The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

by Vladimir Nabokov

  'It's really awfully good of you to take all this trouble,' I' laid.

  She sat down on the bench beside me, and as the bench was very short and I am rather – well – on the sturdy side – her shoulder touched mine. I moistened my lips with my tongue and scrawled lines on the ground with the stick I was holding.

  'What are you trying to draw?' she asked and then cleared' her throat.

  'My thought-waves,' I answered foolishly.

  'Once upon a time,' she said softly, 'I kissed a man just because he could write his name upside down.'

  The stick dropped from my hand. I stared at Madame Lecerf. I stared at her smooth white brow, I saw her violet dark eyelids, which she had lowered, possibly mistaking my stare – saw a tiny pale birth-mark on the pale cheek, the delicate wings of her nose, the pucker of her upper lip, as she bent her dark head, the dull whiteness of her throat, the lacquered rose-red nails of her thin fingers. She lifted her face, her queer velvety eyes with that iris placed slightly higher than usual, looked at my lips.

  I got up.

  'What's the matter,' she said, 'what are you thinking about?'

  I shook my head. But she was right. I was thinking of something now – something that had to be solved, at once…

  'Why, are we going in?' she asked as we moved up the path.

  I nodded.

  'But she won't be down before another minute, you know. Tell me why are you sulking?'

  I think I stopped and stared at her again, this time at her I slim little figure in that buff, close-fitting frock.

  I moved on, brooding heavily, and the sun-dappled path seemed to frown back at me.

  'Vous n'кtes guиre amiable,' said Madame Lecerf.

  There was a table and several chairs on the terrace. The silent blond person whom I had seen at lunch was sitting there examining the works of his watch. As I sat down I clumsily jolted his elbow and he let drop a tiny screw.

  'Boga radi,' he said (don't mention it) as I apologized.

  (Oh, he was Russian, was he? Good, that would help me.)

  The lady stood with her back to us, humming gently, her foot tapping the stone flags.

  It was then that I turned to my silent compatriot who was ogling his broken watch.

  'Ah-oo-neigh na-sheiky pah-ook,' I said softly.

  The lady's hand flew up to the nape of her neck, she turned on her heel.

  'Shto?' (what?) asked my slow-minded compatriot, glancing at me. Then he looked at the lady, grinned uncomfortably and fumbled with his watch.

  'J'ai quelque chose dans le cou…. There's something on my neck, I feel it,' said Madame Lecerf.

  'As a matter of fact,' I said, 'I have just been telling this Russian gentleman that I thought there was a spider on your neck. But I was mistaken, it was a trick of light.'

  'Shall we put on the gramophone?' she asked brightly.

  'I'm awfully sorry,' I said, 'but I think I must be going home. You'll excuse me won't you?'

  'Mais vous кtes fou,' she cried, 'you are mad, don't you want to see my mend?'

  'Another time perhaps,' I said soothingly, 'another time.'

  'Tell me,' she said following me into the garden, 'what is the matter?'

  'It was very clever of you,' I said, in our liberal grand Russian language, 'it was very clever of you to make me believe you were talking about your friend when all the time you were talking about yourself. This little hoax would have gone on for quite a long time if fate had not pushed your elbow, and now you've spilled the curds and whey. Because I happen to have met your former husband's cousin, the one who could write upside down. So I made a little test. And when you subconsciously caught the Russian sentence I muttered aside….' No, I did not say a word of all this. I just bowed myself out of the garden. She will be sent a copy of this book and will understand.

  18

  That question which I had wished to ask Nina remained unuttered. I had wished to ask her whether she ever realized that the wan-faced man, whose presence she had found so tedious, was one of the most remarkable writers of his time. What was the use of asking! Books mean nothing to a woman of her kind; her own life seems to her to contain the thrills of a hundred novels. Had she been condemned to spend a whole day shut up in a library, she would have been found dead about noon. I am quite sure that Sebastian never alluded to his work in her presence: it would have been like discussing sundials with a bat. So let us leave that bat to quiver and wheel in the deepening dusk: the clumsy mimic of a swallow.

  In those last and saddest years of his life Sebastian wrote The Doubtful Asphodel, which is unquestionably his masterpiece. Where and how dig he write it? In the reading room of the British Museum (far from Mr Goodman's vigilant eye). At a humble table deep in the corner of a Parisian 'bistro' (not of the kind that his mistress might patronize). In a deck-chair under an orange parasol somewhere in Cannes or Juan, when she and her gang had deserted him for a spree elsewhere. In the waiting room of an anonymous station, between two heart attacks. In a hotel, to the clatter of plates being washed in the yard. In many other places which I can but vaguely conjecture. The theme of the book is simple: a man is dying: you feel him sinking throughout the book; his thought and his memories pervade the whole with greater or lesser distinction (like the swell and fall of uneven breathing), now rolling up this image, now that, letting it ride in the wind, or even tossing it out on the shore, where it seems to move and live for a minute on its own and presently is drawn back again by grey seas where it sinks or is strangely transfigured. A man is dying, and he is the hero of the tale; but whereas the lives of other people in the book seem perfectly realistic (or at least realistic in a Knightian sense), the reader is kept ignorant as to who the dying man is, and where his deathbed stands or floats, or whether it is a bed at all. The man is the book; the book itself is heaving and dying, and drawing up a ghostly knee. One thought-image, then another breaks upon the shores of consciousness, and we follow the thing or the being that has been evoked: stray remnants of a wrecked life; sluggish fancies which crawl and then unfurl eyed wings. They are, these lives, but commentaries to the main subject. We follow the gentle old chess player Schwarz, who sits down on a chair in a room in a house, to teach an orphan boy the moves of the knight; we meet the fat Bohemian woman with that grey streak showing in the fast colour of her cheaply dyed hair; we listen to a pale wretch noisily denouncing the policy of oppression to an attentive plainclothes man in an ill-famed public-house. The lovely tall prima donna steps in her haste into a puddle, and her silver shoes are ruined. An old man sobs and is soothed by a soft-lipped girl in mourning. Professor Nussbaum, a Swiss scientist, shoots his young mistress and himself dead in a hotel room at half past three in the morning. They come and go, these and other people, opening and shutting doors, living as long as the way they follow is lit, and are engulfed in turn by the waves of the dominant theme: a man is dying. He seems to move an arm or turn his head on what might be a pillow, and as he moves, this or that life we have just been watching, fades or changes. At moments, his personality grows conscious of itself, and then we feel that we are passing down some main artery of the book. 'Now, when it was too late, and Life's shops were closed, he regretted not having bought a certain book he had always wanted; never having gone through an earthquake, a fire, a train accident; never having seen Tatsienlu in Tibet, or heard blue magpies chattering in Chinese willows; not having spoken to that errant schoolgirl with shameless eyes, met one day in a lonely glade; not having laughed at the poor little joke of a shy ugly woman, when no one had laughed in the room; having missed trains, allusions, and opportunities; not having handed the penny he had in his pocket to that old street violinist playing to himself tremulously on a certain bleak day in a certain forgotten town.'

  Sebastian Knight had always liked juggling with themes, making them clash or blending them cunningly, making them express that hidden meaning, which could only be expressed in a succession of waves, as the music of a Chinese buoy can be made to sound
only by undulation. In The Doubtful Asphodel, his method has attained perfection. It is not the parts that matter, it is their combinations.

  There seems to be a method, too, in the author's way of expressing the physical process of dying: the steps leading into darkness; action being taken in turns by the brain, the flesh, the lungs. First the brain follows up a certain hierarchy of ideas – ideas about death: sham-clever thoughts scribbled in the margin of a borrowed book (the episode of the philosopher): 'Attraction of death: physical growth considered upside down as the lengthening of a suspended drop; at last falling into nothing.' Thoughts, poetical, religious: '…the swamp of rank materialism and the golden paradises of those whom Dean Park calls the optimystics….' 'But the dying man knew that these were not real ideas; that only one half of the notion of death can be said really to exist: this side of the question – the wrench, the parting, the quay of life gently moving away aflutter with handkerchiefs: ah I he was already on the other side, if he could see the beach receding; no, not quite – if he was still thinking.' (Thus, one who has come to see a friend away may stay on deck too late, but still not become a traveller.)

  Then, little by little, the demons of physical sickness smother with mountains of pain all kinds of thought, philosophy, surmise, memories, hope, regret. We stumble and crawl through hideous landscapes, nor do we mind where we go – because it is all anguish and nothing bur. anguish. The method is now reversed. Instead of those thought-images which radiated fainter and fainter, as we followed them down blind alleys, it is now the slow assault of horrible uncouth visions drawing upon us and hemming us in: the story of a tortured child; an exile's account of life in the cruel country whence he fled; a meek lunatic with a black eye; a farmer kicking his dog – lustily, wickedly. Then the pain fades too. 'Now he was left so exhausted that he failed to be interested in death.' Thus 'sweaty men snore in a crowded third-class carriage; thus a schoolboy falls asleep over his unfinished sum.' 'I am tired, tired… a tyre rolling and rolling by itself, now wobbling, now slowing down, now….

  This is the moment when a wave of light suddenly floods the book: '…as if somebody had flung open the door and people in the room have started up, blinking, feverishly picking up parcels.' We feel that we are on the brink of some absolute truth, dazzling in its splendour and at the same time almost homely in its perfect simplicity. By an incredible feat of suggestive wording, the author makes us believe that he knows the truth about death and that he is going to tell it. In a moment or two, at the end of this sentence, in the middle of the next, or perhaps a little further still, we shall learn something that will change all our concepts, as if we discovered that by moving our arms in some simple, but never yet attempted manner, we could fly. 'The hardest knot is but a meandering string; tough to the finger nails, but really a matter of lazy and graceful loopings. The eye undoes it, while clumsy fingers bleed. He (the dying man) was that knot, and he would be untied at once, if he could manage to see and follow the thread. And hot only himself, everything would be unravelled – everything that he might imagine in our childish terms of space and time, both being riddles invented by man as riddles, and thus coming back to us: the boomerangs of nonsense…. Now he had caught something real, which had nothing to do with any of the thoughts or feelings, or experiences he might have had in the kindergarten of life….

  The answer to all questions of life and death, 'the absolute solution' was written all over the world he had known: it was like a traveller realizing that the wild country he surveys is not an accidental assembly of natural phenomena, but the page in a book where these mountains and forests, and fields, and rivers are disposed in such a way as to form a coherent sentence; the vowel of a lake fusing with the con. sonant of a sibilant slope; the windings of a road writing its message in a round hand, as clear as that of one's father; trees conversing in dumb-show, making sense to one who has learnt the gestures of their language…. Thus the traveller spells the landscape and its sense is disclosed, and likewise, the intricate pattern of human life turns out to be monogrammatic, now quite clear to the inner eye disentangling the interwoven letters, And the word, the meaning which appears is astounding in its simplicity: the greatest surprise being perhaps that in the course of one's earthly existence, with one's brain encompassed by an iron ring, by the close-fitting dream of one's own personality – one had not made by chance that simple mental jerk, which would have set free imprisoned thought and granted it the great understanding, Now the puzzle was solved, 'And as the meaning of all things shone through their shapes, many ideas and events which had seemed of the utmost importance dwindled not to insignificance, for nothing could be insignificant now, but to the same size which other ideas and events, once denied any importance, now attained.' Thus, such shining giants of our brain as science, art or religion fell out of the familiar scheme of their classification, and joining hands, were mixed and joyfully levelled. Thus, a cherry stone and its tiny shadow which lay on the painted wood of a tired bench, or a bit of tom paper, or any other such trifle out of millions and millions of trifles grew to a wonderful size, Remodelled and re-combined, the world yielded its sense to the soul as naturally as both breathed.

  And now we shall know what exactly it is; the word will be uttered – and you, and I, and everyone in the world will slap himself on the forehead: What fools we have been! At this last bend of his book the author seems to pause for a minute, as if he were pondering whether it were wise to let the truth out. He seems to lift his head and to leave the dying man, whose thoughts he was following, and to turn away and to think: Shall we follow him to the end? Shall we whisper the word which will shatter the snug silence of our brains? We shall. We have gone too far as it is, and the word is being already formed, and will come out. And we turn and bend again over a hazy bed, over a grey, floating form – lower and lower…. But that minute of doubt was fatal: the man is dead.

  The man is dead and we do not know. The asphodel on the other shore is as doubtful as ever. We hold a dead book in our hands. Or are we mistaken? I sometimes feel when I turn the pages of Sebastian's masterpiece that the 'absolute solution' is there, somewhere, concealed in some passage I have read too hastily, or that it is intertwined with other words whose familiar guise deceived me. I don't know any other book that gives one this special sensation, and perhaps this was the author's special intention.

  I recall vividly the day when I saw The Doubtful Asphodel announced in an English paper. I had come across a copy of that paper in the lobby of a hotel in Paris, where I was waiting for a man whom my firm wanted wheedled into settling a certain deal. I am not good at wheedling, and generally the business seemed to me less promising than it seemed to my employers. And as I sat there alone in the lugubriously comfortable hall, and read the publisher's advertisement and Sebastian's handsome black name in block letters, I envied his lot more acutely than I had ever envied it before. I did not know where he was at the time, I had not seen him for at least six years, nor did I know of his being so ill and so miserable. On the contrary, that announcement of his book seemed to me a token of happiness – and I imagined him standing in a warm cheerful room at some club, with his hands in his pockets, his ears glowing, his eyes moist and bright, a smile fluttering on his lips – and all the other people in the room standing round him, holding glasses of port, and laughing at his jokes. It was a silly picture, but it kept shining in its trembling pattern of white shirtfronts and black dinner jackets and mellow-coloured wine, and clear-cut faces, as one of those coloured photographs you see on the back of magazines. I decided to get that book as soon as it was published, I always used to get his books at once, but somehow I was particularly impatient to get this one. Presently the person I was waiting for came down. He was an Englishman, and fairly well-read. As we talked for a few moments about ordinary things before broaching the business in hand, I pointed casually to the advertisement in the paper and asked whether he had read any of Sebastian Knight's books. He said he had read one or two – The Pr
ismatic Something and Lost Property. I asked him whether he had liked them. He said he had in a way, but the author seemed to him a terrible snob, intellectually, at least. Asked to explain, he added that Knight seemed to him to be constantly playing some game of his own invention, without telling his partners its rules. He said he preferred books that made one think, and Knight's books didn't – they left you puzzled and cross. Then he talked of another living author, whom he thought so much better than Knight. I took advantage of a pause to enter on our business conversation. It did not prove as successful as my firm had expected.

  The Doubtful Asphodel obtained many reviews, and most of them were long and quite flattering. But here and there the hint kept recurring that the author was a tired author, which seemed another way of saying that he was just an old bore. I even caught a faint suggestion of commiseration, as if they knew certain sad dreary things about the author which were not really in the book, but which permeated their attitude towards it. One critic even went as far as to say that he read it 'with mingled feelings, because it was a rather unpleasant experience for the reader, to sit beside a deathbed and never be quite sure whether the author was the doctor or the patient'. Nearly all the reviews gave to understand that the book was a little too long, and that many passages were obscure and obscurely aggravating. All praised Sebastian Knight's 'sincerity' – whatever that was. I wondered what Sebastian thought of those reviews.

  I lent my copy to a friend who kept it several weeks without reading it, and then lost it in a train. I got another and never lent it to anybody. Yes, I think that of all his books this is my favourite one. I don't know whether it makes one 'think', and I don't much care if it does not. I like it for its own sake. I like its manners. And sometimes I tell myself that it would not be inordinately hard to translate it into Russian.