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.

Page 153 of 288 · 20 per page

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Twenty years later, looking back on this enduring and delighting book, the miracle seems that—as De Gaulle first described then embodied the French people, who loved what he showed them of themselves—Edmund White seems to have enjoyed and then outstripped his own utility to the social movement that tried making a mere flag from his exquisitely dyed silk scarf. It is a pleasure to see the work regain itself, and with the added footnote pedigree of its Liberationist utility. By being so comic, so informed, with a style so Nabokovian—when any good journalist’s tiptoe-best prose might have done perfectly well—this novel was enlisted by a worthy cause that really would’ve settled for something far less good. And subsequently has. Little else in the gay canon approaches the joyous control, the go-for-broke candor and high style of this work. If its young narrator kept breaking out of the closet he guessed to be his lifelong fate, gay lit has since set up housekeeping in that dark if capacious storage space. Journalistic romps through gay Savannah by gay journalists pretending—again for popularity’s sake—not to be, that is what, a decade later, outsold but never supplanted this work. White’s novel served its political purpose all too well. Happily, now we can simply read it. James Agee once described the fiction of Theodore Dreiser as seeming the outpouring of some great Russian novelist but served up in a very poor English translation. White’s oeuvre might have been first written in impeccable French, then translated by a party committee including Virgil Thomson, Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Nabokov. The ear for urgent casual speech exists alongside a topiaried control, a rigorous sentence-by-sentence reveling in the merit of “composition.” The surface would surely gladden the heart of any Gallic schoolmaster, as its subject matter might disturb him. This novel’s diction imitates the young character emerging at its center, the sort of boy who senses the history of everything he sees and touches, the kind of kid who could tell you in the middle of the night the name of the best chocolate on earth and where, on Michigan Avenue, you might acquire some at this hour. But under this knowing pearly overlay, the comedy remains as rude as it is suave. And the writing still feels so wet, generative, scarily honest: I hypothesized a lover who’d take me away. He’d climb the fir tree outside my window, step into my room and gather me into his arms. What he said or looked like remained indistinct, just a cherishing wraith enveloping me, whose face glowed more and more brightly. His delay in coming went on so long that soon I’d passed from anticipation to nostalgia.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  A breeze from wonderland: there are several references to Alice in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll, the pseudonym of Charles L. Dodgson (1832–1898), English writer, mathematician, and nympholept (see Alice-in-Wonderland). “I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll,” said Nabokov, “because he was the first Humbert Humbert.” Nabokov translated Alice into Russian (Berlin, 1923). “I got five dollars (quite a sum during the inflation in Germany),” he recalls (Speak, Memory, p. 283). In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, a character speaks “in the elenctic tones of Lewis Carroll’s caterpillar” (p. 123), while in Ada, “Ada in Wonderland” (p. 129), “Ada’s adventures in Adaland” (p. 568), and the “titles” Palace in Wonderland (p. 53) and Alice in the Camera Obscura (p. 547) are variously invoked (the latter a play on the original title of Laughter in the Dark). “In common with many other English children (I was an English child) I have been always very fond of Carroll,” he said in the Wisconsin Studies interview. “No, I do not think his invented language shares any roots with mine [in Bend Sinister and Pale Fire]. He has a pathetic affinity with H.H. but some odd scruple prevented me from alluding in Lolita to his wretched perversion and to those ambiguous photographs he took in dim rooms. He got away with it, as so many other Victorians got away with pederasty and nympholepsy. His were sad scrawny little nymphets, bedraggled and half-undressed, or rather semi-undraped, as if participating in some dusty and dreadful charade.” But it might seem as though Nabokov did allude to Carroll in Lolita, through what might be called “the photography theme”: H.H. cherishes his worn old photograph of Annabel, has in a sense been living with this “still,” tries to make Lolita conform to it, and often laments his failure to capture her on film. Quilty’s hobby is announced as “photography,” and the unspeakable films he produces at the Duk Duk Ranch would seem to answer Carroll’s wildest needs. Asked about this, Nabokov replied, “I did not consciously think of Carroll’s hobby when I referred to the use of photography in Lolita.” “I have only words to play with,” moans H.H., and several readers have been tempted to call the ensuing wordplay “Joycean”—loosely enough, since “Carrollian” might do almost as well, given Nabokov’s fondness for auditory wordplay and portmanteau words, and the fact that the latter usage was coined by Carroll. The family line is nicely established on Sebastian. Knight’s neatest book shelf, where Alice in Wonderland and Ulysses stand side by side, along with works by some of Nabokov’s other favorite writers (Stevenson, Chekhov, Flaubert, Proust, Wells, and Shakespeare, who encloses the shelf at either end with Hamlet and King Lear [p. 41]). For Shakespeare, see God or Shakespeare. metamorphosing: see not human, but nymphic. CHAPTER 30emeritus read to by a boy: an echo of the opening of Eliot’s “Gerontion”: “Here I am, an old man in a dry month,/Being read to by a boy …” See pastiches.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  It was the major émigré poet and critic Vladislav Khodasevich who first pointed out, more than fifty years ago, that whatever their occupations may be, Nabokov’s protagonists represent the artist, and that Nabokov’s principal works in part concern the creative process.28 Khodasevich died in 1939, and until the 1960s, his criticism remained untranslated. If it had been available earlier, Nabokov’s English and American readers would have recognized his deep seriousness at a much earlier date. This is especially true of Lolita, where Nabokov’s constant theme is masked, but not obscured, by the novel’s ostensible subject, sexual perversion. But what may have been a brilliant formulation in the thirties should be evident enough by now, and not because so many other critics have said it of Nabokov, but rather because it has become a commonplace of recent criticism to note that a work of art is about itself (Wordsworth, Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Yeats, Queneau, Borges, Barth, Claude Mauriac, Robbe-Grillet, Picasso, Saul Steinberg, and Fellini’s film 8½—to name but a baker’s dozen). What is not so clear is how Nabokov’s artifice and strategies of involution reveal the “second plot” in his fiction, the “contiguous world” of the author’s mind; what it has meant to that mind to have created a fictional world; and what the effect of those strategies is upon the reader, whose illicit involvement with that fiction constitutes a “third plot,” and who is manipulated by Nabokov’s dizzying illusionistic devices to such an extent that he too can be said to become, at certain moments, another of Vladimir Nabokov’s creations. 3. THE ARTIFICE OF LOLITAAlthough Lolita has received much serious attention (see this edition’s Selected Bibliography), the criticism which it has elicited usually forces a thesis which does not and in fact cannot accommodate the total design of the novel. That intricate design, described in the Notes to this edition, makes Lolita one of the few supremely original novels of the century. It is difficult to imagine, say, that Lord Jim could have been achieved without the example of Henry James’s narrative strategies, or that The Sound and the Fury would be the same novel if Faulkner had not read Ulysses. But like The Castle, Remembrance of Things Past, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and Pale Fire, Lolita is one of those transcendent works of the imagination which defy the neat continuum maintained so carefully by literary historians. At most, it is one of those works which create their own precursors, to use Jorge Luis Borges’s winning phrase.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  This eccentric teacher was also a Genius; every summer he played Falstaff in an outdoor theater and he’d once written a textbook on semantics. For Dr. Schlumberger, Chuck knocked himself out composing a novel about an oil driller in Oklahoma much given to epic drunks and fornications—a novel in which terse dialogue and tersely narrated violence alternated with nature descriptions of a shocking delicacy, silverpoint tracery against a wash of Chinese white. I read and praised Chuck’s book, and that made him like me. And the book made me like him, for though he continued to slouch about and swear and weep with laughter and refused to say an intelligent word, nevertheless I’d had that written glimpse into his temperament, and just as oils can be made fragrant by saturating them in the perfume of flowers, in the same way in my imagination Chuck’s character had been transformed by this literary enfleurage. Chuck decided we should visit a whorehouse. He picked up four day students from their houses and we lurched and wheezed in Chuck’s Chevy down through the black section of the city. It was midnight and though this was the weekend the streets were deserted; only here and there a few neon lights outlined the windows of a tavern. The bordello was a dingy wooden house behind a larger one. To get to it we had to squeeze down a narrow strip of sidewalk past a sturdy metal fence behind which a neighbor’s German shepherd kept barking and running back and forth. After we rang the bell for several minutes and Chuck pounded the door and sang a love song in warbling falsetto, which elevated the dog into new ecstasies of rage, the door at last was cracked open and a tall Negro man looked out. He had a tight black silk kerchief on his head and a few short white curly whiskers growing out of a shiny mole beside his mouth. Inside, two young black women and one woman who was white and middle-aged were sitting in slips in front of a television set. One of the black women had on pink-rimmed glasses and was knitting. The room beyond them, a waiting room lined with crude wooden folding chairs, was deserted and harshly lit. Three pictures leaned forward off the dirty walls, one a reproduction of a painting of Jesus praying in Gethsemane while his disciples dozed unmindful of the approaching Roman guards. The other pictures were of cloth behind glass, each embroidered with a motto: “Peace on Earth” and “Bless This House”—puns, I guess, but who could be certain. The house smelled of cooking fat and pork. “Now, you boys sit in here,” the white woman said, indicating the waiting room with a precise push of her hand, as though her hand were a croupier’s rake, “and choose your women.” We filed in under the harsh light. Chuck’s nose looked huge and cratered, his teeth as big as a dog’s.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters and the simultaneous revelation that Jesus had quite literally died for her sins. She spoke with peculiar emphasis about the nails in Christ’s wrists and hands and she even drew a little sketch on the telephone message pad of how she thought the nails had looked (she’d been doing some research into Aramaic pig iron). When I nodded respectfully but with a visible mote of scorn in my eye, she quite accurately read my thoughts. “Oh, I see, you think I’m some no ’count Baptist, huh, some raving redneck?” She spoke with an unaccustomed crudeness. “Well, I respect your religion,” I spluttered, “but I’m a bit of an agnostic personally and I—” “You’re full of shit,” she told me. She was looking right into my eyes. She was breathing emphatically, as though breath were psychic italic marks. She’d pushed her pageboy back from her face and shoved the sleeve of her madras blouse up to expose a pale biceps. She was halfway up out of her chair and leaning toward me. “Shit,” she said, her eyes darting for a second up to some invisible cue card before fixing me again. I felt she was torn between shyness and holy fury. “Jesus died for you,” she said, “and that’s something the greatest poets, Eliot and Dante and Donne, that’s something they knew—and they weren’t Florida crackers.” “Bravo,” DeQuincey whispered in awe. He turned to me with an isn’t-this-gal-great? grin—“She’s done it again, she’s really done it this time”—and he shook his head in admiring disbelief at the sheer wacky brilliance of his wife’s spiritual daredevilry. Exhausted by her performance, she shrank back into her chair, then rose and toddled off to the dark bedroom beyond. The moment DeQuincey and I were alone he stiffened, which I attributed to the embarrassment he must be feeling about his confession to me of his homosexual past. Not that he was attracted to me, nor I to him, but the possibility of attraction existed now and our sexual self-consciousness richocheted like sunlight in the Hall of Mirrors. That autumn with the Scotts I remember as a tender haze of tiredness, as the sight of their bright windows projecting a lattice of cross-barred shadows on flower beds filled with chrysanthemums, then dead leaves, then snow. The talk was continuous, it lasted for months, with interruptions only for our lives, which we grabbed at in short, obligatory snatches. Even during the day I’d pop in for ten minutes before lunch or on my way to class. I’d find Rachel foundered on her couch, a bilingual volume of Rilke cast aside, the air around her streaky with angelic transits. More and more I was spending my long afternoons with Rachel rather than with my old friend Howie. Over the summer Howie had grown taller and his skin had cleared up.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The following summer I spent with my father at his cottage—the summer of my exciting, frustrating idyll with Kevin. When I returned to school the next September I was switched to a new room in a new dormitory next door to the housemaster’s suite. Mr. and Mrs. Scott seemed an odd pair, he a grinning, skinny, forgetful little Latin teacher behind glasses cloudy with thumbprints, the fly of his gray, unpressed Brooks Brothers trousers sometimes open, usually half open, his hair worn in a salt-and-pepper crew cut, his shoulders fallen, perhaps broken under a perpetual burden of sin and duty and uxoriousness, which must be either one or the other. He was at his sweetest with Tim, his four-year-old son, a lovely wide-awake kid who alternated between bouts of boyish roughhousing and almost seraphic spells of listening. Yes, listening to adult conversation, to the radio, to the muted shoutings of the dorm during free time, to practically anything, even silence, which for him came across as a plenum, supersonic scrape and lift and settling, the sound of the feathered jets of the spheres. Whenever Tim clung to his father’s leg or sat on his lap and asked questions, Mr. Scott seemed most in focus. An admiration of his handsome, intelligent, good-natured little boy brightened and fattened the wavering flame in Mr. Scott’s eyes and sweetened the vinegar of his smile, for usually Mr. Scott smiled as if in queasy anticipation of a practical joke about to be played on him. Indeed, the students had offered him “a new bike” at an end-of-semester ceremony last year, but when he came bounding up the aisle with a glad grin they greeted him not with some sleek English racer to replace his battered old Schwinn but with a Bike athletic supporter (sour smile, “Very funny, you guys, a big yuck for your side”). His students counted on his being dazed. In Latin class, when he called attendance, someone different responded to each name each time, nor did Mr. Scott appear to notice when the same person answered to three different names in a row. Kids were always taping on his back the message “Kick me.” When he had to make an announcement in general assembly, he’d be unable to read his own writing. Soon he would have shoved his glasses up onto his forehead and he would be holding the paper an inch away from his eyes.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Not only was nothing lost on Nabokov, but, like the title character in Borges’s story “Funes the Memorious,” he seemed to remember everything. At dinner the first evening of my 1966 visit, we reminisced about Cornell and his courses there, which were extraordinary and thoroughly Nabokovian, even in the smallest ways (witness the “bonus system” employed in examinations, allowing students two extra points per effort whenever they could garnish an answer with a substantial and accurate quotation [“a gem”] drawn from the text in question). Skeptically enough, I asked Nabokov if he remembered my wife, Nina, who had taken his Literature 312 course in 1955, and I mentioned that she had received a grade of 96. Indeed he did, since he had always asked to meet the students who performed well, and he described her accurately (seeing her in person in 1968, he remembered where she had sat in the lecture hall). On the night of my departure I asked Nabokov to inscribe my Olympia Press first edition of Lolita. With great rapidity he not only signed and dated it but added two elegant drawings of recently discovered butterflies, one identified as “Flammea palida” (“Pale Fire”) and, below it, a considerably smaller species, labeled “Bonus bonus.”19 Delighted but in part mystified, I inquired, “Why ‘Bonus bonus’?” Wrinkling his brow and peering over his eyeglasses, a parody of a professor, Nabokov replied in a mock-stentorian voice, “Now your wife has 100!” After four days and some twelve hours of conversation, and within an instant of my seemingly unrelated request, my prideful but passing comment had come leaping out of storage. So too was Nabokov’s memory able to draw on a lifetime of reading—a lifetime in the most literal sense.20

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Fear of Flying’s legacy in our culture is as complicated as its birth was. The book’s movie rights were optioned, but a movie was never made. Erica sued for the rights back and lost. In those two sentences there live a thousand legal documents and just as many hurt feelings. The lawsuit consumed her. Her divorce consumed her. The unprecedented literary fame consumed her. She had sworn she would never write a sequel to Fear of Flying, but her next book was about a woman named Isadora who was suing a producer and movie studio and enduring a divorce amid unprecedented literary fame. She wrote three more books that were narrated by or featured Isadora as a character. But those books contain something slightly less than the promise of Fear of Flying; they lack its excitement, its ingenuity, its urgency. I don’t know, maybe they lack its youthful exuberance. Maybe they are just missing the surprise. But more likely, they are themselves a document of what happens when the lightning bolt of literary fame and success hits you so hard that, in your paralysis, you start to wonder what exactly people want from you in the first place. Don’t get me wrong; they are all worth reading. But in Erica’s later books—historical fiction about witches, about fourteen-year-old Sappho, about an eighteenth-century poet—where there is a spark of new territory, a reader is reminded of those first fists that held her lapels as she held her breath and read. It’s hard to know what she was thinking at that time and what it felt like to be inside of her mind. I met Erica for the first time in 2003, thirty years after the book’s publication. I was working at an Internet startup where I was in charge of hiring writing teachers for continuing education classes. Someone I knew had her email address and I invited her to meet me at Balthazar for lunch. She didn’t teach for us in the end; we couldn’t afford her. But I don’t think I ever thought she would. Instead, I used the lunch to tell her what she’d meant to me over the years—how she had legitimized the notion in modern books that a mouthy Jewish girl from Manhattan could also be intellectual and literary. We have all these dumb ways of categorizing books for women now, but back then, we were mostly left to read the men’s work. We had read every man’s musing and had allowed them to plant their flag to stand for all human experience. Our choices were to witness or to identify. With Erica, with Fear of Flying, the world started over, and all our stories were new and legitimate.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The Corks were both “climbers,” he in business, she in society; they seemed to me fascinating shams. I especially admired the way Kevin’s mother, so obviously a bohemian, hard drinker and hell raiser, had toned down her exuberance enough to win invitations to a few polite “functions,” those given by the Women’s Club if not by the Steinway Club (the Steinway pretended to be nothing but a little gathering of ladies who liked to play four-hand versions of “Mister Haydn’s” symphonies, though it was in fact the highest social pinnacle). In pursuit of such heights, Mrs. Cork had reduced her damns and hells by the end of the week with us to darns and hecks. I had to admire the way Mrs. Cork was pretending to be shocked by the innocent improprieties that so excited my stepmother. I could tell Mrs. Cork had palled around with real screwballs, even unwed couples—it was just a sense I had. When I took her out one day in a motorboat alone, she and I happily discussed opera. We cut the motor and drifted. I relaxed and became animated to the point of effeminacy; she relaxed and became coarser. “Oh, my boy,” she promised me in her brogue, “you want to hear fine singing, I’ll play you my John McCormack records, make you weep your damn eyes out of their bloody sockets. That ‘Lucevan le stelle,’ it’ll freeze your balls.” I shrieked with delight—we were conspirators who’d somehow found ourselves stranded together here in a world of unthrillable souls. I dreamed of running off and becoming a great singer; I walked through the woods and vocalized. Tonight we had not yet made our rapport explicit, but I was already wise to her. She had through circumstance ended up not on the La Scala stage but in this American cottage, married to an affable, overweight businessman. Now her job was to ingratiate herself with people who would help her husband in his career (lawyer for industry); she was retaining just enough brogue and temperament to be a “character.” Characters—conventional women with minor eccentricities—flourished in our world, as Mrs. Cork had no doubt observed. But she’d failed to notice that the characters were all old, rich and pedigreed. Newcomers, especially those of moderate means, were expected to form an attractive but featureless chorus behind our few madcap divas. “Time for bed, young fella,” my father said at last.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Helen Paper had a wide, regal forehead, straight dark hair pulled back from her face, curiously narrow hips and strong, thin legs. She was famous for the great globes of her breasts, as evident as her smile and almost as easy to acknowledge and so heavy that her shoulders had become very strong. How her breasts hung naturally I had no way of knowing, since in her surgically sturdy brassiere her form had been idealized into—well, two uncannily symmetrical globes, at once proud, inviting and (by virtue of their symmetry) respectable. But to describe her without mentioning her face would be absurd, since everyone was dazzled by those fine blue eyes, harder or perhaps less informative than one would have anticipated, and by that nose, so straight and classical, joined to the forehead without a bump or transition of any sort, the nose a prayer ascending above the altar of lips so rich and sweet that one could understand how men had once regarded women as spoils in wars worth fighting. She was a woman (for she surely seemed a woman despite her youth) supremely confident of her own appeal, her status as someone desirable in the abstract, that is, attractive and practicable to anyone under any conditions at any time, rather than in the concrete, to me now as mine. She wasn’t shy or passive, but to the extent she was a vessel she was full to the brim with the knowledge that she represented a prize. She was the custodian of her own beauty. She acted as though she were royalty and being beautiful a sort of Trooping the Colours. At any rate, I once watched her through a window (she didn’t know I was there) and she was acting very differently. She was with just one other person, a girl from school, and they were on the floor in front of the television with beers and a big bowl of popcorn. It was a summer night and it must have been very late and they were laughing and laughing. Helen Paper, wearing just shorts and halter, was sprawled on the floor sick with laugher, in a squalor of laughter. She kept saying, “Stop or you’ll make me pee.” Our date was quick, unremarkable (it’s the particular curse of adolescence that its events are never adequate to the feelings they inspire, that no unadorned retelling of those events can suggest the feelings). Tommy’s mother collected us all in her car (we were still too young to drive) and deposited us at the theater. Green spotlights buried in fake ferns in the lobby played on a marble fountain that had long since been drained.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Last summer, I ran into her during intermission at a performance of Hamlet at the Park Avenue Armory. She was with her grandson. She was able to recount for me nearly every rendition of Hamlet she’d ever seen, plus give me the Columbia ABD’s halftime commentary on the one we were seeing now. As she spoke, I had the same thought that I’ve had every time I’ve spoken with her—the same thought I had standing at that bookstand in Tel Aviv: There is nothing else like this. There is no one like this. There is nothing like Fear of Flying. There is no other Erica Jong. There never will be again. —Taffy Brodesser-Akner May 18, 2023 Alas! the love of women! it is known To be a lovely and a fearful thing; For all of theirs upon that die is thrown, And if ‘tis lost, life hath no more to bring To them but mockeries of the past alone, And their revenge is as the tiger’s spring, Deadly, and quick, and crushing; yet, as real Torture is theirs—what they inflict they feel. They are right; for man, to man so oft unjust, Is always so to women; one sole bond Awaits them—treachery is all their trust; Taught to conceal, their bursting hearts despond Over their idol, till some wealthier lust Buys them in marriage—and what rests beyond? A thankless husband—next, a faithless lover— Then dressing, nursing, praying—and all’s over. Some take a lover, some take drams or prayers, Some mind their household, others dissipation, Some run away, and but exchange their cares, Losing the advantage of a virtuous station; Few changes e’er can better their affairs, Theirs being an unnatural situation, From the dull palace to the dirty hovel: Some play the devil, and then write a novel. —Lord Byron (from Don Juan) ONEEn Route to the Congress of Dreams or the Zipless Fuck Bigamy is having one husband too many. Monogamy is the same. —Anonymous (a woman) There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh. God knows it was a tribute either to the shrinks’ ineptitude or my own glorious unanalyzability that I was now, if anything, more scared of flying than when I began my analytic adventures some thirteen years earlier. My husband grabbed my hand therapeutically at the moment of takeoff.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Well, I thought it was amazing,’ pressed Kiki. ‘It’s obviously the work of a genius – ’ Howard groaned at the term. ‘Oh, Howard, come on – you have to be a genius to write music like that.’ ‘Music like what? Define genius.’ Kiki ignored the request. ‘I think the kids were quite moved,’ she said, squeezing Jerome’s arm lightly but saying no more. She would not expose him to his father’s ridicule. ‘And I was very moved. I  On Beauty don’t see how it’s possible not to be moved by music like that. You’re serious – you didn’t like it?’ ‘I liked it fine . . . it was fine. I just prefer music which isn’t trying to fake me into some metaphysical idea by the back door.’ ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s like God’s music or something.’ ‘I rest my case,’ said Howard, and now turned from her and waved at Levi, who was stuck in the crowd, waving back at them. Levi nodded as Howard pointed to the gate where they should all meet up. ‘Howard,’ continued Kiki, because she was happiest when she could get him to talk to her about his ideas, ‘explain to me how what we just heard wasn’t the work of a genius . . . I mean, no matter what you say, there’s obviously a difference between something like that and something like . . .’ The family set off, continuing their debate, with the voices of the children now added to the dispute. The black boy with the elegant neck who had been sitting next to Zora strained to hear the disappearing remnants of a conversation he had been interested in, although he had not followed all of it. More and more these days he found himself listening to people talk, wanting to add something. He had wanted to add something just then, a point of information – it was from that movie. According to the film, Mozart died before he finished the thing, right? So someone else must have finished it – so that seemed relevant to that genius thing they were discussing. But he wasn’t in the habit of talking to strangers. Besides, the moment passed. It always did. He pulled his baseball cap down his forehead and checked in his pocket for his cell. He reached under his deckchair to retrieve his Discman – it was gone. He swore violently, padded his hand around the area in the darkness and found something, a Discman. But not his. His had a faint sticky residue on the bottom that he could always feel, the remains of a long-gone sticker of a silhouetted naked lady with a big afro. Apart from that the two Discmans were identical. It took him a second to figure it out. He rushed to get his hoodie off the back of his  kipps and belsey

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Nabokov’s responsiveness is characterized for me by the last evening of my first visit to Montreux in September 1966. During my two hours of conversation with the Nabokovs in their suite after dinner, Nabokov tried to imagine what the history of painting might have been like if photography had been invented in the Middle Ages; spoke about science fiction; asked me if I had noticed what was happening in Li’l Abner and then compared it, in learned fashion, with an analogous episode of a dozen years back; noted that a deodorant stick had been found among the many days’ siege provisions which the Texas sniper had with him on the tower; discoursed on a monstrous howler in the translation of Bely’s St. Petersburg; showed me a beautifully illustrated book on hummingbirds, and then discussed the birdlife of Lake Geneva; talked admiringly and often wittily of the work of Borges, Updike, Salinger, Genet, Andrei Sinyavsky (“Abram Tertz”), Burgess, and Graham Greene, always making precise critical discriminations; recalled his experiences in Hollywood while working on the screenplay of Lolita, and his having met Marilyn Monroe at a party (“A delightful actress. Delightful,” he said. “Which is your favorite Monroe film?”); talked of the Soviet writers he admired, summarizing their stratagems for survival; and defined for me exactly what kind of beetle Kafka’s Gregor Samsa was in The Metamorphosis (“It was a domed beetle, a scarab beetle with wing-sheaths, and neither Gregor nor his maker realized that when the room was being made by the maid, and the window was open, he could have flown out and escaped and joined the other happy dung beetles rolling the dung balls on rural paths”). And did I know how a dung beetle laid its eggs? Since I did not, Nabokov rose and imitated the process, bending his head toward his waist as he walked slowly across the room, making a dung-rolling motion with his hands until his head was buried in them and the eggs were laid. When Lenny Bruce’s name somehow came up, both Nabokov and his wife commented on how sad they had been to hear of Bruce’s death; he had been a favorite of theirs. But they disagreed about where it was that they had last seen Bruce; Mrs. Nabokov thought it had been on Jack Paar’s television show, while her husband—the scientist, linguist, and author of fifteen novels, who has written and published in three languages, and whose vast erudition is most clearly evidenced by the four-volume translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, with its two volumes of annotations and one-hundred-page “Note on Prosody”—held out for the Ed Sullivan show.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Scott seemed an odd pair, he a grinning, skinny, forgetful little Latin teacher behind glasses cloudy with thumbprints, the fly of his gray, unpressed Brooks Brothers trousers sometimes open, usually half open, his hair worn in a salt-and-pepper crew cut, his shoulders fallen, perhaps broken under a perpetual burden of sin and duty and uxoriousness, which must be either one or the other. He was at his sweetest with Tim, his four-year-old son, a lovely wide-awake kid who alternated between bouts of boyish roughhousing and almost seraphic spells of listening. Yes, listening to adult conversation, to the radio, to the muted shoutings of the dorm during free time, to practically anything, even silence, which for him came across as a plenum, supersonic scrape and lift and settling, the sound of the feathered jets of the spheres. Whenever Tim clung to his father’s leg or sat on his lap and asked questions, Mr. Scott seemed most in focus. An admiration of his handsome, intelligent, good-natured little boy brightened and fattened the wavering flame in Mr. Scott’s eyes and sweetened the vinegar of his smile, for usually Mr. Scott smiled as if in queasy anticipation of a practical joke about to be played on him. Indeed, the students had offered him “a new bike” at an end-of-semester ceremony last year, but when he came bounding up the aisle with a glad grin they greeted him not with some sleek English racer to replace his battered old Schwinn but with a Bike athletic supporter (sour smile, “Very funny, you guys, a big yuck for your side”). His students counted on his being dazed. In Latin class, when he called attendance, someone different responded to each name each time, nor did Mr. Scott appear to notice when the same person answered to three different names in a row. Kids were always taping on his back the message “Kick me.” When he had to make an announcement in general assembly, he’d be unable to read his own writing. Soon he would have shoved his glasses up onto his forehead and he would be holding the paper an inch away from his eyes. He himself was the product of prep schools and his natural position in this rough, raw society would have been as one of those skinny little kids who don’t hit puberty until sixteen and who learn to take a lot of teasing until then and know how to dish out a few practical jokes in return (dead frog under the pillow).

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Along with his cowboy clothes he had taken up a gentle Western manner. No longer did he inveigh against Jews in high finance, he no longer denounced our idiot teachers, parents, classmates, the entirely barbaric hemisphere we were unfortunate enough to have been born on. The Juliette Greco record had been banished in favor of one by the black folk singer Odetta. Howie himself had taken up the guitar and he favored the old songs of the IWW period. His change in height had led to a change of wardrobe that had in turn inspired a change in his politics. No longer did he pore over hagiographies of the Führer; now he was reading Emma Goldman’s Living My Life. And this change was as temperamental as ideological, for suddenly he seemed sensitive to the labor of the many gardeners and cooks and janitors at Eton who were always in the background of everyone’s snapshots and who maintained the miles and miles of grounds. We’d stroll past a frosted-over greenhouse on a cold November afternoon and through the cloudy glass we’d see the Scottish gardeners hovering and stretching and reaching as they bedded down bulbs for the winter or repotted plants or misted giant tropical ferns, and Howie would start grumbling about the unfairness of things: “Why should they have to work so hard to make things beautiful for us?” I felt like pointing out that a gardener’s life was pleasantly varied by the seasons and offered chances for self-expression and in any event was a skilled craft, but Howie’s sympathy for what he called “the poor” came as such a welcome relief to last year’s fascism that I scarcely wanted to discourage it. Any sign of suffering moved Howie, even to the point of tears. He was also treating me with kindness and for the first time was willing to listen to me when I talked about my shrink or my homosexuality or my infatuation with the Scotts, although he was dubious about most of my enthusiasms. He thought psychoanalysis was a terrible waste of money and breath. As for homosexuality, he didn’t know what to think about it. Last year he had told me with a saurian little smile that the Führer had liquidated Ernst Röhm for his “inversion.” But now all of Howie’s views were becoming mammalian. I saw that the anger and hauteur of the past, which I’d accepted without interpreting, had been merely a counterpart to his isolation and the terrible shame he’d felt about the way he looked. If he couldn’t participate in the festivities of friendship and romance, then he’d burn the tents and poison the wells.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  He held out his long palm towards her – coloured a rich brown like Kiki’s, with all the lines drawn in a still darker shade. The goggles hung from his index finger. Zora moved to snatch them but instead nudged them from his finger. She thrust her hands into the water; they twirled on down to the bottom, the red band spiralling, inanimate, yet dancing. Zora took a shallow asthmatic breath and tried to dive. Halfway down the buoyancy of her own flesh reeled her back up, ass first. ‘You want me to – ?’ offered the boy and didn’t wait for the answer. He curved in on himself and shot down with barely a splash. He resurfaced a moment later with the goggles hanging from his wrist. He dropped them into her hands, another fumbling  the anatomy lesson move, for it took all the energy Zora had to tread water while simultaneously opening her palms to receive them. 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.’

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  As often was the way with Sebastian Knight he used parody as a kind of springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion. J. L. Coleman has called it “a clown developing wings, an angel mimicking a tumbler pigeon,” and the metaphor seems to me very apt. Based cunningly on a parody of certain tricks of the literary trade, The Prismatic Bezel soars skyward. With something akin to fanatical hate Sebastian Knight was ever hunting out the things which had once been fresh and bright but which were now worn to a thread, dead things among living ones; dead things shamming life, painted and repainted, continuing to be accepted by lazy minds serenely unaware of the fraud, (p. 91) “But all this obscure fun is, I repeat, only the author’s springboard” (p. 92), says the narrator, whose tone is justifiably insistent, for although Nabokov is a virtuoso of the minor art of literary burlesque, which is at best a kind of literary criticism, he knows that the novelist who uses parody is under an obligation to engage the reader emotionally in a way that Max Beerbohm’s A Christmas Garland (1912) does not. The description of The Prismatic Bezel and the remainder of Chapter Ten in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight indicate that Nabokov is fully aware of this necessity, and, like Knight, he has succeeded in making parody a “springboard.” There is thus an important paradox implicit in Nabokov’s most audacious parodies: Lolita makes fun of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864), but Humbert’s pages are indeed notes from underground in their own right, and Clare Quilty is both a parody of the Double as a convention of modern fiction and a Double who formulates the horror in Humbert’s life.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Handy, and Josh White, introduce me to Frankie Newton and tell tall tales about Ethel Waters. And these people were not meant to be looked on by me as celebrities, but as a part of Beauford's life and as part of my inheritance. I may have been with Beauford, for example, the first time I saw Paul Robeson, in concert, and in Othello: but I know that he bought tickets tor us-really, for me-to see and hear Miss Marian Anderson, at Carnegie Hall. Because of her color, Miss Anderson was not allowed to sing at The Met, nor, as far as The Daughters of The Amer ican Revolution were concerned, anywhere in Washington where white people might risk hearing her. Eleanor Roosevelt was appalled by this species of patriotism and arranged for Marian Anderson to sing on the steps of the Lincoln Me morial. This was a quite marvellous and passionate event in those years, triggered by the indignation of one woman who had, clearly, it seemed to me, married beneath her. By this time, I was working for the Army--or the Yankee dollar!-in New Jersey. I hitchhiked, in sub�zero weather, out of what I will always remember as one of the lowest and most obscene circles of Hell, into Manhattan: where both Beauford and Miss Anderson were on hand to inform me that I had no right to permit myself to be defined by so pitiful a people. Not only was I not born to be a slave: I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave-master. They had, the mas ters, incontestably, the rope-in ti me, with enough, they would hang themselves with it. They were not to hang me: I was to sec to that. If Beauford and Miss Anderson were a part of my inheritance, I was a part of their hope. OTHER ESSAYS l still remember Miss Anderson, at the end of that concert, in a kind of smoky yellow gown, her skin copper and tan, roses in the air about her, roses at her feet. Beauford painted it, an enormous painting, he fixed it in time, for me, forever, and he painted it, he said, for me. Beauford was the first walking, living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist. In a warmer time, a less blas phemous place, he would have been recognized as my Master and l as his Pupil. He became, f( >r me, an example of courage and integrity, humility and passion. An absolute integrity: I saw him shaken many times and I lived to sec him broken but I never saw him bow. His example operated as an enormous protection: for the Village, then, and not only for a boy like me, was an alabaster maze perched above a boiling sea. To lose oneself in the maze was to f.1ll into the sea.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Then he put his hand, above the quilt, very softly, somewhere on her thigh. She began to cry. ‘Ah got a good feelin’ about this semester,’ said Smith, and whistled and released his sprightly Southern chuckle. ‘Expectin’ standing room only.’ On to the blackboard Smith was poster-gumming a reproduction of Rembrandt’s Dr Nicolaes Tulp Demonstrating the Anatomy of the Arm , , that clarion call of an Enlightenment not yet arrived, with its rational apostles gathered around a dead man, their faces uncannily lit by the holy light of science. The left hand of the doctor, raised in explicit imitation (or so Howard would argue to his students) of the benefactions of Christ; the gentleman at the back staring out at us, requesting admiration for the fearless humanity of the project, the rigorous scientific pursuance of the dictum Nosce te ipsium , ‘Know thyself ’ – Howard had a long shtick about this painting that never failed to captivate his army of shopping-day students, their new eyes boring holes into the old photocopy. Howard had seen it so many times he could no longer see it at all. He spoke with his back to it, pointing to what he needed to with the pencil in his left hand. But today Howard felt himself caught in the painting’s orbit. He could see himself laid out on that very table, his skin white and finished with the world, his arm cut open for students to examine. He turned back to the window. Suddenly he spotted the small but unmistakable figure of his daughter, clomping a speedy diagonal towards the English Department. ‘My daughter,’ said Howard, without meaning to. ‘Zora? She coming today?’ ‘Oh, yes – yes, I believe so.’ ‘She’s such a satisfying student, rilly she is.’  the anatomy lesson ‘She works terribly hard,’ agreed Howard. He saw Zora stop by the corner of the Greenman to speak with another girl. Even from here Howard could see she was standing much too close to this other person, closing in on her personal space in a way Americans do not enjoy. Why was she wearing his old hat? ‘Oh, ah know it. Ah was supervising her Joyce class and her Eliot class last semester. Compared to the other freshmen, she was lahk a text-eating machine – ah mean, she strips the area of sentiment and goes to work . Ah’m dealing with these kids who are still saying Ah really like the part when and Ah love the way – you know, that’s their high-school-analysis level. But Zora . . .’ Smith whistled again. ‘She’s awl business. Whatever she gits in front of her she rips apart to see how it works.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  None of them were like Fear of Flying, though. It seemed to have been written by its by-then PhD candidate (satire in Victorian England) in one frantic breath, typed as quickly as possible while the thought was in her head, a compendium of the ideas and reactions of the second-wave feminist hell-bent on finding the kind of love and sex that made you not hate yourself. Had there ever been a book as high up on the intellectual/educated/literate index as it was on the horny/boisterous/dirty one? For every Scheherazade reference, there’s a clitoral one; there is as much talk about existentialism as there is about libidinousness. There is Heathcliff, Hera, the Iliad, an A–Z understanding of Freud (part-objects!), Story of O, Sylvia Plath, Zelda Fitzgerald, Marjorie Morningstar, the conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos. Fear of Flying asks you to keep up with it; it expects you are as smart and educated and horny as it is—as she is. And once that’s established, it becomes the elevated, intellectually rigorous and totally raunchy saga of a woman’s desire; the non-apology of the self-aware Jew just existing; the perplexities of feminism; the constraints of these new, pioneering freedoms; the unabashed demand to be loved and satisfied. At its most basic, Fear of Flying is a trailblazing, historic account of what it meant to grapple with the complexities and contradictions of what women were told they should want and what they actually do want. Any woman alive and reading today is so familiar with this grappling that it doesn’t feel like grappling; it feels like the human condition. It is important to remember that when Erica Jong wrote it down, when she took feminism’s glasses off (and then its slacks, and then its panties), she made this grappling accessible to a mass audience of women who, for the first time, understood that they weren’t alone. To do this now is de rigueur; in my own debut novel, the female characters struggle with this condition but, by the time I wrote it, it wasn’t new; it was just the most recent version (and probably, four years later, no longer is). In fact, my book was so much a tribute that it ends the same way Fear of Flying does: a missing person standing in the doorway, returning home. When my first novel was made into a TV show, the poster the network created to advertise on billboards and cab roofs contained a series of visual signifiers to indicate to an audience the tradition of the story we were telling. Right there in the middle of the poster was Manhattan being opened up by a zipper. It is a reference to Fear of Flying, and, when I saw it, I nearly collapsed, I was so proud. I knew where I came from. —