Books 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 Vladimir Nabokov 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 Lolita. 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 Dmitri Nabokov 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 sounds 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 Pale Fire, 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, Bend Sinister 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 the eye 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 SR·3/8/75 PRODUCED 2005 BY UNZ.ORG 21 ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED Books 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 Pnin'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.