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PARTISAN REVIEW
The give-away which cancels the entire glossary of terribly clever
tricks, is the fact that the narrator and Sebastian are identical, both are
identical with the author, and the hook is. not a biography hut an auto–
biography. There is no search for the real life of Sebastian. The author
is really in search of his own life. And the characters-the narrator who
turns into Sebastian, or Madame Lecerf who pretends to be her own friend
-all of them, are merely schizophrenic stooges. The result of all this
superimposition is zero. There is no life in the book, and there are really
no characters. Sebastian's "life" is not reconstructed, "things past" are
not remembered, no knowledge or order are found. What is more, it is
not only that when all things are meant nothing is meant, but that a book
built on a world created and peopled by oneself, and palmed off as real–
ity, is essentially dishonest. The book is as false to the author as it is
to life.
When the writing is straight it is good, but good by such superficial
standards, that it doesn't matter. Mr. Nabokov believes that the right word
unlocks all mysteries, likE! the Holy Ghost. "No real idea can be said to
exist without the words made to measure." So he dismisses sex "because
the very sound of the word 'sex' with its hissing vulgarity and the 'ks, ks'
catcall at the end, seems so inane to me that I
canno~
help doubting
whether there
is
any real idea behind the word." The overrun metaphors–
whole catalogs of them-are contrived. A fair example is the portrait of
an Adam's apple "moving like the bulging shape of an arrased eaves–
dropper." Or, "a fifth was the letter of a spy with its steely secrel hidden
in a haystack of idle prattle." "Our life together was alliterative," written
in a love letter, is my favorite. The notion that writing is a holy mystery,
and the description of the pangs of creation Sebastian suffers when he
writes, reflect the attitude of minor writers. In point of fact, Sebastian
does not suffer as a writer, unless heart trouble is artistic, or to be lonely
and maladjusted is to be an artist. The life of the writer is sentimentalized
into nothing more than the old notion that writers are successful in pro–
portion to their unpopular appeal. Mr. Nabokov's book may be read with
interest as a curious piece of fiction, or may indeed be read with great
pleasure by those who I am sure will enjoy its faults. But when the book
is closed the book is dead. Nothing remains.
I also found Henry Miller's new book easier to close than to open. I
find Miller extremely boring. It is not merely his eternal fascination
with himself, but the enthusiasm of his fascination that is wearing. It
doesn't matter what's in the book; one either reads Henry Miller or one
does not. Miller doesn't really write, nor does he take writing seriously;
he is concerned with salvation, his own and everyone's. He destroys the
world by turning it into a song of himself. He writes in a prose belonging
to poetry, in an unending flow which has the suffocating quality of
an
irrelevant and overlong confession. One listens rather than reads. There
are a few pages worth while, and now and then, wrapped up warm
and
comfortable in the blanket of his plenitude, a sympathy and tenderness
that are touching.
