Young Nabokov readers have an exciting experience ahead
of them since so much of the old world is slowly fading and Nabokov's
contemporaries or quasi-contemporaries are aging away, along with an Epoch.
Not having been bred on English-Lit. only this
week did Martin Amis' "Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions"
reach my eyes ( by courtesy of Jacob
Wilkenfeld) and his critical essays, applying the
words he used for Johyn Updike, are "littered with
brilliancies". But comfortingly dated, although his essays ranged from
1984 to 1993.
His interview with Véra and Dmitri stands out from the
rest because of its tenderness that adhered to
their own fierce loyalties. He observed: " This kind of
talk,like the Nabokovian indignation, is all of a piece with the nature of the
family commitment. It bespeaks great self-belief, but there is no
self-importance in it. It is selfless, indeed almost impersonal, in the same way
that art is impersonal. It is also, I imagine, very Russian in its
timbre."
(his essay on Mrs. Nabokov is immediately followed by a
painful one on Bombay and Naipaul's India).
In the extract from his 1987 interview
with John Updike he compared the latter's self-revelatory openness to
Humbert Humbert's: "Updike tags along, not only into the
bedroom but... Humbert, in Lolita, wishes that he could turn his symphet
inside out and gorge himself on her very organs. Updike unpeels and vivisects
his characteris in this way." A year
later, writing about "Tennis: The Women's Game", he employed the word
"nymphet": " In First Class you find the top ten
ladies ( or bobbysoxers or nymphets), with footrests up, harassed
by..." and later situated their nymphethood in a way
similar to Humbert's: "Hence the money trap of the
women's game, and one of its peculiar cruelties: as an earner, a girl can peak
at puberty and be 'history' by the age of
sixteen."
Fortunately we, as readers, are not nymphets romping in
the literary courts but, perhaps, closer to the Olympic
torch-bearers.
Jansy