438
DWIGHT MACDONALD
two-Mrs. Humphrey Ward, to name some failed major writers of a
conveniently distant time and place. It is our romantic prejudice in
favor of the extensive, indeed of the infinite, with its concomitant
nonsense about "genius," that leads us to over-value the big push.
Homer was a great poet but Theocritus wasn't bad either. And it is
striking that while Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer, to name our two
best novelists of the middle generation, may some day produce a
major novel, their best things so far have not been such ambitious
efforts as
The Adventures of Augie March
and
The Naked and the
Dead
but relatively minor pieces like
Seize the Day
and
The Man Who
Studied Yoga.
There is no need, then, to commiserate Mr. Nabokov because his
successful works to date fall into the minor category. (Muriel Spark
is another modern instance of the minof key being beautifully played.)
He has written one small masterpiece,
Lolita,
which combines comedy
-high and low-social satire, feeling, and an exuberance of mood and
language that has rarely been displayed in our literature since the
Elizabethans and Laurence Sterne.
*
He has also written three other
excellent works: the stories about Mr. Pnin; the little book on Gogol,
which is the best introduction to that marvelous writer I know, since
it is as idiosyncratic as its subject and in much the same way; and his
memoir of his early life,
Conclusive Evidence,
shimmering with nostalgia
and wit.
The reviews I've seen of
Pale Fire
have been cautiously unfavor–
able, the caution being due to Mr. Nabokov's literary reputation–
and also to the fact his last book was a best-seller.
**
They give the
misleading impression that, despite reservations, the book is fun to
read, full of "Quips and cranks and wanton wiles/Nods and becks and
wreathed smiles." But it isn't fun. In fact, it
is
precisely its pervasive
• On feeling, the quality most often denied to
Lolita:
Lionel Trilling overdid
it
when he insisted that love is its main theme, but he was right to see
that Humbert Humbert's yen for his nymphet went much deeper than lust or
perversion. Cf. the moving penultimate episode when Humbert confronts the
aged-i.e., 17-year-old-and married Lolita. Or the earlier sentence (p. 177)
in which Humbert summarizes it all: "And I catch myself thinking today
that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the love–
ly, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no
more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires,
and her sobs in the night--every night, every night-the moment
I
feigned
sleep."
.*
An
interesting exception was the flatly hostile article (by the British critic,
George Cloyne) in the
N.Y. Times Book Review,
a weekly not celebrated
for denigration, especially on its front page.
