The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

by Vladimir Nabokov

  'The letters are burnt,' I said. I then continued to plead, repeating again and again that surely there could be no harm in trying; could she not convince Clare, when telling her of our talk, that my visit would be very short, very innocent?

  'What is it exactly you want to know?' asked Miss Pratt, 'because, you see, I can tell you lots myself.'

  She spoke for a long time about Clare and Sebastian. She did it very well, although, like most women, she was inclined to be somewhat didactic in retrospection.

  'Do you mean to say,' I interrupted her at a certain point of her story, 'that nobody ever found out what that other woman's name was?'

  'No,' said Miss Pratt.

  'But how shall I find her,' I cried.

  'You never will.'

  'When do you say it began?' I interrupted again, as she referred to his illness.

  'Well,' she said, 'I'm not quite sure. What I witnessed wasn't his first attack. We were coming out of some restaurant. It was very cold and he could not find a taxi. He got nervous and angry. He started .to run towards one that had drawn up a little way off. Then he stopped and said he was not feeling well. I remember he took a pill or something out of a little box and crushed it in his white silk scarf, sort of pressing it to his face as he did so. That must have been in twenty-seven or twenty-eight.'

  I asked several more questions. She answered them all in the same conscientious fashion and went on with her dismal tale.

  When she had gone, I wrote it all down – but it was dead, dead. I simply had to see Clare! One glance, one word, the mere sound of her voice would be sufficient (and necessary, absolutely necessary) to animate the past. Why it was thus I did not understand, just as I have never understood why on a certain unforgettable day some weeks earlier I had been so sure that if I could find a dying man alive and conscious I would learn something which no human being had yet learnt.

  Then one Monday morning I made a call.

  The maid showed me into a small sitting room. Clare was at home, this at least I learnt from that ruddy and rather raw young female. (Sebastian mentions somewhere that English novelists never' depart from a certain fixed tone when describing housemaids.) On the other hand I knew from Miss Pratt that Mr Bishop was busy in the City on weekdays; queer – her having married a man with the same name, no relation either, just pure coincidence. Would she not see me? Fairly well off, I should say, but not very…. Probably an L-shaped drawing room on the first floor and over that a couple of bedrooms. The whole street consisted of just such close-pressed narrow houses. She was long in roaking up her mind…. Should I have risked telephoning first? Had Miss Pratt already told her about the letters? Suddenly I heard soft footfalls coming down the stairs and a huge man in a black dressing-gown with purple facings came bouncing into the room.

  'I apologize for my attire,' he said, 'but I am suffering from a severe cold. My name is Bishop and I gather you want to see my wife.'

  Had he caught that cold, I thought in a curious flash of fancy, from the pink-nosed husky-voiced Clare I had seen twelve years ago?

  'Why, yes,' I said, 'if she hasn't forgotten me. We met once in Paris!

  'Oh, she remembered your name all right,' said Mr Bishop, looking at me squarely, 'but I am sorry to say she can't see you,'

  'May I call later?' I asked.

  There was a slight silence, and then Mr Bishop asked. 'Am I right in presuming that your visit is connected in some way with your brother's death?' There he stood before roe, hands thrust into his dressing-gown pockets, looking at roe, his fair hair brushed back with an angry brush – a good fellow, a decent fellow, and I hope he will not mind my saying so here. Quite recently, I may add, in very sad circumstances, letters have been exchanged between us, which have quite done away with any ill-feeling that might have crept into our first conversation.

  'Would that prevent her seeing me?' I asked in my turn. It was a foolish phrase, I admit.

  'You are not going to see her in any case,' said Mr Bishop. 'Sorry,' he added, relenting a little, as he felt I was safely drifting out. 'I am sure that in other circumstances… but you see my wife is not overkeen to recall past friendships, and you will forgive me if I say quite frankly I do not think you should have come.'

  I walked back feeling I had bungled it badly. I pictured to myself what I would have said to Clare had I found her alone. Somehow I managed to convince myself now that had she been alone, she would have seen me: so an unforeseen obstacle belittles those one had imagined. I would have said: 'Let us not talk of Sebastian. Let us talk of Paris. Do you know it well? Do you remember those pigeons? Tell me what you have been reading lately…. And what about films? Do you still lose your gloves, parcels?' Or else I might have resorted to a bolder method, a direct attack. 'Yes, I know how you must feel about it, but please, please, talk to me about him. For the sake of his portrait. For the sake of little things which will wander away and perish if you refuse to let me have them for my book about him.' Oh, I was sure she would never have refused.

  And two days later with this last intention firm in my mind, I made still another attempt. This time I was resolved to be much more circumspect. It was a fine morning, quite early yet, and I was sure she would not stay indoors. I would unobtrusively take up my position at the corner of her street, wait for her husband's departure to the city, wait for her to come out and then accost her. But things did not work out quite as I had expected.

  I had still some little way to go when suddenly Clare Bishop appeared. She had just crossed from my side of the street to the opposite pavement. I knew her at once although I had seen her only once for a short half-hour years before. I knew her although her face was now pinched and her body strangely full. She walked slowly and heavily, and as I crossed towards her I realized that she was in an advanced stage of pregnancy. Owing to the impetuous strain in my nature, which has often led me astray, I found myself walking towards her with a smile of welcome, but in those few instants I was already overwhelmed by the perfectly clear consciousness that I might neither talk to her nor greet her in any manner. It had nothing to do with Sebastian or my book, or my words with Mr Bishop, it was solely on account of her stately concentration. I knew I was forbidden even to make myself known to her, but as I say, my impetus had carried me across the street and in such a way that I nearly bumped into her upon reaching the pavement. She sidestepped heavily and lifted her near-sighted eyes. No, thank God, she did not recognize me. There was something heart-rending in the solemn expression of her pale sawdusty face. We had stopped short. With ridiculous presence of mind I brought out of my pocket the first thing my hand met with, and I said: 'I beg your pardon, but have you dropped this?'

  'No,' she said, with an impersonal smile. She held it for a moment close to her eyes, 'no,' she repeated, and giving it back to me went on her way. I stood with a key in my hand, as if I had just picked it up off the pavement. It was the latchkey of Sebastian's flat, and with a queer pang I now realized that she had touched it with her innocent blind fingers….

  9

  Their relationship lasted six years. During that period Sebastian produced his two first novels: The Prismatic Bezel and Success. It took him some seven months to compose the first (April-October 1924) and twenty-two months to compose the second (July I925-April 1927). Between autumn 1927 and summer 1929 he wrote the three stories which later (1932) were republished together under the tide The Funny Mountain. In other words, Clare intimately witnessed the first three-fifths of his entire production (I skip the juvenilia – the Cambridge poems for instance – which he himself destroyed); and as in the intervals between the above-mentioned books Sebastian kept twisting and laying aside and re-twisting this or that imaginative scheme it may be safely assumed that during those six years he was continuously occupied. And Clare loved his occupation.

  She entered his life without knocking, as one might step into the wrong room because of its vague resemblance to one's own. She stayed there forgetting the way out and quietly getting
used to the strange creatures she found there and petted despite their amazing shapes. She had no special intention of being happy or of making Sebastian happy, nor had she the slightest misgivings as to what might come next; it was merely a matter of naturally accepting life with Sebastian because life without him was less imaginable than a tellurian's camping-tent on a mountain in the moon. Most probably, if she had borne him a child they would have slipped into marriage since that would have been the simplest way for all three; but that not being the case it did not enter their heads to submit to those white and wholesome formalities which very possibly both would have enjoyed had they given them necessary thought. There was nothing of your advanced prejudice-be-damned stuff about Sebastian. Well did he know that to flaunt one's contempt for a moral code was but smuggled smugness and prejudice turned inside out. He usually chose the easiest ethical path (just as he chose the thorniest aesthetic one) merely because it happened to be the shortest cut to his chosen object; he was far too lazy in everyday life (just as he was far too hardworking in his artistic life) to be bothered by problems set and solved by others.

  Clare was twenty-two when she met Sebastian. She did not remember her father; her mother was dead too, and her stepfather had married again, so that the faint notion of home which that couple presented to her might be compared to the old sophism of changed handle and changed blade, though of course she could hardly expect to find and join the original parts – this side of Eternity at least. She lived alone in London, rather vaguely attending an art school and taking a course in Eastern languages, of all things. People liked her because she was quietly-attractive with her charming dim face and soft husky voice, somehow remaining in one's memory as if she were subtly endowed with the gift of being remembered: she came out well in one's mind, she was mnemogenic. Even her rather large and knuckly hands had a singular charm, and she was a good light silent dancer. But best of all she was one of those rare, very rare women who do not take the world for granted and who see everyday things not merely as familiar mirrors of their own feminity. She had imagination – the muscle of the soul – and her imagination was of a particularly strong, almost masculine quality. She possessed, too, that real sense of beauty which has far less to do with art than with the constant readiness to discern the halo round a frying-pan or the likeness between a weeping-willow and a Skye terrier. And finally she was blest with a keen sense of humour. No wonder she fitted into his life so well.

  Already during the first season of their acquaintance they saw a great deal of each other; in the autumn she went to Paris and he visited her there more than once, I suspect. By then his first book was ready. She had learnt to type and the summer evenings of 1924 had been to her as many pages slipped into the slit and rolled out again alive with black and violet words. I should like to imagine her tapping the glistening keys to the sound of a warm shower rustling in the dark elms beyond the open window, with Sebastian's slow and serious voice (he did not merely dictate, said Miss Pratt – he officiated) coming and going across the room. He used to spend most of the day writing, but so laborious was his progress that there would hardly be more than a couple of fresh pages for her to type in the evening and even these had to be done over again, for Sebastian used to indulge in an orgy of corrections; and sometimes he would do what I daresay no author ever did – recopy the typed sheet in his own slanting un-English hand and then dictate it anew. His struggle with words was unusually painful and this for two reasons. One was the common one with writers of his type: the bridging of the abyss lying between expression and thought; the maddening feeling that the right words, the only words are awaiting you on the opposite bank in the misty distance, and the shudderings of the still unclothed thought clamouring for them on this side of the abyss. He had no use for ready-made phrases because the things he wanted to say were of an exceptional build and he knew moreover that no real idea can be said to exist without the words made to measure. So that (to use a closer simile) the thought which only seemed naked was but pleading for the clothes it wore to become visible, while the words lurking afar were not empty shells as they seemed, but were only waiting for the thought they already concealed to set them aflame and in motion. At times he felt like a child given a farrago of wires and ordered to produce the wonder of light. And he did produce it; and sometimes he would not be conscious at all of the way he succeeded in doing so, and at other times he would be worrying the wires for hours in what seemed the most rational way – and achieve nothing. And Clare, who had not composed a single line of imaginative prose or poetry in her life, understood so well (and that was her private miracle) every detail of Sebastian's struggle, that the words she typed were to her not so much the conveyors of their natural sense, but the curves and gaps and zig-zags showing Sebastian's groping along a certain ideal line of expression.

  This, however, was not all. I know, I know as definitely as I know we had the same father, I know Sebastian's Russian was better and more natural to him than his English. I quite believe that by not speaking Russian for five years he may have forced himself into thinking he had forgotten it. But a language is a live physical thing which cannot be so easily dismissed. It should moreover be remembered that five years before his first book – that is, at the time he left Russia – his English was as thin as mine. I have improved mine artificially years later (by dint of hard study abroad); he tried to let his thrive naturally in its own surroundings. It did thrive wonderfully but still I maintain that had he started to write in Russian, those particular linguistic throes would have been spared him. Let me add that I have in my possession a letter written by him not long before his death. And that short letter is couched in a Russian purer and richer than his English ever was, no matter what beauty of expression he attained in his books.

  I know too that as Clare took down the words he disentangled from his manuscript she sometimes would stop tapping and say with a little frown, slightly lifting the outer edge of the imprisoned sheet and re-reading the line: 'No, my dear. You can't say it so in English.' He would stare at her for an instant or two and then resume his prowl, reluctantly pondering on her observation, while she sat with her hands softly folded in her lap quietly waiting. 'There is no other way of expressing it,' he would mutter at last. 'And if for instance,' she would say – and then an exact suggestion would follow.

  'Oh, well, if you like,' he would reply.

  'I'm not insisting, my dear, just as you wish, if you think bad grammar won't hurt….'

  'Oh, go on,' he would cry, 'you are perfectly right, go on….

  By November 1924, The Prismatic Bezel was completed. It was published in the following March and fell completely flat. As far as I can find out by looking up newspapers of that period, it was alluded to only once. Five lines and a half in a Sunday paper, between other lines referring to other books. 'The Prismatic Bezel is apparently a first novel and as such ought not to be judged as severely as (So-and-So's book mentioned previously). Its fun seemed to me obscure and its obscurities funny, but possibly there exists a kind of fiction the niceties of which will always elude me. However, for the benefit of readers who like that sort of stuff I may add that Mr Knight is as good at splitting hairs as he is at splitting infinitives.'

  That spring was probably the happiest period of Sebastian's existence. He had been delivered of one book and was already feeling the throbs of the next one. He was in excellent health. He had a delightful companion. He suffered' from none of those petty worries which formerly used to assail him at times with the perseverance of a swarm of ants spreading over a hacienda. Clare posted letters for him, and checked laundry returns, and saw that he was well supplied with shaving blades, tobacco, and salted almonds for which he had a special weakness. He enjoyed dining out with her and then going to a play. The play almost invariably made him writhe and groan afterwards, but he derived a morbid pleasure from dissecting platitudes. An expression of greed, of wicked eagerness, would make his nostrils expand while his back teeth ground in a paroxys
m of disgust, as he pounced upon some poor triviality. Miss Pratt remembered one particular occasion when her father, who had at one time had some financial interest in the cinema industry, invited Sebastian and Clare to the private view of a very gorgeous and expensive film. The leading actor was a remarkably handsome young man wearing a luxurious turban and the plot was powerfully dramatic. At the highest point of tension, Sebastian, to Mr Pratt's extreme surprise and annoyance, began to shake with laughter, with Clare bubbling too but plucking at his sleeve in a helpless effort to make him stop. They must have had a glorious time together, those two. And it is hard to believe that the warmth, the tenderness, the beauty of it has not been gathered, and is not treasured somewhere, somehow, by some immortal witness of mortal life. They must have been seen wandering in Kew Gardens, or Richmond Park (personally I have never been there but the names attract me), or eating ham and eggs at some pretty inn in their summer rambles in the country, or reading on the vast divan in Sebastian's study with the fire cheerfully burning and an English Christmas already filling the air with faintly spicy smells on a background of lavender and leather. And Sebastian must have been overheard telling her of the extraordinary things he would try to express in his next book Success.

  One day in the summer of 1926, as he was feeling parched and fuzzled after battling with a particularly rebellious chapter, he thought he might take a month's holiday abroad. Clare having some business in London said she would join him a week or two later. When she eventually arrived at the German seaside resort which Sebastian had decided upon, she was unexpectedly informed at the hotel that he had left for an unknown destination but would be back in a couple of days. This puzzled Clare, although, as she afterwards told Miss Pratt, she did not feel unduly anxious or distressed. We may picture her, a thin tall figure in a blue mackintosh (the weather was overcast and unfriendly) strolling rather aimlessly on the promenade, the sandy beach, empty except for a few undismayed children, the three-coloured flags flapping mournfully in a dying breeze, and a steely grey sea breaking here and there into crests of foam. Farther down the coast there was a beech wood, deep and dark with no undergrowth except bindwood patching the undulating brown soil; and a strange brown stillness stood waiting among the straight smooth tree-trunks: she thought she might find at any moment a red-capped German gnome peeping bright-eyed at her from among the dead leaves of a hollow. She unpacked her bathing things and passed a pleasant though somewhat listless day lying on the soft white sand. Next morning was rainy again and she stayed in her room until lunch time, reading Donne, who for ever after remained to her associated with the pale grey light of that damp and hazy day and the whine of a child wanting to play in the corridor. And presently Sebastian arrived. He was certainly glad to see her but there was something not quite natural in his demeanour. He seemed nervous and troubled, and averted his face whenever she tried to meet his look. He said he had come across a man he had known ages ago, in Russia, and they had gone in the man's car to – he named a place on the coast some miles away. 'But what is the matter, my dear?' she asked peering into his sulky face.