Vladimir Nabokov. Inspiration
(written on November 20, 1972, for Saturday Review)
The awakening, quickening, or creative impulse, esp. as manifested in high artistic achievement.
Webster, Second Ed., unabridged, 1957
The enthusiasm that sweeps away (entraine) poets. Also a term of physiology (insufflation): ". . . wolves and dogs howl only by inspiration; one can easily ascertain this by causing a little dog to howl close to one's face (Buffon)."
Littre. ed. integrate, 1963
The enthusiasm, concentration, and unusual manifestation of the mental faculties (umstvennyh sil).
Dal, Revised Ed., St. Petersburg, 1904
A creative upsurge. [Examples:] Inspired poet. Inspired socialistic work.
Ozhegov, Russian dictionary, Moscow, 1960
A special study, which I do not plan to conduct, would reveal, probably, that inspiration is seldom dwelt upon nowadays even by the worst reviewers of our best prose. I say "our" and I say "prose" because I am thinking of American works of fiction, including my own stuff. It would seem that this reticence is somehow linked up with a sense of decorum. Conformists suspect that to speak of "inspiration" is as tasteless and old-fashioned as to stand up for the Ivory Tower. Yet inspiration exists as do towers and tusks.
One can distinguish several types of inspiration, which intergrade, as all things do in this fluid and interesting world of ours, while yielding gracefully to a semblance of classification. A prefatory glow, not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack, is something the artist learns to perceive very early in life. This feeling of tickly well-being branches through him like the red and the blue in the picture of a skinned man under Circulation. As it spreads, it banishes all awareness of physical discomfort— youth's toothache as well as the neuralgia of old age. The beauty of it is that, while completely intelligible (as if it were connected with a known gland or led to an expected climax), it has neither source nor object. It expands, glows, and subsides without revealing its secret. In the meantime, however, a window has opened, an auroral wind has blown, every exposed nerve has tingled. Presently all dissolves: the familiar worries are back and the eyebrow redescribes its arc of pain; but the artist knows he is ready.
A few days elapse. The next stage of inspiration is something ardently anticipated— and no longer anonymous. The shape of the new impact is indeed so definite that I am forced to relinquish metaphors and resort to specific terms. The narrator forefeels what he is going to tell. The forefeeling can be defined as an instant vision turning into rapid speech. If some instrument were to render this rare and delightful phenomenon, the image would come as a shimmer of exact details, and the verbal part as a tumble of merging words. The experienced writer immediately takes it down and, in the process of doing so, transforms what is little more than a running blur into gradually dawning sense, with epithets and sentence construction growing as clear and trim as they would be on the printed page: Sea crashing, retreating with shuffle of pebbles, Juan and beloved young whore— is her name, as they say. Adora? is she Italian, Roumanian, Irish?— asleep in his lap, his opera cloak pulled over her, candle messily burning in its tin cup, next to it a paper-wrapped bunch of long roses, his silk hat on the stone floor near a patch of moonlight, all this in a corner of a decrepit, once palatial whorehouse, Villa Venus, on a rocky Mediterranean coast, a door standing ajar gives on what seems to be a moonlit gallery but is really a half-demolished reception room with a broken outer wall, through a great rip in it the naked sea is heard as a panting space separated from time, it dully booms, dully withdraws dragging its platter of wet pebbles.
This I jotted down one morning at the very end of 1965, a couple of months before the novel began to flow. What I give above is its first throb, the strange nucleus of the book that was to grow around it in the course of the next three years. Much of that growth obviously differs in coloration and lighting from the foreglimpsed scene, whose structural centrality, however, is emphasized, with a kind of pleasing neatness, by the fact that it now exists as an inset scene right in the middle of the novel (which was entitled at first Villa Venus, then The Veens, then Ardor, and finally Ada).
Reverting to a more generalized account, one sees inspiration accompanying the author in his actual work on the new book. She accompanies him (for by now we are in the presence of a nubile muse) by means of successive flashes to which the writer may grow so accustomed that a sudden fizzle in the domestic illumination may strike him as an act of betrayal.
One and the same person can compose parts of one and the same story or poem, either in his head or on paper, pencil or pen in hand (I am told there exist fantastic performers who actually type out their immediate product or, still more incredibly, dictate it, warm and bubbly, to a typist or to a machine!). Some prefer the bathtub to the study and the bed to the windy moor— the place does not matter much, it is the relationship between the brain and the hand that poses some odd problems. As John Shade says somewhere: "I am puzzled by the difference between two methods of composing: A, the kind which goes on solely in the poet's mind, a testing of performing words, while he is soaping a third time one leg, and B, the other kind, much more decorous, when he's in his study writing with a pen. In method Btbe hand supports the thought, the abstract battle is concretely fought. The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar a canceled sunset or restore a star, and thus it physically guides the phrase toward faint daylight through the inky maze. But method A is agony! The brain is soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain. A muse in overalls directs the drill which grinds, and which no effort of the will can interrupt, while the automaton is taking off what he has just put on or walking briskly to the corner store to buy the paper he has read before. Why is it so? Is it, perhaps, because in penless work there is no pen-poised pause . . . Or is the process deeper, with no desk to prop the false and hoist the picturesque? For there are those mysterious moments when, too weary to delete, I drop my pen; I ambulate— and by some mute command the right word flutes and perches on my hand."
This is, of course, where inspiration comes in. The vords which on various occasions, during some fifty years jf composing prose, I have put together and then canceled may have formed by now in the Realm of Rejection (a foggy but not quite unlikely land north of nowhere) a huge library of scrapped phrases, characterized and concorded only by their wanting the benison of inspiration.
No wonder, then, that a writer who is not afraid to confess that he has known inspiration and can readily distinguish it from the froth of a fit, as well as from the humdrum comfort of the "right word," should seek the bright trace of that thrill in the work of fellow authors. The bolt of inspiration strikes invariably: you observe the flash in this or that piece of great writing, be it a stretch of fine verse, or a passage in Joyce or Tolstoy, or a phrase in a short story, or a spurt of genius in the paper of a naturalist, of a scholar, or even in a book reviewer's article. I have in view, naturally, not the hopeless hacks we all know— but people who are creative artists in their own right, such as, say, Trilling (with his critical opinions I am not concerned), or Thurber (e.g. in Voices of Revolution: "Art does not rush to the barricades").
In recent years numerous publishers have had the pleasure of sending me their anthologies— homing pigeons really, for all of them contain samples of the recipient's writings. Amongst the thirty or so of those collections, some flaunt pretentious labels ("Fables of Our Time" or "Themes and Targets"); others are presented more soberly ("Great Tales") and their blurbs promise the reader that he will meet cranberry pickers and hunkies; but almost in each of them there arc at least two or three first-rate stories.
Age is chary, but it is also forgetful, and in order to choose instantly what to reread on a night of Orphic thirst and what to reject for ever, I am careful to put an A, or a C, or a D-minus, against this or that item in the anthology. The profusion of high marks reconfirms me every time in the exhilarating belief that at the present time (say, for the last fifty years) the greatest short stories have been produced not in England, not in Russia, and certainly not in France, but in this country.
Examples are the stained-glass windows of knowledge. From a small number of A-plus stories I have chosen half-a-dozen particular favorites of mine. T list their titles below and parenthesize briefly the passage— or one of the passages— in which genuine afflation appears to be present, no matter how trivial the inspired detail may look to a dull criticule.
John Cheever's "The Country Husband" ("Jupiter [a black retriever] crashed through the tomato vines with the remains of a felt hat in his mouth." The story is really a miniature novel beautifully traced, so that the impression of there being a little too many things happening in it is completely redeemed by the satisfying coherence of its thematic interlacings.)
John Updike's "The Happiest I've Been" ("The important thing, rather than the subject, was the conversation itself, the quick agreements, the slow nods, the weave of different memories; it was like one of these Panama baskets shaped underwater around a worthless stone." I like so many of Updike's stories that it was difficult to choose one for demonstration and even more difficult to settle upon its most inspired bit.)
J. D. Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" ("Stopping only to sink a foot in a soggy, collapsed castle . . ." This is a great story, too famous and fragile to be measured here by a casual conchometrist.)
Herbert Gold's "Death in Miami Beach" ("Finally we die, opposable thumbs and all." Or to do even better justice to this admirable piece; "Barbados turtles as large as children . . . crucified like thieves . . . the tough leather of their skin does not disguise their present helplessness and pain.")
John Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse" ("What is the story's point? Ambrose is ill. He perspires in the dark passages; candied apples-on-a-stick, delicious-looking, disappointing to eat. Funhouses need men's and ladies' rooms at interval." I had some trouble in pinning down what I needed amidst the lovely swift speckled imagery.)
Delmore Schwartz's "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" (". . . and the fatal merciless passionate ocean." Although there are several other divine vibrations in this story that so miraculously blends an old cinema film with a personal past, the quoted phrase wins its citation for power and impeccable rhythm.)
I must add that I would be very pleased if a Professor of Literature to test his students at the start or the close of the term would request them to write a paper discussing the following points:
1. What is so good about those six stories? (Refrain from referring to "commitment," "ecology," "realism," "symbols," and so forth).
2. What other passages in them bear the mark of inspiration?
3. How exactly was that poor lap dog made to howl in those lace-cuffed hands, close to that periwig?