Picked-Up Pieces (32 page)

Nor is the matter being thus roughly intruded into our consciousness of a compensating solidity or persuasive immediacy.
Ada
is subtitled “Or Ardor: A Family Chronicle,” and the central family matter, not easily grasped, concerns the marriage of the two Durmanov sisters, Marina and Aqua, to two men each called Walter D. Veen, first cousins differentiated by the nicknames Red (or Dan) and Demon. Demon has an extensive love affair with Marina but marries Aqua, who readily goes insane; this unhappy marriage has one apparent offspring, Ivan, who is not to be confused with Uncle Ivan, the Durmanov sisters’ short-lived brother. “Apparent,” I say, because young “Van’s” real mother is Marina, who, fertile as well as obliging, is also the mother of Demon’s other illegitimate child, Ada, and—by her own husband, Red Veen, the well-known art dealer—another daughter, Lucette. The very incestuous (“very” because besides being ostensible first cousins and actual siblings they are also third cousins, descended from Prince Vseslav Zemski) love affair between Van and Ada preoccupies nearly six hundred rollicking pages.

The genealogical maze rests upon the unquiet geography of the planet Demonia, or Antiterra, where our homely Terra is a disconnected rumor,
pieced together from the visions of madmen and “believed in,” or not, like Heaven. On Antiterra, Canady and Estoty contain large French and Russian territories (much as Nabokov’s memory must) and surprising sights, like “the peasant-bare footprint of Tolstoy preserved in the clay of a motor court in Utah where he had written the tale of Murat, the Navajo chieftain, a French general’s bastard.” Most of
Ada
occurs in the second half of Antiterra’s 19th century, after the “L disaster” has caused electricity to be banned, leaving people to communicate with “dorophones,” which ring by making all the toilets in the house gurgle; one answers by saying “
A l’eau!
” The atmosphere of this “distortive glass of our distorted glebe” is dreamy with the stale air of classic novels and swarms with swattable little midges like “Mr. Eliot, a Jewish businessman,” “Dr. Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu,” “
Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago
,” “
Collected Works of Falknermann
,” “that dislikable Norbert von Miller,” and “James Jones, a formula whose complete lack of connotation made an ideal pseudonym despite its happening to be his real name.”

Now, why should an author not create a “nulliverse” to represent “oneirologically” the contents of his own mind? The “L disaster,” “which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of ‘Terra,’ ” is surely the Russian Revolution, which caused such a great dislocation in Nabokov’s life. The confusion of America (Estotiland) and Russia (Tartary) into one idyllic nation where everyone speaks French is, more than a joke upon Canada, a metaphor of personal history. Vain, venereal Van Veen verges on V.N.; Nabokov = Van + book. Ada (rhymes with Nevada) is ardor and art—but not, I think, the Americans for Democratic Action. She is also, in a dimension or two, Nabokov’s wife Véra, his constant collaboratrice and the invariable dedicatee of his works. Ada’s marginal comments on Van’s manuscript, reproduced in print, are among the liveliest bits in the book, and offer an occasional check upon the author’s rampaging genius. I suspect that many of the details in this novel double as personal communication between husband and wife; some of the bothersomely exact dates, for instance, must be, to use a favorite word of our author, “fatadic.” I am certain that trilingual puns crowd and crawl (“
Je raffole de tout ce qui rampe
”—“I’m crazy about everything that crawls”—Ada says) beneath the surface of this novel like wood lice under the bark of an old stump. Their patient explication, and
the formal arrangement of the parallels and contraries that geometricize “our rambling romance,” the hurried reviewer may confidently leave to the graduate student who, between puffs of pot, while his wife strums the baby or dandles the guitar—by Log, this deadly style is infectious!—can spend many a pleasant and blameless hour unstitching the sequinned embroidery of Nabokov’s five years’ labor of love. He might begin with the prominently displayed anagram of “insect” (“incest,” “nicest,” “scient”), move on to the orchid-imitating butterflies and butterfly-imitating orchids, get his feet wet in the water imagery (Aqua, Marina, “
A l’eau!
” yourself), and then do something with “cruciform,” which crops up in several surprising connections, such as mounted moths, the hero’s feces, and the arrangement of a mature woman’s four patches of hair. Indeed, this book is Nabokov’s most religious—his Testament as well as his
Tempest
—and manages several oblique squints at the Christian religion, a previous sketch of a structured supernature.
Ada
is the feminine form of the Russian “Ad,” for Hades or Hell, and there is a Van in Nirvana and Heaven, for instance.

But, to answer the question posed above, one reason that an author should not create a nulliverse is that it is difficult to generate on an Antiterra the gravity that even the feeblest terrestrial tale appropriates. The details, the sometimes comical and sometimes waspish extensions of the author’s prejudices and fancy, distract us from the angels and demons, who are, it turns out, meant to be human. Specifically, Ada and Van adventure amid obstacles so automatic, so confessedly retrieved from the attics of Mme. de La Fayette and Count Tolstoy, that it is hard to care about their intermittences of copulation as much as they and their creator do. In a landscape of “Ladore, Ladoga, Laguna, Lugano, and Luga,” everything melts into foolery. I confess to a prejudice: fiction is earthbound, and while in decency the names of small towns and middling cities must be faked, metropolises and nations are unique and should be given their own names or none. I did not even like it when Nabokov, in
Pale Fire
, gave New York State the preëmpted appellation of Appalachia. He is, among other titles to our love, the foremost poet of Earth’s geography, who in his remarkable story “Lance” saw long before the actual astronauts “the praying woman of the Baltic, and … the elegant Americas caught in their trapeze act, and Australia like a baby Africa lying on its side.” His vision and flair are themselves so supermundane that to
apply them to a fairyland is to put icing on icing. There is nothing in the landscapes of
Ada
to rank with the Russian scenery of
Speak, Memory
or the trans-American hegira of Lolita and Humbert Humbert.

As with place names, so with face names; we never get over the playful twinning of Aqua and Marina, Demon and Dan, and though Aqua’s madness spins a few beautiful pages and Demon makes some noises approximating those of a flesh-and-blood father, the four remain animated anagrams, symmetrical appendages that want to be characters. To be sure, we are in a world of chrysalis and metamorphosis; as in
Invitation to a Beheading
and
Bend Sinister
, the cardboard flats and gauze trappings collapse, and the author/hero, heavy with death, lumbers toward the lip of the stage. This does happen, and the last pages of
Ada
are the best, and rank with Nabokov’s best, but to get to them we traverse too wide a waste of facetious, airy, side-slipped semi-reality.

Define reality
.

That which exists.

Don’t you mean merely that which is perceived? Can we divide the universe, of which you seem so wholly fond, from our perception of it? And can we, more to the point, divide the reality of a book from what the author says it is? Does a “dorophone” exist less on the paper than a “telephone” because a hundred million “real” telephones echo in coarse Bakelite the latter, while the former is a unique coinage of the writer’s imperious imagination? And isn’t an author entitled to applause and gratitude for daring to work not in dreary Zolaesque dredging of a swampy “external world” as hallucinatory as the next but along the living rainbow edge where writer’s mind meets reader’s in the mist of the retreating thunderstorms of “traditional” novels, a retreat most prettily signalled by the jovial iridescence of parody? Don’t you think that your plebeian cavils were anticipated and scornfully dismissed in advance by this towering, snorting wizard?

To be sure, the risks have been calculated. Some offenses are intentional. On the second page, Van disarmingly confesses his “ancestral strain of whimsical, and not seldom deplorable, taste.” And defensive jabs at “cretinic critics” abound. But is it intentional that the conversations between the two lovers so stiflingly reek of mutual congratulation, that the dialogue everywhere defuses itself with quibbles and pranks, and that the hero is such a brute? When the girl who relieves him of his virginity, courteously described as “a fubsy pig-pink whorlet,” tries to kiss him, Van “elbow[s] her face away.” When Lucette, Ada’s younger
sister, falls in love with him, he drives her to suicide. When Kim, a servant boy at Ardis Hall, photographs Van and Ada making love and tries to blackmail them, Van arranges to have him blinded—“carried out of his cottage with one eye hanging on a red thread and the other drowned in its blood.” Ada, bless her, now and then rebukes him for his hard-heartedness, explaining that “not everybody is as happy as we are,” but Van holds aloof from “silly pity—a sentiment I rarely experience” and continues to nourish at the expense of others an ego “richer and prouder than anything those two poor worms could imagine,” the two worms being two lovers of Ada whom the author dispatches before duel-crazy Van can get to them. As to Kim: “ ‘Amends have been made,’ replied fat Van with a fat man’s chuckle. ‘I’m keeping Kim safe and snug in a nice Home for Disabled Professional People, where he gets from me loads of nicely brailled books on new processes in chromophotography.’ ” This useful therapy is cousin, presumably, to “those helpful hobbies which polio patients, lunatics, and convicts are taught by generous institutions, by enlightened administrators, by ingenious psychiatrists—such as bookbinding, or putting blue beads into the orbits of dolls made by other criminals, cripples, and madmen.”

It is not always easy, but it is necessary, to distinguish between the hero’s callousness and the author’s zest for describing deformity and pain. Gentle Professor Pnin, we remember, was going to give someday a course on “The History of Pain.” Throughout Nabokov’s work, pain appears as the twin, in the physical world, of madness in the psychical.
Ada
contains a cruel vision of the afterlife: “The only consciousness that persists in the hereafter is the consciousness of pain.” Little sensitive particles, a web of toothaches here, a bundle of nightmares there, cling to each other “like tiny groups of obsure refugees from some obliterated country huddling together for a little smelly warmth, for dingy charities or shared recollections of nameless tortures in Tartar camps.” The fragmentation of Lucette’s consciousness as she drowns (“she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes … that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude”) is monstrously well felt. Such sharp focus on pain, death, and madness incriminates not Van but the world. After Lucette’s death, he longs in a letter for “more deeply moral worlds than this pellet of muck.” Yet the phrase “pellet of muck” is a dandy’s dismissal, and as Van goes about the world swaddled in his millions, exposing himself to
chambermaids, feasting off of adolescent prostitutes, squashing literary critics, despising his lecture audiences, and fiercely repelling all who would trespass upon his inviolate ego and his adoration of Ada, he bares, perhaps unintentionally, a moral deformity comparable to the physical deformities that fascinate him.

Nabokov was born and reared as an aristocrat. Rich, healthy, brilliant, physically successful, he lacks the neurasthenic infirmities that gave the modernism of Proust, Joyce, Kafka, and Mann its tender underside. Asked, in a recent Japanese magazine (
The Umi
, Volume 1, No. 1), the question “What authors or works have influenced you most?” Nabokov answered serenely, “None.” In truth, it is hard, in the ranks of literary genius, recruited as they are from the shabby-genteel and the bedridden, to find his aristocratic, vigorous peers. There is Tolstoy, and there is Chateaubriand. Tolstoy is much on Nabokov’s mind.
Ada
begins by inverting the opening sentence of
Anna Karenina
and closes by likening itself, “in pure joyousness, and Arcadian innocence,” to Tolstoy’s reminiscences. It contains a Vronsky, a Kitty, a Dolly; Levin’s code-word courtship of Kitty is parodied by Scrabble games between Van and Ada. The country-house atmosphere of Ardis Hall mimics yet partakes of the Tolstoyan idyll. Van’s father accuses him of belonging to “the Decadent School of writing, in company of naughty old Leo and consumptive Anton,” and Ada does a “clever pastiche … mimicking Tolstoy’s paragraph rhythm and chapter closings.” The list of concealed allusions and twittings could doubtless be lengthened. (Graduate student, go do it!)

But Chateaubriand, to whom the author tips his hat at half a dozen intersections, looms more fondly, as grandfathers will over fathers—and boorish, booted, crypto-Communist fathers at that.
Ada
shares with
Atala
its heroine’s vowels and the setting of a fantasized America, with
René
the theme of incest, and with
Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe
its posthumous posture and an affinity of tone. Even through the brown varnish of translation, certain colors and twists in Chateaubriand’s prose suggest Nabokov. In
Atala
, the Mississippi (which Chateaubriand probably never saw) is described in flood:

The observation of the
counter
-current, the magical precision applied to a vision, the detection of an idyll at the heart of a tumult, have a kinship with the prose flights of our Russian; Chateaubriand, too, was a survivor of revolution and a naturalist: