Pachyderm in a Panic

LAUGHTER IN THE DARK (292 pp.)--Vladimir Nabokov -- New Directions ($3.50).

This book, first published in 1938, is one of Vladimir Nabokov's prehumous works. Like The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Invitation to a Beheading, it was buried under critical neglect and popular apathy when it appeared, is now gaining a second life through the continuing Lolita boom. But Laughter in the Dark only superficially resembles Lolita; it is closer to the Heinrich Mann novel that became The Blue Angel, the famed Marlene Dietrich film of the same general setting and period. At its loftiest, Nabokov's theme is the degradation, by lust, of dignity and intellect--Shakespeare's "expense of spirit in a waste of shame."

Like the professor of The Blue Angel, Albinus, a middle-aged Berlin art dealer, is pudgy, pompous and naive, a kind of pachyderm in a panic whose downfall is chilling precisely because a sardonic hilarity bubbles continuously through the pathos. In the velvety darkness of a movie theater, Albinus (no last name) is hypnotized by the usherette's "pale, sulky, painfully beautiful face.'' Margot is one of the daughters of the poor who have learned the market quotations on fair white bodies. Albinus, respectably and dully married, is enthralled by her, not because she is earthy, but because she might have stepped out of a stag magazine.

A cartoonist named Axel Rex emerges out of Margot's past, and his urbane chitchat somehow convinces Albinus that three is no crowd. Besides, Axel stills Albinus' qualms with a ploy at least as old as Restoration comedy: he confides to Albinus that he is really a homosexual. Soon clouds mass amid the comic lightning. After a series of tragic plot incidents, Albinus drives into a telephone pole, but lives on, blinded. What follows is more climactic and cruel than the book's actual ending. Axel silently shares the house and Margot, while the pair mulct the pitiable Albinus of his remaining money ("Before we go we'll buy him a dog--as a small token of our gratitude").

Laughter foreshadows the mature Nabokov's brilliance and, compared with a lot of current fiction, is well worth reading. But what might have been searing in the book is somehow merely slick or shallowly cynical. Nabokov's gift for the vivid image is already sparkling, but his characters slip into caricatures. A tendency the later Nabokov has largely suppressed, of confusing imagination with prestidigitation, gets the better of him here, and the deftly manipulated mirror he holds up to nature reflects not life but simply more mirrors.

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