Stalking Nabokov (51 page)

When I addressed Nabokov’s autobiography in the course of writing his biography, I focused especially on the roles of his father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, and his son, Dmitri Vladimirovich Nabokov. Introducing
Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years
, I lingered over the extraordinary sentence at the end of
Speak, Memory’
s first chapter that pays tribute to Nabokov’s father, anticipates his death, and seems to leave him suspended in the timelessness that the very shape of the autobiography’s sentences somehow impart to their subjects. Introducing
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years
, I drew together the patterns that converge on Dmitri at the end of
Speak, Memory’
s last chapter to suggest the intimation of America looming ahead as a solution to the problem of exile from Russia and even as a metaphor for the solution to the problem of our inevitable exile from our past.

Nabokov reflects his hunch that there must be something beyond time in both the texture of
Speak, Memory’
s individual sentences and the structure of the whole. Midway between these extremes stands the chapter. At this level, too, he finds ways to resist the relentless linearity of time, time as mere succession, time as implacable cause and effect. By exploring chapter 2 of the autobiography, entitled in its original
New Yorker
version “Portrait of My Mother,” we can turn from the role of the males in his family (father and son as standard and stand-in) to the role of the females (his mother as source and stimulus, prefiguring the even richer role his wife will one day play as a kind of second self) and see how Nabokov shapes a single chapter to acknowledge and yet transcend time.

Speak, Memory’
s first chapter, “Perfect Past,” revolves around his first memory, which he thinks may date from one of his mother’s birthdays. As he walks along an avenue at Vyra, holding his parents’ hands, he feels his first awareness of his self as distinct from theirs and his first awareness of time, when he discovers their age in relation to his and becomes “acutely aware that the twenty-seven-year-old being, in soft white and pink, holding my left hand, was my mother, and that the thirty-three-year-old being, in hard white and gold, holding my right hand, was my father” (
SM
22).

Eschewing strict chronology,
Speak, Memory
strives to be less the slave of time than its master. True, each chapter introduces a new phase of his life: his first inklings of consciousness; his mother; his wider family; his early English governesses (from 1902 to 1905); his French governess (from 1905); his passion for butterflies (from 1906); his first love (1909); his Russian tutors (from 1906 to 1915); his school (from 1911 to 1917); his adolescent pursuit of his own masculinity and others’ femininity; his first poem (1914); his first love affair and first taste of exile (from 1915 to 1919); his Cambridge years (1919 to 1922); his years in the Russian emigration (from 1922); his watching over the growth of his son (from 1934). Yet within each essay-like chapter Nabokov moves fluidly about in time.

“Portrait of My Mother” starts with a constant in Nabokov’s psychic life; pauses for a second at a moment when he was six; shifts to summarize his mother’s solicitude for him in his early childhood; lingers over another day when he was seven; leads to an overview of his mother’s metaphysics; returns to her minute attention to the physical; shades naturally into a luminous but typical and timeless scene; summarizes her passions for games and gathering mushrooms; shifts to a portrait of the family’s housekeeper, Elena Nabokov’s old nurse; retraces the disappointment he caused his mother one Christmas morning; and glides forward to picture her as a wartime volunteer nurse, as a devotee of her dachshunds, as an exile in Berlin and in desolate bereavement in Prague. In the course of the chapter he surveys his life, zooms in on a moment, expands an incident, revives a setting, traces a passion or habit or quirk, scans ahead to a later loss, and gazes out toward timelessness.

Although organized around the subject the original titles announce, each chapter also has its riddling quality, especially in the melting vista with which so many end. Chapter 2 even
begins
with a double riddle: first, with the mild but inexplicable hallucinations that Nabokov can always remember being subject to, some aural, some optical, especially just before sleep, and then with the question why he should start a chapter called “Portrait of My Mother” with these solitary idiosyncracies. From there he segues into his colored hearing—an account that has become a classic, cited in scientific studies of synesthesia ever since its first publication—and toward his mother. For after spelling out and filling in the colors each sound of the alphabet evokes in him, he concedes that the

confessions of a synesthete must sound tedious and pretentious to those who are protected from such leakings and drafts by more solid walls than mine are. To my mother, though, this all seemed quite normal. The matter came up, one day in my seventh year, as I was using a heap of old alphabet blocks to build a tower. I casually remarked to her that their colors were all wrong. We discovered then that some of her letters had the same tint as mine and that, besides, she was optically affected by musical notes. These evoked no chromatisms in me whatsoever.

(
SM
35)

Not only does he inherit special sensitivities from her, but he also then becomes the special object of her understanding and encouragement. Noticing his sharp responsiveness to the visual, she paints him aquarelle after aquarelle and even brings out her jewels for him to play with.

“My numerous childhood illnesses brought my mother and me still closer together,” he declares (
SM
36), before describing the strangest experience of his childhood. As he lies in bed while delirium ebbs, he seems to watch or accompany his mother as she enters a stationery shop and emerges with her footman, behind her, carrying the pencil she has purchased. Nabokov renders his vision so uncannily vividly and precisely that he seems to relive it now and allow us to relive it with him, as if we can transcend time and personality just as he seemed then to transcend space. As he watches the scene roll on, he cannot fathom why his mother does not herself carry something as small as a pencil, until she walks through his bedroom door, in reality now, carrying a four-feet-long model display pencil that he has often coveted and that the rational part of his mind has apparently “corrected” in size within his clairvoyant trance. “ ‘Oh, yes,’ she would say as I mentioned this or that unusual sensation. ‘Yes, I know all that,’ and with a somewhat eerie ingenuousness she would discuss such things as double sight, and little raps in the woodwork of tripod tables, and premonitions, and the feeling of the
déjà vu”
(
SM
39).

Suddenly we can see why Nabokov starts this “Portrait of My Mother” with his own moments at the margins of consciousness: they, more than anything, link him to what is innermost in his mother. At the end of section 2, he describes her peculiar faith, in a way that recalls his own quirks of consciousness at the beginning of the chapter:

Her intense and pure religiousness took the form of her having equal faith in the existence of another world and in the impossibility of comprehending it in terms of earthly life. All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.

(
SM
39)

Section 3 turns from the metaphysical to the physical as it opens with Elena Nabokov’s instructions to her son:

“Vot zapomni
[now remember],” she would say in conspiratorial tones as she drew my attention to this or that loved thing in Vyra—a lark ascending the curds-and-whey sky of a dull spring day, heat lightning taking pictures of a distant line of trees in the night, the palette of maple leaves on brown sand, a small bird’s cuneate footprints on new snow. As if feeling that in a few years the tangible part of her world would perish, she cultivated an extraordinary consciousness of the various time marks distributed throughout our country place.

(
SM
40)

No wonder he thinks of entitling his autobiography
Speak, Mnemosyne—
until he is told it is unpronounceable—as if he were formally invoking Mnemosyne, memory, the mother of the muses. For it is his mother who teaches him to treasure Vyra, the home of
her
childhood, too, and to notice its fleeting details because they can be hoarded only within the sanctum of the mind. Just as she fosters his senses and his extrasensory intuitions, she trains him in memory and in her sense of the preciousness and precariousness of the world around, even as her love and her wealth enfold him in such security.

As so often, a stroll through the park turns a corner from space into time, as a glimpse of the overgrown old tennis court calls up the new court and the elaborately protracted picture of a typical game, Vladimir partnering his mother against his father and his younger brother, Sergey, with character sketches of principals and extras, action shots and comedy, landscapes and melting effects of light and shade, the seemingly effortless recreation of the presence of the past.

From this scene Nabokov slides into a summary—“She loved all games of skill and gambling” (
SM
42)—that again suggests how much his passion for play owes to her, then leads into her zeal for the “very Russian sport of . . . looking for mushrooms” (
SM
43), a drive that he understands and that enables
her
to understand when his own compulsion for collecting butterflies develops.

The fourth and final section of “Portrait of My Mother” opens with Nabokov’s explanation of his mother’s remoteness from the running of their large household (“fifty servants and no questions asked” [
SM
46]). “Nominally,” he explains, “the housekeeping was in the hands of her former nurse,” but Elena Borisovna’s encroaching senility means that the real organization of the household has to carry on behind her back, “with my mother deriving considerable comfort from the hope that her old nurse’s illusory world would not be shattered” (
SM
45–46). A little Christmas incident when Vladimir and Sergey shatter
her
illusions fades out into a picture of the First World War, with Elena Nabokov setting up a private hospital for wounded soldiers and playing the part of nurse. Another natural transition takes us to her fondness for dachshunds, and when we follow that to the end we find her in 1930 in Prague with her last dackel waddling far behind her “in a huff, tremendously old and furious with his long Czech muzzle of wire—an émigré dog in a patched and ill-fitting coat” (
SM
48).

Rewinding a few years, Nabokov recalls sitting with his mother in the family apartment in Berlin, while on vacation from Cambridge, and reading her “Blok’s verse on Italy—had just got to the end of the little poem about Florence, which Blok compares to the delicate, smoky bloom of an iris, and she was saying over her knitting, ‘Yes, yes, Florence does look like a
dïmnïy iris
, how true! I remember—‘ when the telephone rang” (
SM
49). He does not linger, does not explain, but the attentive reader can deduce: the call that interrupts them comes from the hall where Nabokov senior has just been assassinated. As I wrote in the biography and the previous chapter of this book, throughout
Speak, Memory
Nabokov returns obliquely to his father’s death as if it were a wound he cannot leave alone but can hardly bear to touch.

He now advances to his mother’s last years in Prague, without Vyra, without her husband, without her favorite son, in the “pitiable lodgings” where she has no large household to look after or to look after her:

A soapbox covered with green cloth supported the dim little photographs in crumbling frames she liked to have near her couch. She did not really need them, for nothing had been lost. As a company of traveling players carry with them everywhere, while they still remember their lines, a windy heath, a misty castle, an enchanted island, so she had with her all that her soul had stored.

(
SM
49–50)

This sequence of treasured memories and anticipated losses, of disappointed hopes and new unexpected losses has not quite come to an end, for Nabokov’s loss of his mother is still to come. Discussing his predormitary hallucinations at the start of the chapter, he had insisted, “What I mean is not the bright mental image (as, for instance, the face of a beloved parent long dead) conjured up by a wing-stroke of the will;
that
is one of the bravest movements a human spirit can make” (
SM
33). Now at the end of the chapter, after a last image of the two wedding rings on his mother’s fourth finger, her own and her husband’s, too big for her, but tied to hers by a bit of black thread, he returns in a sense to that beginning, as he faces her death and his father’s:

Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then—not in dreams—but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.