fiction

Shadwell didn’t require much encouragement. It was easy to see that he was clever and well read, but he was also boring. Like many spectacular bores, his thoughts were catalogued and indexed. When I asked him a question he’d say, “The answer to that is – in fact the several answers to that are…A.” And you’d get point A followed by points B and C, and on the one hand F, and on the other foot G, until you could see the whole alphabet stretching ahead, each letter a Sahara in itself to be crawled across.

* * *

“Concentrate on the way you think your position in society has been fixed,” said Pyke.

Being sceptical and suspicious, the English sort to be embarrassed by such a Californian display of self, I found the life-stories – accounts of contradiction and wretchedness, confusion and intermittent happiness – oddly affecting. I giggled all through Lawrence’s account of working in a San Francisco massage parlour (when she was stranded there), where the women were not allowed to proposition men directly in case they were cops. They had to say, “Is there any other muscle you’d like relaxed, sir?” This was where Lawrence discovered socialism, for here, in a forest of pricks and pond of semen, “I soon realized that nothing human was alien to me,” as she put it.

Richard talked about wanting to fuck only black men, and the clubs he cruised constantly in order to acquire them. And to Pyke’s delight and my surprise Eleanor told of how she’d worked with a woman performance artist who persuaded her to extract the texts of poems – “Cows’ teeth like snowdrops bite the garlic grass” – from her vagina before reading them. The performance artist herself meanwhile had a microphone up her vagina and relayed the gurglings of her cunt to the audience. This was enough for me. I was hot on Eleanor’s trail. For the time being I gave up on Terry.

From Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader:

“What happened at the selections?”

Hanna described how the guards had agreed among themselves to tally the same number of prisoners from their six equal areas of responsibility, ten each and sixty in all, but that the figures could fluctuate when the number of sick was low in one person’s area of responsibility and high in another’s, and that all the guards on duty had decided together who was to be sent back.

“None of you held back, you all acted together?”

“Yes.”

“Did you not know that you were sending the prisoners to their death?”

“Yes, but the new ones came, and the old ones had to make room for the new ones.”

“So because you wanted to make room, you said you and you and you have to be sent back to be killed?”

Hanna didn’t understand what the presiding judge was getting at.

“I…I mean…so what would you have done?” Hanna meant it as a serious question. She did not know what she should or could have done differently, and therefore wanted to hear from the judge, who seemed to know everything, what he would have done.

Everything was quiet for a moment. It is not the custom at German trials for defendants to question the judges. But now the question had been asked, and everyone was waiting for the judge’s answer. He had to answer; he could not ignore the question or brush it away with a reprimand or a dismissive counterquestion. It was clear to everyone, it was clear to him too, and I understood why he had adopted an expression of irritation as his defining feature. It was his mask. Behind it, he could take a little time to find an answer. But not too long; the longer he took, the greater tension and expectation, and the better his answer had to be.

“There are matters one simply cannot get drawn into, that one can distance oneself from, if the price is not life and limb.”

Perhaps this would have been all right if he had said the same thing, but referred directly to Hanna or himself. Talking about what “one” must and must not do and what it costs did not do justice to the seriousness of Hanna’s question. She had wanted to know what she should have done in her particular situation, not that there are things that are not done. The judge’s answer came across as hapless and pathetic. Everyone felt it. They reacted with sighs of disappointment and stared in amazement at Hanna, who had more or less won the exchange. But she herself was lost in thought.

“So should I have…should I have not…should I not have signed up at Siemens?”

It was not a question directed at the judge. She was talking out loud to herself, hesitantly, because she had not yet asked herself that question and did not know whether it was the right one, or what the answer was.

[The reference to signing up at Siemens is to her signing up with the SS when it recruited workers from the Siemens factory where she had been working.]

My first Norman Mailer book since giving up on The Armies Of The Night in disgust is The Gospel According To The Son, which is either very appropriate or somewhat blasphemous to begin reading today, judging from its first page:

“While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men. Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.”

Nabokov’s novella The Enchanter is a precursor of sorts to Lolita, but it really does inhabit an immensely foggier area between literature and soft-core pornography than the latter work. Although the basic idea of marrying the nymphet’s mother to gain access to her stays much the same between both books, by the time Nabokov came to write Lolita (The Enchanter was written years before that in Russian and translated only recently into English by his son) “the thing was new and had grown in secret the claws and wings of a novel” – as he puts it so inimitably in the preface.

Basically, I recommend The Enchanter if you:
(a) are a Nabokov junkie; and/or
(b) are a paedophile

Here are some sample passages. The first one’s from page 4, no less. He certainly wastes no time in getting to the point:

“What if the way to true bliss is indeed through a still delicate membrane, before it has had time to harden, become overgrown, lose the fragrance and the shimmer through which one penetrates to the throbbing star of that bliss? Even within these limitations I proceed with a refined selectivity; I’m not attracted to every schoolgirl that comes along, far from it – how many one sees, on a gray morning street, that are husky, or skinny, or have a necklace of pimples or wear spectacles – those kinds interest me as little, in the amorous sense, as a lumpy female acquaintance might interest someone else. In any case, independently of any special sensations, I feel at home with children in general, in all simplicity; I know that I would be a most loving father in the common sense of the word, and to this day cannot decide whether this is a natural complement or a demonic contradiction.”

The next two are considerably more ewww-worthy. After his wife’s sudden death, the protagonist is on a train to her friend’s house, where her daughter had been staying during her illness. He is now the little girl’s guardian.

“Luxuriating in the concentrated rays of an internal sun, he pondered the delicious alliance between premeditation and pure chance, the Edenic discoveries that awaited her, the way the amusing traits peculiar to bodies of different sex, seen at close range, would appear extraordinary yet natural and homey to her, while the subtle distinctions of intricately refined passion would long remain for her but the alphabet of innocent caresses: she would be entertained only with storybook images (the pet giant, the fairy-tale forest, the sack with its treasure), and with the amusing consequences that would ensue when she inquisitively fingered the toy with the familiar but never tedious trick.

…

Thus they would live on – laughing, reading books, marveling at gilded fireflies, talking of the flowering walled prison of the world, and he would tell her tales and she would listen, his little Cordelia, and nearby the sea would breathe beneath the moon….And exceedingly slowly, at first with all the sensitivity of his lips, then in earnest, with all their weight, ever deeper, only thus – for the first time – into your inflamed heart, thus, forcing my way, thus, plunging into it, between its melting edges…

The lady who had been sitting across from him for some reason suddenly got up and went into another compartment; he glanced at the blank face of his wristwatch – it wouldn’t be long now – and then he was already ascending next to a white wall crowned with blinding shards of glass as a multitude of swallows flew overhead.”

The thing is, even at his worst, Nabokov’s prose in other parts of this book is still head and shoulders over almost anything else I read. I would like to deny The Enchanter the status of “literature” (yes, I realize that word contains multitudes but let’s just use it in its most narrow-minded traditional sense for these purposes, mmmmkay?), but I can’t. Nabokov junkies should read this, because I’m pretty sure it still has a lot of what you like about him. People who have never read Nabokov should not start with this, but buy Lolita pronto. I’m not qualified to advise the paedophiles.