I bought a copy of Nabokov’s Collected Stories five or six years ago on the strength of some kind of recommendation. It was a time I was looking into all kinds of short story writers. Looking back it is hard to believe how this interest of mine went cold. Though I packed and unpacked William Trevor’s weighty Collected Stories numerous times from my suitcase as I packed for my first trip to Prague on the 30th of December, 2003, weighing and reweighing the damn thing, I barely read two or three stories in the twenty months I was there, each time remarking to myself how cathartic it was to do just that, and how important it was to do just that much more often. I read V. S. Pritchett, Frank O’Connor, Flannery O’Connor, Carver, of course, Brendan Behan, Grace Paley, Katherine Mansfield, and many other greats. But I would read only a handful of stories by each author rather than a whole book. Indeed, I remember being depressed when M_____ read Where I’m Calling From, Carver’s Selected Stories, in English, in no time at all, when I was not convinced I had even made it through the whole collection myself.[–More–]
The Nabokov collection stalled after a few stories because there was far too much of the supernatural for my liking. I find it very difficult to read stories and novels which deal in either the supernatural or indulge in any kind of magical realism, allegory or fantasy - my attempt to read Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, the subject under discussion this month for the Guardian book club, in order to gauge my ability to closely read a book in a month, is struggling for this reason.
Nabokov’s prose style is incredibly rich. In my last post I had intended to write a little about two stories of his I had read. The first of these, Beneficence, was a short piece that saw a man, a sculptor, waiting for a lover with whom he had recently quarrelled. He was waiting at the Brandenburg Gate. (This is part of the experience, for me, of reading Nabokov, this sense of envy, of inferiority, of this man with his experience of evocative places in what seems to me to have been, experientially, such a richer period of history than our own. He knows languages and places so well, and indeed, his son, in the preface can sign off, “Dmitri Nabokov, St. Petersburg, Russia, and Montreux, Switzerland, June 1995″.) This story is little more than it’s setting, albeit a setting seen through the eyes of this man, who is to be disappointed. But it is the descriptive skill Nabokov has that makes the story. In his youth he had planned to be a painter (and here again, one reads of his experiences and wilts in envy and sadness), and with a story like this one can see he had the eye for it.
La Veneziana is the story Dmitri writes of as demonstrating this love of painting most clearly. In addition, it displays his love of playing and writing about tennis. Set in a castle, the story concerns an art dealer, McGore, and his beautiful wife, the old colonel and his tempestuous son, Frank, who is carrying on with his aforementioned Maureen, and this latter’s bashful friend, Simpson.
The story carries many authorial interjections of the kind I find far less off-putting than even the suspicion of otherworldly goings-on. “Narrowing his eyes, Frank looked after them… and then, turning to Maureen, said a few words that will doubtless surprise the unprerceptive reader…” This I find inobtrusively playful. In contrast, I resent, in postmodern literature the idea that the manner in which a narrative has come to be on paper must be explained away as if, firstly, a story, expertly told, remains the most unnatural thing in the world, and secondly, and absurdly, it can only be normalised by means of a further story.* I suppose I struggle when such interjections become more involved, and perhaps have difficulty when, say, Milan Kundera, steps into his novel to describe how a character first came to him, but it is refreshing, I suppose, to see that I so embrace these old-fashioned values of story telling.
It is the detail and the setting again which bring me in to the story. The relations between the characters are very real. It was, paradoxically, this which I believe first disturbed me about Nabokov’s stories those years ago. I think that I may have found, say, A E Coppard’s stories of wood sprites and supernatural beings, a little less alienating, partly because these seemed to be so much a part of rural life. Nabokov’s were rich and detailed, set the scene and then, it seemed, brought in the supernatural for twists and turns, and for endings. This seemed like gimmickry. It seemed like he was almost sabotaging his own story, the world he had constructed.
In La Venezia, this is much the same, but this time I was able to read on, and, more or less, to continue to enjoy and admire the story. There is a twist to the story, and by the end of the tale I found myself perhaps trying to anticipate the twist as much as I was involved in the lives of the characters, and this is, for me, an inferior way of reading a story. All the same I will persist with Nabokov. He is certainly worth it.
In reading such stories I am inevitably reminded of my own struggles with word-finding. Maybe it is with being away from England for a period, and because of my own suspicion of the language while I was away (I considered it somehow a language in decline, a debased and [again I search for the word!] decadent tongue which refuses to come alive with the people I am intent on writing about, people I for so long resisted in terms of my fiction, considering them somehow unworthwhile subjects of literature). But there again, I always had problems with word blindness, and though my vocabulary was once much superior to what it is today, it was the simpler words which often evaded me, leaving my prose reading like an imitation of Will Self at his worst.
Oh, yes, one section of the story which was interesting to me in terms of POV, was a short section (which reminded me somewhat of Keats’ Beadman) in which the watchman introduces some activity in the gallery in which Simpson is to be humiliated. He is granted two paragraphs and then moves on:
Thus the pleasant, innnocuous old fellow, like some guardian anggel, momentarily traverses this narrrative and rapidly vanishes into the misty domains whence he was evoked by a whim of the pen.
* * *
On reading this, a couple of exercises occurred to me. One could, on reading a story, strike out all those passages that, for one reason or another, one would not write oneself, and either try to do something with them, or to write analogues of them, or resculpt the story without them in one’s own style to give some indication of how one stands.
* This is part of the animus for carrying on with the Lord of the Flies structure that built up around FF while I was inn Florence with one story being placed within another which itself stands within another. I would see this as excrescence were it not for the fact that, A> I have a real fondness for old stories of mine which have expired due to lack of time and temperamental constraints. This one, Lord of the Flies, died when the Apple iBook computer I am writing on at the moment died on me in Prague, forcing me to fly home heartbroken. And B> Quite aside from encoding a political commentary on the world in which we live, the structure which grew up around Lord of the Flies, can serve as a comment on the development of literature.
ps. Should the formatting of this post be all to cock, this is due to the fact that Firefox keeps on crashing on this old G3 iBook, locking up the damn thing for minutes at a time. I have loaded up the old version of Internet Explorer it shipped with to try and get something done, but find that it is either incapable of running Java or for one reason or another is not up o the task of encoding the text into HTML. It may take me some timme, of course, to get round to updating it.