Nabokov’s Words

“Swept out of the valley night by an inspired oneiric wind, I stood at the edge of a road under a clear pure-gold sky, in an extraordinary mountainous land. Without looking I sensed the luster, the angels, and the facets of immense mosaic cliffs, dazzling precipices, and the mirrorlike glint of multitudinous lakes lying somewhere below, behind me. My soul was seized by a sense of iridescence, freedom, and loftiness: I knew I was in Paradise.”

Thus begins Vladimir Nabokov’s story “The Word”. Those lovely people at The New Yorker Magazine have given us, as a Christmas present, the first-ever translation of that work in this week’s International Fiction Issue of their magazine. After being so thoroughly depressed by Lolita I was very happy to see this story in the magazine when it arrived the other day and last night I read it again just to savor the beauty of Nabokov’s words without the disturbing content.

I think there is something magical about the ability to use words well. Though I have never been a great one for reading much poetry I remember my first awareness of the beauty of words came while reading some poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins when I was in school. Later I had the same reaction to Dylan Thomas but it is prose fiction that dazzles me most when the words are finely, magnificently used.

A.S. Byatt is one of my favorite writers. She has a gift for pouring music into her words and making descriptions so delicious I get so caught up in the visual impressions that I can forget about the story. In Possession, Maude and Roland enter the decayed and crumbling part of Maude’s ancestral estate house and venture into the room that had been Christabel’s where she hid her love letters in the bottom of a cradle full of dolls. That passage is so exquisitely crafted that I could swear it is a memory of a past experience of my own and not something I read in a book. I love the books of Isabel Allende for the same reason. Not long ago I read Regina McBride’s The Nature of Water and Air and was so mesmerized, so enchanted, by the imagery woven into a tale of a strangely haunted woman – half-human, half-“selkie” – that I failed to notice that the story had some flaws that didn’t surface until I tried to tell a friend what the story was about. Such is the power of well-crafted prose.

Mark and I have been talking about this a lot lately. He is (I hope, I hope) nearly finished with his last rewrite of F/V Black Sheep during which he has been working on refining his prose and rewriting trite imagery. For a guy who has spent his life at sea – either under it or over it – he has a natural gift for language. Maybe that comes when you don’t do a lot of talking. In one of my favorite passages in his book he says, “my house sits on a tidal marsh in back of Good Harbor Beach, I work on my lobster traps there and watch hawks soar.” What beauty from absolute simplicity of language! Recently I had pointed out a trite descriptive phrase in one chapter and suggested he change it. He did and the imagery he chose just stunned me – it is that beautiful.

Russians have a reputation for being great visual writers. Nabokov certainly illustrates that. They say that the Irish and the Russians are the best lyrical writers. In the Twentieth Century a good many South Americans joined that group. I wonder what it is that makes some nationalities more gifted in a particular discipline than others. The Germans have produced few brilliant painters and many brilliant composers. The French and the Italians, well, they can do anything.

In the same issue of The New Yorker there is a memoir by a contemporary Russian, Tatyana Tolstaya which ends with these words:

“Clench a fragment of Yorick in your fist–milky and chill–and the heart grows younger, pounds faster and strains; the suitor wants to snatch the young lady, and water spouts like a fountain to all ends of the sea, and the world circulates, whirling, spinning, wanting to fall; it stands on three whales, and splits away from them into the head-spinning abyss of time.”

Ah, words!

Thanks for reading.