Contents

About the Book

Of all the great novelists writing today, none shows the same gift as Martin Amis for writing non-fiction – his essays, literary criticism and journalism are justly acclaimed. As Rachel Cusk wrote in the The Times, reviewing a previous collection, ‘Amis is as talented a journalist as he is a novelist, but these essays all manifest an unusual extra quality, one that is not unlike friendship. He makes an effort; he makes readers feel that they are the only person there.’

The essays in The Rub of Time range from superb critical pieces on Amis’s heroes Nabokov, Bellow and Larkin to brilliantly funny ruminations on sport, Las Vegas, John Travolta and the pornography industry. The collection includes his essay on Princess Diana and a tribute to his great friend Christopher Hitchens, but at the centre of the book, perhaps inevitably, are essays on politics, and in particular the American election campaigns of 2012 and 2016. One of the very few consolations of Donald Trump’s rise to power is that Martin Amis is there to write about him.

About the Author

Martin Amis is the author of fourteen novels, the memoir Experience, two collections of stories and six collections of non-fiction. He lives in New York.

Also by Martin Amis

FICTION

The Rachel Papers

Dead Babies

Success

Other People

Money

Einstein’s Monsters

London Fields

Time’s Arrow

The Information

Night Train

Heavy Water

Yellow Dog

House of Meetings

The Pregnant Widow

Lionel Asbo

The Zone of Interest

NON-FICTION

Invasion of the Space Invaders

The Moronic Inferno

Visiting Mrs Nabokov

Experience

The War Against Cliché

Koba the Dread

The Second Plane

He’s Leaving Home

Once upon a time, in a kingdom called England, literary fiction was an obscure and blameless pursuit. It was more respectable than angelology, true, and more esteemed than the study of phosphorescent mould; but it was without question a minority-interest sphere.

In 1972, I submitted my first novel: I typed it out on a second-hand Olivetti and sent it in from the sub-editorial office I shared at the Times Literary Supplement. The print run was 1,000 (and the advance was £250). It was published, and reviewed, and that was that. There was no launch party and no book tour; there were no interviews, no profiles, no photo shoots, no signings, no readings, no panels, no on-stage conversations, no Woodstocks of the Mind in Hay-on-Wye, in Toledo, in Mantova, in Parati, in Cartagena, in Jaipur, in Dubai; and there was no radio and no television. The same went for my second novel (1975) and my third (1978). By the time of my fourth novel (1981), nearly all the collateral activities were in place, and writers, in effect, had been transferred from vanity press to Vanity Fair.

What happened in the interim? We can safely say that as the 1970s became the 1980s there was no spontaneous flowering of enthusiasm for the psychological nuance, the artful simile, and the curlicued sentence. The phenomenon, as I now see it, was entirely media-borne. To put it crudely, the newspapers had been getting fatter and fatter (first the Sundays, then the Saturdays, then all the days in between), and what filled these extra pages was not additional news but additional features. And the featurists were running out of people to write about – running out of alcoholic actors, ne’er-do-well royals, depressive comedians, jailed rock stars, defecting ballet dancers, reclusive film directors, hysterical fashion models, indigent marquises, adulterous golfers, wife-beating footballers, and rapist boxers. The dragnet went on widening until journalists, often to their patent dismay, were writing about writers: literary writers.

This modest and perhaps temporary change in status involved a number of costs and benefits. A storyteller is nothing without a listener, and the novelists started getting what they can’t help but covet: not more sales necessarily, but more readers. And it was gratifying to find that many people were indeed quite intrigued by the business of creating fiction: to prove the point, one need only adduce the fact that every last acre of the planet is now the scene of a boisterous literary festival. With its interplay of the conscious and the unconscious, the novel involves a process that no writers, and no critics, really understand. Nor can they quite see why it arouses such curiosity. (‘Do you write in longhand?’ ‘How hard do you press on the paper?’) All the same, as J.G. Ballard once said, readers and listeners ‘are your supporters – urging on this one-man team’. They release you from your habitual solitude, and they give you heart. So far, so good: these are the benefits. Now we come to the costs, which, I suppose, are the usual costs of conspicuousness.

Needless to say, the enlarging and emboldening of the mass-communications sector was not confined to the United Kingdom. And ‘visibility’, as Americans call it, was no doubt granted to writers in all the advanced democracies – with variations determined by national character. In my home country, the situation is, as always, paradoxical. Despite the existence of a literary tradition of unparalleled magnificence (presided over by the world’s only obvious authorial divinity), writers are regarded with a studied scepticism – not by the English public, but by the English commentariat. It sometimes seems that a curious circularity is at work. If it is true that writers owe their ascendancy to the media, then the media has promoted the very people that irritate them most: a crowd of pretentious – and by now quite prosperous – egomaniacs. When writers complain about this, or about anything else, they are accused of self-pity (‘celebrity whinge’). But the unspoken gravamen is not self-pity. It is ingratitude.

Nor should we neglect a profound peculiarity of fiction and the column inches that attend it: a fortuitous consanguinity. The appraisal of an exhibition does not involve the use of an easel and a palette; the appraisal of a ballet does not involve the use of a pair of slippers and a tutu. And the same goes for all but one of the written arts: you don’t review poetry by writing verse (unless you’re a jerk), and you don’t review plays by writing dialogue (unless you’re a jerk); novels, though, come in the form of prose narrative – and so does journalism. This odd affinity causes no great tension in other countries, but it sits less well, perhaps, with certain traits of the Albionic Fourth Estate – emulousness, a kind of cruising belligerence, and an instinctive proprietoriality.

Conspicuous persons, in my motherland, are most seriously advised to lead a private life denuded of all colour and complication. They should also, if they are prudent, have as little as possible to do with America – seen as the world HQ of arrogance and glitz. When I and my wife, who is a New Yorker, entrained the epic project of moving house, from Camden Town in London to Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, I took every public opportunity to make it clear that our reasons for doing so were exclusively personal and familial, and had nothing to do with any supposed dissatisfaction with England or the English people (whom, as I truthfully stressed, I have always admired for their tolerance, generosity, and wit). Backed up by lavish misquotes together with satirical impersonations (‘cod’ interviews and the like), the impression given was that I was leaving because of a vicious hatred of my native land and because I could no longer endure the well-aimed barbs of patriotic journalists.

‘I wish I weren’t English’: of all the fake tags affixed to my name, this is the one I greet with the deepest moan of inanition. I suggest that the remark – and its equivalent in any language or any alphabet – is unutterable by anyone whose IQ reaches double figures. ‘I wish I weren’t North Korean’ might make a bit of sense, assuming the existence of a North Korean sufficiently well-informed and intrepid to give voice to it. Otherwise and elsewhere, the sentiment is inconceivably null. And for a writer to say it of England – the country of Dickens, George Eliot, Blake, Milton, and, yes, William Shakespeare – isn’t even perverse. It is merely twee.

The term ‘American exceptionalism’ was coined in 1929 by none other than Josef Stalin, who condemned it as a ‘heresy’ (he meant that America, like everywhere else, was subject to the iron laws of Karl Marx). If that much-mocked notion still means anything, we should apply it to America’s exceptionally hospitable attitude to outsiders (and America has certainly been exceptionally hospitable to me and my family). All friends of the stars and stripes are pained to see that this unique and noble tradition is now under threat, and from all sides; but America remains, definingly, an immigrant society, vast and formless; writers have always occupied an unresented place in it, because everyone subliminally understood that writers would play a part in construing its protean immensity. Remarkably, the ‘American Century’ (to take another semi-wowserism) is due to last exactly that long – with China scheduled for prepotence in about 2045. The role of the writers, for the time being, is at least clear enough. They will be taking America’s temperature, and tenderly checking its pulse, as the New World follows the old country down the long road of decline.

New Republic 2012

Nabokov and the Problem from Hell

The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov

Language leads a double life – and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you negotiate the public prints, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs (LOOK LEFT), and so on and so forth. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form – as the stuff of patterned artifice. Most writers, I think, would want to go along with Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), when he reminisced in 1974:

Well, the creative joy is authentic; and yet it isn’t faithful (in common with pretty well the entire cast of Nabokov’s fictional women, creative joy, in the end, is a ruthless flirt). Writing remains a very interesting job, but destiny, or ‘fat Fate’ as Humbert Humbert calls it, has arranged a very interesting retribution. Writers lead a double life. And they die doubly, too. This is modern literature’s dirty little secret. Writers die twice: once when the body dies, and once when the language dies.fn1

Nabokov composed The Original of Laura, or what we have of it, against the clock of doom (a series of sickening falls, then hospital infections, then bronchial collapse). It is not ‘A novel in fragments’, as the cover states; it is immediately recognisable as a longish short story struggling to become a novella. In this palatial edition, every left-hand page is blank, and every right-hand page reproduces Nabokov’s manuscript (with its robust handwriting and fragile spelling – ‘bycycle’, ‘stomack’, ‘suprize’), plus the text in typed print (and infested with square brackets). It is nice, I dare say, to see those world-famous index cards up close; but in truth there is little in Laura that reverberates in the mind. ‘Auroral rumbles and bangs had begun jolting the cold misty city’: in this we hear an echo of the Nabokovian music. And in the following we glimpse the funny and fearless Nabokovian disdain for our ‘abject physicality’:

Otherwise and in general Laura is somewhere between larva and pupa (to use a lepidopteral metaphor), and very far from the finished imago.

Apart from a welcome flurry of interest in the work, the only thing this relic will effect, I fear, is the slight exacerbation of what is already a problem from hell. It is infernal, for me, because I bow to no one in my love for this great and greatly inspiring genius. And yet Nabokov, in his decline, makes even the most well-attuned reader feel uncomfortable, seeming to impose authorial condemnation on you for being so vulgar, literal-minded, and prim. Nothing much, in Laura, qualifies as a theme (i.e., as a structural or at least a recurring motif). But we do notice the appearance of a certain Hubert H. Hubert (a reeking Englishman who slobbers over a pre-teen’s bed), we do notice the twenty-four-year-old vamp with twelve-year-old breasts (‘pale squinty nipples and firm form’), and we do notice the fevered dream about a juvenile love (‘her little bottom, so smooth, so moonlit’). In other words, Laura joins The Enchanter (1939), Lolita (1955), Ada (1970), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins! (1974) in unignorably concerning itself with the sexual despoliation of very young girls.

Six fictions: six fictions, two or perhaps three of which are spectacular masterpieces. You will, I hope, admit that the hellish problem is at least Nabokovian in its complexity and ticklishness. For no human being in the history of the world has done more to vivify the cruelty, the violence, and the dismal squalor of this particular crime. The problem, which turns out to be an aesthetic problem, and not quite a moral one, has to do with the intimate malice of age.

The word we want is not the legalistic ‘paedophilia’, which in any case deceitfully translates as ‘fondness for children’. The word we want is ‘nympholepsy’, which doesn’t quite mean what you think it means. It means ‘frenzy caused by desire for the unattainable’, and is rightly labelled by my COD as ‘literary’. Nympholepsy is therefore a legitimate, indeed an almost unavoidable subject for this very singular talent. ‘Nabokov’s is really an amorous style’, John Updike lucidly observed: ‘It yearns to clasp diaphonous exactitude into its hairy arms’. With the later Nabokov, though, nympholepsy crumbles into its etymology – ‘from Gk numpholeptos “caught by nymphs”, on the pattern of EPILEPSY’; ‘from Gk epilepsia, from epilambanein “seize, attack”’.

Dreamed up in 1930s Berlin (with Hitler’s voice spluttering out from the rooftop loudspeakers), and written in Paris (post-Kristallnacht, at the start of the Nabokovs’ nerve-racking flight from Europe), The Enchanter is a vicious triumph, brilliantly and almost osmotically translated from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov in 1987, ten years after his father’s death. As a narrative it is logistically identical to the first half of Lolita: the rapist will marry – and perhaps murder – the mother, and then attend to the child. Unlike the redoubtable Charlotte Haze (‘she of the noble nipple and massive thigh’), the nameless widow in The Enchanter is already promisingly frail, her large body warped out of symmetry by hospitalisations and surgeons’ knives. And this is why her suitor reluctantly rejects the idea of poison: ‘Besides, they’ll inevitably open her up, out of sheer habit’.

The wedding takes place, and so does the wedding night: ‘… and it was perfectly clear that he (little Gulliver)’ would be physically unable to tackle ‘those multiple caverns’ and ‘the repulsively listing conformation of her ponderous pelvis’. But ‘in the middle of his farewell speeches about his migraine’, things take an unexpected turn,

Soon the mother is dead for real, and the enchanter is alone with his twelve-year-old. ‘The lone wolf was getting ready to don Granny’s nightcap’.

In Lolita, Humbert has ‘strenuous sexual intercourse’ with his nymphet at least twice a day for two years. In The Enchanter there is a single delectation – non-invasive, voyeuristic, masturbatory. In the hotel room the drugged girl is asleep, and naked; ‘he began passing his magic wand above her body’, measuring her ‘with an enchanted yardstick’. She awakes, she looks at ‘his rearing nudity’, and she screams. With his obsession now reduced to a cooling smear on the raincoat he throws on, our enchanter runs out into the street, seeking to rid himself, by any means, of a world ‘already-looked-at’ and ‘no-longer-needed’. A tramcar grinds into sight, and under

In moral terms The Enchanter is sulphurously direct. Lolita, by contrast, is delicately cumulative; but in its judgment of Humbert’s abomination it is, if anything, the more severe. To establish this it is necessary to adduce only two key points. First, the fate of its tragic heroine. No unprepared reader could be expected to notice that Lolita meets a terrible end on page two of the novel that bears her name: ‘Mrs “Richard F. Schiller” died in childbed’, says the ‘editor’ in his Foreword, ‘giving birth to a still-born girl … in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest’; and the novel is almost over by the time Mrs Richard F. Schiller (i.e., Lo) briefly appears. Thus we note, with a parenthetical gasp, the size of Nabokov’s gamble on greatness. ‘Curiously enough, one cannot read a book,’ he had announced (at the lectern), ‘one can only reread it.’ Nabokov knew that Lolita would be reread, and re-reread. He knew that we would eventually absorb Lolita’s fate – her stolen childhood, her stolen womanhood. Gray Star, he wrote, is ‘the capital town of the book’. The shifting qualification – gray star, silent lightning, torpid smoke, pale fire, and yes, even hot filth: this is the Nabokovian counter-tone.

The second fundamental point is the description of a recurring dream that shadows Humbert after Lolita has flown (she absconds with the cynically carnal Quilty). It is also proof of the fact that style, that prose itself, can control morality. Who would want to do something that gave them dreams like these?

That final phrase, with its clear allusion, reminds us of the painful diffidence with which Nabokov wrote about the century’s terminal crime. His father, the distinguished liberal statesman (whom Trotsky loathed), was shot dead by a fascist thug in Berlin; and Nabokov’s homosexual brother, Sergey, was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp (‘What a joy you are well, alive, in good spirits,’ Nabokov wrote to his sister Elena, from the US to the USSR, in November 1945. ‘Poor, poor Seryozha …!’). Nabokov’s wife, Véra, was Jewish, and so, therefore, was their son (born in 1934); and there is a strong likelihood that if the Nabokovs had failed to escape from France when they did (in May 1940, with the Wehrmacht seventy miles from Paris), they would have joined the scores of thousands of the racially impure delivered by Vichy to the Reich.

In his fiction, to my knowledge, Nabokov wrote about the Holocaust at paragraph length only once – in the incomparable Pnin (1957). Other references, as in Lolita, are glancing. Take, for example, this one-sentence demonstration of genius from the insanely inspired six-page short story of 1948, ‘Signs and Symbols’ (it is a description of a Jewish matriarch):

Pnin goes further. At an émigré houseparty in rural America a Madam Shpolyanski mentions her cousin Mira, and asks Timofey Pnin if he has heard of her ‘terrible end’. ‘Indeed, I have’, Pnin answers. Gentle Timofey sits on alone in the twilight. Then Nabokov gives us this:

How resonantly this passage chimes with Primo Levi’s crucial observation that we cannot, we must not, ‘understand what happened’. Because to ‘understand’ it would be to ‘contain’ it. ‘What happened’ was ‘non-human’, or ‘counter-human’, and remains incomprehensible to human beings.

By linking Humbert Humbert’s crime to the Shoah, and to ‘those whom the wind of death has scattered’ (Paul Celan), Nabokov pushes out to the very limits of the moral universe. Like The Enchanter, Lolita is airtight, intact and entire. The frenzy of the unattainable desire is confronted, and framed, with stupendous courage and cunning. And so matters might have rested. But then came the meltdown of artistic self-possession – tumultuously announced, in 1970, by the arrival of Ada. When a writer starts to come off the rails, you expect skidmarks and broken glass; with Nabokov, naturally, the eruption is on the scale of a nuclear accident.

I have read at least half a dozen Nabokov novels at least half a dozen times. And at least half a dozen times I have tried, and promptly failed, to read Ada (‘Or Ardor: A Family Chronicle’). My first attempt took place about three decades ago. I put it down after the first chapter, with a curious sensation, a kind of negative tingle. Every five years or so (this became the pattern), I picked it up again; and after a while I began to articulate the difficulty: ‘But this is dead,’ I said to myself. The curious sensation, the negative tingle, is of course miserably familiar to me now: it is the reader’s response to what seems to happen to all writers as they overstep the biblical span. The radiance, the life-giving power, begins to fade. Last summer I went away with Ada and locked myself up with it. And I was right. At six hundred pages, two or three times Nabokov’s usual fighting-weight, the novel is what homicide detectives call ‘a burster’. It is a waterlogged corpse at the stage of maximal bloat.

When Finnegans Wake appeared, in 1939, it was greeted with wary respect – or with ‘terror-stricken praise’, in the words of Jorge Luis Borges. Ada garnered plenty of terror-stricken praise; and the similarities between the two magna opera are in fact profound. Nabokov nominated Ulysses as his novel of the century, but he described Finnegans Wake as, variously, ‘formless and dull’, ‘a cold pudding of a book’, ‘a tragic failure’, and ‘a frightful bore’. Both novels seek to make a virtue of unbounded self-indulgence; they turn away, so to speak, and fold in on themselves. Literary talent has several ways of dying. With Joyce and Nabokov (and with others), we see a decisive loss of love for the reader – a loss of comity, of courtesy. The pleasures of writing, Nabokov said, ‘correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading’; and the two activities are in some sense indivisible. In Ada, that bond loosens and frays.

There is a weakness in Nabokov for ‘partricianism’, as Saul Bellow called it (Nabokov the classic émigré, Bellow the classic immigrant). In the former’s purely ‘Russian’ novels (I mean the novels written in Russian that Nabokov did not himself translate), the male characters, in particular, have a self-magnifying quality: they are larger and louder than life. They don’t walk – they ‘march’ or ‘stride’; they don’t eat and drink – they ‘munch’ and ‘gulp’; they don’t laugh – they ‘roar’. They are very far from being the furtive, hesitant neurasthenics of mainstream anglophone fiction: they are brawny (and gifted) heart-throbs, who win all the fights and win all the girls. Pride, for them, is not a deadly sin but a cardinal virtue. Of course, we cannot do without this vein in Nabokov: it gives us, elsewhere, his magnificently comic hauteur. In Lolita, the superbity is meant to be funny; elsewhere, it is a trait that irony does not protect.

In Ada nabobism disastrously combines with a nympholepsy that is lavishly, monotonously, and frictionlessly gratified. Ada herself, at the outset, is twelve; and Van Veen, her cousin (and half-sibling) is fourteen. As Ada starts to age, in adolescence, her tiny sister Lucette is also on hand to enliven their ‘strenuous trysts’. On top of this, there is a running quasi-fantasy about an international chain of elite bordellos where girls as young as eleven can be ‘fondled and fouled’. And Van’s sixty-year-old father (incidentally but typically) has a mistress who is barely out of single figures: she is ten. This interminable book is written in dense, erudite, alliterative, punsome, pore-clogging prose; and every character, without exception, sounds like late Henry James.

In common with Finnegans Wake, Ada probably does ‘work out’ and ‘measure up’ – the multilingual decoder, given enough time and nothing better to do, might eventually disentangle its toiling systems and symmetries, its lonely and comfortless labyrinths, and its glutinous nostalgies. What both novels signally lack, though, is any hint of narrative traction: they slip and they slide; they just can’t hold the road. And then, too, with Ada, there is something altogether alien – a sense of monstrous entitlement, of unbridled, head-in-air seigneurism. Morally, this is the world for which the twisted Humbert thirsts: a world where ‘nothing matters’, and ‘everything is allowed’.

This leaves us with Transparent Things (to which we will uneasily return) and Look at the Harlequins! – as well as the more or less negligible volume under review. ‘LATH!’, as the author called it, just as he called The Original of Laura ‘TOOL’, is the Nabokov swansong. It has some wonderful rumbles, and glimmers of unearthly colour, but it is hard-of-hearing and rheumy-eyed; and the little-girl theme is by now hardly more than a logo – part of the Nabokovian furniture, like mirrors, doubles, chess, butterflies. There is a visit to a motel called Lolita Lodge; there is a brief impersonation of Dumbert Dumbert. More centrally, the narrator, Vadim Vadimovich, suddenly finds himself in sole charge of his seldom-seen daughter, Bel, who, inexorably, is twelve years old (they are always twelve years old).

Now, where does this thread lead?

Well, the dismaying answer is that this thread leads nowhere. The only repercussion, thematic or otherwise, is that Vadim ends up marrying one of Bel’s classmates, who is forty-three years his junior. And that is all.

Between the hysterical Ada and the doddery Look at the Harlequins! comes the mysterious, sinister, and beautifully melancholic novella, Transparent Things: Nabokov’s remission. Our hero, Hugh Person, a middle-grade American publisher, is an endearing misfit and sexual loser, like Timofey Pnin (Pnin regularly dines at a shabby little restaurant called The Egg and We, which he frequents out of ‘sheer sympathy with failure’). Four visits to Switzerland provide the cornerstones of this expert little piece, as Hugh shyly courts the exasperating flirt, Armande, and also monitors an aged, portly, decadent, and forbiddingly highbrow novelist called ‘Mr. R.’.

Mr R. is said to have debauched his stepdaughter (a friend of Armande’s) when she was a child or at any rate a minor. The nympholeptic theme thus hovers over the story, and is reinforced, in one extraordinary scene, by the disclosure of Hugh’s latent yearnings. A pitiful bumbler, with a treacherous libido (wiltings and premature ejaculations mark his ‘mediocre potency’), Hugh calls on Armande’s villa, and her mother diverts him, while he waits, with some family snapshots. He comes across a photo of a naked Armande, aged ten:

At first this passage seems shockingly anomalous. But then we reflect that Hugh’s unconscious thoughts, his dreams, his insomnias (‘night is always a giant’), are saturated with inarticulate dreads:

Hugh marries Armande and then, years later, strangles her in his sleep. So it may be that Nabokov identifies the paedophiliac prompting as an urge towards violence and self-obliteration. Hugh Person’s subliminal churning extracts a terrible revenge, in pathos and isolation (prison, madhouse), and demands the ultimate purgation: he is burnt to death in one of the most ravishing conflagrations in all literature. The torched hotel:

Left to themselves, The Enchanter, Lolita, and Transparent Things might have formed a lustrous and utterly unnerving trilogy. But they are not left to themselves; by sheer weight of numbers, by sheer iteration, the nympholepsy novels begin to infect one another – they cross-contaminate. We gratefully take all we can from them; and yet … Where else in the canon do we find such wayward fixity? In the awful itch of Lawrence, maybe, or in the murky sexual transpositions of Proust? No: you would need to venture to the very fringes of literature – Lewis Carroll, William Burroughs, the Marquis de Sade – to find an equivalent emphasis: an emphasis on activities we rightly and eternally hold to be unforgivable.

In fiction, of course, nobody ever gets hurt; the flaw, as I said, is not moral but aesthetic. And I intend no innuendo by pointing out that Nabokov’s obsession with nymphets has a parallel: the ponderous intrusiveness of his obsession with Freud – ‘the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world’ of ‘the Viennese quack’, with ‘its bitter little embryos, spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents’. Nabokov cherished the anarchy of the inner mind, and Freud is excoriated because he sought to systematise it. Is there something rivalrous in this hatred? Well, in the end it is Nabokov, and not Freud, who emerges as our supreme poet of dreams (with Kafka), and our supreme poet of madness.

One commonsensical caveat persists, for all our literary-critical impartiality: writers like to write about the things they like to think about. And, to put it at its sternest, Nabokov’s mind, during his last period, insufficiently honoured the innocence – insufficiently honoured the honour – of twelve-year-old girls. In the three novels described above he prepotently defends the emphasis; in Ada (that incontinent splurge), in Look at the Harlequins!, and now in The Original of Laura, he does not defend it. This leaves a faint but visible scar on the leviathan of his corpus.

‘Now, soyons raisonnable,’ says Quilty, staring down the barrel of Humbert’s revolver. ‘You will only wound me hideously and then rot in jail while I recuperate in a tropical setting.’ All right, let us be reasonable. In his book about Updike, Nicholson Baker refers to an order of literary achievement that he calls ‘Prousto-Nabokovian’. Yes, Prousto-Nabokovian, or Joyceo-Borgesian, or, for the Americans, Jameso-Bellovian. And it is at the highest table that Vladimir Nabokov coolly takes his place.

Lolita, Pnin, and Despair (1936; translated by the author in 1966), and four or five short stories are immortal. King, Queen, Knave (1928, 1968), Laughter in the Dark (1932, 1936), The Enchanter, The Eye (1930), Bend Sinister (1947), Pale Fire (1962), and Transparent Things are ferociously accomplished; and little Mary (1925), his first novel, is a little beauty. Lectures on Literature (1980), Lectures on Russian Literature (1981), and Lectures on Don Quixote (1983), together with Strong Opinions (1973), constitute the shining record of a pre-eminent artist-critic. And the Selected Letters (1989), the Nabokov – Wilson Letters (1979), and that marshlight of an autobiography, Speak, Memory (1967), give us a four-dimensional portrait of a delightful and honourable man. The vice Nabokov most frequently reviled was ‘cruelty’. And his gentleness of nature is most clearly seen in the loving attentiveness with which, in his fiction, he writes about animals. A minute’s thought gives me the cat in King, Queen, Knave (washing itself with one hindleg raised ‘like a shouldered club’), the charming dogs and monkeys in Lolita, the shadow-tailed squirrel and the unforgettable ant in Pnin, and the sick bat in Pale Fire – creeping past ‘like a cripple with a broken umbrella’.

They call it a ‘shimmer’ – a glint, a glitter, a glisten. The Nabokovian essence is a miraculously fertile instability, where without warning the words detach themselves from the everyday and streak off like flares in a night sky, illuminating hidden versts of longing and terror. From Lolita, as the fateful cohabitation begins (nous connûmes, a Flaubertian intonation, means ‘we came to know’):

Guardian 2009

Saul Bellow, As Opposed to Henry James

Whereas English poetry ‘fears no one’, E.M. Forster wrote in 1927, English fiction ‘is less triumphant’: there remained the little matter of the Russians and the French. Forster published his last novel, A Passage to India, in 1924, but he lived on until 1970 – long enough to witness a profound rearrangement in the balance of power. Russian fiction, as dementedly robust as ever in the early years of the century (Bulgakov, Zamyatin, Bely, Bunin), had been wiped off the face of the earth; French fiction seemed to have strayed into philosophical and essayistic peripheries; and English fiction (which still awaited the crucial infusion from the ‘colonials’) felt, well, hopelessly English – hopelessly inert and inbred. Meanwhile, and as if in obedience to the political reality, American fiction was assuming its manifest destiny.

The American novel, having become dominant, was in turn dominated by the Jewish-American novel, and everybody knows who dominated that: Saul Bellow. His was and is a pre-eminence that rests not on sales figures and honorary degrees, not on rosettes and sashes, but on incontestable legitimacy. To hold otherwise is to waste your breath. Bellow sees more than we see – sees, hears, smells, tastes, touches. Compared to him, the rest of us are only fitfully sentient; and intellectually, too, his sentences simply weigh more than anybody else’s. John Updike and Philip Roth, the two writers in perhaps the strongest position to rival Bellow, or to succeed him, have both acknowledged that his seniority is not merely a question of Anno Domini. Egomania is an ingredient of literary talent, and a burdensome one: the egomaniacal reverie is not, as many suppose, a stupor of self-satisfaction; it is more like a state of red alert. Yet American writers, in particular, are surprisingly level-headed about hierarchy. John Berryman claimed he was ‘comfortable’ playing second fiddle to Robert Lowell; and when that old flagship Robert Frost sank to the bottom, in 1963, he said impulsively (and unsentimentally), ‘It’s scary. Who’s number one?’ But that was just a rush of blood. Berryman knew his proper place.

Rather impertinently, perhaps, you could summarise the preoccupations of the Jewish-American novel in one word: ‘shiksas’ (literally, ‘detested things’). It transpired that there was something uniquely riveting about the conflict between the Jewish sensibility and the temptations – the inevitabilities – of materialist America. As one Bellow narrator puts it, ‘At home, inside the house, an archaic rule; outside, the facts of life’. The archaic rule is sombre, blood-bound, guilt-torn, renunciatory, and transcendental; the facts of life are atomised, unreflecting, and unclean. Of course, the Jewish-American novel subsumes the experience of the immigrant, with an ‘old country’ at one remove; and the emphasis is on the anxiety of entitlement (marked in Roth, too, and in Malamud). It is not an anxiety about succeeding, about making good; it is an anxiety about the right to pronounce, the right to judge – about the right to write. And the consequence would seem to be that these novelists brought a new intensity to the act of authorial commitment, offering up the self entire, holding nothing back. Although Jewish-American fiction is often comic and deflationary, concerning itself with what Herzog called ‘high-minded mistakes’, something world-historically dismal lies behind it – a terminal standard of human brutality. The dimensions of this brutality were barely graspable in 1944, the year that saw the beginning of Bellow’s serial epic. And America would subsequently be seen as ‘the land of historical redress,’ a place where (as Bellow wrote with cold simplicity) ‘the Jews could not be put to death’.

Universalisingly, the Jewish-American novel poses a mind-body problem – and then goes ahead and solves it on the page. ‘When some new thought gripped his heart he went to the kitchen, his headquarters, to write it down,’ says Bellow on page one of Herzog (1964). ‘When some new thought gripped his heart’: the voice is undisassociated; it responds to the world with passionate sensuality, and at a pitch of cerebration no less prodigious and unflagging. Bellow has presided over an efflorescence that clearly owes much to historical circumstances, and we must now elegiacally conclude that the phase is coming to an end. No replacements stand in line. Did ‘assimilation’ do it, or was the process something flabbier and more diffuse? ‘Your history, too, became one of your options,’ the narrator of The Bellarosa Connection (1989) notes drily. ‘Whether or not having a history was a “consideration” was entirely up to you’. Recalling Philip Rahv’s famous essay of 1939, we may say that the Palefaces have prevailed over the Redskins. Roth will maintain the tradition, for a while. Yet he is Uncas – last of the Mohicans.

Praise and dispraise play their part in the quality control of literary journalism, but when the value judgement is applied to the past its essential irrationality is sharply exposed. The practice of rearranging the canon on aesthetic or moralistic grounds (today such grounds would be political – that is, egalitarian) was unanswerably ridiculed by Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957). To imagine a literary ‘stock exchange’ in which reputations ‘boom and crash’, he argued, is to reduce literary criticism to the sphere of ‘leisure-class gossip’. You can go on about it, you can labour the point, but you cannot demonstrate that Milton is a better poet than Macaulay – or, indeed, that Milton is a better poet than McGonagall. It is evident, it is obvious, but it cannot be proved.

Still, I propose to make an educated guess about literary futures, and I hereby trumpet the prediction that Bellow will emerge as the supreme American novelist. There is, hereabouts, no shortage of narrative genius, and it tends, as Bellow tends, towards the visionary – a quality needed for the interpretation of a New World. But when we look to the verbal surface, to the instrument, to the prose, Bellow is sui generis. What should he fear? The melodramatic formularies of Hawthorne? The multitudinous facetiousness of Melville? The murkily iterative menace of Faulkner? No. The only American who gives Bellow any serious trouble is Henry James.

All writers enter into a platonic marriage with their readers, and in this respect James’s fiction follows a peculiar arc: courtship, honeymoon, vigorous cohabitation, and then growing disaffection and estrangement; separate beds, and then separate rooms. As with any marriage, the relationship is measured by the quality of its daily intercourse – by the quality of its language. And even at its most equable and beguiling (the androgynous delicacy, the wonderfully alien eye), James’s prose suffers from an acute behavioural flaw.

Students of usage have identified the habit as ‘elegant variation’. The phrase is intended ironically, because the elegance aspired to is really pseudo-elegance, anti-elegance. For example: ‘She proceeded to the left, towards the Ponte Vecchio, and stopped in front of one of the hotels which overlook that delightful structure.’ I can think of another variation on the Ponte Vecchio: how about that vulgar little pronoun ‘it’? Similarly, ‘breakfast,’ later in its appointed sentence, becomes ‘this repast’, and ‘tea-pot’ becomes ‘this receptacle’; ‘Lord Warburton’ becomes ‘that nobleman’ (or ‘the master of Lockleigh’); ‘letters’ become ‘epistles’; ‘his arms’ become ‘these members’; and so on.

Apart from causing the reader to groan out loud as often as three times in a single sentence, James’s variations suggest broader deficiencies: gentility, fastidiousness, and a lack of warmth, a lack of candour and engagement. All the instances quoted above come from The Portrait of a Lady (1881), from the generous and hospitable early-middle period. When we enter the arctic labyrinth known as Late James, the retreat from the reader, the embrace of introversion, is as emphatic as that of Joyce, and far more fiendishly prolonged.

The phantom marriage with the reader is the basis of the novelist’s creative equilibrium. Such a relationship needs to be unconscious, silent, tacit; and, naturally, it needs to be informed by love. Bellow’s love for the reader has always been at once safely subliminal and thrillingly ardent. And it combines with another kind of love, to produce what may be the Bellovian quiddity. Looking again at the late short story ‘By the St Lawrence’, I found I had marked a passage and written in the margin, ‘So is this it?’ The passage runs:

And this is it, I think. Love has always been celebrated for, among other things, its transformative powers; and it is with love, in concert with his overpowering need to commemorate and preserve (‘I am the nemesis of the would-be forgotten’), that Bellow transforms the world: