Assorted Prose

by John Updike

  His foreword, shameless and disdainful in his usual first-person style, specifies, for “hack reviewers” and “persons who move their lips when reading,” the forked appeal of “this attractive novel”—the intricate immanence in plot and imagery of chess as a prevailing metaphor, and the weird lovableness of the virtually inert hero.

  Of all my Russian books, The Defense contains and diffuses the greatest “warmth”—which may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract chess is supposed to be. In point of fact, Luzhin has been found lovable even by those who understand nothing about chess and/or detest all my other books. He is uncouth, unwashed, uncomely—but as my gentle young lady (a dear girl in her own right) so quickly notices, there is something in him that transcends both the coarseness of his gray flesh and the sterility of his recondite genius.

  What makes characters endearing does not admit of such analysis: I would divide Luzhin’s charm into (a) the delineation of his childhood (b) the evocation of his chess prowess. As to (a), Nabokov has always warmed to the subject of children, precocious children—David Krug, Victor Wind, the all-seeing “I” of Conclusive Evidence, and, most precocious and achingly childlike of all, Dolores Haze. The four chapters devoted to little Luzhin are pure gold, a fascinating extraction of the thread of genius from the tangle of a lonely boy’s existence. The child’s ominous lethargy; his father’s brooding ambitiousness for him; the hints of talent in his heredity; the first gropings, through mathematical and jigsaw puzzles, of his peculiar aptitude toward the light; the bizarre introduction, at the hands of a nameless violinist who tinges the game forever with a somehow cursed musicality, to the bare pieces; his instruction in the rules, ironically counterpointed against an amorous intrigue of which he is oblivious; his rapid climb through a hierarchy of adult opponents†—all this is witty, tender, delicate, resonant. By abruptly switching to Luzhin as a chess-sodden adult, Nabokov islands the childhood, frames its naïve brightness so that, superimposed upon the grown figure, it operates as a kind of heart, as an abruptly doused light reddens the subsequent darkness.

  As to (b), Nabokov has never shied from characters who excel. In Pale Fire he presumed to give us a long poem by an American poet second only to Frost; Adam Krug in Bend Sinister is the leading intellectual of his nation; no doubt is left that Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev of The Gift is truly gifted. Luzhin’s “recondite genius” is delineated as if by one who knows—though we know, from Chapter XIV of his autobiography, that Nabokov’s forte was not tournament play but the “beautiful, complex, and sterile art” of composing chess problems of a “poetico-mathematical type.” On its level as a work-epic of chess (as Moby Dick is a work-epic of whaling) The Defense is splendidly shaped toward Luzhin’s match with Turati,‡ the dashing Italian grandmaster against whose unorthodox attack, “leaving the middle of the board unoccupied by Pawns but exercising a most dangerous influence on the center from the sides,” Luzhin’s defense is devised. Of Turati physically we are given the briefest glimpses, “rubbing his hands and deeply clearing his throat like a bass singer,” but his chess presence is surpassingly vivid, and during the tournament in which Luzhin thinks himself into a nervous breakdown keen suspense mounts as to whether “the limpidity and lightness of Luzhin’s thought would prevail over the Italian’s tumultuous fantasy.” Their game, a potential draw which is never completed, draws forth a display of metaphorical brilliance that turns pure thought heroic. Beneath the singing, quivering, trumpeting, humming battlefield of the chessboard, Turati and Luzhin become fabulous monsters groping through unthinkable tunnels:

  Luzhin’s thought roamed through entrancing and terrible labyrinths, meeting there now and then the anxious thought of Turati, who sought the same thing as he.… Luzhin, preparing an attack for which it was first necessary to explore a maze of variations, where his every step aroused a perilous echo, began a long meditation: he needed, it seemed, to make one last prodigious effort and he would find the secret move leading to victory. Suddenly, something occurred outside his being, a scorching pain—and he let out a loud cry, shaking his hand stung by the flame of a match, which he had lit and forgotten to apply to his cigarette. The pain immediately passed, but in the fiery gap he had seen something unbearably awesome, the full horror of the abysmal depths of chess.

  The game is adjourned, and after such an evocation we have no difficulty in feeling with Luzhin how the chess images that have haunted the fringes of his existence now move into the center and render the real world phantasmal. The metaphors have reversed the terms.

  Chess imagery has infiltrated the book from all sides. Nabokov in his foreword preens perhaps unduly on the tiled and parqueted floors, the Knight-like leaps of the plot. His hero’s monomania plays tricks with the objective world: “The urns that stood on stone pedestals at the four corners of the terrace threatened one another across their diagonals.” “He sat thinking … that with a Knight’s move of this lime tree standing on a sunlit slope one could take that telegraph pole over there …” “… Luzhin involuntarily put out a hand to remove shadow’s King from the threat of light’s Pawn.” He warily watches the floor, “where a slight movement was taking place perceptible to him alone, an evil differentiation of shadows.” Throughout the book, glimpses of black and white abound—tuxedos, raspberries and milk, “the white boat on the lake, black with the reflected conifers.” Many lamps are lit against the night; Luzhin’s father thinks it “strange and awesome … to sit on this bright veranda amid the black summer night, across from this boy whose tensed forehead seemed to expand and swell as soon as he bent over the pieces,” this boy for whom “the whole world suddenly went dark” when he learned chess and who is to glide, across the alternation of many nights and days, from the oblivion of breakdown into the whiteness of a hospital where the psychiatrist wears “a black Assyrian beard.”

  The squares on the board can also be construed as chess vs. sex. The child maneuvers his own initiation on the blind board of an illicit affair. His father, while he is poring over chess diagrams in the attic, fears that “his son might have been looking for pictures of naked women.” Valentinov (!), his sinister “chess father,” part manager and part pimp, “fearing lest Luzhin should squander his precious power in releasing by natural means the beneficial inner tension … kept him at a distance from women and rejoiced over his chaste moroseness.” His marriage, then, is a kind of defensive castling undertaken too late, for the black forces that have put him in check press on irresistibly, past his impotent Queen, toward certain mate. The Luzhin defense becomes abandonment of play—suicide. Such a design eminently satisfies Nabokov’s exacting criteria of artistic performance, which, in a memorable section in Conclusive Evidence concerning butterflies, he relates to the “mysteries of mimicry”: “I discovered in nature the non-utilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.”

  However, I am not sure it perfectly works, this chess puzzle pieced out with human characters. In the last third of the book, the author’s youth may begin to show; émigré parties, arranged by Mrs. Luzhin, are introduced for no apparent better reason (not a bad reason) than that Nabokov was going to such parties at this time. A “mercilessly stupid” Leningrad visitor pops up irrelevantly, as a naked index of editorial distaste for the Soviet regime. It is as if pawns were proliferating to plug a leaky problem. The reintroduction of Valentinov, though well-prepared, does not function smoothly; if the plot were scored like a game, this move would receive a (?). One becomes conscious of rather aimless intricacies: the chronic mention of a one-armed schoolmate (Nabokov’s teasing of cripples, not the most sympathetic of his fads, deserves a monograph to itself),§ and the somewhat mannered withholding of the hero’s first name and patronymic until the last sentences, which then link up with the first. In short, the novel loses inevitability as it needs it most. Suicide, being one experience no writer or reader has undergone, requires extra credentials to pass into belief. I can beli
eve in the suicides of Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary as terrible but just—in the sense of fitting—events within the worlds the authors have evolved. I am even more willing to believe in Kirillov’s suicide in The Possessed as the outcome of a philosophic-psychotic mental state explored with frightening empathy. But I am unable to feel Luzhin’s descent into an eternity of “dark and pale squares” as anything but the foreordained outcome of an abstract scheme that, however pretty, is less weighty than the human fictions it has conjured up.

  Early in The Defense Nabokov describes an obtuse chess spectator who, exasperated by what seems to him a premature concession, itches to pick up the pieces and play the game out. So too, I cannot see why, now that Luzhin is equipped with a willing if not enthusiastic female caretaker and, what’s more, a wealthy father-in-law, the grandmaster is hopelessly blocked from pursuing, this side of madness, his vocation. He is lovable, this child within a monster, this “chess moron,” and we want him to go on, to finish his classic game with Turati, and, win or lose, to play other games, to warm and dazzle the exquisite twilit world of his preoccupation with the “limpidity and lightness” of his thought. He seems blocked by something outside the novel, perhaps by the lepidopterist’s habit of killing what it loves; how remarkably few, after all, of Nabokov’s characters do evade the mounting pin. But in asking (irrationally, he has been dead for over thirty years) that Luzhin survive and be fruitful, we are asking no more than his creator, no pet of fate, has asked of himself and has, to his great honor, done.

  * It is a matter for some gratitude, I think, that Nabokov (by way of Lolita, which other publishers gutlessly declined to print) has fallen into the hands of a publisher, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, willing to issue his fiction, both new and resurrected, in a sensible uniform format. The Nabokov bibliography is still untidy: Doubleday, characteristically, has allowed all of the titles it controlled to go out of print; Bend Sinister and Poems can be bought new only in England; and Three Russian Poets (verse translations) and a mysterious novel listed as Despair are, in the midst of the present paperback plethora, nowhere to be found.

  † In the course of the novel Luzhin plays, in order:

  (1) his red-haired aunt, whose “pieces would conglomerate in an unseemly jumble, out of which there would suddenly dash an exposed helpless King”

  (2) her suitor, an old gentleman always fragrant of the fiowers he brings her and who “played divinely”

  (3) Luzhin Sr., a poor player the child beats easily

  (4) “the gloomy country doctor,” a better player

  (5) his geography teacher, “a well-known amateur”

  (6) “a gray-haired Jew”—“a senile chess genius who had been victorious in all the cities of the world but now lived in idleness and poverty, purblind, with a sick heart, having lost forever his fire, his grip, his luck …”

  (7) “the most respectable German players”

  (8) “the decrepit champion of England,” who after two days forces a draw

  (9) a Hungarian

  (13) Turati

  ‡ A letter to me from Mr. Hugh E. Myers, of Decatur, Illinois, states: “The character of Turati clearly was modelled after the famous Czech grandmaster Richard Réti.… The description of Turati’s opening … describes Réti’s own favorite opening, still known as the Réti System.” Curiously, Réti also somewhat resembled Luzhin; he died in 1929, at the age of forty, and in 1926 had married a Russian girl much younger than himself. There were many Russian émigré masters during this period, the greatest of them Alexander Alekhine (1892–1946), world’s champion from 1927 to 1935. Mr. Myers’ helpful letter goes on to differ with my reservations about the novel’s end: “Luzhin’s suicide seemed inevitable and natural. A good chessplayer resigns a lost game.”

  § Consider deaf Dick Schiller and his one-armed pal Bill in Lolita; the moving Siamese twins of “Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster”; and this couplet from “The Ballad of Longwood Glen”:

  Pauline had asthma, Paul used a crutch.

  They were cute little rascals but could not run much.

  Uncomfortably often we seem to be invited to share a lordly impatience with the unfortunate. In Bend Sinister, Paduk’s schoolboy disciples are described: “Every one of his followers had some little defect or ‘background of insecurity’ as an educationist after a fruit cocktail might put it: one boy suffered from permanent boils, another was morbidly shy, a third had by accident beheaded his baby sister, a fourth stuttered so badly that you could go out and buy yourself a chocolate bar while he was wrestling with an initial p or b …” Paduk himself has a shaved “gray-blue cranium with bumps,” and Krug, the novel’s hero, is portrayed as somehow right in tormenting him by sitting on his face. This identical mode of abuse, incidentally, turned up recently in the newly translated story “Lik,” only now the hero is the victim, and the bully is the loathsome Koldunov. In the autobiography appended to his study of Gogol, Nabokov says, “I am good at games, especially at tennis.”

  TO WILLIAM SHAWN

  Books by John Updike

  POEMS

  The Carpentered Hen (1958) • Telephone Poles (1963) • Midpoint (1969) • Tossing and Turning (1977) • Facing Nature (1985) • Collected Poems 1953–1993 (1993) • Americana (2001) • Endpoint (2009)

  NOVELS

  The Poorhouse Fair (1959) • Rabbit, Run (1960) • The Centaur (1963) • Of the Farm (1965) • Couples (1968) • Rabbit Redux (1971) • A Month of Sundays (1975) • Marry Me (1976) • The Coup (1978) • Rabbit Is Rich (1981) • The Witches of Eastwick (1984) • Roger’s Version (1986) • S. (1988) • Rabbit at Rest (1990) • Memories of the Ford Administration (1992) • Brazil (1994) • In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) • Toward the End of Time (1997) • Gertrude and Claudius (2000) • Seek My Face (2002) • Villages (2004) • Terrorist (2006) • The Widows of Eastwick (2008)

  SHORT STORIES

  The Same Door (1959) • Pigeon Feathers (1962) • Olinger Stories (a selection, 1964) • The Music School (1966) • Bech: A Book (1970) • Museums and Women (1972) • Problems (1979) • Too Far to Go (a selection, 1979) • Bech Is Back (1982) • Trust Me (1987) • The Afterlife (1994) • Bech at Bay (1998) • Licks of Love (2000) • The Complete Henry Bech (2001) • The Early Stories: 1953–1975 (2003) • My Father’s Tears (2009) • The Maples Stories (2009)

  ESSAYS AND CRITICISM

  Assorted Prose (1965) • Picked-Up Pieces (1975) • Hugging the Shore (1983) • Just Looking (1989) • Odd Jobs (1991) • Golf Dreams (1996) • More Matter (1999) • Still Looking (2005) • Due Considerations (2007) • Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (2010) • Higher Gossip (2011) • Always Looking (2012)

  PLAY

  Buchanan Dying (1974)

  MEMOIRS

  Self-Consciousness (1989)

  CHILDREN’S BOOKS

  The Magic Flute (1962) • The Ring (1964) • A Child’s Calendar (1965) • Bottom’s Dream (1969) • A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects (1996)

  John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.