According to the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, "Nabokovian" pertains to and is "characteristic of, or resembling the literary style of Vladimir Nabokov: a sly, Nabokovian sense of the absurd." But what does that sense of the absurd specifically entail? Something slyly appropriate in someone's name, for a start. A mass murderer named Starkweather is an obvious example. The name of the patrolman witness who saw Teddy Kennedy driving toward the bridge at Chappaquiddick (a Nabokovian word if there ever was one with its double "p" and "d") was Look.
"Nabokovian" can also refer to the diabolical consequences the change of a single word can have, particularly when it makes a sentence mean the opposite of what was intended, and even more particularly when it occurs in a review of a book by Nabokov himself, as happened in last week's Town Topics when a colleague's well-intentioned change in wording in my review of Lolita turned "ever" to "never," thus reversing the meaning of a sentence that was supposed to suggest that few of the thousands who bought Lolita when it was on the best-seller list ever actually read the book. The creator of Humbert Humbert would also have appreciated the fact that Humbert Street was incorrectly listed as Humbert Lane in the same issue of Town Topics.
The Nabokov syndrome is equally relevant to the book I'm reviewing this week, With Billie Holiday (Pantheon $25) by Julia Blackburn. Readers of Nabokov's other masterpiece Pale Fire know the wonders he worked when a long poem of the same name by one John Shade (another Nabokovian touch) is extensively and fantastically annotated by a character named Charles Kinbote.
The "Shade" in this new book about Billie Holiday is a woman named Linda Kuehl (if it's pronounced "kill" or even "cull" you have yet another example of that "sly sense of the absurd" at work). The "Kinbote" is Julia Blackburn, although she does nothing comparably fantastic with the 30-year-old shambles of a work-in-progress left behind by the pretty, "flirtatious" white woman who devoted so much of her time in the early 1970s to searching out and interviewing everyone she could find who had known Billie Holiday. Linda Kuehl tape-recorded more than 150 interviews, filling two shoeboxes with the cassettes, from which she then laboriously typed transcripts. Once she had all the material she needed, she was unable to put the pieces together into a readable manuscript and so her first publisher gave up on it. One reason the taped findings about Billie Holiday were so rich was because the men being interviewed by the dark-haired beauty not only liked her, opened up to her, and flirted with her but, in more than one instance, apparently fell in love and/or had affairs with her. Still "struggling to find the right form" for her biography, she jumped to her death from a hotel room window in Washington, D.C. in 1979. A suicide note is mentioned but never quoted. The Billie Holiday papers were eventually sold to a private collector. who eventually gave Julia Blackburn access to them.
The story takes on an even more Nabokovian cast because one of the most notorious songs in Billie Holiday's repertoire was "Gloomy Sunday," which is said to have caused people to attempt or commit suicide after hearing it.
Although it provides all kinds of fascinating, earthy, profane insights into the singer, With Billie Holiday isn't much more than a case study patched together from the papers Kuehl left behind. "If I had been a different sort of person," Blackburn admits, "I might have tried to establish order in this chaos, but order has never been one of my strong points." Maybe that's why she resorts to padding the narrative, as with the chapter on Lester Young, which is nothing more than a culling of preexisting information.
Even so, open-ended works like this have an immediacy that serious or ploddingly scholarly studies often lack. As Toni Morrison's cover blurb suggests, the book "vividly" captures the "context" of Billie Holiday's life and work. Probably the most touching and one of the most colorful accounts comes from a rare instance where the speaker is quoted at length; in fact Blackburn (who would have morphed into "Blackbird" by now, if Nabokov had his way) wisely lets James "Stump" Cross talk for a whole chapter without commentary (except to note that he and Linda Kuehl had "obviously got on very well"). Describing how quickly Holiday could learn a song: "She'd look at a music sheet. Put it down. Walk away. Have a drink. And come back three minutes later and sing the whole thing! Between the lyric and the drink, I don't know what happened .... There must have been a Lyric Angel who came down from the clouds." About Lady Day and tenor man Lester Young, whose playing complements the spirit of her singing so sympathetically he seems to be, as was said in regard to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, "the other half" of her "heartbeat" -- "Lester Young loved Lady like he loved spring, summer, winter and fall and every day that broke at dawn."
The First Time
Anyone who can still remember a first encounter with the singer will be there with Julia Blackburn when she describes what happened when she "first heard Billie Holiday's voice" at age 14 at a wild party during which a naked prostitute was dancing around (an environment not unlike the one Billie grew up and lived in); the album she escaped into a corner to listen to was A Billie Holiday Memorial, and "I Cried for You" was the first song: "She didn't seem to care about the beat ... She kept pulling at it and stretching it until I thought she had lost it entirely"; her voice was "as clear and strong as a trumpet"; and "she sounded so close and familiar ... as if she was looking straight at me." And then: "She sounded as brave as a lioness and ... as fearful as a child."
In a review two weeks ago I mentioned the first time I "got" Billie Holiday after years of wondering what people saw in her. She can either seduce you right off as she did Julia Blackburn or she can repel you, as she did me. I know people who still find her hard to listen to. Her timing is off, they say. Or they think she sounds too stylized or too dreary. One problem may be the association with "Gloomy Sunday." It's possible I had that in mind when I passed her off as sounding depressed, murky, excessive. When I finally heard her it was at four in the morning in New York with a misty rain falling and the window open, her voice coming to me from a small blue transistor radio on the windowsill, "close and familiar," yes, except it was not as though she were looking at me but singing inside my head, all the excesses and the bending and stretching of time no more to be questioned or resisted than the sound of the rain.
Nabokov had nothing to do with it.
Finally I had discovered what all the excitement was about.