BOOKS
VIRTUOSITY REWARDED, OR DR. KINBOTE'S REVENGE
PALE FIRE.
By
Vlodimir Nobokov. Putnom. $5.00.
Except possibly for
Y oungblood Hawke,
this is the most
unreadable novel I've attempted this season. Mr. Nabokov's impene–
trability is a negative print of Mr. Wouk's; the latter is not clever
enough, but the fonner is too clever by half. This British locution is,
of course, not only philistine but also false: one cannot be too clever
any more than one can be too rich or too virtuous, and one of the
few racial defects of the English is-or used to be until recent years,
when brains have become fashionable everywhere, even in London–
that they suspect cleverness per se; thus Stanley Baldwin and Neville
Chamberlain were trusted (up to 1940) and Winston Churchill was
not, and thus Max Beerbohm, who had one of the clearest and most
original minds of his period, was never taken seriously. Still, there is a
legitimate complaint against cleverness and that is when it becomes
disconnected from meaning, when the virtuoso becomes so proficient
at his instrument that his delight in showing off its qualities goes
beyond the artistic purposes technique is supposed to serve.
Mr. Nabokov is a stylistic virtuoso who is all the more remarkable
because English is not his native tongue. He is often compared to
Conrad, but the comparison is unfair to both writers: to Nabokov
because he can sound a greater range of notes; to Conrad because
the few he did sound were major. Nabokov is a minor writer, by which
I intend no insult; so is Herrick compared to Donne, Austen to
Dickens, Gogol to Tolstoy, Frost to Yeats or Eliot. It's a matter of
scope rather than quality, and while a writer who successfully tackles
large themes is more important than one whose ambitions are more
restricted-otherwise there would
be
no point in the major-minor
distinction-a good minor writer is much to be preferred to such
writers as Wells, Galsworthy, Bennett and--corning down an octave or
