Nabokov Studies

Nabokov always discouraged source- and influence-hunting, routinely insisting that his predecessors and contemporaries had had little in the way of discernible effect on him. He even went out of his way to forestall precisely the sort of investigation that I am proposing here. In a 1965 interview, he spoke of his youthful admiration for a range of writers he characterizes as romantic— Conan Doyle, Conrad, Kipling, Wilde, and Chesterton—but described his interest in them as a juvenile phase he quickly outgrew, noting that they are "essentially writers for very young people" (Strong Opinions 57). Readers are less likely to go looking for artistic forebears among authors who have been so summarily banished to the nursery. Another reason these two have not been considered in conjunction is that their fiction feels different and reads differently. Chesterton's extra-literary commitments made him careless and his creative work expendable; any old vehicle would do. His one-time admirer obviously worked much harder on, and had more talent for, the sort of thing that lasts. They both wrote nightmare visions, for example, but ten minutes with The Man Who Was Thursday and Invitation to a Beheading will show the most determined source hunter that they come into only hazy focus when considered together. They both imagined worlds in transformation, but Ada owes about as much to The Napoleon of Notting Hill or The Ball and the Cross as it does to Pilgrim's Progress. They both published books of poetry in which Christian subjects figure prominently—The Wild Knight and Other Poems, Gorniy Put'—but so did D.H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway, and nobody is suggesting them as plausible candidates for comparison with Nabokov. They both wrote plays about would-be conjurors—Magic, The Waltz Invention— but here too the resemblances are as negligible as the ones between The Tempest and a David Copperfield matinee.

And yet ... the juxtaposition of all sorts of names with Nabokov's has proved helpful. The "Nabokov and ..." section in the Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov is an extensive one, and even writers he never mentioned— Evreinov, Uspensky—quite rightly figure there. A similarly titled section on [End Page 43] one of the websites dedicated to his work takes us from "Nabokov and Bellow" and "Nabokov and Bely" all the way to Zhukovsky and Zelda Fitzgerald. Even Nabokov's strange characterization of Chesterton as a writer for the very young constitutes at least a sanction of sorts for such inquiries. Nabokov spent a lifetime emitting similarly colorful summary judgments: Conrad's work, he said, consisted of "polished clichés and primitive clashes" (Strong Opinions 57), and Oscar Wilde was a "rank moralist and didacticist" (SO 33). That sort of idiosyncratic iconoclasm characterizes a number of the interviews he gave, but juxtaposing these writers and Nabokov has proved more useful than such dismissive comments suggest. Yeats shrewdly remarks that "we are never satisfied with the maturity of those we have admired in boyhood" (Frye 188), and Kingsley Amis notes that "If we could find out by some more reliable means than the adult rereader's unreliable memory, how adolescents respond to works of literature (beyond categorizing them as terrific or tripe), then we would have found out a lot about literature" (Conlon 269).¹ Other contemporaries of Chesterton—Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, Lytton Strachey —have been plausibly linked to Nabokov. In making the case for Brooke's influence, D. Barton Johnson has argued convincingly that "Nabokov could scarcely have insulated himself from British literary life while at Cambridge" (178), the period in which Chesterton's reputation was at its height, and has proven that the time spent in England was "far from inconsequential for Nabokov's later career" (193).² If poets as minor as Brooke and de la Mare can be usefully linked with Nabokov, why not Chesterton and his multi-faceted oeuvre? Nina Berberova is on record as saying that "Chesterton's work, his own attitude toward it, and his entire image had a tremendous impact on Nabokov, so he told me once in the thirties" (264). She is not always the most reliable authority on such matters, and the article in which she seeks to substantiate her claim ranges widely and inconclusively over a number of Nabokov's potential "ancestors," but the relationship implied by her indirect quotation is tantalizing nonetheless.

Let me begin with a catalogue, a series of similarities that have a kind of cumulative power when strung end-to-end, a list that would seem to constitute some kind of prima facie evidence for at least thinking about these two [End Page 44] writers in conjunction, even if they had nothing else in common. Like Nabokov, Chesterton dedicated his entire life to writing: novels, poetry, short stories, literary criticism, plays, and autobiography. He too was extravagantly uxorious and utterly dependent on the administrative beneficence of his spouse, like Véra a self-effacing woman who worked very hard so as to allow her husband the chance to dedicate himself to his work. Chesterton too wrote poems that were in formal terms heavily influenced by his nineteenth-century forebears. He was also a skilled parodist, adept at light verse, and unsympathetic to the modernist aesthetic that took poetry in new directions. Like Nabokov, Chesterton had considerable artistic talent and produced work that was intensely visual as a result. Their ability to describe sharply distinguished objects or the effect of light on a landscape, to take but two examples, is positively uncanny. Both were intrigued by the conventions of the detective novel and made distinctive contributions to a genre that particularly appealed to them because of its artificiality, because of its resemblance to a game. In their experiments with narrative form, both displayed an interest in fooling the reader, or at least in playing with the reader's expectations.

Intensely independent and individualistic themselves, both thought that the individual was far more important than any system, and both thought of themselves as what Nabokov called "a one-man multitude" (Strong Opinions 99). Both began adult life as self-declared liberals and went on to become patriotic conservatives in one sense and something sui generis in another. Both believed that democracy was morally invincible. Both regarded rationalistic philosophies like materialism as very limited views of extraordinarily complex phenomena. Both were convinced that to see history as a mere sequence of material causation was to ignore its most salient characteristics. Their attitudes to various aspects of the modern world—the potential reductiveness of Darwinian ideas about evolution, the misguided nature of the precepts of psychiatry, the sanctity of marriage and the family, and so on—these are not only similar but often eerily so.

Both combine a "rare fertility of mind" with "an almost unbelievable range of self-expression" (Sheed 166). Both believed that art is far more moral than anything else and were critical of the potential sterility of aestheticism. Both took "an almost palpable joy in revealing what other people have missed" (Conlon xxv). Eminently sane and decent citizens, they were both fascinated by insanity and the dark places of the human psyche generally. For both, the exclusively rational man is the purest kind of madman, one whose obsession makes him find evidence for it in everything he sees. In this regard, both were interested in the theme of the double and treated it in original ways. As writers, both were attracted to circular forms, freakish characters with odd [End Page 45] names, characters inclined to solipsism, and types who seem incompletely alive (Fanger 421).

That is quite a list, and just contemplating its length and musing about its implications might well prove salutary for those interested in Nabokov's work. The source of many of the similarities itemized above is not the fiction but the lives, and the writing that conveyed it to their readers, the essays, interviews, lectures, obiter dicta, and so on, what they said and did when they were not writing novels. Both Chesterton and Nabokov, for example, were responsible for excellent studies of important precursors: Chesterton's books on Browning and Dickens neatly parallel Nabokov's work on Pushkin and Gogol. When Chesterton observes that criticism "means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots" (Charles Dickens 20), he summarizes the aesthetic credo, if that is the right word, underpinning such studies. Nabokov's formalism, an approach that makes him deny that what Pushkin and Gogol wrote has any social relevance at all, would have shocked his subjects as much as it did their Soviet critics. Both Chesterton and Nabokov were also writing against certain superficial notions that had built up around their authors. They had little interest in academic studies of writing because their own responses were so subjective, the only kind of response in their view that was entirely trustworthy. Nabokov speaks fondly of reading "with his spine" (Lectures 6) and Chesterton says, "We cannot have A Midsummer Night's Dream if our one object in life is to keep ourselves awake with the black coffee of criticism" (Bodley Head 59). Any approach that threatens to disguise the distinctive quality of a given work with mere banalities is anathema to them, because such a proceeding runs directly counter to what Pushkin and Gogol, Browning and Dickens were themselves trying to do: that is, force us to abjure the general and concentrate on the particular. Interestingly, despite having succeeded so brilliantly in mimicking their models, both spoke slightingly of their own criticism, of studies that are still by any just estimate superb intuitive accounts of their subjects. Chesterton described his first book as one "in which the name of Browning was introduced from time to time, I might almost say with considerable art" (Bodley Head xx) and Nabokov dismissed his brilliant assessment of Gogol's work as "superficial" (Strong Opinions 156) and "frivolous" (Eugene Onegin, II, 314).

Both Chesterton and Nabokov deal convincingly with minute particulars and generalize enthusiastically about large conceptions. Extravagance relishes extravagance, two masters of language delight in the verbal felicity they encounter, and jokes and puns abound: "Art is, in its inmost nature, fantastic" (Dickens 18) says one; "the Dedlocks, I am sorry to say, are as dead as doornails or door locks" (Lectures 65), notes the other. Although the English [End Page 46] Catholic is primarily remembered because he used his extraordinary brilliance to speak to the moral and political issues of his day, and the Russian/American agnostic is routinely associated with writers dedicated to working out certain kinds of aesthetic problems, Chesterton and Nabokov in their criticism were happy to stress the importance of style and structure at the expense of the explicit moral recommendations included in the text. It might amuse readers to try to guess which of the two said of Tolstoy: "an artist teaches far more by his mere background and properties, his landscapes, his costume, his idiom and technique—all the part of the work, in short, of which he is probably entirely unconscious, than by the elaborate and pompous moral dicta he fondly imagines to be his opinions" (Varied Types 131).

But the most significant similarity revealed by comparing these writers' essays on others is, to use the language of one of Nabokov's most influential critics, the fact that their aesthetics merges with their ethics and their metaphysics in a "single continuum of beliefs" (Alexandrov 568). The singularity of their faith is adjusted to the singularity of the universe as they conceive it. Both believe in a "transcendental, non-material, timeless and beneficent, ordering and ordered realm" contrived by some "higher intelligence" (Alexandrov 554); their ideas of good and evil are "absolutized by being linked" to that realm; the "structures, devices, syntax, alliteration, narrative perspectives, and rhythms" (Alexandrov 568) of what they write are inextricably bound up with these ideas. The book written about Chesterton to explain these relations, Hugh Kenner's Paradox in Chesterton, is as compelling and provocative as Alexandrov's Nabokov's Otherworld. Both commentators set out to show that form is not mere excrescence in either writer: Kenner says that Chesterton's metaphors are not "excogitated illustrations of the vision but ingredients of it" (147); Alexandrov is baffled that some of Nabokov's readers still have not understood that "the metaliterary is camouflage for and a model of the metaphysical" (554). Both Kenner and Alexandrov admit that, at a certain point, a recourse to ineffability becomes obligatory, and both deal ably with the difficulties involved in articulating clearly such a complex of beliefs, particularly when the language of rational exposition is the very thing being challenged by those beliefs.

Phrases like "moralized metaphysics" and references to the clearly defined "ethical positions" that these writers arrive at can make both of them sound more like conventional philosophers than they actually are. In articulating their views on such matters, their first task is clearly to add an important if idiosyncratic new chapter to metaphysical inquiry and to jolt us out of our somnolence and surprise us with the ordinary. Here the similarity between them seems striking indeed. Chesterton puts it this way at one point: [End Page 47]

We have all read in ... romances the story of the man who has forgotten his name. This man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot remember who he is. Well, every man is that man in the story. Every man has forgotten who he is. We may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. ... We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstacy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.

This is finally more emotive appeal than metaphysical argument. Ecstasy in this sense means quite literally being "outside oneself," the anti-mystical immediacy of an immersion in the present, the exclusion of the past and its seductive illusions (Kundera 85). This has everything to do with subjective vision, rather less to do with ratiocination.

Compare that with the following passage from an essay in which Nabokov argues that common sense is "fundamentally immoral":

I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a sign-board had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering ... at the patterns of the passing wall. ... It is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.

In such passages, we note yet again the reliance on the entertaining anecdote, the curious mix of the comic and plangent tones in that anecdote, its novel interpretation once it has been recounted, the surprise move from the specific to the general, and the engaging directness of the whole exercise. Both stories celebrate a sentiment that is made possible by ignoring the grim evidence of the receding past and the tense predictions for an uncertain future. This is as close, both writers seem to be saying, as we get to an intimation of eternity. Such evocative yet casual formulations are in fact a kind of anti-ethics. The [End Page 48] serene self-sufficiency they bespeak celebrates the subjective vision and refuses to admit the possibility of qualification or refutation.

Once one notices the similarity in subject of such meditations and of the tone in which they are expressed, one starts to find resemblances everywhere. Here is Chesterton again, writing about the rapt significance of the ultra-ordinary. He quotes a description of a bleak landscape in Browning's "Childe Roland" and remarks:

This is a perfect realization of that eerie sentiment which comes up on us, not so often among mountains and water-falls, as it does on some half-starved common at twilight, or in walking down some grey mean street. It is the song of the beauty of refuse; and Browning was the first to sing it. Oddly enough it has been one of the poems about which most of those pedantic and trivial questions have been asked ... "What does the poem of 'Childe Roland' mean?" The only genuine answer to this is, "What does anything mean?" Does the earth mean nothing? Do grey skies and wastes covered with thistles mean nothing? Does an old horse turned out to graze mean nothing? If it does, there is but one further truth to be added—that everything means nothing.

Compare that lyrical paean to the signifying power of things with the following comment on Gogol and the importance of his "magically vivifying novelty":

As if a man has awakened on a moonlit night in a shabby, shadow-striped hotel room and, before sinking again into insensibility, hears on the other side of the thin wall that seems to be melting in the grey light the muffled rumor of what sounds at first like a quietly playful orchestra: nonsensical and at the same time infinitely important speeches; a mixture of strange, broken voices speaking of human existence, now with the hysterical crackling of wings being spread, now with anxious nocturnal muttering.

In both citations, suggestive decor facilitates extended meditation; playful description matches playful discussion; the criticism exhibits an esthetic value in its own right, "quite irrespective of the relative adequacy, justice, or even truth of the propositions it contains"; the end product affords a dazzling "double view of author and subject" (Introduction 426); and the implied reader becomes a metamorphosed participant in the new world being depicted, seeing with the eyes of both the writer being commented on and with the eyes of the commentator.

Both writers are fond of imagining vivid examples, hypothetical and vaguely absurd cases, structured in "If ... then ..." form. Here is Chesterton explaining [End Page 49] his conviction that certain fairytale conventions inform all of human life:

happiness depended on not doing something which you could at any moment do and which, very often, it was not obvious why you should not do. Now, the point here is that to me this did not seem unjust. If the miller's third son said to the fairy, "Explain why I must not stand on my head in the fairy palace," the other might fairly reply, "Well, if it comes to that, explain the fairy palace." If Cinderella says, "How is it that I must leave the ball at twelve?" her godmother might answer, "How is it that you are going there till twelve?" If I leave a man in my will ten talking elephants and a hundred winged horses, he cannot complain if the conditions partake of the slight eccentricity of the gift. He must not look a winged horse in the mouth. And it seemed to me that existence was itself so very eccentric a legacy that I could not complain of not understanding the limitations of the vision when I did not understand the vision they limited. The frame was no stranger than the picture.

Note the splendid impression of on-going inventiveness here, the exhilaration of verbal extemporizing, as the limits of rational discourse are probed, the wonder of the fairy tale that is human life comes alive, its characters become agents in an ethic drama, and that winged horse metamorphoses into the one from the old saw. Although Chesterton is clearly enjoying himself, this is serious amusement, and the centrality of it to his thought is obvious.

We should be prepared to find similar things in the work of someone who once wrote: "the natural morals of mankind are as irrational as the magic rites that they evolved since the immemorial dimness of time" (Nabokov, Lectures 372). And similar locutions: compare the above passage with the following from Nabokov's Gogol:

If I paint my face with home made Prussian blue instead of applying the Prussian blue which is sold by the state and cannot be manufactured by private persons, my crime will be hardly worth a passing smile and no writer will make of it a Prussian Tragedy. But if I have surrounded the whole business with a good deal of mystery and flaunted a cleverness that presupposed the most intricate difficulties in perpetrating a crime of that kind, and if owing to my letting a garrulous neighbour peep at my pots of home-brewn paint I get arrested and am roughly handled by men with authentic blue faces, then the laugh for what it is worth is on me.

Nabokov's "Prussian Tragedy" is Chesterton's winged gift horse, the inspiration of the moment as the prose itself throws up the asides that seem almost [End Page 50] inevitable when one sets out to explore the miraculousness of Chichikov's absurdities and the absurdity of everyday miracles.

Their fascination with the magic of the quotidian is matched by their skepticism about certain kinds of abstraction, and both writers' guarded responses to mathematical descriptions of the world are also expressed in terms worth comparing. In an essay on anthropology, Chesterton puts it this way:

Men can construct a science with very few instruments, or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could construct a science with unreliable instruments. A man might work out the whole of mathematics with a handful of pebbles, but not with a handful of clay which was always falling apart into new fragments, and falling together into new combinations. A man might measure heaven and earth with a reed, but not with a growing reed.

He believes that logic is stymied when human beings try to become scientifically objective about themselves. Nabokov critiques a similar confusion between the organic and the abstract by sounding the same sort of note:

Man at a certain stage of his development invented arithmetic for the purely practical purpose of obtaining some kind of human order in a world which he knew to be ruled by gods whom he could not prevent from playing havoc with his sums whenever they felt so inclined. He accepted that inevitable indeterminism which they know and then introduced, called it magic, and calmly proceeded to count the skins he had bartered by chalking bars on the wall of his cave. ... [Then] mathematics transcended their initial condition and became as it were a natural part of the world to which they had been merely applied. Instead of having numbers based on certain phenomena that they happened to fit because we ourselves happened to fit into the pattern we apprehended, the whole world gradually turned out to be based on numbers, and nobody seems to have been surprised at the queer fact of the outer network becoming an inner skeleton.

Both write the sort of personalized criticism whose success is determined finally by the quality of mind on display in it. They love, for example, illustrating points with extended digressions that seem to take us far from the text at hand. Here is Chesterton in the midst of a discussion of Dickens and Christmas:

considered poetically, fog is not undeserving, it has a real significance. We have in our great cities abolished the clean and sane darkness of the country. We have outlawed night and sent her wandering in wild [End Page 51] meadows; we have lit eternal watch-fires against her return. We have made a new cosmos, and as a consequence our own sun and stars. And as a consequence also, and most justly, we have made our own darkness. Just as every lamp is a warm human moon, so every fog is a rich human nightfall. If it were not for this mystic accident we should never see darkness, and he who has never seen darkness has never seen the sun.

Past and present, aesthetics and ethics, subject and object—all come together quietly yet inexorably in such passages. Dickens is temporarily forgotten but something more important, the instruction of the reader in the art of reading the world, ends up occupying center stage. Interrupting his commentary on Dead Souls with the following description of a different sort of "new cosmos," Nabokov speaks of the changes that have been wrought in our own era in a way that is just as digressive, just as insightful, and just as idiosyncratic.

Open the first magazine at hand and you are sure to find something of the following kind: a radio set (or a car, or a refrigerator, or table silver— anything will do) has just come to the family: mother clasps her hands in dazed delight, the children crowd around, all agog, Junior and the dog strain up to the edge of the table where the Idol is enthroned; even Grandma of the beaming wrinkles peeps out somewhere in the background (forgetful, we presume, of the terrific row she has had that very morning with her daughter-in-law); and somewhat apart, his thumbs gleefully inserted in the armpits of his waistcoat, legs a-straddle and eyes a-twinkle, stands triumphant Pop, the Proud Donor.

Here the prose is less dreamily evocative and the satiric edge sharper, but the idea of alerting readers to a system of values that inheres in the appreciation of all these glorious details and yet transcends what is merely material is in both cases the same. The most profound meaning of the text in question, the essential idea in Dickens or Gogol, is actually the subject of these passages, which finally only seem digressive, even digressive within their digressiveness. Such interludes figure prominently in the work of both writers, not to distract readers from the business at hand, but to condition their vision to the light in a new setting. By reminding us that everything we take for granted has an effect on our spiritual well-being, this sort of excursion helps us recall why we read in the first place.

Those bemused by such similarities in world view and modes of expression but determined to dismiss them as purely verbal should consider the following as well, something first pointed out by Martin Amis in his book Experience. He paraphrases Chesterton on the subject of suicide ("The murderer kills just one [End Page 52] person. The suicide kills everybody") and then goes on to quotethe passage from The Eye in which the narrator muses about precisely this subject:

a man who has decided upon self-destruction is far removed from mundane affairs, and to sit down and write his will would be, at that moment, an act just as absurd as winding up one's watch, since together with the man, the whole world is destroyed; the last letter is instantly reduced to dust and, with it, all the postmen; and like smoke, vanishes the estate bequeathed to a nonexistent progeny.

Amis contrasts Chesterton and Nabokov, resisting what he calls "the harshness of Chesterton's great formulation," and pointing out that Nabokov is "moral but not moralistic" and therefore "more painfully persuasive" (281). There is something to be said for this reading, but again I wonder if finally the similarities between the two writers are not more striking than the differences. Is "moralistic" the best way to characterize the passage in which Chesterton makes the point? Here is the quote and part of the context:

Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world. His act is worse (symbolically considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage. For it destroys all buildings: it insults all women. The thief is satisfied with diamonds; but the suicide is not: that is his crime. He cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the Celestial City. The thief compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them. But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it.

The moralizing impulse satisfied, most moralizers stop, or if they do not stop, they usually manage to bore their listeners to death by mind-numbing repetition. Chesterton keeps going, and going, long after the splendid pair of balanced clauses in sentences 3 and 4 have done all the "getting-out-the-message" work that needs to be done (in the original the discussion goes on for many paragraphs⁴), and what he does is anything but boring. The same [End Page 53] creative impulse that makes Nabokov say that, in the act of killing himself, the suicide's letter turns to dust "and, with it, all the postmen" makes Chesterton take that extraordinary journey through thievery, rape, the jewels in the celestial City, and so on. Drunk on his own inspiration, he fills in the implications of his provocative idea by following the line that language creates for him.

What all these passages finally convey is a sense of two writers who, whatever their differences about what role literature should play, resemble each other because they are repeatedly overwhelmed by their exultation that it and the world in which it has a role to play actually exist. Surely this constitutes another reason that the great English proselytizer and the Russian/American writer, when they talk about literature, often end up sounding so much alike. For what distinguishes both Chesterton and Nabokov from so many of their contemporaries and what makes Nabokov's links with England and pre-modernist writers like Chesterton so important is their conviction that life is "a gem in any light," that "the universe is a single jewel ... without peer and without price" (Bodley Head 268). Chesterton says this implicitly in everything he wrote; Nabokov's assertions of it are more qualified and more problematic. As I have already intimated, despite the extraordinarily inventive things they did with language, both ultimately suggest the importance of a certain humility in the face of what is by its very nature ineffable. Chesterton concludes his own account of what he believes by noting: "Thus ends, in unavoidable inadequacy, the attempt to utter the unutterable things" (Bodley Head 268). Nabokov's most famous formulation of this comes at the end of an interview: "I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more" (Strong Opinions 45).

There are presumably other things to be learned by thinking about those writers Nabokov read with passion in his boyhood and youth, and those to [End Page 54] whose work he was re-exposed while at university, no matter how determinedly he expressed the conviction that he had outgrown them. It could even be argued that, in the end, the links between him and such writers might well prove even more interesting than those between him and some of the writers who more easily suggest themselves. Bely, Proust, and Joyce, it could be claimed, all have obvious things in common with him and with each other, but among them it is the differences that are essential. With Chesterton it is the differences—as listed above—that are obvious and the things they have in common that may prove, if not essential, at least worthy of note.

Like Nabokov, Chesterton ultimately became a figure who was larger than literature, important to those who admire his work not only for his extraordinary verbal skills and the startling originality of his vision, but because he was seen as that rare-ish thing in twentieth-century letters, a genuinely good human being. What one of Chesterton's most insightful commentators has said of him is true for both: "although a man of strong tastes and opinions, [he] was not driven by personal discontent, goads in the flesh or splits in the personality. He was, almost uniquely among creative writers, adjusted to his surroundings and to himself" (Sheed 156). In an age that has succeeded the one that celebrated the death of the author, we are aware of these two as still very much alive. They are still present as memorable images, for example, in the minds of at least a portion of the reading public: the pictures of Nabokov with his butterfly net are now almost as well known as those of Chesterton in his cloak gazing balefully at the photographer.

More than twenty-five years after his death, with the extraordinary interest generated by the 1999 centenary celebrations of his birth, his reputation continues to grow apace. Writing more than two decades after Chesterton's death, Wilfrid Sheed spoke of "the massive Chestertonian assumption" that "life is worth all this trouble: that in gratitude for the gift of living, no price is too high to pay in love and understanding." He went on:

This assumption on this scale was either great wisdom or great folly, a blazing vision or a tipsy hallucination. Whatever it was, it was spectacular: one of the loudest, truest voices for sanity, or absurdity, in the whole of literature. If his intuitive appraisal of life was right, then his work must surely stand as a great masterpiece of human wisdom; if it was wrong, then he is at least a giant among clowns, dancing wildly in the empty moonlight. In either case, the effect is magnificent and unforgettable; and quite certainly unique in literature.

The vagaries of literary reputation, the lonely and uncertain isolation of those fated to wear the "sui generis" label, and the problematic status of the very [End Page 55] notion of canonicity for many contemporary critics—all these being what they are, one of the most astonishing things for me about Chesterton is that, although Sheed's appraisal of his achievement seems entirely unexceptionable, there are, alas, fewer readers now who see him as Sheed did than there were when he wrote that in 1958. Nabokov's work continues to be celebrated with similar encomia twenty-five years after his death, even as his extraordinary forebear becomes more forgotten by the day. Chesterton and Nabokov best served the writers they admired by trying to make more people read them. A great deal of instruction and delight, for the impressionable adolescent and the curious adult, depends on the success of our commitment to do the same for them.