http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/80834/?CMP=Spklr-_-Editorial-_-TWITTER-_-TheTLS-_-20160803-_-ArtsandCulture-_-535796122
AUGUST 3 2016
An advertisement for Wilson Wear pyjamas and shorts, 1944
Nabokov’s ‘great gay comic novel’
EDMUND WHITE
I never met Vladimir Nabokov face to face, though I exchanged phone calls and letters with him. My psychiatrist encouraged me to visit him in Switzerland, but I was too afraid that I would quickly sabotage close-up whatever good impression I might have managed to create long-distance. As an editor at the American Saturday Review, I had orchestrated a cover story dedicated to Nabokov on the publication of his novel Transparent Things (1972), and sent Antony Armstrong-Jones to take a portfolio of photographs, including one that showed the novelist dressed as Borges in a poncho. (My boss had wanted to send a great artistic photographer such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, but I believed Nabokov would be more amused by Armstrong-Jones, the Earl of Snowdon, who had been married to Princess Margaret since 1960 and was, I guessed, more polished than the austere French genius. The two men got along famously.) Nabokov wrote a short piece on “Inspiration” for us, which I illustrated with a reproduction of “Pygmalion and Galatea” by Jean-Léon Gérôme, a big bad nineteenth-century painting of the infatuated sculptor embracing his creation as she turns from marble to flesh, feet last.
A number of tiny errors, typographic and even grammatical, had crept into Nabokov’s text. I had the copy set twice in print, my version and his, and sent them both by overnight express. He wired back, “your version perfect”. In the Nabokov “number” I included rather grudging essays by Joyce Carol Oates, William Gass and Joseph McElroy – and of course my own ecstatic response.
A few months later, I sent him galley proofs of my own first novel,Forgetting Elena. Nabokov sent me a note in response: “This is not for publication but my wife and I enjoyed your novel in which everything is teetering on the edge of everything”. (I later found this same “teetering” image in his evocation of a passenger’s point of view from inside a train leaving the station.) I couldn’t believe my good luck in gaining this endorsement from my favourite author, someone who was dismissive of Conrad, Dostoevsky, Faulkner and Balzac – even if I had to keep quiet about it. (Three years later Gerald Clarke, the biographer of Truman Capote, interviewed Nabokov, who in an unguarded moment revealed that I was his favourite American writer. He even tried to convince McGraw-Hill to take a look at my new manuscript, then titled “Woman Reading Pascal”, but without success. It remains unpublished.)
Nabokov’s masterpiece, of course, is Lolita, which finds a way of renewing the exhausted nineteenth-century tradition of the novel that analyses the passions (Adolphe, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary) by re-creating it through the eyes of a criminal paedophile, in accordance with Nabokov’s doctrine that a novel should explore, not the genus or the species but an aberrant variety. Lolita is romantic and funny and perverted. But I have recently re-read Pale Fire (1962) which is, I realize only now, the great gay comic novel, an equally funny and sometimes tender portrait of a homosexual madman, Charles Kinbote. Kinbote (or Botkin) claims to have been the king of the “distant northern land” of Zembla who, deposed by revolutionary forces, has made another life teaching in an American college. The whole prose component of the book is his “scholarly” commentary on a 999-line poem by his neighbour, the venerable John Shade. The poem is actually an elegy to the poet’s dead daughter, but Kinbote is convinced it is about him and his flight from his captors.
Nabokov may have been inspired by his own four-volume translation and annotation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which he had been working on for years. Repeatedly, in the notes to Onegin, he tells the story of his own family and their lost Russian estates. It must have struck him that the self-serving scholarly annotations were funny and ripe for self-satire.
Kinbote’s mad “notes”, far from commenting on Shade’s poem, trace out a mini-biography of Kinbote. And that biography, real or delusional, is the picture of an unrepentant homosexual, sensual, guilt-free, tirelessly on the make. In the 1950s, gay men were portrayed in fiction and films as lonely phantoms – sad and colourless – or sometimes as instant villains (see Norman Mailer’s essay, “The Gay Villain”, 1954). Nabokov, by contrast, depicts Kinbote as lustful, entitled, screamingly absurd.
Kinbote is always drooling over some handsome lad and, as king (Charles the Beloved II), he usually has his way with them, even in a water closet: “the recent thrill of adventure had been superseded already by another sort of excitement. They locked themselves up. The tap ran unheeded. Both were in a manly state and moaning like doves”. What is perhaps the funniest scene involves a putative assassin, Gradus, and a lad named Gordon. Since this is a moment completely imagined by Kinbote (and, by any standard, not observed), the king’s imagination runs wild. He “dresses” the comely Gordon in one clichéd gay outfit after another. At first the tanned fifteen-year-old (“dyed a nectarine hue by the sun”) is in a “leopard-spotted loincloth”. Then he is “wreathed about the loins with ivy”. A second later he is fellating “a pipe of spring water” and wiping his hands “on his black bathing trunks”. Next, he’s magically “striking his flanks clothed in white tennis shorts” before that image dissolves into a “Tarzan brief” that is “cast aside”. Nabokov has plundered the full wardrobe of period gay porn.
Stranded now in a small American college town, Kinbote takes in a “dissipated young roomer”, whom he later calls “drunken, impossible, unforgettable”. When a rumour springs up that Kinbote is given to a “persecution mania”, he ascribes the gossip to “certain youthful instructors whose advances I’d rejected”. (As if.) One of the liberal gazettes in Zembla dubs the capital city “Uranograd”. The king, when still a prince of seventeen, dances in “masques with boy-girls and girl-boys”. The prince goes to “a formal heterosexual affair, rather refreshing after some previous sport”. When he dances with a pretty girl, Fleur – “pretty but not repellent” – he “hardly squirmed at all when she stroked his hand or applied herself soundlessly with open lips to his cheek”, nor did she “seem to mind when he abandoned her for manlier pleasures”. An American medium, channelling his dead mother, fruitlessly begs him “to renounce sodomy”. When he returns to his chambers “lying all over the painted marble and piled three or four deep were his new boy pages, a whole mountain of gift boys from Troth, and Tuscany, and Albanoland”.
When the Soviets take over his kingdom, he refuses to abdicate and remorselessly looks through field glasses at “lithe youths diving into the swimming pool of a fairy tale sport club”. Even when held captive, the king “kept in touch with numerous adherents, young nobles, artists, college athletes, gamblers, Black Rose Paldins, members of fencing clubs, and other men of fashion and adventure”. Of his youth we learn that “in those days growing boys of high-born families wore on festive occasions – of which we had so many during our long northern spring – sleeveless jerseys, white anklesocks with black buckle shoes, and very tight, very short shorts called hotinguens”. At twelve, Prince Oleg in the “mist of the bathhouse” reveals “bold virilia [that] contrasted harshly with his girlish grace. He was a regular faunlet”. Eventually Kinbote and Oleg are allowed by the authorities “to share the same bed”. When Oleg returns, “He carried a tulip. His soft blond locks had been cut since his last visit to the palace and the young Prince thought: Yes, I knew he would be different. But when Oleg knitted his golden brows and bent close . . ., the young Prince knew by the downy warmth of that crimson ear and by the vivacious nod . . . that no change had occurred in his dear bedfellow”. Even as Oleg and Charles escape the castle, the king is looking at his “shapely buttocks encased in tight indigo cotton”.
There are plenty of hints that Kinbote (the King, Charles) is demented or that “reality” itself is disputable. The absurd Kinbote – obsessed with his own royal story – is fantastically unaware of John Shade’s reluctance to waste time with him and especially of the scorn of Shade’s wife’s, whom Kinbote in return loathes when he isn’t condescending to her. Kinbote is the well-observed gay outsider of the past – lecherous, self-important, obsessed with fantasies of aristocracy, impervious to the subtleties of the heterosexual world around him. He would be despicable if his very earnestness and naivety were not so touching. His reckless “scholarship” must have been especially amusing to Nabokov (in particular, to Nabokov the lepidopterist, his failure to identify even the most ordinary butterflies). But Kinbote shares Nabokov’s distaste for Soviet brutes and his narrow but deep human sympathies.
At the time of the novel’s publication, many gay men were vexed by the satirical portrait, though now it seems perfectly acceptable. Gay critics are no longer prospecting for positive role models. What we have instead in Kinbote is a compendium of “period” gay images. The “Baron” (a fake title) Wilhelm von Gloeden’s staged photographs of Sicilian boys with cracked feet, peasant tans, hunger-bloated stomachs and coarse faces, wearing ancient Greek togas and laurel wreaths and holding papier maché lyres; Prussian porn and English gentlemen’s proclivities for willing, paid guardsmen; the aesthetes of Oscar Wilde’s day (a single tulip); the gay son of a famous womanizing king (Mad Ludwig and his royal father, lover of La Belle Otéro); the tennis champion Bill Tilden, whose spectacular playing made him famous in the 1920s – and whose paedophilia landed him in prison; “scoutmasters with something to hide”; idyllic romances with athletes and shepherd boys in the style of A. E. Housman, whose Shropshire Lad Kinbote admires above all other poems except for Tennyson’s equally fruity In Memoriam; the sailors so sought after as “rough trade” (non-reciprocating, drunk, heterosexual bullies): all are evoked here, a catalogue of male homosexual desire through the ages.
Nabokov took an entomologist’s delight in observing grotesqueries, but he could not resist lending Kinbote, at least in dreams, a little heterosexual tenderness for his Queen Disa, living in exile on the Riviera. At Edmund Wilson’s urging Nabokov read Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet and admired the writing, but was mystified as to why Genet wrote about men of all things. Even the misogynistic Kinbote thinks of Disa at night:
This love was like an endless wringing of hands, like a blundering of the soul through an infinite maze of hopelessness and remorse. They were, in a sense, amorous dreams, for they were permeated with tenderness, with a longing to sink his head onto her lap and sob away the monstrous past. They brimmed with the awful awareness of her being so young and so helpless. They were purer than his life. What carnal aura there was in them came not from her but from those with whom he betrayed her – prickly-chinned Phrynia, pretty Timandra with that boom under her apron – and even so the sexual scum remained somewhere far above the sunken treasure and was quite unimportant. He would see her being accosted by a misty relative so distant as to be practically featureless. She would quickly hide what she held and extend her arched hand to be kissed. He knew she had just come across a telltale object – a riding boot in his bed – establishing beyond any doubt his unfaithfulness . . . . One might bear – a strong merciless dreamer might bear – the knowledge of her grief and pride but none could bear the sight of her automatic smile as she turned from the agony of the disclosure to the polite trivialities required of her. She would be cancelling an illumination, or discussing hospital cots with the head nurse, or merely ordering breakfast for two in the sea cave – and through the everyday plainness of the talk, through the play of the charming gestures with which she always accompanied certain readymade phrases, he, the groaning dreamer, perceived the disarray of her soul and was aware that an odious, undeserved, humiliating disaster had befallen her, and that only obligations of etiquette and her staunch kindness to a guiltless third party gave her the force to smile . . . .
This is possibly Nabokov’s most lyrical tribute to a disappointed woman, but does it suit Kinbote’s character? Or is it Nabokov (who was unfaithful to his beloved wife Vera) expressing his own repentance for his extramarital affairs? Or is it Nabokov peeping through a mask and making his character more sympathetic, as he does more than once with Humbert? Nabokov knew that a long novel cannot be devoted to an entirely hateful character, and Kinbote has many redeeming qualities including an endearing narcissism, a strong libido, a vivid imagination and a poetic sense – even if this last tends to the kitschy.
Nabokov had a gay brother, Sergei,who died at the hands of the Nazis, and a gay maternal uncle, “Uncle Ruka”, who left him a large house and estate, which he possessed only briefly before the October Revolution. These relatives must have made him somewhat uneasy, since he believed homosexuality was inherited (in the past an eccentric opinion, but now a fairly mainstream theory), though a more libertarian position would be: you have a right to be whatever you are, no matter the cause; even searching for a “cause” is reactionary. Nabokov had a rare capacity for imagining himself into the minds of outsiders. A paranoid outsider is a particularly good subject for a novel, since a paranoid organizes all the world’s unrelated facts and random impressions around one central, focusing obsession. Kinbote sees himself as a monarch in exile threatened by an assassin, real or imagined, and he is determined to tell his story before he is killed. As it happens, perhaps the killer is Kinbote himself and the victim, Shade, who tells “Kinbote’s story” only according to the demented man’s scholarly annotations. As the novel winds down we discover that Shade’s killer might actually be an escaped madman named Jack Grey. Of course Kinbote thinks he was the intended victim and “Jack Grey” an identity that Gradus, the would-be regicide, had assumed. Fortunately for Kinbote and his delusions, Grey commits suicide before he can be interrogated. (Nabokov’s own father, a liberal Democrat, was assassinated in Berlin in 1922 by a misguided Russian monarchist while saving the life of the intended victim.)
Nabokov liked to play with shadow lives – “creative autobiography”, we might call it. Look at the Harlequins! features a satanic writer who really is a paedophile – a playful confirmation of some people’s worst suspicions about the author of Lolita. Humbert traverses the United States and teaches at a dowdy American university, as Nabokov did.Glory (1932; published in English translation, 1971) recounts the implausible return of its hero, whose history otherwise resembles Nabokov’s, to Russia, just as Ada (1969) tells of a parallel universe in which Russia and America are parts of the same country. Hermann, the principal character in Despair (1934; 1965), imagines he is the double of another man, but in fact they in no way resemble each other. The plot of this novel, too, recounts a misfired murder. Nabokov returned several times to the theme of the false doppel-gänger, a parody of the despised Dostoevsky’s The Double, not to mention his Notes From the Underground.
Even the index to Pale Fire is funny, and camp. We are told of a cordoned-off section of the royal picture gallery that “contains the statues of Igor’s 400 favourite catamites”. In the entry for Kinbote himself we discover inconsequential mentions of “his boyhood in Cedarn and the little angler, a honey-skinned lad, naked except for a pair of torn dungarees, one trouser leg rolled up . . . but then school started or the weather changed”. No matter that the little angler has never been mentioned until now. Kinbote also cites his loathing for a person who “makes advances and then betrays a noble and naïve heart, telling foul stories about his victim and pursuing him with brutal practical jokes”. Marcel is dismissed as “the fussy, unpleasant, and not altogether plausible central character, pampered by everybody in Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu”. Under “Odon”, who is identified as the actor who helps the king escape, the very last index entry is, “ought not to marry that blubber-lipped cinemactress, with untidy hair”. Finally we are told of “Uran the Last Emperor of Zembla, reigned 1798-1799; an incredibly brilliant, luxurious and cruel monarch whose whistling whip made Zembla spin like a rainbow top”.
Archive page mate
AUGUST 3 2016
An advertisement for Wilson Wear pyjamas and shorts, 1944
Nabokov’s ‘great gay comic novel’
EDMUND WHITE
I never met Vladimir Nabokov face to face, though I exchanged phone calls and letters with him. My psychiatrist encouraged me to visit him in Switzerland, but I was too afraid that I would quickly sabotage close-up whatever good impression I might have managed to create long-distance. As an editor at the American Saturday Review, I had orchestrated a cover story dedicated to Nabokov on the publication of his novel Transparent Things (1972), and sent Antony Armstrong-Jones to take a portfolio of photographs, including one that showed the novelist dressed as Borges in a poncho. (My boss had wanted to send a great artistic photographer such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, but I believed Nabokov would be more amused by Armstrong-Jones, the Earl of Snowdon, who had been married to Princess Margaret since 1960 and was, I guessed, more polished than the austere French genius. The two men got along famously.) Nabokov wrote a short piece on “Inspiration” for us, which I illustrated with a reproduction of “Pygmalion and Galatea” by Jean-Léon Gérôme, a big bad nineteenth-century painting of the infatuated sculptor embracing his creation as she turns from marble to flesh, feet last.
A number of tiny errors, typographic and even grammatical, had crept into Nabokov’s text. I had the copy set twice in print, my version and his, and sent them both by overnight express. He wired back, “your version perfect”. In the Nabokov “number” I included rather grudging essays by Joyce Carol Oates, William Gass and Joseph McElroy – and of course my own ecstatic response.
A few months later, I sent him galley proofs of my own first novel,Forgetting Elena. Nabokov sent me a note in response: “This is not for publication but my wife and I enjoyed your novel in which everything is teetering on the edge of everything”. (I later found this same “teetering” image in his evocation of a passenger’s point of view from inside a train leaving the station.) I couldn’t believe my good luck in gaining this endorsement from my favourite author, someone who was dismissive of Conrad, Dostoevsky, Faulkner and Balzac – even if I had to keep quiet about it. (Three years later Gerald Clarke, the biographer of Truman Capote, interviewed Nabokov, who in an unguarded moment revealed that I was his favourite American writer. He even tried to convince McGraw-Hill to take a look at my new manuscript, then titled “Woman Reading Pascal”, but without success. It remains unpublished.)
Nabokov’s masterpiece, of course, is Lolita, which finds a way of renewing the exhausted nineteenth-century tradition of the novel that analyses the passions (Adolphe, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary) by re-creating it through the eyes of a criminal paedophile, in accordance with Nabokov’s doctrine that a novel should explore, not the genus or the species but an aberrant variety. Lolita is romantic and funny and perverted. But I have recently re-read Pale Fire (1962) which is, I realize only now, the great gay comic novel, an equally funny and sometimes tender portrait of a homosexual madman, Charles Kinbote. Kinbote (or Botkin) claims to have been the king of the “distant northern land” of Zembla who, deposed by revolutionary forces, has made another life teaching in an American college. The whole prose component of the book is his “scholarly” commentary on a 999-line poem by his neighbour, the venerable John Shade. The poem is actually an elegy to the poet’s dead daughter, but Kinbote is convinced it is about him and his flight from his captors.
Nabokov may have been inspired by his own four-volume translation and annotation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which he had been working on for years. Repeatedly, in the notes to Onegin, he tells the story of his own family and their lost Russian estates. It must have struck him that the self-serving scholarly annotations were funny and ripe for self-satire.
Kinbote’s mad “notes”, far from commenting on Shade’s poem, trace out a mini-biography of Kinbote. And that biography, real or delusional, is the picture of an unrepentant homosexual, sensual, guilt-free, tirelessly on the make. In the 1950s, gay men were portrayed in fiction and films as lonely phantoms – sad and colourless – or sometimes as instant villains (see Norman Mailer’s essay, “The Gay Villain”, 1954). Nabokov, by contrast, depicts Kinbote as lustful, entitled, screamingly absurd.
Kinbote is always drooling over some handsome lad and, as king (Charles the Beloved II), he usually has his way with them, even in a water closet: “the recent thrill of adventure had been superseded already by another sort of excitement. They locked themselves up. The tap ran unheeded. Both were in a manly state and moaning like doves”. What is perhaps the funniest scene involves a putative assassin, Gradus, and a lad named Gordon. Since this is a moment completely imagined by Kinbote (and, by any standard, not observed), the king’s imagination runs wild. He “dresses” the comely Gordon in one clichéd gay outfit after another. At first the tanned fifteen-year-old (“dyed a nectarine hue by the sun”) is in a “leopard-spotted loincloth”. Then he is “wreathed about the loins with ivy”. A second later he is fellating “a pipe of spring water” and wiping his hands “on his black bathing trunks”. Next, he’s magically “striking his flanks clothed in white tennis shorts” before that image dissolves into a “Tarzan brief” that is “cast aside”. Nabokov has plundered the full wardrobe of period gay porn.
Stranded now in a small American college town, Kinbote takes in a “dissipated young roomer”, whom he later calls “drunken, impossible, unforgettable”. When a rumour springs up that Kinbote is given to a “persecution mania”, he ascribes the gossip to “certain youthful instructors whose advances I’d rejected”. (As if.) One of the liberal gazettes in Zembla dubs the capital city “Uranograd”. The king, when still a prince of seventeen, dances in “masques with boy-girls and girl-boys”. The prince goes to “a formal heterosexual affair, rather refreshing after some previous sport”. When he dances with a pretty girl, Fleur – “pretty but not repellent” – he “hardly squirmed at all when she stroked his hand or applied herself soundlessly with open lips to his cheek”, nor did she “seem to mind when he abandoned her for manlier pleasures”. An American medium, channelling his dead mother, fruitlessly begs him “to renounce sodomy”. When he returns to his chambers “lying all over the painted marble and piled three or four deep were his new boy pages, a whole mountain of gift boys from Troth, and Tuscany, and Albanoland”.
When the Soviets take over his kingdom, he refuses to abdicate and remorselessly looks through field glasses at “lithe youths diving into the swimming pool of a fairy tale sport club”. Even when held captive, the king “kept in touch with numerous adherents, young nobles, artists, college athletes, gamblers, Black Rose Paldins, members of fencing clubs, and other men of fashion and adventure”. Of his youth we learn that “in those days growing boys of high-born families wore on festive occasions – of which we had so many during our long northern spring – sleeveless jerseys, white anklesocks with black buckle shoes, and very tight, very short shorts called hotinguens”. At twelve, Prince Oleg in the “mist of the bathhouse” reveals “bold virilia [that] contrasted harshly with his girlish grace. He was a regular faunlet”. Eventually Kinbote and Oleg are allowed by the authorities “to share the same bed”. When Oleg returns, “He carried a tulip. His soft blond locks had been cut since his last visit to the palace and the young Prince thought: Yes, I knew he would be different. But when Oleg knitted his golden brows and bent close . . ., the young Prince knew by the downy warmth of that crimson ear and by the vivacious nod . . . that no change had occurred in his dear bedfellow”. Even as Oleg and Charles escape the castle, the king is looking at his “shapely buttocks encased in tight indigo cotton”.
There are plenty of hints that Kinbote (the King, Charles) is demented or that “reality” itself is disputable. The absurd Kinbote – obsessed with his own royal story – is fantastically unaware of John Shade’s reluctance to waste time with him and especially of the scorn of Shade’s wife’s, whom Kinbote in return loathes when he isn’t condescending to her. Kinbote is the well-observed gay outsider of the past – lecherous, self-important, obsessed with fantasies of aristocracy, impervious to the subtleties of the heterosexual world around him. He would be despicable if his very earnestness and naivety were not so touching. His reckless “scholarship” must have been especially amusing to Nabokov (in particular, to Nabokov the lepidopterist, his failure to identify even the most ordinary butterflies). But Kinbote shares Nabokov’s distaste for Soviet brutes and his narrow but deep human sympathies.
At the time of the novel’s publication, many gay men were vexed by the satirical portrait, though now it seems perfectly acceptable. Gay critics are no longer prospecting for positive role models. What we have instead in Kinbote is a compendium of “period” gay images. The “Baron” (a fake title) Wilhelm von Gloeden’s staged photographs of Sicilian boys with cracked feet, peasant tans, hunger-bloated stomachs and coarse faces, wearing ancient Greek togas and laurel wreaths and holding papier maché lyres; Prussian porn and English gentlemen’s proclivities for willing, paid guardsmen; the aesthetes of Oscar Wilde’s day (a single tulip); the gay son of a famous womanizing king (Mad Ludwig and his royal father, lover of La Belle Otéro); the tennis champion Bill Tilden, whose spectacular playing made him famous in the 1920s – and whose paedophilia landed him in prison; “scoutmasters with something to hide”; idyllic romances with athletes and shepherd boys in the style of A. E. Housman, whose Shropshire Lad Kinbote admires above all other poems except for Tennyson’s equally fruity In Memoriam; the sailors so sought after as “rough trade” (non-reciprocating, drunk, heterosexual bullies): all are evoked here, a catalogue of male homosexual desire through the ages.
Nabokov took an entomologist’s delight in observing grotesqueries, but he could not resist lending Kinbote, at least in dreams, a little heterosexual tenderness for his Queen Disa, living in exile on the Riviera. At Edmund Wilson’s urging Nabokov read Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet and admired the writing, but was mystified as to why Genet wrote about men of all things. Even the misogynistic Kinbote thinks of Disa at night:
This love was like an endless wringing of hands, like a blundering of the soul through an infinite maze of hopelessness and remorse. They were, in a sense, amorous dreams, for they were permeated with tenderness, with a longing to sink his head onto her lap and sob away the monstrous past. They brimmed with the awful awareness of her being so young and so helpless. They were purer than his life. What carnal aura there was in them came not from her but from those with whom he betrayed her – prickly-chinned Phrynia, pretty Timandra with that boom under her apron – and even so the sexual scum remained somewhere far above the sunken treasure and was quite unimportant. He would see her being accosted by a misty relative so distant as to be practically featureless. She would quickly hide what she held and extend her arched hand to be kissed. He knew she had just come across a telltale object – a riding boot in his bed – establishing beyond any doubt his unfaithfulness . . . . One might bear – a strong merciless dreamer might bear – the knowledge of her grief and pride but none could bear the sight of her automatic smile as she turned from the agony of the disclosure to the polite trivialities required of her. She would be cancelling an illumination, or discussing hospital cots with the head nurse, or merely ordering breakfast for two in the sea cave – and through the everyday plainness of the talk, through the play of the charming gestures with which she always accompanied certain readymade phrases, he, the groaning dreamer, perceived the disarray of her soul and was aware that an odious, undeserved, humiliating disaster had befallen her, and that only obligations of etiquette and her staunch kindness to a guiltless third party gave her the force to smile . . . .
This is possibly Nabokov’s most lyrical tribute to a disappointed woman, but does it suit Kinbote’s character? Or is it Nabokov (who was unfaithful to his beloved wife Vera) expressing his own repentance for his extramarital affairs? Or is it Nabokov peeping through a mask and making his character more sympathetic, as he does more than once with Humbert? Nabokov knew that a long novel cannot be devoted to an entirely hateful character, and Kinbote has many redeeming qualities including an endearing narcissism, a strong libido, a vivid imagination and a poetic sense – even if this last tends to the kitschy.
Nabokov had a gay brother, Sergei,who died at the hands of the Nazis, and a gay maternal uncle, “Uncle Ruka”, who left him a large house and estate, which he possessed only briefly before the October Revolution. These relatives must have made him somewhat uneasy, since he believed homosexuality was inherited (in the past an eccentric opinion, but now a fairly mainstream theory), though a more libertarian position would be: you have a right to be whatever you are, no matter the cause; even searching for a “cause” is reactionary. Nabokov had a rare capacity for imagining himself into the minds of outsiders. A paranoid outsider is a particularly good subject for a novel, since a paranoid organizes all the world’s unrelated facts and random impressions around one central, focusing obsession. Kinbote sees himself as a monarch in exile threatened by an assassin, real or imagined, and he is determined to tell his story before he is killed. As it happens, perhaps the killer is Kinbote himself and the victim, Shade, who tells “Kinbote’s story” only according to the demented man’s scholarly annotations. As the novel winds down we discover that Shade’s killer might actually be an escaped madman named Jack Grey. Of course Kinbote thinks he was the intended victim and “Jack Grey” an identity that Gradus, the would-be regicide, had assumed. Fortunately for Kinbote and his delusions, Grey commits suicide before he can be interrogated. (Nabokov’s own father, a liberal Democrat, was assassinated in Berlin in 1922 by a misguided Russian monarchist while saving the life of the intended victim.)
Nabokov liked to play with shadow lives – “creative autobiography”, we might call it. Look at the Harlequins! features a satanic writer who really is a paedophile – a playful confirmation of some people’s worst suspicions about the author of Lolita. Humbert traverses the United States and teaches at a dowdy American university, as Nabokov did.Glory (1932; published in English translation, 1971) recounts the implausible return of its hero, whose history otherwise resembles Nabokov’s, to Russia, just as Ada (1969) tells of a parallel universe in which Russia and America are parts of the same country. Hermann, the principal character in Despair (1934; 1965), imagines he is the double of another man, but in fact they in no way resemble each other. The plot of this novel, too, recounts a misfired murder. Nabokov returned several times to the theme of the false doppel-gänger, a parody of the despised Dostoevsky’s The Double, not to mention his Notes From the Underground.
Even the index to Pale Fire is funny, and camp. We are told of a cordoned-off section of the royal picture gallery that “contains the statues of Igor’s 400 favourite catamites”. In the entry for Kinbote himself we discover inconsequential mentions of “his boyhood in Cedarn and the little angler, a honey-skinned lad, naked except for a pair of torn dungarees, one trouser leg rolled up . . . but then school started or the weather changed”. No matter that the little angler has never been mentioned until now. Kinbote also cites his loathing for a person who “makes advances and then betrays a noble and naïve heart, telling foul stories about his victim and pursuing him with brutal practical jokes”. Marcel is dismissed as “the fussy, unpleasant, and not altogether plausible central character, pampered by everybody in Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu”. Under “Odon”, who is identified as the actor who helps the king escape, the very last index entry is, “ought not to marry that blubber-lipped cinemactress, with untidy hair”. Finally we are told of “Uran the Last Emperor of Zembla, reigned 1798-1799; an incredibly brilliant, luxurious and cruel monarch whose whistling whip made Zembla spin like a rainbow top”.
Table of Contents
MUSIC
RICHARD TARUSKIN – Vincent Giroud Nicolas Nabokov – A life in freedom and music.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
KENNETH DOVER – Animals, Donald Trump, etc theatre & dance.
THEATRE & DANCE
MEMOIR & BIOGRAPHY
ROBERT GILDEA – Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac – L’Étrange Victoire: De la défense de la République à la libération de la France.
SOCIAL STUDIES
POLITICS
TIMOTHY PHILLIPS – Brian Glyn Williams – Inferno in Chechnya: The Russian–Chechen wars, the Al Qaeda myth, and the Boston Marathon bombings.
COMMENTARY
EDMUND WHITE – The Rainbow Top: On Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘great gay comic novel’ and his imaginative empathy with the outsider.
GALYA DIMENT – Sudden sunburst: Evidence that Vladimir Nabokov suffered from a mild form of epilepsy.
MICHAEL DIRDA – Freelance.
ARTS
PATRICK MCCAUGHEY – Stuart Davis – In full swing (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Harry Cooper and Barbara Haskell – Stuart Davis – In full swing.
CLAIR WILLS – Sean O’Casey – The Plough and the Stars (National Theatre).
FICTION
BEN BOLLIG – Carlos – Gamerro Cardenio.
LORNA SCOTT FOX – Yuri Herrera – The Transmigration of Bodies; Translated by Lisa Dillman.
KATE MCLOUGHLIN – Rose Tremain – The Gustav Sonata.
MAGGIE DOHERTY – Lucy Caldwell – Multitudes.
LITERATURE
MERIEL TULANTE – Sebastiano Vassalli – Io, Partenope.
WILLIAM ARMSTRONG – Ahmet Midhat Efendi – Felâtun Bey and Râkım Efendi – An Ottoman novel; Translated by Melih Levi and Monica M. Ringer.
LITERARY CRITICISM
JONATHAN TAYLOR – Elisha Cohn – Still Life: Suspended development in the Victorian novel.
HISTORY
JOHN ROGISTER – Gérard Sabatier and Béatrix Saule, editors – Le Roi est mort. Rémi Mathis et al, editors – Images du grand siècle. Charissa Bremer-David, editor – Woven Gold. William Ritchie Newton – Dans L’Ombre de la cour. Lucien Bély, editor – Dictionnaire Louis XIV. Joël Cornette – La Mort de Louis XIV. Hélène Delalex –Louis XIV intime.
TIMOTHY TACKETT – John Hardman – The Life of Louis XVI.
RELIGION
MARKUS BOCKMUEHL – N. T. Wright – The Paul Debate: Critical questions for understanding the Apostle. Rowan Williams – Meeting God in Paul.
NATURAL HISTORY
BERND BRUNNER – Drew Harvell – A Sea of Glass: Searching for the Blaschkas’ fragile legacy in an ocean at risk.
JEFFREY W. STREICHER – Ted Levin – America’s Snake: The rise and fall of the timber rattlesnake.
TRAVEL
LINDSAY DUGUID – Hunter Davies – Lakeland: A personal journey.
JOANNA KAVENNA – Oliver Balch –Under the Tump: Sketches of real life on the Welsh borders.
CULTURAL STUDIES
IAN THOMSON – Sarah Phillips Casteel – Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean literary imagination.
IN BRIEF
ALICIA RIX – Sergio Perosa – Art Making Life, Studies in Henry James, etc.
NIGEL PERRIN – Jean-Marie Borzeik – One Day in France.
HILARY PEARSON – Miranda Threlfall Holmes – The Little Book of Prayer.
MATT STURROCK – Dylan Jones – London Rules.
GRACE MOORE – Margarette Lincoln – British Pirates and Society.
HARRIET CURTIS – Mathilde Roman – On Stage.
STUART GEORGE – Simon Barnes – Losing It.
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
LUCIAN ROBINSON – Alan S. Kahan – Tocqueville, Democracy, and Religion – Checks and balances for democratic souls.
FROM THE ARCHIVES
NB
Nabokov’s ‘great gay comic novel’
I never met Vladimir Nabokov face to face, though I exchanged phone calls and letters with him. My psychiatrist encouraged me to visit him in Switzerland, but I was too afraid that I would quickly sabotage close-up whatever good impression I might have managed to create long-distance. As an editor at the American Saturday Review, I had orchestrated a cover story dedicated to Nabokov on the publication of his novel Transparent Things (1972), and sent Antony Armstrong-Jones to take a portfolio of photographs, including one that showed the novelist dressed as Borges in a poncho. (My boss had wanted to send a great artistic photographer such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, but I believed Nabokov would be more amused by Armstrong-Jones, the Earl of Snowdon, who had been married to Princess Margaret since 1960 and was, I guessed, more polished than the austere French genius. The two men got along famously.) Nabokov wrote a short piece on “Inspiration” for us, which I illustrated with a reproduction of “Pygmalion and Galatea” by Jean-Léon Gérôme, a big bad nineteenth-century painting of the infatuated sculptor embracing his creation as she turns from marble to flesh, feet last.
A number of tiny errors, typographic and even grammatical, had crept into Nabokov’s text. I had the copy set twice in print, my version and his, and sent them both by overnight express. He wired back, “your version perfect”. In the Nabokov “number” I included rather grudging essays by Joyce Carol Oates, William Gass and Joseph McElroy – and of course my own ecstatic response.
A few months later, I sent him galley proofs of my own first novel, Forgetting Elena. Nabokov sent me a note in response: “This is not for publication but my wife and I enjoyed your novel in which everything is teetering on the edge of everything”. (I later found this same “teetering” image in his evocation of a passenger’s point of view from inside a train leaving the station.) I couldn’t believe my good luck in gaining this endorsement from my favourite author, someone who was dismissive of Conrad, Dostoevsky, Faulkner and Balzac – even if I had to keep quiet about it. (Three years later Gerald Clarke, the biographer of Truman Capote, interviewed Nabokov, who in an unguarded moment revealed that I was his favourite American writer. He even tried to convince McGraw-Hill to take a look at my new manuscript, then titled “Woman Reading Pascal”, but without success. It remains unpublished.)
Nabokov’s masterpiece, of course, is Lolita, which finds a way of renewing the exhausted nineteenth-century tradition of the novel that analyses the passions (Adolphe,Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary) by re-creating it through the eyes of a criminal paedophile, in accordance with Nabokov’s doctrine that a novel should explore, not the genus or the species but an aberrant variety. Lolita is romantic and funny and perverted. But I have recently re-read Pale Fire (1962) which is, I realize only now, the great gay comic novel, an equally funny and sometimes tender portrait of a homosexual madman, Charles Kinbote. Kinbote (or Botkin) claims to have been the king of the “distant northern land” of Zembla who, deposed by revolutionary forces, has made another life teaching in an American college. The whole prose component of the book is his “scholarly” commentary on a 999-line poem by his neighbour, the venerable John Shade. The poem is actually an elegy to the poet’s dead daughter, but Kinbote is convinced it is about him and his flight from his captors.
Nabokov may have been inspired by his own four-volume translation and annotation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which he had been working on for years. Repeatedly, in the notes to Onegin, he tells the story of his own family and their lost Russian estates. It must have struck him that the self-serving scholarly annotations were funny and ripe for self-satire.
Kinbote’s mad “notes”, far from commenting on Shade’s poem, trace out a mini-biography of Kinbote. And that biography, real or delusional, is the picture of an unrepentant homosexual, sensual, guilt-free, tirelessly on the make. In the 1950s, gay men were portrayed in fiction and films as lonely phantoms – sad and colourless – or sometimes as instant villains (see Norman Mailer’s essay, “The Gay Villain”, 1954). Nabokov, by contrast, depicts Kinbote as lustful, entitled, screamingly absurd.
Kinbote is always drooling over some handsome lad and, as king (Charles the Beloved II), he usually has his way with them, even in a water closet: “the recent thrill of adventure had been superseded already by another sort of excitement. They locked themselves up. The tap ran unheeded. Both were in a manly state and moaning like doves”. What is perhaps the funniest scene involves a putative assassin, Gradus, and a lad named Gordon. Since this is a moment completely imagined by Kinbote (and, by any standard, not observed), the king’s imagination runs wild. He “dresses” the comely Gordon in one clichéd gay outfit after another. At first the tanned fifteen-year-old (“dyed a nectarine hue by the sun”) is in a “leopard-spotted loincloth”. Then he is “wreathed about the loins with ivy”. A second later he is fellating “a pipe of spring water” and wiping his hands “on his black bathing trunks”. Next, he’s magically “striking his flanks clothed in white tennis shorts” before that image dissolves into a “Tarzan brief” that is “cast aside”. Nabokov has plundered the full wardrobe of period gay porn.
Stranded now in a small American college town, Kinbote takes in a “dissipated young roomer”, whom he later calls “drunken, impossible, unforgettable”. When a rumour springs up that Kinbote is given to a “persecution mania”, he ascribes the gossip to “certain youthful instructors whose advances I’d rejected”. (As if.) One of the liberal gazettes in Zembla dubs the capital city “Uranograd”. The king, when still a prince of seventeen, dances in “masques with boy-girls and girl-boys”. The prince goes to “a formal heterosexual affair, rather refreshing after some previous sport”. When he dances with a pretty girl, Fleur – “pretty but not repellent” – he “hardly squirmed at all when she stroked his hand or applied herself soundlessly with open lips to his cheek”, nor did she “seem to mind when he abandoned her for manlier pleasures”. An American medium, channelling his dead mother, fruitlessly begs him “to renounce sodomy”. When he returns to his chambers “lying all over the painted marble and piled three or four deep were his new boy pages, a whole mountain of gift boys from Troth, and Tuscany, and Albanoland”.
When the Soviets take over his kingdom, he refuses to abdicate and remorselessly looks through field glasses at “lithe youths diving into the swimming pool of a fairy tale sport club”. Even when held captive, the king “kept in touch with numerous adherents, young nobles, artists, college athletes, gamblers, Black Rose Paldins, members of fencing clubs, and other men of fashion and adventure”. Of his youth we learn that “in those days growing boys of high-born families wore on festive occasions – of which we had so many during our long northern spring – sleeveless jerseys, white anklesocks with black buckle shoes, and very tight, very short shorts called hotinguens”. At twelve, Prince Oleg in the “mist of the bathhouse” reveals “bold virilia [that] contrasted harshly with his girlish grace. He was a regular faunlet”. Eventually Kinbote and Oleg are allowed by the authorities “to share the same bed”. When Oleg returns, “He carried a tulip. His soft blond locks had been cut since his last visit to the palace and the young Prince thought: Yes, I knew he would be different. But when Oleg knitted his golden brows and bent close . . ., the young Prince knew by the downy warmth of that crimson ear and by the vivacious nod . . . that no change had occurred in his dear bedfellow”. Even as Oleg and Charles escape the castle, the king is looking at his “shapely buttocks encased in tight indigo cotton”.
There are plenty of hints that Kinbote (the King, Charles) is demented or that “reality” itself is disputable. The absurd Kinbote – obsessed with his own royal story – is fantastically unaware of John Shade’s reluctance to waste time with him and especially of the scorn of Shade’s wife’s, whom Kinbote in return loathes when he isn’t condescending to her. Kinbote is the well-observed gay outsider of the past – lecherous, self-important, obsessed with fantasies of aristocracy, impervious to the subtleties of the heterosexual world around him. He would be despicable if his very earnestness and naivety were not so touching. His reckless “scholarship” must have been especially amusing to Nabokov (in particular, to Nabokov the lepidopterist, his failure to identify even the most ordinary butterflies). But Kinbote shares Nabokov’s distaste for Soviet brutes and his narrow but deep human sympathies.
At the time of the novel’s publication, many gay men were vexed by the satirical portrait, though now it seems perfectly acceptable. Gay critics are no longer prospecting for positive role models. What we have instead in Kinbote is a compendium of “period” gay images. The “Baron” (a fake title) Wilhelm von Gloeden’s staged photographs of Sicilian boys with cracked feet, peasant tans, hunger-bloated stomachs and coarse faces, wearing ancient Greek togas and laurel wreaths and holding papier maché lyres; Prussian porn and English gentlemen’s proclivities for willing, paid guardsmen; the aesthetes of Oscar Wilde’s day (a single tulip); the gay son of a famous womanizing king (Mad Ludwig and his royal father, lover of La Belle Otéro); the tennis champion Bill Tilden, whose spectacular playing made him famous in the 1920s – and whose paedophilia landed him in prison; “scoutmasters with something to hide”; idyllic romances with athletes and shepherd boys in the style of A. E. Housman, whose Shropshire Lad Kinbote admires above all other poems except for Tennyson’s equally fruity In Memoriam; the sailors so sought after as “rough trade” (non-reciprocating, drunk, heterosexual bullies): all are evoked here, a catalogue of male homosexual desire through the ages.
Nabokov took an entomologist’s delight in observing grotesqueries, but he could not resist lending Kinbote, at least in dreams, a little heterosexual tenderness for his Queen Disa, living in exile on the Riviera. At Edmund Wilson’s urging Nabokov read Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet and admired the writing, but was mystified as to why Genet wrote about men of all things. Even the misogynistic Kinbote thinks of Disa at night:
This love was like an endless wringing of hands, like a blundering of the soul through an infinite maze of hopelessness and remorse. They were, in a sense, amorous dreams, for they were permeated with tenderness, with a longing to sink his head onto her lap and sob away the monstrous past. They brimmed with the awful awareness of her being so young and so helpless. They were purer than his life. What carnal aura there was in them came not from her but from those with whom he betrayed her – prickly-chinned Phrynia, pretty Timandra with that boom under her apron – and even so the sexual scum remained somewhere far above the sunken treasure and was quite unimportant. He would see her being accosted by a misty relative so distant as to be practically featureless. She would quickly hide what she held and extend her arched hand to be kissed. He knew she had just come across a telltale object – a riding boot in his bed – establishing beyond any doubt his unfaithfulness . . . . One might bear – a strong merciless dreamer might bear – the knowledge of her grief and pride but none could bear the sight of her automatic smile as she turned from the agony of the disclosure to the polite trivialities required of her. She would be cancelling an illumination, or discussing hospital cots with the head nurse, or merely ordering breakfast for two in the sea cave – and through the everyday plainness of the talk, through the play of the charming gestures with which she always accompanied certain readymade phrases, he, the groaning dreamer, perceived the disarray of her soul and was aware that an odious, undeserved, humiliating disaster had befallen her, and that only obligations of etiquette and her staunch kindness to a guiltless third party gave her the force to smile . . . .
This is possibly Nabokov’s most lyrical tribute to a disappointed woman, but does it suit Kinbote’s character? Or is it Nabokov (who was unfaithful to his beloved wife Vera) expressing his own repentance for his extramarital affairs? Or is it Nabokov peeping through a mask and making his character more sympathetic, as he does more than once with Humbert? Nabokov knew that a long novel cannot be devoted to an entirely hateful character, and Kinbote has many redeeming qualities including an endearing narcissism, a strong libido, a vivid imagination and a poetic sense – even if this last tends to the kitschy.
Nabokov had a gay brother, Sergei,who died at the hands of the Nazis, and a gay maternal uncle, “Uncle Ruka”, who left him a large house and estate, which he possessed only briefly before the October Revolution. These relatives must have made him somewhat uneasy, since he believed homosexuality was inherited (in the past an eccentric opinion, but now a fairly mainstream theory), though a more libertarian position would be: you have a right to be whatever you are, no matter the cause; even searching for a “cause” is reactionary. Nabokov had a rare capacity for imagining himself into the minds of outsiders. A paranoid outsider is a particularly good subject for a novel, since a paranoid organizes all the world’s unrelated facts and random impressions around one central, focusing obsession. Kinbote sees himself as a monarch in exile threatened by an assassin, real or imagined, and he is determined to tell his story before he is killed. As it happens, perhaps the killer is Kinbote himself and the victim, Shade, who tells “Kinbote’s story” only according to the demented man’s scholarly annotations. As the novel winds down we discover that Shade’s killer might actually be an escaped madman named Jack Grey. Of course Kinbote thinks he was the intended victim and “Jack Grey” an identity that Gradus, the would-be regicide, had assumed. Fortunately for Kinbote and his delusions, Grey commits suicide before he can be interrogated. (Nabokov’s own father, a liberal Democrat, was assassinated in Berlin in 1922 by a misguided Russian monarchist while saving the life of the intended victim.)
Nabokov liked to play with shadow lives – “creative autobiography”, we might call it. Look at the Harlequins! features a satanic writer who really is a paedophile – a playful confirmation of some people’s worst suspicions about the author of Lolita. Humbert traverses the United States and teaches at a dowdy American university, as Nabokov did. Glory (1932; published in English translation, 1971) recounts the implausible return of its hero, whose history otherwise resembles Nabokov’s, to Russia, just as Ada (1969) tells of a parallel universe in which Russia and America are parts of the same country. Hermann, the principal character in Despair (1934; 1965), imagines he is the double of another man, but in fact they in no way resemble each other. The plot of this novel, too, recounts a misfired murder. Nabokov returned several times to the theme of the false doppel-gänger, a parody of the despised Dostoevsky’s The Double, not to mention his Notes From the Underground.
Even the index to Pale Fire is funny, and camp. We are told of a cordoned-off section of the royal picture gallery that “contains the statues of Igor’s 400 favourite catamites”. In the entry for Kinbote himself we discover inconsequential mentions of “his boyhood in Cedarn and the little angler, a honey-skinned lad, naked except for a pair of torn dungarees, one trouser leg rolled up . . . but then school started or the weather changed”. No matter that the little angler has never been mentioned until now. Kinbote also cites his loathing for a person who “makes advances and then betrays a noble and naïve heart, telling foul stories about his victim and pursuing him with brutal practical jokes”. Marcel is dismissed as “the fussy, unpleasant, and not altogether plausible central character, pampered by everybody in Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu”. Under “Odon”, who is identified as the actor who helps the king escape, the very last index entry is, “ought not to marry that blubber-lipped cinemactress, with untidy hair”. Finally we are told of “Uran the Last Emperor of Zembla, reigned 1798-1799; an incredibly brilliant, luxurious and cruel monarch whose whistling whip made Zembla spin like a rainbow top”.
Kingsley Amis, licence to kill
We revisit a review by Kingsley Amis of For Special Services, a James Bond novel by John Gardner, published in the TLS of September 17, 1982.
Ian Fleming’s last novel, The Man with the Golden Gun, appeared in 1965, the year after its author’s death. I published Colonel Sun: a James Bond adventure under the pseudonym of Robert Markham in 1968. The next Bond novel, Licence Renewed, by John Gardner, did not come along till 1981. Here now is For Special Services, by the same author.
Quite likely it ill becomes a man placed as I am to say that, whereas its predecessor was bad enough by any reasonable standard, the present offering is an unrelieved disaster all the way from its aptly forgettable title to the photograph of the author – surely an unflattering likeness – on the back of the jacket. If so that is just my bad luck. On the other hand, perhaps I can claim the privilege of at least a momentary venting of indignation at the disrepute into which this publication brings the name and works of Ian Fleming. Let me get something like that said before I have to start being funny and clever and risk letting the thing escape through underkill.
Over the last dozen years the Bond of the books must have been largely overlaid in the popular mind by the Bond of the films, a comic character with a lot of gadgets and witty remarks at his disposal. The temptation to let this Bond go the same way must have been considerable, but it has been resisted. Only once is he called upon to round off an action sequence with a yobbo-tickling throwaway of the sort that Sean Connery used to be so good at dropping out of the side of his mouth. No ridiculous feats are required of him. His personal armament seems plausible, his car seems capable of neither flight nor underwater locomotion, his cigarettes in the gunmetal case have the three gold rings as always and M calls him 007.
Nobody else does, though. The designation is a pure honorific like Warden of the Cinque Ports; some ruling from Brussels or The Hague has put paid to the pristine Double-O Section and its licence to kill long ago. Even the cigarettes are low-tar. But these and similar changes would hardly show if he had been allowed to keep some other interests and bits of himself, or find new ones. Does he still drink champagne with scrambled eggs and sausages? Wear a lightweight black-and-white dog-tooth check suit in the country? Do twenty slow press-ups each morning? Read Country Life? Ski, play baccarat and golf for high stakes, dive in scuba gear? What happened to that elegant international scene with its grand hotels and yachts? No information.
One thing Bond still does is have girls. There are three in this book, not counting a glimpse of Miss Moneypenny outside M’s door. The first is there just for local colour, around at the start, to be dropped as soon as the wheels start turning. She is called Q’ute because she comes from Q Branch. (Q himself is never mentioned, lives only in the films, belongs body and soul to Cubby Broccoli, the producer.) Q’ute is liberated and a champion of feminism. Luckily she only has two lines, but one of these contains a jovial mild obscenity, and a moment later there comes a terrifically subtle reference to the famous moment in the film of Dr No when Bond said, “Something big’s come up” in ambiguous circumstances and got the hoped-for laugh from the first audiences, thus, legend says, turning the subsequent films on to their giggly course. When you consider how much the original Bond would have hated these small manifestations of what the world has become since 1960 or so, you might be led to suspect a furtive taking of the piss, but nothing like it occurs again, as if Gardner, not the most self-assured of writers, had repented of his daring.
Bond’s second girl has the cacophonous and uncertainly suggestive name of Cedar Leiter – yes, kin to that Felix Leiter of the CIA whom sharks deprived of an arm and half a leg in Live and Let Die (1954). Cedar is his daughter, a superfluous and unprofitable device that raises that thorniest of all questions, Bond’s age in 1982. Bond keeps his hands off her throughout, perhaps out of scruple but more likely because only a satyromaniac would find her appealing. She is described as short – a deadly word. An attractive girl may be small, tiny, petite, pocket-sized and such, but never short. Poor Cedar has no style or presence, no skills or accessories, no colour, no shape. And it is this wan creature whom Bond instantly accepts as his partner for the whole enterprise. In a Fleming novel – I nearly wrote “in real life” – Bond would have outrun sound getting away from her. To be accurate, of course, he would have done that even if she had been Pussy Galore or Domino Vitali all over again. He knew all about the way women “hang on your gun-arm” and “fog things up with sex and hurt feelings”. But then that was 1953.
Bond scores all right with the third of the present trio, Nena Bismaquer, née Blofeld and the revengeful daughter of his old enemy, a detail meant to be a stunning revelation near the end but you guess it instantly. Nena – let me find the place – Nena looks fantastic and has incredible black eyes. Her voice is low and clear, with a tantalizing trace of accent. She wears exceptionally well-cut jeans and has that special poise which combines all the attributes Bond most admires in a woman. When she sees him first she gives him a smile calculated to make even the most misogynistic male buckle at the knees. As she comes closer, he feels a charge, an unmistakable chemistry passing between them. From expressions like these you can estimate the amount of trouble Gardner has taken with the figure of Nena and indeed the general level of his performance. It remains to be said about her that she has a long, slender nose and – by nature, not surgery – only one breast, an arresting combination of defects. Nobody really cares when she gets thrown among the pythons on the bayou. Well, there are pythons on this bayou.
There are two other villains round the place about whose villainy no bones are made from the beginning, Nena’s husband Markus and his boyfriend Walter Luxor. One is fat and cherubic, the other of corpse-like appearance, but neither exudes a particle of menace or looks for a moment as if he would be any trouble to kill, and Nena casually knocks them off one after the other on a late page. The three had schemed to steal the computer tapes governing America’s military space-satellites, having fed drugged ice-cream to the personnel in charge of them. Bond, brainwashed by other drugs into believing himself to be a US general, is at the head of the party of infiltrators, but a third set of drugs, administered by a suddenly renegade Bismaquer, brings him to himself just in time. This sounds, I know, like a renewed and more radical bid to take the piss, but seen in the context of the whole book and its genesis the absurdity, however gross, is contingent, mere blundering.
I have suggested that For Special Services has little to do with the Bond films. In one sense this is its misfortune. Those films cover up any old implausibility or inconsistency by piling one outrage on another. You start to say to yourself “But he wouldn’t –” or “But they couldn’t –” and before you can finish Bond is crossing the sunward side of the planet Mercury in a tropical suit or sinking a Soviet aircraft-carrier with his teeth. Hardly a page in the book would not have gone the smoother for a diversion of this sort. Why, for instance, does the New York gang boss set his hoods on Bond when all he has to do is ask him nicely? Echo answers why. The reader is offered no relief from his bafflement.
What makes Mr Gardner’s book so hard to read is not so much its endlessly silly story as its desolateness, its lack of the slightest human interest or warmth. Ian Fleming himself would have conceded that he was not the greatest delineator of character; even so his people have genuine life and substance and many of them both experience and inspire feeling. So far from being “the man who is only a silhouette” Bond is shown to be fully capable of indignation, compunction, remorse, tenderness and a protective instinct towards defenceless creatures. His girls have a liveliness, a tenacity and sometimes a claim on affection beyond the requirements of formula. Most of the Fleming books also have a more or less flamboyant figure assisting Bond and acting as a foil to him, such as Darko Kerim, the Turkish agent in From Russia, with Love, and Enrico Colombo, the virtuous black-marketeer and smuggler in “Risico”. By a kind of tradition, however, perhaps started by Buchan with Dominick Medina inThe Three Hostages, the main character-interest in this type of novel attaches to the villain. Mr Big, Hugo Drax, Dr No and their like are persons of some size and power. They are made to seem to exist in their own right, to have been operating since long before Bond crossed their paths, rather than to have been run up on the spot for him to practise on. But then to do anything like that the writer must be genuinely interested in his material.
Nabokov and epilepsy
The first time I had what was later determined to be a mild epileptic seizure – acute anxiety in the pit of my stomach and in my chest, accompanied by a dazed sensation, and followed by a bewildering and alarming sense that I was entering a kind of a parallel, déjà-vu universe, where I knew exactly what the person I was talking to (and whom I had just met for the first time) was going to say before he said it – was at a Nabokov conference organized by Nabokov’s biographer, Brian Boyd, in New Zealand, in January 2012. It lasted no more than a couple of minutes but left me feeling nauseous, disoriented and scared. After my return to the United States, similar episodes started occurring every thirty days or so. They were always brief, and were preceded not just by dazedness and disorientation, or “cephalic auras” as they are called, but also by “olfactory auras”, a very sharp and acrid smell. Finally I was diagnosed with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. I was stunned. To me, epilepsy was what Fyodor Dostoevsky and his characters experienced: stupor, frothing at the mouth, loss of consciousness, and even long spells of near-insanity.
The standard medical classification of epileptic seizures is as follows:
The manifestations of epilepsy depend on the area of the brain where the abnormal discharge occurs . . . . An attack of grand mal (tonic-clonic) epilepsy usually begins with bilateral jerks of the extremities or focal seizure activity. There is loss of consciousness and both tonic and clonic type convulsions . . . . Complex partial seizures, as in psychomotor (temporal lobe) epilepsy, usually, but not always, originate in the temporal lobe of the brain, often with a preceding aura . . . . Simple partial seizures, called also focal seizures, result from a localized cortical discharge. The symptoms may be either motor, sensory, autonomic, or any combination of the three.
Dostoevsky had “grand mal” seizures; mine were the simple partial ones. And they may have made me a much more discerning reader of the very same Nabokov who was the subject of the conference where my first seizure took place. I write about Nabokov and teach him every year, which means that I constantly re-read him (“One cannot read a book”, Nabokov famously advised his students; “one can only re-read it”). And certain passages in his autobiographical and fictional writings – amounting overall to a kind of obsession – started to come into sharper focus: he, too, must have suffered from some form of epilepsy.
Nabokov is, in fact, as generous in distributing epilepsy among his characters as was Dostoevsky who, as I will discuss below, may have been the main reason why the author of Lolita was not more open about his affliction. Nabokov’s personal testimonies do, however, at times approach the confessional. Thus in the second chapter of his autobiography, Speak, Memory, he writes:
As far back as I remember myself . . . I have been subject to mild hallucinations. Some are aural, others are optical . . . . Just before falling asleep, I often become aware of a kind of one-sided conversation going on in an adjacent section of my mind, quite independently from the actual trend of my thoughts. It is a neutral, detached, anonymous voice, which I catch saying words of no importance to me whatever – an English or a Russian sentence, not even addressed to me . . . . This silly phenomenon seems to be the auditory counterpart of certain praedormitory visions which I also know well . . . . On top of this I present a fine case of coloured hearing.
Nabokov shared his synaesthesia – “coloured hearing” and seeing letters in colours – with his mother; it occurs, we are told, in at least 4 per cent of temporal lobe epilepsies. He also apparently shared with her, as he reveals in the same chapter, “double sight . . . premonitions, and the feeling of the déjà vu”, all three definitely characteristic of epileptic seizures. Nabokov further elaborated on these strange sensations in “Inspiration”, an essay written late in 1972 for the Saturday Review(January 6, 1973; see Edmund White’s article in this issue). In this piece he even uses the notion of “an epileptic attack” to describe what is taking place: “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 . . . . [It] has neither source nor object. It expands, glows, and subsides without revealing its secret. In the meantime . . . a window has opened, an auroral wind has blown, every exposed nerve has tingled”.
When Nabokov reveals the effects of epilepsy on his characters who suffer from it, the accuracy is uncanny. In Pale Fire, the poet John Shade, who, if we are to believe his “annotator” Charles Kinbote, has “a mild form of epilepsy”, gives the following account of his childhood fainting fits:
There was a sudden sunburst in my head.
And then black night. That blackness was sublime.
I felt distributed through space and time:
One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand
Under the pebbles of a panting strand . . .
During one winter every afternoon
I’d sink into that momentary swoon.
In the same novel one of the rare astute observations by Kinbote in his commentary to Shade’s poem can be found in the description of “what physicians call the aura, a strange sensation both tense and vaporous, a hot-cold ineffable exasperation pervading the entire nervous system before a seizure”. And then there is the hapless but lovable Timofey Pnin, from the eponymous novel, whose seizure in a park in an unfamiliar town is depicted through the overwrought reaction, immediately recognizable to all epileptics, to this inexplicable occurrence:
that eerie feeling, that tingle of unreality overpowered him completely. . . .Was it a mysterious disease that none of his doctors had yet detected? . . . He felt porous and pregnable. He was sweating. He was terrified. A stone bench among the laurels saved him from collapsing on the sidewalk. Was his seizure a heart attack? I doubt it. For nonce I am his physician, and let me repeat, I doubt it . . . . Pnin felt what he had felt already on August 10, 1942, and February 15 (his birthday), 1937, and May 18, 1929, and July 4, 1920 – that the repulsive automaton he lodged had developed a consciousness of its own and not only was grossly alive but was causing him pain and panic. He pressed his poor bald head against the stone back of the bench and recalled all the past occasions of similar discomfort and despair . . . . The seizure had left him a little frightened and shaky . . .
When the narrator steps in to “doubt” that Pnin’s seizure stemmed from a heart attack, he appears to give us a clear indication not only as to what this “mysterious disease” was not, but also as to what it was. I believe the narrator’s diagnosis here was based on Nabokov’s own medical history.
Since there are no medical records available, the best sources of relevant clues are of course Boyd’s biography and Nabokov’s personal letters. Boyd lists the following known health problems that the writer apparently suffered from: “adenoma . . . concussion . . . heart palpitations . . . influenza/pneumonia . . . intercoastal neuralgia . . . lumbago . . . lung damage . . . nervous strain . . . pleurisy . . . psoriasis . . . shadow behind the heart . . . sunstroke . . . urinary tract infection . . .”.The “nervous strain” is particularly intriguing, since it is so vague. “Volodya has had a kind of nervous breakdown, due to overwork”, Edmund Wilson wrote in 1946 to their mutual friend, Roman Grynberg, the editor of Russian émigré journals. In 1952 Nabokov himself wrote to Grynberg, that his state of health was such that his nervous system only just then “had stopped resembling tangled barbed wire” (“перестала походить на спутанную колючую проволоку”), which is quite reminiscent of Kinbote’s characterization in Pale Fire of Shade’s clusters of epileptic seizures as “a derailment of the nerves at the same spot, on the same curve of the tracks, every day, for several weeks, until nature repaired the damage”.
“I was so joggy and jittery and buzzy with insomnia and so forth”, Nabokov complained to Wilson the following year, “that I decided to lay aside Pushkin for a few months.” “Pushkin” was his translation of Eugene Onegin, and he was already working on Lolita by then as well. There was definitely enough labour and anxiety there – as there had surely been in 1946, and in 1952 – to cause much general stress, but the way he describes it – “joggy and jittery and buzzy” – is also a perfect characterization of epileptic events.
As to Nabokov’s heart problems, he once suggested to Grynberg, who in 1950 was recovering from a mild heart attack, that when “one’s diaphragm presses onto one’s heart” it can by itself cause “seizures and faintings”, therefore revealing that he at that point must still have preferred to attribute those in his own experience to his heart troubles rather than to epilepsy. By the time he came to depict poor Pnin’s seizure in a strange city park, Nabokov seems to have already ruled that possibility out. While Pnin, like his creator, also suffers from “heart palpitations”, the “mysterious disease” here is obviously of an epileptic nature. Nabokov actually liked to apply the attribute “mysterious” to epilepsy. “Dostoevski . . . from his early years . . . had been subject to that mysterious illness, the epilepsy”, he stated in his Lectures on Russian Literature.
Nabokov knowing or suspecting he had epilepsy may also explain why he never drove a car. Back in the 1940s when the Nabokovs bought their first American automobile, people diagnosed with any form of epilepsy, including the mildest, were routinely prevented from having a licence. I should note, however, that it is probably equally likely that – as most Nabokov memoirists and biographers suggest – he simply proved to be a talentless learner and, in general, preferred to be chauffeured by his wife, Véra, just as he and his family had been chauffeured in St Petersburg and Vyra, where they spent the summers.
In search of more revelations about Nabokov’s medical history I wrote to Vladimir Petkevic, Nabokov’s great-nephew (his sister Olga’s grandson), who is a professor of Linguistics at Charles University in Prague, asking him if he was aware of anything in their family history that could shed more light on whether Nabokov indeed had the disease. “My answer is negative”, Dr Petkevic promptly responded. “I do not know anything about Nabokov’s epilepsy, nor was there anything of the kind in our broader family, as far as I know.” But on that score he turned out to be wrong. As I discovered later, there was, in fact, a “broader family” history of epilepsy among the Nabokovs: Nabokov’s first cousin, Nicolas, the composer, suffered from it.
This information comes to us from the recollections of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, which were incorporated into Vincent Giroud’s biography of Nicolas Nabokov (see Richard Taruskin’s review in this issue). Iwaszkiewicz, a Polish writer and occasional librettist, met Nicolas Nabokov in the 1920s, and the composer confided in him that “seizures could assault him on the street, on the steps of the metro, or in a restaurant”, and that he then experienced both crippling fear and amazing “moments of clairvoyance”; Iwaszkiewicz claimed to have personally witnessed the latter. Nicolas was, according to him, very good at masking his seizures, often through what Iwaszkiewicz called, using a Russian word, “Dostoevshchina”, or “Dostoevskian stuff”, which usually means over-the-top emotionalism and melodrama (or, to cite Iwaszkiewicz’s own elaboration of the term, “bad living, drinking, completely Russian outbursts which were terrifying in the orderly compartmentalized world of the West”). Quite predictably, it was also the author of The Idiot, the most famous epileptic of them all, whom Iwaszkiewicz deployed to describe Nicolas’s affliction: “he had the same disease as Dostoevsky”. When I asked Vincent Giroud whether he had come across any other references to his subject’s epilepsy, his response was that he had not: “He evidently never discussed it with members of his family, at least the surviving ones”.
I have no doubt whatsoever that Vladimir Nabokov, whose variant of epilepsy was probably even milder than Nicolas’s, likewise would have masked and concealed it from anyone but his immediate family. “Epilepsy” is, after all, a frightening word; to many, the condition is a violent and ugly one (in some cultures, it is even associated with in-bred criminality). But his main reason not to disclose it may have been rooted in something else entirely: namely, his legendary distaste for Dostoevsky, whom he considered to be a “third-rate writer”, “a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar”.
In Lectures on Russian Literature Nabokov readily admitted that he had done substantial research on epilepsy, in relation to Dostoevsky and in order to enlighten his students to whom he was – oh so reluctantly! – now and then teaching Dostoevsky’s novels:
I have consulted doctors’ case studies and here is their list classifying Dostoevski’s characters by the categories of mental illnesses by which they are affected:
I. EPILEPSY
The four well-marked cases of epilepsy among Dostoevski’s characters are: Prince Myshkin in The Idiot; Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov; Kirillov in The Possessed; and Nellie in The Humiliated and Insulted.
1) Myshkin is the classic case. He has frequent mood of ecstasy . . .
2) Smerdyakov . . . developed an exaggerated case of self-esteem, verging on megalomania
3) Kirillov . . . describes clearly the premonitory symptoms which he had often experienced.
4) The case of Nellie is unimportant . . .
Yet I strongly believe his interest in the subject was far from just purely academic. And if Nabokov himself indeed suffered from epilepsy, the prospect of people constantly comparing him to the author of The Brothers Karamazov, as the other famous Russian writer who was epileptic, would have absolutely horrified him. For Vladimir Nabokov there was, after all, no worse fate than being forever coupled with Fyodor Dostoevsky, except, perhaps, being forever linked with Sigmund Freud . . . . In Nabokov’s estimation, such eternal companionships had to be reserved only for those whom “Hell shall never parole”.
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All hitherto unpublished letters @ the Estates of Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, used by kind permission of the Wylie Agency LLC.
Born to be king
Last September marked the tercentenary of Louis XIV’s death. At least three impressive exhibitions were held, one on the King’s death at the Palace of Versailles, a second at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) on the development and impact of prints and engravings during his period of personal rule from 1661 to 1715, and a third at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles on the tapestries commissioned or bought by the King for display on ceremonial occasions. Two professors at the Sorbonne, Joël Cornette and Lucien Bély, have used the anniversary to produce an analysis of his reign, and in the case of Bély, a wide-ranging and detailed dictionary of its many aspects. A curator at Versailles, meanwhile, has tried to get behind the King’s majestic façade to discover his personality. And finally, readers of the TLS can renew their interest in the ongoing work of William Ritchie Newton on the topography and occupancy of Versailles and of its multitude of outlying buildings.
Cornette’s account of the reign in La Mort de Louis XIV proceeds along familiar lines. The child King is watched over by his mother Queen Anne as Regent and her clever but unpopular minister, Cardinal Mazarin. They steered a somewhat precarious ship of state through the rebellious Frondes and Spanish military invasion. Immediately after Mazarin’s death in 1661, the King assumed full authority and embarked on an impressive restructuring of the machinery of government and on the creation of academies and institutions that would develop the arts, sciences and manufacturing. The King’s thirst for military glory led to the projection of himself as a heroic figure through art and literature. The number of commemorative medals rose from thirty-seven struck in 1683 to 286 in 1702. Charles Le Brun, the King’s new official painter, was responsible for depicting the diplomatic and military successes of the early part of the reign on the ceilings of the state rooms at Versailles. Several French cities followed the trend, building statues and triumphal arches glorifying the monarch.
The wars were financially ruinous, and they forced the King to raise taxes, to borrow heavily and to put on the market an ever increasing number of unnecessary offices in the magistracy and in municipal and financial administration. Although rich entrepreneurs were keen to ennoble their families by the purchase of such offices, their channelling of funds away from profitable trading activities in this direction also gave rise to conflicts with existing bodies and to a reduction in the financial value of the offices.
Louis XIV’s pious practices concealed a vast ignorance of his religion, as the more knowledgeable Madame de Maintenon discovered when she had to read out chunks from the Bible to him. In Bély’s Dictionnaire, Raynald Abad usefully reminds us that “Jansenism” – a term rejected by its adherents – was simply an impressive reaffirmation of Augustinian theology that had for centuries been the doctrine of the Church and a basis of orthodoxy. This doctrine was perceived in an increasing number of universities and monasteries to be under attack from the Jesuit order. Where the Jesuits claimed, for instance, that one could obtain salvation if one chose to to lead a Christian life, the so-called Jansenists argued that one could only hope to attain salvation, as all things were preordained by God. Cornette concentrates more on the spread of Jansenism as a social phenomenon that turned into a focus for malcontents. He is not the only historian to go down this questionable path, losing sight of the ongoing religious appeal of a doctrine which also stressed the legal freedoms of the French Church and condemned tyrraunicide, unlike that of the Jesuits. Cornette fails to engage with the theological and legal issues at stake here.
Hélène Delalex’s Louis XIV intime is beautifully illustrated and sensitively written. Delalex delineates the contrasting aspects of the King’s personality. Louis explained in his memoirs how he overcame shyness once he had to speak in public. Only then did it appear to him that he was “the King and born to be so”. What remained of that shyness, he used to advantage by his laconic and memorable speech, by his frightening and awesome silences, and by his majestic bearing. Surrounded by fawning courtiers, he usually kept his shrewd appraisal of men. The guard of majesty only rarely slipped. Glancing in the mirror from his deathbed at a pair of footmen weeping, he asked them simply: “Did you think me immortal?” Amid the intricacies of court life and etiquette that she describes, Delalex also draws attention to the immense relief which music brought during the night to a monarch who suffered from insomnia and had strummed the guitar in his youth.
The BnF celebrated the reign with a lavish exhibition of engravings and prints showing how the development of these media owed much to the desire of the King and his minister Colbert to be less dependent on foreign artisans. French printmakers and engravers did not have to belong to a corporation, and the King so appreciated their work that he even soiled his golden-tasselled gloves while trying out the equipment of one of his printers. An early example of the political use of prints occurred in 1654 after his belated coronation in Rheims Cathedral took place in the difficult circumstances of internal conflict and war, with several royal princes in exile or fighting on the enemy side. Mazarin asked the gifted engraver Jean Lepautre to produce three large engravings of the ceremony. These were converted into numerous prints which could be distributed throughout the kingdom as proof that the King had been crowned. The political use of this medium was not lost on the monarch. The range and quality of the engravers was not limited to portraits of the King and of “les grands”, or of aerial views of Versailles, of court festivities, and of Lebrun’s series of paintings extolling the glory of le Roi Soleil. These artists produced biblical and mythological scenes, architectural plans, allegories for the academies, floral or furniture designs and scenes of everyday life. Their prints could be brought together in expensively bound volumes, and they also helped to publicize French art and fashion abroad.
Louis XIV’s coronation had been lacklustre, and Mazarin and the King were eager to enhance the magnificence of future ceremonies. They bought some of Charles I’s Mortlake tapestries when these were sold by Cromwell. With the aid of Le Brun, Louis set up his own Mortlake with the creation of the Gobelins, which produced a series of tapestries depicting scenes of the Histoire du Roy, including not just the King’s victories but his reception of an apology from the Pope. These and other tapestries depicting biblical and mythological scenes are superbly reproduced in Woven Gold, a volume of essays that accompanies a recent exhibition at the Getty Center and which, like the BnF catalogue, brings together experts on both sides of the Atlantic. By 1722, when Louis XV was crowned, Rheims Cathedral could be bedecked, both inside and out, with a wealth of tapestries, French and foreign. These concealed the choir’s Gothic appearance, which later disappeared from view altogether behind a huge theatrical construction in the Pompeian style at Louis XVI’s coronation in 1775. Le Pautre’s three prints may have been the only guide at the disposal of the organizers of Louis XV’s coronation, but now paintings and expensively printed books of engravings could mark the ceremony as well.
A combination of royal splendour and private squalor is described by William Ritchie Newton in his series of books on Versailles. Les Chevaux et les chiens was reviewed in the TLS when it first appeared as a privately printed volume (March 22, 2013). It is available to a wider public now that Champion has taken over the publication of the series. In Les Baraques we move speedily down the social scale to the lower orders who kept the wooden stalls and shacks that straddled and marred the approaches to the palace. They sold wine or tobacco and some were run by the wives of ostlers and floor-polishers. Others dealt in “take-away food” for courtiers whose apartments in the palace did not include kitchens. Food left on the royal and princely tables was passed down the line to those who had served it, and thence to their valets. Those who had brought down the remains of these meals would then sell them off in the baraques (shacks), usually at a higher price in winter when the King was in residence. The French attachment to les acquis (benefits) evident at the top of the social hierarchy reached down to the tenants of the stalls, who asserted rights to keep these in the family, lease them out for a retainer, or else sell them on. Newton displays his customary mastery of the archives and provides excellent plans and illustrations. Versailles emerges as an extraordinary microcosm of French society at the time.
The death of the King was accompanied by various rituals, well described in the book of the Versailles exhibition. Louis XIV approached his end in a Christian manner, putting into practice the medieval Ars moriendi. Familiar with the liturgy, he corrected the chaplains if they omitted or garbled passages from the prayers for the dying. After he died, the Faculty of Medicine moved in. The autopsy began with the removal of the heart and entrails followed by the embalming process, described in fascinating detail. The heart went in a golden reliquary to hang in the Jesuit Church in Paris, the entrails to Notre-Dame, and a few days later, the coffin was taken by night in a long torch-lit procession arriving at Saint-Denis in time for the lengthy obsequies, at which suitably lugubrious music by Charpentier and others was played. In 1793 the Revolutionary authorities disinterred the kings, and after the architect had made a few sketches they threw their bodies into a common grave. The entrails were also thrown out, and Louis XIV’s heart was sold as useful mumia to a painter, though its reliquary survives. One revolutionary turned the copperplate on the coffin into a casserole. When Louis XIV’s coffin was opened, those present were struck by his fixed majestic stare, and it was as much out of fear as of hatred that his body was cast into the earth with a final knifing to the mouth and to the stomach.
Grim Reader
A few years ago, I entered a morbid phase, and started subscribing to the in-house trade journals of the American funeral industry. The sangfroid that insiders bring to the business can be soothing. In the latest issue of American Funeral Director, it is salutary to learn, for instance, that “ninety-three percent of modern cremation families prefer non-traditionally shaped urns”, or that there is “an uptick of interest in new techniques of deep freezing”. Forty-five per cent of the country cremates, and the pace of innovation is reassuring. We can learn of Kyrprotek® mausoleum sealant systems, which protect against pests and stains; speedier lowering mechanisms for coffins; new “eco-friendly caskets”; and “natural scattering tubes” offered by Passages International®: “Our products don’t last!” Whatever place the act of dying now occupies in our late modern lives, the burial industry seems prepared to adapt to it, or, as it likes to counsel its clients, move forward.
As Thomas Laqueur remarks towards the end of his sprawling meditation on mortal remains, it is possible to cremate someone in the United States today “without ever speaking to, much less seeing a human being”. You can arrange it online, pay by credit card, order the body to be picked up, and have the ashes FedExed. “A small percentage of people leave the ashes of a relative with the undertaker”, Laqueur writes, “as they would leave with the veterinarian the remains of a pet that had been put down.” Marx’s adage can be retired: the tradition of dead generations no longer weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. Even close relatives – even parents – increasingly weigh very little. Laqueur estimates that the ash of a cremated body fills a milk carton. For better or worse, the West has escaped the tyranny that the dead once held over the living, and still do in many lands and cultures. We no longer make room for the dead in our worlds: the household flame lit for the ancestors, death masks, Sunday picnics in the cemetery, Funeral Savings Banks, even coffins themselves – all of these seem increasingly distant from our death-wary present.
If this outline of the history of mortality seems familiar – that once we grieved communally (think of tidy churchyards, or the crowds of female mourners tearing out their hair on ancient Greek vases) and now we grieve in less ordered ways; that people were once preoccupied with “dying well”, whereas now planning the details of anyone’s end seems almost obscene; that death has become a medicalized event, rather than a natural part of life – then it is in part because of one very idiosyncratic French historian, Philippe Ariès, whose masterpiece L’Homme devant la Mort appeared in 1977. For Ariès, who was pro-Vichy in his youth and remained a reactionary monarchist, the story of mortality in the West was one of our increasing alienation from death: the death of others and our own. This was a lamentable outcome of dechristianization, Ariès argued, and the unravelling of catholic rituals, which could no longer keep collective forms of mourning intact. Remarkably, many of the historians of death who followed Ariès – from Michel Foucault to Michel Vovelle to Arthur Imhof – have substituted new villains for Ariès’s story without altering the moral.
Laqueur’s book directly challenges Ariès’s story, but he begins by picking a quarrel with the ancient cynic Diogenes, who didn’t care what happened to his corpse and asked his followers to throw it to the dogs. For Diogenes to deliberately court this kind of end was saying something. The ancient Greeks tended to believe the “self” of the person was contained in the body, not the insubstantial soul that peeled away from it in death (Achilles re-joined and won the Trojan War in part in order to avoid watching his friend Patrocles’s corpse be mauled by dogs). But for Laqueur there is a trans-historical truth that Diogenes cannot get around. “It appears to be impossible to live for long with the stark sophism of Diogenes, whatever one might believe”, he writes. Or as the literary scholar Robert Pogue Harrison has put it, “To be human means, above all, to bury”. For as long as there have been human cultures – even human settlements – we have buried our dead. Lacquer offers an intricate historical narrative about the place the dead occupy in our lives, but he also has an anthropological, unabashedly universal argument about how the dead have always mattered, often in recurring ways that are often already available in the present. Consider, for example, that many of the families of the victims of 9/11 could not begin any form of grieving until they had been reassured that they had obtained at least some trace, some set of molecules that once belonged to their loved one. Achilles would have understood.
The Work of the Dead is a methodologically bracing book, but also one with an oddly retro, early-modern flavour. Laqueur likes to channel Thomas Browne, and often his work reads like compendium jammed with all the interesting tidbits he has collected in thirty plus years of reading and thinking about his subject. In the anthropological chapters, disparate moments and temperaments are sometimes thrillingly linked, and we are invited to make our own connections. Where Heraclitus once wrote in a poem that dead bodies make excellent fertilizer, Lacquer tells us that a nineteenth-century history professor at Heidelberg was fired from his post for making the same point. In a discussion of politically dangerous burials, Laqueur mentions how, in 2011, the German town of Wunsiedel had to destroy its grave for Rudolf Hess owing to the site’s attraction for neo-Nazis, while British imperialists in nineteenth-century Sudan were likewise careful not to incite the passions of Muslims in revolt by making sure the Mahdi got a respectful burial without a grave (as US Marines did with Osama bin Laden’s corpse). When the body of the Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev was rejected by many public cemeteries in the United States (eventually finding a resting place in a small private burial ground in Virginia), the classicist Daniel Mendelsohn noted the similarities with the story of Antigone’s brother, Polynices, whose remains were banished from Thebes because of the traitorous pollution they contained. The trans-historical need of the living to care for their own is so pronounced, according to Laqueur, that even an express materialist like Marx could not escape it. Laqueur tells of how Marx’s remains have been removed several times and his gravestone in Highgate was upgraded with the donations of his comrades. And how to account for the sentimental instructions of the anti-sentimentalist Eric Hobsbawm, who wanted to be buried near his idol? Or the case of Lenin, whose frozen body in the Kremlin required the invention of the science of cryogenics to keep it from deteriorating? When the Soviet scientists in charge of Lenin’s mausoleum ran out of funding at the end of the Cold War, they received donations from Vietnam and North Korea, which were willing to pay to keep Ho Chi Minh and Kim Il-Sung’s bodies intact for future generations.
Laqueur’s anti-historical picture is rich in vignettes, but his historical chapters are ultimately more satisfying. In the introduction, the author says that he originally set out to write a book about English churchyards. One wishes in a way that he had stuck with it, and then saved the rest for a giant anatomy of mortality-style collection. His argument about churchyards agrees in many way with Ariès’s account, with some notable twists. In a wonderful bit of back-of-the-envelope computing, for instance, Laqueur rejects the standard notion that cemeteries (as opposed to church graveyards) only came into being in the nineteenth century as a result of urban planners deciding that decaying corpses posed sanitary threats to the population. Not only does Laqueur argue that no one bought this line at the time, but by his rough estimate fecal and other decaying matter was produced in so much greater quantities that the dead were largely irrelevant to sanitation. In fact, a decomposing body is not very dangerous: the most noxious chemicals leave it quickly, and the more putrid and rotten it is, the safer it is to be near it. Rather than it being a question of hygiene, Laqueur sees the churchyard as a target of Nonconformists who “opposed using public money to support an established Church in which they did not worship and churchyards in which their dead were often made to feel unwelcome”. Where Ariès argued that cemeteries were an expression of the romantic urge to make death into something peaceful and beautiful, Laqueur finds a materialist cause lurking too. The “revolutionaries of the cemeteries” turned out in many cases to be joint-stock companies that bought cheap tracts of land around the world and profited by turning them into real estate.
In societies more rural than England’s, however, the “revolution of the cemeteries” was more straightforwardly tumultuous. Laqueur gives a good account of the Maria da Fonta Revolt that swept through Portugal in the 1840s, and which was at least partly animated by the revolt of peasants against the bourgeois transformation of their world. At the centre of that transformation was the requirement that priests have a certificate of inspection of a corpse before they could bury it – a certificate that could only be obtained from a doctor of the new liberal regime, who shared his fee with the state. Portuguese women in particular were at the forefront of one of the largest upheavals in the country’s history: a revolt against doctors and liberal scientific management.
“Just as the dead body has always been disenchanted it has also always been enchanted”, writes Laqueur. It is rare to encounter such a prominent historian so comfortable with the word “always”. At the heart of The Work of the Dead is the author’s conviction that the dead have always mattered for the living, but that the forms our practice of disposal and enchantment have taken over the centuries reflect – and will continue to reflect – our entry into modernity. A chief pleasure in Laqueur’s book, in which Amitav Ghosh rubs shoulders with Herodotus, is also sometimes the source of its frustrations. One wishes that Laqueur sometimes lingered a bit longer over fewer examples of the work the dead do, rather than briskly serving them page after page. Conversely, one relatively unexplored side of the subject is the revolutionary potential of the dead. We get no account from Laqueur of why the nineteenth-century Positivist Auguste Comte thought a cult of the dead could reinvigorate the “religion of humanity”, or how the cult of Patrice Lumumba, whose body was never found, keeps alive the old flame of anti-colonialist revolution in the DRC, or how the revolutionary call of Jesus not to bury the dead – with the end of world fast approaching, there just wasn’t enough time – was even possible. A book that captures all the different types of work the dead do would be impossible, but there is much more to understand about how Western culture, after once giving the dead so many tasks, increasingly no longer feels their weight.
A note from the Editor
Reputations are difficult to acquire, and stubbornly hard to shift.
Nicolas Nabokov is a man scarcely recognized for his work as a composer and writer. Indeed, he once described himself as a “half-composer”, not fully identified with his art because – as his great-nephew remarked – “he’s more famous for other things”. Those things are his association with the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), widely said to be a front for the CIA during the Cold War.
Richard Taruskin rails against the unfairness of the charge in his review of Vincent Giroud’s biography of Nabokov. Taruskin believes that Nabokov “was not told, and knew better than to ask” about the involvement of the CIA in the CFF, of which he was Secretary-General for sixteen years. Nabokov needed no external encouragement, after all, to oppose the totalitarianism of Stalin, or to support the artistic endeavours of the artists that surrounded him.
Of Nabokov’s own musical and writing talent, the biography says too little. As Taruskin himself notes, “his books, like his essays on music, are fairly insubstantial compendia of polished anecdotes and table talk”; his music is now hard to find and not universally liked. One Polish writer called it “strazne gówno”, for example (you will have to read the review to discover what that means).
Nicolas’s cousin was, of course, Vladimir, known to the family as Volodya. His reputation is, to say the least, secure. But such a figure of greatness invites ongoing scrutiny and assessment. Edmund White (who, he tells us, was Nabokov’s favourite American writer) has reconsidered Pale Fire, that “great gay comic novel”. Nabokov had a gay brother, Sergei, murdered by the Nazis, and a gay maternal uncle, and was – perhaps not coincidentally – gifted with “the rare capacity for imagining himself into the minds of outsiders”.
Galya Diment peers further into Nabokov’s mind, asking whether he suffered from a mild form of epilepsy. Cousin Nicolas, to complete the family circle, did have seizures himself, concealing them – according to his friend – via “Dostoevshchina” or “Dostoevskian stuff”, the sort of over-the-top emotionalism characteristic of the Russian temperament.
The very fact that Dostoevsky had the disease may have ensured Vladimir Nabokov’s silence about his own condition. He would have hated to have been paired with his fellow countryman for that reason (or any other), and had his eye on future comparisons. “In the long run we are all dead”, as Keynes noted; but our reputations live on after us.
Stig Abell
Poem of the Week: ‘The Donkey’
In his study of modern masculinity Iron John (1990), the American poet Robert Bly (b.1926) talks of the way fairy stories “continue to unfold” their meanings “once taken in”. This interest in the deep, suggestive power of archetypes is also evident in his poetry, much of which draws on the storytelling element of spiritual traditions such as Sufism: poems, like parables, release their meanings slowly. Perhaps this is why Bly is particularly drawn to the Persian ghazal, whose six stanzas often create apparently unconnected landscapes from which, at first, no unifying theme emerges. As he said in the introduction to his translations of the ghazals of the nineteenth-century Indian poet Ghalib (The Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib, 1999), “it slowly becomes clear that we are dealing with a way of adventuring . . . through a poem utterly distinct from our habit of textual consistency”.
Bly is a keen reviser of his own work – not afraid to “educate himself in public” – which may be another reason why such open-endedness appeals to him. In this version of “The Donkey” published in the TLS in 2000, religious seekers sacrifice Nikos’s donkey in a ritual celebration of the beauty of God’s creation. It is no longer Nikos’s donkey; in a sense, our world is no longer ours. But in the last stanza of the version Bly included in his collection The Night Abraham Called to the Stars (2001)
The donkey we have loved for years may be killedAnd cooked one day while we go on singing.Let’s not write a single poem without gratitude
the original implication that our faith may get between us and what we love changes into the suggestion that something may one day kill off our ability to see things properly “while we go on singing”. For that reason, we ought to be grateful for every poem we write.
The Donkey
Do you remember the afternoon when Nikos,After wandering with his donkey and saddlebags,Arrived one day at a farm of Godseekers?
The Godseekers all came out when he knocked.They welcomed him, gave him tea, broughtHis donkey to the stable for oats and water.
“Stay for supper,” they said. How glad he was!They drank tea for hours. Dinner came.They all ate happily and began to dance.
The Godseekers sang one poem overAnd over: “What a long bray on the tail of a God!How many tiny hairs under God’s jaw!”
In the morning, he said, “Could I have my donkey?”They said: “What do you mean, your donkey?You ate the meal! You heard the songs!”
We are all like this Greek wanderer.We don’t know it, but the chances are goodWe’ve eaten the donkey that brought us here.
ROBERT BLY (2000)
Table of Contents
LITERARY CRITICM
D. J. TAYLOR Clinging Sixties – The pivotal year of 1966.
ANDREW MOTION Peter Parker Housman Country – Into the heart of England.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
HISTORY
KATE CHISHOLM Michael Kassler et al, editors – Memoirs of the Court of George III.
LINDSAY GAIL GIBSON Lauren Elkin – Flâneuse – Women walk the city in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London.
LAW
ALAN MOSES Sally Smith – Marshall Hall – A law unto himself.
POLITICS & MEMOIRS
TIM MARSHALL Tabish Khair – The New Xenophobia. Hsiao-Hung Pai – Angry White People – Coming face-to-face with the British far Right.
SOCIAL STUDIES
BARNABY ROGERSON Lawrence Rosen – Two Arabs, a Berber and a Jew – Entangled lives in Morocco cultural history.
RONA CRAN Margo Jefferson – Negroland.
CULTURAL HISTORY
LARA FEIGEL Kate Murphy Behind the Wireless – A history of early women at the BBC.
KRISTEN ROTH-EY Stephen Lovell Russia in the Microphone Age – A history of Soviet radio, 1919–1970.
CLASSICS
TIM WHITMARSH K. J. Dover – Greek Homosexuality.
CAROL ATACK Esther Eidinow Envy, Poison, and Death – Women on trial in classical Athens. Andrew T. Alwine – Enmity and Feuding in Classical Athens.
CHINESE LITERATURE
JEFFREY WASSERSTROM Yunte Huang, editor – The Big Red Book of Modern Chinese Literature – Writings from the mainland in the long twentieth century.
COMMENTARY
ZINOVY ZINIK Freelance – Pushkin’s waistcoat.
ARTS
TOBY LICHTIG Roald Dahl Love From Boy – Roald Dahl’s letters to his mother; Edited by Donald Sturrock. The BFG (Various cinemas).
GUY DAMMANN Hector Berlioz Béatrice et Bénédict (Glyndebourne Festival Opera) C. W. von Gluck Philemon and Baucis. Thomas Arne The Judgement of Paris (Bampton Classical Opera, on tour).
ADAM MARS-JONES The Commune (Various cinemas)
FICTION
ADAM THORPE Paul Kingsnorth – Beast.
GERRI KIMBER Sarah Perry – The Essex Serpent.
ANNA GIRLING Daisy Johnson – Fen.
ANNA KATHARINA SCHAFFNER Charlotte Roche – Mädchen für alles.
JONATHAN GIBBS Sarah Moss – The Tidal Zone.
BIOGRAPHY & LITERARY CRITICISM
TREV BROUGHTON Charlotte Brontë – A Life.
CAMILLA CASSIDY Gage McWeeny – The Comfort of Strangers – Social life and literary form.
POETRY
WILLIAM WOOTEN Craig Raine – My Grandmother’s Glass Eye – A look at poetry.
NATURAL HISTORY
MATT GOLD Richard Fortey The Wood for the Trees – The long view of nature from a small wood.
RICHARD HAMBLY Hugh Aldersey-Williams Tide – The science and lore of the greatest force on earth.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
DAVID RUNDLE Stephen Orgel The Reader in the Book – A study of spaces and traces.
JIM MCCUE Rob Shepherd The Cinderella of the Arts – A short history of Sangorski & Sutcliffe.
RELIGION
ALBERT WEALE Edward L. Rubin Soul, Self, and Society – The new morality and the modern state in brief.
IN BRIEF
PATRICK DIAMOND Andrew S. Crines and Kevin Hickson, editors Harold Wilson – The unprincipled Prime Minister?
JONATHAN DRUMMOND Graham Robb Cols and Passes of the British Isles.
SCOTT ESPOSITO Michèle Audin One Hundred Twenty-One Days.
STEVEN GUNN Lauren Johnson So Great a Prince – England and the accession of Henry VIII.
RACHEL HADAS Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber The Slow Professor.
JEREMY MYNOTT Peter Marren Where the Wild Thyme Grew -Growing up with nature in the Fifties and Sixties
ROSS WILSON Reginald Gibbons – How Poems Think.
FROM THE ARCHIVES
NB
Segregated comfort
Last year in St Louis, during a fiery speech by the president of the NAACP Cornell William Brooks, a group of black agitators in their early twenties stood up before a gathering of older Civil Rights figures. Accusing their leaders of standing by while they dodged rubber bullets and tear gas canisters, the protesters demanded, and received, a chance to speak. “This ain’t your grandparents’ Civil Rights movement”, a young St Louis rapper named Tef Poe exhorted them. “Get off your ass and join us!”
Paul Beatty may be a few years older than Poe, but with his well-timed and audacious novel, he has written a book-length version of Poe’s generational cri di coeur. In both form and page-upon-page of hilarious content, The Sellout lays to rest rational narratives of any comfortable “post-racial” America.
Beatty stakes out a fractured universe that would be merely cartoonish if it did not contain so many whispers of the real. The story opens with its pot-smoking narrator, whose last name is Me – and who is variously nicknamed “Bonbon”, “Massa” and “Sellout” – before the Supreme Court bench, hands cuffed and crossed behind his back. From a marijuana haze, he assures us that his crimes are graver than we might expect:
This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything. Never cheated on my taxes or at cards . . . . I’ve never burgled a house. Held up a liquor store.
What Me has done is violate the Constitution’s Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments by instituting slavery and segregation. In a quixotic bid to recover his lost hometown of Dickens, an “agrarian ghetto” gentrified off the Los Angeles map, Me has revived the two deadliest sins of American history.
Me’s programme to keep whites out of the public transport and education systems in Dickens has met with unexpected success. Me deploys separatism as a tool because he recognizes that integration, in America, is often used as “a cover-up”. As Me mockingly puts it, “I’m not a racist. My prom date, my second cousin, my president is black (or whatever)”. Me’s social engineering eventually prompts a panic-stricken reaction. The vastly improved test scores of black children in Dickens’s newly segregated Chaff middle school draw the smug ire of one national magazine:
… the secret was out. The New-ish Republic Magazine, which hadn’t had a child on its cover since the Lindbergh baby, broke the story: Above the caption “The New Jim Crow: Has Public Education Clipped The Wings of the White Child?” was a twelve-year-old white boy, posed as the pint-sized symbol of reverse racism.
Like the novel itself, which is both riotously experimental and touching, both erudite (it alludes, often jeeringly, to everyone from Tennyson and Mark Twain to Toni Morrison and Jean-Michel Basquiat) and viscerally engaging, Me inhabits a state of crushing bifurcations. Raised by his radical academic single father, who made Me the subject of a series of race-related psychological experiments, Me is an alien to his own community while sharing the same “shitty upbringing” in south Los Angeles “that I’ll never be able to live down”. When his father is gunned down by police in a ludicrous “accident”, his first reaction is disbelief: “I didn’t cry. I thought his death was a trick. Another one of his elaborate schemes to educate me on the plight of the black race and to inspire me to make something of myself …. . . “.
There lingers throughout The Sellout a fatalism, an expectation that “like all lower-middle-class Californians, I’d die in the same bedroom I’d grown up in, looking up in the cracks in the stucco ceiling that have been there since the ’68 quake”. While the narrator of The Sellout possesses a home-school education and the dreams of his father, he has little else, save his wit. And there’s no money. His father’s memoir that he said would one day secure “an easy twenty thousand up front” never materializes.
Rather than tightly woven plots, Beatty fashions a rough-hewn narrative scaffolding. From that vantage point, the greater part of the novel is a loosely corralled series of routines, to echo William Burroughs’s word for the “fragmentary” vignettes that comprise Naked Lunch, a book that shares with The Sellout a no-holds-barred sense of sacred mission and endless playfulness.
Exceptional comic writing makes the skeletal plotting work. Similar in spirit and form to the iconoclastic stand-up of Bill Hicks or the early storytelling of Chris Rock, the routines allow you to dip in almost anywhere and reap rewards. The author of two books of poetry and two well-regarded novels in a peripatetic career reaching back to the early 1990s, Beatty is especially acute when pointing at literary culture. As Me puts it during one of his local “Dum Dum Donuts” book club discussions:
I’m so fucking tired of black women always being described by their skin tones! Honey-colored this! Dark-chocolate that! My paternal grandmother was mocha-tinged, café-au-lait, graham-fucking-cracker brown! How come they never describe white characters in relation to foodstuff and hot liquids?
Terms such as “bitter”, “caustic”, “biting”, “acerbic”, and anything in the “corrosive” line always have a way of reducing satire to something that sounds more like a toxic dump or a bathroom cleaner than literature. Beatty’s inspiring new novel about the impossibility of “post-racial” anything in America is much more than “scathing” – it is constructive.
