The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

by Vladimir Nabokov

  'Oh, nothing, nothing,' he cried peevishly, 'I can't sit and do nothing, I want my work,' he added and looked away.

  'I wonder if you are telling me the truth,' she said.

  He shrugged his shoulders and slid the edge of his palm along the groove of the hat he was holding.

  'Come along,' he said. 'Let's have lunch and then go back to London.'

  But there was no convenient train before evening. As the weather had cleared they went out for a stroll. Sebastian tried once or twice to be as bright with her as he usually was, but it somehow fizzled out and they were both silent. They reached the beech wood. There was the same mysterious and dull suspense about it, and he said, though she had not told him she had been there before: 'What a funny quiet place. Eerie, isn't it? One half-expects to see a brownie among those dead leaves and convolvulus.'

  'Look here, Sebastian,' she suddenly exclaimed, putting her hands on his shoulders. 'I want to know what's the matter. Perhaps you've stopped loving me. Is it that?'

  'Oh my darling, what nonsense,' said he with perfect sincerity. 'But… if you must know… you see… I'm not good at deceiving, and well, I'd rather you knew. The fact is I felt a confounded pain in my chest and arm, so I thought I'd better dash to Berlin and see a doctor. He packed me off to bed there…. Serious?… No, I hope not. We discussed coronary arteries and blood supply and sinuses of Salva and he generally seemed to be a very knowing old beggar. I'll see another man in London and get a second opinion, though I feel fit as a fiddle today….'

  I suppose Sebastian already knew from what exact heart-disease he was suffering. His mother had died of the same complaint, a rather rare variety of angina pectoris, called by some doctors 'Lehmann's disease'. It appears, however, that after the first attack he had at least a year's respite, though now and then he did experience a queer twinge as of inner itch in his left arm.

  He sat down to his task again and worked steadily through the autumn, spring, and winter. The composing of Success turned out to be even more arduous than that of his first novel and took him much longer, although both books were about the same length. By a stroke of luck I have a direct picture of the day Success was finished. This I owe to someone I met later – and indeed many of the impressions I have offered in this chapter have been formed by corroborating the statements of Miss Pratt with those of another friend of Sebastian's, though the spark which had kindled it all belongs in some mysterious manner to that glimpse I had of Clare Bishop walking heavily down a London street.

  The door opens. Sebastian Knight is disclosed lying spread-eagled on the floor of his study. Clare is making a neat bundle of the typed sheets on the desk. The person who entered stops short.

  'No, Leslie,' says Sebastian from the floor, 'I'm not dead. I have finished building a world, and this is my Sabbath rest.'

  10

  The Prismatic Bezel was appreciated at its true worth only when Sebastian's first real success caused it to be presented anew by another firm (Bronson), but even then it did not sell as well as Success, or Lost Property. For a first novel it shows remarkable force of artistic will and literary self-control. As often was the way with Sebastian Knight he used parody as a kind of springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion. J. L. Coleman has called it 'al clown developing wings, an angel mimicking a tumbler pigeon', and the metaphor seems to me very apt. Based cunningly on a parody of certain tricks of the literary trade, The Prismatic Bezel soars skyward. With something akin to fanatical hate Sebastian Knight was ever hunting out the things which had once been fresh and bright but which were now worn to a thread, dead things among living ones; dead things shamming life, painted and repainted, continuing to be accepted by lazy minds serenely unaware of the fraud. The decayed idea might be in itself quite innocent and it may be argued that there is not much sin in continually exploiting this or that thoroughly worn subject or style if it still pleases and amuses. But for Sebastian Knight, the merest trifle, as, say, the, adopted method of a detective story, became a bloated and malodorous corpse. He did not mind in the least 'penny dreadfuls' because he wasn't concerned with ordinary morals; what annoyed him invariably was the second rate, not the third or nth-rate, because here, at the readable stage, the shamming began, and this was, in an artistic sense, immoral. But The Prismatic Bezel is not only a rollicking parody of the setting of a detective tale; it is also a wicked imitation of many other things: as for instance a certain literary habit which Sebastian Knight, with his uncanny perception of secret decay, noticed in the modem novel, namely the fashionable trick of grouping a medley of people in a limited space (a hotel, an island, a street). Then also different kinds of styles are satirized in the course of the book as well as the problem of blending direct speech with narration and description which an elegant pen solves by finding as many variations of 'he said' as may be found in the dictionary between 'acceded' and 'yelped'. But all this obscure fun is, I repeat, only the author's springboard.

  Twelve persons are staying at a boarding house; the house is very carefully depicted but in order to stress the 'island' note, the rest of the town is casually shown as a secondary cross between natural mist and a primary cross between stage-properties and a real-estate agent's nightmare. As the author points out (indirectly) this method is somewhat allied to the cinema practice of showing the leading lady in her impossible dormitory years as glamorously different from a crowd of plain and fairly realistic schoolmates. One of the lodgers, a certain G. Abeson, art dealer, is found murdered in his room. The local police officer, who is described solely in terms of boots, rings up a London detective, asking him to come at once. Owing to a combination of mishaps (his car runs over an old woman and then he takes the wrong train) he is very long in arriving. In the meantime the inhabitants of the boarding house plus a chance passer-by, old Nosebag, who happened to be in the lobby when the crime was discovered, are thoroughly examined. All of them except the last named, a mild old gentleman with a white beard yellowish about the mouth, and a harmless passion for collecting snuffboxes, are more or less open to suspicion; and one of them, a fishy art-student, seems particularly so: half a dozen blood-stained handkerchiefs are found under his bed. Incidentally, it may be noted that in order to simplify and 'concentrate' things not a single servant or hotel employee is specifically mentioned and nobody bothers about their non-existence. Then, with a quick sliding motion, something in the story begins to shift (the detective, it must be remembered, is still on the way and G. Abeson's stiff corpse lying on the carpet). It gradually transpires that all the lodgers are in various ways connected with one another. The old lady in No.3 turns out to be the mother of the violinist in No.11. The novelist occupying the front bedroom is really the husband of the young lady in the third floor back. The fishy art-student is no less than this lady's brother. The solemn moonfaced person who is so very polite to everyone, happens to be butler to the crusty old colonel who, it appears, is the violinist's father. The gradual melting process continues through the art-student's being engaged to the fat little woman in No.5, and she is the old lady's daughter by a previous marriage. And when the amateur lawn-tennis champion in No.6 turns out to be the violinist's brother and the novelist their uncle and the old lady in No.3 the crusty old colonel's wife, then the numbers on the doors are quietly wiped out and the boarding-house motif is painlessly and smoothly replaced by that of a country-house, with all its natural implications. And here the tale takes on a strange beauty. The idea of time, which was made to look comic (detective losing his way… stranded somewhere in the night), now seems to curl up and fall asleep. Now the lives of the characters shine forth with a real and human significance and G. Abeson's sealed door is but that of a forgotten lumber room. A new plot, a new drama utterly unconnected with the opening of the story, which is thus thrust back into the region of dreams, seems to struggle for existence and break into light. But at the very moment when the reader feels quite safe in an atmosphere of pleasurable reality and the grace and glory of the
author's prose seems to indicate some lofty and rich intention, there is a grotesque knocking at the door and the detective enters. We are again wallowing in a morass of parody. The detective, a shifty fellow, drops his h's, and this is meant to look as if it were meant to look quaint; for it is not a parody of the Sherlock Holmes vogue but a parody of the modern reaction from it. The lodgers are examined afresh. New clues are guessed at. Mild old Nosebag potters about, very absent-minded and harmless.

  He had just dropped in to see if they had a spare room, he explains. The old gag of making the most innocent-looking person turn out to be the master-villain seems to be on the point of being exploited. The sleuth suddenly gets interested in snuffboxes. ''Ullo,' he says, ''ow about Hart?' Suddenly a policeman lumbers in, very red in the face and reports that the corpse has gone. The detective: 'What dy'a mean by gorn?' The policeman: 'Gone, Sir, the room is empty.' There was a moment of ridiculous suspense. 'I think,' said old Nosebag quietly, 'that I can explain.' Slowly and very carefully he removes his beard, his grey wig, his dark spectacles, and the face of G. Abeson is disclosed. 'You see,' says Mr Abeson with a self-deprecating smile, 'one dislikes being murdered.'

  I have tried my best to show the workings of the book, at least some of its workings. Its charm, humour, and pathos can only be appreciated by direct reading. But for enlightenment of those who felt baffled by its habit of metamorphosis, or merely disgusted at finding something incompatible with the idea of a 'nice book' in the discovery of a book's being an utterly new one, I should like to point out that The Prismatic Bezel can be thoroughly enjoyed once it is understood that the heroes of the book are what can be loosely called 'methods. of composition'. It is as if a painter said: look, here I'm going to show you not the painting of a landscape, but the painting of different ways of painting a certain landscape, and I trust their harmonious fusion will disclose the landscape as I intend you to see it. In the first book Sebastian brought this experiment to a logical and satisfactory conclusion. By putting to the ad absurdum test this or that literary manner and then dismissing them one after the other, he deduced his own manner and fully exploited it in his next book Success. Here he seems to have passed from one plane to another rising a step higher, for, if his first novel is based on methods of literary composition – the second one deals mainly with the methods of human fate. With scientific precision in the classification, examination, and rejection of an immense amount of data (the accumulation of which is rendered possible by the fundamental assumption that an author is able to discover anything he may want to know about his characters, such capacity being limited only by the manner and purpose of his selection in so far as it ought to be not a haphazard jumble of worthless details but a definite and methodical quest), Sebastian Knight devotes the three hundred pages of Success to one of the most complicated researches that has ever been attempted by a writer. We are informed that a certain commercial traveller Percival Q at a certain stage of his life and in certain circumstances meets the girl, a conjuror's assistant, with whom he will be happy ever after. The meeting is or seems accidental: both happen to use the same car belonging to an amiable stranger on a day the buses went on strike. This is the formula: quite uninteresting if viewed as an actual happening, but becoming a source of remarkable mental enjoyment and excitement, when examined from a special angle. The author's task is to find out how this formula has been arrived at; and all the magic and force of his art are summoned in order to discover the exact way in which two lines of life were made to come into contact – the whole book indeed being but a glorious gamble on causalities or, if you prefer, the probing of the aetiological secret of aleatory occurrences. The odds seem unlimited. Several obvious lines of inquiry are followed with varying success. Working backwards the author finds out why the strike was fixed to take place that particular day and a certain politician's life-long predilection for the number nine is found to be at the root of the business. This leads us nowhere and the trail is abandoned (not without having given us the opportunity of witnessing a heated party debate). Another false scent is the stranger's car. We try to find out who he was and what caused him to pass at a given moment along a given street but when we do learn that he had passed there on his way to his office every week-day at the same time for the last years of his life, we are left none the wiser. Thus we forced to assume that the outward circumstances of meeting are not samples of fate's activity in regard to two, subjects but a given entity, a fixed point, of no causal import; and so, with a clear conscience we turn to the problem of why Q and the girl Anne of all people were made to come and stand side by side for a minute on the kerb at that particular spot. So the girl's line of fate is traced back for a time, then the man's, notes are compared, and then again both lives are followed up in turn.

  We learn a number of curious things. The two lines which have finally tapered to the point of meeting are really not the straight lines of a triangle which diverge steadily towards an unknown base, but wavy lines, now running wide apart, now almost touching. In other words there have been at least two occasions in these two people's lives when unknowingly to one another they all but met. In each case fate seemed to have prepared such a meeting with the utmost care; touching up now this possibility now that one; screening exits and repainting signposts; narrowing in its creeping grasp the bag of the net where the butterflies were flapping; timing the least detail and leaving nothing to chance. The disclosure of these secret preparations is a fascinating one and the author seems argus-eyed as he takes into account all the colours of place and circumstance. But, every time, a minute mistake (the shadow of a flaw, the stopped hole of an unwatched possibility, a caprice of free will) spoils the necessitarian's pleasure and the two lives are diverging again with increased rapidity. Thus, Percival Q is prevented, by a bee stinging him on the lip, at the last minute, from coming to the party, to which fate with endless difficulty had managed to bring Anne; thus, by a trick of temper she fails to get the carefully prepared job in the lost property office where Q's brother is employed. But fate is much too persevering to be put off by failure. And when finally success is achieved it is reached by such delicate machinations that not the merest click is audible when at last the two are brought together.

  I shall not go into further details of this clever and delightful novel. It is the best known of Sebastian Knight's works, although his three later books surpass it in many ways. As in my demonstration of The Prismatic Bezel, my sole object is to show the workings, perhaps detrimentally to the impression of beauty left by the book itself, apart from its artifices. It contains, let me add, a passage so strangely connected with Sebastian's inner life at the time of the completing of the last chapters, that it deserves being quoted in contrast to a series of observations referring rather to the meanders of the author's brain than to the emotional side of his art.

  'William [Anne's first queer effeminate fiancй, who afterwards jilted her] saw her home as usual and cuddled her a little in the darkness of the doorway. All of a sudden, she felt that his face was wet. He covered it with his hand and groped for his handkerchief. "Raining in Paradise," he said… "the onion of happiness… poor Willy is willy nilly a willow." He kissed the corner of her mouth and then blew his nose with a faint moist squizzle. "Grown-up men don't cry," said Anne. "But I'm not a grown-up," he replied with a whimper. "That moon is childish, and that wet pavement is childish, and Love is a honey-suckling babe…" "Please stop," she said. "You know I hate when you go on talking like that. It's so silly, so…" "So Willy," he sighed. He kissed her again and they stood like some soft dark statue with two dim heads. A policeman passed leading the night on a leash and then paused to let it sniff at a pillar-box. "I'm as happy as you," she said, "but I don't want to cry in the least or to talk nonsense." "But can't you see," he whispered, "can't you see that happiness at its very best is but the zany of its own mortality?" "Good-night," said Anne. "Tomorrow at eight," he cried as she slipped away. He patted the door gently and presently was strolling do
wn the street. She is warm and she is pretty, he mused, and I love her, and it's all no good, no good, because we are dying. I cannot bear that backward glide into the past. That last kiss is already dead and The Woman in White [a film they had been to see that night] is stone dead, and the policeman who passed is dead too, and even the door is as dead as its nail. And that last thought is already a dead thing by now. Coates (the doctor) is right when he says that my heart is too small for my size. And sighs. He wandered on talking to himself, his shadow now pulling a long nose, now dropping a curtsy, as it slipped back round a lamp-post. When he reached his dismal lodgings he was a long time climbing the dark stairs. Before going to bed he knocked at the conjuror's door and found the old man standing in his underwear and inspecting a pair of black trousers. "Well?" said William…."They don't kinda like my accent," he replied, "but I guess I'm going to get that turn all the same." William sat down on the bed and said: "You ought to dye your hair." "I'm more bald than grey," said the conjuror. "I sometimes wonder," said William, "where the things we shed are – because they must go somewhere, you know – lost hair, fingernails…." "Been drinking again," suggested the conjuror without much curiosity. He folded his trousers with care and told William to quit the bed, so that he might put them under the mattress. William sat down on a chair and the conjuror went on with his business; the hairs bristled on his calves, his lips were pursed, his soft hands moved tenderly. "I am merely happy," said William. "You don't look it," said the solemn old man. "May I buy you a rabbit?" asked William. "I'll hire one when necessary," the conjuror replied drawing out the "necessary" as if it were an endless ribbon. "A ridiculous profession," said William, "a pick-pocket gone mad, a matter of patter. The pennies in a beggar's cap and the omelette in your top hat. Absurdly the same." "We are used to insult," said the conjuror. He calmly put out the light and William groped his way out. The books on the bed in his room seemed reluctant to move. As he undressed he imagined the forbidden bliss of a sunlit laundry: blue water and scarlet wrists. Might he beg Anne to wash his shirt? Had he really annoyed her again? Did she really believe they would be married some day? The pale little freckles on the glistening skin under her innocent eyes. The right front-tooth that protruded a little. Her soft warm neck. He felt again the pressure of tears. Would she go the way of May, Judy, Juliette, Augusta, and all the rest of his love-embers? He heard the dancing-girl in the next room locking the door, washing, bumping down a jug, wistfully clearing her throat. Something dropped with a tinkle. The conjuror began to snore.'