The Enchanter (10 page)

In agonizing moments of introspection he recognizes the beast and tries to will it away. Ingeniously appropriate images recur in bestial counterpoint—hyenas in every hygiene; onanistic tentacles; the lupine leer in place of the intended smile; the licking of chops at the thought of his defenseless, sleeping prey; the whole leitmotif of the Wolf about to devour his Red Riding Hood, complete with its eerie final echo. This dark beast within him, this bête noire of his, must always be construed as the protagonist’s implicit self-perception, and, in his rational moments, it is what the Enchanter fears most; thus, catching himself in an absentminded smile, he posits, with pathetic, flimsy hope, that “only
humans
are capable of absentmindedness” and that therefore he too might after all be human.

The stratification of the story is most striking in its double- and triple-bottomed imagery. It is true, in a sense, that some delicate passages are more explicit than elsewhere in Nabokov. But at other moments the sexual undercurrent is no more than the glinting facet of a simile or the momentary derailment of a train of thought headed for a quite different destination. Multiple levels and senses, as is known, occur often in Nabokov. Yet the line he treads here is razor thin, and the virtuosity consists in a deliberate vagueness of verbal and visual elements whose sum is a complex, otherwise undefinable, but totally precise unit of communication.

An analogous kind of ambiguity, whose purpose and synthesis are again the exact expression of a complex concept, is at times employed to convey the concurrent—and conflicting—thoughts racing through the protagonist’s brain. As a limpid instance of what I mean, let me cite one such passage, whose paradoxes, at first sight, challenge reader and translator alike, but, when approached without selectively closing the switch on tracks of thought parallel to what at first seems the main line, again reward one with a crystalline whole that is greater than the sum of its parts; the openness of receptivity required here, which would perhaps represent overkill in dealing with more conventional writing, is akin to that which a sensitive ear will apply to the counterpoint of Bach or the thematic texture of Wagner, or which a
stubborn eye will force upon a recalcitrant brain when their possessor perceives that the same elements of a tricky design can simultaneously yield, say, an ape peering wistfully out of its cage and a beach ball bobbing, hopelessly out of reach, amid the reflections of a sunset on the repetitious ripples of an azure sea.

The protagonist, rather than face his odious nuptial obligations, has gone roaming in the night. He has considered various alternatives of disposing of his newly acquired, already superfluous spouse, who is promisingly ill, but every moment of whose existence keeps him from the girl he craves. He has pondered poison, presumably entered a pharmacy, perhaps made a purchase. On his return he sees a strip of light under the door of the “dear departed” and says to himself “Charlatans … We’ll have to stick to the original version.” The concurrent ideas here can be listed thus:

1. He is disappointed that she has not gone to sleep.
   
2. He had half-consciously been equating sleep with death.
   
3. Our seeing her, through his eyes, as the “dear departed” connotes his sarcastic reaction to her being
   
   1. awake
      
   2. alive.
      
4. Or the term “dear departed” signifies that, in his mind, she is already dead or as good as dead.
   
5. He must now either satisfy his unappetizing bride or find a plausible excuse to say good night and go to bed (the “original version”).
   
6. His access to the girl remains as problematic as ever.
   
7. The “charlatans” are
   
   1. the pharmacists whose potion he did not buy;
      
   2. the pharmacists whose potion he did buy but did not use;
      
   3. the pharmacists whose potion his obsessed imagination has meanwhile administered, expecting to find the woman dead, equating, as we have seen, wakefulness with life (for “pharmacists” read the whole establishment of forensic medicine that has somehow let him down);
      
   4. the pangs of conscience and/or fear that have made him discard the idea of poison and/or murder in general; or
      
   5. the hope against hope that he has succeeded in simply willing her demise.
      
8. All of the above merge in the kaleidoscope of a mad mind.
   

Did the man actually enter the pharmacy? Here, as elsewhere, my translatorial ethics would prohibit adding to Father’s text to make things more explicit in English
than they are in Russian. The text’s multilevel, pleasingly elliptical form is an integral part of its character. If VN had wanted to be more specific here, he would have done so in the original.

Time and place are purposely left imprecise in the story, which is essentially timeless and placeless. One might presume that the 1930s are nearly over, and, as Nabokov later confirmed,
⁹
that we are in Paris, and then en route to the south of France. There is also a brief detour to a small city not very far from the capital. The only character mentioned by name in the text
¹⁰
is the least important one: the female servant, in that provincial city, who helps the ill-fated child pack and shoos away the chicks as the car, containing protagonist and prey united at last, speeds away.

I shall leave to the studious—among whom exist some superbly sensitive readers of Nabokov—the detailed identification and the documentation of themes and levels (straight narrative, tricky metaphor, romantic poetry, sexuality, fairy-tale sublimation, mathematics, conscience, compassion, fear of being strung up by the heels), as well as the search for hidden parallels with
The Song of Igor’s Campaign
or
Moby Dick
. Father would have put Freudians
on guard against rejoicing at the ephemeral mention of a sister, the girl’s curious regression into infancy at the end, or the elaborate walking stick (which
is
unabashedly and entertainingly phallic but, on a totally distinct plane, visually evocative as well of the appetizing, “valuable” objects—another example is the rare, blank-faced watch—with which Nabokov sometimes liked to endow his characters).

Certain other compressed images and locutions should, possibly, be explained, since it would be a pity if they were wasted. Here are a few “special” examples, given, unlike those singled out above, in proper order.

The “black salad devouring a green rabbit” (
this page
; one of a number (see below) of visual aberrations that, on one level, give the story a surreal, enchanted aura while, on another, describing with utmost economy and directness how a character’s perception of reality is momentarily distorted by a state of being (in this case, the protagonist’s overpowering, thwarted, barely concealed excitement).

The “little Japanese steps” (
this page
): many if not all readers must have seen, on the big screen or the little one, or at the opera, or perhaps in the real Orient, the geisha-style walk—short, mincing steps on high platform sandals—to which Nabokov likens the girl’s progress on skates whose wheels refuse to roll on the gravel.

A potentially more cryptic passage is that of the “strange,
nailless finger” scrawled on the fence (
this page
). Here, again, deliberate ambiguity, concurrent images and ideas, and multiple levels of interpretation are at play. To spell this one out: The “definite goal” that emerges from a substratum of the man’s brain is access to the girl via marriage to the mother. The imagined graffito on the fence is a hybrid of the forefinger pointing the way on old-fashioned signs and of some joker’s phallic doodle that the digit’s stylized, nailless shape simultaneously suggests to a mind bent, basically, on depravity, but not devoid of self-reproaching flashes of objectivity. This ambiguous finger simultaneously indicates, in the fleeting image, the path of courtship (of the mother), the secret parts of the yearned-for girl, and the protagonist’s own vulgarity that no amount of rationalization can explain away.

“Cuff” (
this page
) as in “cufflinks.” It is clearly implied that the poor woman is still playing hard to get. The wordplay, with an oblique echo of the work’s Russian title, whose most direct meaning is “magician,” refers to a card up the conjuror’s sleeve—the superficial trappings of marriage—plus the actual, live, presumably loving husband, “the live ace of hearts.” There is also a parallel, introspective nuance here: the cynical trick that this travesty of a marriage represents to the protagonist. He shares this underlying joke with the perceptive reader, though not, of course, with his bride-to-be. We have the same kind of multiple compression here as in the graffito image.

“Compass rose” (
this page
): The early Italian nautical compass card, more stylized than today’s, and indicating, as compass roses still do, the principal and subsidiary compass points (which also identified the directions from which winds blew) was called
rosa dei venti
, “rose of the winds,” because of its flowerlike appearance and because wind directions were of paramount concern to navigators; the Italian term survives to this day. A nice fillip is gained in translation (for a minority of readers perhaps—those who navigate and those who know Italian), since the image refers to drafts coming from various directions through windows opened by the charwoman.

“The 32nd” (
this page
): another beautifully concentrated image that it is almost a pity to deaden by bookish explication. His violent emotions—anticipation of finally encountering the girl alone, the infuriating surprise and disappointment of finding the bustling char—have simply imparted a moist blur to his vision and made him see an absurd date. The month is immaterial. A Nabokovian irony is there, but a bit of compassion for the monster seeps through as well.

A “doubling cat” (
this page
) is a cat seen by a child so tired that she has difficulty keeping her eyes focused. It is, optically, akin to “32nd” and the “green rabbit.”

It would of course have been possible to give a minute explanation of every challenging passage, but that would have produced a scholarly apparatus longer than the text
itself. These little puzzles, which, without exception, have an artistic purpose, should also be fun. The approximate reader, drowsy from the airliner’s unhealthy air and the complimentary drinks he has downed, always has the lamentable option of skipping, as he often did with the best-selling
Lolita
.

The things
I
love about the story are, among others, the suspense (how will reality betray the dream?) and the corollary of a surprise on every page; the eerie humor (the grotesque wedding night; the suspicious chauffeur who vaguely foreshadows Clare Quilty; the Shakespearean clown of a night porter; the protagonist’s desperate search for the misplaced room—will he emerge, as in “A Visit to the Museum,”
¹¹
into a totally different town or will the old porter, whom he comes upon at last, react as if seeing him for the first time in his life?); the descriptions (the forest hopping from hill to hill only to trip over the highway, and much else); the preliminary glimpses of people and things with a parallel life of their own that will, incidentally or crucially, recur; the trucks ominously thundering in the night; the splendidly innovative use of Russian in the original; the cinematic imagery of the surreal conclusion and the frenzied pace, a kind of
stretta finale
, that accelerates toward the crashing climax.

The English title chosen by Father has, of course, a
not-so-secret echo in The Enchanted Hunters of
Lolita
. I shall leave to others the search for additional Easter eggs of this kind. One should be wary, however, of exaggerating the significance of superficial similarities. Nabokov considered
The Enchanter
a totally distinct work, only distantly connected to
Lolita
. It may have contained, as he put it, “the first little throb” of the later novel—and even that thesis might be questioned if one attentively examines certain earlier works of his—but we must also not forget that the arts in general pulsate with first throbs that foreshadow future, larger works; various literary compositions come to mind, such as Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist
. Or, conversely, there may be a subsequent mini-version, a final distillation such as Massenet’s
Portrait of Manon
. In any case,
Volshebnik
is certainly not a
Portrait of Lolita:
the differences between the two are clearly greater than the similarities. Whether or not the later novel is a love affair between the author and the English language, a love affair between Europe and America, a jaundiced view of the motel scene and the surrounding landscape, a modern-day “free translation of
Onegin”
(these and a multitude of other hypotheses have been advanced, eagerly but with varying degrees of seriousness and credibility),
Lolita
is unquestionably the product of very new and different artistic stimuli.

On the premise that it is preferable to be angelic than foolish in approaching the genesis of a complex artistic
work, I shall not venture to assess the importance to
Lolita
of Nabokov’s study of Lewis Carroll; of his observations in Palo Alto in 1941; or of Havelock Ellis’s transcription, circa 1912, of a Ukrainian pedophile’s confessions, which have been translated from the original French by Donald Rayfield (who, despite a haunting echo of the fictional John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., in
Lolita
, is a very real British scholar). Rayfield theorizes, amid certain less convincing assertions, that the pseudonymous Victor, via Ellis, deserves credit “for his contribution to the theme and plot of
Lolita
and the strange sensuous and intellectual character of Humbert Humbert, the hero of Nabokov’s finest English-language novel.” And, while acknowledging the previous composition of
The Enchanter
(whose title he translates literally as “The Magician”), he further conjectures that the unfortunate Ukrainian’s account provided the final impetus for the emergence of
“Lolita
’s central theme.”
¹²
This hypothesis might merit consideration, were it not for certain chronological facts that I must nevertheless point out: It was not until 1948 that Edmund Wilson sent the Ellis transcription to Nabokov, who had had no previous acquaintance with it—while
Volshebnik
, which does contain what might be called the “central theme” (if little else) of
Lolita
, was completed in 1939.