Written Lives

by Javier Marías

  According to those who knew him, Thomas Mann had a solemn bearing, especially from behind. From the front, his nose, eyebrows, and ears (all of which were pointed) gave him a rather impish appearance, which was somewhat at odds perhaps with solemnity. He was passionate in his public speeches, so much so that, on one occasion, he went over his allotted time during a radio broadcast and had to stop in mid-sentence and apologise. His upper-middle-class background revealed itself at times in his quarrels with servants: “Attack of rage with the maid Josefa”; “Disloyal cook, deaf maid”; “The new maids do not seem entirely useless”; and “All the servants are again threatening to leave. The vile rabble fill me with nausea and loathing,” are just a few of the angry comments he vouchsafed to his secret diaries.

  His two sisters committed suicide, as did his son Klaus, a novelist more modest and forgotten than his father. He did, therefore, suffer greatly, although when his sister Carla died, the pain of loss was mingled with disapproval that she should have taken her life in her mother’s house and not in some more suitable place. He also suffered exile and the vicious hatred of his compatriots, he became both a Czech and an American citizen, but had the satisfaction of enjoying the most absolute literary success throughout his life, which may have been some compensation. He died on August 12, 1955 in Zurich, at the age of eighty, from a thrombosis. There were no ironic comments at his death. His family was thoughtful enough to bury with him a ring of which he had always been very proud and which he always wore. The stone was green, but it was not an emerald.

  Nabokov in Raptures

  VLADIMIR NABOKOV PROBABLY harboured no more obsessions or antipathies than any of his writer colleagues; it may just seem that way because he was prepared to recognise, proclaim and continually foment them. This brought him something of a reputation as a misanthrope, as was bound to happen in a country as convinced of its own rectitude and tolerance as the one he adopted during the crucial years of his literary life: in the United States, especially in New England, it is not the done thing for foreigners to hold forceful opinions, still less to express them freely. “That disagreeable old man,” is a remark that recurs among those who knew Nabokov superficially.

  Nabokov spent a number of years in that part of America, always as a teacher of literature. He taught first at Wellesley College, one of the few exclusively female universities still remaining in the world, an admirable relic. It is an idyllic place, dominated by the lovely Lake Waban and the perennial autumn of its vast, changing trees and their population of squirrels. Although there are a few male teachers, on campus you see only women, most of them very young (as graduates, they’re even called “alumnae”), the daughters of ambitious, wealthy, conservative families (the students are also called “princesses”). There, the vain illusion persists that Nabokov must have found some inspiration among those quasi-adolescent multitudes in skirts (although shorts were already quite common by then too) for his most famous creation, Lolita; but as he himself explained on numerous occasions, the germ of that masterpiece lay in a story from his European days, The Enchanter, written in Russian. His longest period of teaching was spent at Cornell University, which is co-ed, but no wiser for that, and Nabokov apparently never had a very strong vocation for teaching, that is, he took far too much trouble and too many pains over his lectures, which he always wrote down and then read very slowly, with the text before him on the lectern, and as if he were talking to himself. One of his many obsessions was the so-called Literature of Ideas, as well as Allegory, which is why his lectures on Joyce’s Ulysses, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Anna Karenina or Jekyll and Hyde dealt mainly with the exact plan of the city of Dublin, the exact type of insect into which Gregor Samsa was transformed, the exact arrangement of a railway carriage on the night train from Moscow to St Petersburg in 1870, and the exact appearance of the façade and interior of Dr Jekyll’s house. According to this particular teacher, the only way of getting any pleasure out of reading these novels was to have a very clear idea of such things.

  Given his reputation as a misanthrope, it is odd how often the words “pleasure”, “bliss” and “rapture” appear in his mouth. He admitted that he wrote for two reasons: in order to achieve pleasure, bliss and rapture and to rid himself of the book on which he was currently working. Once it was started, he said, the only way to get rid of it was to finish it. On one occasion, though, he was tempted to resort to a quicker and more irrevocable method. One day in 1950, his wife, Véra, only just managed to stop him as he was heading out into the garden to burn the first chapters of Lolita, beset as he was with doubts and technical difficulties. On another occasion, he blamed the saving of the manuscript on his own startled conscience, convinced, he said, that the ghost of the destroyed book would pursue him for the rest of his life. Nabokov clearly had a soft spot for the novel, for, after pouring all his energies into writing it, he still found the strength to translate it into Russian, knowing full well that it would not be read in his own country for more years than he would be alive.

  One must also bear in mind that the person unable to relinquish that novel was a man accustomed to relinquishing many things: according to Nabokov, all artists live in a kind of constant state of exile, whether surreptitious or manifest, although in his case, these words can only be taken ironically. He never recovered (if I can put it like that) from the loss not so much of his country of birth as of the scenes of his childhood, and although he was sure that he would never return to Russia, he sometimes toyed with the idea of getting himself a false passport and then, disguised as an American tourist, visiting his family’s old country house in Rozhestveno, now converted into a Soviet school, or their house in present-day Herzen Street in what was and is once more St Petersburg. Deep down though, like all “manifest” exiles, he knew that he would gain nothing by going back and that it would, in fact, do him harm, since it would change his unchanging memories. Doubtless because of that loss, Nabokov never really had a house of his own, in Paris or in Berlin (the cities in which he spent his first twenty years outside of Russia), or in America either, nor, at the end, in Switzerland. He lived in this last country in the Hotel Palace in Montreux, overlooking Lake Geneva, in a series of communicating rooms, which, according to various visitors, looked as temporary as if he had just arrived. One of those visitors, his fellow writer and lepidopterist Frederic Prokosch, had a long conversation with him about butterflies, their great shared passion, and although, during the conversation, the aforementioned words—pleasure, bliss and rapture—appeared more than once, the voice of his host Nabokov sounded to him “very weary, disenchanted, and melancholy”. In the gloom of the living room, he saw him smile several times, “perhaps with amusement or maybe in pain”.

  All these perceptions must have been very subtle, since Nabokov never openly complained about his condition. Indeed, during his American years and afterwards (for he kept that nationality), he never ceased proclaiming how happy he was in the United States and how much he approved of everything in his new country. Such insistence was suspicious: on one occasion, he even made the highly improbable statement that he was “as American as April in Arizona”, and in his rooms in the Hotel Palace, the stars and stripes were flamboyantly displayed above a mantelpiece. He was conscious, too, that exiles “end by despising the land of their exile”, and he would recall how Lenin and Nietzsche, consumed by a sense of invincible nostalgia for the places of their childhood, both loathed the same country, Switzerland, that had now taken him in too.

  Nevertheless—as he recounted in his extraordinary autobiography, Speak, Memory—when he left Russia at the age of twenty, the most painful thing was the kno
wledge that for weeks, possibly months, letters from his girlfriend Tamara would continue to arrive at his abandoned address in southern Crimea, where he had settled briefly before his final departure and after fleeing St Petersburg. Letters never read or answered, and that would remain so for all eternity: envelopes sealed for ever at the moment when the beloved’s lips had touched them.

  Before Paris and Berlin, which were packed with Russian emigrés during the 1920s and 1930s, Nabokov and his brother Sergei spent three years at Cambridge University, from which they both graduated. Nabokov’s memories of that place are not exactly flattering, since what predominates is the contrast between the Russian abundance he had left behind and the deliberate meanness of things English. His fondest memories are of soccer, a sport he had always liked and which he played with considerable success not just in Russia but in Cambridge too, as goalkeeper. Apparently he saved what looked like certain goals, and was the perfect embodiment of the strange, mysterious figure of the truly legendary goalie. In his own words, he was seen as “a fabulous, exotic being in an English footballer’s disguise, composing verse in a tongue nobody understood about a remote country nobody knew”.

  Nabokov must have been very reserved in his relationships with his family, as if, even in Russia, before the diaspora and before exile, he had been incapable of having much to do with his two brothers and his two sisters (perhaps rather more with his parents). He had barely any childhood memories of Sergei, who, only eleven months younger, was the nearest in age to him, and he recounted with excessive sobriety his brother’s death in 1945 in Hamburg, in the Nazi concentration camp he had been taken to, accused of being a British spy, and where he died of starvation. He spoke with rather more feeling of his father who was murdered by two fascists as he was leaving a public lecture in Berlin, in 1922: the assassins’ aim had been to kill the lecturer, but Nabokov’s father stepped in, knocked one of them down and was felled by the other attacker’s bullets.

  Although Nabokov did not achieve world fame until he was fifty-six, with the absurdly scandalous publication of Lolita, he was always sure of his own talent. Excusing himself for being so tongue-tied, he had this to say: “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.” It bothered him enormously when people spoke of his “influences”, be it Joyce, Kafka or Proust, but especially Dostoyevsky, whom he loathed, considering him “a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar”. In fact, he hated nearly all writers: Mann and Faulkner, Conrad and Lorca, Lawrence and Pound, Camus and Sartre, Balzac and Forster. He could just about bear Henry James, Conan Doyle, and H.G. Wells. Of Joyce’s work, he admired Ulysses, but described Finnegans Wake as “regional literature”, which, generally speaking, he also abominated. He made an exception for Petersburg by his compatriot Biely, the first half of A la recherche du temps perdu, Pushkin and Shakespeare, but little else. He did not understand Don Quixote, and yet despite his doubts, did, in the end, find it moving. Above all, though, he hated four doctors—“Dr Freud, Dr Zhivago, Dr Schweitzer, and Dr Castro”—especially the first, one of his bêtes noires, to whom he used to refer as “the Viennese quack” and whose theories he considered medieval and on a par with astrology and palmistry. His obsessions and antipathies, however, went much further: he hated jazz, bullfighting, primitive masks, canned music, swimming pools, trucks, transistor radios, bidets, insecticides, yachts, the circus, hooligans, nightclubs and the roar of motorbikes, to name but a few.

  He was undeniably immodest, but his arrogance seemed so genuine that it was occasionally justified and always mocking. He prided himself on being able to trace his family back to the fourteenth century, to Nabok Murza, the Russianised Tartar prince and supposed descendant of Genghis Khan. He was even prouder of his obscure literary antecedents, not so much the real (his father wrote several books) as the legendary: for example, one of his forebears had had some kind of relationship with Kleist, another with Dante, another with Pushkin, and yet another with Boccaccio. These four relationships seem altogether too much of a coincidence.

  He suffered from insomnia even as a child, he was a womaniser in his youth and extremely faithful in his mature years (almost all his books are dedicated to his wife, Véra), but one should perhaps see him overall as a loner. The greatest pleasure, the greatest bliss, the greatest moments of rapture were all experienced alone: hunting butterflies, concocting chess problems, translating Pushkin, writing his books. He died on July 2, 1977 in Montreux, at the age of seventy-eight, and I learned about his death in Calle Sierpes in Seville, when I opened the newspaper as I was having breakfast in the Laredo.

  He got annoyed with people who praised art that was “sincere and simple”, or who believed that the quality of art depended on its simplicity and sincerity. For him, everything was artifice, including the most authentic and deeply felt emotions, to which he himself was not immune. He put it another way too: “In high art and pure science, detail is everything.” He never went back to Russia nor did he ever hear from Tamara. Or perhaps he did so only in the long letters he wrote to his past while ridding himself of each of his moving and artificial books.

  Rainer Maria Rilke in Waiting

  WHEN RAINER MARIA RILKE was very young, he went to visit Tolstoy, by then an old man, on his estate in Yasnaya Polyana. They went for a walk in the country with the ubiquitous Lou Andreas-Salomé, and Tolstoy asked Rilke: “What are you devoting your time to at the moment?” The poet replied shyly and naturally: “To the lyric.” Apparently, he received in response not just a string of insults, but an out-and-out diatribe against all forms of the lyric, as something to which no one could possibly devote their time.

  It is clear that, in Rilke’s case, the words of the old Russian master must have gone in one ear and out the other, since few poets in the history of poetry have devoted themselves, devoted being the word, so obsessively and exclusively, not just to the lyric, but to the lyric in all its forms. Rilke wrote lyrical poetry, but also lyrical prose, in his diaries, letters, articles, travel journals, and in his plays. Whenever he picked up a pen, even if only to ask a favour, he wrote lyrics, and not always of the loftiest kind. To be honest, at least in his early days, he was rather given to flattery, and he did not restrict himself merely to taking an inordinate interest in the work of others and to praising it, but on two occasions he even offered to write a book about the works he had praised: an offer he fulfilled in the case of the sculptor Rodin, for whom he worked for a while as secretary and—perhaps fortunately for him—one he did not fulfill in the case of the Spanish painter Zuloaga, although he was quite clear in his mind what the project would be like: “An ardent book full of flowers and dances.” Who knows, maybe Rilke’s enthusiasm waned in part after a Spanish party he went to at Zuloaga’s house in Paris, on the occasion of the christening of the latter’s son in 1906, and of which the reporter from a Madrid newspaper left this description: “The guitarist Llovet astonished us all with his brilliant playing, and the guitarist Palmero, in true flamenco style, accompanied the lithesome and enlivening bailaora Carmela in tangos such as the morrongo, to the amazement of the good abbé Brebain, who was among those watching.” We do not know Rilke’s reaction, but after the party, he did at least create a lyric, that is, he wrote a poem with the predictable title “The Spanish Dancer”.

  As we now know, thanks to the work of the celebrated scholar Ferreiro Alemparte, Rilke’s Spanish connection was a long and fruitful one, ending in a stay of four months, mainly in Toledo and Ronda, with brief sorties to Córdoba, Seville and Madrid. He found the last two cities most disagreeable: of the Andalusian capital he wrote: “apart f
rom the sun, I expected nothing, and it gave me nothing, so we have no reason to complain”. However, he did complain about the cathedral, “unfriendly, not to say hostile”, and inside it, “a vile organ, with a horribly sentimental tone”. He was even harder on Spain’s capital, which displeased him “almost as much as Trieste” when he left, and, about which, when he came back, he was less enigmatic and more categorical: “… it is almost as if this sad land of Madrid could not tolerate any city, and as if it had never even really wanted to be farmed either”. He spent his time in the Prado and then left at a gallop; not even the Goyas and the Velázquez and the El Grecos were enough to placate him.