Assorted Prose (40 page)

 
HOW HOW IT IS WAS

H
OW
I
T
I
S
, by Samuel Beckett, translated from the French by the author. 147 pp. Grove Press, 1964.

how it is I quote and unquote by Samuel Beckett published by Grove Press translated from the French by the author Samuel Beckett

in French how it is is comment c’est which is a pun id est commencez which means begin in English no pun simply how it is otherwise not much probably lost in translation

begin beginning not so easy book is written how it is I quote unquote in words like this unpunctuated clumps of words with spaces white between the I guess you’d call them paragraphs I write it as I read it

word clumps no punctuation commas no periods colons no semi colons none of them ampersands and asterisks or even arse yes arsterisks not one but now and then in caps I said in ARE YOU LISTENING capitals to make it quite clear CAPITALS and there it is how how it is is written technically considered

aesthetically considered

something wrong here

aesthetically considered quote how it is unquote can hardly be considered as it is deliberately antiaesthetic like graphic art of Dubuffet like plastic art of Giacometti whose figures cosmic vastness whittles to such a painful smallness
style if style it is conveys effect of panting more or less for hero who is crawling face down in the mud and dragging sack of jute containing cans of food also something incantatory also makes of language something viscous which images push through with effort awful effort blue sky there was one blue did you see it sky

plot faceless nameless hero crawling through the mud as mentioned dragging sack of cans as mentioned can opener not mentioned there is one nameless hero murmuring in the mud and dark alone

when something other in the dark and mud called Pim the name is PIM comes lies beside or under difficult to gather precisely which and suffers being stabbed in many places inducing speech or yells when stabbed with the can opener just mentioned

then departs or fades or sinks or was entirely imagined by hero faceless nameless who retrospectively divides his crawl through mud into three stages before Pim with Pim after Pim and that is plot of how it is

delightfully retold and thank you

welcome surely clearly hero faceless voice is us mankind you me brother and mud the earth or hell or both and sack the body dragged along and Pim is Christ name in Greek begins chi rho iota looks XPI take away X add M which is Sam SAM Beckett’s favorite letter and you have PIM whose name is also BOM to come the second coming of PIM is BOM mob spelled arsyversy also bomb also KRIM a scribe a tribe of scribes to follow PIM must be the Christian church apostles popes so that before Pim with Pim after Pim is human history how it is demarcated Christianly surely not sure not clear you’re welcome

hero everyman not only Christianly but biologically for as with elementary organisms mouth and cloaca are confused and tongue and penis mud and merde and words the same somehow the panting wriggling struggle evokes the fish who out of water gasped to breathe evolving manwards
incarnation felt as animal encounter analogy a worm encounters a pebble nibbles then must crawl around it

Pim and hero cruelly copulate with graphic inexpertness a blasphemous analogy with buggery that Beckett LOUDLY underlines also analogy with any love affair I quote there wherewith to beguile a moment of this vast season end of quote

the period after Pim full of numbers analogy with modern science the empty universe proliferates with the explicit mathematicism in which the author so boringly delights OKAY

attempt to take the novel into bowels beneath society and circumstance COMMENDABLE obstinacy in producing novels each one of which is smaller than the one before ADMIRABLE with less furniture VERY WORTHY kind of fierce poetry YOU BET out of rancid Platonism WHY NOT but BUT

something wrong here

something undergraduate inert a neoclassicism in which one’s early works are taken as the classics a laziness in which young urgencies become old rhetoric hermetic avantgardism unviolated by the outer word the world beyond the skin except the customary almost automatic glimpse of rural maybe Irish bliss which bothers Beckett like a mote of blue sky in his eye

this proud priest perfecting his forlorn ritual

the plays OKAY very the stage an altar anyway the radio plays EVEN BETTER the ear rebuilds the actors foist existence on the words I remember the wonderful lavender sandals of the messenger boy in a certain production of Godot and his mystical haircut BUT

in how it is where Joyce and Kafka intersect one misses now the one and now the other compare The Burrow compare Nighttown compare The Penal Colony and deplore the relative thinness the sterile stridency
question is the novel no longer a fit vessel for Beckett’s noble sorrow and quote comedy of incapacity unquote Hugh Kenner

unanswered but good the end of review the END of meditating upon this mud and subprimate sadism NO MORE no more thinking upon it few books have I read I will not reread sooner SORRY but that is how it is

 
GRANDMASTER NABOKOV

T
HE
D
EFENSE
, by Vladimir Nabokov, translated from the Russian by Michael Scammell in collaboration with the author. 256 pp. Putnam, 1964.

One hesitates to call him an “American writer”; the phrase fetches to mind Norman Mailer and James Jones and other homegrown cabbages loyally mistaken for roses. Say, rather, that Vladimir Nabokov distinctly seems to be the best writer of English prose at present holding American citizenship, the only writer, with the possible exception of the long-silent Thornton Wilder, whose books, considered as a whole, give the happy impression of an
oeuvre
, of a continuous task carried forward variously, of a solid personality, of a plenitude of gifts exploited knowingly. His works are an edifice whose every corner rewards inspection. Each book, including the super-slim
Poems
and the uproariously pedantic and copious commentaries to his translation of
Eugene Onegin
, yields delight and presents to the aesthetic sense the peculiar hardness of a finished, fully meant thing. His sentences are beautiful out of context and doubly beautiful in it. He writes prose the only way it should be written—that is, ecstatically. In the intensity of its intelligence and reflective joy, his fiction is unique in this decade and scarcely precedented in American literature. Melville and James do not, oddly, offer themselves for comparison. Yet our literature, that scraggly association of hermits, cranks, and exiles, is strange enough to include this arrogant immigrant; as an expatriate Nabokov is squarely in the native tradition.

Very curiously, his
oeuvre
is growing at both ends. At one end, the end pointed toward the future, are the works composed in English, beginning with the gentlest of his novels,
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
, and terminating, for the time being, in his—the word must be—monumental translation of
Onegin
, a physically gorgeous, sumptuously erudite gift
from one language to another; it is pleasant to think of Nabokov laboring in the libraries of his adopted land, the libraries fondly described in
Pnin
, laboring with Janus-faced patriotism on the filigreed guy-wires and piled buttresses of this bridge whereby the genius of Pushkin is to cross after him into America. The translation itself, so laconic compared to the footnotes, with its breathtaking gaps, pages long, of omitted stanzas whose lines are eerily numbered as if they were there, ranks with Horace Gregory’s Catullus and Richmond Lattimore’s
Iliad
as superb, quirky, and definitive: a permanent contribution to the demi-art of “Englishing” and a final refutation, let’s hope, of the fallacy of equivalent rhyme. In retrospect, Nabokov’s more recent novels—obviously
Pale Fire
but there are also Humbert Humbert’s mysterious “scholarly exertions” on a “manual of French literature for English-speaking students”—transparently reveal glimpses of the Pushkinian travail begun in 1950.

At the other end (an end, as in earthworms, not immediately distinguishable), Nabokov’s
oeuvre
is growing backwards, into the past, as English versions appear of those novels he wrote in Russian, for a post-Revolutionary émigré audience concentrated in Paris and Berlin, during his twenty years of European residence (1919–40), under the pen name of “V. Sirin.”
The Defense
, originally
Zashchita Luzhina
, is the latest of these to be translated.
^*
In the chronology of his eight Russian novels,
The Luzhin Defense
(this literal title was used by
The New Yorker
and seems better, in clearly suggesting a chess ploy, though the ghosts of “illusion” and “losin’ ” fluttering around the proper name perhaps were worth exorcising) comes third, after two untranslated ones and just before
Laughter in the Dark
. It is thus the earliest Nabokov work now available in English. An author’s foreword states that it was written in 1929—that is, when Nabokov was thirty, which is the age of Luzhin, an ex-chess prodigy and international grandmaster. Like his hero, the
author seems older; few Americans so young could write a novel wherein the autobiographical elements are so cunningly rearranged and transmuted by a fictional design, and the emotional content is so obedient to such cruelly ingenious commands, and the characterization shows so little of indignation or the shock of discovery. On this last point, it needs to be said—so much has been pointlessly said about Nabokov’s “virtuosity,” as if he is a verbal magician working with stuffed rabbits and hats nobody could wear—that Nabokov’s characters live. They “read” as art students say; their frames are loaded with bright color and twisted to fit abstract schemes but remain anatomically credible. The humanity that has come within Nabokov’s rather narrow field of vision has been illuminated by a guarded but genuine compassion. Two characters occur to me, randomly and vividly: Charlotte Haze of
Lolita
, with her blatant bourgeois Bohemianism, her cigarettes, her Mexican doodads, her touchingly clumsy sexuality, her utterly savage and believable war with her daughter; and Albinus Kretschmar of
Laughter in the Dark
, with his doll-like dignity, his bestial softness, his hobbies, his family feelings, his abject romanticism, his quaint competence. An American housewife and a German businessman, both observed, certainly, from well on the outside, yet animated from well within. How much more, then, can Nabokov do with characters who are Russian, and whose concerns circle close to his own aloof passions!

His foreword, shameless and disdainful in his usual first-person style, specifies, for “hack reviewers” and “persons who move their lips when reading,” the forked appeal of “this attractive novel”—the intricate immanence in plot and imagery of chess as a prevailing metaphor, and the weird lovableness of the virtually inert hero.

What makes characters endearing does not admit of such analysis: I would divide Luzhin’s charm into (a) the delineation of his childhood (b) the evocation of his chess prowess. As to (a), Nabokov has always warmed to the subject of children, precocious children—David Krug, Victor Wind, the all-seeing “I” of
Conclusive Evidence
, and, most precocious and achingly childlike of all, Dolores Haze. The four chapters devoted to little Luzhin are pure gold, a fascinating extraction of the thread of genius from the tangle of a lonely boy’s existence. The child’s ominous lethargy; his father’s brooding ambitiousness for him; the hints of talent in his heredity; the first gropings, through mathematical and jigsaw puzzles, of his peculiar aptitude toward the light; the bizarre introduction, at the hands of a nameless violinist who tinges the game forever with a somehow cursed musicality, to the bare pieces; his instruction in the rules, ironically counterpointed against an amorous intrigue of which he is oblivious; his rapid climb through a hierarchy of adult opponents
^†
—all this is witty, tender, delicate, resonant. By abruptly switching to Luzhin as a chess-sodden adult, Nabokov islands the childhood, frames its naïve brightness so that, superimposed upon the grown figure, it operates as a kind of heart, as an abruptly doused light reddens the subsequent darkness.