Stalking Nabokov (5 page)
(
RLSK
52)
This was advice I kept in mind. One of the most distinguished of American literary scholars told me of the time he was walking along the corridors of Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall with his arm in a sling. Other colleagues joshed him about skiing accidents and the like; Nabokov hailed him with an ebullient and delighted “Ah! a duel!” And then I found out that the incident had not happened to this particular professor at all because another professor almost as well known told me in minute detail of the circumstances—and the first professor, I had noticed, had a memory that seemed fuzzy in the extreme away from the books he still remembered with wonderful lucidity. He had simply heard the tale told and in the retelling had forgotten it was not his own memory. And yet this was a great scholar, and Nabokov’s colleague for years. You can imagine that along with the masses of anecdote I garnered for Nabokov’s American years from those who had stood at the toilet beside him (I kid you not) or heard him in the lecture hall or passed him in the corridor or knew somebody who had passed him once, I was also treated to masses of garbling, misconstruction, and decomposing gossip.
In his last two decades—from 1959 to 1977, to be precise—Nabokov could afford to retire from Cornell and live in a Swiss luxury hotel. He was an international celebrity, his face on the cover of
Newsweek
and
Time
, his books the hottest property on the high literary market, but at the same time he withdrew from the public gaze to the controlled seclusion of his retreat in Montreux, Switzerland. He constructed a literary persona of intimidating arrogance and protested in letters to editors against factual inaccuracies or infringements of his privacy. And although he was interviewed for
Vogue
,
Life
,
Playboy
,
People
, and American and European TV, he agreed to interviews only if the questions were submitted in writing well ahead of time so that he could craft his answers in writing, too. There were advantages of the steadiness of his life in these years—I could interview his secretary and the concierge and under-concierge and under-under-concierge at the Montreux Palace Hotel and use his own private library and sift through the ton of paper that had now accumulated in his archive.
But Nabokov had a reputation for arrogance and aloofness that the rococo fortress of the Montreux Palace Hotel seemed to bear out. I remember dressing for my first meeting with Véra Nabokov there. During the last eight of my nine years as a student, I had worn nothing but purple, tangerine, lime green, or scarlet overalls. Knowing of the Nabokovs’ reputation for old-fashioned formality, and sitting in the three-piece suit that my parents had bought in the hope of mending my ways and that I now, in all my gaucheness and diffidence, thought necessary for the occasion, I felt as comfortable as a giraffe on a surfboard. It took years for the awe and the awkwardness to wear off.
The problems of finding the materials and of trying to compensate for the unevenness of the record can occupy a biographer for many months. But then you have to write. Although at the research stage you are desperate to read every scrap, to find out every fact, you also know that readers won’t want to read about all these facts any more than you will want to write about them all. You want your readers to have the satisfying illusion of completeness, of unreserved disclosure, of unobstructed access, but you also want them never to be bored: believe it or not, you want to be as brief as possible.
The tension between comprehensiveness and concision is one of many you have to harness as you write. As a biographer, you have to resolve the conflicts between the urge to collect and the urge to select; between the need to set the scene and the need to advance the action; between the desire to explain and the desire to let things speak for themselves; between the impulse to look ahead for distant outcomes or back for remote causes and the impulse to treat the present moment in its own right; between the need to provide as much shape and structure as you can and the need to leave room for life’s unruly details; between your wish to remain objective and your knowledge that every phrase creates and colors what you want your readers to see; between allying with your subject and asserting your independence; between attention to your material and attention to your reader.
And in writing the life of someone whose claim on our interest was not in the drama of battle or courts, like Charlemagne, but in the inner drama that unfolds at a quiet desk, you have to find some rhythm to move between the inner and the outer, the work and the life, the timeless image or idea and time ticking away.
But time has ticked away long enough. Thank you, Seligenstadt, for the honor of the Einhard Prize, thank you for bringing me here to talk to you, and thank you for listening.
After a talk I gave in the Slavic Department of Columbia University, the editors of their graduate journal asked me to write a personal introduction to their forthcoming special issue on the theme “My Nabokov.” Later in the same trip, the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg, where I happened to have spoken earlier on the day I wrote most of this, had put me up at the Hotel Astoria, 39 Bol’shaya Morskaya Street, just on the other side of St. Isaac’s Square from Nabokov’s birthplace at number 47, now the Nabokov Museum—details that will help explain the original ending. Back at my own desk, I have now added a coda.
We all have our own Nabokov, and—despite some seeing him as a tyrant to his readers—he would have it no other way. When he said that his ideal audience would be a room filled with little Nabokovs, he did not mean by that a room of identical thinkers but a room full of people who could derive as much pleasure and point from his texts as he had taken the trouble to provide. He always took things in his own way and expected anyone who was properly alive to do the same.
1
We may each have our own Nabokov, but, like friends or family, he changes for us as well as remaining the same. When I pick up Nabokov after not having read him for a long time (and this
does
happen), I immediately hear his unmistakable voice, see via his singular vision, laugh at his unique humor with recognition and surprise but often, also, with a sense of discovery as I notice nuances, echoes, or implications I have never previously seen. Even when I reread, even though he still says what he said the last time I noticed this page, I hear with new ears, though I had heard and felt I understood before.
We all have our unique associations with favorite writers that accumulate over a lifetime. Nabokov recollects reading
War and Peace
“for the first time when I was eleven (in Berlin, on a Turkish sofa, in our somberly rococo Privatstrasse flat giving on a dark, damp back garden with larches and gnomes that have remained in that book, like an old postcard, forever)” (
SM
199). I recall reading
Lolita
for the first time in the Weidenfeld and Nicolson edition with a black-and-white Sue Lyon (at fourteen, a year older than me) on the jacket. My parents had both left school at fourteen in the Depression to support their families. They knew I had an appetite for books, but not knowing how to satisfy it, they had bought a bookstore with a lending library both as a business and to offer me somewhere to graze. I soon apprehended that one of the tomes I had to reshelve in the library,
Lolita
, was both “a dirty book” and “a modern classic” and, knowing my parents’ Puritanism, snuck it home and hid it under the pillow when I wasn’t reading it. It mystified me then, in many ways, and although it mystifies me now in completely different ways, I can still evoke some of those first feelings.
As I can also evoke in a different way the thrill when, three and a half years later, I picked up my next Nabokov. In the bookstore my parents had built up a large stock of magazine orders for regular customers, and it was my job on Saturday to check off against the shipping invoice the bundles sent by the distributor and to place customers’ orders in their folders. Had I still been the age when I first read
Lolita
, I would have read almost all that crossed my gaze in this way, from English schoolgirl comics to encyclopedias by weekly installment, but by my last year at high school I had become more careful with discretionary reading. On May 24, 1969, on the narrow mezzanine looking into the rest of the bookshop, I checked off
Time
magazine, which had a cover story on Nabokov to mark the publication of
Ada
. Three years older than when I had tried
Lolita
, I now found fascinating everything that Nabokov said in the red-boxed story with the headline quote “I have never met a more lonely, more lucid, better balanced mad mind than mine.”
2
Dazzled by his language, ideas, and attitudes, I rushed to the Palmerston North public library for the latest Nabokov novel. Finding
Pale Fire
, I read it with more enchantment and exhilaration than anything I had ever encountered—and I still regularly recall that sense of explosive discovery and vivid magic when I think of the best in Nabokov or when a fresh blast of discovery shakes me in anyone else’s fiction.
At the end of that year my father gave me for Christmas the first English edition of
Ada
, newly arrived in New Zealand, with our bookstore’s rubber stamp on the paste-down front endpaper. I still have it beside me at my usual desk, with not only the plastic protective jacket that the bookstore usually added for its library volumes but also a second-generation second plastic layer I’ve added to hold together what is now my most valuable physical possession, since its marginalia provide the raw data for most of my ongoing
Ada
annotations.
3
I recall re-re-re-reading
Ada
for my doctoral thesis, in a south-facing room in Toronto between 1976 and 1978, with a strange light catching the colored glass on the fanlight above my desk as I added still more marginalia, or reading the “Pale Fire” poem aloud to roommates in the kitchen of that old Edwardian brick house. I recall reading Nabokov’s novels in Russian, between 1981 and 1983, over a late-night
thé citron
in the ground-floor café of the Montreux Palace Hotel during breaks between working on the biography up on the sixth floor, in the former laundry storeroom at the end of Véra’s corridor where all her husband’s manuscripts were housed. I recall arguing with Alexander Dolinin as we walked along the icy Nevsky Prospect, with his wife Galina Lapina, the Russian translator of
Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years
, looking agog from one of us to the other as we passionately debated, on December 11, 1990, the dating problem in
Lolita
. I recall reading
Ada
again to my students in the Nabokov Museum, a floor below where Nabokov was born, at the Nabokov 101 Summer School in July 2002. Just as I will remember tonight, where a few hours ago I spoke at the Nabokov Museum, about
Lolita
and evolution, and as I hope I will remember writing this, looking out across my left shoulder to the polished pillars of a spruced-up St. Isaac’s gleaming in the lamplight. Late November, and a poor night for mothing.
We all have our unique associations with favorite authors. Strange how recalling them can make memory speak so volubly, when we sometimes fear it can only stammer or stumble.
And strange how, as I expand this for
Stalking Nabokov
beyond the space I was allowed for
Ulbandus
, I think of Nabokov paying tribute to his father at the end of the first chapter of
Speak, Memory
or focusing on Dmitri’s developing mind in the last chapter, and of Dmitri, now in his seventies and looking so like his father at that age, telling me he still recalls that experience of “Finding What the Sailor Has Hidden.” I look at the photo of my father at the far edge of my desk and at the copy of
Ada
beside me, with his stamp in it, and think of what he gave me—even though he could not read Nabokov, or my Nabokov biography, let alone offer anything like the vast personal library that Nabokov’s father was pleased to see his son roam in.
By the time I was seventeen and writing on
Pale Fire
I was already growing a patchy beard. Twenty-five years later, because it was starting to grey before my head hair, I shaved it off and was surprised to see in the mirror what seemed my father’s face looking back in surprise at the resemblance. (When, already dying of cancer, he saw me for the first time without the beard, he scrutinized my shaving job and said: “You could have stood a little closer to the razor.”) John Shade in the poem “Pale Fire” writes about the inspiration that comes to him as he shaves, and as I now shave each morning, that passage from canto 4 will be more likely than not to spring to my mind. That’s how close my Nabokov can be.
Now I’ve written this, I expect that my morning shave will be linked now not only with my memory of my beardless self looking back at me with my father’s face, and my imagining Shade shaving, but also with memories of Nabokov’s tributes to his father in
Speak, Memory
, to the inspiration he sensed his father gave him, to the fact that he has Shade shot, just after he finishes writing canto 4, on July 21, 1959, his own father’s birthday, in heart-wrenching homage to his own murdered father. My Nabokov builds patterns in time. So does life, as generation gives, and gives way, to generation. Nabokov helps us notice, and care.
NABOKOV’S MANUSCRIPTS AND BOOKS
