Stalking Nabokov (44 page)

“I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes.” As John Bayley points out, Tolstoy eschews biography: he refuses to give background information on his characters’ past.
¹²
Bayley explains this as part of Tolstoy’s distaste for invention, his reluctance to create characters over whom he can have control. To put it another way, perhaps, Tolstoy can present truth to life when he shows all the complexities of a scene, the integrity of a situation, the openness of a moment, but he cannot keep that complexity, that integrity, that openness when he has to reduce to a summary. So he simply avoids biographical résumés.

Nabokov, on the other hand, was compulsively biographical about his heroes. He might not tell a character’s history in linear sequence, but he almost invariably traces a novel’s hero somehow from birth to death or at least to his exit from the book. He was too interested in the unique pattern of human personality, the mystery of identity, the design of individual distinctiveness
not
to allow readers to trace in their own way the subtle and often subterranean repetitions of a protagonist’s past.

One last sip of
Lolita
. Humbert tells us his father was

a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects—paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.

In 1956 Roman Jakobson distinguished between two linguistic devices, one characteristic of verse, one of prose: metaphor and metonymy: the principle of similarity, in an image, and the principle of contiguity, of natural connectedness, in a narrative: “My love is like a red, red rose,” an image from a line of verse, and Anna Karenina’s red handbag in the scene of her death, a detail typical of prose.
¹³
In fact, even a novelist like Dickens, famous for creating carriages or costumes that are metonymic extensions of character, also swarms with metaphor and simile. Of all great novelists, none eschews imagery as assiduously as Tolstoy, none keeps as faithfully as he to pure contiguity, to the particulars of the scene before his eyes.

Nabokov, on the other hand, disrupts scenes with the greatest of glee. Where Robbe-Grillet or Donald Barthelme does so programmatically, to undermine or explode what they decree to be no longer relevant habits of narrative connection, Nabokov doesn’t deny the particulars of his scenes: Humbert
is
writing under observation, in a prison psychiatric ward, after the murder of Quilty, and he is attempting to set down his remote past to explain his recent life. But within that he darts this way and that with the utmost ebullience and ease, in the process upsetting the distinction between metaphor and metonymy in a phrase like “I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards” (that feigns to be met-onymic, an aspect of Humbert’s situation as narrator, but is really metaphoric, only to serve a metonymic function of describing his father’s Riviera hotel). Or again, that crazily compacted aside, “picnic, lightning,” whose picnic landscape generates that crazily extended metaphor of hollows and dells that start to take on a solid, “metonymic” life of their own.

In a paragraph like this Nabokov revels in invention, in the sheer mobility of the mind, in the endless proliferation of the quirkiest particulars, in the eccentricity and centrifugality of things and facts: “two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects—paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively.” And he pays us the compliment of expecting that we will follow his imagination with all the speed and delight of his prose. Just as Humbert here remains trapped in his psychiatric ward and in the aftermath of the past he describes, so we stay with him in his situation, but within the constraint of the here and now we find that we can be freer than we thought.

Nothing could be further from Tolstoy’s scenic method than Nabokov’s, yet in both of them, I think, we discover ourselves.

I have compared Tolstoy and Nabokov by close analysis—although obviously not solely by deducing from the passages in front of us. But I could do it another way—for instance, by comparing trains in
Anna Karenina
and cars in
Lolita—
and I think the conclusions will be much the same.

In Tolstoy the trains, despite Nabokov’s diagram, are the background for the wonderful situations he prepares: Anna’s meeting with Vronsky after her arrival in Moscow and the ominous crushing by a train of the peasant whose widow Vronsky offers money in order to impress the woman who has just made such an impression on him; the romantic scene of the return to St. Petersburg, with Vronsky deliberately pursuing Anna and declaring his love on a station platform in the midst of a snowstorm, and Anna’s catching sight of her husband’s big ears as she descends from her train in St. Peters-burg; and the final catastrophe of Anna’s suicide. Again, it’s the integrity of the situations, the reflections and the involuntary interactions, that carry us into the characters’ experiences.

Tolstoy did say that “the railroad is to travel as the whore is to love,”
¹⁴
and certainly he does associate trains with the encroachment of Western ways, a loosening of the old values, an invasion that won’t be as quickly turned back as Napoleon’s. It is no accident that when Lyovin has the glimpse of Kitty returning to Russia that starts him in pursuit of her again, she is riding in a carriage, not a train. But trains are not symbols, or even obtrusive settings, so much as the place where situations evolve. Tolstoy has unusually strong opinions about many things he describes—the army in which Vron-sky serves, the restaurants in which Stiva eats, the trains in which characters meet—but in this novel he presents things objectively, whatever his private judgments, and allows situations to speak for themselves.

Nabokov never learned to drive a car any more than Tolstoy learnt to drive a train, but in
Lolita
cars are everywhere, from the taxi in Paris where the cabdriver proves to be Valeria’s new beau, to the car that kills Charlotte, and to all that follows from her death. Humbert takes Lolita by car around the whole of the United States; on their apparent reprise of that long excursion, Quilty follows them in a prismatic series of rented roadsters; and in a final flourish, after killing Quilty, Humbert drives on the wrong side of the road. If trains in
Anna Karenina
seem associated with Europe, cars in
Lolita
represent in a sense American mobility and freedom and variety but simultaneously become a prison for Lolita as Humbert forces her to remain on the move. But again cars are not so much a symbol as a fact of the novel’s world, a fact that Nabokov renders with acute detail or eerie pattern (the spectrum of cars that Quilty hires in pursuit of Humbert), or a mixture of the real and the fantastic (the scene of Charlotte’s death, turned into a toy diagram by a driver anxious to escape charges), or a blend of the comprehensive and the wildly centrifugal—like Humbert’s catalogues of “the curious roadside species, Hitchhiking Man,
Homo pollex
of science,” or “all cars on the road—behind, before, alongside, coming, going, every vehicle under the dancing sun”—but never with an unobtrusive Tolstoyan solidity. There’s the town with the improbable but brilliant name of “Parkington”; or the close of the murder scene (“With a heavy heart I left the house and walked through the spotted blaze of the sun to my car. Two other cars were parked on both sides of it, and I had some trouble squeezing out”: as Craig Raine says, you commit a murder, and you still have to worry about parking);
¹⁵
or Humbert’s mad final fling, after the murder, as he drives along the wrong side of the road: “Cars coming towards me wobbled, swerved, and cried out in fear.” His drives the way he writes, breaking all the rules.

Let me now offer another reason for focusing primarily on the opening of
Anna Karenina
and
Lolita
. If Tolstoy would have hated
Lolita
, he would have been simply unable to read
Ada
, which starts like this:

“All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,” says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (
Anna Arkadievitch Karenina
, transfigured into English by R. G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880). That pronouncement has little if any relation to the story to be unfolded now, a family chronicle, the first part of which is, perhaps, closer to another Tolstoy work,
Detstvo i Otrochestvo
(
Childhood and Fatherland
, Pontius Press, 1858).

And in
Ada
, although there are nineteenth-century trains and twentieth-century cars, there are also “jikkers,” petrol-powered magic carpets that swoop low over hedges, causing cyclists to wobble and dive into ditches.

I have been stressing the differences between these two writers, and in that sense, my argument seems to ally me more closely with Nabokov, who focuses on the wild divergences of the world, than Tolstoy, who searches for a common humanity. But at the same time I have also been trying to suggest that both writers do share something profound: a passion for truth that makes them rethink what fiction can do—and if I had space I could show that same passion for truth even in the flamboyant artifice of
Ada—
a passion for working out their
own
ways of expressing their own truths.

Isaiah Berlin uses the old proverb of the fox who knows many little things and the hedgehog who knows one big thing (how to roll itself in a protective ball) to characterize Tolstoy as a brilliant fox who thought it was more important to be a hedgehog.
¹⁶
Tolstoy had an instinctive mastery of the little things, the details of situation, as I have termed it, and searched for the one big thing, which was usually nothing less than the meaning of life. (Stephen Hawkings was reputedly lazy at school until he came on the problem of cosmology and thought that
there
was something big enough and hard enough to be worth the effort; Tolstoy comes back to the meaning of life as if it were the only problem big enough to tackle and he were the only person big enough to tackle it.) But his answer was generally a way of overcoming the apartness of things by honest living and working together, like Lyovin’s day in the hay harvest, and as I have tried to suggest, every detail of his fiction seems based on the premise that the way he can portray fundamentally similar human beings in their different situations offers a way of overcoming our apartness.

Nabokov, on the other hand, was a hedgehog who knew it was more important to be a fox. He felt that he had found what the hedgehog was after, so instead of a sense of relentless quest he had a Cheshire cat smile because he had found it: “it” being a quiet conviction that beyond the prison of self and time and understanding in which mortal consciousness is confined there are greater freedoms to be had, and that precisely because of the limits on human understanding there is no way we can reach whatever these freedoms are, except through the endless particulars that seem to differentiate and recombine in a way that he sees as inherently artistic, somehow related to the deceptive artistry behind things.