On Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov (Photo by Carl Mydans)

Recent essays on Vladimir Nabokov by Ian Frazier (“Rereading Lolita,” The New Yorker, December 14, 2020) and Patricia Lockwood (“Eat butterflies with me,” London Review of Books, November 5, 2020) spurred me to consider my own view of Nabokov’s work. I’m not a fan of his novels – too many puns, puzzles, and chess moves. But two of his nonfiction pieces have influenced me tremendously: “Colette” (chapter 7 of his brilliant autobiography Speak, Memory, 1966) and “Inspiration” (included in his 1973 Strong Opinions, a collection of interviews and articles). 

“Colette” originally appeared in The New Yorker, July 31, 1948. It’s a wonderful recounting of a 1909 trip that young Nabokov and his family took from St. Petersburg to Paris on the Nord-Express, and then from Paris to Biarritz on the Sud-Express. It begins unforgettably:

In the early years of this century, a travel agency on Nevski Avenue displayed a three-foot-long model of an oak-brown international sleeping car. In delicate verisimilitude it completely outranked the painted tin of my clockwork trains. Unfortunately it was not for sale. One could make out the blue upholstery inside, the embossed leather lining of the compartment walls, their polished panels, inset mirrors, tulip-shaped reading lamps, and other maddening details. Spacious windows alternated with narrower ones, single or geminate, and some of these were of frosted glass. In a few of the compartments, the beds had been made. 

This superb passage enacts the “delicate verisimilitude” of the object it describes. In detail after marvelous detail, the memory of a model sleeping car seen long ago is fondly evoked. I love the way the details – the blue upholstery, the embossed leather, the polished panels, the inset mirrors, the tulip-shaped reading lamps – steadily accrue. Nabokov lavishes his attention on it. It’s a thrilling act of description – the first of many in this exquisite story. 

My other favorite Nabokov piece, “Inspiration,” defines a seldom mentioned, but essential literary ingredient: “One can distinguish several types of inspiration, which intergrade, as all things do in this fluid and interesting world of ours, while yielding gracefully to a semblance of classification.” The first phase is the “prefatory glow” (“This feeling of tickly well-being branches through him like the red and the blue in the picture of a skinned man under Circulation”). The second stage is the “forefeeling” of what the writer is going to tell:

The forefeeling can be defined as an instant vision turning into rapid speech. If some instrument were to render this rare and delightful phenomenon, the image would come as a shimmer of exact details, and the verbal part as a tumble of merging words.

“A shimmer of exact details” - how fine that is.

Nabokov not only defines inspiration, he provides examples of it in other writers’ work. He says,

From a small number of A-plus stories I have chosen half-a-dozen particular favorites of mine. I list their titles below and parenthesize briefly the passage – or one of the passages – in which genuine afflation appears to be present, no matter how trivial the inspired detail may look to a dull criticule.

One of the stories he lists is John Cheever’s “The Country Husband” (The New Yorker, November 20, 1954). The passage he chooses is “Jupiter [a black retriever] crashed through the tomato vines with the remains of a felt hat in his mouth.” Cheever’s sentence is sublime. Would I have noticed it on my own? Probably not. Nabokov’s selection of it helped shape my own idea of what constitutes an inspired sentence. I’ve never forgotten it.