Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Of the cleansing the will alone gives proof, which fills the soul, all free to change her cloister, and avails her to will. She wills indeed before,11 but that desire permits it not which divine justice sets, counter to will, toward the penalty, even as it was toward the sin. And I who have lain under this torment five hundred years and more, only now felt free will for a better threshold. Therefore didst thou feel the earthquake, and hear the pious spirits about the mount give praises to that Lord-soon may he send them above.” Thus he spake to us; and since we enjoy most the draught in proportion as our thirst is great, I could not tell how much he profited me. And the wise Leader: “Now I see the net that catches you here, and how one breaks through, wherefore it quakes here, and whereat ye make glad together. Now may it please thee that I know who thou wast; and why thou hast lain here so many ages, let me learn from thy words.” “What time the good Titus with help of the Highest King avenged the wounds whence issued the blood by Judas sold, with the name which most endures, and honours most,” answered that spirit, “I was yonder, great in fame, but not yet with faith. So sweet was the music of my words, that me, a Toulousian, Rome drew to herself, where I did merit a crown of myrtle for my brow. Statius folk yonder still do name me; I sang of Thebes, and then of the great Achilles; but I fell by the way with the second burden. The sparks, which warmed me, from the divine flame whence more than a thousand have been kindled, were the seeds of my poetic fire: of the Æneid I speak, which was a mother to me, and was to me a nurse in poesy; without it I had not stayed the weight of a drachm. And to have lived yonder, when Virgil was alive, I would consent to one sun more than I owe to my coming forth from exile.” These words turned Virgil to me with a look that silently said: “Be silent.” But the virtue which wills is not all powerful; for laughter and tears follow so closely the passion from which each springs, that they least obey the will in the most truthful. I did but smile, like one who makes a sign: whereat the shade was silent and looked at me in the eyes, where most the soul is fixed. And he said: “So may such great toil achieve its end; wherefore did thy face but now display to me a flash of laughter?” Now am I caught on either side; one makes me keep, silence, the other conjures me to speak; wherefore I sigh and am understood

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  but not from Casale, nor from Acquasparta shall he be, whence come such to our Scripture that the one shirketh, the other draweth it yet tighter.22 I am the life of Bonaventura of Bagnoregio, who in the great offices did ever place behind the left-hand care.28 Illuminato and Augustine24 are here, who were of the first unshod poor brethren, that with the cord made themselves friends to God. Hugh of St. Victor25 is here with them, and Pietro Mangiadore, and Pietro Ispano,26 who giveth light below in twelve booklets; Nathan the prophet, the metropolitan Chrysostom, and Anselm, and that Donatus27 who deigned to set his hand to the first art; Rabanus28 is here, and there shineth at my side the Calabrian abbot Joachim,29 dowed with prophetic spirit. To emulous speech of so great paladin moved me the enkindled courtesy of brother Thomas and his well-judged discourse, and moved this company with me.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Jong LoveErica Jong’s first novel, Fear of Flying, feels like a winner. It has class and sass, brightness and bite. Containing all the cracked eggs of the feminist litany, her soufflé rises with a poet’s afflatus. She sprinkles on the four-letter words as if women had invented them; her cheerful sexual frankness brings a new flavor to female prose. Mrs. Jong’s heroine, Isadora Wing, surveying the “shy, shrinking, schizoid” array of women writers in English, asks, “Where was the female Chaucer?” and the Wife of Bath, were she young and gorgeous, neurotic and Jewish, urban and contemporary, might have written like this. Fear of Flying not only stands as a luxuriant and glowing bloom in the sometimes thistly garden of “raised” feminine consciousness but belongs to, and hilariously extends, the tradition of Catcher in the Rye and Portnoy’s Complaint, that of the New York voice on the couch, the smart kid’s lament. Though Isadora Wing, as shamelessly and obsessively as Alexander Portnoy, rubs the reader’s nose in the fantasies and phobias and family slapstick of growing up, she avoids the solipsism that turns Roth’s hero unwittingly cruel; nor does she, like Holden Caulfield, though no less sensitive to phoniness, make of innocence an ideal. She remains alert to this world. “How little our happiness depends on: an open drugstore, an unstolen suitcase, a cup of cappuccino! Suddenly I was acutely aware of all the small pleasures of being alive. The superb taste of the coffee, the sunlight streaming down, the people posing on the street corners for you to admire them.” Admiring she is, even of the impotence, madness, and defective hygiene of her many awful lovers. Feminist since birth (she says), radicalized at the age of thirteen “on the IRT subway when the moronic Horace Mann boy who was my date asked me if I planned to be a secretary,” Isadora Wing nevertheless has more kind words for the male body than any author since the penning of Fanny Hill: “He was so beautiful lying there and his body smelled so good. I thought of all those centuries in which men adored women for their bodies while they despised their minds. That was how I so often felt about men. Their minds were hopelessly befuddled, but their bodies were so nice.”

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Only the decor nodded to the town’s hunger for kitschy ethnic charm: oak tables inlaid with mother of pearl, low banquette seating buried in multicoloured cushions of  On Beauty harsh goat’s wool. Long-necked hookah pipes rested on the high shelves like exotic birds come to roost. Six years ago, when the Essakallis went into retirement, their son Yousef took over with his German-American wife, Katrin. Unlike his parents, who had merely tolerated the students – their pitchers of beer, fake IDs and requests for ketchup – the younger, more American Yousef enjoyed their presence and understood their needs. It was his idea to convert the restaurant’s -foot basement into a club space where many different classes and events and parties could take place. Here the visuals of Star Wars were shown alongside the soundtrack to Dr Zhivago . Here a fleshy, dimpled red-headed lady explained to a gang of willowy freshman girls how to move one’s abdomen in tiny increments of clockwise motion, the art of the belly dance. Local rappers performed impromptu sets. It was a favourite stop-off for British guitar bands hoping to rid themselves of nerves before their American tours. Morocco, as it was reimagined in the Bus Stop, was an inclusive place. The black kids from Boston were down with Morocco, down with its essential Arab nature and African soul, the massive hash pipes, the chilli in the food, the infectious rhythms of the music. The white kids from the college were down with Morocco too: they liked its shabby glamour, its cinematic history of non-politicized Orientalism, the cool pointy slippers. The hippies and activists of Kennedy Square – without even really being conscious of it – came more regularly to the Bus Stop now than they had before the war started. It was their way of showing solidarity with foreign suffering. Of all the Bus Stop’s regular events, the bi-monthly Spoken Word nights were the greatest sensation. As an art form it practised the same inclusiveness as the venue itself: it made everybody feel at home. Neither rap nor poetry, not formal but also not too wild, it wasn’t black, it wasn’t white. It was whatever anybody had to say and whoever had the guts to get up on the small boxy stage at the back of the basement and say it. For Claire Malcolm, it was an opportunity each year to show her new students that poetry was a broad church, one that she was not afraid to explore. Because of these visits, and as a regular of the restaurant, Claire  the anatomy lesson was well known and loved by the Essakalis.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  8. They were under the Angevin dynasty so hated by Dante. Cf Canto vi, note 11. But others (with less probability) interpret heavy yoke as referring to the barren eastern slope of Monte Subasio.9. Dante uses Ascesi, an old form of Assisi, which may be translated “I have ascended.” A play upon the word, in connection with Orient, is found by some commentators. The comparison of Francis to the rising Sun is ancient and widespread. “Glowing as the light-bearer and as the morning star, yea, even as the rising Sun, illuminating, cleansing and fertilizing the world like some new luminary, was Francis seen to arise,” says the Prologue of one of the earliest Lives.10. He was about twenty-four when he began to woo Poverty.11. In the early biographies of Francis (including the Fioretti or popular stories of him) with which every reader of Dante should be familiar, we are told how he fell in love with Poverty; how his father indignantly sought to reclaim him; how he appealed to the Bishop, stripped himself naked before him, giving to his earthly father Pietro Bernadone that which was his, and dedicating himself to his heavenly father, and thus publicly espousing Poverty; how Bernard, the nobleman of Assisi, was converted by overhearing his devotions; how Egidius whose thoughts were already turning from the world flung himself at the feet of Francis and implored him to receive him as a companion; how Sylvester, the priest, tried to cheat him over some stones he had from him with which to repair a church and was overcome by his unworldly generosity; how he rejoiced in all suffering and humiliation; how he loved and rejoiced in all God’s creatures; how two successive Popes sanctioned his Order (1210 (?) and 1223); how he preached to the Soldan in Egypt; and finally, how he received the stigmata or impress of the nails and the lance as a testimony to his oneness of spirit with Christ (b. 1182, d. 1226).12. Jesus Christ.13. Lucan tells how Cæsar found the fishennan, Amyclas, lying on a bed of seaweed, undismayed when he roused him to demand his services, and unmoved by the revolutions of the times, secure in his poverty.14. Nearly all the MSS. read pianse (wept) for salse (rose) and the best modern editions for the most part follow them. Dr. Moore, however (rightly as we think), adheres to the reading we have adopted. It is supported not only by internal evidence, but by some of the old commentators and by the analogy of the ancient prayer for Poverty ascribed to St. Francis, in which are the words “when thy very mother, because the cross was so high … could not come at thee, Lady Poverty, embraced thee more closely,” etc.15. The rope girdle worn by the Franciscans.16. Note the first, second, final.17. An enigmatical phrase, since it is in heaven that the song of praise is being sung. Cf. Canto xii.18. Alvernia.19. “And when he had blessed the brothers he had them take off his tunic, and place him naked on the ground” (Old Biography).20. St. Thomas now passes to his own founder, Dominic, and rebukes the degenerate Dominicans. Cf. Canto xii, note 20.21. Another reading of the original is coreggier, which would mean the Dominican (that is, one girt with the leather thong), and would refer either to the speaker (St. Thomas) himself or to any Dominican who might reprove his order in this way. [image file=image_rsrcA6D.jpg] C A N T O X I IA second circle of lights encloses the first and-with music whereof our sweetest strains are but as the reflection—the two, like the parallels of a double rainbow, circle Dante and Beatrice, first moving and then at rest. Like the needle of the compass to the north star so Dante is swept round to one of the new-come lights at the sound of its voice. It is Bonaventura, the Franciscan, who undertakes the enconium of Dominic, just as Thomas, the Dominican, had pronounced that of Francis. Dominic’s zeal for true learning and against heresy. If he was such, what must his colleague have been? But his disciples are ruined by the extremes of the strict and lax schools of observance. Bonaventura names himself and the other lights that circle with him.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I’D INHERITED the complete VHS set of Star Trek: The Next Generation from my father. Ordering those cassettes was probably the one time in my father’s life that he’d dialed a 1-800 number. Watching Star Trek as an adolescent was when I first came to regard Whoopi Goldberg with the reverence she deserves. Whoopi seemed like an absurd interloper on the U.S.S. Enterprise. Whenever she appeared on-screen, I sensed she was laughing at the whole production. Her presence made the show completely absurd. That was true of all her movies, too. Whoopi in her nun’s habit. Whoopi dressed like a churchgoing Georgian in the 1930s with her Sunday hat and Bible. Whoopi in Moonlight and Valentino alongside the pasty Elizabeth Perkins. Wherever she went, everything around her became a parody of itself, gauche and ridiculous. That was a comfort to see. Thank God for Whoopi. Nothing was sacred. Whoopi was proof. After a few episodes, I got up and took a few Nembutals and a Placidyl and guzzled another half a bottle of children’s Robitussin and sat down to watch Whoopi—in a cornflower blue velour tunic and an upside-down cone-shaped hat like a futuristic bishop—have a heart-to-heart talk with Marina Sirtis. It was all nonsense. But I couldn’t sleep. I kept watching. I went through three seasons. I took Solfoton. I took Ambien. I even made myself a cup of chamomile tea, the nauseating sweet smell wafting up from my chipped coffee cup like a hot diaper. This was supposed to be relaxing? I took a bath and put on a brand new set of slippery satin pajamas I found in the closet. Still I wasn’t sleepy. Nothing was working. I thought I’d watch Braveheart again so I put it into the VCR and pressed “rewind.” And then the VCR broke. I heard the wheels spin, then whine, then screech, then stop. I hit “eject” and nothing happened. I poked at all the buttons. I unplugged and replugged the machine. I picked it up and shook it. I banged on it with the butt of my hand, then a shoe. Nothing was working. Outside, it was dark. My phone said it was January 6, 11:52 P.M. So now I was stuck with TV. I surfed the channels. A commercial for cat food. A commercial for home saunas. A commercial for low-fat butter. Fabric softener. Potato chips in individually portioned packages. Chocolate yogurt. Go to Greece, the birthplace of civilization. Drinks that give you energy. Face cream that makes you younger. Fish for your kitties. Coca-Cola means “I love you.” Sleep in the most comfortable bed in the world. Ice cream is not just for children, ladies: your husbands like it, too! If your house smells like shit, light this candle that smells like freshly baked brownies. My mother used to say that if I couldn’t sleep I should count something that matters, anything but sheep. Count stars. Count Mercedes-Benzes.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  And yet, it is a split screen we soon adjust to. Using a term oculists employ, “we compensate for it,” one eye giving the other rest then automatically trading off that function. Our young guide is utterly in love with the retinal world and capable of rendering it, now with the folkloric simplifying capacity of N. C. Wyeth, now with a detailed feather-by-feather Audubon notation. And yet, knowing he is banished by his very desire, he stands ever to one side, commenting on the action, judging the dessert forks, remarking the relative allure of all those around him. He is unsparing of his own vanity, more generous with others’. We witness a fierce sustained emotional tussle, but one somewhat cushioned, offset, by an upholstered diction of surpassing humor, knowing reference, compositional refinement. We see this young man seek approval and admiration through clothes and savoir faire; we watch him search for a loving community however small, for some scrap of his father’s own vast distant power. And yet, this youth of the mid-twentieth century shows a potency quite different from that of those pinky-goldy youths in English pulp fiction. Selflessness does not rank high in his repertoire. His merit and clout stem from his cerebral allusiveness, his physical beauty and sexual precocity. Like all prep school boys his age, he has been forced to read Death in Venice. But our young man’s view of the work remains very much his own: I … luxuriated in the tale of a dignified grown-up who died for the love of an indifferent boy my age. That was the sort of power I wanted over an older man. And I awakened to the idea that a great world existed in which things happened and people changed, took risks—more, took notice: a world so sensitive, like a grand piano, that even a step or a word could awaken vibrations in its taut strings. Music is still a distant father. And yet, who else in literature has ever identified, not with Thomas Mann’s deranged older Venetian tourist, the poor man, his face streaming rivulets of orange hair dye, but instead with the roué’s secret love, that Polish boy-aristocrat self-sated, ringlets tossing as he looks back over the shoulder of his form-fitting middy? Our present narrator’s merit depends upon his learnedness and his social wit; both these require and facilitate his endless mutability. Whereas the boy heroes of Victorian novels were praised most when they showed unbending ethical standards, when demonstrating their gift for withstanding cold showers and colder lakes, while evincing their willingness to forgo sexual pleasure till Marriage sanctified it. A Boy’s Own Story is hardly a traditional coming-of-age novel in which some innocent is tested then formed by a gallery of his elders. Instead, this preternaturally observant (and therefore dubious) narrator often seems the oldest person in any company. And yet his own gangliness, his dread of making mistakes, offer us the deadpan humor that makes this work so mortifyingly funny.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Spotting her now, Yousef pushed through the line of people waiting to be seated and helped Claire hold open the double doors so that her kids might come in from the cold. With his arm high on the doorframe, Yousef smiled at each student in turn, and each got the opportunity to admire his emerald eyes, set improbably in a dark, unmistakably Arab face, and large silky curls, untended, like an infant’s. Once they had all passed through he carefully bent down to Claire’s height and allowed himself to be kissed on both cheeks. During this courtly display, he held on to a little embroidered skullcap that sat on the back of his head. Claire’s class loved all this. Many of them were freshmen for whom a visit to the Bus Stop, indeed to Kennedy Square, was as exotic as a trip to Morocco itself. ‘ Yousef, c¸a fait bien trop longtemps! ’ cried Claire, stepping back but with both her little hands still gripping his own. She tipped her head girlishly to the side. ‘ Moi, je deviens toute vieille, et toi, tu rajeunis .’ Yousef laughed, shook his head and looked appreciatively at the tiny figure before him, swathed in many layers of black shawl. ‘ Non, c’est pas vrai, c’est pas vrai . . . Vous eˆtes magnifique, comme toujours .’ ‘ Tu me flattes comme un diable. Et comment va la famille? ’ asked Claire, and looked over the restaurant to the bar at the far end, where Katrin, waiting to be acknowledged, raised her skinny arm and waved. A naturally angular woman, she was dressed today in a sensual brown wrap dress to accentuate the fact that she was heavily pregnant, with the high-sitting, pointed bump that suggests a boy. She was tearing off raffle tickets and giving them to a line of teenagers who each paid their three dollars and descended into the basement. ‘ Bien ,’ said Yousef simply, and then, encouraged by Claire’s delight at this pure and honest description, extended it in a manner less to her taste, prattling happily about this longed-for pregnancy, his parents’ second, deeper retirement to the wilds of Vermont, the growth and success of his restaurant. Claire’s poetry class, not understanding French, huddled together behind their teacher, smiling shyly. But Claire always grew tired of other people’s  On Beauty prose narratives and now patted Yousef several times on the arm. ‘We need a table, darling,’ she said, in English, looking over his head into the double line-up of booths on each side of a wide aisle, like pews in a church. Yousef, in turn, was instantly businesslike. ‘Yes, of course. For how many are you?’ ‘I haven’t even introduced you,’ said Claire, and began to point her finger around her bashful class, finding something wonderful – although based only loosely in fact – to say about everybody.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  If you played the piano a little, you were described as a maestro. Once acted in a college cabaret? The next Minnelli. Everyone warmed themselves in the generous communal glow. Even Zora – described as ‘the brains of the outfit’ – began to feel a little of the real, unassailable magic of Claire: she made you feel that just being in this moment, doing this thing, was the most important and marvellous possibility for you. Claire spoke often in her poetry of the idea of ‘fittingness’: that is, when your chosen pursuit and your ability to achieve it – no matter how small or insignificant both might be – are matched exactly, are fitting. This , Claire argued, is when we become truly human, fully ourselves, beautiful. To swim when your body is made for swimming. To kneel when you feel humble. To drink water when you are thirsty. Or – if one wishes to be grand about it – to write the poem that is exactly the fitting receptacle of the feeling or thought that you hoped to convey. In Claire’s presence, you were not faulty or badly designed, no, not at all. You were the fitting receptacle and instrument of your talents and beliefs and desires. This was why students at Wellington applied in their hundreds for her class. Poor Yousef ran out of facial expressions of wonder with which to greet this race of giants who had come to eat at his establishment. ‘And how many is this?’ he asked again, when Claire had finished. ‘Ten, eleven? Actually, darling, we’re going to need three booths, I think.’ Settling into the tables was a political matter. The booth to sit in was clearly whichever one contained Claire and, failing that, Zora, but when these two unintentionally chose the same booth, an indecorous struggle began for the vacant seats. The two who found  the anatomy lesson themselves in these prime positions – Ron and Daisy – did little to conceal their joy. By contrast the second booth behind this one was despondently quiet. The stragglers’ booth across the room – with only three people in it – openly sulked. Claire too, was disappointed. Her own affections rested with other students, not at this table. Ron and Daisy’s callow, spiky humour did not amuse her. American humour in general left her cold. She never felt less at home in the States than when confronted with one of those bewildering sitcoms: people walking in, people walking out, gags, laugh tracks, idiocy, irony. Tonight, she would really have preferred to be sitting at the stragglers’ table with Chantelle, listening to that saturnine young lady’s startling accounts of ghetto life in a bad Boston neighbourhood. Claire was spellbound by this news of lives so different from her own as to seem interplanetary.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Lolita had made Lolita famous, rather than Nabokov. Although praised by influential critics, Lolita was treated as a kind of miracle of spontaneous generation, for Nabokov’s oeuvre was like an iceberg, the massive body of his Russian novels, stories, plays, and poems remaining untranslated and out of sight, lurking beneath the visible peaks of Lolita and Pnin (1957). But in those eleven years since Putnam’s had published Lolita, twenty-one Nabokov titles had appeared, including six works translated from the Russian, three out-of-print novels, two collections of stories, Pale Fire (1962), the monumental four-volume translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1964), Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1966)—a considerably revised and expanded version of the memoir first issued in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence—and Ada (1969), his fifteenth novel, whose publication celebrated his seventieth birthday. The publication of Mary (1926) and Glory (1931), then being Englished by, respectively, Michael Glenny and Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, would complete the translation of his Russian novels. This extraordinary outburst of Nabokoviana highlights the resolute spirit of the man who published his masterpieces, Lolita and Pale Fire, at the ages of fifty-six and sixty-three, respectively. Nabokov had endured the exigencies of being an émigré writer when the Western world seemed interested only in his inferior Soviet contemporaries, and emerged not only as a major Russian writer but as the most important living American novelist. No doubt some academic pigeonholers still worried about Nabokov’s nationality and where to “place” him, but John Updike had solved this synthetic problem when he described Nabokov as “the best writer of English prose at present holding American citizenship.”3 Not since Henry James, an émigré in his own right, had an American citizen created so formidable a corpus of work.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘ Bien ,’ said Yousef simply, and then, encouraged by Claire’s delight at this pure and honest description, extended it in a manner less to her taste, prattling happily about this longed-for pregnancy, his parents’ second, deeper retirement to the wilds of Vermont, the growth and success of his restaurant. Claire’s poetry class, not understanding French, huddled together behind their teacher, smiling shyly. But Claire always grew tired of other people’s  On Beauty prose narratives and now patted Yousef several times on the arm. ‘We need a table, darling,’ she said, in English, looking over his head into the double line-up of booths on each side of a wide aisle, like pews in a church. Yousef, in turn, was instantly businesslike. ‘Yes, of course. For how many are you?’ ‘I haven’t even introduced you,’ said Claire, and began to point her finger around her bashful class, finding something wonderful – although based only loosely in fact – to say about everybody. If you played the piano a little, you were described as a maestro. Once acted in a college cabaret? The next Minnelli. Everyone warmed themselves in the generous communal glow. Even Zora – described as ‘the brains of the outfit’ – began to feel a little of the real, unassailable magic of Claire: she made you feel that just being in this moment, doing this thing, was the most important and marvellous possibility for you. Claire spoke often in her poetry of the idea of ‘fittingness’: that is, when your chosen pursuit and your ability to achieve it – no matter how small or insignificant both might be – are matched exactly, are fitting. This , Claire argued, is when we become truly human, fully ourselves, beautiful. To swim when your body is made for swimming. To kneel when you feel humble. To drink water when you are thirsty. Or – if one wishes to be grand about it – to write the poem that is exactly the fitting receptacle of the feeling or thought that you hoped to convey. In Claire’s presence, you were not faulty or badly designed, no, not at all. You were the fitting receptacle and instrument of your talents and beliefs and desires. This was why students at Wellington applied in their hundreds for her class. Poor Yousef ran out of facial expressions of wonder with which to greet this race of giants who had come to eat at his establishment. ‘And how many is this?’ he asked again, when Claire had finished. ‘Ten, eleven? Actually, darling, we’re going to need three booths, I think.’ Settling into the tables was a political matter. The booth to sit in was clearly whichever one contained Claire and, failing that, Zora, but when these two unintentionally chose the same booth, an indecorous struggle began for the vacant seats. The two who found  the anatomy lesson

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Decugis or Borman: Max Decugis was a great European tennis player who often teamed with Gobbert (see Gobbert). They were Wimbledon men’s doubles champions in 1911. Paul de Borman was the Belgian champion in the first decade of this century. Nabokov recalled, “He was left-handed, and one of the first Europeans to use a sliced (or twist) service. There is a photograph of him in the Wallis Myers book on tennis (c. 1913).” I could not find the Myers book, but Decugis and Borman are discussed in George W. Beldman and P. A. Vaile’s Great Lawn Tennis Players (New York, 1907). Beldman deplores Borman’s lack of aggressiveness and poor position (resulting from the way he used his body to achieve his spins and cut shots), and writes of him, inimitably, “I do not know that he has a single perfect stroke, yet in every shot he made there was education for him who was able to take it” (pp. 350–351). Nabokov took it, and immortalized Borman in Lolita. At first wince (to quote H.H.), such minutiae may seem no better than Kinbotisms, but they are calmly offered as an example of the precise manner in which Nabokov’s memory speaks to him and, as well, to suggest how he does indeed stock his “imaginary garden with real toads” (see Parody of a hotel corridor … and death). He was in fact a life-long tennis enthusiast and supplemented his meagre income as an émigré by giving tennis lessons to wealthy Berliners. Not by chance does he have H.H. poeticize Lolita’s tennis game, on a court invested with the geometric perfection that the painter Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) brought to rigorous abstractions that sometimes look like overviews of tennis courts. butterfly: although Nabokov intended no “symbolism,” it appears after H.H. has come as close to capturing Lolita’s grace as he ever will. Nabokov only commented, “Butterflies are indeed inquisitive, and the dipping motion is characteristic of a number of genera.” See John Ray, Jr.. wimbles: any of several instruments for boring holes. a syncope in the series: an elision or loss of one or more letters or sounds from the middle of a word. Maffy On Say: phonetic American pronunciation of “ma fiancée.” purling: gently murmuring, as a brook. three horrible Boschian cripples: one of whom is Quilty. Hieronymous Bosch (c. 1450–1516), the great Flemish master of the grotesque, whose paintings abound in moral and physiological cripples. “And Flemish hells with porcupines and things” is a brief Boschian vision in the poem Pale Fire (line 226). On his deathbed, in Ada, Daniel Veen, an art collector and Bosch devotee, imagines that he is being put-upon by creatures from a Bosch painting, and dies “an odd Boschean death” (pp. 435–436). Nabokov then comments at length on the butterfly rendered at the center of Bosch’s “Garden of Delights.” That … intruder … a double: Quilty; a pun: a double at tennis and a Doppelgänger. See double game. CHAPTER 21red ball: rolled by Quilty, who reappears here.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  20 “Tune ego, sensim gliscente adhuc illo tumultu, retrogradi fuga domo facesso sed plane Thrasyleo- nem mire canibus repugnantem, latens pone ianuam ipse, prospicio: quamquam enim vitae metas ulti- mas obiret, non tamen sui nostrique vel pristinae virtutis oblitus iam faucibus ipsis hiantis Cerberi re- luctabat : scaenam denique quam sponte sumpserat cum anima retinens, nunc fugiens, nune resistens, 172 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK IV burden; but I, for our common weal, would stand alone at the gate watching diligently when they would return, and the bear running about the house would make such of the family afraid as fortuned to wake and eome out : for who is he that is so puissant and courageous, that at the sight of so great a monster would not quail and flee away and keep his chamber well barred, especially in the night? * Now when we had brought this matter to so good a point, there chanced a pitiful case ; for as I looked for my companions that should come from the sepulchre, behold there was a boy of the house that fortuned to be awaked by the noise, as fate would have it, and look out of a window and espy the bear running freely about the house, and he went back on his steps a-tiptoe and very secretly, and told all the servants, and at once the house was filled with the whole train of them. Incontinently they came forth with torches, lanterns, candles and tapers, and other lights, that they might see all the yard over; they came not unarmed, but. with clubs, spears, and naked swords, to guard the entrances, and they set on greyhounds and mastiffs, even those with great ears and shaggy hair, to subdue the poor beast. Then I, during this broil, thought to run away, but because I would see Thrasyleon fighting wonderfully with the dogs, 1 lay behind the gate to behold him. And although I might perceive that he was at the very term or limit of life, yet remembered he his own faithfulness and ours, and valiantly resisted the gaping and ravenous mouths of the hound of Hell: for he took well to play the part which he so will- ingly had taken in hand himself, and with much ado, so long as the breath was in him, now flying and now pursuing, with many twistings and turnings 178 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  J’ai toujours … Dublinois: “I have always admired the [ormonde] work of the sublime Dubliner.” The sublime one is James Joyce, but ormonde does not exist in French; it refers to Dublin’s Hotel Ormond (no e), whose restaurant provides the setting for the so-called “Sirens” episode of Ulysses, and whose name is a most Joycean pun—hors [de ce] monde (“out-of-this-world,” a further tribute). (See also Keys, p. 20.) The reverential allusion is delivered obliquely in the requisite Joycean manner. Also in the Dubliner’s spirit is the “jolls-joyce” car in which the hero of Ada rides in one scene (p. 473). See outspoken book: Ulysses. In a 1966 National Educational Television network interview, Nabokov said the “greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century prose are, in this order: Joyce’s Ulysses; Kafka’s Transformation; Bely’s St. Petersburg; and the first half of Proust’s fairy tale, In Search of Lost Time.” “On fait son grand Joyce after doing one’s petit Proust,” reads a parenthetical statement in Ada, added to the “manuscript” by gently derisive Ada herself, “In [her] lovely hand” (p. 169). When Véra Nabokov saw some of the opened pages of the annotator’s copy of Lolita, the typeface barely visible beneath an overlay of comments in several colors of pencil and ink, she turned to her husband and said, “Darling, it looks like your copy of Ulysses.” Although there are strong artistic affinities between Joyce and Nabokov, he dismissed the possibility of formal “influence”: “My first real contact with Ulysses, after a leering glimpse in the early ’twenties, was in the ’thirties at a time when I was definitely formed as a writer and immune to any literary influence. I studied Ulysses seriously only much later, in the ’fifties, when preparing my Cornell courses. That was the best part of the education I received at Cornell” (Wisconsin Studies interview). See children-colors … a passage in James Joyce.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I returned to her life a couple of years ago, when I was lucky enough to be hired to write a screenplay about what happened to her around the time of Fear of Flying’s publication. She couldn’t help me much with the facts. By then, she was experiencing memory problems, which have only worsened since. She couldn’t recall her feelings around the time of the publication, or any of the events or people she met. She could only recall the shame of losing her lawsuit and her regret for filing it in the first place. I went searching. Her archives are housed at Columbia, where she finished her classwork but not her dissertation. Inside those boxes are her literary legacy and the living memory of the electric life she lived. Big New Yorker day books that mark her meetings, her ideas, her doodles, her to-do lists. Letters from everyone from Ingmar Bergman to Henry Miller to Joan Rivers extolling her bravery and warning her to not let all that Hollywood shit get her down. There are notebook pages of half-poems, lists of things she’d like to do, drafts of a Fear of Flying musical (“Why am IIIIII…so afraid to flyyyyyy?”). She has at least one living ex-husband who remembers everything. She has a devoted daughter who is also a good listener and who collected stories from the carousel of her chaotic childhood. Together, a picture emerged. The story of the publication of Fear of Flying is the story of Fear of Flying. It’s the story of a woman, brilliant and cheerful and optimistic and energetic and voracious, eager to engage in her work, in her life, her beating, bloody heart out for anyone to see, flattered by the attention, overwhelmed and left lonely by how few people could really understand what it means to have the book that contains your insides widely consumed by the public. It’s the story of a woman who can roll a Mephistopheles reference off her tongue as easily as she can pull out a blow job pun. It is magnificent. I told her this. Even though she doesn’t remember that time, she can still talk with incredible specificity and depth about the writing process and its challenges. She’s happy she seemed to have had a good time back then, even if it was complicated. She smiled, and I could see the broad grin of that back cover as if a day hadn’t passed for either her or for me.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  But above all, they are fearless. I cannot help but wonder how Women’s Lib. regards this book of Erica Jong. Here is a liberated woman who tells of her need for men, or, as she sometimes puts it, her need for a lay. She admits to being horny, and how! We don’t hear enough from women on this subject. With all this, and she goes the limit, this book can scarcely be called “pornographic.” It is full of obscenity, whatever that means, but underneath it all, there is a most serious purpose. The book is full of meaning and a paean to life. The death-eaters are the shrinks, teachers, parents, and so on. What is most intriguing of all to me is that she has made a British shrink, who is really a first-class scoundrel, a delightful character. He makes an awful lot of sense, despite his propensity for handing out one-liners, like Henny Youngman. This lousy bastard turns out to be the savior of Isadora Zelda, though he may not have meant to be. It’s he who, by his unabashed treachery, opens her eyes, makes her face herself, makes her accept reality. He is certainly an “antihero.” Bastard though he is, he knows how to get along, or, I suppose I should say, “he knows on which side his bread is buttered”. I dwell on this character because too few of us are ready to acknowledge that we can learn (as much or more) from an evil character as from a good one. We know that the do-gooders wreak a lot of havoc, but we do not seem to know that the evil-doers can work a lot of good in this fucked-up world. If they accomplish nothing more than to shatter our idealistic dreams, they have done enough. But I am exaggerating somewhat, as regards Adrian, the British shrink and no. 1 bastard. He is not truly evil; he just doesn’t give a fuck if he happens to ruin a few lives in the course of his having his way. I had a most intense feeling of joy, of liberation, when the bandages finally fell from Isadora’s eyes. Though it was a bit of a letdown to see her return to her husband (another shrink, but an Oriental one), I felt that she would remain on her own two feet. Once the bandages are removed you don’t put them on again. Maybe she, author or protagonist, still has a fear of flying—who hasn’t?—but she can cope with it. I feel like predicting that this book will make literary history, that because of it women are going to find their own voice and give us great sagas of sex, life, joy and adventure. —Henry Miller E Jong Love rica Jong’s first novel, Fear of Flying, feels like a winner. It has class and sass, brightness and bite. Containing all the cracked eggs of the feminist litany, her soufflé rises with a poet’s afflatus.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  I don’t know if I be calling myself a street poet, exactly.’ ‘Spoken Word?’ repeated Howard. Zora, who considered herself the essential bridge between Wellington’s popular culture and her parents’ academic culture, stepped in here. ‘It’s like oral poetry . . . it’s in the African-American tradition – Claire Malcolm’s all into it. She thinks it’s vital and earthy , etcetera, etcetera. She goes to the Bus Stop to check it out with her little Cult of Claire groupies.’ This last was sour grapes on Zora’s part; she had applied for, but not been accepted into, Claire’s poetry workshop the previous semester. ‘I’ve done the Bus Stop, several times,’ said Carl quietly. ‘It’s a good place. It’s about the only cool place for that stuff in Wellington. I did some stuff there just Tuesday night past.’ Now he put a thumb to the brim of his cap and lifted it a little so that he might get a good look at these people. Was the white guy the father? ‘Claire Malcolm goes to a bus stop to hear poetry . . .’ began Howard, bewildered, busy looking up and down the street. ‘Shut up, Dad,’ said Zora. ‘Do you know Claire Malcolm?’ ‘Nope . . . can’t say I do,’ replied Carl, releasing another one of his winning smiles, just nerves probably, but each time he did, you warmed to him further. ‘She’s like a poet poet,’ explained Zora. ‘Oh . . . A poet poet.’ Carl’s smile disappeared. ‘Shut up, Zoor,’ said Jerome. ‘Rubens,’ said Howard suddenly. ‘Your face. From the four African heads. Nice to meet you, anyway.’ Howard’s family stared at him. Howard stepped off the sidewalk to wave down a cab that passed him by. Carl pulled his hoodie over his cap and began to look around himself. ‘You should meet Claire,’ said Kiki enthusiastically, trying to patch the thing up. It’s remarkable what a face like Carl’s makes  On Beauty you want to do in order to see it smile again. ‘She’s very respected – everybody says she’s very good.’ ‘Cab!’ yelled Howard. ‘It’s going to pull up on the other side. Come on.’ ‘Why do you say it like Claire’s a country you’ve never been to?’ demanded Zora. ‘You’ve read her – so you can have an opinion, Mom, it won’t kill you.’ Kiki ignored this. ‘I’m sure she’d love to meet a young poet, she’s very encouraging – you know actually we’re having a party – ’ ‘Come on, come on,’ droned Howard. He was in the middle of the traffic island. ‘Why would he even want to go to your party?’ asked Levi, mortified. ‘It’s an anniversary party.’ ‘Well, baby, I can ask , can’t I?

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Without a word she kicked away to the side, trying her best to climb the ladder with dignity, and left the pool. Except she didn’t quite leave. For the time it takes to swim one length she stood by the side of the lifeguard’s chair and watched the smiling sun make its way through the water, watched the initial seal-pup flip-flop of the boy’s torso, the ploughing and lifting of two dark arms in turbine motion, the grinding muscles of the shoulders, the streamlined legs doing what all human legs could do if only they tried a little harder. For a whole twenty-three seconds the last thing on Zora’s mind was herself. ‘I knew I knew you – Mozart.’ He was dressed now, the necklines of several T-shirts visible underneath his Red Sox hoodie. His black jeans swamped the white scallop-shell toes of his sneakers. If Zora hadn’t just seen him almost as God intended, she would have had no idea of the contours beneath all of this. The only clue was that elegant neck of his, angling the head away from the body like a young animal looking about the world for the first time. He was sitting on the outdoor steps of the gym, legs wide open, earphones on, nodding to the music – Zora almost stood on him. ‘Sorry – if I can just . . .’ she murmured, stepping round. He slipped his earphones down to his neck, bounced up and kept pace with her down the stairs. ‘Hey, hat girl – yo, I’m talking to you – hey, slow down for a second there.’ Zora stopped at the bottom of the stairs, pushed the brim of her stupid hat up, looked into his face and recognized him at last. ‘Mozart,’ he repeated, cocking a finger at her. ‘Right? You took my player – my man Levi’s sister.’ ‘Zora, right.’ ‘Carl. Carl Thomas. I knew it was you. Levi’s sister.’ He stood there nodding and smiling as if together they had just cracked the cure for cancer.  On Beauty ‘So . . . umm, do you see Levi . . . or . . . ?’ tried Zora, awkwardly. His well-madeness as a human being made her feel her own bad design. She folded her arms across her chest and then refolded them the other way. Suddenly she couldn’t stand in a position that was even half normal. Carl looked over her shoulder towards the frizzled corridor of yew trees that led to the river. ‘You know, I ain’t even seen him since that concert – I guess we was meant to hang at one point but . . .’ His attention flipped back to her. ‘Which way you walking, you walking down there?’ ‘Actually, I’m going the other way, just into the square.’ ‘Cool, I can go that way.’ ‘Er . . . OK.’ They took a few steps, but here the sidewalk ended. They waited at the traffic lights in silence.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  J’ai toujours … Dublinois: “I have always admired the [ormonde] work of the sublime Dubliner.” The sublime one is James Joyce, but ormonde does not exist in French; it refers to Dublin’s Hotel Ormond (no e), whose restaurant provides the setting for the so-called “Sirens” episode of Ulysses, and whose name is a most Joycean pun—hors [de ce] monde (“out-of-this-world,” a further tribute). (See also Keys, p. 20.) The reverential allusion is delivered obliquely in the requisite Joycean manner. Also in the Dubliner’s spirit is the “jolls-joyce” car in which the hero of Ada rides in one scene (p. 473). See outspoken book: Ulysses. In a 1966 National Educational Television network interview, Nabokov said the “greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century prose are, in this order: Joyce’s Ulysses; Kafka’s Transformation; Bely’s St. Petersburg; and the first half of Proust’s fairy tale, In Search of Lost Time.” “On fait son grand Joyce after doing one’s petit Proust,” reads a parenthetical statement in Ada, added to the “manuscript” by gently derisive Ada herself, “In [her] lovely hand” (p. 169). When Véra Nabokov saw some of the opened pages of the annotator’s copy of Lolita, the typeface barely visible beneath an overlay of comments in several colors of pencil and ink, she turned to her husband and said, “Darling, it looks like your copy of Ulysses.” Although there are strong artistic affinities between Joyce and Nabokov, he dismissed the possibility of formal “influence”: “My first real contact with Ulysses, after a leering glimpse in the early ’twenties, was in the ’thirties at a time when I was definitely formed as a writer and immune to any literary influence. I studied Ulysses seriously only much later, in the ’fifties, when preparing my Cornell courses. That was the best part of the education I received at Cornell” (Wisconsin Studies interview). See children-colors … a passage in James Joyce.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  bantered among themselves, as if prospective customers didn’t even matter. Their display was so magnificent no further hustling was required. They struck Levi as splendid beings, from quite another planet than the one he had been in only five minutes ago – spring-footed, athletic, carelessly loud, coal-black, laughing, immune to the frowns of Bostonian ladies passing with their stupid little dogs. Brothers. An unanchored sentence of Howard’s from his morning lecture – now floating free of the tedious original context – meandered into Levi’s consciousness. Situationists transform the urban landscape . ‘Hey, you want hip-hop? Hip-hop? We got your hip-hop here,’ said one of the guys, like an actor breaking the suspended disbelief of the fourth wall. He reached out his long fingers to Levi, and Levi walked towards him at once.  ‘Mom – what are you doing ?’ Is it unusual, then, to be sat thus on a raised step, half in the kitchen and half in the garden, your feet numb on the chill flagstones, waiting for winter? Kiki had been quite content for the best part of an hour, just like this, watching the pitchy wind bully the last leaves to the ground – now here was her daughter, incredulous. The older we get the more our kids seem to want us to walk in a very straight line with our arms pinned to our sides, our faces cast with the neutral expression of mannequins, not looking to the left, not looking to the right, and not – please not – waiting for winter. They must find it comforting. ‘Mom – hello ? It’s blowing a gale out there.’ ‘Oh – morning, baby. No, I’m not cold.’ ‘ I’m cold. Can you close the door? What are you doing?’ ‘I don’t know, really. Looking.’ ‘At?’ ‘Just looking.’  the anatomy lesson Zora gawped at her mother crudely and then, just as abruptly, lost interest. She set about opening cabinets. ‘O kay . . . Have you had breakfast?’ ‘No, honey, I ate . . .’ Kiki put both hands on her knees to signify a decision; she wanted Zora to feel her mother was not an eccentric. That she had been sitting for a reason and now would rise for a reason. She said, ‘That garden could do with a little TLC. The grass is full of dead leaves. Nobody picked up any of the apples, they’re just rotting there.’ But Zora could find nothing interesting in this. ‘Well,’ she replied, sighing, ‘I’m going to make toast and scrambled. I can have scrambled once on a Sunday – I feel like I earned it, I swam my butt off this week. We got eggs?’ ‘Cupboard – far right.’ Kiki tucked her feet back under her. She was cold now, after all.