While leav­ing a com­ment at Johannes Göransson’s blog today, I remem­bered an essay by Martin Amis that sug­gests another avatar for the Bovary-dandy-hipster daisy chain I assem­bled last Friday. In the midst of a long recon­sid­er­a­tion of Lolita (the last essay in The War Against Cliché) Amis writes:

Shock­able Hum­bert, who finds bad lan­guage so “disgusting.” I shud­der to think how his ghost, attired in its ghostly smoking-​jacket, would round on me for call­ing him a vul­gar­ian and a philis­tine. Actu­ally he is of a more dan­ger­ous and rarer breed (though one very fully rep­re­sented in Nabokov’s corpus): such people, because they cannot make art out of life, make their lives into art. Hum­bert is the artist manqué…The weep­ing Hum­bert sheds above-​average teardrops, “hot, opales­cent, thick tears that poets and lover shed.” He is “her Catullus,” he is “poor Catullus”: “The gentle and dreamy regions though which I crept were the pat­ri­monies of poets—not crime’s stamp­ing ground.” This is all blas­phe­mous flan­nel, nat­u­rally. Who but Hum could refer to the gauged post­pone­ment of his orgasm (on the sofa, with a still inno­cent Lo) as a “nicety of phys­i­o­log­i­cal equipoise com­pa­ra­ble to cer­tain tech­niques in the arts”? “Emphatically, no killers are we,” Hum­bert pleads: “Poets never kill.” But this one does. Before he pulls the trig­ger he recites a poem: a parody—under the cir­cum­stances, a travesty—of “Ash Wednesday.” And Nabokov never had much time for Eliot.