Madness & Art

NABOKOV: HIS LIFE IN ART by Andrew Field. 397 pages. Little, Brown. $8.95.

Vladimir Nabokov once remarked that the ideal reader for his books would be someone like himself, "a little Nabokov." There may never be one, for it would be hard to match him even in junior size. Besides being a scholar, critic, translator, chess player, lepidopterist and eccentric, he is one of those relatively rare writers who in the midst of their career have been able to alter the language of their craft. Above all, he is a unique artificer in the arid world of contemporary fiction.

At a time when so many novelists are merely tinkering with far-out techniques or grinding out hunks of undigested raw material, Nabokov is an artist who fastidiously constructs intricate plots and dazzling verbal mosaics. He creates books without precedent in form (Pale Fire) or treatment (Lolita). He can also be a clever ice skater, stylishly tracing or following someone else's figures--the Conradian Laughter in the Dark, for example, or the Kafkaesque Invitation to a Beheading.

Nabokov's achievements fully merit a major critical study. Andrew Field, a New Jersey-born critic now teaching Russian literature at the University of Queensland in Australia, microscopically analyzes all 15 Nabokov novels and the major short stories and poems, and traces Nabokov's abiding themes--love, death, exile and memory--through his Russian and American books.

Novel of Prisons. As an exile in Germany from the Russian Revolution, Nabokov commanded a relatively tiny public in emigre circles. When he went to America before World War II, he painstakingly learned every nuance of English and translated his works back and forth in an effort to find a wider audience. He achieved notoriety before legitimate fame in 1958 with Lolita, and Field argues that the book, in which 42-year-old Humbert Humbert lusts for a child of twelve, would not have shocked nearly so much if readers had understood Nabokov's deeper preoccupations.

Lolita, says Field, "is a novel of prisons." The idea for it came to Nabokov from a Paris newspaper account of a monkey who, "after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage." Humbert Humbert is a prisoner of lust. He imprisons first Lolita, then his deadly rival Quilty. Later he writes his memoirs from prison. For Nabokov, the book's theme is love--and the necessity to liberate love from "its extreme and seemingly mutually exclusive opposite, lechery." Eventually Humbert Humbert is able to face the darkest images of death and debauchery in his past, and learns the definition of love from Lolita's warm and undemanding successor, Rita. (Few readers even remember that Lolita had a successor.)

Dotty Commentary. Nabokov's twin loves, says Field, are art and words. There are artists in virtually all his books, usually failed or mad artists. More often his heroes are demented chess players, professors, homosexuals, murderers. Writes Field: "Madness and art are always in each other's presence in Nabokov's prose," because the demands of art and life are incompatible.

This theme runs through all his work but achieves its greatest expression in Pale Fire. The novel has two parts: a morbid autobiographical poem written by John Shade, and a dotty commentary by an admirer, Charles Kinbote. But is that really all there is to it? No, argues Field, who suggests that not only the poem but the commentary are Shade's work: he has absorbed Kinbote's theories and has fashioned the commentary as an extravagant coda to his own poem. This kind of argument about a possible fiction within a fiction --essentially, the was-Hamlet-reallymad type of argument--may seem academic to all but Nabokov's most devoted readers. But it testifies to the extraordinary reality that Nabokov imparts to his artificial world.

Dappled Nouns. If art is Nabokov's muse, words are his mania: puns, anagrams (he has pointed out with glee that T. S. Eliot is almost "toilets" spelled backward), "word golf" (get from "live" to "dead" in five steps*), bilingual and trilingual double-entendres. More seriously, words of any language are vital possessions:

Beyond the seas where I have lost a sceptre

I hear the neighing of my dappled nouns,

soft participles coming down the steps,

treading on leaves, trailing their rustling gowns . . .

My back is Argus-eyed. I live in danger.

False shadows turn to track me as I pass

and, wearing beards, disguised as secret agents,

creep in to blot the freshly written page

and read the blotter in the lookingglass.

The poem, written in 1945, is a metaphor of Nabokov's career. It evokes the lost kingdom from which he was banished, the beloved words that can restore it, the mysterious agent of imagination that holds up the new material of life to the looking glass of art.

In his first book, Andrew Field, 29, is himself a talented secret agent, tracking patiently through Nabokov's dreams and disguises, his ruses and games. His knowledge of Nabokoviana is awesome. Unfortunately, he is so awed by the master that he plays down his flaws and goes to ingenious extremes to explain away Nabokov's limited emotional resources or the coldness that occasionally turns high comedy into desolating farce. More important, he seems to lack breadth: it would have been good for the reader to find some comparison of Nabokov with such a contemporary as Isaac Babel, another great Russian who stayed home to his grief, or with such predecessors as Tolstoy and Henry James. Within these limitations, the book offers clear thinking and uncluttered prose; it is a fitting guide to the most complex, demanding and fertile novelist now writing.

* Live-line-lene-lend-lead-dead.

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