as exploring a relationship. There is a besetting (and appealing) discretion in Boyd's approach.In fact, we don't learn a whole lot about Nabokov himself in this book, if we think of "Nabokov" as a psychological entity rather than as a public face or a series of performances. This is not a failure on Boyd's part, it is an aspect of his triumph. It's not that Nabokov didn't have a psychology, it's that he seems to have made it disappear into style, even in his private life. But then the "real Nabokov," as Boyd calls him in an unguarded phrase, seems to be yet another performance, only much nicer, the man of "warmth and simple friendliness".The hero of Boyd's book, the real "real" Nabokov, is finally a man whose life is already a form of writing, an awesome figure whose textual career has swallowed up all but a few small segments of his self. VLADIMIR NABOKOV ÉCRIVAIN*."
..............................
* "I am almost exclusively a writer, ...and my style is all I have." For Wood, Nabokov's affection goes to the many "things that one always hopes might survive captivity in the zoo of words [...] The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style."
................................................................................................................................................................................
Copyright of New Republic is the property of TNR II, LLC and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/