A writer and a gentleman
John Bayley
THE ENCHANTER by Vladimir Nabokov Picador, 1'8.95 Not many authors insist on their sepa- rate status as gentlemen. A mark of those that do is that any eccentricity they may possess is to be tacitly referred by their public — who ought to know a gentleman when they read one — to the non-player side of them. Their oddities are confident- ly, regally, on display; there is nothing furtive or concealed about them: a gentle- man does not exploit his personality, or seek to dissimulate it; and other gentlemen take no notice. This was the stance adopted by William Empson as a critic, and by Robert Graves as a poet. It was also typical of Vladimir Nabokov. In Nabokov's case it went with his insistence upon the purely aesthetic pleasure to be supped from his master- pieces. If he chose, in Despair, to write about the pathetic delusions of a murderer, or the madness of a chess-master in The Defence, or physical deformation in The Double Monster, or paedophilia in Lolita, it was because such matters gave unrivalled opportunities for aesthetic display. `Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all, but rather the play of light and shadow on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled . . . in a unique and inimitable way.' That observa- tion from his 1925 short story The Fight has often been quoted. Moral disapproval is beside the point, and it is also ungentle- manly to ask personal questions. None the less there is something oddly disabling about Nabokov's attitudes as writer and gentleman. It explains his contempt for Dostoievsky, who was the reverse of one, but who was also a great writer who put the whole of himself into what he wrote. As indeed, in his more secretive way, did Gogol, whom Nabokov very deeply admired.
Nabokov's insistence that there was 'no- thing personal' about his interest in little girls is thus more irritating than anything else. Dostoievsky's novels and diaries make it clear that he had constant fantasies about raping little girls in bath-houses, and this gives great force and power to his creation of characters like Svidrigailov and Stavrogin, who actually do such things. To play with the idea of the thing as a craftsman is perhaps a bit repellent, however, humorously beguiling Nabokov takes it impatiently for granted, as a gentleman would, that his reader under- stands the horror and pathos implicit in such things; and a writer who kept drawing our attention to them, and to his own resources of pity and love, could certainly be even more irritating. But . . . can the enormous success of Lolita really have been due only to its aesthetic triumph, and its readers' delighted pleasure in that triumph? The scale of child molestation in California has recently been in the news, because in such an open society everything comes out. There is probably just as much quietly going on everywhere else. No writer can be blamed for the use his readers make of his work. Or can he? Above Nabokov's there is bound to hang something equivocal.
What is certain is that the old master began, way back in Europe before the war (and not unlike his own Humbert Hum- bert) to toy with the notion, as a literary sqbject, of course, of acquiring a little girl by means of marriage with her mother. He wrote, in Russian, a story, but was dissatis- fied and put it by. Now rediscovered, and hailed as a 'long lost novel', it has been translated — and very brilliantly trans- lated, in the master's own style — by his son Dimitri. The author's original instinct may have been right. Yet it remains a wholly successful short story, because it deals so curtly and so deftly with its theme.
That theme, as the author surmised, needed the relaxed, humorous, untidy treatment possible in a novel. Humorous above all. There is plenty of humour in The Enchanter, as in all of Nabokov's stories, but it is a stylised, self-regulating humour. It does not put on carpet slippers and let its hair down, as it does in Lolita, where humanity is marvellously and invisibly restored by its presence. True humour is never wholly under the author's direction, or does not seem to be; and the humour of Lolita (whose true heroine is `big Haze') seems to evade the somewhat too pertina- cious pursuit of its effects by the narrator and his creator. A good novel is funnier than its author knows. The Enchanter should really be called 'The Magician', which is a more accurate rendering of its Russian title Volshebnik, but Nabokov himself called it The Enchanter, no doubt because enchantment sounds more rapt and poetical than magic, more suited to the nymphet's effect on her would-be owner, and the owner's lyrical description of her.
But there is the irony, for it is he himself who is the enchanter or magician — a failed magician, who 'starting little by little to cast his spell, began passing his magic wand above her body . . . until she made a faint motion, and turned her face away with a barely audible, somnolent smack of her lips.' There, however, the resemblance between Lolita and The Enchanter ends. Both have these wonderfully hilarious, slow-motion physical pictures: the nym- phet comes 'clamping' along on her roller- skates; a quick knitter 'now and then, with a lightning motion, adjusted the trailing tail of her woollen foetus'; and both — like most of Nabokov's stories — have their ritual moment of romantic disillusion: after the fantastic peepshow of love comes the awakening on the cold hill side. But whereas the wretchedly comfortable and comic Humbert, the 'I' of Lolita, finds that his nymphet is already entirely knowing and sardonic about the absurdities of mas- culine desire, the enchanter's victim mani- fests the conventional appalled response, and the end of her anonymous would-be rapist (a jeweller by trade incidentally) is an equally conventional nightmare one.
In both cases, of course, the rich texture of the writing serves to point up the deadliness of the fixation. A consummate artist, Nabokov was justified in implying that such art has no need crudely to draw our attention to the pathos and horror of its subject. As empirical technician, moreover, he would be justified in pointing out that the alternative treatment of the subject in Lolita and The Enchanter faithfully reflects what occurs in real life. Some girls might be devastated, some merely amused. The child abuse, which hovers in the background of Dostoievsky's novels, is given the same slant by him in the nightmare of Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment, who finds his little victim looking up at him with a knowing leer. For all his expressed contempt for Dostoievsky Nabokov certainly got a lot from him.
The sheer play of the artist's intelli- gence, perhaps a little overblown by the time of Lolita, appears here with masterly economy. Nabokov's Russian is probably never self-indulgent, as his English can be. His son, who contributes a most engaging and perceptive afterword, has done a superb job, no doubt with some original help from father. The story should prob- ably be read first very quickly, and then very slowly, when the reticent way in which the creator has got inside his jeweller's mind will be fully clear. (The latter, whose attention is always ecstatically and agoni- singly concentrated, observes none the less that only human beings can be absent- minded.) The nymphet's mother, whom the jeweller marries for his pathetically fell purposes, is sketched with Shakespearian certainty, and — as of Nabokovian right the direness of the poor creature's situation Is taken for granted. When she dies un- expectedly after an operation the jeweller's first reaction is one of acute disappoint- ment. Though fate has given him exactly what he wanted, her death means that the nymphet will not come home 'that night', as her step-father had carefully planned. Another stroke of psychology worthy of Shakespeare is the jeweller's wholly justified confidence that he has made the last months of the nymphet's mother comparatively happy ones. Things like this put the story in the top class of Nabokov's work: the jeweller is a character compara- ble to the chess-player Luzhin, of The Defence, or to the hero of his very first and one of his best novels, Mary.
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