The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (85 page)

As no conversation was possible because of Mademoiselle’s deafness, my friend and I decided to bring her next day the appliance which we gathered she could not afford. She adjusted the clumsy thing improperly at first, but no sooner had she done so than she turned to me with a dazzled look of moist wonder and bliss in her eyes. She swore she could hear every word, every murmur of mine. She could not for, having my doubts, I had not spoken. If I had, I would have told her to thank my friend, who had paid for the instrument. Was it, then, silence she heard, that Alpine Silence she had talked about in the past? In that past, she had been lying to herself; now she was lying to me.

Before leaving for Basle and Berlin, I happened to be walking along the lake in the cold, misty night. At one spot a lone light dimly diluted the darkness. In its nimbus the mist seemed transformed into a visible drizzle. “
Il pleut toujours en Suisse” was
one of those casual comments which, formerly, had made Mademoiselle weep. Below, a wide ripple,
almost a wave, and something vaguely white attracted my eye. As I came quite close to the lapping water, I saw what it was—an aged swan, a large, uncouth, dodolike creature, making ridiculous efforts to hoist himself into a moored boat. He could not do it. The heavy, impotent flapping of his wings, their slippery sound against the rocking and plashing boat, the gluey glistening of the dark swell where it caught the light—all seemed for a moment laden with that strange significance which sometimes in dreams is attached to a finger pressed to mute lips and then pointed at something the dreamer has no time to distinguish before waking with a start. But although I soon forgot that dismal night, it was, oddly enough, that night, that compound image—shudder and swan and swell—which first came to my mind when a couple of years later I learned that Mademoiselle had died.

She had spent all her life in feeling miserable; this misery was her native element; its fluctuations, its varying depths, alone gave her the impression of moving and living. What bothers me is that a sense of misery, and nothing else, is not enough to make a permanent soul. My enormous and morose Mademoiselle is all right on earth but impossible in eternity. Have I really salvaged her from fiction? Just before the rhythm I hear falters and fades, I catch myself wondering whether, during the years I knew her, I had not kept utterly missing something in her that was far more she than her chins or her ways or even her French—something perhaps akin to that last glimpse of her, to the radiant deceit she had used in order to have me depart pleased with my own kindness, or to that swan whose agony was so much closer to artistic truth than a drooping dancer’s pale arms; something, in short, that I could appreciate only after the things and beings that I had most loved in the security of my childhood had been turned to ashes or shot through the heart.

T
HE
little I remember about him is centered within the confines of last spring: the spring of 1939. I had been to some “Evening of Russian Émigré Literature”—one of those boring affairs so current in Paris since the early twenties. As I was quickly descending the stairs (an intermission having given me the opportunity to escape), I seemed to hear the gallop of eager pursuit behind me; I looked back, and this is when I saw him for the first time. From a couple of steps above me where he had come to a stop, he said: “My name is Vasiliy Shishkov. I am a poet.”

Then he came down to my level—a solidly built young man of an eminently Russian type, thick-lipped and gray-eyed, with a deep voice and a capacious, comfortable handshake.

“I want to consult you about something,” he continued. “A meeting between us would be desirable.”

I am a person not spoiled by such desires. My assent all but brimmed with tender emotion. We
decided
he would see me next day at my shabby hotel (grandly named Royal Versailles). Very punctually I came down into the simulacrum of a lounge which was comparatively quiet at that hour, if one discounted the convulsive exertions of the lift, and the conversation conducted in their accustomed corner by four German refugees who were discussing certain intricacies of the
carte d’identité
system. One of them apparently thought that his plight was not as bad as that of the others, and the others argued that it was exactly the same. Then a fifth appeared and greeted his compatriots for some reason in French: facetiousness? swank? the lure of a new language? He had just bought a hat; they all started trying it on.

Shishkov entered. With a serious expression on his face and something equally serious in the thrust of his shoulder, he overcame the rusty reluctance of the revolving door and barely had time to look
around before he saw me. Here I noted with pleasure that he eschewed the conventional grin which I fear so greatly—and to which I myself am prone. I had some difficulty in drawing together two overstuffed armchairs—and again I found most pleasing that instead of sketching a mechanical gesture of cooperation, he remained standing at ease, his hands in the pockets of his ancient trench coat, waiting for me to arrange our seats. As soon as we had settled down, he produced a tawny notebook.

“First of all,” said Shishkov, fixing me with nice, furry eyes, “a person must produce his credentials—am I right? At the police station I would have shown my identity card, and to you, Gospodin Nabokov, I must show this—a cahier of verse.”

I leafed through it. The firm handwriting, slightly inclined to the left, emanated health and talent. Alas, once my glance went zigzagging down the lines, I felt a pang of disappointment. The poetry was dreadful—flat, flashy, ominously pretentious. Its utter mediocrity was stressed by the fraudulent chic of alliterations and the meretricious richness of illiterate rhymes. Sufficient to say that such pairs were formed as, for example,
teatr-gladiator, mustang-tank, Madonna-belladonna
. As to the themes, they were best left alone: the author sang with unvarying gusto anything that his lyre came across. Reading his poems one after the other was torture for a nervous person, but since my conscientiousness happened to be reinforced by the author’s watching closely over me and controlling both the direction of my gaze and the action of my fingers, I found myself obliged to stop for a few moments at every consecutive page.

“Well, what’s the verdict?” he asked when I had finished: “Not too awful?”

I considered him. His somewhat glossy face with enlarged pores expressed no ominous premonition whatever. I replied that his poetry was hopelessly bad. Shishkov clicked his tongue, thrust the notebook back into the pocket of his trench coat, and said: “Those credentials are not mine. I mean, I did write that stuff myself, and yet it is all forged. The entire lot of thirty poems was composed this morning, and to tell the truth, I found rather nasty the task of parodying the product of metromania. In return, I now have learned that you are merciless—which means that you can be trusted. Here is my real passport.” (Shishkov handed me another, much more tattered, notebook.) “Read just one poem at random, it will be enough for both you and me. By the way, to avoid any misapprehension, let me warn you that I do not care for your novels; they irritate me as would a harsh light or the loud conversation of strangers when one longs not to talk, but
to think. Yet, at the same time, in a purely physiological way—if I may put it like that—you possess some secret of writing, the secret of certain basic colors, something exceptionally rare and important, which, alas, you apply to little purpose, within the narrow limits of your general abilities—driving about, so to speak, all over the place in a powerful racing car for which you have absolutely no use, but which keeps you thinking where could one thunder off next. However, as you possess that secret, people must reckon with you—and this is why I should like to enlist your support in a certain matter; but first take, please, a look at my poems.”

(I must admit that the unexpected and uncalled-for lecture on the character of my literary work struck me as considerably more impudent than the harmless bit of deception my visitor had devised. I write for the sake of concrete pleasure and publish my writings for the sake of much less concrete money, and though the latter point should imply, in one way or another, the existence of a consumer, it always seems to me that the farther my published books, in the course of their natural evolution, retreat from their self-contained source, the more abstract and insignificant become the fortuitous events of their career. As to the so-called Readers’ Judgment, I feel, at that trial, not as the defendant, but, at best, as a distant relative of one of the least important witnesses. In other words a reviewer’s praise seems to me an odd kind of
sans-gêne
, and his abuse, a vain lunge at a specter. At the moment, I was trying to decide whether Shishkov tumbled his candid opinion into the lap of every proud writer he met or whether it was only with me that he was so blunt because he believed I deserved it. I concluded that just as the doggerel trick had been a result of his somewhat childish but genuine thirst for truth, so the voicing of his views about me was prompted by the urge of widening to the utmost the frame of mutual frankness.)

I vaguely feared that the genuine product might reveal traces of the defects monstrously exaggerated in the parody, but my fears proved unfounded. The poems were very good—I hope to discuss them some other time in much greater detail. Recently, I was instrumental in getting one published in an émigré magazine, and lovers of poetry noticed its originality.
^*
To the poet that was so strangely gourmand in regard to another’s opinion, I incontinently expressed mine, adding, as a corrective, that the poem in question contained some tiny fluctuations of style such as, for instance, the not quite idiomatic
v soldatskih mundirah;
here
mundir
(uniform) should rather be
forma
when referring
as it did to the lower ranks. The line, however, was much too good to be tampered with.

“You know what,” said Shishkov, “since you agree with me that my poems are not trifles, let me leave that book in your keeping. One never knows what may happen; strange, very strange thoughts occur to me, and—Well, anyway, everything now turns out admirably. You see, my object in visiting you was to ask you to take part in a new magazine I am planning to launch. Saturday there will be a gathering at my place and everything must be
decided
. Naturally, I cherish no illusions concerning your capacity for being carried away by the problems of the modern world, but I think the idea of that journal might interest you from a stylistic point of view. So, please, come. Incidentally, we expect” (Shishkov named an extremely famous Russian writer) “and some other prominent people. You have to understand—I have reached a certain limit, I absolutely must take the strain off, or else I’ll go mad. I’ll be thirty soon; last year I came here, to Paris, after an utterly sterile adolescence in the Balkans and then in Austria. I am working here as a bookbinder but I have been a typesetter and even a librarian—in short I have always rubbed against books. Yet, I repeat, my life has been sterile, and, of late, I’m bursting with the urge to do something—a most agonizing sensation—for you must see yourself, from another angle, perhaps, but still you
must
see, how much suffering, imbecility, and filth surround us; yet people of my generation notice nothing, do nothing, though action is simply as necessary as, say, breath or bread. And mind you, I speak not of big, burning questions that have bored everybody to death, but of a trillion trivia which people do not perceive, although they, those trifles, are the embryos of most obvious monsters. Just the other day, for example, a mother, having lost patience, drowned her two-year-old daughter in the bathtub and then took a bath in the same water, because it was hot, and hot water should not be squandered. Good God, how far this is from the old peasant woman, in one of Turgenev’s turgid little tales, who had just lost her son and shocked the fine lady who visited her in her isba by calmly finishing a bowl of cabbage soup ‘because it had been salted’! I shan’t mind in the least if you regard as absurd the fact that the tremendous number of similar trifles, every day, everywhere, of various degrees of importance and of different shapes—tailed germs, punctiform, cubic—can trouble a man so badly that he suffocates and loses his appetite—but, maybe, you will come all the same.”

I have combined here our conversation at the Royal Versailles with excerpts from a diffuse letter that Shishkov sent me next day by way of corroboration. On the following Saturday I was a little late for the
meeting, so that when I entered his
chambre garnie
which was as modest as it was tidy, all were assembled, excepting the famous writer. Among those present, I knew by sight the editor of a defunct publication; the others—an ample female (a translatress, I believe, or perhaps a theosophist) with a gloomy little husband resembling a black breloque; her old mother; two seedy gentlemen in the kind of ill-fitting suits that the émigré cartoonist Mad gives to his characters; and an energetic-looking blond fellow, our host’s chum—were unknown to me. Upon observing that Shishkov kept cocking an anxious ear—observing, too, how resolutely and joyfully he clapped the table and rose, before realizing that the doorbell he had heard pertained to another apartment—I ardently hoped for the celebrity’s arrival, but the old boy never turned up.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Shishkov and began to develop, quite eloquently and engagingly, his plans for a monthly, which would be entitled
A Survey of Pain and Vulgarity
and would mainly consist of a collection of relevant newspaper items for the month, with the stipulation that they be arranged not chronologically but in an “ascending” and “artistically unobtrusive” sequence. The one-time editor quoted certain figures and declared he was perfectly sure that a Russian émigré review of that sort would never sell. The husband of the ample literary lady removed his pince-nez and, while massaging the bridge of his nose, said with horrible haws and hems that if the intention was to fight human misery, it might be much more practical to distribute among the poor the sum of money needed for the review; and since it was from him one expected that money, a chill came over the listeners. After that, the host’s friend repeated—in brisker but baser terms—what Shishkov had already stated. My opinion was also asked. The expression on Shishkov’s face was so tragic that I did my best to champion his project. We dispersed rather early. As he was accompanying us to the landing, Shishkov slipped and, a little longer than was required to encourage the general laughter, remained sitting on the floor with a cheerful smile and impossible eyes.