Vladimir Nabokov: The Enchanter

[pontalba]

If you go back in this thread and look at my post #204, I compare the two scenes you are talking about. The Lolita scene is in a way paying tribute to the child in TE. VN did that quite a lot, referring from one book to the other.

Wait a minute.........are you talking about VN himself?
'Cause that was one thing that Vera was a bit concerned about, that people might think that Nabokov himself was like that.
And BTW, I don't think that in the least!!! Emphatically so.

 

[pontalba]

SFG75
Just wait until you get to the end! When you read the ending, you'll see what VN thinks Arthur deserves!

But you do know the end don't you? It was in the thesis....

 

[SFG75]

If you go back in this thread and look at my post #204, I compare the two scenes you are talking about. The Lolita scene is in a way paying tribute to the child in TE. VN did that quite a lot, referring from one book to the other.

From page 20 of Lolita that you quoted:

How marvelous were my fancied adventures as I sat on a hard park bench pretending to be immersed in a trembling book. Around the quiet scholar, nymphets played freely, as if he were a familiar statue or part of an old tree's shadow and sheen. Once a perfect little beauty in a tartan frock, with a clatter put her heavily armed foot near me upon the bench to dip her slim bare arms into me and tighten the strap of her roller skate, and I dissolved in the sun, with my book for fig leaf, as her auburn ringlets fell all over her skinned knee, and the shadow of leaves I shared pulsated and melted on her radiant limb next to my chameleonic cheek.

How well-written!, a masterpiece!!....as Peder would say...if only he wasn't so perverted(i.e.-Humbert)

The wording in TE is also of note:

...the radiance of her large, slightly vacuous eyes, somehow suggesting translucent gooseberries; hermerry, warm complexion; her pink mouth, slightly open so that two large front teeth barely rested on the protuberance of the lower lip; the summery tint of her bare arms with the sleek foxlike hairs running along the forearms; the indistinct tenderness of her still narrow but already not quite flat chest; the way the folds of her skin moved.

(page 9) TE

What amazing lines!.

 

[Peder]

SFG
Nabokov definitely believed very much in detail as a crucial element of excellent writing. The sort of detail that you are referring to.

I've seen that belief of his mentioned in several places that I can't put my finger on. That he was able to create such vivid and detailed scenes in his mind evidently took a fair amount of thinking about them, and also actual careful research observing and taking notes about actual school girls on buses and in playgrounds, as well as having a number of conversations with their family friends' daughter whenever they came to visit, (all mentioned in Boyd and/or Vera). He was also, not so incidentally, an avid reader of popular magazines and newspapers [read "non-intellectual" including "trash"] to keep up with details of pop culture. He saved matchbooks from the motels they stopped at on their butterfly expeditions, and I imagine he probably looked at and took notice of everything that passed before his eyes. If he read milk cartons, as potential grist for his eventual mill, it would not surprise me in the least. He was devoted to the craft of writing and didn't rely only on genius and flashes of inspiration alone. And he produced an enormous output as a result.

No credible hint that he himself was ever the way you suggest has ever surfaced, although the thought has always come up, and always been denied completely by people who have known him directly.

Now, if you want to say "womanizing," there's a whole 'nother story. (see Vera, at the least).

Do tight rope walkers have hidden wires that are holding them up there doing things that none of us can do? I think not. Certainly not necessarily.
In their case it is practice, practice, practice. For Nabokov it was imagine, imagine, imagine I would say.

How do you prove something never happened? Never sufficiently well enough to satisfy everyone, is all I can say.

Meanwhile, please try to enjoy the parts that don't turn you hair on end,
There are definitely some of those too,
Peder

 

[SFG75]

Contradiction or other side of the coin?

Just a few odds and ends-from chapter 1

I feel at home with children in general, in all simplicity; I know that I would be a most loving father in the common sense of the word...

Yet *Arthur* acknowledges that his lust and desire to be Ward Cleaver are somewhat antagonistic

...to this day cannot decide wehther this is a natural complement or a demonic contradiction.

Could it be that he would've been a person who showed warmth and empathy to children and be a monster at the same time? After all, it's well documented that even the most monstrous war criminals were devoted and caring family men. Appearances of contradiction aside, it does happen. Any thoughts?

 

[Peder]

SFG,
i do have thoughts but they run in a differeent vein.

A post of mine on the other thread refers to Nabokov's well-domented womanizing (by Stacy Shiff in Vera). By all accounts he had very healthy and active male interests in grown women, both in the sense of grown women and also grown college co-eds. I would offer that as being incompatible with eyes or any active sexual interest for younger children.

As for your other points let me think, over coffee,
Be back in a bit,
Peder

 

[pontalba]

SFG75 wrote--Could it be that he would've been a person who showed warmth and empathy to children and be a monster at the same time?

Having come to know Vera thru Stacy Schiff's bio, it is not imaginable that VN was of that ilk.

SFG75 wrote--After all, it's well documented that even the most monstrous war criminals were devoted and caring family men. Appearances of contradiction aside, it does happen. Any thoughts?
__________________

Thats a horse of a different color. And as far as it being well documented that these sort were "devoted and caring family men", what odds would you care to lay that given a choice between whatever clone of Hitler/Stalin and the 'family' they would have chosen family? Not very high. IMHO.

 

[Peder]

May I be so bold as to ask whether or not you think V.N. unknowingly projected himself into the book? Perhaps his own inner-darkest secrets are what we are reading?

SFG,
You certainly maybe so bold.
My answer is "no," pure and simple.
And, in any event,if we are going to judge a real person guilty of anything I would require that it be evidence from the real world not from a fictional world.
Barring any real evidence, the presumption of innocence has to apply, it seems to me.
IMO
Peder

 

[Peder]

I don't know if it's too simplistic to call him a perv, but you just have to wonder a bit,

SFG,
If that is VN you are speaking about, then yes it is too simplistic to call him a perv, or even to insinuate it by linking the two words in the same sentence. As for having to wonder a bit, I don't think that is necessary either, that one has to wonder a bit.
He decided to write a story about a pervert, imagined a personality for him, and wrote it down. That doesn't at all indicate that the pervert's personality was VN's own, nor does it imply that VN was a pervert. We both have enough knowledge from newspaper acounts, for example, to write down descriptions of perverts if we had to, without making ourselves perverts.
Peder

 

[Peder]

Just a few odds and ends-from chapter 1

Yet *Arthur* acknowledges that his lust and desire to be Ward Cleaver are somewhat antagonistic

Could it be that he would've been a person who showed warmth and empathy to children and be a monster at the same time? After all, it's well documented that even the most monstrous war criminals were devoted and caring family men. Appearances of contradiction aside, it does happen. Any thoughts?

SFG,
I would not so quickly and easily conflate "he" with "he" with "Ward Cleaver" with "Nabokov" with "Nazi war criiminals."

The fictional "he," Arthur in the book, could have been anything Nabokov wanted hime to be, whther or not consistent with any actual human personality types.

The "he" Nabokov does not have to be the same as any characters in any of his books, which is well understood for any other and all authors in literature.

"Ward Cleaver" is new to me.

The Nazi war criminals were convicted of actual crimes based on actual evidence at the least, whatever else they might have been. I'm not convinced that the members of the SS, who perpetrated Kristallnacht for example, were nice people rather than thugs (and criminals).

That criminals often lead public lives until apprehended is true. So?

Peder

 

[pontalba]

"Ward Cleaver" was the father figure on the somewhat ancient television series "Leave It To Beaver". Supposedly the archtype father figure. Yeech.

 

[Peder]

"Ward Cleaver" was the father figure on the somewhat ancient television series "Leave It To Beaver". Supposedly the archtype father figure. Yeech.

Shows what I know!
I follow female figures not father figures.

 

[pontalba]

Shows what I know!
I follow female figures not father figures.

We'd all start worrying if it was any other way.....

 

[Peder]

BTW SFG,
It occurs to me that by reading Lolita and Enchanter back to back you might well come away with the impression that Nabokov was only focused on perversion. Not so.

Pnin presents a totally different protagonist, a gentle soul who is a college professor coping with the world of campus life and private life as well as he can. And in that novel, some of the scenes can definitely be correlated with Nabokov in real life at Cornell (through reading Vera), while other scenes are clearly not autobiographical.

It is a gentle read, totally different from Lolita and Enchanter. And it certainly adds to a more rounded look at the capabilities of Nabokov the author.
Peder

 

[pontalba]

Plus, SFG to speak with any kind of background or authority on Nabokov, reading his Speak Memory, and the bio of his wife Vera is a necessity. Brian Boyd's volumes are high on the list as well.

In the end both Lolita and The Enchanter are about freedom and the aquisition thereof, and even retribution. In both pieces the offender dies. The unrepentant one in a rather melodramatic and messy ending, and the repentant one (HH) less messy at least. No death is "easy", but HH's was a bit...........at least less violent.

Peder!! You are making me change my "next" Nabokov again.......

 

[Peder]

Plus, SFG to speak with any kind of background or authority on Nabokov, reading his Speak Memory, and the bio of his wife Vera is a necessity. Brian Boyd's volumes are high on the list as well.

In the end both Lolita and The Enchanter are about freedom and the aquisition thereof, and even retribution. In both pieces the offender dies. The unrepentant one in a rather melodramatic and messy ending, and the repentant one (HH) less messy at least. No death is "easy", but HH's was a bit...........at least less violent.

Peder!! You are making me change my "next" Nabokov again.......

Pontalba,
What can I say?
Pnin would not be a bad choice, and back-to-back with Vera might be just the right place to read it. It may sound exactly just like a continuation. It's my own reading that is getting to be all over the place!
Charles

 

[SFG75]

So can a person be geuinely good with kids and a monster? I'd argue yes.

 

[pontalba]

So can a person be geuinely good with kids and a monster? I'd argue yes.

Can you be more specific? What exactly are the parameters of the question in reference to what person? And since your answer is yes, to whatever the exact question, why? Examples.

 

[SFG75]

Can you be more specific? What exactly are the parameters of the question in reference to what person? And since your answer is yes, to whatever the exact question, why? Examples.

I'm referencing the part where Arthur states that he likes children and that he works well with them, despite his criminal instincts("pick-pocket" desires though not robbery)

 

[Peder]

SFG,
Can a person be good wth children and still be a monster?
I see no reason to doubt the possbility, nor to take the opposite view, given the extreme variability in human behvior that is possible.
But I thought we were talking about VN. That someone else might be good with children and still be a monster, seems to me to have no relevance for the question you originally raised.
That a fictional character might be good with children and still be a monster has even less relevance IMO.
Peder