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?

"Our speeches in the day time cause our phantasy to work upon the like in our sleep," or, In dreams

"I had dreams, not nightmares but musical dreams, dreams about transparent questions . . . "--from Amulet, by Roberto Bolano

1 I was reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, which I've not read.

"I think dreams have a great many sorts of explanation. Once the Freud virus has, as it were, got into you, you keep on looking at things in that way. But surely there's a lot of pure accident in dreams. One has kinds of obsessions and fears that can't be given a sexual meaning. I think the inventiveness and details of dreams are amazing."--from From a Small Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch

2 I am playing basketball with the Chicago Bulls. I take a pass and fling up an outside shot, which misses abysmally. I turn around to find Michael Jordan shaming me by wagging a long finger, while Dennis Rodman is doubled over, gripping his knees in helpless laughter.

"The Atlantes, according to my sources, never eat any living thing, and never dream, either."--from The Histories, by Herodotus

3 At my nephew's ninth birthday party I was surprised to notice two guests whose attendance I certainly had not expected: Marcel Proust and Eloise of the Plaza. I got the sense that they'd somehow been invited in error, that it was quite possible that they knew no one at the party aside from each other. That wasn't really a problem, however, as they gave the impression of being the sort of close friends who need little to no outside contact. Huddled together in a corner, they sipped from the tiny teacups of my niece's tea set and quietly shared private, gossipy jokes that caused them now and again to break out in skeins of poorly muffled giggles.

"I knew that in many dreams one must disregard the appearance of people, who may be disguised or may have exchanged faces with one another, like those mutilated saints on the fronts of cathedrals which have been repaired by ignorant archaeologists in a jumble of mismatched heads and bodies, attributes and names. Those we give to characters in our dreams can be misleading. The one we love can be recognized only by the quality of the pain we feel."--from In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, by Marcel Proust

4 I am running a marathon in some anonymous but lovely European mountain town. The course, which winds through the narrow, wandering late-medieval streets of the town, is convoluted and difficult to follow, but that difficulty, in the early part of the race, is a help, giving my mind something to focus on aside from the details of my exertion. But around mile twelve I realize quite suddenly that I'm all alone, the body of fellow runners having silently slipped away somewhere along the course. It's clear that I've take a wrong turn and left the course behind. Worried, I look around, hoping to find a guide or a map. All I see is a quaint-looking pastry shop spilling a warm glow of candlelight onto the crooked sidewalk. I enter the pastry shop, conscious of the salty sweat caking my body, and, with apologies for my gross condition, I ask the baker whether he might happen to have a map of the marathon course. Smiling, he reaches into the display case and selects a cookie baked in the shape of an elephant balancing on a ball. He pokes a pudgy finger at the intricate lines that, pressed into the cookie, make up the design. In a voice tinged with a vaguely Germanic accent, he says, "You simply follow these lines." The cookie is a map of the route; the route forms the shape of an elephant balancing on a ball.

With a smile on my face and a cookie in hand, I leave the shop and begin to trot back toward the course.

"It is not much of a dream, considering the vast extent of the domains of dreamland, and their wonderful productions; it is only remarkable for being unusually restless, and unusually real. He dreams of lying there, asleep, and yet counting his companion's footsteps as he walks to and fro. He dreams that the footsteps die away into distance of time and of space, and that something touches him, and that something falls from his hand. Then something clinks and gropes about, and he dreams that he is alone for so long a time, that the lanes of light take new directions as the moon advances in her course. From succeeding unconsciousness he passes into a dream of slow uneasiness from cold; and painfully awakes to a perception of the lanes of light--really changed, much as he had dreamed--and Jasper walking among them, beating his hands and feet."--from The Mystery of Edwin Drood, by Charles Dickens

5 One of the editors at my workplace had arranged for some prominent authors to give lectures on their craft to the entire office. First up were Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad. They took turns speaking, and they actually had fairly interesting things to say about each other’s work. Hemingway was surprisingly self-effacing, and Conrad was exactly as I expected: formal, precise, and thoroughly serious.

It was only after I’d returned to my office following the lecture that I remembered that both Hemingway and Conrad were long dead. “Of course!” I thought. “Those must have been professional impersonators!”

I ran for the front desk, hoping to catch them before they left. Conrad was gone by the time I got there, but Hemingway was just stepping into the elevator. “Wait!” I shouted. “Who do you do when you’re not doing Hemingway?”

Hemingway turned. Then, smiling, he ripped off his mask, held it aloft, and jauntily shouted, "Yourcenar!”

"Against fearful and troublesome dreams, nightmare and such inconveniences, wherewith melancholy men are molested, the best remedy is to eat a light supper, and of such meats as are easy of digestion; no Hare, Venison, Beef, &c. not to lie on his back, not to meditate or think in the day time of any terrible objects, or especially talk of them before he goes to bed. For, as he said in Lucian after such conference, I seem to dream of Hecate, I can think of nothing but Hobgoblins; and, as Tully notes, for the most part our speeches in the day time cause our phantasy to work upon the like in our sleep, which Ennius writes of Homer: as a dog dreams of an hare, so do men dream on such subjects they thought on last."--from The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton

6 I was at the zoo, watching a gorilla very close up through the bars of his cage. He gave me a quizzical look, tugged at his earlobe, then pointed at my earlobes while mouthing the word, "Earring?" I stared for a second, then remembered that I was wearing a big, gold pirate-style hoop in each ear.

"There is no great difference, says Proust, between the memory of a dream and the memory of reality. When the sleeper awakes, this emissary of his habit assures him that his 'personality' has not disappeared with his fatigue."--from Proust, by Samuel Beckett

7 I am reading James Boswell's Life of Johnson and find a typo that somehow turns an ordinary sentence into some sort of prognostication about my brother's life. As I read it I am amused but impressed, and I remember that Johnson himself left a cryptic note about dreams and brothers in his diary. The entry for January 23, 1759, the day of his mother's funeral, includes the line, "The dream of my Brother I shall remember." Johnson's brother, Nathanael, had died at only twenty-four, a possible suicide; his sole surviving letter is an indictment of Samuel for his harsh treatment.

"It makes a difference whether your dreams usually come true or not. . . . See then if you can follow my example, and give a happy interpretation to your dream."--from a letter to Suetonius Tranquillus by Pliny the Younger

8 I was at Wrigley Field to watch a Cubs game, and, as game time approached, I got out my scorebook to take down the starting lineup. The public address announcer began to rattle off the Cubs lineup. "Leading off, and playing right field . . . a sesame ball." I wrote it down. "Batting second, and playing second base, a furry kitten." I wrote it down. "Batting third, and playing first base, Stacey Shintani." On hearing my wife's name, I threw down my pencil and exclaimed to my seatmate, "They're trying to throw this game!"

"My earliest memory is of a dream. It was in the house where we lived when I was three or four years of age. I dreamed I was asleep in the house in an upper room.

Then I awoke and came downstairs and stood in the living room. The lights were on in the living room, although it was hushed and empty. The usual dark green sofa and chairs stood along the usual pale green walls. It was the same old living room as ever, I knew it well, nothing was out of place. And yet it was utterly, certainly, different. Inside its usual appearance the living room was as changed as if it had gone mad."--from "Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)," by Anne Carson

9 I was reading—and greatly enjoying—Anthony Powell's’s biography of Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy. It was only after I woke up that I remembered that Powell never wrote a biography of Burton; that was Nick Jenkins, the narrator of Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, who serves as Powell’s stand-in.

"In some ways a narrative is like a dream. You don't analyze a dream--you just pass through it. A dream is sometimes healing and sometimes makes you anxious. A narrative is just the same--you are just in it. A novelist is not an analyst. He just transforms one scene into another. A novelist is one who dreams wide awake. He decides to write and he sits down and dreams away, then wraps it into a package called fiction which allows other people to dream. Fiction warms the hearts and minds of the readers. So I believe that there is something deep and enduring in fiction, and I have learned to trust the power of narrative."--Haruki Murakami, from a lecture in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2005

10 I dreamed that Van Morrison was at a dinner party I was attending with about a dozen other friends. After dinner, he got up to play a few songs. He ran through a somewhat perfunctory "Moondance," then asked me if I would accompany him on vocals and guitar for a couple of numbers. I don't play guitar, and while I do like to sing, I'm far from a good singer. But, unwilling to refuse Van Morrison, I got up and faked my way through "The Way Young Lovers Do," strumming and singing along. I was sufficiently nervous that I forgot nearly half the lyrics, but Van sang them all beautifully.

Then he launched into Sam Cooke's "That's Where It's At," and suddenly everything was right: I happened across the right chords, was even able to throw in some simple, but convincing finger-picked flourishes, and Van and I sounded stunningly good singing together.

"He was also terrified with manifest warnings, both old and new, arising from dreams, auspices, and omens. He had never been used to dream before the murder of his mother. After that event, he fancied in his sleep that he was steering a ship, and that the rudder was forced from him: that he was dragged by his wife Octavia into a prodigiously dark place; and was at one time covered over with a vast swarm of winged ants, and at another, surrounded by the national images which were set up near Pompey's theatre, and hindered from advancing farther; that a Spanish jennet he was fond of, had his hinder parts so changed, as to resemble those of an ape, and having his head only left unaltered, neighed very harmoniously. The doors of the mausoleum of Augustus flying open of themselves, there issued from it a voice, calling on him by name."--from The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, by Suetonius

11 I was rereading Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark, in the pages of which I encountered a book I hadn't noticed on my first reading: Ghost Whim, by Robin Anne Powter.

According to Nabokov's narrator, Ghost Whim is a cultural history of dreaming . . . but before I could learn what would happen if I read a nonexistent cultural history of dreaming inside an actual novel inside a dream, I woke up.

"Night comes when you least expect it. You are making dinner or working late, you look out the window and the sky is already dark. The arrival of night can be elusive, mysterious, and in the city we don't often see it, though we always know when it has fallen. In the country night takes its time. A glorious sunset might flag its approach, yet it seems we can never pinpoint its exact arrival. Nightfall is a subtle process."--from Acquainted with the Night, by Christopher Dewdney

This only happens to Nabokov

I was planning to write today about the letters of William Maxwell and Eudora Welty, but I was unexpectedly waylaid by another set of letters, ones that arrived as a completely unexpected and unheralded treat in the June 13-20 issue of the New Yorker: five letters sent by Vladimir Nabookov to Vera in the autumn of 1942 as he traveled the United States on a lecture tour.

The letters are a joy, loving and slightly absurd and polished and precise like all of Nabokov's prose. The first letter, which finds him having difficulty convincing several different South Carolinians who are waiting to meet a visiting Russian professor that he is that man, reads like a deleted scene from Pnin, all gentle misunderstanding and comedy. But the most wonderfully Nabokovian letter, the one that really makes it hard not to conclude that he somehow lived in a slightly different, stranger dimension and just sent back dispatches, is one mailed from Springfield, Illinois on November 7, 1942:

At the station in Springfield I was met . . . by the club secretary, a creepily silent melancholic of somewhat clerical cast with a small stock of automatic questions, which he quickly exhausted. He is an elderly bachelor, and his profession consists of doing secretarial work for several Springfield clubs. He livened up and flashed his eyes one single time--got awfully nervous, having noticed that the flagpole by the Lincoln mausoleum had been replaced by a new, taller one. It turned out that his hobby--or, rather, the passion of his life--is flagpoles. He sighed with relief when a watchman gave him the exact information--seventy feet--because the pole in his own garden is still ten feet taller.

The occasional treat like this would be enough on its own to make a New Yorker subscription worthwhile; as far as I'm concerned, everything good the magazine publishes for the rest of the year now is gravy.

The Paris Review

Following my George Plimpton post, it seems right that I praise the marketing department at Picador for the ingenious promotional scheme they came up with for The Paris Review Interviews, Volume III (2008): they arranged with a couple of blogs--including Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle, and Mark Sarvas's Elegant Variation--to run contests through which they would give away sets of the three volumes.

The contests required readers to identify interview subjects through a snippet of an answer, which was not only fun but good marketing--after reading a few days of stumpers (and probably trolling the Paris Review archives to try to find the answer) you couldn't help but be impressed by the quality of the collections.

To make it even better, I actually won a set last week, by identifying the interview subject who gave E. M. Forster the back of his hand in this exchange:

INTERVIEWER

E. M. Forster speaks speaks of his major characters sometimes taking over and dictating the course of his novels. Has this ever been a problem for you, or are you in complete command?

AUTHOR

My knowledge of Mr. Forster's works is limited to one novel, which I dislike; and anyway, it was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills, although of course one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves.

Initially the savagery of "trite little whimsy" made me think of Evelyn Waugh, but I eventually decided that Waugh couldn't have so successfully avoided Forster's novels, settling instead on Nabokov--it was "whimsy" and "quills" that did it, along with the flat brutality of "galley slaves."

On receiving my set today, I was pleased to see that the topic of E. M. Forster does come up in the interview with Waugh in Volume III. Conducted in 1963, when Waugh was well into what Penelope Fitzgerald calls his "I am bored; you are frightened" phase, the interview features the usual Wauvian combination of crankiness and intelligence. At one point, he mutters, looking out the window over Hyde Park, "The horrors of London life! The horrors of London life!"

Forster's name surfaces when the interviewer asks about his famous distinction between flat and round characters. Having always had difficulty with the false simplicity of those categories, I appreciate Waugh's repudiation of them:

WAUGH

All fictional characters are flat. A writer can give an illusion of depth by giving an apparently stereoscopic view of a character--seeing him from two vantage points; all a writer can do is give more or less information about a character, not information of a different order.

INTERVIEWER

Then do you make no radical distinction between characters as differently conceived as Mr. Prendergast and Sebastian Flyte?

WAUGH

Yes, I do. There are protagonists and there are characters who are furniture. One gives only one aspect of the furniture. Sebastian Flyte was a protagonist.

INTERVIEWER

Would you say, then, that Charles Ryder was the character about whom you gave the most information?

WAUGH

No, Guy Crouchback. [A little restlessly] But look, I think that your questions are dealing too much with the creation of character and not enough with the technique of writing. I regard writing not as investigation of character, but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. I have no technical psychological interest. It is drama, speech, and events that interest me.

Would it be better to be Waugh's furniture or Nabokov's galley slave? And, to keep the theme running, when I think of a writer who is "obsessed with the use of language," I think first of Nabokov, but Waugh runs a close second

Finally, I can't resist closing with this exchange about writers Waugh likes, in part because it includes a couple of my own favorites:

INTERVIEWER

What about Ronald Firbank?

WAUGH

I enjoyed him very much when I was young. I can't read him now.

INTERVIEWER

Why?

WAUGH

I think there would be something wrong with an elderly man who could enjoy Firbank.

INTERVIEWER

Whom do you read for pleasure?

WAUGH

Anthony Powell. Ronald Knox, both for pleasure and moral edification. Erle Stanley Gardner.

INTERVIEWER

And Raymond Chandler!

WAUGH

No. I'm bored by all those slugs of whiskey. I don't care for all the violence either.

INTERVIEWER

But isn't there a lot of violence in Gardner?

WAUGH

Not of the extraneous lubricious sort you find in other American crime writers.

"Extraneous lubricious sort"--now that could have come from the mouth of Nabokov!

"Mr. Hardy was of medium height and figure . . . his expression placid rather than sad."

{Photo of Thomas Hardy's boyhood home by rocketlass.}

Earlier this week I raved about the many pleasures to be found in The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (2007), offering a couple of examples from the entry for Lord Byron, whose life spun off enough rich anecdotes to fill a personal Decameron.

It would seem wrong, however, to close discussion of the book without also turning to another of this blog's favorite preoccupations, Thomas Hardy; fortunately, the volume doesn't disappoint when it comes to Dorchester's greatest export. First, we learn that Hardy had something unexpected in common with Vladimir Nabokov: both were synesthetes, as Elliot Felkin's "Days with Thomas Hardy" (published in Encounter in 1962) reveals:

He went on to talk about days of the week and colours and associations. Monday was colourless, and Tuesday a little less colourless, and Wednesday was blue--"this sort of blue" pointing to an imitation Sevres plate--and Thursday is darker blue, and Friday is dark blue, and Saturday is yellow, and Sunday is always red.

And Tess fans can't help but marvel at this story, told by Hardy's second wife, Florence, in her The Later Years of Thomas Hardy (1930), of a hospital visit to Hardy's friend Lord Pembroke:

He [Pembroke] was now ill at a nursing home in London, and an amusing incident occurred while his visitor was sitting by his bedside one afternoon, thinking what havoc of good material it was that such a fine and handsome man should be prostrated. He whispered to Hardy that there was a "Tess" in the establishment, who always came if he rang at that time of day, and that he would do so then that Hardy might see her. He accordingly rang, whereupon Tess's chronicler was much disappointed at the result; but endeavoured to discern beauty in the very indifferent figure who responded, and at last persuaded himself that he could do so. When she had gone the patient apologized, saying that for the first time since he had lain there a stranger had attended to his summons.

The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes includes a handful of additional Hardy stories, all good--but really nothing can touch the trove that is Thomas Hardy Remembered (2007), edited by Martin Ray. A compilation of firsthand accounts of Hardy by both the well- and the little-known, it offers page after fascinating page of sheer pleasure for the Hardy fan. Sure, it costs £55 (which, until John McCain unsuspends the suspension of the suspension of his campaign and flat-out superheros this economic crisis, is something like $1,000,000,000.34), but where else are you going to find such a collection of Hardy anecdotes?

Hell, I would argue that this one from Augustus John's Chiaroscuro: Fragments of Autobiography (1952) is worth nearly £55 on its own, if for no other reason than the vehemence of Hardy's protest:

Thomas Hardy had good reason to view with anxiety the demonstrations of some of his admirers. One of these, hailing from the USA, on the strength of a few minutes interview, produced a book entitled Thomas Hardy's Universe [Ernest Brennecke, 1952--ed.], in which the poet was described as soliloquizing before the fire, while smoking a succession of cigarettes. "But," said Hardy, with a gesture of despair, "I have never smoked a cigarette in my life!"

Or this nuanced appraisal from Edmund Gosse's obituary of Hardy in the Sunday Times of January 15, 1928:

[Hardy] needed all the natural magic of his genius to prevent his work, interpenetrated as it was by this resigned and hopeless melancholy, from becoming sterile, but joy streamed into it from other sources--the joy of observation, of sympathy, of humour. Yet, after all, the core of Hardy's genius was austere and tragical, and this has to be taken into consideration, and weighed in every estimation of his writings. It was a curious fact, and difficult to explain, that this obvious aspect of his temperament was the one which he firmly refused to contemplate. The author of Tess of the d'Urbervilles conceived himself to be an optimist.

Or, returning to Tess, this account of authorial travails from Frank A. Hedgcock's "Reminiscences of Thomas Hardy" (published in the National and English Review of October 1951):

He thought that public opinion was probably right in regarding it as his best novel; but he had put too much feeling into it to recall it with pleasure.

However, my favorite of Hardy's references to Tess (aside, that is, from this one) comes from Desmond MacCarthy's "Thomas Hardy: The Writer" (published in the BBC magazine The Listener on June 6, 1940). For its sheer disingenuousness, this anecdote alone is definitely worth £55, exchange rates be damned:

Once when we were passing some spot in Tess he said to me, "If I had thought that story was going to be such a success, I'd have made it a really good book."

Methinks a re-read of Tess may be on my autumn calendar.


{Photo by rocketlass.}

Stocking the shelves of the Invisible Library

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Earlier this summer, inspired by book-filled novels by Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, I hit upon the idea of using the Internet to start a catalog of books that exist only within other books--a Borgesian invisible library.

Now, through the inventiveness and industry of Ed Park--no mean begetter of imaginary books himself--the Invisible Library has a home! So far Ed and I have catalogued a mere handful of titles--leaning heavily on our old favorite, Anthony Powell--but the library is designed to be infinitely expandable, and we'll continually add more as we come across them.

Come by for a visit: whether you find your fancy piqued by Odo Stevens's wartime memoir Sad Majors or Fellowes Kraft's Joseph-Campbellesque mythic exploration Time's Body or Sebastian Knight's little-understood first novel, The Prismatic Bezel, we promise you'll leave empty-handed.

"The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir."

{Photo by rocketlass.}

One night last week I dreamed that a previously unknown and unpublished story by Vladimir Nabokov, called "H. H. in Eden," had come to light. Even as I was dreaming, I was trying deliberately to remember the details of the story as I read it; the usual half-lucidity of my dreaming self allowed me to know that the only place "H. H. in Eden" actually existed was in my head. Though on waking I lost the rich language of Nabokov--which, heartbreakingly, was fully realized in the dream--I retained the basic outline of the tale.

What I remember of it is this:

Humbert Humbert, having somehow escaped the fate described for him in the introduction to Lolita, manages to trick the Archangel Michael into letting him slip into the long-vacant Eden to escape the hash he has made of his life. Once past Michael and his flaming sword, however, Humbert is surprised to discover that Eden, rather than being depopulated . . . is full of other Humberts. Somehow {and here is where my ability to translate the logic of dreamlife begins to break down} that brings home to Humbert the painful realization that Michael hadn't been fooled at all, and that he'd let Humbert, not into Eden, but into Purgatory.

And there, with that somewhat metaphysical take on an O. Henry twist, the story ended. If only I could get back to that specific dream--but we so rarely find our way back to the same dreams twice, to what Proust called the "second apartment that we have, into which, abandoning our own, we go in order to sleep." I fear that the summary above is all our world is likely to enjoy of "H. H. in Eden."

The dream reminded me that I haven't yet presented a link to a pleasantly strange article by Hilary Mantel that appeared in the Guardian a while back, in which she tells of a story that, Coleridge-like, she pulled straight from a dream. Explains Mantel,

Wrapped in its peculiar atmosphere, as if draped in clouds, I walked entranced to my desk at about 4am and typed it on to the screen. The story was called "Nadine at Forty". In its subject matter, in its tone, its setting, it bore no relation to anything I have ever written before or since. It extended itself easily into paragraphs, requiring little correction and not really admitting any; how could my waking self revise what my sleeping self had imagined? By 6am I had finished. I was shaking with fatigue.

Part of what draws me to Mantel as a writer is her ability to plausibly--and yet chillingly--convey, both in fiction or memoir, uncanny moments; in this particular tale, there's still another unexpected creepy turn to come once she's transcribed the story from her dream brain to her computer.

I should also point out the nice recent piece on sleep in the London Review of Books by regular contributor Jenny Diski. Diski is a lover of sleep, while I only reluctantly make my daily peace with its necessity, but her column is wonderfully decriptive and anecdotal, her description of the borderlands of sleep--forevermore owned by Proust though they may be--sufficiently enchanting to justify reading the whole article:

Coming to, coming round. Slowly. Holding onto sleep, then hovering in hypnoland for as long as you can. Jung almost redeems himself from creepy spiritus munditude with the story in which he asks his new patient, a pathologically anxious, blocked writer, to describe his day in detail. ‘Well, I wake, get up and . . .’ ‘Stop,’ Jung says. ‘That’s where you’re going wrong.’ Not likely to be true, but perfectly correct. The hinterland between sleeping and waking is what compensates for having to start and get through the day, blocked writer, besieged schoolteacher or sullen secretary as I’ve been in my time.

Finally, a prize* awaits the first person who can tell me where I took this post's headline from.

*Prize to be your choice of one of two books I've discovered multiple copies of recently in my house: Tanizaki's Some Prefer Nettles or the second volume of Tolstoy's letters. This is, after all, a low-rent blog, which fact prizes will necessarily reflect.

"The past makes noble fuel."

{Photo by rocketlass of my brother trying to light the world's lousiest grill. He failed.}

Vladimir Nabokov is an author whom one should quote reluctantly and carefully in support of a point one is trying to make. The greatest trick of reading him, after all, is parsing the various levels of playfulness, trickery, and irony. Like Jane Austen's characters--whose words one so often sees adorning bookstore tchochkes--he often isn't saying quite what he's saying; to quote him with confidence is a fool's game.

Here, wind--have some caution, as I plunge in nonetheless! Given the recent furor over Nabokov's final, unfinished work, The Original of Laura (which, it appears, will see the golden light of day after all), I naturally perked up when I came across several incidents of the loss or destruction of writing in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941). As you probably know, this blog takes a staunch anti-burning position, however unjustifiable: I'm greedy, and I want all the detritus and ephemera of my favorite authors at my fingertips. Letters, diaries, drafts, notebooks, shopping lists, crosswords, pornographic sketches--authors who don't want me to see all that stuff should have regular, rousing trash-barrel fire rituals during their lives, a la Henry James.

But what did Nabokov himself think? You all have your grains of salt handy, right? Then here goes.

This first passage of burning is worth sharing for its beautiful prose alone. Sebastian Knight's brother, under orders from the late author, takes up a batch of his brother's letters to put them to the match:

For a wild instant I struggled with the temptation to examine closer both bundles. I am sorry to say the better man won. But as I was burning them in the grate one sheet of the blue became loose, curving backwards under the torturing flame, and before the crumpling blackness had crept over it, a few words appeared in full radiance, then swooned and all was over.

What effective, patient imagery, subduing and delineating every tiny moment! The way the words briefly appear "in full radiance" reminds me of burning letters to Santa in my grandparents' stove when I was a kid, imagining my wishes reconstituting themselves in wavering figures of smoke against the wintry sky above the house.

The next passage tells not of active destruction, but of the inevitable losses imposed by casualness and time. A college friend of Sebastian tells his brother about Sebastian's "vaguely un-English" juvenile poems. Rummaging among his papers, the friend is unable to come up with any samples:

"Perhaps, in some trunk at my sister's place," he said vaguely," but I'm not even sure . . . Little things like that are the darlings of oblivion, and moreover I know Sebastian would have applauded their loss."

And Nabokov gives me yet another phrase to try to add to my lexicon: "the darlings of oblivion." {Alternatively, I could simply start a band with that name. Our first album could be called The Prismatic Bezel.}

Later in the novel, the subject of the burned love letters arises again, as Sebastian's brother attempts to find their unknown subject. At one point, he believes himself to be very close to finding the answer, talking with the friend of a woman whom he suspects might have been his brother's paramour:

"Why must you write a book about him, and how is it you don't know the woman's name?"

"Sebastian Knight was very secretive," I explained. "And that lady's letters which he kept . . . Well, you see--he wished them destroyed after his death."

"That's right," she said cheerfully," I quite understand. By all means, burn love-letters. The past makes noble fuel."

I'll close with the clearest statement in Sebastian Knight of an authorial position on burning. (Though, again, we must remember that this is not only not necessarily Nabokov's position--it's not necessarily even Sebastian Knight's position, related to us as it is by his brother. Layers, layers, layers!) Soon after Sebastian's death, his brother takes on the job of going through his effects:

He had left everything to me and I had a letter from him instructing me to burn certain of his papers. It was so obscurely worderd that at first I thought it might refer to rough drafts or discarded manuscripts, but I soon found out that except for a few pages, he himself had destroyed them long ago, for he belonged to that rare type of writer who knows that nothing ought to remain except the perfect achivement: the printed book; that its actual existence is inconsistent with that of its spectre, the uncouth manuscript flaunting its imperfections like a revengeful ghost carrying its own head under its arm; and that for this reason the litter of the workshop, no matter its sentimental or commercial value, must never subsist.

As someone who writes and edits almost entirely on a computer, I've begun to wonder whether Nabokov might have adapted to that technology, had he lived longer. Write, rewrite, overwrite . . . and nothing is left for the literary scavengers except the final document as sent to one's publisher. Oh, but what is lost along the way!

Dreaming of the Imaginary Library

1 My initial list of books that only exist within novels featured one, Sebastian Knight's The Prismatic Bezel, for which we even have a review in hand. In Vladimir Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Sebastian Knight's brother explains that the book only received one review, a five-and-a-half-line notice in a Sunday paper:

The Prismatic Bezel is apparently a first novel and as such ought not to be judged as severely as (So-and-So's book mentioned previously). Its fun seemed to me obscure and its obscurities funny, but possibly there exists a kind of fiction the niceties of which will always elude me. However, for the benefit of readers who like that sort of stuff I may add that Mr. Knight is as good at splitting hairs as he is at splitting infinitives.

2 In a comment to the original post about imaginary books, MomVee from Watering Place said that she has always wanted to read The Horn of Joy, by Matthew Maddox, which is featured in Madeleine L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet.

Off the top of my head, the one that I'd most like to read is Borage and Hellebore, the critical biographical study of Robert Burton written just after World War II by Nick Jenkins, narrator of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. Or possibly the mysterious The Book of Three, from which Dallben draws his often troubling knowledge of forthcoming events in Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain--though I have a bad feeling that it would turn out to be some stultifying mix of Nostradamusy vagueness and Tolkienien genealogical portentuousness.

And what about you folks?

3 The night after I wrote the post about the imaginary library, I dreamed that I was rereading Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark, in the pages of which I encountered a book I'd failed to note in my post: Ghost Whim, by Robin Anne Powter.

According to Nabokov's narrator in my dream version of Laughter in the Dark, Ghost Whim is a cultural history of dreaming . . . but before I could learn what would happen if I read a nonexistent cultural history of dreaming inside an actual novel inside a dream, I woke up. But now I really want to read that book!

4 This final item has nothing to do with an imagined book, but I can't resist adding it--my excuse is that it ties in to the discussion of Nabokov because it might have been triggered by a conversation Ed Park and I had last night about the ape that is discussed at the end of Lolita. It's another dream, this one from a brief doze on the bus on the way home today:

I was at the zoo, watching a gorilla very close-up through the bars of his cage. He gave me a quizzical look, tugged at his earlobe, then pointed at my earlobes while mouthing the word, "Earring?" I stared for a second, then remembered that I was wearing a big, gold pirate-style hoop in each ear.

Going all the way back to vaudeville days . . . that had to be the gorilla my dreams, right?

And that's all for tonight, because I have no choice but to go spend the rest of the evening reading Roberto Bolano. I'm 200 pages into The Savage Detectives and it's proving ridiculously difficult to put down.

Cataloging the Imaginary Library

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Vladimir Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) is a novel purporting to be a biography of a recently dead writer, penned by his half-brother. As such, it's full of the titles of books that don't exist outside the world of the novel. Like other prolific fake-titlers, such as Anthony Powell (J. G. Quiggin's Unburnt Boats, St. John Clarke's Fields of Amaranth, etc.), Nabokov seems to have greatly enjoyed the task of naming these phantom books, which at their best reside comfortably at the mysterious juncture of plausibility, originality, and amusement.

When, the day after reading Sebastian Knight, I encountered yet more fake titles in Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark (1938), then even more--though tipped more towards verisimilitude--last night in Graham Greene's The End of the Affair (1951), I began to think . . . what better, more Borgesian use could there be for the infinite capacity of the Internet than to assemble a catalog of the world's Fictional Library?

Thus was born a new feature! If I end up sticking with this over the months and building a ridiculously long list, I'll probably at some point figure out a different place to put them and a different way to organize them. For now, however, those of you who enjoy the art of fake titling as much as I do can simply enjoy this first batch:

From Graham Greene's The End of the Affair

For Ever Fido (1912), author unknown
The Ambitious Host, by Maurice Bendrix
The Crowned Image, by Maurice Bendrix
The Grave on the Water-Front, by Maurice Bendrix

From Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark

Memoirs of a Forgetful Man, by Udo Conrad
History of Art: Volumes One through Ten, by Nonnenmacher

From Vladimir Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

The Laws of Literary Imagination, author unknown
The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight, by Mr. Goodman
Fall of Man, by Godfrey Goodman
Recollections of a Lifetime, by Samuel Goodrich
The Doubtful Asphodel, by Sebastian Knight
The Funny Mountain, by Sebastian Knight
Lost Property, by Sebastian Knight
The Prismatic Bezel, by Sebastian Knight
Success, by Sebastian Knight

Finally, I can't resist sharing some of the titles of go-getting business books featured in Ed Park's great new novel Personal Days (2008):

Every Worker's War Chest, by Fred Glass
Office Politics 101, by Randall Slurry
Climbing the Seven-Rung Ladder: The Business of Business, by Chad Ravioli and Khader Adipose
The Business Warrior's 30-Day Mental Fitness Plan (Revised Edition), by Cody Waxing
Yes, I Drank the Kool-Aid--and I Went Back for Seconds, by M. Halsey Patterson
Mine for the Taking: or, Some (INCREDIBLY!) Irreverent Notes on the Business of Wealth, by Parker Edwards
Letters to a Young Tycoon, by Percy Ampersand, edited by Percy Ampersand IV

Because part of the fun of that section of Ed's book is coming across these and other titles, I won't share nearly all of them--but maybe Ed will offer more at his reading at Chicago's lovely Book Cellar in Lincoln Square tomorrow night. Come out and see for yourself! Thursday, June 5th at 7 o'clock, 4736 N. Lincoln Avenue!

There's a different world . . . a more mysterious world . . . right there . . . just through that door. All we have to do is open it . . .

{Photo by Flickr user andshewas, used under a Creative Commons license.}

Steven Millhauser's brief but powerful story "The Other Town," which is included in his new collection, Dangerous Laughter (2008), tells of a town that for centuries has lived across a woods from an unpopulated exact replica of itself. The origin of the replica is unknown, but in the flush latter-day of the story, it has become a combination of theme park and obsession, supported by tax dollars and run with the guarantee that any change, however minor, in the physical details of the primary town will within two hours be mirrored in the other town. (Techniques that will allow for instant replication are rumored to be just around the corner.) Ruminating on the value of the other town, the narrative voice--which is, as so often in Millhauser, an unnamed collective of town opinion--offers the following justification:

The real value of the town . . . lies in the way it permits us to see our own town more clearly or completely. Preoccupied as we are with domestic and financial cares, we pass through our lives noticing so little of what's really around us that we might be said to inhabit an invisible town; in the other town, the visible town, our attention is seized, we feel compelled to look at things closely, to linger over details that would otherwise fail to exist at all. In this way the other town leads us to a fuller or truer grasp of things.

The passage makes for a nice capsule description of the effect of Steven Millhauser's stories as well: though his tales nearly always involve an element of the fantastic--or at least the improbable--they are so firmly grounded in our material world that they throw that world itself into sharp relief, reminding us even as they break from it that it, too, has dark corners and hidden secrets, roads not taken and doors never opened. At their best, Millhauser's stories combine the intellectual rigor of Borges, the whimsy of Calvino, and the exquisite prose of Nabokov; they conjure up our own world, so bright and detailed that we can no longer pass through it inattentively--and then they give it a little twist.

After a story, labeled as an Opening Cartoon, that hilariously explores the inner life of Tom-and-Jerry-style cartoon characters, Dangerous Laughter is divided into three sections that roughly correspond to Millhauser's three most common types of story, though shared elements run through all three: Impossible Architectures, Heretical Histories, and Vanishing Acts. Impossible Architectures, as the name suggests, is Millhauser at his most Calvino-esque: he writes on such topics as a craze for doming one's home, the aforementioned other town, or a tower stretching to heaven. Technology, once loosed, outstrips human ability to understand it--but the result, rather than a sci-fi dystopia, is most often simply an altered version of the reality we're used to: we are accommodating by nature, and the new situation quickly becomes commonplace.

Heretical Histories, on the other hand, offer us views of, as the narrator of the extremely good "A Precursor of the Cinema" says of its painter of inexplicably animated paintings,

a turn, a dislocation, a bold error, a venture into a possible future that somehow failed to take place.

In these stories--which as a category would include his Pulitzer Prize-winning Martin Dressler (and his better, shorter, and very similar "The Dream of the Consortium")--we see the deepest logics of both art and capitalism worked out: everyone pushes always for more and better, more and better. In one story, fashion designers goad one another to ever-dizzier heights of absurdity, while in another an inventor in a Menlo Park-style laboratory presses onward in his quest to understand the sensation of touch. In both these categories of story, Millhauser's inventiveness is at the fore: he sinks a new idea deeply into the material reality we know already, then offers genuine, exhilarating surprises.

The last category, Vanishing Acts, is the least useful as a descriptive grouping--but the stories I would place there, based on what Millhauser has included under that name in this volume, are my favorites in his ouvre. Though they bring out Millhauser's richest, most lavishly descriptive language, they tend to be more restrained in their invention, more tied to our experience--but in a sense, that is where they derive their power. Most often, these stories are set in some vague post-World War II American towns--railroad towns, maybe bedroom communities, perhaps up the Hudson.

It is usually summer, and we are before the ubiquity of air conditioning, so windows are open and escape is so simple. We are also long before the Internet and its easy answers, or even, most often, television and its link to the world outside one's town. Word travels by rumor, and teenagers--a group that has just begun to be identified as such--occupy a liminal world of many questions and few answers. Parents are mostly absent, like in Peanuts, though we catch occasional glimpses of them; they're usually troubled, possibly fuzzed by the haze of the post-war pharmaceutical cornucopia. (I can imagine a whole series of counterstories, the tales of the parents--their parties and golf outings, their furtive affairs--that occur during the exact moments when Millhauser is taking us on the journey of the children. I suppose that's the land of Cheever, or Updike.)

That world seems clearly the land of Millhauser's own youth, in the way that Ray Bradbury's stories of small-town life refract his own upbringing--and there are times, especially when he uses the dangerous multiperson narrative voice, when Millhauser treads awfully close to the nostalgia that so often ensnares Bradbury. But he almost always avoids it, most often by reminding us of the mysterious power of the unknown--and, specifically, of the power of sex, simultaneously a force and an experience, seeming at times the only real divide between the fading pleasures of childhood and the still-mysterious world of the grown-ups. The best story in Dangerous Laughter, "The Room in the Attic," traffics almost wholly in sublimated sex, ratcheting up the tension as day after day the narrator spends hours sitting in a darkened attic room playing games of "guess what's touching you" with the never-seen sister of his best friend.

For all the worries and often-frustrated desires expressed in these stories, the best of them--such as the novella Enchanted Night (1999) and "A Game of Clue," from The Barnum Museum (1990)--also serve to remind us of that feeling (occasionally still available to us, but common when we were teens) that the world really does offer myriad possibilities, and its mysteries can be construed as inherently romantic.

Not all of Millhauser's stories work, even in this strong collection. Both the aforementioned story about fashion and another, "The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman," never quite overcome relatively banal premises, while "Dangerous Laughter," about a craze for unrestrained laughter that sweeps a town's youth, mostly lies dead on the page, its central conceit never coming to life. Yet even the failed stories offer shining prose and the occasional memorable insight. "Dangerous Laughter," for example, offers us the following, once the teens' passion for laughter has turned to its opposite, a rage for tears:

The pleasures of weeping proved more satisfying than the old pleasures of laughter, probably because, when all was said and done, we weren't happy, we who were restless and always in search of diversion.

Perhaps it's that relentless search for diversion that unifies all of Millhauser's stories: it drives the capitalists and inventors, the artists and their audiences, and of course the teens. Change, innovation, new experience are all inherently seductive--and Millhauser shows us both that seduction and its consequences: the loss of control, the loss of certainty, the loss, even, of oneself. And then, with his lush prose and his endless inventions, he seduces us again and again regardless.

Some animals I met today, whose relations describe a continuum from kindly cooperation to deadly enmity

{Owen and Mzee, photographer unknown.}

From Pnin (1957), by Vladimir Nabokov

He seemed to be quite unexpectedly (for human despair seldom leads to great truths) on the verge of a simple solution of the universe but was interrupted by an urgent request. A squirrel under a tree had seen Pnin on the path. In one sinuous tendril-like movement, the intelligent animal climbed up to the brim of a drinking fountain and, as Pnin approached, thrust its oval face toward him with a rather coarse spluttering sound, its cheeks puffed out. Pnin understood and after some fumbling he found what had to be pressed for the necessary results. Eying him with contempt, the thirsty rodent forthwith began to sample the stocky sparkling pillar of water, and went on drinking for a considerable time. "She has fever, perhaps," thought Pnin, weeping quietly and freely, and all the time politely pressing the contraption down while trying not to meet the unpleasant eye fixed upon him. Its thirst quenched, the squirrel departed without the least sign of gratitude.

From The Executor: A Comedy of Letters (2006), by Michael Kruger, translated by John Hargraves

I caught a whiff of cigarette smoke and turned around to find her already standing in the room. Like an animal, I thought, that knows every hiding place in the apartment, can disappear at the first sign of danger, and reappears as soon as there's something it can grab and run off with. She must have lit her cigarette in her office, even though this was strictly forbidden, for the trip upstairs. She looked for an ashtray, and, not finding one, dropped the butt into a test tube--there were a couple of the desk, set in a wooden rack. She held her thumb over the opening until the glass took on a milky color and the butt went out. Then she put the tube back in its place.

From "Cat 'n' Mouse," by Steven Millhauser, collected in Dangerous Laughter (2008)

The mouse is sitting in his armchair with his chin in his hand, looking off into the distance with a melancholy expression. He is thoughtful by temperament, and he is distressed at the necessity of interrupting his meditations for the daily search for food. The search is wearying and absurd in itself, but is made unbearable be the presence of the brutish cat. The mouse's disdain for the cat is precise and abundant: he loathes the soft, heavy paws with their hidden hooks, the glinting teeth, the hot, fish-stinking breath. At the same time, he confesses to himself a secret admiration for the cat's coarse energy and simplicity. It appears that the cat has no other aim in life than to catch the mouse. Although the faculty of astonishment is not highly developed in the mouse, he is constantly astonished by the cat's unremitting enmity.

{Krazy and Ignatz, by George Herriman.}

Elementary, my dear Vladimir

When Stacey and I travel by car, we read Sherlock Holmes aloud during the drive. One story on the way there, and one on the way back. When packing, I sometimes wonder whether it's worth lugging the large hardcover of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes rather than a more manageable paperback. It's the same stories, after all, and since you can't really enjoy the illustrations while driving, all you gain are the notes, written from a Sherlockian perspective--the Sherlockians being the branch of fans that treats the Holmes stories as history rather than fiction. Today I was reminded why it's always worth the extra weight.

The reminder took the form of an editorial note near the end of "The Speckled Band." (If you've not read the story and would like to avoid learning about its solution, you should immediately go somewhere else--perhaps here--instead of continuing to read). One of the most popular Sherlock Holmes stories, "The Speckled Band" is also one that has over the years generated some questions among Sherlockians about its solution, in no small part because of some minor questions about the details of the case. (How could the adder live in the safe if there were not ventilation holes? Why would the Doctor whistle to recall the snake when it hadn't had time to perform its murderous duty? etc.) The note rounding up all these alternative theories--note #44 for this story--convinced me that this edition is worth lugging to the ends of the earth; even if you're not a Holmes fan, you might find it worth your time to read through to the end.

44There are some revisionist theories respecting "The Speckled Band." Several argue that Helen Stoner murdered Julius and Dr. Roylott, and probably her mother as well. Vivian Darkbloom, in the self-described "somewhat revisionist" essay "Holmes Is Where the Heart Is, or Tooth-Tooth, Tooties," suggests that Holmes murdered Dr. Roylott, to clear the way for an illicit liaison with Helen Stoner. Roylott's behaviour, the essay contends, was not that of a murderer, but of a man attempting to scare off a suitor. The essay appeared in the December 1976 issue of the Sherlockian journal Baker Street Miscellanea, and the editors reported that "the anagramatically pseudonymous Vivian Darkbloom has not seen fit to furnish us with any personal data, and consdering the scandalously icononclastic thrust of her principal thesis, we are not surprised. The author appears to be California-based, also engaged in medical studies, and a student of the works of Vladimir Nabokov as well as John H. Watson's . . . " A character named "Vivian Darkbloom" appeared in Stanley Kubrick's 1961 film adaptation of Nabokov's Lolita, for which Vladimir Nabokov wrote the screenplay, and in "Vladimir Nabokov: In Tribute to Sherlock Holmes," Andrew Page analyses references and images in Nabokov's Lolita,The Defense, Pnin, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Despair, and Pale Fire that demonstrate the author's familiarity with and affection for the Canon.

Now, perhaps more serious fans of Nabokov than I already knew about this revisionist theory--and, granted, it's not even certain that the article is by Nabokov--but I didn't know about it, and it made my day. Of course Nabokov is a Holmes fan, and of course he would have enjoyed sitting around thinking up alternate solutions to Holmes's cases!



His solution to this particular case is, you'll note, insane.

[Correction, 11/28/07, 12:10 AM: Ed at the Dizzies notes, quite sensibly,

I don't think it's VN's handiwork—I don't think he'd be so obvious as to offer that "Vivian Darkbloom"—an anagram he's dropped into several of his novels—was a fan of Nabokov...i.e., of himself!

That seems likely. Even the title of the article seems a bit too blunt an instrument for Nabokov. I think my critical sense was overwhelmed by my joy at immediately recognizing the Vivian Darkbloom anagram--that, and my fervent desire to imagine Nabokov scribbling out articles for Sherlockian publications under pseudonyms! A Holmes fan can dream, can he not?]