Stalking Nabokov (30 page)

What’s special is everything I have omitted. Here’s how chapter 2 of
Transparent Things
actually begins, with all the Nabokovian peculiarity reinstated:

As the person, Hugh Person (corrupted “Peterson” and pronounced “Parson” by some) extricated his angular bulk from the taxi that had brought him to this shoddy mountain resort from Trux, and while his head was still lowered in an opening meant for emerging dwarfs, his eyes went up—not to acknowledge the helpful gesture sketched by the driver who had opened the door for him but to check the aspect of the Ascot Hotel (Ascot!) against an eight-year-old recollection, one fifth of his life, engrained by grief. A dreadful building of gray stone and brown wood, it sported cherry-red shutters (not all of them shut) which by some mnemoptical trick he remembered as apple green. The steps of the porch were flanked with electrified carriage lamps on a pair of iron posts. Down those steps an aproned valet came tripping to take the two bags, and (under one arm) the shoebox, all of which the driver had alertly removed from the yawning boot. Person pays alert driver.

(
TT
3)

Earlier I contrasted Nabokov the stylist with Nabokov the storyteller. It may be an artificial distinction, certainly not an absolute one, but it is true that a story’s needs may be at odds with sheer style. This is high-energy prose, yet it will never appear in any anthology of fine flourishes: it’s no “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins,” or “the cradle rocks above an abyss.” This is what I mean by saying that Nabokov, like late Shakespeare, subordinates style to story. Shakespeare was an immeasurably more sophisticated dramatic storyteller in his late play
Cymbeline
than in his youthful
Romeo and Juliet
. He had to write with more compression to achieve more complex aims, but where the
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
includes phrases from
Romeo and Juliet
as early as the play’s first speech and then from scene after scene, it cites nothing of
Cymbeline
until almost a thousand lines into the play and then not dialogue but an inset song. Like Shakespeare, Nabokov can exude eloquence but subdues it to the local needs of his story. His language works wonders in situ but does not necessarily seem stylish out of its situation.

“As the person, Hugh Person (corrupted ‘Peterson’ and pronounced ‘Parson’ by some)” would be off-putting as an isolated line of prose but is beguiling in context. We notice with surprise, amusement, and relief the echo of the “person” of “Hullo, person” in chapter 1: this is presumably the person whom the disembodied voice was addressing, and his name, absurdly, is actually Person. The parenthetical aside about Person as a surname is comically clumsy pedantry, when the protagonist and his name have just been introduced, but it proves of a piece with the clumsiness of “Hullo, person” in the first line of the novel or “easy, you know, does it, son,” in the last, or Mr. R.’s awkward and pedantic introduction of his editor Mr. Person and his secretary Mr. Tamworth:

“I don’t think you met Mr. Tamworth. Person, pronounced Parson; and Tamworth: like the English breed of black-botched swine.”

“No,” said Hugh, “it does not come from Parson, but rather from Peterson.”

“O.K., son.”

(
TT
31)

We can eventually discover, therefore, that that ungainly parenthesis is one more clue that the unidentified speaker or narrator at the start of the novel is none other than the ghost of Mr. R.—who, when alive, learned the information it imparts from Hugh in this very scene.

A crucial and unique aspect of Nabokov’s storytelling, especially in a tale like this, is that the strategy is as important as the story, that in this case the riddle of who tells the tale is as important as the role of the hero. It’s crucial, too, that the strategy nevertheless arises out of the story, that this is a story of someone finding his way out of a life of mounting frustration when he is welcomed across the threshold of death by perhaps the only person in his recent life who had taken an interest in him and who cares enough now to tell his story. And it’s crucial, as so often in Nabokov, that there is a story behind the story—although Nabokov, with his love of surprise, of posing new
kinds
of problems in novel after novel, begins
Transparent Things
, paradoxically and unprecedentedly, with the story
behind
the story (“Hullo person. Doesn’t hear me”), and in
this
case the immediate riddle the novel poses is to discover that the speaker in the story
behind
the story was a character in the story while he was alive.

But long before we can see that, we see long-limbed Hugh clambering out of the taxi. Nabokov renders the scene vividly. He attends, as always, to human movement, seen from the outside but also felt from the inside, here in the irritation of “an opening meant for emerging dwarfs” that infects the narrating voice. He attends to visual detail, not that there’s much of it— Hugh’s “angular bulk,” the driver’s “helpful gesture,” the hotel’s “gray stone and brown wood,” “cherry-red shutters,” and “electrified carriage lamps on a pair of iron posts”—just enough to render in full color and movement the scene of arrival and the pseudo-chalet setting, but he also attends to the character registering the details, to Hugh’s distaste for the town, his effort in emerging, his recoil at the “dreadful” building, his memory of the shutters as green.

Not that the narration confines itself to Hugh’s perspective. Although visually alert to the outer details of the scene and alert to Hugh’s mind within the scene at all sorts of levels (his larger context, “one fifth of his life, engrained by grief”; his current mood of distaste for “this shoddy mountain resort”; his bodily ungainliness, which will prove so unfortunately important; his sudden perception of a misrecollection), although it pays such attention to the outer and inner within the scene, the paragraph also shifts easily from the scene, to an aside on etymology or to highlight its own verbal surface (“the aspect of the Ascot Hotel,” “cherry-red shutters (not all of them shut)”: and in this second case, notice how the visual attention to the scene and the verbal attention to the sentence do not at all exclude each other).

The long first sentence moves effortlessly back and forth from outer to inner, from locomotion to perception, from scene to language, from the long term (“one fifth of his life”) to the immediate and even the instant (the sudden snort of derision in that parenthetical “(Ascot!)”—presumably at the inappropriateness of the name’s social pretensions for an alpine hotel). The sentence renders the scene, but even as it does so, it draws attention to the mind of Hugh within the scene, the mind of the narrator recording the scene, the mind of the reader registering the scene both with and beyond Hugh and with and yet somehow behind the narrator, but able to catch up.

In the sentence that follows, what “mnemoptical trick” causes Hugh to remember the cherry-red shutters as apple-green? It doesn’t matter. It’s amusing in itself, the complementary color, the contrasting fruit; but two pages later the person introduced as “an aproned valet” will be described slightly more fully as “the apple-green-aproned valet,” and we can recognize with more amusement what has caused Hugh’s confusion and what a game of attention Nabokov is playing with his audience, what rewards he can hide behind any detail.

We have to keep attention up across a gap like this, but we have to exercise attention even within the sentence: the aproned valet came tripping down those steps “to take the two bags, and (under one arm) the shoebox, all of which the driver had alertly removed from the yawning boot.” Are we alert enough to notice the
alert
driver versus the
yawning
boot, or the
shoebox
removed from a
boot
? And to see the humor in the driver so pointedly alert just when he can earn a tip?

As an observer, a naturalist, and an artist, Nabokov renders the scene of Hugh’s arrival in Witt with precision—the milieu, the occasion, the activity, the character as he takes in the scene or moves his awkward body within it or imposes his temperament and mood on it—but what makes it so uniquely Nabokovian is that at the same time as he renders the inner and outer scene so sharply, he can shift from the scene to the mind evoking it in words or to the mind of the reader, engaged with the scene seen from outside Hugh and seen and felt from within him, engaged with the unseen storyteller behind the words, and engaged with the words seen on the page. That multiplicity of levels we already sense here will only be compounded when we become aware both of the layers of Hugh’s past that fold over onto this moment and of exactly what level of being the transparent things observe him from.

Every mature Nabokov novel is a demanding but exhilarating workout in what Fyodor calls “multilevel thinking” (
Gift
175). What especially distinguishes Nabokov’s stories, on small scale and large, is that they are saturated by mind: the hero’s, the narrator’s, the author’s, and the reader’s. Nothing could be further from Hemingway’s presentation of a story through objective actions and utterances that only
imply
the subjective.

Hemingway was writing partly against the fashion, by the early 1920s, for the deep representation of mind in the moment, in the stream of consciousness of a Dorothy Richardson, a Joyce, a Woolf. Nabokov, too, differs markedly from stream of consciousness, but in another direction. He is interested chiefly not in the mind within the moment—although he gives this its due (Hugh’s surprise as he looks up at the Ascot Hotel)—but in minds able to transcend the moment, the mind of a character, a narrator, an author, or a reader able to flash or soar beyond a scene through a sudden shift of thought or perspective, consciousness able either to enfold or escape a scene.

Transparent Things
is an extreme example of Nabokov as storyteller. In his previous novel,
Ada
, he had created a whole new world, a long, passionate, rapturous, and tragic story amid bright settings and brighter characters. In
Transparent Things
, despite the cherry-red shutters and the apple-green aprons, we enter a grey and gloomy world where not much happens to poor Hugh except that he strangles the woman whom for some reason he loves, no matter how unlovable she is, then loses his own life in a pathetic attempt to revisit the scene of his first humiliations with her, which are all he has left. Nabokov can sweep us up in the emotions of his characters, as in the case of Van’s enthusiasm for Ada or Kinbote’s for Zembla or even, to our discomfort, Humbert’s for Lolita, but he deliberately leaves us unmoved by Hugh’s love for Armande or Hugh’s pilgrimage back to his past, and he has to use all his virtuosity as a storyteller to make this story on the brink of a death come to life. But the storytelling skills so concentrated even in the uneventful opening scene of
Transparent Things
can help suggest what makes Nabokovian narrative so special.

MARY
AND
TRANSPARENT THINGS:
ZOOM OUT

How do
Mary
and
Transparent Things
reflect Nabokov as storyteller at the large scale rather than the small? In terms of plot, each novel focuses on love—indeed, love compounded by adultery—and death: Ganin’s love for Mary and his planned elopement with her from Berlin, an adultery anticipated, assumed, but left untried, and placed in pointed counterpoint with Podtyagin’s planned escape from Berlin, which will be thwarted by his approaching death; Hugh’s abject love for Armande, despite her flagrant infidelities, and his strangling her in his sleep not because of but despite her unlovableness, and
his
death by fire on his pathetic pilgrimage to the scene of his past with her.

Each novel is
driven by character
:
Mary’
s plot depends on Ganin’s love, his self-enclosed nature, his arrogance, his restlessness. And although neither the strangling of Armande nor his own suffocation in a hotel fire are Hugh Person’s choices, the plot of
Transparent Things
depends on his abjectness, his frustration, his doggedness, his misplaced sentimentality.

Each hero is
obsessed
to the point of disjunction from his world and in a uniquely Nabokovian way that maximizes the tension between obsession and freedom. Although Ganin chafes at the confines of his room in a cramped pension, his obsession with Mary lets him exult in his capacity to roam Berlin streets while inhabiting his spacious past, until to his surprise and ours he walks away from Mary and memory into an open future. The much less happy Hugh, as soon as he is released from prison for killing his wife in a dream, makes the free decision to return across the Atlantic to where Armande first obsessed him, but although in Witt he still seems trapped by inimical space and oppressive time, his chance death there liberates him at last into the ampler dimensions of his future.

Each novel deploys
anticipation
and
recapitulation
in new ways, and each exposes the myths of return to the past and arrival at the future. The numbered doors from April 1 to April 6 and the countdown from Sunday to the Saturday of Mary’s advent provide a stark and insistently unilinear means of stalking the expected climax of Nabokov’s first novel. In
Transparent Things
the anticipation of the future is much more multichanneled, saturated with apparent foreshadowings of Hugh’s imminent death, from the failed warning of the opening chapter, and even the narrators’ “perhaps if the future existed,” through the throng of images, real, fictional, and dreamed, of deaths, fires, and falls.

In
Mary
, recapitulation plays a key structural role as the novel alternates present time, the days marking Mary’s approach, with Ganin’s memories of their past, again in rather rigid linear form, the memories proceeding with a chronological neatness that serves the novelist’s needs rather than his hero’s psychic reality.
⁹
In
Transparent Things
, recapitulation takes flamboyant form in the hands of narrators, who can trace a mere pencil back centuries to the tree from which its wood was made. The story folds into Hugh’s present trip to Switzerland an account of his first trip and his father’s death and his first whore and on top of
that
past scene, a bravura recollection of a writer who enjoyed a whore in the same room almost a century earlier, and on top of that Hugh’s second trip, to meet the novelist R., when he also found himself sitting opposite Armande in a train.