BOOKS
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archness and whimsicality that puts one off. Nagged on by professional
duty, I did stagger on to the end, like a sober man trudging through
the confetti and festoons of an interminable mardi gras. It seemed to
me high-class doodling like
Invitation to a Beheading
and one or two
other of Mr. Nabokov's earlier books, as boring as any exhibition of
virtuosity disconnected from feeling and thought-Mr. Cloyne justly
complains of the author's "self-imposed limitations" in both these depart–
ments. I also sensed a perverse bravado, as if the author, with a superior
smile, is saying to the large public that read
Lolita:
"So you think I'm a
manufacturer of best-sellers? Try
this
on your pianola!" I must confess
I find this attitude, if not its product, attractive.
Pale Fire
is in four unequal parts: a poem with that title supposed
to have been written by John Francis Shade, an eminent and elderly
poet who is in residence at an American university not unlike Cornell,
where Mr. Nabokov taught for some years-the only alive parts of
the book are the satirical glimpses of American academic life--and a
foreword, commentary and index by Charles Kinbote, a colleague
at the same institution. The poem is thirty-nine pages long, the fore–
word fourteen, the index eleven, and the commentary two hundred
and twenty-eight. Dr. Kinbote advises the reader to read his com–
mentary before reading the poem. High jinks. I did so, was bored,
shifted to the poem, was bored, etc., like an insomniac restlessly seek–
ing
a more comfortable position. The mbst that can be said for the
poem is that it is often good pastiche (though more often doggerel).
Pope and Swift are wittily echoed:
The light
is
good; The reading-lamp long-necked;
All doors ha'r/e keys. Your modern architect
Is in collusion with psychoanalysts:
When planning parents' bedrooms, he insists
On lockless doors so that, when looking back,
The future patient of the future quack
May find, all set for him, the Primal Scene.
And the seventeenth century metaphysical poets-who also often push–
ed virtuosity too far-are skillfully imitated:
And then the black night. That blackness was sublime.
I felt distributed through space and time:
One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand
Under the pebbles of a panting strand,
One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain,
In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.
