Nabokov the bad Samaritan?

A tip from Dan Visel sent me to the library today, where I secured a couple of volumes of Guy Davenport's letters. The most immediately interesting was the one from 2007 collecting his correspondence with New Directions founder James Laughlin, a figure who's long been of interest to this blog. Even a cursory flip through the book offered up some gems, like this passage from Davenport:

Both Hemingway's tight style and D. H. Lawrence's sloppy one are now in the attic. Neither had any sense of humor whatsoever; this tells a lot. The Terribly Serious writer is serious in relation to his age and the eternal verities wear very different clothes from one age to the next.

And there's a line from Laughlin that I'll never forget:

Shadow are useful in love poems.

The most striking discovery thus far, though, is a brief, almost tossed-off story Laughlin shares about Vladimir Nabokov in a letter from July 30, 1989:

You're so right about Nabokov. He had beautiful manners but his blood was icy. One day that summer when he was staying with me in the mountains of Utah he came in for dinner and told me that he had heard what sounded like groaning in Grizzly Gulch. What was it? He hadn't gone to investigate because he was chasing a lepidopteroid he had never seen before. Next day some hikers found the body of an old prospector who had fallen in the steep gulch and cracked open his head and bled to death.

Davenport doesn't seem to take the story very seriously, replying only

I forget what I said about Nabokov. I think the old prospector was lucky to be desamaritanized by him.

Now, even if one, not necessarily unreasonably, wants to more or less let Nabokov off the hook here (Was he sure about what he was hearing? Would we all definitely have investigated, butterflies or no?), it's odd that the story seems never to have gone anywhere beyond Laughlin. It doesn't appear in Brian Boyd's biography, and while I initially thought that could be an artifact of timing, as the Laughlin letter wasn't published until 2007, sixteen years after Boyd's book, I later found a slightly different version of it, also credited to Laughlin, though (at least so far as I can tell from Google Books) without explicit footnoting, in Clifton Fadiman's 1989 anthology The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes (which was picked up verbatim by Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes in 2000).

But that's basically it: the literary world, which generally is ready to hyperventilate over any Nabokov-related news, seems to have completely missed this chilling-if-true story. And while a single-source anecdote is always eligible for substantial discounting, Laughlin would seem tough to impeach: while the pair had their differences over the years, Laughlin was nonetheless one of Nabokov's biggest supporters, and while there may have been an edge to their interpersonal relationship, it's hard to imagine him inventing such a damning story out of whole cloth.

The anecdote has lived on, it seems, in one way--and this is perhaps the strangest part of the whole story. A search on "Nabokov prospector gulch" turns up . . . sermons. Laughlin's story has, it seems, been folded into standard sermons on selfishness, become one of those brief bits of filler that a desperate minister might turn to when his text needs some fleshing out. Could there be a more bizarre outcome of this tale?

Guy Davenport's journals

Despite years of reading Patrick Kurp's praise for Guy Davenport, I've only very recently started reading him, earlier this month picking up The Guy Davenport Reader (2012). As is my wont, I turned immediately to the ephemeral and unintentional, the writings made for the self or friends rather than for publication: had there been letters, I would have started there; as is, a selection from Davenport's journals sufficed.

Davenport's journals, as excerpted in the Reader, remind me a lot of D. J. Enright's "kind of commonplace book" notebooks: they're collections of fugitive thoughts, often inspired by reading or travel, that have obviously been honed a bit, if not fully polished into aphorisms. The notebook feels less like a storehouse for later writing than a thing in itself, a way of supporting a particular type of thinking: mordant, epigrammatic, hither-and-yon, unconnected. Some quickly harvested gems:

This paradox: that where exact truth must be found the only guide thereto is intuition.

The hope of philosophy was to create a tranquility so stable that the world could not assail it.

Hemingway's prose is like an animal talking. But what animal?

Kinship is one of the most primitive of tyrannies. Our real kin are those we have chosen.

Avoid the suave flow of prose that's the trademark of the glib writer. An easy and smooth style is all very well, but it takes no chances and has no seductive wrinkles, no pauses for thought.

"Pauses for thought" is a good enough way to think of the journal: a considered response to an external trigger, stretched and shaped and stripped down to a judicious jotting.

One slightly longer entry in particular caught my eye:

In our century the great event has been the destruction of the city, and therefore of public life, by the automobile. Next, the obliteration of the family by television. Thirdly, the negation of the university by its transformation into a social club for nonstudents. Finally, the abandonment of surveillance by the police, who act only on request and arrive long after their presence could be of any use. All of this can be blamed on the stupidity, moral indifference, and ignorance of politicians and public alike.

Davenport is right about cars, and TV (to say nothing of smartphones and tablets). I'm a bit surprised that, as a Kentuckian, he didn't also include air conditioning, another innovation that pushed life indoors and closed off avenues of community. But the university has become something different from what he laments: if anything, today's push for relevance and ROI and vocational training could make a person nostalgic for the old assumption that a lot of personal development (and a not-insignificant part of intellectual growth) in young people emerges through socialization.

Finally, there's the line about the police. The journals are, frustratingly, undated, but if we assume that they were written before 2000 (Davenport died in 2005), then Davenport was viewing the question from at best the tail end of the long postwar crime surge. In the years since, that wave has subsided so much that American cities are safer than they've been in living memory (and you could probably mount an argument that Manhattan is right now one of the safest places in the history of humanity). When Davenport was writing, police forces seemed overwhelmed, and, in some locales, resigned to failure; now, if anything, the opposite of his statement is true. Surveillance is common, and, in the face of plummeting crime rates, probably overdone.

None of which is to take away from Davenport, or the pleasures of reading his journals. Just a reminder that even the sharpest-eyed among us are often wrong, either about what we're seeing at any given moment, or about what that sight portends.

The Ark of Studies

{Bibliochaise, from nobody&co..}

From "Prologues to a Personal Library," by Jorge Luis Borges:

A book is a thing among things, a volume lost among the volumes that populate the indifferent universe, until it meets its reader, the person destined for its symbols. What then occurs is that singular emotion called beauty, that lovely mystery which neither psychology nor criticism can describe.

Anyone with an interest in the various schema by which books may be organized is liable at some point to find himself thinking about the furniture that carries out those organizational plans. Bookshelves are a remarkably simple, effective design for most of our storage and retrieval purposes. Yet they're not very good at handling one of the most basic problems that has faced scholars and dilettantes alike since the first bound volumes: how to deal with the fact that one is often reading half a dozen or more books more or less simultaneously? How is one to keep all those books in easy reach and usefully organized--especially when so many readers, like me, have already given over control of the most natural resting place for extra volumes--the lap--to a cat or two?

Via the Athanasius Kircher Society, I've learned about an admirable solution from sixteenth-century Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli: the Book Wheel.



Here's how Ramelli described it in 1588:

A beautiful and ingenious machine, which is very useful and convenient to every person who takes pleasure in study, especially those who are suffering from indisposition or are subject to gout: for with this sort of machine a man can see and read a great quantity of books, without moving his place: besides, it has this fine convenience, which is, of occupying a little space in the place where it is set, as any person of understanding can appreciate from the drawing.

Meanwhile, in this week's New Yorker Anthony Grafton highlights more inventions designed to help sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars deal with the unprecedented flood of books:

Jacques Cujas, a sixteenth-century legal scholar, astonished visitors to his study when he showed them the rotating barber's chair and movable bookstand that enabled him to keep many open books in view at the same time. Thomas Harrison, a seventeenth-century English inventor, devised a cabinet that he called the Ark of Studies: readers could synopsize and excerpt books and then arrange their notes by subject on a series of labeled metal hooks, somewhat in the manner of a card index. The German philosopher Leibniz obtained one of Harrison's cabinets and used it in his research.

The Ark of Studies reminds me of Dr. Johnson's relatively simple system for organizing the source materials for his Dictionary. Henry Hitchings describes Johnson's method in Definining the World (2005):

When he identified a passage suitable for quotation, he underlined with a black pencil the word he meant it to illustrate, marked the beginning and end of the passage with vertical strokes, and wrote the initial letter of the chosen word in the margin. Working in pairs, the amanuenses would then go over the books Johnson had marked. Each time one of them came to a marked passage, he would transcribe it on to a quarto sheet and strike out the marginal letter. . . . The quotations were set out in columns, and, once full, the quarto sheets were cut up into slips, each bearing a single quotation. These copy slips were kept in bins, and arranged in alphabetical order by the amaneuenses. As work proceeded, the juggling of copy slips unfortunately allowed some of the illustrations to be lost. We can see evidence of this occasionally in the finished Dictionary. Explaining one sense of the verb "to cream," Johnson says is "used somewhere by Swift," while another word, "dripple," is "used somewhere by Fairfax."

Of course, even the best scheme and the most ingenious book furniture won’t avail in those situations where the information one desires is simply not there, as Guy Davenport laments in "Dictionary":

Some years ago, on a particularly distraught evening, the drift of things into chaos was precipitated by my consulting Webster's Third International for the word Mauser. All I wanted to know was whether it sported an umlaut or not. It wasn't there. I paid $47.50 for my Webster's; it weighs as much as a six-year-old girl; and I had to build a table for it, as it is too bulky to go into a bookshelf, and will anyway come all to pieces unless it sits open day and night.

Perhaps we should just give up and move into Borges's Library of Babel, where we accept a life of isolation for the certainty that the knowledge we seek is in there, somewhere:

There is no combination of characters one can make--dhcmrlchtdj, for example--that the divine Library has not foreseen and that in one or more of its secret tongues does not hide a terrible significance. There is no syllable one can speak that is not filled with tenderness and terror, that is not, in one of those languages, the mighty name of a god. To speak is to commit tautologies. This pointless, verbose epistle already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five bookshelves in one of the countless hexagons--as does its refutation.

To be honest, that probably is where we belong, immured in the endless library. Even the fact that we're worrying about these organizational problems at all suggests that we fit the pejorative connotation that Dr. Johnson ascribes to the term "booklearned":

Versed in books, or literature: a term implying some slight contempt.

To back up his assertion, Johnson turns--this time with attribution in hand--to a sharp little line from Jonathan Swift:

He will quote passages out of Plato and Pindar, at his own table, to some booklearned companion, without blushing.

We book people can tell ourselves that an ingenious piece of furniture may be all we need to establish order, but we know better. Entropy and its constant companion infinitude will never leave off plaguing us.

From Certain of the Chronicles, by Levi Stahl:

After a long night, I have at times slipped into dreams wherein I wander a vast ship full of books, shelves as numerous as the waves of the ocean, floors as many as the footsteps on a mountain, all unread, pages uncut, unknown. I know in my heart that I can find my way out, but I fear in my soul that I cannot find my way in.