Frank Kermode

This ‘long lost novel’ isn’t a novel but a story of some two thousand five hundred words, here augmented by eight thousand from the pen of the translator, Dmitri Nabokov, and by blank pages. The existence of The Enchanter, also known as The Magician, was well attested, and its relation to Lolita was established by Nabokov himself. In his essay ‘On a book entitled Lolita’, first published in 1957, and thereafter appended to the novel, he referred to this opusculum of 1939 as the product of ‘the first little throb of Lolita’, and added that its ‘anonymous nymphet’ was ‘basically the same lass’ as Dolores Haze. At the time he supposed the story to have been lost, indeed claimed to have destroyed it: but a copy turned up soon afterwards, and in 1959 he wrote to the publisher Putnam suggesting publication, having reread the story ‘with considerably more pleasure than I experienced when recalling it as a dead scrap during my work on Lolita’. Excerpts from the essay and the letter are given here. Perhaps Nabokov didn’t press on with his plan to publish The Enchanter because he was so busy at the time; or perhaps he changed his mind. In 1967 Andrew Field in his book Nabokov: His Life and Art gave a brief but accurate account of the piece, translating two longish passages with similar accuracy, judging by the closeness of his version to Dmitri Nabokov’s. However, Mr Nabokov seems to have fallen out with Field, and says he has ‘a very sketchy idea at best’ of The Enchanter, having seen ‘only two pages of it’. This is possible, for Field says the second passage he translates would occur in print on the next-to-last page of the story, when it actually comes 14 pages before the end. Perhaps the Nabokovs showed him only samples. All the same Field gave one a reasonable notion of what the story was like.

Faced with the average book of modern literary criticism, the reviewer may wisely resolve to say nothing about the author’s skills as a writer of prose. If they ever existed, they would very likely have been dissembled, for many now believe that to write well is to act in bad faith, even to risk the charge of fascism. This belief may not at first glance seem compatible with the opinion that poetry and criticism are indistinguishable – both of them just writing; even less with the view that in our present situation literary criticism and theory are in fact the highest kind of poetry available.’

Roy Shaw will not have expected an easy passage as Secretary-General of the Arts Council, but the weather worsened steadily during his tenure, and the discomfort exceeded all rational apprehensions. His book explains why this was so. The directorate of the Council exists primarily to make judgments of value; it is required, having taken the best advice available, to decide which enterprises deserve public support, and to what extent. The directors must therefore be confident that they can tell the bad from the good and the good from the best; and their criteria, which they cannot be expected to scrutinise from day to day, are those of standardly-educated middle-class people with an interest in the arts. Shaw has no quarrel with them on this score, and spends quite a lot of time in this book defending establishment valuations. However, he also thinks that the best should be made available to sections of the population denied the education to enjoy it. His earlier career had been in adult education, and he brought to the Council a conviction that it had a duty to make its high-class products accessible to the lower classes. Nobody else wanted this: it wasn’t the job they’d signed on for, and in any case it was undesirable and perhaps impossible to bring off. So Shaw had to deal with a mutinous directorate as well as with a difficult chairman, Sir William Rees-Mogg, and a series of unsympathetic ministers. He has lost no time in his retirement in giving an account of what went on.

The Royal Beasts contains works of Empson’s previously unpublished or published long ago and very obscurely. There is a short play, an unfinished novel, a ballet scenario and a batch of poems, all early. It is the third posthumous volume and much the most important, though a fourth – a collection of essays on 17th-century poetry and drama – is promised for 1987. Since it will presumably contain Empson’s essays on Donne, which have a peculiar centrality in his work, this final volume will be needed for any considered estimate of a writer much honoured by fellow critics (at any rate in England) even when they found him most exasperating. However, it will hardly match The Royal Beasts in interest.’