Strong opinions

by Vladimir Nabokov

  I wish to share with him the following secret: In the case of a certain type of writer it often happens that a whole paragraph or sinuous sentence exists as a discrete organism, with its own imagery, its own invocations, its own bloom, and then it is especially precious, and also vulnerable, so that if an outsider, immune to poetry and common sense, injects spurious symbols into it, or actually tampers with its wording (see Mr. Rowe's crass attempt on his page 113), its magic is replaced by maggots. The various words that Mr. Rowe mistakes for the «symbols» of academic jargon, supposedly planted by an idiotically sly novelist to keep schoolmen busy, are not labels, not pointers, and certainly not the garbage cans of a Viennese tenement, but live fragments of specific description, rudiments metaphor, and echoes of creative emotion. The fatal flaw in Mr. Rowe's treatment of recurrent words, such as «garden» or «water», is his regarding them as abstractions, and not realizing that the sound of a bath being filled, say, in the world of Laughter in the Dark, is as different from the limes rustling in the rain of Speak, Memory as the Garden of Delights in Ada is from the lawns in Lolita. If every «come» and «part» on the pages of my books is supposedly usedfey me to represent «climax» and «genitals», one can well imagine the naughty treasures Mr. Rowe might find in any French novel where the prefix «con» occurs so frequently as to make every chapter a veritable compote of female organs. I do not think, however, that his French is sufficient for such feasts; nor is his Russian good enough for his manipulations if he believes that «otblesk» (confused apparently with otliv) means «low tide» (page 111) or that the nonexistent «triazh» stands for «tyranny» (page 41) when actually the word that I used (and that he wrongly transcribed), tirazh, is merely a publisher's term for «circulation».

  One can excuse a critic for not finding «stillici and «ganch» in his abridged dictionary and concluding that I invented those words; one can understand a dull r Invitation to a Beheading thinking that the executioner] ops a homosexual tenderness for his victim when that affectionate look reflects only the lust or a coveting a live chicken; but what I find unpardonal indeed unworthy of a scholar, is Mr. Rowe's twist discussion of prosody (as appended to my tr; Eugene Onegin) into a torrent of Freudian drivel,! allows him to construe «metrical length» as an erected «rhyme» as a sexual climax. No less ludicrous f» his examination of Lolita's tennis and his claim that ** balls represent testicles (those of a giant albino, no Passing on to my reference to chess problems mU}peak,Memory Mr. Rowe finds «sexual analogies» in such m rases as «mating devices» and «grnp'ng f°r a pavrn in the box» — all of which is as much an insult to chess as to the problemist. I

  The jacket of Mr. Rowe's book depicts jl butterfly incongruously flying around a candle. Moths, not butterflies, are attracted to light but the designer's blunder neatly

  illustrates the quality of Mr. Rowe's preposterous and nasty interpretations. And he will be read, he will be quoted, he will be filed in great libraries, next to my arbors and mists!

  Written at Gstaad, Bernese Oberland, on August 28, 1971, and published in The New York Review on October 7 of the same year.

  INSPIRATION

  (written on November 20, 1972, for Saturday Review)

  The awakening, quickening, or creative impulse, esp. as manifested in high artistic achievement.

  Webster, Second Ed., unabridged, 1957

  The enthusiasm that sweeps away (entraine) poets. Also a term of physiology (insufflation): «. . . wolves and dogs howl only by inspiration; one can easily ascertain this by causing a little dog to howl close to one's face (Buffon)».

  Littre, id. intigrak, 1963

  The enthusiasm, concentration, and unusual manifestation of the mental faculties (umstvennyb sil).

  Dal, Revised Ed., St. Petersburg, 1904

  A creative upsurge. [Examples:] Inspired poet. Inspired socialistic work.

  Ozhegov, Russian dictionary, Moscow, 1960

  A special study, which I do not plan to conduct, would reveal, probably, that inspiration is seldom dwelt upon nowadays even by the worst reviewers of our best prose. I say «our» and I say «prose» because I am thinking of American works of fiction, including my own stuff. It would seem that this reticence is somehow linked up with a sense of decorum. Conformists suspect that to speak of «inspiration» is as tasteless and old-fashioned as to stand up for the Ivory Tower. Yet inspiration exists as do towers and tusks.

  One can distinguish several types of inspiration, which intergrade, as all things do in this fluid and interesting world of ours, while yielding gracefully to a semblance of classification. A prefatory glow, not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack, is something the artist learns to perceive very early in life. This feeling of tickly wellbeing branches through him like the red and the blue in the picture of a skinned man under Circulation. As it spreads, it banishes all awareness of physical discomfort — youth's toothache as well as the neuralgia of old age. The beauty of it is that, while completely intelligible (as if it were connected with a known gland or led to an expected climax), it has neither source nor object. It expands, glows, and subsides without revealing its secret. In the meantime, however, a window has opened, an auroral wind has blown, every exposed nerve has tingled. Presently all dissolves: the familiar worries are back and the eyebrow redescribes its arc of pain; but the artist knows he is ready.

  A few days elapse. The next stage of inspiration is something ardently anticipated — and no longer anonymous. The shape of the new impact is indeed so definite that I am forced to relinquish metaphors and resort to specific terms. The narrator forefeels what he is going to tell. The forefeeling can be defined as an instant vision turning into rapid speech. If some instrument were to render this rare and delightful phenomenon, the image would come as a shimmer of exact details, and the verbal part as a tumble of merging words. The experienced writer immediately takes it down and, in the process of doing so, transforms what is little more than a running blur into gradually dawning sense, with epithets and sentence construction growing as clear and trim as they would be on the printed page:

  Sea crashing, retreating with shuffle of pebbles, Juan and beloved young whore — is her name, as they say, Adora? is she Italian, Roumanian, Irish? — asleep in his lap, his opera cloak pulled over her, candle messily burning in its tin cup, next to it a paperwrapped bunch of long roses, his silk hat on the stone floor near a patch of moonlight, all this in a corner of a decrepit, once palatial whorehouse, Villa Venus, on a rocky Mediterranean coast, a door standing ajar gives on what seems to be a moonlit gallery but is really a half-demolished reception room with a broken outer wall, through a great rip in tt the naked sea is heard as a panting space separated from time, it dully booms, dully withdraws dragging its platter of wet pebbles.

  This I jotted down one morning at the very end of 1965, a couple of months before the novel began to flow. What I give above is its first throb, the strange nucleus of the book that was to grow around it in the course of the next three years. Much of that growth obviously differs in coloration and lighting from the foreglimpsed scene, whose structural centrality, however, is emphasized, with a kind of pleasing neatness, by the fact that it now exists as an insetscene right in the middle of the novel (which was entitled at first Villa Venus, then The Veens, then Ardor, and finally Ada.

  Reverting to a more generalized account, one sees inspiration accompanying the author in his actual work at the new book. She accompanies him (for by now we are at presence of a nubile muse) by means of successive flashes to which the writer may grow so accustomed that a sudden fizzle in the domestic illumination may strike him as an act of betrayal.

  One and the same person can compose parts of one and the same story or poem, either in his head or on paper, pencil or pen in hand (I am told there exist fantastic performers who actually type out their immediate product or, still more incredibly, dictate it, warm and bubbly, to a typist or to a machine!). Some prefer the bathtub to the study and the bed to the windy moo
r — the place does not matter much, it is the relationship between the brain and the (hand that poses some odd problems. As John Shade says somewhere: «I am puzzled by the difference between two methods of composing: A, the kind which goes on solely in the poet's mind, a testing of performing words, while he is soaping a third time one leg, and B, the other kind, milch more decorous, when he's in his study writing with a pen.

  In method B the hand supports the thought, the abstract battle is concretely fought. The pen stops in midair, then swoops to bar a canceled sunset or restore a star thus it physically guides the phrase toward faint daylight through the inky maze. But method A is agony! The pain is soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain. A muse in overalls directs the rill which grinds, and which no effort Mil can interrupt, while the automaton is taking off has just put on or walking briskly to the corner store to buy the paper he has read before. Why is it so? Is it, is because in penless work there is no pen-poised pause.

  Or is the process deeper, with no desk to propse and hoist the picturesque? For there are those lous moments when, too weary to delete, I drop my 'ambulate — and by some mute command the right on my hand.

  This is, of course, where inspiration comes in. The words which on various occasions, during some fifty years of composing prose, I have put together and then canceled may have formed by now in the Realm of Rejection (a foggy but not quite unlikely land north of nowhere) a huge library of scrapped phrases, characterized and concorded only by their wanting the benison of inspiration.

  No wonder, then, that a writer who is not afraid to confess that he has known inspiration and can readily distinguish it from the froth of a fit, as well as from the humdrum comfort of the «right word», should seek the bright trace of that thrill in the work of fellow authors. The bolt of inspiration strikes invariably: you observe the flash in this or that piece of great writing, be it a stretch of fine verse, or a passage in Joyce or Tolstoy, or a phrase in a short story, or a spurt of genius in the paper of a naturalist, of a scholar, or even in a book reviewer's article. I have in view, naturally, not the hopeless hacks we all know — but people who are creative artists in their own right, such as, say, Trilling (with his critical opinions I am not concerned), or Thurber (e.g. in Voices of Revolution. «Art does not rush to the barricades»).

  In recent years numerous publishers have had the pleasure of sending me their anthologies — homing pigeons really, for all of them contain samples of the recipient's writings. Amongst the thirty or so of those collections, some flaunt pretentious labels («Fables of Our Time» or «Themes and Targets»); others are presented more soberly («Great Tales») and their blurbs promise the reader that he will meet cranberry pickers and hunkies; but almost in each of them there are at least two or three first-rate stories.

  Age is chary, but it is also forgetful, and in order to choose instantly what to reread on a night of Orphic thirst and what to reject for ever, I am careful to put an A, or a C, or a D-minus, against this or that item in the anthology. The profusion of high marks reconfirms me every time in the exhilarating belief that at the present time (say, for the last fifty years) the greatest short stories have been produced not in England, not in Russia, and certainly not in France, but in this country.

  Examples are the stained-glass windows of knowledge. From a small number of A-plus stories I have chosen half-a-dozen particular favorites of mine. I list their titles below and parenthesize briefly the passage — or one of the passages — in which genuine afflation appears to be present, no matter how trivial the inspired detail may look to a dull criticule.

  John Cheever's «The Country Husband» («Jupiter [a black retriever] crashed through the tomato vines with the remains of a felt hat in his mouth». The story is really a miniature novel beautifully traced, so that the impression of there being a little too many things happening in it is completely redeemed by the satisfying coherence of its thematic interlacings.)

  John Updike's «The Happiest I've Been» («The important thing, rather than the subject, was the conversation itself, the quick agreements, the slow nods, the weave of different memories; it was like one of these Panama baskets shaped underwater around a worthless stone». I like so many of Updike's stories that it was difficult to choose one for demonstration and even more difficult to settle upon its most inspired bit.)

  J. D. Salinger's «A Perfect Day for Bananafish» («Stopping only to sink a foot in a soggy, collapsed castle ..». This is a great story, too famous and fragile to be measured here by a casual conchometrist.)

  Herbert Gold's «Death in Miami Beach» («Finally we die, opposable thumbs and all». Or to do even better justice to this admirable piece: «Barbados turtles as large as children . . . crucified like thieves . . . the tough leather of their skin does not disguise their present helplessness and pain». )

  John Barth's «Lost in the Funhouse» («What is the story's point? Ambrose is ill. He perspires in the dark passages; candied apples-on-a-stick, delicious-looking, disappointing to eat. Funhouses need men's and ladies' rooms at interval». I had some trouble in pinning down what I needed amidst the lovely swift speckled imagery.)

  Delmore Schwartz's «In Dreams Begin Responsibilities» («. . . and the fatal merciless passionate ocean». Althongh there are several other divine vibrations in this story that so miraculously blends an old cinema film with a personal past, the quoted phrase wins its citation for power and impeccable rhythm.)

  I must add that I would he very pleased if a Professor of Literature to test his students at the start or the close of the term would request them to write a paper discussing the following points:

  1. What is so good about those six stones? (Refrain from referring to «commitment», «ecology», «realism», «symbols», and so forth).

  2. What other passages in them bear the mark of inspiration?

  3. How exactly was that poor lap dog made to howl in those lacecuffed hands, close to that periwig?

  LEPIDOPTERA PAPERS

  For nearly fifteen years after moving, in 1940, to America I devoted a tremendous amount of time (more in fact than I did to writing and teaching) to the study of lepidoptera, a study consisting of three parts: working out certain microscopic structures in the laboratory of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard; contributing scientific papers to entomological journals; and collecting during summer vacations. At least three of those papers have sufficient literary interest to deserve a place in this volume and to them I have added two book reviews, the last one published quite recently.

  THE FEMALE OF LYCAEIDES SUBLIVENS NAB.*

  Last summer (1951) I decided to visit Telluride, San Miguel County, Colorado, in order to search for the unknown female of what I had described as Lycaeides argyrognomon sublivens in 1949 (Bull. Mus. Comp. Zool., vol. 101: p. 513) on the strength of nine males in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard, which had been taken in the vicinity of Telluride half a century ago. L. sublivens is an isolated southern representative (the only known one south of northwestern Wyoming, southeast of Idaho, and east of California) of the species (the holarctic argyrognomon Bergstr. = idas auct.) to which anna Edw., scudderi Edw., aster Edw., and six other nearctic subspecies belong. I bungled my family's vacation but got what I wanted.

  * Now known as Plebejus (Lycaeides) idas sublivens or Lycaeides sublivens Nab.; it has been dubbed «Nabokov's Blue» by F. Martin Brown (1955).

  Owing to rains and floods, especially noticeable in Kansas, most of the drive from New York State to Colorado was entomologically uneventful. When reached at last, Telluride turned out to be a damp, unfrequented, but very spectacular cul-de-sac (which a prodigious rainbow straddled every evening) at the end of two converging roads, one from Placerville, the other from Dolores, both atrocious. There is one motel, the optimistic and excellent Valley View Court where my wife and I stayed, at 9,000 feet altitude, from the 3rd to the 29th of July, walking up daily to at least 12,000 feet along various more or less steep trails in search of sublivens. Once or twice Mr. Homer R
eid of Telluride took us up in his jeep. Every morning the sky would be of an impeccable blue at 6 a.m.when I set out. The first innocent cloudlet would scud across at 7:30 a.m. Bigger fellows with darker bellies would start tampering with the sun around 9 a.m., just as we emerged from the shadow of the cliffs and trees onto good hunting grounds. Everything would be cold and gloomy half an hour later. At around 10 a.m. there would come the daily electric storm, in several installments, accompanied by the most irritatingly close lightning I have ever encountered anywhere in the Rockies, not excepting Longs Peak, which is saying a good deal, and followed by cloudy and rainy weather through the rest of the day.