June 13 & 20, 2011 Issue

I wonder if I’m alone in preferring Vladimir Nabokov’s nonfiction to his fiction? His Lolita and Pale Fire seem like such word games, such tricky artifices. They strike me as semi-real - not so much mimetic as illusionistic. Whereas his autobiography Speak, Memory is amazing in its authenticity, in its effort to pin things down precisely. The same can be said for the selection of letters to his wife Véra that appears in this week’s issue of the magazine. Their sentences brim with glistening thisness:

Couldn’t sleep at all, since at the numerous stations the wild jolts and thunderings of the train cars’ copulations and unlatchings allowed no rest.

I asked, in what seemed a rather pale voice….

He shaved me horribly, leaving my Adam’s apple all bristly….

… and two days ago rode with a woman professor and a group of very black young ladies, very intensely chewing mint gum, in a wooden charabanc-cum-automobile to collect insects about twenty miles from here.

Miss Read, the college head, is very pleasant, round, with a wart by her nostril, but very ideological….

It is very Southern here. I took a walk down the only big street in the velvet of the twilight and the azure of neon lamps, and came back, overcome by a Southern yawn.

I note, in the October 2-3, 1942, letter, written in Hartsville, South Carolina, the occurrence of “bliss” (“It is hard to convey the bliss of roaming through this strange bluish grass …”), a key word in Nabokov’s vast vocabulary, one that is central to the artistic credo that he stated fourteen years later in Lolita’s famous afterword (“For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss…”).

My favorite sentence in the letters is this compressed, slightly surrealistic, three-semicolon beauty:

I’m just back; on the bed; have asked a boy to extract numerous burrs from my pants; I love you very much.