Look at the Harlequins!

by Vladimir Nabokov

  I might have been displeased by the tolerance she showed Basilevski (knowing none of his works and only vaguely aware of his preposterous reputation) had it not occurred to me that the theme of her sympathy was repeating, as it were, the friendly phase of my own initial relations with that faux bonhomme. From behind a more or less Doric column I overheard him asking my naïve gentle Annette had she any idea why I hated so fiercely Gorki (for whom he cultivated total veneration). Was it because I resented the world fame of a proletarian? Had I really read any of that wonderful writer’s books? Annette had looked puzzled but all at once a charming childish smile illumined her whole face and she recalled The Mother, a corny Soviet film that I had criticized, she said, “because the tears rolling down the faces were too big and too slow.”

  “Aha! That explains a lot,” proclaimed Basilevski with gloomy satisfaction.

  10

  I received the typed translations of The Red Topper (sic) and Camera Lucida virtually at the same time, in the autumn of 1937. They proved to be even more ignoble than I expected. Miss Haworth, an Englishwoman, had spent three happy years in Moscow where her father had been Ambassador; Mr. Kulich was an elderly Russian-born New Yorker who signed his letters Ben. Both made identical mistakes, choosing the wrong term in their identical dictionaries, and with identical recklessness never bothering to check the treacherous homonym of a familiar-looking word. They were blind to contextual shades of color and deaf to nuances of noise. Their classification of natural objects seldom descended from the class to the family; still more seldom to the genus in the strict sense. They confused the specimen with the species; Hop, Leap, and Jump wore in their minds the drab uniform of regimented synonymity; and not one page passed without a boner. What struck me as especially fascinating, in a dreadful diabolical way, was their taking for granted that a respectable author could have written this or that descriptive passage, which their ignorance and carelessness had reduced to the cries and grunts of a cretin. In all their habits of expression Ben Kulich and Miss Haworth were so close that I now think they might have been secretly married to one another and had corresponded regularly when trying to settle a tricky paragraph; or else, maybe, they used to meet midway for lexical picnics on the grassy lip of some crater in the Azores.

  It took me several months to revise those atrocities and dictate my revisions to Annette. She derived her English from the four years she had spent at an American boarding school in Constantinople (1920–1924), the Blagovos’ first stage of westward expatriation. I was amazed to see how fast her vocabulary grew and improved in the performance of her new functions and was amused by the innocent pride she took in correctly taking down the blasts and sarcasms I directed in letters to Allan & Overton, London, and James Lodge, New York. In fact, her doigté in English (and French) was better than in the typing of Russian texts. Minor stumbles were, of course, bound to occur in any language. One day, in referring to the carbon copy of a spate of corrections already posted to my patient Allan, I discovered a trivial slip she had made, a mere typo (“here” instead of “hero,” or perhaps “that” instead of “hat,” I don’t even remember—but there was an “h” somewhere, I think) which, however, gave the sentence a dismally flat, but, alas, not implausible sense (verisimilitude has been the undoing of many a conscientious proofreader). A telegram could eliminate the fault incontinently, but an overworked edgy author finds such events jarring—and I voiced my annoyance with unwarranted vehemence. Annette started looking for a telegram form in the (wrong) drawer and said, without raising her head:

  “She would have helped you so much better than I, though I really am doing my best (strashno starayus’, trying terribly).”

  We never referred to Iris—that was a tacit condition in the code of our marriage—but I instantly understood that Annette meant her and not the inept English girl whom an agency had sent me several weeks before and got back with wrappage and string. For some occult reason (overwork again) I felt the tears welling and before I could get up and leave the room, I found myself shamelessly sobbing and hitting a fat anonymous book with my fist. She glided into my arms, also weeping, and that same evening we went to see René Clair’s new film, followed by supper at the Grand Velour.

  During those months of correcting and partly rewriting The Red Topper and the other thing, I began to experience the pangs of a strange transformation. I did not wake up one Central European morning as a great scarab with more legs than any beetle can have, but certain excruciating tearings of secret tissues did take place in me. The Russian typewriter was closed like a coffin. The end of The Dare had been delivered to Patria. Annette and I planned to go in the spring to England (a plan never executed) and in the summer of 1939 to America (where she was to die fourteen years later). By the middle of 1938 I felt I could sit back and quietly enjoy both the private praise bestowed upon me by Andoverton and Lodge in their letters and the public accusations of aristocratic obscurity which facetious criticules in the Sunday papers directed at the style of such passages in the English versions of my two novels as had been authored by me alone. It was, however, quite a different matter “to work without net” (as Russian acrobats say), when attempting to compose a novel straight in English, for now there was no Russian safety net spread below, between me and the lighted circlet of the arena.

  As was also to happen in regard to my next English books (including the present sketch), the title of my first one came to me at the moment of impregnation, long before actual birth and growth. Holding that name to the light, I distinguished the entire contents of the semitransparent capsule. The title was to be without any choice or change: See under Real. A preview of its eventual tribulations in the catalogues of public libraries could not have deterred me.

  The idea may have been an oblique effect of the insult dealt by the two bunglers to my careful art. An English novelist, a brilliant and unique performer, was supposed to have recently died. The story of his life was being knocked together by the uninformed, coarse-minded, malevolent Hamlet Godman, an Oxonian Dane, who found in this grotesque task a Kovalevskian “outlet” for the literary flops that his proper mediocrity fully deserved. The biography was being edited, rather unfortunately for its reckless concocter, by the indignant brother of the dead novelist. As the opening chapter unfolded its first reptilian coil (with insinuations of “masturbation guilt” and the castration of toy soldiers) there commenced what was to me the delight and the magic of my book: fraternal footnotes, half-a-dozen lines per page, then more, then much more, which started to question, then refute, then demolish by ridicule the would-be biographer’s doctored anecdotes and vulgar inventions. A multiplication of such notes at the bottom of the page led to an ominous increase (no doubt disturbing to clubby or convalescent readers) of astronomical symbols bespeckling the text. By the end of the biographee’s college years the height of the critical apparatus had reached one third of each page. Editorial warnings of a national disaster—flooded fields and so on—accompanied a further rise of the water line. By page 200 the footnote material had crowded out three-quarters of the text and the type of the note had changed, psychologically at least (I loathe typographical frolics in books) from brevier to long primer. In the course of the last chapters the commentary not only replaced the entire text but finally swelled to boldface. “We witness here the admirable phenomenon of a bogus biographie romancée being gradually supplanted by the true story of a great man’s life.” For good measure I appended a three-page account of the great annotator’s academic career: “He now teaches Modern Literature, including his brother’s works, at Paragon University, Oregon.”

  This is the description of a novel written almost forty-five years ago and probably forgotten by the general public. I have never reread it because I reread (je relis, pere-chityvayu—I’m teasing an adorable mistress!) only the page proofs of my paperbacks; and for reasons which, I am sure, J. Lodge finds judicious, the thing is still in its hard-cover instar. But in rosy retrospect I feel it as a plea
surable event, and have completely dissociated it in my mind from the terrors and torments that attended the writing of that rather lightweight little satire.

  Actually, its composition, despite the pleasure (maybe also noxious) that the iridescent bubbles in my alembics gave me after a night of inspiration, trial, and triumph (look at the harlequins, everybody look—Iris, Annette, Bel, Louise, and you, you, my ultimate and immortal one!), almost led to the dementia paralytica that I feared since youth.

  In the world of athletic games there has never been, I think, a World Champion of Lawn Tennis and Ski; yet in two Literatures, as dissimilar as grass and snow, I have been the first to achieve that kind of feat. I do not know (being a complete non-athlete, whom the sports pages of a newspaper bore almost as much as does its kitchen section) what physical stress may be involved in serving one day a sequence of thirty-six aces at sea level and on the next soaring from a ski jump 136 meters through bright mountain air. Colossal, no doubt, and, perhaps, inconceivable. But I have managed to transcend the rack and the wrench of literary metamorphosis.

  We think in images, not in words; all right; when, however, we compose, recall, or refashion at midnight in our brain something we wish to say in tomorrow’s sermon, or have said to Dolly in a recent dream, or wish we had said to that impertinent proctor twenty years ago, the images we think in are, of course, verbal—and even audible if we happen to be lonely and old. We do not usually think in words, since most of life is mimodrama, but we certainly do imagine words when we need them, just as we imagine everything else capable of being perceived in this, or even in a still more unlikely, world. The book in my mind appeared at first, under my right cheek (I sleep on my non-cardial side), as a varicolored procession with a head and a tail, winding in a general western direction through an attentive town. The children among you and all my old selves on their thresholds were being promised a stunning show. I then saw the show in full detail with every scene in its place, every trapeze in the stars. Yet it was not a masque, not a circus, but a bound book, a short novel in a tongue as far removed as Thracian or Pahlavi from the fata-morganic prose that I had willed into being in the desert of exile. An upsurge of nausea overcame me at the thought of imagining a hundred-thousand adequate words and I switched on the light and called to Annette in the adjacent bedroom to give me one of my strictly rationed tablets.

  The evolution of my English, like that of birds, had had its ups and downs. A beloved Cockney nurse had looked after me from 1900 (when I was one year old) to 1903. She was followed by a succession of three English governesses (1903–1906, 1907–1909, and November, 1909, to Christmas of the same year) whom I see over the shoulder of time as representing, mythologically, Didactic Prose, Dramatic Poetry, and the Erotic Idyll. My grand-aunt, a dear person with uncommonly liberal views, gave in, however, to domestic considerations, and discharged Cherry Neaple, my last shepherdess. After an interlude of Russian and French pedagogy, two English tutors more or less succeeded each other between 1912 and 1916, rather comically overlapping in the spring of 1914 when they competed for the favors of a young village beauty who had been my girl in the first place. English fairy tales had been replaced around 1910 by the B.O.P., immediately followed by all the Tauchnitz volumes that had accumulated in the family libraries. Throughout adolescence I read, in pairs, and both with the same rich thrill, Othello and Onegin, Tyutchev and Tennyson, Browning and Blok. During my three Cambridge years (1919–1922) and thereafter, till April 23, 1930, my domestic tongue remained English, while the body of my own Russian works started to grow and was soon to disorb my household gods.

  So far so good. But the phrase itself is a glib cliché; and the question confronting me in Paris, in the late Thirties, was precisely could I fight off the formula and rip up the ready-made, and switch from my glorious self-developed Russian, not to the dead leaden English of the high seas with dummies in sailor suits, but an English I alone would be responsible for, in all its new ripples and changing light?

  I daresay the description of my literary troubles will be skipped by the common reader; yet for my sake, rather than his, I wish to dwell mercilessly on a situation that was bad enough before I left Europe but almost killed me during the crossing.

  Russian and English had existed for years in my mind as two worlds detached from one another. (It is only today that some interspatial contact has been established: “A knowledge of Russian,” writes George Oakwood in his astute essay on my Ardis, 1970, “will help you to relish much of the wordplay in the most English of the author’s English novels; consider for instance this: ‘The champ and the chimp came all the way from Omsk to Neochomsk.’ What a delightful link between a real round place and ‘nio-chyom,’ the About-Nothing land of modern philosophic linguistics!”) I was acutely aware of the syntactic gulf separating their sentence structures. I feared (unreasonably, as was to transpire eventually) that my allegiance to Russian grammar might interfere with an apostatical courtship. Take tenses: how different their elaborate and strict minuet in English from the free and fluid interplay between the present and the past in their Russian counterpart (which Ian Bunyan has so amusingly compared in last Sunday’s NYT to “a dance of the veil performed by a plump graceful lady in a circle of cheering drunks”). The fantastic number of natural-looking nouns that the British and the Americans apply in lovely technical senses to very specific objects also distressed me. What is the exact term for the little cup in which you place the diamond you want to cut? (We call it “dop,” the pupal case of a butterfly, replied my informer, an old Boston jeweler who sold me the ring for my third bride). Is there not a nice special word for a pigling? (“I am toying with ‘snork’ said Professor Noteboke, the best translator of Gogol’s immortal The Carrick”). I want the right word for the break in a boy’s voice at puberty, I said to an amiable opera basso in the adjacent deck chair during my first transatlantic voyage. (“I think, he said, “it’s called ‘ponticello,’ a small bridge, un petit pont, mostik.… Oh, you’re Russian too?”)

  The traversal of my particular bridge ended, weeks after landing, in a charming New York apartment (it was leant to Annette and me by a generous relative of mine and faced the sunset flaming beyond Central Park). The neuralgia in my right forearm was a gray adumbration compared to the solid black headache that no pill could pierce. Annette rang up James Lodge, and he, out of the misdirected kindness of his heart, had an old little physician of Russian extraction examine me. The poor fellow drove me even crazier than I was by not only insisting on discussing my symptoms in an execrable version of the language I was trying to shed, but on translating into it various irrelevant terms used by the Viennese Quack and his apostles (simbolizirovanie, mortidnik). Yet his visit, I must confess, strikes me in retrospect as a most artistic coda.

  Part Three

  1

  Neither Slaughter in the Sun (as the English translation of Camera Lucida got retitled while I lay helplessly hospitalized in New York) nor The Red Topper sold well. My ambitious, beautiful, strange See under Real shone for a breathless instant on the lowest rung of the bestseller list in a West Coast paper, and vanished for good. In those circumstances I could not refuse the lectureship offered me in 1940 by Quirn University on the strength of my European reputation. I was to develop a plump tenure there and expand into a Full Professor by 1950 or 1955: I can’t find the exact date in my old notes.

  Although I was adequately remunerated for my two weekly lectures on European Masterpieces and one Thursday seminar on Joyce’s Ulysses (from a yearly 5000 dollars in the beginning to 15,000 in the Fifties) and had furthermore several splendidly paid stories accepted by The Beau and the Butterfly, the kindest magazine in the world, I was not really comfortable until my Kingdom by the Sea (1962) atoned for a fraction of the loss of my Russian fortune (1917) and bundled away all financial worries till the end of worrisome time. I do not usually preserve cuttings of adverse criticism and envious abuse; but I do treasure the following definition: “This is the only kn
own case in history when a European pauper ever became his own American uncle [amerikanskiy dyadyushka, oncle d’Amérique],” so phrased by my faithful Zoilus, Demian Basilevski; he was one of the very few larger saurians in the émigré marshes who followed me in 1939 to the hospitable and altogether admirable U.S.A., where with egg-laying promptness he founded a Russian-language quarterly which he is still directing today, thirty-five years later, in his heroic dotage.

  The furnished apartment we finally rented on the upper floor of a handsome house (10 Buffalo St.) was much to my liking because of an exceptionally comfortable study with a great bookcase full of works on American lore including an encyclopedia in twenty volumes. Annette would have preferred one of the dacha-like structures which the Administration also showed us; but she gave in when I pointed out to her that what looked snug and quaint in summer was bound to be chilly and weird the rest of the year.

  Annette’s emotional health caused me anxiety: her graceful neck seemed even longer and thinner. An expression of mild melancholy lent a new, unwelcome, beauty to her Botticellian face: its hollowed outline below the zygoma was accentuated by her increasing habit of sucking in her cheeks when hesitative or pensive. All her cold petals remained closed in our infrequent lovemaking. Her abstraction grew perilous: stray cats at night knew that the same erratic deity that had not shut the kitchen window would leave ajar the door of the fridge; her bath regularly overflowed while she telephoned, knitting her innocent brows (what on earth did she care for my pains, my welling insanity!), to find out how the first-floor person’s migraine or menopause was faring; and that vagueness of hers in relation to me was also responsible for her omitting a precaution she was supposed to take, so that by the autumn, which followed our moving into the accursed Langley house, she informed me that the doctor she had just consulted looked the very image of Oksman and that she was two-months pregnant.