Odd Jobs (121 page)

The authenticity, never belabored, of the historical background, and the fascinating elucidation of the procedures of perfume-making, as revealed first in a Paris shop and laboratory and then in the essence-extracting cottage industry of Grasse, carry us quite pleasurably along. The writing has the light-handed authority of Mr. Süskind’s fellow Münchner Thomas Mann (in the mood, say, of
Royal Highness
and
Felix Krull
), and John E. Woods has produced a translation of exceptional verve and grace. The reconstruction of the world in terms of scent is a charming tour de force. Babies, we learn from a wet nurse, have a variety of smells: “Their feet, for instance, they smell like a smooth, warm stone—or no, more like curds … or like butter, like fresh butter. And their bodies smell like … like a griddle cake that’s been soaked in milk. And their heads, up on top, at the back of the head, where the hair makes a cowlick … is where they smell best of all. It smells like caramel.” For Grenouille, smells are subtle and numerous beyond reckoning: there is “the odor of glass, the clayey, cool odor of smooth glass,” and “the cool, musty, brawny smell” of a brass doorknob, and the “moist, fresh, tallowy, and a bit pungent” aroma of a dog. His murderous activities have to do with capturing the delicate scent a very young woman exudes, which has “a freshness, but not the freshness of limes or pomegranates, not the freshness of myrrh or cinnamon bark or curly mint or birch or camphor or pine needles, not that of a May rain or a frosty wind or of well water … and at the same time it had warmth, but not as bergamot, cypress, or musk has, or jasmine or daffodils, not as rosewood has or iris.… This scent was a blend of both, of evanescence and substance, not a blend, but a unity, although slight and frail as well, and yet solid and sustaining, like a piece of thin, shimmering silk … and yet again not
like silk, but like pastry soaked in honey-sweet milk.” Generally, Grenouille hates the smell of human beings; fleeing Paris, he travels by night to avoid this oppressive effluvium, which pervades most of the world. “There were humans in the remote regions. They had only pulled back like rats into their lairs to sleep. The earth was not cleansed of them, for even in sleep they exuded their odor, which then forced its way out between the cracks of their dwellings and into the open air, poisoning a natural world only apparently left to its own devices.”

Another subtext of
Perfume
, and perhaps the major one, is Sartre’s aphorism that hell is other people. People stink, nauseatingly; when Grenouille, to help give himself a human personality and presence, mixes up the odor normal people have, “the scent of humanness,” his ingredients are half a teaspoon of cat excrement, “still rather fresh,” plus vinegar, salt, and some decomposing cheese. Then: “From the lid of a sardine tub that stood at the back of the shop, he scratched off a rancid, fishy something-or-other, mixed it with rotten egg and castoreum, ammonia, nutmeg, horn shavings, and singed pork round, finely ground. To this he added a relatively large amount of civet, mixed these ghastly ingredients with alcohol, let it digest, and filtered it into a second bottle. The bilge smelled revolting.” Wearing dabs of this complex concoction, overlaid with perfume, he ventures into the street, timidly, “because he could not imagine that other people would not also perceive his odor as a stench.” They do not. For the first time in his existence, he is favorably noticed; he exerts an effect on people; he casts a proper, customary olfactory shadow. Seldom since Gulliver described the Brobdingnagian women from up close (“They would often strip me naked from top to toe, and lay me at full length in their bosoms; wherewith I was much disgusted; because, to say the truth, a very offensive smell came from their skins”) has our fleshly envelope been the object of such merciless comedy. Along with the existential nausea is the proposition, borne out by modern scientific studies, that we are more sensitive and responsive to odors than we realize—that the great buried language of smell is still being spoken, subconsciously, by our brains. Whether that language is loud enough to carry instantly to the back of a great crowd and disarm ten thousand people of their reason seems unlikely but, in a land and city mesmerized within living man’s memory by the unprepossessing Hitler, perhaps worth imagining.

Having invented his monster and run him through society like a hot knife through butter, Mr. Süskind doesn’t quite know how to finish him off, short of calling in armies; the ending is the weakest part, an abrupt
and bitter whiff capping a delicious book.
Perfume
slightly disconcerts us in being, like Grenouille’s fabrication of human odor, so bluntly a concoction: it seems a fiction in which all personal and involuntary elements have been sublimated, a book that animates, with readily summoned erudition and flair, only its ideas. It is characteristically cavalier of Mr. Süskind, in framing his fable, to assign his hero two physiologically quite unrelated attributes—a superkeen sense of smell, which pertains to the olfactory membrane high in the nose, and an utter lack of body odor, which the skin and the glands generate. We close the book with the presumably postmodern sensation of having been twitted. Calvino’s fantasies, though more genial, leave something of this same impression, as does Umberto Eco’s
The Name of the Rose
—that of an adroit and dazzling playing at novel-writing, which has become, in our age of deconstruction, a smaller art than it used to be, a trick almost contemptibly well within an intelligent man’s reach.

Vladimir Nabokov was an inveterate concocter, who patterned his fictions on chess puzzles and butterfly wings, footnoted poems and scrambled maps. But also at work was a live personal impulse, that flared out in projected emotion, were it in the form of a pervert’s misplaced love or an exile’s hopeless grief. He dictated
The Enchanter
to his wife in Paris, late in 1939, six months before sailing to America and leaving his European phase of exile behind. One “blue-papered wartime night,” he stated in the afterword to
Lolita
, Nabokov read this long story—the manuscript, partly reproduced on the book’s endpapers, identifies it with the peculiarly Russian genre-term “
povest’
”—aloud to a small group of friends; “but I was not pleased with the thing and destroyed it sometime after moving to America.” A copy, however, showed up when he and his wife, with their repacked trunks, were returning to Europe in 1959, and he wrote to G. P. Putnam’s Sons, his publisher, that it was “a beautiful piece of Russian prose, precise and lucid, and with a little care could be done into English by the Nabokovs.” The idea was not pursued and the manuscript settled back into its trunk, to surface yet again in the early Eighties, in the course of bibliographical researches conducted in the wake of the author’s death in 1977. Now, at last, having first been run through a French edition,
The Enchanter
has been published in English, perhaps the final significant piece of the Nabokov oeuvre to fit into place—though his unfinished novel
The Original of Laura
is still out there somewhere.

The Enchanter
arrives in the reflected glow of
Lolita
, and does, like it, deal with a middle-aged man’s passion for a twelve-year-old girl. Its nameless heroine is first seen in a Paris park, on roller skates—“skates that did not roll but crunched on the gravel as she raised and lowered them with little Japanese steps and approached his bench through the variable luck of the sunlight.” The nameless hero (whom Nabokov remembered as being called “Arthur” and hailing from Central Europe) is a rather pale monster, though at one point, we are told, he “flashed a tusk from beneath a bluish lip” and at another, as if with Grenouille’s nose, he notes “the rancid emanations of … wilted skin.” His profession, several times coyly alluded to, might be that of diamond-cutter. Unlike Humbert Humbert in
Lolita
, he is not the narrator of his love story, but we are made intimately privy to his heavy-breathing observations of the nymphet’s “large, slightly vacuous eyes, somehow suggesting translucent gooseberries,” “the summery tint of her bare arms with the sleek little foxlike hairs running along the forearms; the indistinct tenderness of her still narrow but already not quite flat chest,” the way in which “her dress clung so closely in back that it outlined a small cleft,” her “rosy, sharp-knuckled hands, on which shifted now a vein, now a deep dimple near the wrist,” “the exact way the checks of her dress … tightened when she raised an arm,” “the soft skin of her underside and the tiny wedge of her taut panties,” and even “the tiny flecks of dandruff” in the “silky vertex” of her head. She is never more than the sum of such details, however, since events contrive to keep her elsewhere even when her admirer marries her mother. When the stepfather and the child are at last thrown together (by the mother’s death, as in
Lolita
) nothing happens equivalent to the complex and robust mixture of seductiveness, defiance, filial dependence, and comradely cockiness with which Dolores Haze meets Humbert Humbert’s desire. The great superiority of
Lolita
to
The Enchanter
resides, above all, in the rich character of Lolita—her Americanness, her toughness, her resilience, her touching childishness as it shades fitfully into treacherous womanhood. The pedophilia of
The Enchanter
seems nastier for having a limp and silent body as its object. The courtship of the mother seems grimmer than the acquiescent conquest of crass Charlotte Haze, and her death sadder. The hero’s lust is less ethereal and more genital, and there is not the relieving circumstantiality, in the vague France of
The Enchanter
, of the later work’s amazingly and uproariously well-observed Americana. And the redeeming, splendid, headlong, endlessly comic and evocative
English of
Lolita
—the manic voice of Humbert Humbert—has no equal in this translation, though there are indications that the original Russian was heavily worked, toward a feverish jocosity that might make its central topic palatable. Nabokov may have been knowingly wrapping up, with a culminating flamboyance, his days as a Russian writer; already, while still in France, he had composed his first English-language novel,
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
.

During the author’s lifetime, his son, Dmitri, raised in the United States, was his best translator of the Russian works into English, producing versions which benefitted from the paternal author’s additional touches and refinements. Here Dmitri had to work with an abandoned text whose “virtuosity,” he says in his afterword (or “postface,” as he puts it) “consists in a deliberate vagueness of verbal and visual elements” and wherein “VN, were he alive, might have exercised his authorial license to change certain details.” In a few spots (such as the “high-speed imagery of the finale,” which comes through smashingly) the translator has ventured away from “a totally literal rendering” that would have been “meaningless in English.” Often enough, the English version feels unnatural and even unintelligible:

In this last instance, the protagonist is drinking tea and looking at some snapshots of his wife-to-be, and perhaps “material” isn’t quite the word, since it seems as applicable to tea as to snapshots. One doesn’t know whether to blame the translator’s Nabokovian insistence on rigorous fidelity or the author’s Nabokovian fondness for “double- and triple-bottomed imagery” that may ripple along in the original Russian but rather clots the derived English. Dmitri elucidates some “compressed
images and locutions” in his afterword, as well as indignantly repelling some recent trespassers upon his father’s reputation; but “precise and lucid” seem odd words to describe
The Enchanter
. Not only is there a fog of namelessness and verbal overload but ambiguity enshrouds such turns of plot as whether or not the hero sleeps with his bride on the wedding night and whether or not he goes into a pharmacy to buy poison for her.

The Enchanter
, in short, is a squirmy work whose basic idea was tenacious enough to inspire a masterpiece on another continent a decade later. It is remembered, in
Lolita
, by the name of the hotel, The Enchanted Hunters, where Humbert and Lolita first sleep together. Or, rather, she sleeps while he stays awake, in one of the most beautifully described of the many insomnias in Nabokov:

In the same bedded situation where these magical sentences evoke the drifting Tristan and his underage Iseult,
The Enchanter
has its cruel, obscene, and cacophonous climax. The transformation is one of the miracles of modern fiction.

T
HE
M
AN FROM THE
U.S.S.R.
and Other Plays
, by Vladimir Nabokov, translated from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov. 342 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.