‘My English is patball to Joyce’s champion game,’ said Nabokov — with, I should guess, very considerable but by no means complete sincerity. I might say the same about Nabokov. Still, I claim peership with these masters in only one area. Not in the art and not in the life. Just in the teeth. In the teeth.‡
The War Against Shame
My first word was bus. Apart from infantile renderings of ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’ and ‘Philip’, bus was the first word I ever uttered. And throughout my childhood in Swansea I had a helpless passion for the great blood-red doubledeckers, and I would ride them, with no destination in mind, for hour after hour and day after day. Once, when I was seven or eight, I overheard a conversation between the bus-conductor — a much grander personage, then, with the metal ticket-dispenser strapped to his chest like a silver accordion — and one of his female passengers. She gave the name of her stop and said,
— I’ve been bad. Terrible I’ve been.
— Oh aye? It’s the hospital then is it?
— Aye. Toothache.
— Have them all out and be done with it is what I say.
— Saves all the bother.
— Common sense.
Using the overhead strap, he leaned his face into hers, as if hesitating before a kiss, and out flashed the full vista of his flawless Chiclets.
— Ooh. Lovely. There’s posh.
These interlocutors were about twenty years old.
Here was the trailing edge of a culture that actually liked dentures, regarding them as a more practical and more personable simulacrum of the real thing. It remained a preference of the working and lower-middle classes only, of course; Evelyn Waugh has a sneer at it, noting, with a thrill of disgust, the ‘grinning dentures’ of a travelling salesman in Brideshead Revisited (1945).* Today, most bourgeois readers would take the foregoing duologue as an illustration of proletarian credulity. But the preference was also an aesthetic preference, and an embrace of the new, just as nylon was preferred to cotton, plastic to wood.
Teeth were clearly, or apparently, connected to rank — which was bad news for the lower classes, and bad news for Osric. Thirty years ago, feeling the trouble coming on and already knowing that it would never go away, I sensed an additional question-mark over my claims to high birth. And anyway the dental demographics were changing. Those shocking gobfuls of the poor were becoming a memory. Observational evidence soon established that everyone had better teeth than me: football hooligans, junkies, tramps. Nor, back then, could I adduce the counter-example of the noble Nabokov, in whose veins raced the grape blood of emperors …†
The other key dental connection, of course, is with sexual potency. Freud has much to say on the subject — how, for instance, dreams of tooth-loss are manifestations of sexual doubt and fear. Interestingly, Nabokov, who had a somewhat over-cultivated contempt for ‘the Viennese quack’ (and his world of ‘bitter little embryos, spying, from their natural nooks, on the love life of their parents’), acknowledged and vivified this association not only in Pnin and elsewhere but also in one of the very greatest paragraphs in Lolita (1955). These sentences — beautiful, dreadful, flinching and groaning with pain and grief — show us the moral soul of the entire enterprise. ‘She did haunt my sleep’, writes Humbert Humbert of Lolita, when she has gone,
but she appeared there in strange and ludicrous disguises as Valeria or Charlotte,† or a cross between them. That complex ghost would come to me, shedding shift after shift, in an atmosphere of great melancholy and disgust, and would recline in dull invitation on some narrow board or hard settee, with flesh ajar like the rubber valve of a soccer ball’s bladder. I would find myself, dentures fractured or hopelessly mislaid, in horrible chambres garnies where I would be entertained at tedious vivisection parties that generally ended with Charlotte or Valeria weeping in my bleeding arms and being tenderly kissed by my brotherly lips in a dream disorder of auctioneered Viennese bric-a-brac, pity, impotence and the brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed.*
I sometimes believed that sex and teeth would be coterminous. Love would end. In some of my more tremulous fantasies I thought that I would slip out of the country and head off to a land — Albania? Uzbekistan? South Wales? — where nobody else had any teeth either. Or, less adventurously, I would locate and sign up with the right kind of amatory crisis-centre, where we would all sit around in a fug of peppermints and fixatives, with various mouthfuls of pottery clacking like castanets, until, perhaps, I would repair to the bar with Dorothy Wordsworth, her with her Corsodyl cocktail, me with my tumbler — so much more frank and manly — of Plax on the rocks …
As for the transitional period, the week of oral nudity, of Kinchdom: it seemed to defy contemplation. But I reckoned I would be comfortable enough in my coalhole or in the cupboard beneath the stairs among the fuseboxes and the geranium bulbs, with somebody rolling the odd thermos of soup under the door. When the day came I would unfurl myself from the foetal position and emerge, as pale as a Sex Pistol, for the first fitting.
When I was much younger and stupider I came up with another strategy for dealing with it: suicide. It was always a fantasy, a way of deferring fear, and could never have been an option while either of my parents was alive. But it seemed to help. The only style of exit I ever envisaged was a nihilistic debauch of Valium and alcohol — with decorous trimmings, though, like the note on the door telling the hotel staff to alert the authorities. All the same, none of this prevented a sluggish, passive, low-level death wish from slowly establishing itself in me. I became, by my standards, very unfrightened on aeroplanes, ethereally calm in the most bestial turbulence.
Suicide disappeared even as a fantasy in November 1984, on the day my first son was born. I had a toothache on the day my first son was born. I had a toothache on the day my second son was born. I had a toothache on the day I communed so vitally with the spirit of Lucy Partington … Now I had these children and I had these toothaches and I no longer had suicide — suicide as a pleasant distraction; these births had killed off suicide. I’m glad. I’m glad I shook the habit. I was soon to find out a little more about suicide: that, for instance, it is sinful (and an insult to suicides) to think about suicide when you know it isn’t in you.
So there was nothing to do but live it. I didn’t have a choice.
Encouragingly (I thought), I only had to Kinch it for three days before I could go and try on the temporary. In the morning I rose believing that a considerable treat lay ahead of me. But the first omen was not a good one. After five minutes on northbound Sixth Avenue I found out where I stood with the Singh brothers. Oh, they had made their feelings very clear … I bounced uptown contemplating the seamed neck of Nelson Rojas, with Isabel at my side. She was there to give support but she also had an appointment with Mike Szabatura: there was evidently room for improvement somewhere among her crystal battlements. I once put it to a dentist that women have better teeth than men, and he did not demur. Better teeth, like better hair. Imagine a planet of filamentary equality: women with the blue lagoons of male-pattern baldness (what other pattern is there?), women with thatch-jobs, with comb-overs … Horrified at first — ‘it was like a poor fossil skull being fitted with the grinning jaws of a perfect stranger’ — Timofey Pnin learnt to love his ‘new amphitheatre of translucid plastics’: ‘It was a revelation, it was a sunrise, it was a firm mouthful of efficient, alabastrine, humane America.’ Soon, then, like Pnin, and like the teenage bus-conductor back in Swansea, I would be telling everybody to have all their teeth out ‘first thing tomorrow. “You will be a reformed man like I,” cried Pnin.’
‘The mouth,’ gentle Millie told me as I took the chair, ‘is remarkably adaptable.’ Mine was about to suffer an intrusion; over time, my enemy would come to feel like my enemy’s enemy: my enemy would feel like my friend. The gadget was borne into the room, and shyly awaited its introduction. Here it came, my ticket to good looks and fine dining, to the head thrown back in vivid laughter, to nuzzling
and honeying, to goopy kisses.
But wait. This wasn’t the grinning jaw of a perfect stranger. Nothing could have been more hideously familiar. This was me, myself: this was my old bridge, my bridge of sighs with its weight of gold, ear-to-ear under the great pink saddle of the palate. In it went. I lay there flattened, utterly decked, by the sheer mass of the prosthesis. And when I tried to express my general dismay I heard the voice of a perfect stranger who seemed to be standing somewhere well behind me. Millie’s face was aswim with sympathy. She said,
— It’s like getting used to new shoes.
Yes, I would have said if I could. A new shoe: in your mouth. No, a football boot: in your mouth. A boot forged from an element quite new to our periodic table: an element called nausium. Millie produced a hand mirror. I made the acquaintance of the nutty professor. And I missed my boys and felt them missing me, and knew that the hardest part, perhaps, would be to face them with this face.
People walk out of doctors’ offices with a quietly satisfied spring in their step or, alternatively, in a meek and burdened shuffle. It was in the latter style that I introduced myself to Madison Avenue. Isabel offered me a sip of orange juice: the flavour took several seconds to get to the back of my throat, and was followed by a cataract of saliva. Smoking a cigarette was no piece of cake either. Smoking a cigarette was no picnic. But imagine a piece of cake. Imagine a picnic … Gulping, gagging, trying to smoke and trying to swear, I leant heavily on Isabel’s arm.
We walked three blocks and entered Brentano’s. It was my notion to buy some books that would transport me from the quotidian, the merely sublunary, the bluntly dental. I approached a tall redhaired youth and said,
— The astronomy section, please.
— Excuse me?
— The astronomy section.
— The what?
— Astronomy.
— Excuse me?
— Astronomy.
— What?
At last he seemed to understand. He led, I followed. And found myself in Astrology … For hundreds of years rational men and women have been expecting astronomy to subsume and then entirely displace astrology. But it hasn’t happened.* Here it all was, shelf upon shelf upon shelf. I didn’t need it. I didn’t need its charts and graphs and cusps and casts to tell me that it wasn’t my day.
Not my day. But it was my night.
Poor Pnin had nothing. He had nothing left, nothing, nothing. Such was not my case.
That night you came bellydancing out of the bathroom wearing (a) your silk bathrobe and (b) my teeth. Both were then removed.
This was the war against shame.
The next morning I woke early and lay there quietly laughing and weeping into the pillow. I felt fragile, guileless, and exquisitely consoled. The quality of the happiness made me think of a poem — early Yeats — that I had once copied out for my sister to memorise, thirty years ago. Had I the … the dark cloths of night and light and the half-light … I have spread my … Tread softly because you …
‘Because you don’t fall in love like that,’ my mother told me. ‘It’s a terrible thing, what’s happening to you. A terrible thing. But it’s all right if you’re loved. Because you don’t fall in love with someone’s teeth, do you.’
No. It wasn’t over. And now, perhaps, more life could be created.
* On perhaps the year’s longest day in, I think, 1975, at a party given by Claire Tomalin, when midnight neared Harold Pinter was asked to read ‘S. Lucies Day’, and he expertly obliged. In the silence that followed the perfectly modulated climax, Claire’s secretary, Sally, burped and said, ‘Nice one, Cyril.’ A football catchphrase, used here with deflationary intent. (I was impressed by the tolerance of Pinter’s laughter.) Sally, in fact, was suicidal. She killed herself the following year. Then there was another suicide, that of Claire’s daughter Susannah, aged twenty-two, in 1980.
* Just a sideswipe and, for Inderjid, no big deal. My host in New York, Richard Cornuelle (who is now my stepfather-in-law), was once very briefly hospitalised after a cab crash. He said to the hard-pressed doctor that he supposed it was a myth — all this about New York cabs crashing the whole time. The doctor said: ‘A myth? Listen. When there’s a cab strike this place is deserted.’
* There are some ridiculous words, and some ridiculous phobias, in the relevant sub-section of the Thesaurus. Kingsley did not suffer from triskaidekaphobia, or fear of the number thirteen. Nor did he suffer from autophobia: he wasn’t at all frightened of referring to himself.
* The Tower of Pisa effect is the ‘junkie lean’, as distinctive as the pimp roll. I had to wait three years to have this explained to me.
* From The Nabokov-Wilson Letters 1940—1971 (1979), edited by Simon Karlinsky. This book is an enthralling duologue of heavyweights. Bunny’s early generosity to Volodya is impressive and endearing, and Volodya can sometimes be brashly satirical at Bunny’s expense. Of the supposedly lascivious women characters in Wilson’s novel Memoirs of Hecate County (successfully prosecuted for obscenity in 1946) Nabokov wrote, ‘I should have as soon tried to open a sardine can with my penis.’ Both humanly and intellectually, though, Volodya prevails. He is right, and Bunny is wrong, about almost everything that matters: prosody, politics (the USSR) and the alleged genius (‘I admit that he has no sense of humour,’ writes Wilson, as if dismissing a merely captious stricture) of André Malraux.
* In 1922 Joyce received a letter from his father, John, asking for a pound to help him through Christmas. James, who was in Rome, got the pound off Stanislaus, who was in Trieste, and sent it to John, who was in Dublin. It has been said that there are only two types of Irish male: the hard man, and the desperate chancer. In life, Joyce was a desperate chancer. But in his work he was a hard man. Tell a dream, and lose a reader, said Henry James. And we all know that the pun is the lowest form of wit. Joyce spent seventeen years punning on dreams. The result, Finnegans Wake, reads like a 600—page crossword clue. But it took a hard man to write it.
* I agree with my father’s entry on ‘Shakespeare’ in The King’s English (1997): ‘To say or imply that the man of this name is not our greatest writer marks a second-rate person at best.’ And I agree with Nabokov: ‘The verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has known’ (Strong Opinions, 1978).
† Yet I shed a tear at the end of Brenda Maddox’s A Married Man. She quotes Sam Johnson: ‘It is so very difficult for a sick man not to be a scoundrel.’ Lawrence’s teeth were once likened to black pumpkin seeds. But they lasted him his short stay on the planet: forty-four years.
‡ John Updike made a transparent attempt to crash the tooth club with the doubly questionable chapter in his memoir, Self-Consciousness (1989), called ‘On Not Being a Dove’. In this essay Updike tries (and fails) to link his opposition to the Vietnam peace movement, or rather his opposition to the sort of bullying he got from the sort of people who were part of the Vietnam peace movement, with his own ‘war effort’ in the dentist’s chair. Vladimir, James and I, however, have blackballed Updike. His teeth are far too good. Look at him: still grinning his head off at sixty-nine. It’s not everyone, you know, who can jostle shoulders with Joyce, who can hobnob with Nabokov. In his criticism, by the way, Updike writes about Nabokov perceptively and responsively but without real excitement. And yet he paid Joyce the vast compliment of trying to write like him for many years — trying to modernise and Americanise Ulysses. See Couples (1968). It didn’t work out, but much else did work out, for Updike. I also concede that he bows to no man in his struggle (also explored in Self-Consciousness) with psoriasis. His fellow-sufferer, Nicholson Baker, in his great book U and I (1990), gave the bays to the Updike character who starts every day by hoovering out his bedclothes. Would it be altogether heartless to suggest that Updike should form an alternative club of his own, starting with Nick Baker and enlisting, as I’m sure he can, many a distinguished forerunner?
* We know from the Letters that Waugh’s teeth didn’t quite go th
e distance. He was manful about it, and felt quite undeclassed.
† A footnote for Nabokovians. Recently (23/4/99), at the centenary celebration organised by PEN, where twelve hundred people filled a theatre on Forty-Third Street, I said that Nabokov was my novelist of the century. At a different event — one for Bellovians — I could have said that Bellow was my novelist of the century, without equivocation. I have always maintained that these two are my twin peaks. Nabokov, ridiculously, once dismissed Bellow as ‘a miserable mediocrity’, an evaluation based (I am confident) on slender acquaintance with his stuff; perhaps too he associated Bellow with the sort of Big Idea novels that Edmund Wilson would sometimes press on him. Besides, Nabokov clearly derived sensual pleasure from being dismissive: it is the patrician in him. At the PEN event his biographer, Brian Boyd, told me that on one occasion VN ‘marked up’ an anthology of short stories by various hands, giving an A-plus to Joyce (for ‘The Dead’) but giving Lawrence, and other writers of hemispherical reputation, a Z-minus. For his part Saul Bellow has his doubts about Nabokov. I know he passionately admires Lolita and Pnin, but there is something in Nabokov that doesn’t sit well with him: that suspicion of aristocratic triumphalism, detectable in the Russian novels Mary (1926), Glory (1932) and The Gift (1937), and in that Russian novel written in English, Ada (1969). I agree, or rather I sympathise. The characters seem head-in-air: they don’t walk, they ‘stride’; they don’t chew, they ‘munch’; they feel entitled. But I would also argue that it has nothing to do with snobbery (of which Nabokov was always a witty enemy). Looking again at Speak, Memory, I noticed that he habitually writes about his father, and no one else, in this supercharged vein (‘he had burst into my room, grabbed my [butterfly] net, shot down the veranda steps’). Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov (1870—1922), whose country house held fifty servants, was a hugely capable lawyer, journalist and politician (‘a liberal of noble family, the son of a former tsarist minister, Nabokov — almost symbolic in his self-satisfied correctness and dry egotism’: this icy description is Trotsky’s). He served in the Provisional Government of 1917, and might have gone on (or so his son always felt) to ‘lead’ Russia in some sort of centralist administration. Exiled to Berlin, he was assassinated by a ‘sinister ruffian’ of Tsarist affiliation (‘whom, during World War Two, Hitler made administrator of émigré Russian affairs’). So perhaps the Nabokovian triumphalism can more properly be seen as nostalgia for the paternal qualities of robustness, decisive vigour, innate confidence: aristocratic (and anachronistic) virtues, but still virtues. I cautiously suggest that this slight disequilibrium in his work was brought about by thwarted filial love.