by Arthur Goldhammer

"Despite Vladimir Nabokov's hostility toward literary labels, he clearly recognized his own place in cultural history." So begins the publisher's squib for some struggling assistant professor's "fresh approach stressing Nabokov's European context." I can almost see him: he wears a burgundy turtle-neck under a rumpled black silk jacket acquired during a Fulbright year in Paris, now alas all but faded from memory. His long fingers, indelibly chalk-stained, convey, when one shakes his hand, ghostly reminiscences of modish French terminology affixed to the blackboard in the manner of regimental pennants, mementos of campaigns waged and won: différance, jouissance, mise en abîme. Upon receiving his publisher's catalogue, he of course leaps at once to page three, where his book, late-structuralist to a fault, finds itself obliged to share space, as if setting up housekeeping, incongruously cohabiting, with an exemplar, doubtless distinguished, of the currently competing historicist mode, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook. He then blanches momentarily at the sight of the phrase "hostility toward." Hostility to, he vehemently mutters; but then, emending himself, he withholds judgment. Perhaps not. Perhaps toward would do after all. My professor's deepest secret, a guilt harbored in the depths of his soul, is that he has never read Madame Bovary, though he has of course read de Man, Brombert, Culler, Genette, Poulet, and others on Madame Bovary and is as quick as the next man to disparage Sartre's hubris in writing L'Idiot du village (which one could safely admit to not having read, in the comfortable belief that no one else had read it either, thereby apotheosizing—pace, Professor—ignorance as contempt).

What would Nabokov have said about "hostility toward"? Certainly a man who "clearly recognized his place in cultural history" could be counted on to have firm opinions on everything. "Along with much else, we shall probably never know," the professor surely had written somewhere in his book. Alas. Yet the matter of Nabokovian prescience, however clumsily broached by the perplexed and surly pedagogue of my imagination, continues to preoccupy me long after his phantom has vanished. While I might not know that milky-fingered Ivy Leaguer himself, I know others of his ilk, his Doppelgänger, as it were. They strut and fret their hour on the podium and then are heard no more. Gone and forgotten. No place in cultural history for them, these professors who nevertheless can with supreme confidence address, so long as they are around, the question of which authors do and which do not "clearly recognize" their "place." But a great writer, it goes without saying, must have such a locus sine qua non, and on the evidence here adduced of Nabokov he must recognize it while still in it, so to speak, much as serfs, in days of yore, knew they were serfs and seigneurs, seigneurs. Here, then, is yet another dimension in which I fall short of Nabokov, for if there is one thing about which I have yet to achieve clarity, it is my claim upon the history of culture.

That claim is perforce quite slender, since I have published virtually nothing. Were I a professor, this failure could easily be ascribed to anxiety of influence. With eminences such as Nabokov to live up to, only the most dauntless could be expected to set pen to paper before turning fifty, and I have yet to reach that dread fork. Of course nothing could please me more than to be compared to VN, even if only by dint of falling short of his august achievement. I have more than once essayed the comparison only to run up at once against the all too foreseeable obstacles. My father, for one, had not been gunned down by an assassin's bullet while attempting to protect a Prime Minister whom he not only served but revered. In point of fact he died of a pulmonary embolism in a shabby southern hospital where medical incompetence was more than a little suspected of having played a part in his demise. Oh, not, mind you, incompetence of an actionable kind: merely inattention, mismanagement, of the sort that could do no more than raise eyebrows in a small Carolina town where all the doctors knew and covered for one another's mistakes. Unlike VN's dad, my father—Sidney, let's call him—was an elderly man in poor health; he would not have lived long anyway, and the fate of liberalism in old Russia could scarcely be said to have depended on his survival.

Nevertheless, like Vladimir, who for a time, during his Berlin years, signed himself Sirin, I found myself, after my father's death, quite alone in the world. Oh, not literally alone, to be sure: my mother, who spoke no French, survived, as did my brother, and I was living at the time with a woman, a quick, tall, thick-set would-be poet with deep, oblique ruts etched in her face from the extremity of either nostril to the snaillike curlicue that formed on either side of her mouth whenever she smiled, which in those days, despite the still-raging Cold War (I am defining my place in, if not cultural history, then at least l'histoire événementielle), was frequently. We had not yet fallen to bickering, as we would later, and bitterly, when early feminism turned her into a raging harridan (or so I believed, having yet to shed my chauvinist carapace) and she abandoned the astringent, très collet monté, Anglo-Catholic precincts of T. S. Eliot for the scorched earth of Marge Piercy and the intimate comradeship of Wittig's guerrière. I reacted badly, I fear, to this humiliating rejection, pursuing, in the archetype of the ewige Weibliche, the will-o'-the-wisp of pre-modernist Romance: more concretely, I followed the Other Woman, la folle de Chaillot, across the moors of Cornwall to Land's End and back to London, where over tea in the India Office Library cafeteria I attempted to persuade her to abandon the quite despicable and I was convinced untrustworthy man to whom she was engaged for a fling with a fledgling writer in search of his place in cultural history: to wit, yours truly. The historian in her was amused: "People don't do such things," she quoted at me, having once played Hedda in a college production of Ibsen. Looking back, ruefully as is wont to be the case where the past is concerned, one cannot help remarking that the title of her thesis suggested greater affinities with hapless Tesman than with passionate Hedda: "Some Aspects of Protoindustrial Demographics in a South Indian Village: An Anthropological View." Be that as it may, her very Episcopalian auburn hair gave off intoxicating emanations of lavender and aloe (the shampoo she used came in a plastic tube with the consistency of a silicone breast implant and had the pallor of fool's gold, rather like French beer, but I have forgotten the brand name). Just when I thought I could no longer bear her hesitation about whether, in view of her pending nuptials, it was quite ethical for her to invite me to share her bed, the phone rang with an invitation from a colleague specializing in Moghul kingship to pop out to a theater in Hampstead Heath for a festival of German Expressionist films. The question, put to me in her ebulliently manic voice, caused me excruciating torment: "Would you like to see a German Expressionist film?" Which? I asked, having quite had my fill of Fritz Lang. "Well, wouldn't you know, as it happens my friend is a connoisseur," she reported acidly to the man on the other end of the phone. Vanquishing snobbery, we went. It was just as well, because when we dragged home later that night, well lubricated after closing the inevitable Lion's Head pub, our loins stoked with unbridled south Indian fare (though duly forewarned by four chili peppers inscribed on the menu, a quantitative metaphor still unclassified by the new rhetoricians, I carried through to the end with my cosmopolitan macho pose), I failed in a moment of moral fléchissement to consummate our prenuptial adultery. Her name, dear reader, was not Dolores, though its pronunciation might be equally picturesquely described as commencing with a labial explosion, triggered by the colliding critical mass of liquidly tumescent upper and lower lips.

Unlike Nabokov, I never attended Cambridge. Indeed, I'm afraid my entire experience of England, beyond a childhood romp through Stonehenge and a quick gander at the Crown Jewels, is limited to that rather sordidly unsuccessful roll in the hay and morning-after shower (in the late Sixties, I assure you, people did do such things) and a considerably more pleasant jaunt that afternoon to Hampton Court Palace, where my paramour and I gawked at ceilings festooned with pendulous, mammary-like protuberances and at the paintings in superspy Anthony Blount's collection before crossing John Updike in the maze (I was only twenty-two at the time and had read of Updike only the relatively unsatisfactory Rabbit Redux, so felt smugly superior to a man whom I regarded chiefly as a semicommercial purveyor of highbrow smut and, pour tout dire, a New Yorker writer: when I discovered, ten years later, the genius of the early novels and the sly depths of the rapidly proliferating Rabbits I felt, in my cheeks, a burning shame, compounded by a grim awareness that in the interim I had produced nothing—but one has to live before one can write, whispered the girlishly giddy voice of amour-propre: in the background of a mental sound-track as carefully layered as that of an Altman film, I could hear Sirin's deep baritone laugh).

Like Nabokov, however, I never attended the Ecole Normale Supérieure either. But I had read a great deal about the place. Like most schools, it has an argot all its own: the little cubicles, for instance, in which students study in groups of four, are known as thurnes. During les années folles (which we of course call the Roaring Twenties, an appellation with a familiar ring though to most of us the thing itself is as alien as Casablanca) adventurous readers would augment their study of Phèdre by enticing one of the liberated flappers who flitted in those days about the Latin Quarter back to the thurne where (translating literally now) they "disported themselves" for an hour or two, with the connivance of the petits camarades. There was a term, too, for the girls who lent themselves to this experimental genre, but I've forgotten it: it wasn't disparaging, because these were jeunes filles rangées, as Simone de Beauvoir would put it later, not prostitutes with hearts of gold—bourgeoises, pas prolos. Anyway, I mention all this only to alert you that whatever my place in cultural history may be, France is deeply implicated in it. This is a rather peculiar twist in the tale. There is no particular reason, after all, why the grandson of immigrant Jews from Vilnius on the one side and Budapest on the other should be parroting stories of the Ecole Normale in the 1920s lifted from the memoirs of Robert Brasillach, the fascist collaborator shot in 1945 for all the unspeakable things he had written in Je Suis Partout about the sales youpins (I don't need to translate, do I?). Blame Proust. I'm not sure, despite the poem, what Keats felt upon opening Chapman's Homer, but I can tell you that when I opened Proust I felt my spirit sprawl ecstatically in a way of which I am reminded now when I see my son of six months settle against his mother's semirecumbent body to quaff his milk in deeply comforting drafts. There are elective affinities in life, and then there are forces against which we are helpless.

Besides Proust there was Communism, for example. Look, I know full well that this is dreary ancient history: hardly anyone now alive can remember how the Free World quaked in its boots for generations because an obscure German Jew wrote that the "history of all hitherto existing societies has been the history of class struggle." I mean, so what? Hadn't Saint Bernard already denounced the stench in God's nostrils of a Church that clothed its walls in silver and gold while the poor went free, or words to that effect? And no one quaked. Still. Anyway, the story is that another bright young francophile acquired, while studying in France, a working knowledge of Marxism that sustained him in his decades-long struggle to free his native country of foreign domination. I, too, joined that struggle in its latter stages and, I fear, on the losing and perhaps undeserving side. Through a concatenation of historical accidents (World War II, Dien Bien Phu, the Tonkin Gulf), I found myself, much to my chagrin, called to prop up the tottering diumvirate of Thieu, the insurance salesman, and Ky, the dashing flier with the silk foulards and sunshades.

One day serendipity took me to a Saigon bookshop, where I could be seen thumbing twenty-year-old copies of Paris Match displayed under glass in handsome cases of hand-hewn redwood of the sort that one might sooner expect to find in a museum than in the back alleys of a wartorn capital. The shopowner, noticing that I eschewed the racks of billowy buttocks up front in favor of the musty French section in the store's shadowy depths, tentatively addressed me in the language of Racine—and I mean that quite literally: his French, exaggeratedly careful, très châtié, confined itself largely to the few thousand words admitted by the vocabulaire classique. The conversation proceeded in its desultory way, much in the fashion of the Baudelairean flâneur, and largely along the same boulevards, since my interlocutor, when he discovered that I knew la ville lumière quite well, pumped me eagerly for firsthand accounts of places he had only read about while a pupil on the benches of a French lycée some thirty-five years earlier: le tombeau de l'Empereur, for instance, at Invalides. I tried to imagine Napoleon as he might seem to a Saigon shopkeeper. Surely his small stature and rotund body would prove less disturbing in the East than they do now in the West, where we no longer conceive of our rulers on the plump and diminutive Buddhalike model. Nor would Thanh have read War and Peace, though he would have known La Chartreuse de Parme (inscribed on the official curriculum of the classe de deuxième, section littéraire) and suffered with Fabrice, whose search for glory was rewarded only with the discovery of chaos. En route from this pleasant afternoon of conversation in French back to Tan Son Nhut, where I was to catch a flight back to the boondocks with one of Air America's slickest sky-cowboys, my motor-rickshaw was briefly halted by the Waterloo-like chaos of an intersection strewn with charred, still smoking, bloody parts of human bodies blown, drinks in hand, to kingdom come by a satchel of plastique. The fortunes of war. Had I not lingered over the Pléiade edition of Pascal's Pensées, I might have arrived at the intersection just enough sooner to have been counted among the dead. And so my place in cultural history accounts, as it were, for my having a history at all.

Well, Nabokov, drat, fought in no wars, though Wittgenstein did. I share my century also with him. I confess to having ignored his influence throughout much of my life. Blame my distraction by things French: bigorneaux, for instance, those delightfully ugly little periwinkles that gyre and gimbol in the garlic butter on the tip of one's twin-pronged snail-fork, as if daring one to ingest them. The French, you see, have no use for philosophers not nurtured by a sun-drenched, mistral-raked terroir, whereas the British, allegedly insular, were willing to clasp to their bosom this queer and disagreeable Austrian refugee who stretched logic to the breaking point. I've lately developed an interest in him, though. The "private language" argument appeals to me at some metaphoric level, perhaps because I spend my waking hours trying to craft a language private enough to be mine, and therefore safe from worldly taint, and yet also public, gloriously so, like what Fabrice was seeking on the battlefield at Waterloo before he discovered cacophony and chaos, which is where I shall end up if unsuccessful in my quest—there, or, my disposition being basically sunny like Fabrice's, perhaps alternatively amusing myself in the pursuit of various earthly substitutes for the elusive apotheosis: duck's breast on galette swimming in sauce bordelaise, let us say.

Of course it takes money to dine out at the upscale sort of establishment where duck's breast supplants roast young tom turkey in giblet gravy, and earning same—I don't mind telling you, but let's keep it, if you will, strictly entre nous—has furnished some rather dull chapters of my cultural history. My first paying job, won I shamelessly confess through nepotism, was on the maintenance crew of the rather appallingly Satanic old mill in which my father was employed as chief tool engineer. It was a great mixed metaphor of a factory, at one time a sweat shop engaged in fitting our doughboys out with uniforms in which to make the world safe for democracy, later converted to spew out capacitors, those teeny mouse ears that protrude from plastic circuit boards in large numbers like some sort of electronic fungus.

And it was a great lark of a job that occupied the better part of one summer. We—the crew chief, who, no matter how hot or cold the weather, liked to doff his shirt at the earliest possible moment in order to display his handsome pectorals; his regular assistant, a tobacco-chewing dropout named Joe Bob; and myself, impecunious aesthete—amused ourselves at the end of thrice-daily rides out to the dump by seeing who could back the truck closest to the edge of the garbage-filled abyss, or by using nail-studded two-by-fours to bat steel bearing-balls in high arcs out over the void. After the last trip of the day, we'd amble back to the plant, contriving to arrive as close as possible to quitting time, and swagger three abreast through the soldering room where hundreds of young women sat curved over their work tables fastening fine silver wires to tightly wrapped bundles of foil and mylar about the size of a baby's thumbnail. Smoke curling from the tips of multiple irons clouded their lovely youthful eyes, but not sufficiently to prevent them from noticing us, and especially our bare-breasted Adonis of a chief, as we strutted our aching masculinity before their tired flesh, old before its time. We preened to their catcalls: "Hey, baby, you can come work out at my house anytime you want." "Hey, Bobby, tomorrow leave the shirt on and take the pants off." "Lookie, lookie, the three blond mice."

The average girl started on this job when she was sixteen and by thirty-five looked sixty. The ambitious ones quit to become prostitutes, but there wasn't room enough in the trade for everyone with ambition, what with this plant being in the Bible Belt and all, where sin was frowned upon and folks married young. So much for my three months as a proletarian. You want to see my congealed labor power, go to Beauregard and ask for the old Instrument Works. Me and Bobby and Joe Bob mounted the rusting motorized winch you'll find out back on the loading dock. Damn thing must have weighed 4,500 pounds, and all we had to move it up the ramp was a block and tackle and a couple of boards for lifesavers, to stop the thing from rolling back on us. Might have killed somebody that day, and after we got it up there the damn thing was never used. National Instrument abandoned Beauregard for Singapore ten, fifteen years ago, then went bust when the technology changed. The Works building's stood empty ever since. I never did lay any of the working girls and still wonder what it would be like to sleep with a woman who could curl the bark off a yew tree with her cussing. Guess I'll never know.

Off and on I used to teach in universities, in the better class of establishment soon after I took my degree and could plausibly pretend still to be pursuing an academic career, then later in institutions that bunco squads ought to investigate for fraud. Teaching, which always exhilarated me at the beginning of the term, depressed me by the end. The analogy to seduction doesn't end there of course. Every lecture was a new performance from which I'd emerge sated yet somehow let down, as if post-coitally triste. It was always with an irritation akin to jealousy that I would notice, just as I had them panting and gasping with pleasure at the discovery of how much Flaubert could accomplish with an objective correlative such as a flung-open shutter fibrillating on its hinge, that the cow-eyed beauty with the extraordinary eyelashes was at that very moment slipping a note to her acned, hawk-beaked neighbor along the oaken tabletop incised with the initials of a generation of ephemeral couples, not to mention a motley medley of political insignia from Peace Now's deformed crucifix to Dixie stars and bars by way of hammers, sickles, and the sinister swastikas of the asocial.

Then, however, I discovered that there was real money to be made in computers. No, I needn't apologize. Nabokov had his lepidoptera, I have my page tables, device-independent bitmaps, memory handles, and raster ops in more flavors than Baskin-Robins. Surely this has some bearing on my place in cultural history. Would Erasmus omit Gutenberg? Perhaps. Things were more compartmentalized in those quasifeudal times. But why should I omit instance thunks, device contexts, or Hungarian notation? Perhaps the author of Nabokov's Place in Cultural History used my code to write his book. Not impossible: I'm in three of the top five word processors with a patented algorithm for multifont justification. And—may I add, however immodestly?—I practically wrote the book on red-black search trees.

Those were exciting times. I see, however, that I have omitted altogether the influence on me of music and the visual arts. Music, suffice it to say, callused my fingers even as it flung open the shutters of my soul (q.v. Flaubert). With the visual arts I was not quite so lucky. I pursued once, for several weeks on end, a self-anointed artist of Lebanese extraction, a women of uncanny beauty, unsettling in the extreme. She had tried and rejected Ash Can and Superrealist before settling on video and performance art. Her waist was remarkably thin, and you could plunge your hands to the wrists into her lush, abundant curls. We had smoked hashish together, seen a French movie, dined at The Middle Eastern, and were due if not overdue to end the next evening in bed. So I responded eagerly when she invited me to witness the videotaping of her performance piece, "Gypsy with Dog." The studio, a dank cube of cinderblock lost in the maze of MFA workshops, was ablaze with blinding spotlights. Belinda—as she was called—had done herself up as a gypsy, carefully researched down to the bandana of black gauze and the rather sleek blouse open it seemed nearly to her navel. A large golden retriever slept at her feet as she fussed with the camera. When all was ready, she lifted the dog, who was by no means light, into her arms where I longed to be and whirled with him several full circles as the camera hummed. When we reviewed the tape, we (or at any rate my untutored eye) saw a girl dressed as a gypsy whirling for no apparent reason with a dog in her arms. "Well?" she asked. The inadequacy of my reply not only deprived me of what I'm sure would have been a short-lived though agreeable enough dalliance but permanently put me off the more determinedly adventurous manifestations of the new spirit in art. Thus, although I can say with assurance that any number of paintings have moved me deeply, I cannot claim to have wed any of the major artistic movements of my time and place. Any other questions?

If not, Professor, I trust that this document, which you have, by a stroke of immense if inexplicable good fortune, found among my unpublished papers, will ease your task when it comes to ascertaining my place in cultural history. Glad to be of service. Please convey my fondest greetings to your spouse, who, though no doubt as capable as yourself, has opted to sacrifice his/her career in order to promote your more immediately certain prospects. Encourage him/her for me to return as soon as possible to that abandoned novel/dissertation, which the world, I am confident, needs far more than an assessment of my place or another of Nabokov's. Put it this way (my last word on the subject, I promise): Consider me to have been a facilitator, an opener of worlds, a connection maker, not a regurgitator of predigested pablum, a hoarse huckster, a Ciceronian tinhorn, a "representative figure." Had I wished to represent, I would have run for office.

Best, as always, Art.

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