Picked-Up Pieces

by John Updike

  If the critic attempts to consider Transparent Things as itself transparent, he can perceive several impulses pressing their faces against the glass. One is an impulse to make the most of language: a hearty impulse, even jolly, by no means above the coarse buffoonery of pun (“Giulia … wore a Doppler shift over her luminous body,” “An electric sign, DOPPLER, shifted to Violet”) and alliteration (“ruts, rocks, and roots,” “cracked that crooked cricoid”). The language bubbles, chortles, and in its abundance of simmering exactitude boils over into mad exhortation:

  The tap expostulated, letting forth a strong squirt of rusty water before settling down to produce the meek normal stuff—which you do not appreciate sufficiently, which is a flowing mystery, and, yes, yes, which deserves monuments to be erected to it, cool shrines!

  Transparent Things’s hero, Hugh Person, is an editor of, among other authors, one “R.” (a mirroring of the Russian Я, ya, meaning “I”), who, though more corpulent and less uxorious than Nabokov himself, does live in Switzerland, composes “surrealistic novels of the poetic sort,” and regards the rest of the world as a grotesquely clumsy siege upon his artistic integrity. “Our Person, our reader, was not sure he entirely approved of R.’s luxuriant and bastard style; yet, at its best (‘the gray rainbow of a fog-dogged moon’), it was diabolically evocative.” Nabokov’s is really an amorous style—foreplay in the guise of horseplay. It yearns to clasp diaphanous exactitude into its hairy arms. To convey a child’s nocturnal unease, it can toss off the looming metaphor “Night is always a giant”; or with tender euphonic trippings it can limn a woman’s facial expression during intercourse as “the never deceived expectancy of the dazed ecstasy that gradually idiotized her dear features.” Such a yen to evoke, to use the full spectrum latent in the dictionary, would teach us how to read again. If not always a comfortable, it is surely a commendable impulse.

  Less so, perhaps, the murderous impulse visible through the workings of Transparent Things. Since the book is something of a thriller, its plot should be left its secrets; but, needless to say, almost no character, major or minor, survives its last turn. Strangulation, conflagration, embolism, cancer—these are some of the methods employed. Characters who barely appear onstage have their offstage demises dutifully reported: a detective who researched an incidental infidelity is “at present dying in a hot dirty hospital on Formosa,” a momentary lover of the heroine is smartly crushed under an avalanche in “Chute, Colorado.” A worse than Calvinist sense of rigor constricts the poor bright creatures into the narrowness of the killing bottle. When Muriel Spark, another deft dealer in fatality, conjures up a hotel fire, a building’s collapse, or a multiple murder, an implacable God is prefigured and the crime transcends the writer’s will. Not so with Nabokov. He proposes, he disposes. A design must be completed. The sometimes touchingly vivid characters exist as spots of color bounded on all sides by a shimmering nothingness; their deaths come as a rubbing out. And the reader, too, is put in his place, exterminated by the announcement that this is all an invention—poof! This announcement surfaces explicitly† in Transparent Things, as it does in Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister, but the gesture of withdrawal, of Prospero’s retirement, of termination and disavowal, closes even such relatively straight fiction as Pnin and Laughter in the Dark. Here, in a book that freely uses the second person and that calls its central figure (a professional reader) Hugh, the wish to personify in order to destroy carries well out into the reader’s lap. You (Hugh) person, whoever you are, are nobody (personne): vanish, die.

  A third impulse is to formulate, at the highest level of intelligence and subtlety, some statement about space/time, death, and being. R., dying, writes to his publisher:

  I believed that treasured memories in a dying man’s mind dwindled to rainbow wisps; but now I feel just the contrary: my most trivial sentiments and those of all men have acquired gigantic proportions. The entire solar system is but a reflection in the crystal of my (or your) wrist watch.… Total rejection of all religions ever dreamt up by man and total composure in the face of total death! If I could explain this triple totality in one big book, that would become no doubt a new bible and its author the founder of a new creed.

  And Vladimir Nabokov writes, on the last page, “This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another.” This at least helps explain this artificer’s compulsive revelations of artifice; in the moment of a fictional world’s collapse, one state of being yields to another. But are we to take this as an analogy for death? If death is total, is it a “state of being” at all? And—to examine the last sentence quoted—aren’t adjectives like “incomparable” and “mysterious” the refuge of an incommunicable mysticism?

  The central impulse behind the novel remains obscure. At first, it seems that the “transparency” of things refers to their dimension in time—an ordinary pencil found in a drawer is taken back to its birth as a rod of agglutinated graphite and a splinter buried in the heart of a pine tree. Then it seems that the transparency has to do with an artful overlapping of beds, bureaus, carpets catching a slant of sunshine, shuttlecocks, dogs, and so on, as Hugh Person returns several times, between the ages of eight and forty, to the Swiss village of Trux. Other things are transparent, such as book titles “that shone through the book like a watermark,” and a loved one “whose image was stamped on the eye of his mind and shone through the show at various levels.” But the culminating image of transparency (“the incandescence of a book or a box grown completely transparent and hollow”), though the author presents it as if it were the crown of his life’s thought and passion, arrives as the answer to a conundrum that has not been posed. Alas, what we remember of Transparent Things are its agreeable opacities: the busy clots of choice adjectives (“frail, lax, merry America”), the erotic peculiarities of Person’s charming and difficult wife, Armande (she likes to make love as fully dressed as possible, while maintaining a flow of cocktail chatter), the delicious, glacial scene of a ski resort particularized by “the glaze of the upper runs, the blue herringbones lower down, the varicolored little figures outlined by the brush of chance against the brilliant white as if by a Flemish master’s hand.” We close the book guiltily, having licked the sugar coating but avoided, somehow, swallowing the pill.

  If an artistic life so variously productive, so self-assured, so hermetically satisfactory to its perpetrator could be said to have a failing, Nabokov has failed to get himself taken seriously enough. A sad shadow of modesty touches this narrative. “This part of our translucing is pretty boring.” “Mr. R., though perhaps not a master of the very first rank.…” Only “some of the less demanding reviewers in his adopted country” call R. a “master stylist.” The book abounds, indeed, in wry self-portraits. The heroine’s perverse sexual charades, in which her excitement derives “from the contrast between the fictitious and the factual,” parody Nabokov’s “it”—the “pangs” of the “maneuver” needed to pass from one state to another. A further “maneuver” with “pangs”: Armande’s Russian mother sits trapped by her own bulk in a chair, waiting for the “one precise little wiggle” that will “fool gravity” and, like “the miracle of a sneeze,” lift her. Nabokov’s own tricky legerity discourages solemn praise; he makes his acolytes and exegetes seem ridiculous as they compile their check lists of puns and chase his butterfly allusions. His aesthetic of gravity-fooling confronts us with a fiction that purposely undervalues its own humanistic content, that openly scorns the psychology and sociology that might bring with them an unfoolable gravity. Joyce also loved puns, and Proust was as lopsided an emotional monster as Humbert Humbert. But these older writers did submit their logomachy and their maimed private lives to a kind of historical commonalty; the Europe of the epics and the cathedrals spoke through them. The impression created by Nabokov’s works in Russian, I am told, differs from that given by his spectacular works in
English; he can be compared to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in a way in which he cannot be compared with Thoreau and Twain. In his post-Lolita novels, especially, he seems more illusionist than seer. Though he offers us sensations never before verbally induced, and performs stunts that lift him right off the page, we are more amused than convinced. The failing may be ours; we are not ready, we are too dull of ear, too slow of eye, too much in love with the stubborn muteness of the earth to read the meaning behind his magic. He mutters from his sky, this comical comet, and hints, through his masks, of “a new bible.” His measure is that we hope for nothing less from him.

  Motley But True

  LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS!, by Vladimir Nabokov. 253 pp. McGraw-Hill, 1974.

  Nabokov’s last three novels form, in the squinting retrospect of at least this surveyor, a trilogy of sorts: one, Ada, is remarkably long; another, Transparent Things, is remarkably short; and the third, the newly published Look at the Harlequins!, is, like Mama Bear’s bed, comfortably middle-sized. All three books feature on the jacket back (in three different tonalities, if you line them up) the same frontal, staring, intimidatingly cranial photograph of the author; and all three, composed in the sparkling and salubrious vacuum of Switzerland, are—in the nicest possible sense—narcissistic to a degree unprecedented in his other English-language fiction, where a distinct madness differentiates the narrator (Humbert Humbert, Charles Kinbote) from the author, or where at the end Nabokov himself breaks in, as if to establish that these unfortunate heroes (Krug, Pnin) are somebody else entirely. But no such disclaimer attaches to Van Veen of Ada or to R. of Transparent Things—creations that flagrantly flirt with our knowledge of their creator. And the main movement of Look at the Harlequins!, the core of its “combinational delight” (to quote Pale Fire), is the reduction to zero of the difference between the author and the apparently contrasting Russian émigré author, Vadim, whose last name we never learn, though he is nicknamed “MacNab” and receives by mistake the press clippings of a British politician called Nabarro.

  Much of the fun of Look at the Harlequins! arises from Nabokov’s apparent invention of a contemporary and peer who is nevertheless conspicuously unlike him—oft-married where Nabokov’s monogamy is declared in every book’s dedication to his wife, anti-athletic where Nabokov was a soccer player and a tennis instructor, dipsomaniacal where wholesome, outdoorsy (“My own life is fresh bread with country butter and Alpine honey”—interview with James Mossman of the BBC) Nabokov is satisfied with “an occasional cup of wine or a triangular gulp of canned beer” (interview with Kurt Hoffman for the Bayerischer Rundfunk). Nabokov provides this alter ego with a list of works—but even at first glance the master’s oeuvre peeps through its mimotype: Tamara (1925) is surely Mary (1926); Camera Lucida (Slaughter in the Sun) replicates Laughter in the Dark (Camera Obscura); The Dare mistranslates The Gift [Dar]; See under Real and Dr. Olga Repnin openly conceal The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Pnin; and Ardis (1970) is scarcely even a pseudonym for Ada, or Ardor (1969). The persona of Vadim, too, is thin to translucence, and rubs thinner as the book goes on. Though he advertises himself as “a complete non-athlete,” he lapses into athletic imagery—“a crack player’s brio and chalk-biting serve”—and likens his literary prowess in two languages to being “World Champion of Lawn Tennis and Ski.” Vadim’s novels as he describes them are oneiric distortions of Nabokov’s own; he signs himself as “Dumbert Dumbert” in one nightmare episode of nymphetolatry, and his central psychological problem, an inability to imagine certain permutations of Space, transposes Ada’s elaborate speculations on Time. Rightly Vadim is haunted by “a dream feeling that my life was the non-identical twin, a parody, an inferior variant of another man’s life, somewhere on this or another earth.” When he comes to describe himself, his face is line for line the face on the back of the jacket. Even his three wives, so lovingly limned and so various—Iris, Annette, Louise—finally seem metamorphic phases of the nameless fourth mate, the “you” to whom this “autobiography” is addressed and who, when she enters Vadim’s hospital room, is saluted as “Reality”—“I emitted a bellow of joy, and Reality entered.”

  Nabokov’s long joust and lovefeast with reality seems notably good-humored in this novel, the best, in my book, of his last three. If Transparent Things is a splintered hand-mirror, and Ada cotton-candy spun to the size of sunset cumulus, Look at the Harlequins! is a brown briefcase, as full of compartments as a magician’s sleeve and lovingly thumbed to a scuff-colored limpness. It holds, in sometimes crumpled form, all the Nabokovian themes, from ardor to Zembla, and shares with us more frankly than any book since The Gift his writer’s bliss, “the endless re-creation of my fluid self”:

  … I regarded Paris, with it gray-toned days and charcoal nights, merely as the chance setting for the most authentic and faithful joys of my life: the colored phrase in my mind under the drizzle, the white page under the desk lamp awaiting me in my humble home.

  Describing his three wives gives Vadim a quite contagious pleasure. First, there is Iris, a petite brunette, “a suntanned beauty with a black bob and eyes like clear honey”:

  The moldings of her brown back, with a patch-size beauty spot below the left shoulder blade and a long spinal hollow, which redeemed all the errors of animal evolution, distracted me painfully.… A few aquamarines of water still glistened on the underside of her brown thighs and on her strong brown calves, and a few grains of wet gravel had stuck to her rose-brown ankles.

  Then there is Annette, a Russian blonde, “with very attractive though not exceptionally pretty features”:

  … her graceful neck seemed even longer and thinner. An expression of mild melancholy lent a new, unwelcome, beauty to her Botticellian face: its hollowed outline below the zygoma was accentuated by her increasing habit of sucking in her cheeks when hesitant or pensive.

  And thirdly Louise, an American, “porcelain-pretty and very fast”:

  She … pulled off her wet sweater over her tumbled chestnut-brown, violet-brown curls and naked clavicles. Artistically, strictly artistically, I daresay she was the best-looking of my three major loves. She had upward-directed thin eyebrows, sapphire eyes registering (and that’s the right word) constant amazement at earth’s paradise (the only one she would ever know, I’m afraid), pink-flushed cheekbones, a rosebud mouth, and a lovely concave abdomen.

  The manner in which these three wives (Nabokov’s three languages?) travel in fictional space, enlarging from first glimpses into love objects and marriage partners and then diminishing through disenchantment into death or abandonment, is no mean feat of projection. And the hero describes other women as well—Lolita-like creatures such as the whorish little Dolly and his own elusive daughter Bel and the schoolmate of Bel’s who turns out to be “you,” repulsive creatures such as the adoring but sub-brachially pungent Lyuba and the stocky, whiskery, pro-Soviet Ninella. But then Nabokov has always loved to describe women, and the landscapes of childhood, and the student chill of Cambridge, and twins, and butterflies, and insomnia, and all the gaudy mirages of “a happy expatriation that began practically on the day of my birth” (to quote a letter to The New York Times). But toward the end of Look at the Harlequins! Vadim does two things never, to our imperfect knowledge, experienced by Vladimir Nabokov: he travels to the Soviet Union, and he has a stroke.

  Both episodes show an exercising of the imaginative powers that one rather wishes had not had so strenuously to vie, over Nabokov’s career, with his passion for trickery and annihilation. For a rabid Soviet-hater, the imagined return is surprisingly mild and calm in tone—and, to this one-time guest of the Soviet state, surprisingly accurate, from the smells on the Aeroflot turboprop to the insolence of the hotel lift-operators and the slowness of the restaurant service to the “morose, drab, oddly old-fashioned aspect that Soviet kids have.” The thrilleresque details of intrigue that get Vadim there are funny, and his conversation afterwards, in the Paris airport, with a Soviet spy who has shadowed him all the
way, is hilarious:

  “Ekh!” he explained, “Ekh, Vadim Vadimovich dorogoy (dear), aren’t you ashamed of deceiving our great warm-hearted country, our benevolent, credulous government, our overworked Intourist staff, in this nasty infantile manner! A Russian writer! Snooping! Incognito!”

  The agent (himself an old émigré, turned Communist) confuses, as the conversation goes on in this bumptious style, Vadim with Nabokov, and when the elderly author (whoever he is) knocks him down, exclaims, with timeless Russian stoicism, “Nu, dali v mordu. Nu, tak chtozh?” (“Well, you’ve given me one in the mug. Well, what does it matter?”). Somehow, absurd and sketchy as it is, this episode contains a warmth, a humor and suspense, that only unguarded feeling bestows, and that are too much missing from the professedly ardent filigree of Nabokov’s later fiction. The stroke, a moment of near-fatal paralysis that overtakes Vadim at the turning-point of a preprandial walk, is amazing in its authentication, in the near-mystical swoops of its inner detail:

  Speed! If I could have given my definition of death to … the black horses gaping at me like people with trick dentures all through my strange skimming progress, I would have cried one word: Speed! … Imagine me, an old gentleman, a distinguished author, gliding rapidly on my back, in the wake of my outstretched dead feet, first through that gap in the granite, then over a pinewood, then along misty water meadows, and then simply between marges of mist, on and on, imagine that sight!

  Or imagine any other writer since the beginning of time providing such a blend of sensation, metaphysics, and comedy.