Stalking Nabokov (8 page)

Early in the novel, an old aunt tells Vadim, “Stop moping! Look at the harlequins!” “What harlequins? Where?” “Oh, everywhere. All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together—jokes, images—and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!” (
LATH
8–9)

As I write in the biography, we see almost nothing of You, Vadim’s fourth wife. She appears shortly before the end of the novel. Vadim describes the scene of their meeting: As he emerges from his office at Quirn University, the string around a batch of his letters and drafts breaks. Coming from the library along the same path, You crouches down to help him collect his papers. “No, you don’t,” she says to a yellow sheet that threatens to glide away in the wind. After helping Vadim to cram everything back into his folder she notices a yellow butterfly settle on a clover head before it wheels away in the same wind. “
Metamorphoza,”
she says, in her “lovely elegant Russian.”

In this one short scene, she helps a writer assemble his papers (like Véra as typist, secretary, archivist); she notices a butterfly (again like Véra, who in June 1941 caught a specimen of the hitherto unknown species
Neonympha dorothea
just as her husband was catching another a few hundred yards below, inside the Grand Canyon); she cannot help disclosing the alertness of her imagination: she
is
Véra, putting two things together—a joke, an image—to make a triple harlequin. And then Vadim terminates the scene to announce that reality would only be adulterated if he now “started to narrate what you know, what I know, what nobody else knows [a pointed echo of
Speak, Memory’
s “and presently nobody will know what you and I know”], what shall never, never be ferreted out by a matter-of-fact, father-of-muck, mucking biograffitist” (
VNAY
633;
LATH
226).

Vadim has been appallingly frank about his other wives, down to their sexual peculiarities. But the moment he introduces You, he insists on privacy. That echo of
Speak, Memory
, that tribute to the
real
privacy of a
real
marriage, as opposed to the three marriages that have left Vadim’s life so empty to this point, made me realize for the first time how decidedly Nabokov sees married love as one of the very rare partial escapes that life allows from the solitude of the soul. That escape, he suggests, can exist only where both partners can have absolute confidence that what they share with the other will go no further: only then can there be the kind of frankness, the kind of total sharing of the self, that elsewhere in mortal life is impossible.

Now, I had long understood the importance to Nabokov’s work of his frustration at what he calls “the solitary confinement of the soul.”
⁴
In life, he stresses, it is impossible to step outside the self as if into another soul. The only way to achieve this is to step outside life, into the unique conditions of art or perhaps into some state beyond the mortal self that the strange freedoms that art allows somehow foreshadow.

What I now realized, after this succession of discoveries in the Archive—and after having written more than 2,000 pages on Nabokov—was that Nabokov was ready to define one other escape from the terms of our mortal imprisonment: not only in the unrealities of art but in the reality of married love. That unexpected equation between art and married love became especially clear as I looked again at the bizarre marriage proposal Vadim makes to You.

Vadim has a strange mental quirk: although in real life he can easily walk in one direction, turn around, and walk back the opposite way, in imagination he cannot make that turn. A very neurotic individual, Vadim sees this as somehow symptomatic of his overall mental instability and feels honor-bound to confess this tell-tale sign to each of the successive women he wants to marry. The first three dreadful inamoratas simply ignore what he has tried to explain; only You understands his irrational anxiety, and manages to allay it.

Vadim gives You a section from the manuscript of his latest novel that describes his inability to contemplate turning around to walk back the way he came. As she reads, he sets off on his evening stroll, but with his recently composed text still fresh in his mind, he can picture every word she reads and keep mental pace with her as her eyes scan each manuscript card. Just as he envisages her at the end of his text, he reaches the end of his walk and prepares to turn and head back to meet her. He cannot. The intensity of his love for her and the vividness of his sense of her have made him so conscious of both ends of the distance separating them that his inability to turn in theory now manifests itself in reality. Rigid, he falls to the ground. Over the next three weeks in hospital, he remains physically paralyzed, sensorially dead, while his mind hurtles through hallucinatory landscapes. Only very slowly do sensation and self begin to seep back.

Until this last confession and proposal, through all of Vadim’s previous marriages, there has been no connection whatever between his love and his art as a writer. During this scene, for the first time in his life, these two parts of his existence come together, and in almost miraculous fashion. The scene records a kind of ecstasy, a standing outside the self: knowing the depths of her artistic responsiveness, Vadim can follow You’s thoughts as she reads over his index cards. Art always allows for a kind of transcendence of the self as one person participates in the visions of another imagination, but here the force of Vadim’s love for You grants him a still more immediate transcendence of the self, a virtual entry into her mind as she reads.
⁵

At their highest, both art and the mental harmony of married love suggest to Nabokov a kind of foretaste of what death may bring: the release of the self from its prison. But in life even these glimpses of a freedom beyond must remain highly conditional. Just at the moment where Vadim’s last confession-cum-proposal seems to blur the boundary between life and art (You reads from Vadim’s novel as he acts out the novel’s scenario), self and other (Vadim seems to be
in
her mind reading his own text even as he heads away from her), life and death—just at that moment he has to turn around and face the anxiety that after all he does not know You’s thoughts, that she might be repelled by his confession, that she might reject his proposal (
VNAY
637–38).

Julian Moynahan once criticized Andrew Field’s first and best book on Nabokov for arguing that Nabokov’s works were all concerned primarily with art. That, Moynahan suggested, was a drastic diminution of their force.
⁶
For Moynahan, Nabokov was above all the great celebrator of married love.
⁷
If we look closely at
Look at the Harlequins!
, we can see the extent to which both are right since there Nabokov links art and married love as different means toward one of his central themes, the transcendence of the self.

A novel that appears compulsively self-referential turns out to focus on the transcendence of self; a novel that seems terminally narcissistic turns out to be a love song, and no less passionate for all its play. And what especially interested me as a biographer was that Nabokov’s career, dedicated unrelentingly to his art, and his life, devoted utterly to Véra, had begun to make a new sort of sense together.

By the time I had reached this conclusion—in the second-to-last of fifty chapters—I could finally appreciate the full measure of what the privacy of their married lives meant to the Nabokovs. By now, having solved the riddle of their first meeting and Nabokov’s sense of the difference that meeting made to his life and his art, I could afford to mind less than ever that Véra had so flatly refused to tell me how she and Nabokov had first met or what happened next. There is a hole at the center of Nabokov’s biography, and there always will be: it is part of the romance of his story. Perhaps the hardest part of my task as a biographer was to find the right frame for that hole, the right knots for my net. And it was in the Archive—in a letter to Rowohlt, in a sequence of cryptic diary entries, in the manuscripts of a poem written in 1923 and a novel begun half a century later—that I found most of the strands I needed.

I returned to Montreux in June 1991 to help with the transfer of the Archive. I had spent years working on the manuscript materials, seeing Véra every day. Usually each time I return to the town, I am struck by the constancy of the place: the same familiar figures in the Grand-Rue, the same faces and furniture and food in the Montreux Palace Hotel. This time, I was struck by change. Véra was no more; the Palace Hotel, where she had lived for three decades, had just been radically renovated and the Nabokovs’ suite, and the small former linen room where I had sorted out the Archive, had vanished. But now the manuscripts are here in New York, in the city where Vladimir and Véra Nabokov arrived from Europe and at last found a new home, a haven from exile. Now, the Archive that Véra began when she was not yet twenty and watched over until she was almost ninety has at last found
its
permanent home.

5. From the Nabokov Archive

Nabokov’s Literary Legacy

In 2009 the Japanese magazine
Gunzo
published a special Nabokov issue on the occasion of the imminent publication of
The Original of Laura
, which Tadashi Wakashima, professor of American literature at Kyoto University, will translate. I was asked to write on
Laura
. Because Dmitri Nabokov, his agent, and the publishers wanted the novel’s contents to be strictly embargoed, and the special issue was to appear before the novel, I asked to write about my encountering
Laura
in the context of other materials in the archive that had been or would also be published posthumously. My focus became the changes to my and our perception of Nabokov as new parts of his archives became available.

Many writers and readers now consider Vladimir Nabokov to be least
among
the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. Martin Amis, in New York in November 2009 to celebrate Nabokov on the eve of the publication of his last, unfinished novel,
The Original of Laura
, told me that he would rate
Ulysses
ahead of any Nabokov novel (as I would, some of the time), but rightly stressed that Nabokov comes out far ahead of Joyce in grand slams.

In the 1920s and 1930s Nabokov, always a prodigious worker, was at his most prolific, although writing mostly for the small, shrinking, and isolated audience of the Russian emigration. By the time of his arrival in the United States in 1940, he had a huge backlog of acclaimed Russian works. He wanted them urgently to appear in English, but not until after
Lolita
made him famous in 1958 did publishers solicit his Russian output. His son, Dmitri, recently graduated from Harvard, was just then becoming old enough to serve as his principal translator. By the 1960s a stream of old work joined the steady flow of new to make a flood. His books began to appear with exhilarating but almost exhausting rapidity, despite his slow, superscrupulous habits of composition: fifteen new or thoroughly revised books appeared in the decade before his death. Six of these volumes were translated by Dmitri—by this time an opera singer and, to his parents’ relief, no longer a race-car driver—in conjunction with his father.

Keeping up with translations of his own expanding backlist, adding to his frontlist, and his declining health from 1975 ensured that Nabokov’s last work,
The Original of Laura
, remained unfinished at his death. Although he had asked Véra to destroy the manuscript should he not complete it, she could not bear to. A third of a century later, Dmitri decided to publish the novel. My own initial recoil from
The Original of Laura
and my later reversal I describe in detail in
chapter 26
of this volume, “A Book Burner Recants.” What else has been found in Nabokov’s papers after his death and his prolific life? Why should I of all people be asked to write about the new or little-known parts of Nabokov’s literary legacy, when I recommended to Véra and Dmitri, after reading the manuscript of
The Original of Laura
, that they should destroy it? And what difference can works published or collected since Nabokov’s death make to our sense of the writer and the man?

I wrote my M.A. thesis on Nabokov and ended up sending it to him (no one, he had complained, had solved the puzzle of
Transparent Things
; I had, and wanted to show him it could be solved independently). Véra returned the thesis with Nabokov’s encomium and one marginal cross and three corrections in his blunt pencil hand: my first treasured sample of a handwriting that would become almost as familiar to me as my own. Soon after, I started a Ph.D. thesis on Nabokov, having become bored with the one I had begun on John Barth. In the summer of 1976, visiting Europe for the first time and all but resolved to switch from Barth to Nabokov’s
Ada
, I visited Montreux, where Nabokov had been living since 1961. I ventured inside the imposing Montreux Palace Hotel and left a note for Nabokov but did not dare ask to meet him. I did not know that already that summer he was in hospital and would never fully recover. I can remember how stunned I was, eleven months into my thesis, to hear of his death on July 2, 1977. In photographs he still looked fit, striding up mountain slopes in pursuit of butterflies. His prose seemed invulnerable. How could death have claimed
him
?

In the course of my research, the interlibrary-loan service at the University of Toronto helped me glean all Nabokov’s published work I could lay my hands on, including even his first book, published when he was seventeen. Although the one known copy in the Americas had recently been sold to Harvard for $10,000, an interlibrary-loan copy arrived for me by ordinary mail from the Lenin Library in Moscow. Some of the material I gathered then has still not appeared in book form, has not been consulted by even some of the best Nabokov scholars, yet offers priceless insights into his thinking and wonderful instances of his imagery. Take this review of a book by a now-forgotten philosopher that Nabokov wrote for a now-defunct New York newspaper in his first year in the United States. He notes