I mean Nabokov, not Updike.
How is it possible that his name and writing, superior in all possible aspects, were even associated in the mind of these two reviewers (whose essays nevertheless are very good, especially the second) with this verbose, conflicted, lecturing old gelding ? Where the urge to kick comes from? Or, rather, not the urge itself (that’s none of my business, really), but the urge to kick this dead thoroughbred, in particular?
See here:
But where Updike celebrates the ordinary and accessible, Nabokov delves into the arcane and mysteriously complex. Where Updike is somewhat warm (although at times repellent), Nabokov is very cold (and at times repellent)*. But both are almost unsurpassed in their ability to string words together beautifully in what are often very long sentences that nevertheless retain their clarity of meaning.
Or, here:
Oddly, as pre-teen critic of literary style, I never had much time for Updike, preferring either the super-saturated arrogance of the later Nabokov* (Speak, Memory, the generally unloved Ada), or Faulkner’s alternatively maddening, compelling repetition.
So, having done an impossible for mere mortals fit: mastering the language of an alien nation to the point of second identity; being, in fact, praised as superb stylist in that second language doesn’t bring one any closer to actual understanding by the natural speakers of that second language. How comforting to know.
*Bold is mine
P.S. Regarding percieved “coldness” of Nabokov: he could be described, to use a phrase by Victor Serge, as “burn of the icy water”.
P.P.S. Minor detail, but Nabokov is pronounced thusly, i.e. with stress on the second syllable and the vowel is O, not A. I remember how 5 years ago, during conversation with [far better than me] encyclopedically educated literary critic I couldn’t understand for good 10 minuted what” excellent Russian writer” he’s talking about – until I finally built up courage to show my possibly devastating ignorance and asked him to spell the name of the writer. Ow.
Who’s kicking Nabokov? Not me!
Read that quotation again, please! My point’s precisely the opposite of what you imply: in my teens I considered Nabokov a better stylist than Updike, as indeed I still do. What’s more – which, admittedly, I don’t mention in the essay – I consider Nabokov a far better writer, as well a far better critic. He had the sort of range of which Updike could not even begin to dream. So if anyone’s getting kicked here, it certainly isn’t Nabokov.
Possibly the confusion arose over my choice of ‘supersaturated arrogance’ as a term of praise – but for what it’s worth, I meant this as a term of praise. When it came to his ability to write in Russian, French and English – as well as his understanding of these three literary traditions – Nabokov had some reason to be arrogant! And anyway, I like arrogant men. (Actually, I like cold men, too.) ‘Ada’ is one of two or three books I re-read yearly. ‘Speak, Memory’ is another. (‘War and Peace’ is the third, in case you’re wondering.) So, then, I plead not guilty as charged. (Unbelievably, I actually typed that as ‘quilty’ on my first try …)
In any event, though, ‘verbose, conflicted, lecturing old gelding’ is certainly a recognisable complaint about the late Mr Updike – and thank you, too, for the implied praise in your paragraph above.
With best wishes
Bunny Smedley
Fugitive Ink
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Well, no, maybe not “kicking” per se, but association itself when writing about Updike – that’s what startled me.
First I read the Neoneo’ post and the fact surprised me, and afterward I find that you, too, tie these two names together in an eulogy! [not exactly an eulogy, gratefully]
It’s not the characteristic itself that I find objectionable, but the misunderstanding of Nabokov the Writer that is widespread – as one cold-hearted, arrogant, cynical SOB. It is so…short-sighted. As if people never seen turtles, with their hard shells protecting tender insides. Why, sometimes he’s a regular tear-jerker! At least for this reader.
It’s hard for me to judge Nabokov’s proficiency in French since I don’t speak a word of it. But I would believe it.
I loved your post, especially the last part of it; the praise is more than well-deserved.
Tatyana
PS Forgot to say: since I found you on one of Brian’s threads, you’re in my WordPress reader. Thank you for an always interesting reading (except the finer points of British politics…sorry)
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Having worried about this all day, I suspect the tendency to link Nabokov and Updike stems more or less organically from the literary conditions of the USA in the late 1960s and 1970s.
If a bookish child wanted to find a model for ways in which to write about contemporary America, what would he or she find? The choices, ultimately, divided fairly neatly into two contrasting camps. On one hand, there were the writers like Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut, writing a relatively spare, unornamented form of explicitly American English, often producing rather schematic books, labouring under a not particularly subtle or even sensible freight of didactic, occasionally highly politicised purpose.
And on the other hand – well, there were writers like Updike, Faulkner (dead, of course, but still a motive force in Southern writing), and Nabokov. (For anyone who’s inclined to feel shocked at the notion of Nabokov as an American writer, I am simply describing how it seemed at the time, in the wake of ‘Lolita’ and ‘Pale Fire’, both of them absolutely sodden with the stuff of American experience.) They weren’t afraid that sounding ‘writerly’ – treating language almost as an end in itself, a ludic enterprise for which no excuse was needed – would somehow come across as effeminate or, heaven help us, un-American. Nor were they particularly programmatic, obsessed with creating the sort of plot best diagrammed on the back on an smallish envelope, or obviously politically committed. (Which isn’t, of course, to say that each of these writers didn’t project some sort of political stance – just that their books seem to have been individualist statements first, rather than generalising and normative ones.)
Their books, of course, were all very different. The point, though, was that it was to this set of influences that I gravitated, rather than towards the spare, slightly joyless language of Mailer & Co. And so when Updike died, it seemed perfectly natural for me to point out that I thought him a less admirable stylist than e.g. Faulkner or Nabokov. That Updike was a less admirable stylist than e.g. Mailer I took, and indeed take, as self-evident.
Does that help? I’ll stand, though, by my claim that Nabokov’s writing comes across as arrogant – as well as by my declaration that this is by no means a criticism of any of his writing, notably the later work. Doesn’t it take a degree of arrogance to believe that it’s humanly possible to make a book like ‘Pale Fire’ work? Doesn’t it take a degree of arrogance to write a book like ‘Ada’, so clearly calibrated to amuse and touch its own author, above and beyond any putative audience? Doesn’t it take arrogance to create a mode of expression as distinctive as that created by Nabokov?
As for coldness, though – I absolutely agree with what you write about turtles. Personally, if there’s a degree of reticence, instances of cool understatement here and there in e.g. ‘Speak, Memory’ – and there is, for instance when he writes of his brother’s death – those are all the more moving for what I take to be an unstated assumption that I, the reader, will understand at least some of what he, the author, is feeling, without having every little nuance spelled out, just as friends or lovers don’t always have to say everything explicitly in order to share something important. Nor do I think Nabokov is ‘detached’ – a charge also directed at Updike, also wrongly – he’s just capable of demonstrating engagement with subtlety. And as for ‘cynical’ – it is genuinely hard for me to think of a single writer, ever, who’s a sterner judge of cynicism when he depicts it in his characters.
Of course whether one likes any of this comes down, ultimately, to a question of taste, and while I’ll argue about that sort of thing all day in the context of the visual arts, I lack the knowledge to do so in the context of literature. Suffice to say, though, that it isn’t necessary to equate Nabokov and Updike in terms of quality to see that at one point in time, at least, they both had something – different things, obviously – to offer a child who was desperate to understand all the various things that language could do, if only in order to find her own voice.
What a very long reply I seem to be leaving – but then you did ask a very interesting question!
Finally, I am very pleased to have found your blog – it’s always bracing to find someone who does not shy away from strong opinions! – and I look forward to exploring this intriguing Creaky Pavillion more fully in the near future.
Bunny Smedley
Fugitive Ink
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Arrogance is not the right word, although one might find deep underlying ties, on distant emotional note, with what Nabokov possessed. It’s difficult to find correct synonyms; disdain? Refusal to respect mundane realism? Objection to Higher Purpose, as it understood by moralists?
He is not the first writer (particularly in Russian literature, there could be similar circles in English and French), who rejected, after much analyzing, the road of didactism, “an underlying lesson”, in work of art. There was a whole school, encompassing fine arts as well as literature and even theater, in turn-of-the-century Petersburg (I’m sure all kinds of ties to symbolists, who were extremely popular at the time, could be followed.) It was called “Art for the Art Sake”, a bit earlier there was a group, formed around magazine called Mir Iskusstva(The World of Art) – I’m sure you heard of it [few names: Dobuzhinsky, Benois, Somov, Bakst – to give an idea] – they all were trying to look at producing piece of art, first and foremost, as an act of creating an aesthetic perfection – all other considerations might – or might not still – come afterwards, including political/moral/social fillers. Vyachesla Ivanov had hosted a salon (“turreted house”, mentioned here), called informally The Ivory Tower, where for 15 years literary and artistic Petersburg could find refuge from stormy reality of politicized world outside. This tradition later stemmed into famous “formalism” school of Sklovsky and Tynyanov.
All of this was a necessary reaction to the 1870s and 80s: social-democratic dumbing down of the literature and arts by the likes of Nekrasov, Chernyshevsky and the rest of them proto-revolutionaries. This curse of “social message” developed later (and crushed so many talents, and even lives) into “social realism”, with it didactic demagoguery.
3 novels and handful of short stories that Nabokov wrote in English might make him a star of American literature, but he’s a link in chain of the Russian one – a formidable link;the biggest part of his legacy is written in Russian. By a caprice of fate, a lucky chance, a circumstance beyond the realm of literature he became internationally known only when he crossed the ocean in the 40’s. He remained, before and after, a Russian classic.
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As to “long reply”: long replies are welcome here! In fact, this is the kind of stimulating conversation I had hoped for when I started this blog; it’s been rather rare, unfortunately (most likely, due to my own failures of communication).
I’m glad you’re interested in my blog, archives at the right are open for perusal.
No shortage of opinion in this quarters, true (which more often than not shocks people…); for instance, I have a few objections to your post about your post about Palladio villas, or rather objections to conservationists who desire to stifle all and every residential and industrial development for the sake of preservation. [yes, I’m in the trade: a commercial interior designer. It shows, I know].
But that’s a sloppy comment; it should be addressed in appropriate place.
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“verbose, conflicted, lecturing old gelding”
Arghhh… no arguing about tastes, I guess. Still, the old man was never a gelding. Pegasus would be a better description.
Oh well…
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Hi, Snoopy.
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