Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (19 page)

you have something like a pain schedule to fill out -a long schedule like a federal document, only it's your pain schedule. Endless categories. First, physical causes — like arthritis, gallstones, menstrual cramps. Next category, injured vanity, betrayal, swindle, injustice. But the hardest items of all have to do with love. The question then is: So why does everybody persist? If love cuts them up so much, and you see the ravages everywhere, why not be sensible and sign off early?

'Because of immortal longings,' says Kenneth. 'Or just hoping for a lucky break.' Meanwhile, a Miss Matilda Layamon, modernity's erotic nemesis, patiently looms.

Kenneth is immersed, or rather stalled, in his own parallel difficulties: unrequited love for a girl called Treckie, the mother of his infant daughter. Early on Kenneth remarks that the nature of his own preoccupations marks him out as 'a genuinely modern individual. (Can you say worse of anybody?)' Compared to Treckie, though, Kenneth isn't modern at all. Compared to Treckie, Kenneth is positively Hanoverian, or Pushkinian. There is a lovely phrase later on in the book, when Benn is being extravagantly lunched by his appalling, his unforgivable, his inadmissible father-in-law; Benn is trying to be cheerful, but he can't 'get the note of TV brightness into his responses'. TV brightness: Treckie has plenty of that. I have a name for girls like Treckie; I call them
Jackanory-
artists
, Blue Peter-
merchants
.
Radiant with non-specific vivacity, they come on like kiddie-show hostesses ('And right after the break we'll be doing it again with me on top'). 'What kind of a name is Treckie?' asks Dita Schwartz, the other contestant for Kenneth's affections. A good question: what kind of a name
is
Treckie? Here, I think, we have a bit of subliminal inspiration on Bellow's part. In TV parlance a 'Trekkie' is a devotee of the space-opera TV series
Star Trek.
Trekkies model themselves on the cast of the show, would-be Captain Kirks and Lieutenant Uhuras who boldly go out into the universe, to pester alien life forms with the American Constitution . . .

Treckie is a person with goals, a 'life-plan'. She is 'either very clever or playing by clever rules': the latter, definitely the latter. Treckie believes in growth, in change, in full self-realisation. 'The way to change for the better,' summarises Kenneth, is to begin by telling everybody about it, You make an announcement. You repeat your intentions until others begin to repeat them to you. When you hear them from others you can say, 'Yes, that's what I think too.' The more often your intention is repeated, the truer it becomes. The key is fluency. It's fluency of formulation that matters most.

This is no kind of fluency, no kind of conversation, no kind of girlfriend for a Bellow hero. How can you discuss life with somebody who lives a 'life-style' according to a 'life-plan'? When Kenneth talks to Benn about Treckie he uses 'skinny Gallic gestures to enlarge the horizon'. The horizon needs all the enlarging it can get.

I have no clue to what Treckie is waiting for. We don't talk about me. These last few days we talked mostly about her. She wanted to tell me about her progress in self-realization, the mistakes she's correcting, her new insights into her former insights and the decisions she's taken as a result.

And yet Kenneth is crazy for Treckie, crazy about Treckie: she has the franchise on his libido, whereas he can't begin to get a line on hers. Diminutive Treckie's sexual life-choice is masochism. She's a masochist and a pushy one, too: '. . . her legs were disfigured by bruises. Her shins were all black and blue. No, blue and green circles like the markings of peacock feathers . .. When she saw me staring at her she shrugged her bare shoulders, she laid her head to one side, and her underlip swelled softly towards me. There being a challenge in this, a "What are you going to do about it?" She seemed to take pride in these injuries.' Treckie likes rough men; Kenneth is a kind man, a delicate man. And that would appear to be that. There is nothing much that Kenneth, or indeed the novel, can do about Treckie. She must, she says, have her 'multiple acculturation', her 'multiple choices': i.e., she must have her multiple boyfriends. With Treckie, says Kenneth, 'it was just me versus contemporary circumstances, and against those I never had a chance'.

Kenneth's 'private life' is a mess but a static one. With Benn, contemporary circumstances assume more dynamic form. Matilda Layamon has been ominously hovering over the first third of the book (bad news, but what kind of bad news?); now she descends. She is rich, clever, beautiful, high-gloss, 'glittering, nervous': what does she see in Benn (and
seeing
is a good deal of what this novel is about: you are what you see, not what you eat, 'as that literalist German maniac Feuerbach insisted')? Look at the men Matilda might have had in Benn's stead! 'A national network anchorman, then a fellow who was now on the federal appeals bench, plus a tax genius consulted by Richard Nixon.' Why, her father plays golf with the likes of Bob Hope and President Ford. Yet she alights on Benn, with his awkward figure, the Russian 'bulge of his back like a wing-case', the infinity-symbol figure-eight spectacles, and his paltry sixty grand a year. This isn't going to be good. And why can't Benn see it? What, in fact, does Benn
see
in her?

When we read, we read with pencils in our hands. When we read something particularly significant or apposite, we draw a vertical line in the margin. The fit reader of the perfect book could thus run his pencil down the length of every last page. And in a way he is still none the wiser — it gets him no further forward.
More Die of Heartbreak
is a bit like that: read it twice, and all you've got is parallel tracks, right the way through. In its allusiveness, its density, its vigour, the novel comes at you like the snowstorm that Kenneth sees: a storm, but with each snowflake doing everything that is acrobatically possible. Yet these allusions, while sending their specific messages, also acquire an emotional aspect. Plants, Eden, a Tree of Life with which botanist Benn cannot commune, a reclining nude, tigers of desire, 'impulses from the fallen world surrounding this green seclusion' - 'twentieth-century instability'. And against this a different setting, the Antarctic, the setting of Benn's rambles and of Admiral Byrd's memoirs entitled
Alone:
out there, on the border of borders, the time quickly comes 'when one has nothing to reveal to the other, when even his unformed thoughts can be anticipated, his pet ideas become a meaningless drool', when 'people find each other
out'.
Hand in hand, modernity and Matilda have something in mind for Uncle Benn. It won't be anything obvious. It won't be secret drinking, infidelity, slobby habits — none of that old stuff. The takeover will have a contemporary subtlety. And it will require Benn's collusion.

As we said earlier, Benn is a strong candidate for love in 'a classic form'. Well, classic form is what Matilda seems at first to embody. Benn speaks of his bride as if she were a 'beloved' in a poem by Edgar Allan Poe: 'thy beauty is to me/Like those Nicean barks of yore . . .' 'Even a four-star general,' Kenneth reasons indulgently, 'will sing a Bing Crosby "Booboobooboo" refrain in a moment of softening or weakness about love.' But Benn? Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face', 'those Nicean barks of yore' - whatever
they
might have looked like. Seeing Benn and hearing the terrible poem, Kenneth decides, 'I would as lief have had Bing Crosby.' Still, when a
botanist
starts talking about hyacinth hair, maybe he is on to something. As another observer puts it later on, when Benn married Matilda 'he followed the esthetics of botany on to the human plane'. This is a risky enterprise, for obvious and numerous reasons. Plants, for instance, don't mind living in caves, or wasting their sweetness on the desert air. Plants are innocently beautiful: they don't know that they
have
an esthetic. Plants don't have plans of their own. Plants don't bite back.

Matilda is the only child of rich parents. As a goodwill gesture (this is rich-people etiquette), Benn moves into the family's penthouse duplex:

.. . and there was Uncle in this fantasia of opulence, every morning wandering in the long rooms of Persian rugs and decorator drapes, lighted cabinets of Baccarat and Wedgwood, and schlock paintings from the 18th century of unidentified (and I'd say uncircumcised) personages from Austria or Italy. Were
they
ever out of place! And Uncle perhaps was even more of a misfit than the portrait subjects, acquired by purchase.

Benn's awkward figure is itself soon draped in an $800 tweed suit. The plant observatory of his head is similarly encased in a costly haircut. Benn's transplantation has begun. Matilda's mother Jo is deliberately pale and shadowy but Matilda's father, Dr Layamon, is one of the most memorable characters in all Bellow. He is, in fact, a boiling nightmare of sly candour, frank cunning, corruption, complacence and 'TV brightness'. A modern entrepreneur, picking up I per cent of everything from his patients and pals, not so much a doctor as a health concessionaire, Layamon is locally known as Motormouth. What Sammler called 'the mad agility of compound deceit' is here elevated to 'conspiratorial inspiration'. When he sits next to Benn his face is so close that it 'is hard to tell whose breath was whose'. Horrible in itself, this TV intimacy has its ulterior aspect.

He was very physical with people. He dropped a hand on your knee, he caught you by the cheek, he worked your shoulder. He played every emotional instrument in the band. You couldn't, however, depend on the music. Suddenly a wild bray would break up the tune. He complimented Benn on his eminence in botany. Then he'd say, 'too bad those overlapping front teeth weren't corrected'; or else: 'Either you're wearing a tight shirt or your
pectoralis major
is overdeveloped - big tits, in other words.' At dinner, when Doctor passed behind Benn's chair, taking his time about it, Uncle couldn't doubt that his bald spot was being inspected. And when they were using old-fashioned urinals at the club, Doctor set his chin on the high partition and looked down through crooked goggles to see how Uncle was hung. His comment was: 'Fire-fighting equipment seems adequate, anyway.'

Matilda is not only Layamon's daughter: she is one of his prime investments. And what does a modern person do with an investment? He protects it, as best he can. 'Don't be annoyed,' he tells Benn, 'but we ran a little check on you, purely private and absolutely discreet. You can't blame us. These are kinky times ... If there was anything bad we wouldn't be sitting here together. Also, if there was serious stuff in the fellow's report, he would have gone to you and tried to sell it to you first. That's the customary blackmail. One expects it.'

Meanwhile the Matilda omens build. Very ominously indeed, Layamon has said of his daughter; 'She didn't have to futz around in Paris with all that postwar sleaze. This girl had brains enough to be chief executive of a blue-chip corporation. With her mentality [mentality!] you could manage NASA . . . She's always watching from her satellite. She's never been too absorbed in the French junk to lose track of economics.' The French junk that failed to keep Matilda's mind off economics is sufficiently sinister in itself. She was researching cultural activities under the Nazi occupation: Ernst Junger, Celine.

. .. she won the confidence of the hysterical persons she interviewed, crooks, most of them, whose strange idea was to reconcile the atrocities of the war period with the highest goals of France as a civilization. For instance, to get information for the Resistance you slept with a collaborator, or after a double-dealer was shot you might discover that you truly loved him after all - that way you could have it all: pornography, heartfelt
douleur,
corrupt love, patriotism, and a fine literary style, so that the purity of French culture was preserved.

'Rotten through and through,' Kenneth decides. 'No reasonable person would pursue such a subject.'

Here is another early sign that there is something seriously wrong with Matilda: she sleeps late in the morning. Now, in most auditoria around the world that sentence might cause some puzzlement. Not here, though. Oh yes, we all know that this means something pretty major is up. Remember Henderson and 'the spirit's sleep'. Remember Citrine, 'out cold' for most of his manhood and his prime. History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake. For Charlie, history is a nightmare during which he is trying to get a good night's sleep. Remember Corde, in deep spiritual trouble in Bucharest - going to bed straight after breakfast! 'As he did this, he sometimes felt how long he had lived and how many, many times the naked creature had crept into its bedding.' I trust that my fellow delegates, here in Haifa, are doing the right thing by their shut-eye. No lie-ins or siestas or prudent early nights. Sometimes I imagine the Nobel Laureate checking on the lights-out schedules here at the university, or grilling the early-call telephone operators at the hotels, or even prowling the corridors at night, examining the breakfast dockets on the doorhandles. Sleep: my wife and I, as the fugitive parents of two infant boys, came to Israel with thoughts of little else. But we haven't had a wink. Saul wouldn't like it. Perhaps this explains a good deal. If I were the envious or competitive type, given to brooding about the superior energies of certain rivals, I might simply conclude that the enemy never sleeps. All I've got to do is give it up entirely: then I'll write
The Adventures of Augie March.

Is Matilda the enemy? 'She hated waking -
hated
it', 'silently warring against bright day and full consciousness'.

As Kenneth observes, The lesson she taught was that you don't often have beauty which doesn't carry some affliction for the observer.' Her plans for Benn — the uses she will find for him - start to edge into visibility when she takes him to view their prospective home, a place of macabre size and grandeur in an old apartment block called the Roanoke. 'The chairman of the Physics Department is overhead, and the woman whose father invented artificial sweeteners is underneath us.' More American eclecticism. What are they to do in this palazzo? Cower in the pantry? Benn is given to understand that a certain amount of entertaining will be done here. Is this what Matilda sees in him? 'An absentminded professor isn't so bad,' says another appraiser of the match, 'if he has the prestige and isn't
too
absentminded, so you don't actually have to check his fly before letting him out of the house.' Whom will they entertain? People like Pavarotti, Kissinger, people like Bob Hope, the great Shwarzenegger, the woman whose father invented artificial sweeteners? Who cares? Matilda shows Benn the nice view of the sycamores that line the building. It is a marvellous passage: