·BOOKS
~27
difficult to believe that so great a man could be reduced to so little
space."
And may one suggest that Mr. Edel's last sentence might serve as
a salutary motto for all future students of Joyce and his work?
WILLIAM TROY
FICTION CHRONICLE
BEND SINISTER.
By Vladimir Nabokov. Holt.
$2.75.
THE CoNFESSIONS OF ZENO.
By Italo Svevo. New Directions.
$3.40.
THREE SHORT NovELS.
By Vercors. Little, Brown.
$2.00.
A
s A SCHOOLBOY the dictator, Paduk,
has
a moment of secondhand
popularity with his fellow pupils. Paduk's father has invented an
instrument called a padograph, a typewriter which reproduces the writer's
script with all its curlicues and evidence of personal temperament. Such
an invention appeals to the childish mind because it is both novel and
full of mischievous possibilities; one can have his own padograph made
and dash off a mechanical imitation of a personal letter, but, at the same
time, the existence of such an
in~trument
means that one is no longer in
sole possession of his own handwriting since pranksters can forge one's
padograph and fill the mails with false love notes, embarrassing documents
and fraudulent claims of all sorts. That Paduk should control his father's
invention and should for a time dazzle and confuse everyone with his pri–
ority provides one of the most successful and entertaining uses of symbol–
ism in Vladimir Nabokov's new novel
Bend Sinister.
The book itself is a
kind of padograph, as historical and factual as one's script and yet pur–
posefully offered as a literary invention, a fantasy.
Bend Sinister,
if it is not quite the great book we await on totalitarian–
ism, rather cleverly offers a reason for our failure to produce such a
great book, or for that matter any significant art on this theme. Perhaps
the totalitarian truth of the Hitler and Stalin governments is, when
translated into art, unconvincing, farcically exaggerated beyond belief
and purpose. The anti-Nazi movies are a good example: they did not suc–
ceed in becoming tragedies, as
I
assume they were meant to be, because the
evil Nazis were not convincing. Nazi brutality was insane and artistically
unmotivated and therefore the struggle against it became melodrama,
which from our immediate point of view may be the only possible ap–
proach. (One can sympathize with the refugees, each of whom had a
tale
to
tell tl1at should have struck the listener dumb; but even these tre–
mendous experiences became "escape" stories since the Soviet and fascist
