Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(10)



But Allende is gone; the Americans helped to overthrow him. Dubcek is gone. Portugal is teetering on the edge of the abyss. There are dark clouds over what remains of Western Europe. “I have my doubts of socialism now,” he says. “It has to be either Communism or the welfare state, it seems.”

And staggering England, what will become of her? He almost sighs. “I have a feeling that somehow, like the war, we will find a way through.” He is like one of his own solitary heroes, concealing untold depths of unhappiness and strength.

He was always an outsider. Even the Catholicism which shapes his great works is gritty and heretical. It is the hard way he has written of, difficult solutions, difficult joys. He has no part of the casual view of life, hedonistic, mindless, glittering. He writes of the necessity to be “informed by a religious conscience,” and it is overwhelming. He is a man who has managed to live his life with honor in an era which does not recognize honor, a man who has found something to remain true to. He quietly recites a bit of Arthur Clough:

We are most hopeless who had once most hope,

And most beliefless that had most believed.

“Isn’t that the way it is now?” he asks.

People

January 19, 1976





An Old Magician Named Nabokov Lives and Writes in Splendid Exile


The Montreux Palace Hotel was built in an age when it was thought that things would last. It is on the very shores of Switzerland’s Lake Geneva, its balconies and iron railings look across the water, its yellow-ocher awnings are a touch of color in the winter light. It is like a great sanitarium or museum. There are Bechstein pianos in the public rooms, a private silver collection, a Salon de Bridge. This is the hotel where the novelist Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov and his wife, Véra, live. They have been here for fourteen years. One imagines his large and brooding reflection in the polished glass of bookcases near the reception desk where there are bound volumes of the Illustrated London News from the years 1849 to 1887, copies of Great Expectations, The Chess Games of Greco, and a book called Things Past, by the Duchess of Sermoneta.

Though old, the hotel is marvelously kept up and, in certain portions, even modernized. Its business now is mainly conventions and, in the summer, tours, but there is still a thin migration of old clients, ancient couples and remnants of families who ask for certain rooms when they come and sometimes certain maids. For Nabokov, a man who rode as a child on the great European express trains, who had private tutors, estates, and inherited millions which disappeared in the Russian revolution, this is a return to his sources. It is a place to retire to, with Visconti’s Mahler and the long-dead figures of La Belle époque, Edward VII, D’Annunzio, the munitions kings where all stroll by the lake and play miniature golf, home at last.

Nabokov, the Wizard of Montreux, the Russian émigré whom critics have called “our only living genius” and “the greatest living American novelist,” submits unwillingly to interviews. He prefers to conduct such exchanges on paper, writing and rewriting the answers “and some of the questions,” as he wryly says. From time to time, though, there is a visitor. “My husband does not ad lib,” Mrs. Nabokov warns on the telephone. She is his companion, guardian, and acolyte. “He is very busy,” she adds.

His newest book, Tyrants Destroyed, has just been published, a collection of thirteen stories. All but one were written in Russian between 1924 and 1939 and have been translated by Nabokov and his son, Dmitri. It is the penultimate work from a famous writer who seems busy bricking up any remaining chinks in the wall of his reputation. These recent books are not cornerstones, but they are, as always, beautifully written and call for frequent trips to the dictionary.

Nabokov deals in painterly colors, in marvelous details and tones. “. . . the last time I went swimming,” he writes in one story, “was not at Hungerburg but in the river Luga. Muzhiks came running out of the water, frog-legged, hands crossed over their private parts: pudor agrestis. Their teeth chattered as they pulled on their shirts over their wet bodies. Nice to go bathing in the river toward evening, especially under a warm rain that makes silent circles, each spreading and encroaching upon the next . . .” He is a visual, sensual writer calling forever upon the past.

Whereas American entertainers such as Truman Capote or Gore Vidal, taking advantage of their fluency and known charm, appear freely on television and give us a more or less close look at the splendors of literary life, Nabokov is a more elusive figure. It is not that he is less attractive, and his English is impeccable. But he is aloof by nature, a compulsive revisionist, and he feels for some reason insecure with nothing between himself and an audience except unrehearsed speech. When he gave his lectures on modern fiction at Cornell, he read them from cards typed by his wife. “My husband,” Véra Nabokov finally agrees, “will meet you at four o’clock in the green room next to the bar.”

The great chandeliers hang silent. The tables in the vast dining room overlooking the lake are spread with white cloth and silver as if for dinners before the war. At a little after four, into the green room with the slow walk of aged people, the Nabokovs come. He wears a navy blue cardigan, a blue-checked shirt, gray slacks, and a tie. His shoes have crepe soles. He is balding, with a fringe of gray hair. His hazel-green eyes are watering, oysterous, as he says. He is seventy-five, born on the same day as Shakespeare, April 23. He is at the end of a great career, a career half-carved out of a language not his own. Only Conrad comes to mind as someone comparable (although Beckett, going the other way, has chosen to write in French), but Conrad, a native Pole, was a duffer in English compared to Nabokov’s prodigious command of an adopted tongue.

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