Glory

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Neither the foul weather nor the icy chill of the bedroom, where tradition forbade heating, could alter the meditative joie de vivre characteristic of Martin. He grew sincerely fond of his little living room, with its comfortable fireplace, its dusty pianola, innocuous lithographs on the walls, low wicker armchairs, and the cheap china bric-a-brac on the shelves. When, late at night, the sacred flame of the fireplace threatened to die, he would scrape the embers together, pile some wood chips on them, heap on a mountain of coal, fan the fire with the asthmatic bellows, and make the chimney draw by spreading an ample sheet of the Times across the mouth of the hearth. The taut sheet would grow warm and transparent, and the lines of print, mingling with the lines showing through from the reverse side, looked like the bizarre lettering of some mumbo-jumbo language. Then, as the hum and tumult of the fire increased, a fox-red, darkening spot would appear on the paper and suddenly burst through. The whole sheet, now aflame, would be instantly sucked in and sent flying up. And a belated passer-by, a gowned don, could observe, through the gloom of the gothic night, a fiery-haired witch emerge from the chimney into the starry sky. Next day Martin would pay a fine.

  Being of lively and sociable temperament Martin did not remain alone for long. Fairly soon he made friends with his downstairs neighbor Darwin, as well as with various men at the soccer field, the club, and the dining hall. He noticed that everyone felt it his duty to discuss Russia with him and to learn what he thought about the Revolution, intervention, Lenin and Trotsky; while some, who had visited Russia, praised Russian hospitality and asked if he happened to know a Mr. Ivanov in Moscow. Such talk nauseated Martin; casually taking a volume of Pushkin from his desk he would read aloud “Autumn” in Archibald Moon’s translation:

  O dismal period, visual enchantment!

  Sweet is to me thy farewell loveliness!

  I love the sumptuous withering of nature,

  The woods arrayed in gold and purple dress.

  This caused some astonishment, and only Darwin, a large, sleepy-looking Englishman in a canary-yellow jumper, who sprawled in an armchair, making wheezing sounds with his pipe and gazing up at the ceiling, would nod approvingly.

  This Darwin, who often dropped in after dinner, elucidated certain strict, primordial rules in full detail for Martin’s edification: a student must not walk outdoors in hat and overcoat, no matter how cold it was; one did not shake hands or wish a good morning, but greeted an acquaintance one happened to meet, even if it were Atom Thompson himself, with a grin and a breezy interjection. It was bad form to go out on the river in an ordinary rowboat: for this purpose there were punts and canoes. One should never repeat the old college witticisms, of which freshmen become immediately enamored. “Remember, though,” Darwin added wisely, “that even in observing these traditions you mustn’t overdo, for sometimes, to shock the snobs, it’s a good thing to go out in a bowler hat and with an umbrella under your arm.” Martin got the impression that Darwin had already been at the university a long time, several years, and he felt sorry for him as he did for any homebody. Darwin amazed him by his sleepiness, the sluggishness of his movements, a certain comfortableness about his whole being. Trying to stir his envy, Martin impetuously told him about his wanderings, unconsciously throwing in some of what he had invented for Bess’s benefit, and barely noticing how the fiction had consolidated. True, these exaggerations were innocent enough: the two or three picnics on the Crimean plateau turned into a habitual roaming of the steppes with a stick and knapsack; Alla Chernosvitov became a mysterious companion on yacht cruises, his walks with her a prolonged sojourn on one of the Greek islands, and the purplish outline of Sicily actual gardens and villas. Darwin would nod approvingly as he gazed at the ceiling. His eyes were pale bluish, vacant, and expressionless; the soles that he always exhibited, fond as he was of semireclining poses with his feet lodged in some high, comfortable position, were equipped with a complicated system of rubber strips. Everything about him, from those solidly shod feet to his bony nose, was high-quality, large, and imperturbable.

  14

  About three times a month Martin was summoned by his “tutor,” that is the professor in charge of keeping an eye on lecture attendance, visiting the sick student, giving permission for trips to London, and making reprimands when one was fined (for getting home after midnight or not wearing the academic gown in the evening). He was a wizened, pigeon-toed, keen-eyed little old man, a Latinist, a translator of Horace, and a great oyster fancier. “Your English is improving,” he once said to Martin. “That’s good. Have you got to know many people?”

  “Oh, yes,” answered Martin.

  “Are you friends with Darwin, for instance?”

  “Oh, yes,” Martin repeated.

  “I’m glad. He’s a splendid specimen. Three years in the trenches, France and Mesopotamia, the Victoria Cross, and not a scratch, either morally or physically. Literary success might have gone to his head, but that didn’t happen either.”

  Besides the facts that Darwin had interrupted his college studies at eighteen to enlist and had recently published a collection of short stories which connoisseurs were raving about, Martin learned that he was a boxing Blue, that he had spent his childhood in Madeira and Hawaii, and that his father was a famous admiral. Martin’s own meager experience seemed insignificant, pathetic, and he felt ashamed about certain yarns he had spun. When Darwin slouched into his room that evening, the situation seemed both humorous and embarrassing to Martin. Little by little he began to fish for information about Mesopotamia and the short stories, and Darwin kept giving facetious answers, saying that the best book he had ever written was a little manual for students entitled “A Complete Description of Sixty-seven Ways of Getting inside Trinity College after Closing of the Gates, with a Detailed Plan of its Walls and Railings, First and Last Edition, Verified many Times by the Author, who has never been Caught.” But Martin insisted on what was interesting and important to him: the collection of short stories connoisseurs were raving about. At last Darwin said, “All right, I’ll give you a copy. Let’s go to my digs.”

  He had furnished his digs himself according to his taste. There were supernaturally comfortable leather armchairs, in which the body would melt as it sank into a yielding abyss, and on the mantelpiece stood a large photograph depicting a bitch lying in complete mollitude on her side and the plump behinds of her six sucklings in a row. Martin had already seen numerous students’ rooms: there were those like his, pleasant, but not pampered by the lodger, containing extraneous objects belonging to the landlord; there was the athlete’s room with silver trophies on a shelf and a broken oar on the wall; there was the den littered with books and dusted with cigarette ash; finally, there was one of the nastiest abodes you could discover—nearly bare, with bright-yellow wallpaper, a room where there was only one picture, but that one a Cézanne (charcoal doodle vaguely resembling the female form), and where a fourteenth-century bishop of colored wood stood proffering the stump of his forearm. The most cordial digs of all were Darwin’s, especially if you looked carefully and browsed a bit: what a gem, for example, that set of newspaper issues Darwin had edited in the trenches! The paper was cheerful, jaunty, full of funny jingles; heaven only knows how and where the type was set; and it used chance clichés to beautify blanks—corset advertisements found in the ruins of some printing plant.

  “Here,” said Darwin, producing a book, “take it.”

  The book proved to be remarkable. The pieces were not really short stories—no, they were rather more like tractates, twenty tractates of equal length. The first was called “Corkscrews,” and contained a thousand interesting things about corkscrews, their history, beauty, and virtues. Another was on parrots, a third on playing cards, a fourth on infernal machines, a fifth on reflections in water. And there was one on trains, and in it Martin found everything he loved: the telegraph poles, cutting short the wires’ upward sweep, the dining car with those bottles of Vichy or Evian that seemed to scan through the win
dow the trees flying past; and those crazy-eyed waiters, and that minuscule kitchen, where swaying and sweating a white-capped man cook could be seen crumbing a fish.

  If Martin had ever thought of becoming a writer and been tormented by a writer’s covetousness (so akin to the fear of death), by that constant state of anxiety compelling one to fix indelibly this or that evanescent trifle, perhaps these dissertations on minutiae that were deeply familiar to him might have aroused in him a pang of envy and the desire to write of the same things still better. Instead, such warm good will toward Darwin overwhelmed him that his eyes even began to tickle. And next morning when, on the way to his lecture, he overtook his friend at the corner, he said with perfect decorum and not looking him in the face that he had liked the book, and silently walked beside him, falling in with Darwin’s indolent but swingy step.

  The lecture halls were scattered about the whole town. If one lecture immediately followed another but was given in a different hall, you had to hop on your bicycle, or else scuttle along back alleys and cross the echoing stone of courts. Limpid chimes called back and forth from tower to tower; the din of motors, the crepitation of wheels, and the tinkle of bicycle bells filled the narrow streets. During the lecture the glittering swarm of bicycles clustered at the gates, awaiting their owners. The black-gowned lecturer would mount the platform and with a thump put his tasseled square cap on the lectern.

  15

  When he entered the university it took Martin a long time to decide on a field of study. There were so many, and all were fascinating. He procrastinated on their outskirts, finding everywhere the same magical spring of vital elixir. He was excited by the viaduct suspended over an alpine precipice, by steel come to life, by the divine exactitude of calculation. He understood that impressionable archeologist who, after having cleared the path to as yet unknown tombs and treasures, knocked on the door before entering, and, once inside, fainted with emotion. Beauty dwells in the light and stillness of laboratories: like an expert diver gliding through the water with open eyes, the biologist gazes with relaxed eyelids into the microscope’s depths, and his neck and forehead slowly begin to flush, and, tearing himself away from the eyepiece, he says, “That settles everything.” Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net, and Martin envied those who attained that vertigo and, with a new calculation, overcame their fear. Predicting an element or creating a theory, discovering a mountain chain or naming a new animal, were all equally enticing. In the study of history Martin liked what he could imagine clearly, and therefore he was fond of Carlyle. With his poor memory for dates and scorn for generalizations, he avidly sought out what was live and human, what belonged to that class of astonishing details which well may satiate coming generations as they watch old, drizzly films of our day. He vividly visualized the shivering white day, the simplicity of the black guillotine, and the clumsy tussle on the scaffold, where the executioners roughly handle a bare-shouldered fat man while, in the crowd, a good-natured citoyen raises by the elbows a citoyenne whose curiosity exceeds her stature.

  There were other vaguer fields, such as the mists of law, government, economics. What scared him away from them was that the scintilla he sought in everything was too deeply buried there. Undecided what to undertake, what to select, Martin gradually rejected all that might take a too exclusive hold over him. Still to be considered was literature. Here, too, Martin found intimations of bliss; how thrilling was that humdrum exchange about weather and sport between Horace and Maecenas, or the grief of old Lear, uttering the mannered names of his daughters’ whippets that barked at him! Just as, in the Russian version of the New Testament, Martin enjoyed coming across “green grass” or “indigo chiton,” in literature he sought not the general sense, but the unexpected, sunlit clearings, where you can stretch until your joints crunch, and remain entranced. He read a very great deal, but it was mostly rereading; and he did have occasional accidents in the course of literary conversation. For example, he once confused Plutarch with Petrarch, and once called Calderón a Scottish poet.

  Not every writer was able to stir him. He remained unmoved when, on his uncle’s advice, he read Lamartine, or when his uncle himself declaimed “Le Lac” with a sob in his voice, shaking his head and adding with helpless emotion, “Comme c’est beau.” The prospect of studying wordy, watery works and their influence on other wordy, watery works did not attract him. At this rate he probably never would have made a choice if some mysterious voice had not kept whispering that he was not free to choose, that there was one thing he must study. During the sumptuous Swiss autumn he felt for the first time that he was, after all, an exile, doomed to live far from home. That word “exile” had a delicious sound: Martin considered the blackness of the coniferous night, sensed a Byronic pallor on his cheeks, and saw himself in a cloak. This cloak he donned at Cambridge, albeit it was only a lightweight academic gown, of a bluish fabric, semitransparent when held up to the light, with many pleats on the shoulders and with winglike half-sleeves that were worn thrown back. The bliss of spiritual solitude and the excitement of travel took on a new significance. It was as if Martin had found the right key to all the vague, tender, and fierce feelings that besieged him.

  At that time the chair of Russian literature and history was occupied by the distinguished scholar Archibald Moon. He had lived fairly long in Russia, and had been everywhere, met everyone, seen everything there. Now, pale and dark-haired, with a pince-nez on his thin nose, he could be observed riding by, sitting perfectly upright, on a bicycle with high handlebars; or, at dinner in the renowned hall with oaken tables and huge stained-glass windows, he would jerk his head from side to side like a bird, and crumble bread extremely fast between his long fingers. They said the only thing this Englishman loved in the world was Russia. Many people could not understand why he had not remained there. Moon’s reply to questions of that kind would invariably be: “Ask Robertson” (the orientalist) “why he did not stay in Babylon.” The perfectly reasonable objection would be raised that Babylon no longer existed. Moon would nod with a sly, silent smile. He saw in the Bolshevist insurrection a certain clear-cut finality. While he willingly allowed that, by-and-by, after the primitive phases, some civilization might develop in the “Soviet Union,” he nevertheless maintained that Russia was concluded and unrepeatable, that you could embrace it like a splendid amphora and put it behind glass. The clay kitchen pot now being baked there had nothing in common with it. The civil war seemed absurd to him: one side fighting for the ghost of the past, the other for the ghost of the future, and meanwhile Archibald Moon quietly had stolen Russia and locked it up in his study. He admired this finality. It was colored by the blue of waters and the transparent porphyry of Pushkin’s poetry. For nearly two years now he had been working on an English-language history of Russia, and he hoped to squeeze it all into one plump volume. An obvious motto (“A thing of beauty is a joy forever”), ultrathin paper, a soft Morocco binding. The task was a difficult one: to find a harmony between erudition and tight picturesque prose, to give a perfect image of one orbicular millennium.

  16

  Archibald Moon amazed and captivated Martin. His slow Russian speech, from which it had taken him years of patience to weed out the last vestige of English velarity, was smooth, simple, and expressive. His knowledge was distinguished by freshness, precision, and depth. He would read aloud from Russian poets whose very names Martin did not know. Holding down the page with long, slightly trembling fingers, Archibald Moon poured out iambic tetrameters. The room was in penumbra, and the lamplight picked out only the page and Moon’s face, with a pale gloss on the cheekbones, fine creases on the forehead, and translucent pink ears. When he had finished he would compress his thin lips, take off his pince-nez as carefully as if it were a dragonfly, and clean the lenses with chamois cloth. Martin sat on the edge of his armchair with his sq
uare black cap on his knees.

  “For Heaven’s sake take off your gown and put that cap away somewhere,” Moon would say with a pained frown. “Don’t tell me you enjoy fussing with that tassel. Away, away with it.”

  He would push a glass cigarette box with the college blazon on its silver lid toward Martin, or, from a cabinet in the wall, produce a bottle of whisky, a soda siphon and two glasses.

  “By the way, do you know what a grape-transporting cart is called there?” he asked with a toss of his head, and, having ascertained that Martin did not, went on with gusto: “Mozhara, mozhara, sir,” and it was not clear which gave him greater pleasure: that he knew the Crimea better than did Martin, or that he could pronounce the word “sir” according to its Russian pronunciation which rhymes it with “air.” He joyfully informed Martin that the Russian “huligan” came from the name of a gang of Irish robbers, and that Golodai Island was named not after “golod” (hunger) but for an Englishman named Holliday who built a factory there. Once, when, speaking of some ignorant journalist (whom Moon had wrathfully taken to task in the Times), Martin said that the journalist had not replied because he probably sdreyfil (had funked), Moon raised his eyebrows, consulted a dictionary, and asked Martin if by chance he had ever lived in the Volga region. On another occasion, when Martin used the colloquialism ugrobil (“bumped off”), Moon grew angry and shouted that such a word did not and could not exist in Russian. “I’ve heard it, everybody knows it,” Martin said meekly, and was sustained by Sonia, who was sitting on the couch next to Mrs. Zilanov and watching not without curiosity Martin playing the host.