* William Woodin Rowe: Nabokov's Deceptive World. New York University Press, 1971, 193 pp.
«The mechanisms revealed below» is a pretty phrase, suggesting perhaps more than its author intends, but it does not quite apply to me. The purpose of the present review is not to answer a critic but to ask him to remove his belongings. The book consists of three parts. Whilst I have no great quarrel with the first two, entitled «A Touch of Russian» and «N. as Stage Manager», I must protest vehemently against a number of indecent absurdities contained in the third part, entitled «Sexual Manipulations».
One may wonder if it was worth Mr. Rowe's time to exhibit erotic bits picked out of Lolita and Ada — a process rather like looking for allusions to aquatic mammals in Moby Dick. But that is his own choice and concern. What I object to is Mr. Rowe's manipulating my most innocent words so as to introduce sexual «symbols» into them. The notion of symbol itself has always been abhorrent to me, and I never tire of retelling how I once failed a student — the dupe, alas, of an earlier teacher — for writing that Jane Austen describes leaves as «green» because Fanny is hopeful, and «green» is the color of hope. The symbolism racket in schools attracts computerized minds but destroys plain intelligence as well as poetical sense. It bleaches the soul. It numbs all capacity to enjoy the fun and enchantment of art. Who the hell cares, as Mr. Rowe wants us to care, that there is, according to his italics, a «man» in the sentence about a homosexual Swede who «had embarrassing manners» (p. 148), and another «man» in «manipulate» (passim)? «Wickedly folded moth» suggests «wick» to Mr. Rowe, and «wick», as we Freudians know, is the Male Organ. «I» stands for «eye», and «eye» stands for the Female Organ. Pencil licking is always a reference to you know what. A soccer goal hints at the vulval orifice (which Mr. Rowe evidently sees as square).
I wish to share with him the following secret: In the case of a certain type of writer it often happens that a whole paragraph or sinuous sentence exists as a discrete organism, with its own imagery, its own invocations, its own bloom, and then it is especially precious, and also vulnerable, so that if an outsider, immune to poetry and common sense, injects spurious symbols into it, or actually tampers with its wording (see Mr. Rowe's crass attempt on his page 113), its magic is replaced by maggots. The various words that Mr. Rowe mistakes for the «symbols» of academic jargon, supposedly planted by an idiotically sly novelist to keep schoolmen busy, are not labels, not pointers, and certainly not the garbage cans of a Viennese tenement, but live fragments of specific description, rudiments metaphor, and echoes of creative emotion. The fatal flaw in Mr. Rowe's treatment of recurrent words, such as «garden» or «water», is his regarding them as abstractions, and not realizing that the sound of a bath being filled, say, in the world of Laughter in the Dark, is as different from the limes rustling in the rain of Speak, Memory as the Garden of Delights in Ada is from the lawns in Lolita. If every «come» and «part» on the pages of my books is supposedly usedfey me to represent «climax» and «genitals», one can well imagine the naughty treasures Mr. Rowe might find in any French novel where the prefix «con» occurs so frequently as to make every chapter a veritable compote of female organs. I do not think, however, that his French is sufficient for such feasts; nor is his Russian good enough for his manipulations if he believes that «otblesk» (confused apparently with otliv) means «low tide» (page 111) or that the nonexistent «triazh» stands for «tyranny» (page 41) when actually the word that I used (and that he wrongly transcribed), tirazh, is merely a publisher's term for «circulation».
One can excuse a critic for not finding «stillici and «ganch» in his abridged dictionary and concluding that I invented those words; one can understand a dull r Invitation to a Beheading thinking that the executioner] ops a homosexual tenderness for his victim when that affectionate look reflects only the lust or a coveting a live chicken; but what I find unpardonal indeed unworthy of a scholar, is Mr. Rowe's twist discussion of prosody (as appended to my tr; Eugene Onegin) into a torrent of Freudian drivel,! allows him to construe «metrical length» as an erected «rhyme» as a sexual climax. No less ludicrous f» his examination of Lolita's tennis and his claim that ** balls represent testicles (those of a giant albino, no Passing on to my reference to chess problems mU}peak,Memory Mr. Rowe finds «sexual analogies» in such m rases as «mating devices» and «grnp'ng f°r a pavrn in the box» — all of which is as much an insult to chess as to the problemist. I
The jacket of Mr. Rowe's book depicts jl butterfly incongruously flying around a candle. Moths, not butterflies, are attracted to light but the designer's blunder neatly
illustrates the quality of Mr. Rowe's preposterous and nasty interpretations. And he will be read, he will be quoted, he will be filed in great libraries, next to my arbors and mists!
Written at Gstaad, Bernese Oberland, on August 28, 1971, and published in The New York Review on October 7 of the same year.
INSPIRATION
(written on November 20, 1972, for Saturday Review)
The awakening, quickening, or creative impulse, esp. as manifested in high artistic achievement.
Webster, Second Ed., unabridged, 1957
The enthusiasm that sweeps away (entraine) poets. Also a term of physiology (insufflation): «. . . wolves and dogs howl only by inspiration; one can easily ascertain this by causing a little dog to howl close to one's face (Buffon)».
Littre, id. intigrak, 1963
The enthusiasm, concentration, and unusual manifestation of the mental faculties (umstvennyb sil).
Dal, Revised Ed., St. Petersburg, 1904
A creative upsurge. [Examples:] Inspired poet. Inspired socialistic work.
Ozhegov, Russian dictionary, Moscow, 1960
A special study, which I do not plan to conduct, would reveal, probably, that inspiration is seldom dwelt upon nowadays even by the worst reviewers of our best prose. I say «our» and I say «prose» because I am thinking of American works of fiction, including my own stuff. It would seem that this reticence is somehow linked up with a sense of decorum. Conformists suspect that to speak of «inspiration» is as tasteless and old-fashioned as to stand up for the Ivory Tower. Yet inspiration exists as do towers and tusks.
One can distinguish several types of inspiration, which intergrade, as all things do in this fluid and interesting world of ours, while yielding gracefully to a semblance of classification. A prefatory glow, not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack, is something the artist learns to perceive very early in life. This feeling of tickly wellbeing branches through him like the red and the blue in the picture of a skinned man under Circulation. As it spreads, it banishes all awareness of physical discomfort — youth's toothache as well as the neuralgia of old age. The beauty of it is that, while completely intelligible (as if it were connected with a known gland or led to an expected climax), it has neither source nor object. It expands, glows, and subsides without revealing its secret. In the meantime, however, a window has opened, an auroral wind has blown, every exposed nerve has tingled. Presently all dissolves: the familiar worries are back and the eyebrow redescribes its arc of pain; but the artist knows he is ready.
A few days elapse. The next stage of inspiration is something ardently anticipated — and no longer anonymous. The shape of the new impact is indeed so definite that I am forced to relinquish metaphors and resort to specific terms. The narrator forefeels what he is going to tell. The forefeeling can be defined as an instant vision turning into rapid speech. If some instrument were to render this rare and delightful phenomenon, the image would come as a shimmer of exact details, and the verbal part as a tumble of merging words. The experienced writer immediately takes it down and, in the process of doing so, transforms what is little more than a running blur into gradually dawning sense, with epithets and sentence construction growing as clear and trim as they would be on the printed page: