“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness―in a landscape selected at random―is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants.- nabokov
Amid grandees of times Elizabethan you shimmered too, you followed sumptuous custom; the circle of ruff, the silv'ry satin that encased your thigh, the wedgelike beard - in all of this you were like other men… Thus was enfolded your godlike thunder in a succinct cape.
Haughty, aloof from theatre's alarums, you easily, regretlessly relinquished the laurels twinning into a dry wreath, concealing for all time your. monstrous genius beneath a mask; and yet, your phantasm's echoes still vibrate for us; your Venetian Moor, his anguish; Falstaff's visage, like an udder with pasted-on mustache; the raging Lear.. You are among us, you're alive; your name, though, your image, too - deceiving, thus, the world you have submerged in your beloved Lethe. It's true, of course, a usurer had grown accustomed, for a sum, to sign your work (that Shakespeare - Will - who played the Ghost in Hamlet, who lives in pubs, and died before he could digest in full his portion of a boar's head)…
The frigate breathed, your country you were leaving, To Italy you went. A female voice called singsong through the iron's pattern called to her balcony the tall inglesse, grown languid from the lemon-tinted moon and Verona's streets. My inclination is to imagine, possibly, the droll and kind creator of Don Quixote exchanging with you a few casual words while waiting for fresh horses - and the evening was surely blue. The well behind the tavern contained a pail's pure tinkling sound… Reply whom did you love? Reveal yourself - whose memoirs refer to you in passing? Look what numbers of lowly, worthless souls have left their trace, what countless names Brantome has for the asking! Reveal yourself, god of iambic thunder, you hundred-mouthed, unthinkably great bard!
No! At the destined hour, when you felt banished by God from your existence, you recalled those secret manuscripts, fully aware that your supremacy would rest unblemished by public rumor's unashamed brand, that ever, midst the shifting dust of ages, faceless you'd stay, like immortality
“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness―in a landscape selected at random―is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern―to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”
Without its obscurities and abracadabra, without its pernicious reticences, shamanic incantations and magnetic trash, Marxism is not Marxism. The paradox which explodes Marxism and other dreams of the ideal state is that the first author is potentially the first tyrant of that state. . . . The individual whims of a ruler tell deeper truths about a corresponding period than the vulgar generalization of class war etc.; and the peculiar mathematical and historical howlers, in the Capital and capitaloids, are transfigured by the synthesis of Revolution into the beastly cruel stupidities it commits.
« It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all ? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message ; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions. »
What was the genesis of Lolita ?
« She was born a long time ago, it must have been in 1939, in Paris ; the first little throb of Lolita went through me in Paris in '39, or perhaps early in '40, at a time when I was laid up with a fierce attack of intercostal neuralgia which is a very painful complaint—rather like the fabulous stitch in Adam's side. As far as I can recall the first shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted in a rather mysterious way by a newspaper story, I think it was in Paris Soir, about an ape in the Paris Zoo, who after months of coaxing by scientists produced finally the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal, and this sketch, reproduced in the paper, showed the bars of the poor creature's cage. »
Did Humbert Humbert, the middle-aged seducer, have any original ?
« No. He's a man I devised, a man with an obsession, and I think many of my characters have sudden obsessions, different kinds of obsessions ; but he never existed. He did exist after I had written the book. While I was writing the book, here and there in a newspaper I would read all sorts of accounts about elderly gentlemen who pursued little girls : a kind of interesting coincidence but that's about all. »
Did Lolita herself have an original ?
« No, Lolita didn't have any original. She was born in my own mind. She never existed. As a matter of fact, I don't know little girls very well. When I consider this subject, I don't think I know a single little girl. I've met them socially now and then, but Lolita is a figment of my imagination. »
—
That nymphet’s beauty lay less on her bones Than in her name’s proclaimed two allophones, A boned veracity slow to be found In all the chanting of recorded sound. Extrude an orange pip upon the track, And it will be a pip played front or back, But only in the kingdom of the shade Can diaper run back and be repaid. Such speculations salt my exile too, One that I bear less stoically than you. I look in sourly on my lemon trees Spiked by the Qs and Xes of Maltese And wonder: Is this home or where is home? (Melita’s caves, Calypso’s honeycomb). I see a cue or clue. Just opposite, The grocer has a cat that loves to sit Upon the scales. Respecting his repose, One day he weighed him: just two rotolos. In this palazzo wood decays and falls; Buses knock stucco from the outer walls, Slam shut the shutters. Coughing as they lurch They yet enclose the silence of a church, Rock in baroque: Teresan spados stab The Sacred Heart upon the driver’s cab, Whereupon, in circus colours, one can read That verbum caro factum est. Indeed. I think the word is all the flesh I need – The taste, and not the vitamins of sense Whatever sense may be. I like the fence Of black and white that keeps those bullocks in – Crossboard or chesswood. Eurish gift of Finn – The crossmess parzel. If words are no more Than pyoshki, preordained to look before, Save for their taking chassé, they alone And not the upper house, can claim a throne (Exploded first the secular magazines And puff of bishops). All aswarm with queens, Potentially, that board. Well, there it is: You help me counter the liquidities With counters that are counties, countries. Best To read it: Caro Verbum Facta Est.
One of the great 20th-century British novelists, Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) was also a prolific poet. His interest both in poetry as an art form and in the psychology of poets is expressed in several works of fiction, for example, the quartet of Enderby novels, and ABBA ABBA. Both contain poems by their protagonists. Burgess’s last novel, Byrne, is in fact composed in ottava rima.
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Burgess’s Collected Poems, edited by Jonathan Mann, is a hefty volume, displaying both strengths and limitations. Burgess is at his best in the role of 20th-century “Augustan” poet: the 18-plus pages of An Essay on Censorship bear comparison, in their power of logical argument and mastery of the rhyming couplet, with the verse essays of Alexander Pope. This week’s poem, written to celebrate Vladimir Nabokov’s 70th birthday, is rather shorter, but shares some of its characteristics.
Censorship is more obliquely addressed, but it’s of the element underlying Burgess’s sense of connection to Nabokov. Burgess’s dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange and Nabokov’s Lolita had both been subject to its tyranny. The opening lines of the Birthday poem reflect, however, a more significant artistic relationship between the novelists, the shared preoccupation with mining the richest resources of their language. Lolita, the so-called “nymphet”, owes her “boned veracity”, Burgess punningly declares, to her creator’s sensuous virtuosity with words. The allophones savoured in line two (and in Nabokov’s own text) are the first two phonemes of “Lo-Li-Ta”.
In his the second volume of his autobiography, You’ve Had Your Time, Burgess explains that the Birthday poem’s sourness of tone was partly the result of a recent negative review by Geoffrey Grigson. The bigger discontent for Burgess, though, was his “exile” on Malta, a country in thrall to the narrow Catholicism that, as a lapsed Catholic, he particularly detested. Censorship flourished and curtailed his access to literary material there. The island where Calypso detained Odysseus for seven years, Ogygia, has been identified as Gozo in the Maltese archipelago, hence the reference in line 14, “(Melita’s caves, Calypso’s honeycomb)”. The poem dryly notes that the image of the Sacred Heart in the bus-driver’s cab, bears the quotation announcing “in circus colours”, “That verbum caro factum est…” (“The Word was made flesh”). Burgess adds the sarcastic “Indeed” to make his point.
The Birthday poem is a strange, dry, bracing cocktail, partly grumpy personal letter, partly a display by Burgess of the qualities he most admires in Nabokov. He emphasises symmetry and pattern, for example: see the reference to the diaper (nothing to do with babies’ nappies) in line eight. This repeated patterning is significant for Burgess, the poet-novelist, and has a more existential, Nabokovian connection – to the re-routing of time and the recovery of the past through memory. It’s further fleshed out in the poem by images of a local farmer’s black and white fence and the chess-board.
Creating chess problems one of Nabokov’s passions. Burgess seems tempted at times to make up word-problems in a counter-cadenza. He honours James Joyce in passing. “The crossmess parzel” is from Finnegans Wake, “a cross between a crossword puzzle and a Christmas parcel”. While the Latin quotation from St John’s gospel in line 26 declares that “the word was made flesh” and the poem’s ultimate tribute to Nabokov is that the word has become flesh (through the power of his literary art), there is a counterpoint of abstraction in some of the wordplay, the effect of which is to de-incarnate language. It’s another complex flavour Burgess adds to the celebration cocktail. Nabokov liked the poem, Burgess reported.
I leave you with a question, reflecting I hope the mischievous spirit of two great writers, and not only my own inability to solve maths problems. Was the grocer’s cat overweight at 2 rotolos? You might find a clue here.
“The kingdom of the shade” – see Nabokov’s novel, Pale Fire. There may also be a reference to the scene in the 19th-century Russian ballet, La Bayadère (The Temple Dancer) in which lovers are reunited after death in a starlit Himalayan Nirvana.
Chassé – a dance step used in many dances in many variations. All variations are triple-step patterns of gliding character in a “step-together-step” pattern.
Pyoshki (Russian, plural of pyoshka ) – pawns.
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“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness―in a landscape selected at random―is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern―to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”
“Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.
"No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.” - Vladimir Nabokov
Be creative with the name Lolita.
