Picked-Up Pieces (35 page)

Describing his three wives gives Vadim a quite contagious pleasure. First, there is Iris, a petite brunette, “a suntanned beauty with a black bob and eyes like clear honey”:

Then there is Annette, a Russian blonde, “with very attractive though not exceptionally pretty features”:

And thirdly Louise, an American, “porcelain-pretty and very fast”:

The manner in which these three wives (Nabokov’s three languages?) travel in fictional space, enlarging from first glimpses into love objects and marriage partners and then diminishing through disenchantment into death or abandonment, is no mean feat of projection. And the hero describes other women as well—Lolita-like creatures such as the whorish little Dolly and his own elusive daughter Bel and the schoolmate of Bel’s who turns out to be “you,” repulsive creatures such as the adoring but sub-brachially pungent Lyuba and the stocky, whiskery, pro-Soviet Ninella. But then Nabokov has always loved to describe women, and the landscapes of childhood, and the student chill of Cambridge, and twins, and butterflies, and insomnia, and all the gaudy mirages of “a happy expatriation that began practically on the day of my birth” (to quote a letter to
The New York Times
). But toward the end of
Look at the Harlequins!
Vadim does two things never, to our imperfect knowledge, experienced by Vladimir Nabokov: he travels to the Soviet Union, and he has a stroke.

Both episodes show an exercising of the imaginative powers that one rather wishes had not had so strenuously to vie, over Nabokov’s career, with his passion for trickery and annihilation. For a rabid Soviet-hater, the imagined return is surprisingly mild and calm in tone—and, to this one-time guest of the Soviet state, surprisingly accurate, from the smells on the Aeroflot turboprop to the insolence of the hotel lift-operators and the slowness of the restaurant service to the “morose, drab, oddly old-fashioned aspect that Soviet kids have.” The thrilleresque details of intrigue that get Vadim there are funny, and his conversation afterwards, in the Paris airport, with a Soviet spy who has shadowed him all the way, is hilarious:

The agent (himself an old émigré, turned Communist) confuses, as the conversation goes on in this bumptious style, Vadim with Nabokov, and when the elderly author (whoever he is) knocks him down, exclaims, with timeless Russian stoicism, “
Nu, dali v mordu. Nu, tak chtozh?
” (“Well, you’ve given me one in the mug. Well, what does it matter?”). Somehow, absurd and sketchy as it is, this episode contains a warmth, a humor and suspense, that only unguarded feeling bestows, and that are too much missing from the professedly ardent filigree of Nabokov’s later fiction. The stroke, a moment of near-fatal paralysis that overtakes Vadim at the turning-point of a preprandial walk, is amazing in its authentication, in the near-mystical swoops of its inner detail:

Or imagine any other writer since the beginning of time providing such a blend of sensation, metaphysics, and comedy.

Oh, yes, the title. Vadim’s great-aunt, when he is an impressionable seven or eight, cries out to him, “Stop moping! … Look at the harlequins!”

Throughout the invented reality of this novel, harlequins recur, as a butterfly glimpsed with Annette and as an Iranian circus troupe that boards a Soviet plane, as the “motley of madness” the hero wears and as a cunning multiplicity of lozenge-shapes, some as small as a “sequence of suspension dots in diamond type.” As the jacket design reminds us, a harlequin’s traditional lozenge-pattern is a chessboard made oblique. Beside him on the hospital bedside table, as Vadim/Vladimir, “paralyzed in symmetrical patches,” slowly reassembles the world, he notices “a pair of harlequin sunglasses, which for some reason suggested not protection from a harsh light but the masking of tear-swollen lids.” Which hint of masked grief suggests, more strongly than is his wont, why our author has so insistently harlequinized the world and tweaked the chessboard of reality awry.

Y
OUR INVITATION
to Vladimir Nabokov’s birthday party reaches me in England, and it was in England, nearly fifteen years ago, in Oxford, that I first read this great man: in
The New Yorker
, the Pnin story where the pencil sharpener says
ticonderoga, ticonderoga
and Pnin bursts into tears
during a flickering Russian film. It was another fictional universe, or at least a stunning intensification of the ordinary one, and it has been one of the steadier pleasures of the fifteen years since to catch up on the considerable amount of Nabokov then in English and to keep up with the ample installments of reincarnated Russian and newly spawned American that have been issued through an untidy assortment of publishers, ranging from the elegant Bollingen Press to a miserable little bindery called, I think, Phaedra.
^‡
Though I may have nodded here and there among the two volumes of notes to
Onegin
, I have not knowingly missed any of the rest; for Nabokov is never lazy, never ungenerous with his jewels and flourishes, and his
oeuvre
is of sufficient majesty to afford interesting perspectives even from the closets and back hallways. I have expressed in print my opinion that he is now an American writer and the best living; I have also expressed my doubt that his aesthetic models—chess puzzles and protective colorations in lepidoptera—can be very helpful ideals for the rest of us. His importance for me as a writer has been his holding high, in an age when the phrase “artistic integrity” has a somewhat paradoxical if not reactionary ring, the stony image of his self-sufficiency: perverse he can be, but not abject; prankish but not hasty; sterile but not impotent. Even the least warming aspects of his image—the implacable hatreds, the reflexive contempt—testify, like fortress walls, to the reality of the siege this strange century lays against our privacy and pride.

As a reader, I want to register my impression that Nabokov does not (as Philip Toynbee, and other critics, have claimed) lack heart.
Speak, Memory
and
Lolita
fairly bulge with heart, and even the less ingratiating works, such as
King, Queen, Knave
, show, in the interstices of their rigorous designs, a plenitude of human understanding. The ability to animate into memorability minor, disagreeable characters bespeaks a kind of love. The little prostitute that Humbert Humbert recalls undressing
herself so quickly, the fatally homely daughter of John Shade, the intolerably pretentious and sloppy-minded woman whom Pnin undyingly loves, the German street figures in
The Gift
, the extras momentarily onscreen in the American novels—all make a nick in the mind. Even characters Nabokov himself was plainly prejudiced against, like the toadlike heroine of
King, Queen, Knave
, linger vividly, with the outlines of the case they must plead on Judgment Day etched in the air; how fully we feel, for example, her descent into fever at the end. And only an artist full of emotion could make us hate the way we hate Axel Rex in
Laughter in the Dark
. If we feel that Nabokov is keeping, for all his expenditure of verbal small coin, some treasure in reserve, it is because of the riches he has revealed. Far from cold, he has access to European vaults of sentiment sealed to Americans; if he feasts the mind like a prodigal son, it is because the heart’s patrimony is assured.

ENGLISH LIVES

A V
OICE
T
HROUGH A
C
LOUD
, by Denton Welch. 254 pp. University of Texas Press, 1966.

“Promising” is a pale term of praise reviewers customarily employ to excuse themselves from reading closely the work at hand. But the term applies with some force to Denton Welch, an Englishman born in 1917, severely injured in a highway accident at the age of eighteen, and dead by 1948. In his thirteen years of pain and invalidism, Welch composed three novels, of which the last, entitled
A Voice Through a Cloud
, was left uncompleted at his death. While not quite a masterpiece (not only does it not end, it gives no sign of knowing how to end), the book is, especially in its first half, masterly: a fine intelligence, a brave candor, a voracious eye, and a sweet, fresh prose are exercised. Possibly these gifts, liberated to wider use by a healthy life, would have proved equal to many subjects. It is also possible that Welch’s gifts were best realized by the one subject he had—the effects of his absurd and savage accident—and that nothing else would have burnt away so much of his dilettantism or turned his somewhat sinister detachment to such good artistic account. Again, it could be argued that save for his accident he would have outgrown the distrustful and diffident brilliance of a schoolboy. But in the end a man is what happens to him plus what he does. In a world aswarm with might-have-beens, Welch took his shortened life, his remittances of pain and fever, and delivered a unique account of shattered flesh and refracted spirit.

This “novel,” in which Welch rechristened himself Maurice and presumably used the convenience of fiction to change some names and fake a few details, begins with the hero, a London art student, setting out on his bicycle for his uncle’s vicarage in Surrey. The landscape and a tea shoppe are rather adjectivally evoked; the hero resumes his pleasant ride; then