Speak, blog

Amanda's Pick: Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1966). 1st revised edition. Originally published as Conclusive Evidence (1947).

25 October @ The Banana Leaf (Broadway and Carnarvon, Vancouver)

Speak, Memory is not a suitable candidate for a blog post, so I will confine myself here to a few passing remarks instead of vainly attempting to capture some kind of essence. Nabokov, I believe, would not have approved of blogging, but there it is. Lowly literary worms like myself will never produce memoirs like Speak, Memory, so we have to content ourselves with shallow, ephemeral commentary on the masterpieces.

Like Lolita, this book - an autobiography of roughly his first forty years, his European period - is mechanically faultless, with prose as crisp and fresh as I can imagine. An astonishing feat considering that English was not his first language. His command of vocabulary is, in my reading experience, unsurpassed; words as obscure as pleach, ecchymotic, quiddity, and ha-ha (look them up) sprinkle every page, but never showboat. Of course, the reader gathers early on that Nabokov was some kind of prodigy, and I was amused, even charmed, by his casual arrogance in that regard. Although he mysteriously lost his mathematical genius in a childhood fever, he seems to have taken his other gifts for granted, scoffing at the fact that his cousin discovered War and Peace at age seventeen, when he had read it at eleven. Later, he pricelessly refers to Balzac and Zola as "detestable mediocrities from my point of view."

Nabokov rarely makes explicit his own self-image, stating instead that the true aim of autobiography should be "the following of... thematic designs through one's life," but it is a pleasure when he reveals his little idiosyncrasies. Sleep, for example, he describes as "the most moronic fraternity in the world," "a mental torture I find debasing," and a "nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius." This is an eccentricity, if there ever was one. Leanne noted that Nabokov discusses his mental snaps and faraway visual memories with a resonance that few have the talent to convey. His extended discussion of the colours he has long attributed to particular letters - the "confessions of a synesthete" - was not "tedious and pretentious" as he predicted, but refreshing.

The other, more obvious fascination of Speak, Memory is Nabokov's fabulous historical background. His family was not merely wealthy; it straddled the peak of the social pyramid. Nabokov's father was a liberal and a democrat, but he made no attempt to live as anything other than what he was - an aristocrat. The Nabokovs' country estate, Vyra, maintained fifty servants, and the star on their Christmas tree touched the ceiling of their "prettiest drawing room"; there were, apparently, multiple drawing rooms from which to choose. Nabokov exhibits a fierce belief in his father's virtue and progressiveness, but he makes no attempt to efface his own privileged outlook, revealed most clearly in his juvenile lust for a local peasant girl:

"Strange to say, she was the first to have the poignant power... of burning a hole in my sleep and jolting me into clammy consciousness, whenever I dreamed of her, although in real life I was even more afraid of being revolted by her dirt-caked feet and stale-smelling clothes than of insulting her by the triteness of quasi-seigneurial advances."

Nabokov was endowed with enough riches to care little for the loss of them when the Bolshevik Revolution broke.

Everyone at our meeting admired these memoirs and were, in many ways, overwhelmed by them. One widely-voiced complaint was that reading Speak, Memory felt like "homework." Nicole confessed that her "escape" between reading snippets of the book was watching snippets of Grey's Anatomy. For Leanne, it was the Sunday paper. Only two of us read it in its entirety, and the others were not sure they'd ultimately finish it. But I would enthusiastically recommend Speak, Memory to anyone who wants to see one of the few true virtuosos at work.

Didn't make my day

Elmore Leonard, Hombre (1961: New York; HarperCollins, 2002).

I read this because I wanted to read some manly pulp; years ago I was lent Charles Willeford's The Cockfighter, and it entranced me. Leonard is revered in western and crime fiction circles, and several of his works have been adapted for the screen. (I very much enjoyed the 2007 adaptation of his short story, "3:10 to Yuma," starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale.) But I found Hombre, considered one of Leonard's best, to be unremarkable.

In short, Leonard's picture of rugged masculine virtue seems trite. But it is certainly possible that he invented the western hero we know so well - that, in 1961, his vision was original. If so, Leonard's reputation is understandable. But from my 2009 perspective, the protagonist is cut from cardboard. In this story, John Russell is the true man of action and few words, a man who looks out for himself and minds his own business, but who, in a pinch, remains unruffled and incorruptible:

"He let people do or think what they wanted while he smoked a cigarette and thought it out calmly, without his feelings getting mixed up in it. Russell never changed the whole time, though I think everyone else did in some way. He did what he felt had to be done. Even if it meant dying. So maybe you don't have to understand him. You just know him."

Ho-hum. These kinds of characters do much better on screen, without the voice-over. That said, our narrator, a young man who spends three days in Russell's company while their stagecoach gets held up by no-good bandits, has an endearing everyman quality that meshes with Leonard's plain-talking literary approach. His remark on an improper exchange between two of the coach passengers made me smile:

"Frank Braden had eased lower in the seat and his head was very close to Mrs. Favor's. He said something to her, a low murmur. She laughed, not out loud, almost to herself, but you could hear it. Her head moved to his and she said one word or maybe a couple. Their faces were close together for a long time, maybe even touching, and yet her husband was right there. Figure that one out."

The book is not without its charms, therefore, but they have faded over the years. I didn't like Hombre enough to further investigate why Leonard is hailed as a master of his craft.