City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [48]
I loved the humor of Nabokov’s fiction, his aristocratic mépris for morons and pedants, his lively if mocking appreciation of madmen. At the secret heart of his writing was a certain sentimentality: a doting on the couple; a belief in romantic love; a chivalric scorn for bullies and a consecrated respect for women who were as clever as they were beautiful; a hot, irrational cult of sex and of sexual passion, but not its mechanical replications. This dandified, Romantic code, so vulnerable to the world’s crude scorn, he protected by ringing it round with the magic fire of his humor, his aggressive dismissal of everyone else, his satirical stabs at Freud, academics, Marx, progressive education, and crass commercialism. For Nabokov everything not coherent with his own cool, elegant style was vulgar or kitsch, a kind of poshlust (his name for a special form of Russian romantic pomposity).
In his interviews, he would attack sacred cows—Thomas Mann, William Faulkner, Conrad, Dostoyevsky. Why, I thought (scandalized), Mann and Faulkner won the Nobel! Conrad was a classic, even if deciphering his books was like undoing knots in a barrel of oil. And Dostoyevsky was a moral giant—even if his scenes went on too long and after they’d reached a rapturous climax and everyone was weeping with tears of reconciliation and relief, they’d start to slide queasily off in some new, horribly disappointing, anxiety-producing direction. Jean Genet had recognized this queasiness, this disquieting anticlimax, but approved of it as being lifelike buffoonery.
Nabokov was a great hater and a rather meager lover. He liked Pushkin and Chekhov and parts of Tolstoy but not all, and nothing of Stendhal (Nabokov’s father had been an unquestioning fan). He liked Biely’s St. Petersburg and all of Khodasevich, whom he’d beautifully translated. He liked Genet but didn’t understand why he didn’t write about girls instead of boys. And he liked me. Was it a joke? After all, Nabokovian jokes were famous—and everyone was on the lookout for them, and afraid to be taken in by them.
In preparing the Nabokov issue I’d contacted Simon Karlinsky, a professor of Russian at Berkeley. Earlier, Simon had tracked down all of the Russian sources for Ada for the New York Times Book Review, and now I wanted him to do the same for Transparent Things for the Saturday Review. He accepted and quickly wrote a brilliant exegesis we were delighted to use. I met him and we became friends. He was friendly with Nabokov, and for me to meet an acquaintance of the Master was thrilling. I sometimes wondered if Nabokov had based Pnin (the otherworldly, thoroughly Russian professor so at a loss in the America where he’d settled) on Simon, but the dates didn’t work out. Maybe Nabokov was making fun of his own absentmindedness.
Simon was short and maybe twelve years older than I. He had a black beard and small, pudgy hands, a bald head, and intelligent eyes that constantly roamed over the objects around us, as if there was nothing in our conversation to absorb his attention, or as if he were plotting out an escape route. Or maybe he was afraid that actual eye contact would mean he’d have to stop and consider the opinions of his interlocutor, and he wasn’t disposed to do that. He had unshakable but subtle and refined opinions of his own. Usually those who hold to their ideas inflexibly don’t have very interesting thoughts, but Simon was wonderfully erudite and his articles of faith were highly nuanced, full of major and minor clauses and lots of codicils, but with all the fine print set in bronze.
He’d been brought up in Mukden by Russian parents who’d fled the Revolution. His mother had a dress shop there. He remembered the deep snows of Manchurian winters and stepping over a frozen Burmese tiger in the street that had been delivered early in the morning in front of a Chinese pharmacy, which needed its whiskers for a highly