{"id":84447,"date":"2015-04-07T15:30:57","date_gmt":"2015-04-07T19:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=84447"},"modified":"2015-04-07T15:57:31","modified_gmt":"2015-04-07T19:57:31","slug":"party-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/07\/party-line\/","title":{"rendered":"Party Line"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"fiftiesparty\"<\/a>

Not Nabokov\u2019s kind of place.<\/p><\/div>\n

Reading about the parties of decades past, it sometimes seems they were all similar, and all awful\u2014or at least that they had an intolerably high jerk quotient. Think of the celebrations in Cheever novels, or O\u2019Hara stories: full of jerks, everyone drunk and uncouth and parochial.<\/p>\n

It should come as no shock that Vladimir Nabokov took a jaundiced view of the midcentury American party. In fact, were I some hapless Wellesley or Ithaca hostess, you couldn\u2019t have paid me enough to invite him to a dinner or sherry hour, even after he became a literary sensation. Imagine the appraisal you\u2019d be in for\u2014his curled lip, his chilly politeness, his scathing mental commentary, his\u00a0careful evasion of the menu\u2019s vulgarities. For your trouble, you\u2019d be caricatured, at best, as some sort of composite Charlotte Haze\u2013esque grotesque, fawning over his manners and dripping with self-assured provincialism. And that would be the good<\/em> outcome. It\u2019s hard to think of someone you\u2019d want less at a midcentury faculty tea, save maybe a seething Shirley Jackson.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The following comes from Nabokov\u2019s 1951 story \u201cThe Vane Sisters.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

A late arrival had the impression of lots of loud people unnecessarily grouped within a smoke-blue space between two mirrors gorged with reflections. Because, I suppose, Cynthia wished to be the youngest in the room, the women she used to invite, married or single, were, at the best, in their precarious forties; some of them would bring from their homes, in dark taxis, intact vestiges of good looks, which, however, they lost as the party progressed. It has always amazed me\u2014the capacity sociable weekend revelers have of finding almost at once, by a purely empiric but very precise method, a common denominator of drunkenness, to which everybody loyally sticks before descending, all together, to the next level. The rich friendliness of the matrons was marked by tomboyish overtones, while the fixed inward look of amiably tight men was like a sacrilegious parody of pregnancy. Although some of the guests were connected in one way or another with the arts, there was no inspired talk, no wreathed, elbow-propped heads, and of course no flute girls. From some vantage point where she had been sitting in a stranded mermaid pose on the pale carpet with one or two younger fellows, Cynthia, her face varnished with a film of beaming sweat, would creep up on her knees, a proffered plate of nuts in one hand, and crisply tap with the other the athletic leg of Cochran or Corcoran, an art dealer, ensconced, on a pearl-grey sofa, between two flushed, happily disintegrating ladies.<\/p>\n

At a further stage there would come spurts of more riotous gaiety. Corcoran or Coransky would grab Cynthia or some other wandering woman by the shoulder and lead her into a corner to confront her with a grinning imbroglio of private jokes and rumors, whereupon, with a laugh and a toss of her head, he would break away. And still later there would be flurries of intersexual chumminess, jocular reconciliations, a bare fleshy arm flung around another woman\u2019s husband (he standing very upright in the midst of a swaying room), or a sudden rush of flirtatious anger, of clumsy pursuit-and the quiet half smile of Bob Wheeler picking up glasses that grew like mushrooms in the shade of chairs.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This kind of delightful cynicism owes a debt to those parties, filled as they were with strong drinks and silly hors d\u2019oeuvres and downright miserable people. If that sort of hostess feels like a clich\u00e9 now, so does the easy mockery.\u00a0Of course, Nabokov knew that.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Vane Sisters\u201d is more complicated and more creepy and more silly than it seems from this extract, and his narrator\u2019s confidence is as ill-founded as anyone else\u2019s.\u00a0The thing people know about \u201cThe Vane Sisters\u201d is that\u00a0The New Yorker\u00a0<\/em>rejected it, and then Nabokov sent a letter explaining what was actually going on and that it was in fact more complicated and metafictional than it seemed and filled with wordplay, et cetera.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nabokov may have known how to enjoy an awful party, but he always knew the joke was on the mocker, too. Plus, he was interested in the paranormal\u2014and perhaps that is really the trick.<\/p>\n

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review, and the <\/em>Daily\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading about the parties of decades past, it sometimes seems they were all similar, and all awful\u2014or at least that they had an intolerably high jerk quotient. Think of the celebrations in Cheever novels, or O\u2019Hara stories: full of jerks, everyone drunk and uncouth and parochial. It should come as no shock that Vladimir Nabokov […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[17705,1810,6206,17706,450,8811,17704,967],"class_list":["post-84447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-jerks","tag-john-cheever","tag-john-ohara","tag-midcentury-literature","tag-parties","tag-stories","tag-the-vane-sisters","tag-vladimir-nabokov"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNabokov Knew How to Hate a Party<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"His evisceration of a dinner party in \u201cThe Vane Sisters\u201d makes you wonder why anyone invited him anywhere.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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