Vladimir Nabokov: Glory

[pontalba]

Wrong, and wrong. But still, and even yet,
in that tirade of his Uncle's
What a bitter, condescending pill for a young man to have to swallow, when he would like to think well of himself!
Peder

Martin was misunderstood by ALL. Its as though he was turned into himself, and showed only the bland and uncommunicative shell. No one around attempted to penetrate that shell, to see what was really there. What I don't understand is Why.
Maybe its a lesson in the manner we see only what we want to see (meaning Martin's surrounding family, friends etc.).

Why? Was it too much trouble to peer into Martin's motivations and true inner self? Were they all just consumed with the trauma of their individual flights from Russia and the day to day dealing with all of That? Sophia truely loved her son, but was so far from understanding him as the earth is from the sun.

 

[Peder]

SIL,
That was fantastic! What a glimpse into an aristocratic household and just how clearly Anglified Nabokov's was. Where would we be without Speak Memory?

From Brian Boyd's Introduction, (p.ix)

Speak Memory is the one work outside of Nabokov's finest novels -- The Gift, Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada -- that is a mastrpiece on their level. Penelope Lively recently rated it her book of the century. It has been rated the greatest of autobiographies, but since such judgements depend so much on the criteria we bring to them, I will call it only the most artistic of biographies. It lacks the probing self-analysis of St. augustine or Tolstoy or the overt and iinadvertent self-display of Rousseau, the historical and categorical aplomb of Henry Adams, or the sparkling anecdotal flow of Robert Graves, but more than these and any other autobiographies it fuses truth to detail with perfection of form, the exact with the evocative, an acute awareness of time with intimations of timelessness.

That's mighty nice company, and mighty fine words!
Peder

 

[Breaca]

OK, I have a question. I read somewhere amongst the pages of Glory something about Martin believing that (day)dreams can come true? Anyone Or was I just imagining it.

 

[pontalba]

Breaca Was that when he was a child, looking "into" the painting in his nursery? On p. 5 it says--

When, as a youth, he recalled the past, hw would wonder if one night he had not actually hopped from bed to picture, and if this had not been the beginning of the journey, full of joy and anguisn, into which his whole life had turned.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thats it! Zoorland. Not that it really happened (?) but it colored his whole life experience.

 

[Peder]

OK, I have a question. I read somewhere amongst the pages of Glory something about Martin believing that (day)dreams can come true? Anyone Or was I just imagining it.

Breaca,
No I don't think you are imagining. I was looking at exactly the following this morning (p.109)

As he reminisced, Martin noticed a certain peculiarity about his life: the property that his reveries had of crystallizing and mutating into reaality as previously they had mutated into sleep. This seemed to guarantee to him that the new series of reveries that he had recently evolved -- about an illegal, clandestine expedition -- would grow solid and also be filled with life, as his dreams about soccer matches had grown solid and incarnate..

Peder

 

[Peder]

Let go of the rope and go to Powell's.com.... 4.80 or 9.85 US!
abe
And that was just in the introduction!

Pontalba,
The one I see is $40 on both amazon and ABE, with nothing on Powells (or vice versa)
Sounds like two different books afoot: Fictitious Biographies ????? There's one devoted to Nabokov, called something like Studies in American Literature: Vladimir Nabokov and that's the $40 one.
Peder

 

[StillILearn]

So, did VN have a mystical side to him, do you think?

 

[StillILearn]

As the water spread all over the young plantation, it picked its way like a live thing; here it would stop, there run on, extending bright tentacles, and Martin, grimacing occasionally from the stings of tiny thistleheads, sloshed up to his ankles in fat purple mud, driving in forcefully an iron shield for a barrier or, on the contrary, helping a streamlet to break through; the hollowed earth would fill with bubbling brown water and, feeling in it with a spade, he mercifully softened the soil, until something gave delightfully, and the percolating water sank away, washing the roots.

What an amazing sentence. I have to admit that I personally don't give much of a hoot about Martin per se, but the writing is extraordinary.

"fat purple mud"

 

[Peder]

So, did VN have a mystical side to him, do you think?

SIL,
The answer to that seems to certainly be yes, depending on what is meant by mystical, and considering my difficulty in defining his beliefs. Vera certainly said the answer was yes and that there were indications in all his works. My eyebrows went up when I read that, but now I see things that make me more of a believer in her view. I would more say that he had a highly unconventional religious (or spiritual) view.
In any event, just before Sonia comes into his bedroom and climbs into his bed we read: (p.91)

He felt an odd vague anguish.....And here without any apparent reason, he realized what it was that disturbed him so. Only a year before, in this room, Nelly had slept, and now she was dead. "What nonsense answered Martin" and tried to resume his reading but this proved impossible. He recalled those nights of long ago when he waited for the ghost of his father to make a scratching sound in a corner. Martin's heart started to beat fast: the bed became hot and uncomfortable........Something began to drum rapidly in the darker part of the room and his heart missed a beat. But it was merely water that had spilled on the washstand and was now dripping on the linoleum. Yet how strange: if ghosts exist, then all is well for it proves that souls can move after death. Why then is it so frightening. ...... Yes perhaps Nelly is here and is seeing me now. Perhaps now, this instant -- she will give me a sign? .... The tension was becoming unbearable. That silence seemed to be waiting: the distant hoot of an automobile horn would have been respite. The level of silence kept rising and all at once poured over the brim: someone on tip-toe was coming barefoot along the passage."

That paragraph captures a great deal of what his beliefs seemed to be: that souls lived on after death; that they could view the doings of the living in this world and be with us unnoticed; but that their influnce in this world was at best through such ordinarily inconsequential sounds as his father's scratching, or perhaps a soft breeze that wafts a curtain open. And then these signs might catch someone's attention and deflect them from what they were doing and cause their action to continue on in a different way. Or possibly not. He did not believe that souls from the afterlife directly controlled things or caused things to happen in this world, except possinly in the very faintest and indirect ways as suggested above.

Transparent Things, written late in his career, gives the clearest exposition and examples, and Pale Fire and its companion book by Boyd also explicitly address the issue. Pale Fire in fact portrays the way in which its fictional protagonist, John Shade, comes to have such beliefs. And that is about as much as I know.

Big however, however: does that passage mean that Sonia's coming to his bedroom had some meaning or intention from the afterlife, even unknown to her or to him? Nabokov's phrasing and syntax seem to do more than merely 'allow' the possibility; they cry out for interpretation in that way it seems to me.

But then, what influence did her intervention have on a story that might have gone differently if she had just stayed in her room and had a good niight's sleep? That's a hard question to answer and I don't (yet) see any indications in the book what that might be. But the question certainly raises itself, in my opinion anyway, and in the abstract, whether that night she somehow influenced his later interest in that clandestine and dangerous reverie which was to lead to such terrible consequences. In other words, did she 'cause' the book's terrible outcome? Can souls cause terrible consequences? Or only act for good?

There's no answers in this corner,
All's mum

Peder

 

[pontalba]

On the other hand.....VN could, by showing that Martin waited in vain for his dead father to show up, that the "afterlife" was so much claptrap. The dripping water weirded him out in a darkened room, and the footsteps were simply Sonia visiting a room that held memories of someone she loved.
The three methods of his death that he foresaw/dreamt about were interesting. Old age. A firing squad. A train wreck.
Which one? Which one?

 

[Peder]

On the other hand.....VN could, by showing that Martin waited in vain for his dead father to show up, that the "afterlife" was so much claptrap. The dripping water weirded him out in a darkened room, and the footsteps were simply Sonia visiting a room that held memories of someone she loved.
The three methods of his death that he foresaw/dreamt about were interesting. Old age. A firing squad. A train wreck.
Which one? Which one?

Pontalba, SIL
Um, yeees, That might all be as you say, in the context of fiction. The only two things outside of fiction that I know of are Vera's remark, and a remark by himself in Speak Memory something along the lines, that we certainly cannot see the after life, or prove that it is there, but as we march along in life I [Nabokov] am confident we are marching in the right direction with such a belief. The phrase "right direction" I remember explicitly.

Ya got me.
I only repeats what I reads,
Peder

 

[Peder]

Afterlife

Pontalba, SIL,
The very last paragraph of Chapter 2 in Speak Memory says this: (p.50)

Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangley depressed, quite unlike their dear bright selves. I am aware of them without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited in their earthly exxistence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then -- not in dreams -- but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past, and from its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.

Vera's remark will be harder to catch, and I don't know what the remainder of Speak Memory might contain. Perhaps there are further thougthts in Boyd, or Field, or perhaps in his VN's own Strong Opinions.

Peder

 

[Peder]

What an amazing sentence. I have to admit that I personally don't give much of a hoot about Martin per se, but the writing is extraordinary.

SIL,
Yes, I think that whole section of the book is utterly amazing and beautiful, and to my limited knowledge of Nabokov it sounds so unlike him. I've always seen him, and his characters, as urban or suburban dwellers, earning livings in colleges or offices or publisher's surroundings, but never before by manual labor and the toil of farming or the land. And he writes it so beautifully, nevertheless! It was a complete revelation to me.
Peder

 

[Peder]

Martin was misunderstood by ALL. Its as though he was turned into himself, and showed only the bland and uncommunicative shell. No one around attempted to penetrate that shell, to see what was really there. What I don't understand is Why.
Maybe its a lesson in the manner we see only what we want to see (meaning Martin's surrounding family, friends etc.).

Why? Was it too much trouble to peer into Martin's motivations and true inner self? Were they all just consumed with the trauma of their individual flights from Russia and the day to day dealing with all of That? Sophia truely loved her son, but was so far from understanding him as the earth is from the sun.

Pontalba,
Martin certainly is a different sort of guy. But actually I'm not sure I can see a single consistent personality "type" in his total character.
In his dream world of reveries, where he could almost have lived his entire life, and in his ability to entertain himself and perhaps live a solitary quiet life, not sharing many ideas with people, he sounds to me like a shy only child. Who was brought up -- Martin, that is -- by a doting mother who gave him unconditional love and approval, but who grew up without so many possibilites for social growth. In Speak Memory VN speaks very lovingly of his mother and one sees that it is a direct reflection of her love for him. IMO So Martin is not far off.
On the other hand, he is not so extremely withdrawn from the real world as to be simply a passive observer, because he is not timid about trying out its personal challenges for himself, and meeting them as well as he can, and then persevering until he conquers them, even if his knees might be trembling at the same time.
And as we have seen he does also function in social settings even if, there, the overall impression he gives might be that he is a "quiet" person.
I think he just kept his inner world to himself rather easily, and associated with people tolerably well enough that communication remained at the casual social level and there never arose any occasions to wonder more deeply. He never appeared neurotic, deranged or crazy (except up the lamp post ). And he engaged in active sports, but was not boisterous. Later on, though, we do begin to see people's reactions to him as he begins to act with his own wilfullness and to indicate his plans to them, and not receiving entirely favorable reactions. But by then he is on his own track and actively pursuing his own goal irrespective of what people might think.

So he is a quiet, but not so quiet, withdrawn, but not so withdrawn, sociable, but not too sociable, timid, but not too timid, active, but not too boisterous, only but not really only, child who has grown up, but not entirely grown up. I don't know if there are many people like that. Or maybe in different proportions all of us are like that somehow, and he just has a very special mix. Even among only children.

"Spoiled only child" is what might first come to mind, but it seems to me not to fit in just too many different ways.

Peder
Amateur Psychologist
$10 please.

 

[pontalba]

Peder So VN had some feelings, but like most people didn't really know how to analyze just what he felt, just that something was out there. Maybe he couldn't analyze, but boy could he vocalize! I love his analogies of "from the mast" and "the castle tower" showing his trying to look above all the pettiness and squabbling of this earth.


SIL Yes, those lines are wonderful! I, likePeder mainly thought of VN as an 'urban dweller', but in Brian Boyd's The Russian Years, one of Boyd's first revelations of VN is that

He was born into an old noble family and stupendous wealth. At seventeen he inherited the most splendid of the family manors, begun at the end of the eighteenth century for Prince Bezborodko, Catherine the Great's foreign policy director.

Doesn't "family manor" imply much land and therefore farming? Not that he would have been directly involved in the actual farming, but at least the observation of same? Giving him a chance to see and feel the land.

Another aside regarding the pronuncation of Nabokov. (from the same Boyd)

Pronounced Vluh-DEEM-ear Nuh-BOK-off. The second syllable of the surname sounds very like the British pronunciation of "awkward," a little less like its American counterpart.

I thought the second syllable was emphasized, as that is how Jeremy Irons pronounces it on his oh-so-sultry rendition of Lolita.

 

[Peder]

Maybe he couldn't analyze, but boy could he vocalize! I love his analogies of "from the mast" and "the castle tower" showing his trying to look above all the pettiness and squabbling of this earth.

Oh neato, Pontalba!
What a shot!
Peder

 

[Peder]

Another aside regarding the pronuncation of Nabokov. (from the same Boyd) I thought the second syllable was emphasized, as that is how Jeremy Irons pronounces it on his oh-so-sultry rendition of Lolita.

Pontalba,
That looks to me like the second syllable is being emphasized, except i don't know how a British "awkward" sounds.
It's all very awkward.
Peder

 

[Peder]

To all,
I'll be out this afternoon and back later.
Not fleeing,
Peder

 

[pontalba]

Pontalba,
That looks to me like the second syllable is being emphasized, except i don't know how a British "awkward" sounds.
It's all very awkward.
Peder

Just with a stiffish Brit accent I would expect (awkward I mean). And yes, the second syllable is the emphasized one.
Which is awkward (haha) for me, as I'd not thought of that pronunciation before. But it sounds so much cooler that way.

In fact a friend of mine teaches lit at one of the universities locally, and didn't even know how it was pronounced. 'Course shes never even read Nabokov!
I don't have a barge pole long enough to touch that one!

 

[pontalba]

Let go of the rope and go to Powell's.com.... 4.80 or 9.85 US!

And that was just in the introduction!

If anyone is wondering just what this post ^^^ is referring to, fear not, go and check out post # 534 in "Everything Nabokov" under Fiction.