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does not instruct. It is true, of course, tliat "resistance" in a novelist, if unac­ Mockings of the Master Illusionist companied by an instinct for true values, can be simply a show-biz number (mor­ Tyrants Destroyed and sian-language past when he went as "V. ally. Mailer and Updike weigh roughly Other Stories Sirin"; and lo, a foreword apprises us the same). But time and again in Up­ by that his oeuvre has been accorded a full- dike's stories, you feel an aptitude for McGraw-Hill, 288 pp., $7.95 dress bibliography and reminds us (cryp­ something better than stylized No! in tically) that he also wrote . The thunder, a capacity for a more active and Reviewed by Hugh Kenner bang-you're-dead reviewer will lower his earnest address to experience, an interest cocked index and think twice before pro­ in playing in other than the sad-song ike Oscar Wilde and Charles Kinbote, nouncing stories so sponsored dismay­ keys, even a trace of moral authority. LI Nabokov plays—has been playing ingly empty, especially as Nabokov has An example: Toward the end of the now for many decades—a game to which more than once slipped in ahead of him, book at hand, Ms. Prynne, keeper of the self-appreciation is intrinsic. His invented anticipating doubts but leaving them rest home. Christian believer, woman of selves even appreciate one another. John equivocal. conscience, commits an exemplary piece Ray, Jr., Ph.D., in his foreword to Lolita, For instance, the fourth story, of kindness in the public ways, when con­ tells us how to admire what Humbert "Music," is called in its headnote "a fronted by a drunken Indian. (The lady Humbert accomplished in the 69 chap­ trifle singularly popular with trans­ betrays no trace of repugnance, offers ters of the narrative proper: "How lators." This phrase conceals several the drunk an imaginative explanation of magically his singing violin can conjure false bottoms. Translators fall for my why men in black suits and white bibs up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita trifles. You are about to read a story that should be abroad of a Saturday noon, that makes us entranced with the book has been—so to speak—around. You are extends a steadying hand to the chap as while abhorring its author!" Then about to see a real job of translating ("by he staggers at her side.) Marshfield is Vladimir Nabokov, closing the huge par­ in collaboration with touched; in his diary he exclaims: enthesis, supplies for our retrospective the author"). And since I present How charming you were . . . ! I, watching delectation in an afterword an inventory "Music" here with a certain amount of closely, felt with you your flicker of antici­ of the more magical bits: not the "good circumstantial fuss, including the date of pation, your wish to move him aside so your parts" of a porn novel—that's the list its Russian-language appearance in a charges could board the bus, your desire to he's parodying—but Lolita playing ten­ Paris emigre daily, you will understand leave this Indian—your fellow-Westerner— some dignity. Oh, I moved through you, un­ nis, or "the tinkling of the valley "trifle" correctly; I, who also wrote Ada derstanding all this and more, and it came to town coming up the mountain trail (on and , am entitled to call this me that love is not an e-motion, an assertive which I caught the first known female of story a trifle. putting out, but a trans-motion, a compliant Lycaeides sublivens Nabokov)." moving through. The story? Some 2,000 words about an A da concludes with a lyrical blurb for unmusical man at a concert who spots his Too swiftly, though, this instant of vul­ itself. The introduction to a reprinted former wife and, while they sit silent, nerability is canceled by embarrassment, lists allusions no one seems 20 feet from each other, must let the succeeded by ironic extravaganza: ". . . to have noticed the first time around. The music—formerly meaningless to him— only you [Ms. Prynne] are solid, only introduction to a revised Speak Memory shape his reliving of a past he had shut you have substance; I fall toward you as prompts us to turn up a sentence deep in away. Phrases like "How long ago it all a meteorite toward the earth, as a comet the book—"The ranks of words I re­ seemed!" and "What bliss it had been" toward the sun." You hear the novelist viewed were again so glowing, with their and "We can't go on like this" suggest telling himself, Easy does it, man. Easy. puffed-out little chests and trim uni­ a trifle indeed, unworthy of the master ... If I don't quickly recover my feigned forms . . ."—and discern buried there illusionist. Then she slips away, and then absence of earnestness, they'll see, won't "the name of a great cartoonist and a the name of the piece of music is re­ they, that it is feigned—and what then? tribute to him." vealed: " 'What you will,' said Boke in All reviewers, it seems, missed that the apprehensive whisper of a rank out­ A WRITER PUBLISHING his Seventeenth one. Reviewers—torpid folk, and with sider. Ά Maiden's Prayer, or the highly readable book deserves to be deadlines—don't pick up Nabokov sen­ Kreutzer Sonata. Whatever you will.' " spared absurd talk about Possibility, tences one by one, as they're meant to be Careful—Beethoven's sonata shares its Growth, Hope, and the rest. But the In­ picked up, or marvel at their irides­ title with a Tolstoy fiction. Check that dian bit in A Month of Sundays does, as cences, tap them for false bottoms, check out, Ο researcher of the twenty-first cen­ I have to acknowledge, incite sobriety. It them for anagrams. His only fit reader is tury. And Beware of the Labyrinth. tells a reader he or she is dealing with finally himself ("it is only the author's So it goes. These are, generally, trick someone who knows the good when he private satisfaction that counts"), and stories with a twist at the end, of the old- sees it and is unobliged by nature, train­ the rest of us should wait to speak until fashioned magazine kind. One—"The ing, or reputation absolutely to despise we're spoken to—as we are being, con­ Vane Sisters," already several times it. When you recall, in addition, that the stantly, by all those notes and prefaces. printed—has an acrostic in the last para­ author in question is barely out of his Now on with the motley: Tyrants De­ graph, implanted there by two dead girls 30s, it's extremely hard not to look stroyed, 13 stories scooped out of the of whose collaboration the narrator is ahead: not to wonder whether, sooner past, 12 of them out of his remote Rus- supposed to be unaware. The headnote than later, he won't be bound to look apprises us to watch for it. "This partic­ the thing straight in without Hugh Kenner's latest book is A Homemade ular trick can be tried only once in a winking. I, for one, can't wait. • World (Knopf). thousand years of fiction. Whether it has

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come off is another question." (But by more concern for the tricky plot than not quite too general to be of use, is this: prompting us, the sly author has made it for imagery and good taste." Lest we A man almost possesses what he seeks, come off.) hasten to agree, he also remarks that it but loses it because of a quirk in the In another, dating from 1926, a lady therefore "required some revamping here conditions. (The Tithonus story, or a devil offers a timid voyeur all the girls and there in the English version," readers fairy-tale plot; no wonder it can be made he shall covet between noon and mid­ of which are being spooked into discern­ to seem Protean.) night, gathered and placed at his com­ ing imagery and good taste. In the story the quirk was simple: The plete disposal, provided only that the A readier way to profit from this story Devil meant an odd number of girls; the total number be odd. (Trick ending: His ("A Nursery Tale") is to discern in its man toted up an odd number of encoun­ tally is 13, but one girl got counted plot, albeit half a century old, the Nabo­ ters. In the novels it is apt to be more twice.) Nabokov, anticipating groans, kov Theme full-bodied, a theme that has complex. The quester changes, or his passes this tale off as "a rather artificial sustained story after story, novel after object (Lolita). He becomes enmeshed affair, composed a little hastily, with novel. A way of stating it, almost but in a larger design of his quarry (Pale Fire; The Real Life of Sebastian Knight). Or the author has contrived an unthink^ THE HOUSE OF able exaction; the unpayable price of 's tenure (Pnin) would have been service under a long-ago trifler with his fiancee. The Pnin case is instructive. Since this parvenu is also the novel's narrator, un­ masking his steely smile in the final chap­ ter, there to dispose of Pnin's destiny much as the author does, he very nearly MEDICI fuses with the author or with what the author has called elsewhere "an anthro­ pomorphic deity impersonated by me." ITS RISE AND FALL ("I have finished building a world," says The full account of the extraordinary family who, through ι—.χ χ their wealth and character, were able to rule Florence, CD Τ the novelist Sebastian Knight, "and this control the Papacy, and influence the policies of an iUJCHRISTOPHE WILLIAM MORROWR is my Sabbath rest.") entire continent. I III—ίΓΙΙ I Ϊ~Γ Those beautiful involuted sentences, 43 Illustrations, two maps. Notes on Buildings and Worl(S iHtDCDtZl—l I of Art. List of Principal IHedici portraits. Busts, Statues which are Nabokov's hallmark, are ways In Florence^^^^^estagoryouevert^^t^'^^o^r,,^. Bibliography. Index. to build a world, not ways to describe A History Bool( Club Selection $12.50 one. "Without any wind blowing, the sheer weight of a raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordate leaf, /^^(^(ΜίηΜΒψ^ηίΐίηί^ caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of quicksilver performed a sudden glissando down the center vein, and then, having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip, relief. . . ." Between book covers, there is no leaf and no raindrop until the cre­ ator has done all that. And as a narrator who fuses with V. Nabokov effects the destiny of Pnin, so what happens in these big and little worlds is what V. Nabokov has decreed shall happen, right down to the passage of an "inquisitive butterfly" across a ten­ nis court in "Champion, Colorado," be­ tween Humbert Humbert and Dolores Haze, in a paragraph all to itself. It is he, Nabokov, who is Humbert's "McFate"; he (not a dead girl) who planted the acrostic in "The Vane Sis­ ters"; he who arranged the arithmetical misfortune of the timid voyeur; he who has equipped such a roster of his crea­ tures with faulty hearts and decreed that the heart of Ivanov in the story "Perfec­ Schimmlpenninck? ^' tion" should fail when it did (for partic­ For a free brochure that explains our name and how we toast our cigars, write: ulars, see the story). Grown bolder, he DOUWE EGBERTS, INC., 8943 FULLBRIGHT AVE., CHATSWORTH, CALIF. 91311 22 PRODUCED 2005 BY UNZ.ORG 3/8/75 «SR ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED British Columbia^ Canada.

These pictures are just a sample of what is waiting for you in British Columbia. 1. One of many intriguing shops that can be found through­ out the Province. 2. Long Beach on Vancouver Island, 11 miles of un­ broken beach on the Pacific Ocean. 3. The Williams Lake Stampede. Dozens of rodeos take place all summer long in British Columbia's cattle country. 4. An outdoor restaurant in Gastown, the original settle­ ment of British Columbia's largest city, Vancouver. For more pictures and lots more information write: British Columbia Department of Travel Industry, 1019 Wharf Street, Victoria, British Columbia V8W 2Z2. Or see your local travel agent.

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PRODUCED 2005 BY UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED Books has re-created space and time: The spaces and times of Ada, where old Russia's hegemony includes the North American continent, and where Anna Karenina, as though written by a counter-Tolstoy, Black Man's Burden opens with a sentence exactly inverse in sense to the sentence the earthbound The Conservationist of the land, the landscape, the animals, Tolstoy wrote. Meddling with the future by Nadine Gordimer the seasons—and of the native black pop­ also, it is he who gives instructions to a Knopf, 252 pp., $7.95 ulation—is as true and accurate and vivid twenty-first-century scholar (who will as ever. surely obey them, if he shall happen to Reviewed by Maxwell Geismar The novel starts out indeed as an exist). "idyll" of Mehring's farm and of his es­ It is he: That is what all the self-appre­ ore than Doris Lessing, a fellow cape from the tedious and empty South ciation is really about. It is also why the M South African who is a bit too African social life that has come to bore stories in Tyrants Destroyed are so emp­ much of an English yenta for my taste, him—while the novel's central love affair ty: the slight amusements of "an an­ and even more than Alan Paton, who has is already part of his past. On the farm thropomorphic deity," arranging small been rather quiescent of late, Nadine he is alone with himself at long last—and systems, like chess problems, to suit him­ Gordimer has become, in the whole solid that is his downfall. When he is at the self. body of her work, the literary voice and very peak of his material content and This deity will allot himself, say, conscience of her society—and how I joy, of his spiritual peace and pride in 3,500 words, and will contrive within wish I could say this about any contem­ being "a farmer," his black supervisor. that limit to place the lost wife whom porary American novelist. In the sense Jacobus (who really runs the farm), in­ Luzhin is seeking on the very train where of being a completely South African forms him that a murdered black man, Luzhin works as a waiter, and have them writer and insisting on remaining there, one of "them," has been thrown upon his not meet, have him even not find the Ms. Gordimer is a "regionalist." But her property. And that nameless black ring she lost in the diner, have him go region is really the whole Third World, corpse, which the police simply hide in a through with his plan to kill himself to which she has increasingly dedicated shallow ditch on Mehring's property, while the train bears her away toward her literary work. remains there in the novel to haunt him, Cologne. "," it's The hero of The Conservationist is and in the end to drive him off, in sheer called. Chance is seldom so hollowly Mehring, a wealthy, civilized South Af­ panic, from his beautiful, peaceful farm. neat. No, a better title would be "The rican businessman who has made a for­ Whims of Nabokov," iron whims. tune in pig iron and who has bought him­ As IN ALL of Ms. Gordimer's works, the By a fraudulent deity's tricks, he con­ self "a little farm" in the Transvaal for farm's blacks are described beautifully. trives to keep patterns trim within nar­ his weekends. By cleaning up the run­ She has a fine grasp of the language they row limits. To the deity responsible for down place, by cultivating it intelligently, speak—both among themselves and to your life and mine, the minimum intel­ by taking good care of the blacks who their masters. She knows their customs, ligible system appears to be the universe come with the property, Mehring has habits, superstitions, holiday ceremoni­ itself, and excerpts have a certain ran­ persuaded himself that he is a "conserva­ als, and tribal rituals. And she sees right dom look. Sensing this principle, V. tionist" who is helping the whole econ­ through the deceptive masks they wear Nabokov now inclines to refer every omy, the whole society, to maintain for their dealings with the whites and excerpt to its universe, which is The itself. even with the Indian settlers in South Complete Works of V. Nabokov. That is The fact that he can also bring his mis­ Africa: All this is no mean achievement what is really going on in Tyrants De­ tress down there without notice, that he for the sheltered South African English stroyed: less the promotion of some can write off the farm as a tax loss, and girl of good family that Nadine Gor­ negligible stories than their careful as­ that he really enjoys "returning to the dimer was at the outset of her career. signment to year and month and room earth" are additional benefits in Mehr- Poor Mehring! His "black family" on and weather and journal, the reinvention ing's mind. And he is really quite a de­ that idyllic and demonic farm of his are of an aspect of the author's past, a pen­ cent guy. He is liberal enough to tolerate far more interesting than he ever realizes. dant to Speak Memory. a much more radical mistress (who keeps Beside the blacks' tribal and communal For his chief work is finally himself, reminding him he is superior to other richness, which is never sentimentalized as it was Hemingway's, as it was Huys- "pig-iron merchants"). And "his" black or patronized in Gordimer's work, the mans's. Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848- slaves do respect him for taking such whites of the chronicle emerge as very 1907) is a point de repere Nabokov's good care of their land. As you can see, pale and alienated individuals indeed. appreciators seem to have shunned. Con- Nadine Gordimer's irony has grown even Mehring's wife has divorced him and templators of Ada's lush verbal jungle heavier in this novel than it is in earlier returned to the United States. His son— (now sleeps the nacreous petal, now the ones, and her South African love affair whom the blacks seem to cherish more gules) might adduce with advantage the is harsher and more devastating—and than he does—is reading textbooks on creator of Des Esseintes, whose tortoises there is less human content. But the sense gay liberation. Mehring's mistress, who were bejeweled, and who tired of flowers, subtly changes from "radical" to do- and indulged in artificial flowers, and Maxweli Geismar is a literary historian and gooder liberal—the reverse of Ms. Gordi­ [ critic whose most recent books are Mark then tired of those and sought out real mer's own career—is happiest when she ! Twain: An American Prophet, a critical flowers so exotic they could pass for i study, and Mark Twain and the Three R's, is taunting him about his capitalist and artificial. Π an anthology of Twain's radical thought. imperialist mentality. Against all this

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