Stalking Nabokov (27 page)

Lolita curved with her spine to Humbert, Humbert resting his head on his hand and burning with desire and dyspepsia.

The latter necessitated a trip to the bathroom for a draft of water, which is the best medicine I know in my case, except perhaps milk with radishes; and when I re-entered the strange pale-striped fastness where Lolita’s old and new clothes reclined in various attitudes of enchantment on pieces of furniture that seemed vaguely afloat, my impossible daughter sat up and in clear tones demanded a drink, too.

(
Lolita
132–33)

The night of unbearable tension, of oscillating hope and frustration, at last draws to an end, and Humbert addresses us: “Frigid gentlewomen of the jury! I had thought that months, perhaps years, would elapse before I dared to reveal myself to Dolores Haze; but by six she was wide awake, and by six fifteen we were technically lovers. I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me” (134).

She wakes, and shortly bends over to whisper in his ear,

and gradually the odd sense of living in a brand new, mad new dream world, where everything was permissible, came over me as I realized what she was suggesting. I answered I did not know what game she and Charlie played. “You mean you have never—?” her features twisted into a stare of disgusted incredulity. “You have never—” she started again. I took time out by nuzzling her a little. “Lay off, will you,” she said with a twangy whine, hastily removing her brown shoulder from my lips. (It was very curious the way she considered—and kept doing so for a long time—all caresses except kisses on the mouth or the stark act of love either “romantic slosh” or “abnormal”.) …

She saw the stark act merely as part of a youngster’s furtive world, unknown to adults. What adults did for purposes of procreation was no business of hers. My life was handled by little Lo in an energetic, matter-of-fact manner as if it were an insensate gadget unconnected with me.

(
Lolita
135–36)

A childhood has just been destroyed, and still we can’t help smiling.

“Invent reality!” the mock muse of
Look at the Harlequins!
tells Vadim, our mock Vladimir. Nabokov’s refusal to accept the fixity of common categories, received evaluations, and rigid frameworks of all kinds, his subversion of standard notions, far from constituting an evasion of the real, has direct implications in the real world. “Curiosity,” he proposes in
Bend Sinister
, “is insubordination in its purest form” (46), and laughter, he suggests in “Tyrants Destroyed,” is the way to defeat tyrants, to stop our minds being colonized or tyrannized.

Nabokov claims he has “no moral in tow” (
Lolita
316). “Satire is a lesson,” he says, “parody is a game” (
SO
75), and it’s parody he admits to. Not because he has nothing to teach, in fact, but because he believes that games get us closer to truth than stolid lessons: the surprise of the game or the imagination can reveal more than the earnest plod of instruction or the strict sequence of logic.

Although he would not have accepted the old definition of comedy as corrective, showing, as Sir Philip Sidney put it, “the common errors of our life” “in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be; so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one,”
¹
he did in fact have a very strong corrective impulse.

His critical humor, his barbs, could be directed even at friends. After noticing that Harry Levin always implied he had read absolutely everything, Nabokov as he talked to him one night invented a nineteenth-century novelist and elaborated in great detail upon his life and works while Levin nodded as if
of course
he knew this person and his work. Nabokov’s could also turn his corrective humor on literary enemies. In the emigration, the critic Georgy Adamovich regularly panned Nabokov’s work, so Nabokov published two poems under the name of “Vasily Shishkov,” and when Adamovich hailed them as works of genius Nabokov then rubbed salt in the wound by publishing a story called “Vasily Shishkov” that toyed with the question of the relationship between Shishkov and Nabokov.

If really provoked, Nabokov could aim his critical humor at his own critics. When William Rowe insisted on seeing sexual allusions everywhere, Nabokov denounced his “torrent of Freudian drivel, which allows him to construe ‘metrical length’ as an erection and ‘rhyme’ as a sexual climax. No less ludicrous is his examination of Lolita’s tennis and his claim that the tennis balls represent testicles (those of a giant albino, no doubt)” (
SO
306). He could apply caustic correctives to literary reputations, to snobbery or racism or pretentiousness, to
poshlost’
, to Freud, to Marx, to Hitler, to all he saw as opponents of freedom.

For Nabokov a sense of humor is closely related to a capacity for freedom, to the mind’s consciousness of its own freedom. He felt strongly the tension between the extraordinary freedom of the mind and its entrapment within the limits of the human: the powers of the mind are triumphant, its limits absurd and humiliating. He explores that tension and that irony again and again, in a Herman, a Humbert, a Kinbote, or, in a different way, in his own person.

In the opening chapter of his autobiography he describes the shock of becoming aware of time, “so boundless at first blush,” the shock of “the awakening of consciousness.” He recalls the particular scene, with his father in the resplendent uniform of the Horse Guards, and adds: “My father, let it be noted, had served his term of military training long before I was born, so I suppose he had that day put on the trappings of his old regiment as a festive joke. To a joke, then, I owe my first glimpse of complete consciousness—which again has recapitulatory implications, since the first creatures on earth to become aware of time were also the first creatures to smile” (
SM
22).

His humor, like his style, offers a chance to see and savor the freedom of the mind, to see how easily we leap from invention to invention, how our minds can twist in midair. Nabokov wants to suggest that we should respond to our world not passively but actively, that we should not dully impose standard expectations on things but notice with surprise and delight when they do not fit what we expect. That incongruity between expectation and actuality is fundamental to humor. “The unusual is funny in itself,” he once said. “A man slips and falls down. It is the contrary of gravity in both sense” (Meras interview).

He wants to show us how active, how nimble, how unexpected our minds can be—how we can put our own spin on our world when we put two things together, a joke, an image, and invent reality, when we become not the passive products of our immediate world but its active shapers. Yet at the same time he asks us to respect our world and let
it
catch
us
by surprise, if we watch closely enough.

Beyond that, Nabokov wants his humor to connect us with the surprises that might lie beyond the understanding of the world that our minds trap us within. “Life is a great surprise,” he makes John Shade say, “and I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.” As a child, Nabokov notes, in the passage where he describes that first flush of excitement at being “plunged into a radiant and mobile medium that was none other than the pure element of time,” he was “unaware that time, so boundless at first blush, was a prison” (
SM
21, 20). He came to feel that beyond the prison of conscious time, beyond the “solitary confinement of the self,” there must be freer, less restricted modes of existence, which perhaps we might reach through the doorway of death.

But existence beyond time and the self would have to be so surprising that the only way we can know it is
through
surprise. Nabokov had a hunch that humor, by making us suddenly conscious of the disparity between expectation and outcome, is one of the most promising signposts to this realm of surprise. At the end of
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
, the narrator, Sebastian’s half-brother, describes Sebastian’s last book, which builds up to the promise of a great revelation, somehow connected with the afterlife. When he hears Sebastian is dying, V. rushes by overnight train to Paris and then to Sebastian’s hospital, but a series of mishaps delay him so he doesn’t arrive until late at night and is directed towards the bedside of the sleeping patient. Sitting beside his brother in the dark, listening to his breathing, he feels a great sense of communion with Sebastian, a rapture of revelation— only to discover that the nurses had misunderstood whom he was asking for. That was the wrong bedside: Sebastian died the previous day.

In
Pale Fire
, the poet John Shade has a near-death experience during a heart attack and in it has a vision of a tall white fountain. He reads a magazine article in which someone else has also had a near-death experience, and in it she, too, saw a white fountain. Agog, he tracks her down but realizes at once that this garrulous sentimentalist will be all over him if he mentions his vision. Later, when he checks with the journalist who wrote up the story, he finds out that the article was accurate: “I’ve not changed her style.”
But
: “There’s one misprint—not that it matters much. /
Mountain
, not
fountain”
(
PF
62).

In one light, these comically frustrated glimpses of the beyond might seem to suggest only a wry metaphysical skepticism, a cruel debunking of desperate human hopes. Some people do think of Nabokov as a savage ironist. An émigré critic wrote in 1929: “How terrible, to see life as Sirin [Nabokov’s émigré nom de plume—BB] does! How wonderful, to see life as Bunin does!” Nabokov reported to a friend: “I read the article and had a good laugh—not at Zaitsev, but at the fact that in life and in my whole mental makeup I am quite indecently optimistic and buoyant, whereas Bunin, as far as I know, is rather inclined to dejection and black thoughts—but in Zaitsev’s article it comes out the other way round” (
VNRY
343). In the 1960s an interviewer suggested to Nabokov that he saw life as a very funny but cruel joke. Nabokov answered: “You must be confusing me with Dostoevsky” (
SO
119).

Although the frustrations at the end of
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight’
s or in John Shade’s probing of the beyond may look like cruel jokes, when we look deeper we find that the joke is not so much that there’s nothing ahead—although Nabokov does leave that as one possibility—as that that all we can know is the surprise, the enormous and absurd distance between mortality and beyond, between whatever we expect and what we might get if our minds
could
escape the prison of time and self. In this sense laughter is indeed a chance ape of truth astray in our world. Or as Nabokov wrote to Véra before they were married: “Only through laughter do mortals get to heaven.”
²

Beyond this, beyond the idea of some almost comically unimaginable state perhaps awaiting us outside the prison of the mortal mind, is a further level of the beyond: a sense of some conscious design, some ultimate playfulness, behind things.

As a naturalist, a lepidopterist, Nabokov insisted on “the incredible artistic wit of mimetic disguise” (
Gift
122). Natural mimicry for him was too complex, too perfect, too playfully deceptive to explain in terms of natural selection: it “seemed to have been invented by some waggish artist for the intelligent eyes of man” (
Gift
122). Nabokov had a sense of some playfully benign design behind the cosmic cyclorama, perhaps some impish fate, perhaps something more, some artistic and gamesome god. In
The Gift
Fyodor watches the stray delights of a summer morning, ending with a glimpse of two elderly postal workers “grown suddenly playful.” He sees them sneak up to tickle a colleague basking with eyes closed on a bench in the sun, and he asks: “Where shall I put all these gifts with which the summer morning rewards me—and only me? Save them up for future books? Use them immediately for a practical handbook:
How to Be Happy
? Or getting deeper, to the bottom of things: understand what is concealed behind all this, behind the play, the sparkle, the thick green grease-paint of the foliage? For there really is something, there is something! And one wants to offer thanks but there is no one to thank. The list of donations already made: 10,000 days—from Person Unknown” (
Gift
340).

Nabokov presents as the first scene of
Speak, Memory
his first taste of consciousness and time, which he attributes to his father’s “joke” in putting on an outdated uniform for a festive occasion. When he had this first flash of self-consciousness, he was holding his parents’ hands and walking along a garden path. The
last
scene of
Speak, Memory
shows Nabokov and his wife walking along another garden path with Dmitri between them, holding their hands. They spot the boat that will take them to America from a France that Germany has already invaded, but they do not immediately point it out

to our child, so as to enjoy in full the blissful shock, the enchantment and glee he would experience on discovering ahead the ungenuinely gigantic, the unrealistically real prototype of the various toy vessels he had doddled about in his bath. There, in front of us, where a broken row of houses stood between us and the harbor, and where the eye encountered all sorts of stratagems, such as pale-blue and pink underwear cakewalking on a clothesline, or a lady’s bicycle and a striped cat oddly sharing a rudimentary balcony of cast iron, it was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship’s funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture—Find What the Sailor Has Hidden—that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen.