Fiction
Soi-disant
Peter Ackroyd,
Look At The I-larlequins Vladimir Nabokov (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £3.25) Mr Nabokov clearly thinks of himself as a very good, if not a great writer; having been praised by sycophantic American reviewers, and having been read by a small percentage of the American middle classes, he has come to the blinding conclusion that the important thing about Nabokov's writings is Nabokov himself. This is the common strategy of second rate writers, and in Look At The Harlequins Nabokov has forestalled the judgement of whatever thin cultural history is written of our time and has composed his own literary history. This is the novel to end all of Nabokov's novels — or at least one hopes so.
"The Narrator" of the book is Vadim, an emigre writer with pretentions and Nabokov in. his own coy and conventional way lists thp man's "other books" on the fly-leaf; this parodic solemnity gives you a sneak preview of a meta-novel in the making. Vadim starts his unreal life in the Easter term of the Cambridge year and "over lunch at the Pitt" — a Cambridge club which only emigres could take seriously — there are hints of Nabokov's adamantine tricks to come: "Ivor Black wanted Gogol's Town Mayor to wear a dressing gown because 'wasn't it merely the old rascal's nightmare and didn't Revizor, its Russian title, actually come from the French for dream, reve?' I said I thought it was a ghastly idea." Ghastly indeed, but this does not prevent Nabokov from pursuing it like a crazed lepidopterist. When Nabokov mentions any writer, of course, he is really discussing himself, and this little vignette will give you some idea of the festschnft to come.
The narrator turns out to be of the sol-disant school and is very much like those other personae whom Nabokov heaps upon himself in an effort to keep warm: Vadim is of Russian stock, he travels to Paris and then to an American university, he writes for emigre journals and throughout it all exhibits an obsession with himself which I could not share. He hates the ticking of clocks, and the smell of other people's bodies: anything and anyone, in fact, who could interrupt his contemplation of his own self-sufficiency. So it is that he marries disastrously and is left with one daughter who, quite naturally, disowns him. But all of this is merely the technical surface of Vadim's misery, since he suffers from a peculiar neuralgia which prevents him from locating his body within the abstract categories of space; this precipitates a seizure, and the novel ends with the notion that this is really about a displacement of time rather than ot space. It would be a cute way of disowning these memoirs, were it not incomprehensible. Meanwhile, Vadim has become a popular and respected novelist, although there is no clue for aspiring authors about cause. The messages received about his great works make them seem uniformly tedious and self-indulgent; but this may be how reputations are made — Nabokov, after all, should know.
What we have, as always, is a magical mystery tour into the purlieus of Nabokov's greatness, and in Look At The Harlequins he presses his search into himself with even greater fervour, daring to go where no man has gone before, He drops a host of tiny allusions and coy hints about his previous novels, and there are a great many characters and situations which have an unmistakable air of deja lus about them. There are two explanations for this: it may be that Nabokov is fascinated by his own work, and so continues to harrass and worry it in order to extract some key or secret code which will justify it all; or, more probably, it may be that his talent has long since atrophied and he is condemned to the constant reworking of his original material, to press some scent out of the already heavily pressed flower.
But to offer Look At The Harlequins as another and a different novel requires the help of two overweening assumptions: the first is that the readers will be so familiar with the range of Nabokov's work that they will pick up the allusions which fly toward them. This is, of course, an unwarranted assumption. The second is, that Nabokov is a great enough writer to be able to afford the luxury of such self-indulgence. To put it more crisply, are his novels good enough to be remembered? No. He simply takes part in more and more elaborate exercises in self-justification and, if you forget the rhetorical tricks which have endeared him to the American critics, there is not and there never has been anything of great import in his writing.
This is principally because Nabokov is a rhetorician rather than a creative writer. He has mastered all of the technical tricks of the novel, and he has invented a few of his own, but the heart of the matter has consistently eluded him. So he is forced to recapitulate the themes and the appearances of his earlier fiction, a fiction composed of fancies rather than imagination, and will never develop its substance. As grand-aunt Baroness Bredow puts it to the narrator of this latest effort: "Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins," which is fine for a Baroness but not for a novelist, Nabokov's prose is self-indulgent without being self-conscious, with that sweet and soft texture which is an infallible sign of something slightly 'off'. Nabokov says of another emigre writer that he employs "pretty prose and borrowed poetry", and that is exactly what is wrong with his own weak and derivative prose. When a novel strives too hard to become literature, it falls
into literariness. Nabokov's words are hollow and external, and he lays them on with a very
flat trowel. All that is left is a solemn persona playing with himself and that — of course — leads to blindness, Peter Ackroycl is the literary editor of The Spectator
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