The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

by Vladimir Nabokov

  I was sorry it stopped here.

  Foreign coins in a chocolate box: francs, marks, schillings, crowns – and their small change. Several fountain pens. An Oriental amethyst, unset. A rubber band. A glass tube of tablets for headache, nervous breakdown, neuralgia, insomnia, bad dreams, toothache. The toothache sounded rather dubious. An old notebook (1926) filled with dead telephone numbers. Photographs.

  I thought I should find lots of girls. You know the kind – smiling in the sun, summer snapshots, continental tricks of shade, smiling in white on pavement, sand or snow – but I was mistaken. The two dozen or so of photographs I shook out of a large envelope with the laconic Mr H. written on top in Sebastian's hand, all featured one and the same person at different stages of his life: first a moonfaced urchin in a vulgarly cut sailor suit, next an ugly boy in a cricket-cap, then a pug-nosed youth, and so on till one arrived at a series of full-grown Mr H. – a rather repellent bulldog type of man, getting steadily fatter in a world of photographic backgrounds and real front gardens. I learnt who the man 'was supposed to be when I came 'across a newspaper clipping attached to one of the photographs:

  'Author writing fictitious biography requires photos of gentleman, efficient appearance, plain, steady, teetotaller, bachelors preferred. Will pay for photos childhood, youth, manhood to appear in said work.'

  That was a book Sebastian never wrote, but possibly he was still contemplating doing so in the last year of his life, for the last photograph of Mr H. standing happily near a brand-new car, bore the date 'March 1935' and Sebastian had died but a year later.

  Suddenly I felt tired and miserable. I wanted the face of his Russian correspondent. I wanted pictures of Sebastian himself. I wanted many things…. Then, as I let my eyes roam around the room, I caught sight of a couple of framed photographs in the dim shadows above the bookshelves.

  I got up and examined them. One was an enlarged snapshot of a Chinese stripped to the waist, in the act of being vigorously beheaded, the other was a banal photographic study of a curly child playing with a pup. The taste of their juxtaposition seemed to me questionable, but probably Sebastian had his own reasons for keeping and hanging them so.

  I glanced too, at the books; they were numerous, untidy, and miscellaneous. But one shelf was a little neater than the rest and here I noted the following sequence which for a moment seemed to form a vague musical phrase, oddly familiar: Hamlet, La morte d'Arthur, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, South Wind, The Lady with the Dog, Madame Bovary, The Invisible Man, Le Temps Retrouvй, Anglo-Persian Dictionary, The Author of Trixie, Alice in Wonderland, Ulysses, About Buying a Horse, King Lear….

  The melody gave a small gasp and faded. I returned to the desk and began sorting out the letters I had laid aside. They were mostly business letters, and I felt entitled to peruse them. Some bore no relation to Sebastian's profession, others did. The disorder was considerable and many allusions remained unintelligible to me. In a few cases he had kept copies of his own letters so that for instance I got in full a long zestful dialogue between him and his publisher in regard to a certain book. Then, there was a fussy soul in Rumania of all places, clamouring for an option…. I learnt too of the sales in England and the Dominions…. Nothing very brilliant – but in one case at least perfectly satisfactory. A few letters from friendly authors. One gentle writer, the author of a single famous book, rebuked Sebastian (April 4, 1928) for being 'Conradish' and suggested his leaving out the 'con' and cultivating the 'radish' in future works – a singularly silly idea, I thought.

  Lastly, at the very bottom of the bundle, I came to my mother's and my own letters, together with several from one of his undergraduate friends; and as I struggled a little with their pages (old letters resent being unfolded) I suddenly realized what my next hunting-ground ought to be.

  5

  Sebastian Knight's college years were not particularly happy. To be sure he enjoyed many of the things he found at Cambridge – he was in fact quite overcome at first to see and smell and feel the country for which he had always longed. A real hansom cab took him from the station to Trinity College: the vehicle, it seemed, had been waiting there especially for him, desperately holding out against extinction till that moment, and then gladly dying out to join side whiskers and the Large Copper. The slush of streets gleaming wet in the misty darkness with its promised counterpoint – a cup of strong tea and a generous fire – formed a harmony which somehow he knew by heart. The pure chimes of tower-clocks, now hanging over the town, now overlapping and echoing afar, in some odd, deeply familiar way blended with the piping cries of the newspaper vendors. And as he entered the stately gloom of Great Court with gowned shadows passing in the mist and the porter's bowler hat bobbing in front of him, Sebastian felt that he somehow recognized every sensation, the wholesome reek of damp turf, the ancient sonority of stone slabs under heel, the blurred outlines of dark walls overhead – everything. That special feeling of elation probably endured for quite a long time, but there was something else intermingled with it, and later on predominant. Sebastian in spite of himself realized with perhaps a kind of helpless amazement (for he had expected more from England than she could do for him) that no matter how wisely and sweetly his new surroundings played up to his old dreams, he himself, or rather still the most precious part of himself, would remain as hopelessly alone as it had always been. The keynote of Sebastian's life was solitude and the kindlier fate tried to make him feel at home by counterfeiting admirably the things he thought he wanted, the more he was aware of his inability to fit into the picture – into any kind of picture. When at last he thoroughly understood this and grimly started to cultivate self-consciousness as if it had been some rare talent or passion, only then did Sebastian derive satisfaction from its rich and monstrous growth, ceasing to worry about his awkward uncongeniality – but that was much later.

  Apparently, at first he was frantically afraid of not doing the right thing or, worse still, of doing it clumsily. Someone told him that the hard cornered part of the academical cap ought to be broken, or even removed altogether, leaving only the limp black cloth. No sooner had he done so, than he found out that he had lapsed into the worst 'undergrad' vulgarity and that perfect taste consisted in ignoring the cap and gown one wore, thus granting them the faultless appearance of insignificant things which otherwise would have dared to matter. Again, whatever the weather, hats and umbrellas were tabooed, and Sebastian piously got wet and caught colds until a certain day when he came to know one D. W. Gorget, a delightful, flippant, lazy, easy-going fellow, famed for his rowdiness, elegance, and wit: and Gorget coolly went about in a town-hat plus umbrella. Fifteen years later, when I visited Cambridge and was told by Sebastian's best college friend (now a prominent scholar) of all these things, I remarked that everybody seemed to be carrying – 'Exactly,' said he, 'Gorget's umbrella has bred.'

  'And tell me,' I asked, 'what about games? Was Sebastian good at games?'

  My informant smiled.

  'I am afraid,' he answered, 'that except a little mild tennis on a rather soggy green court with a daisy or two on the worst patches, neither Sebastian nor I went in very much for that sort of thing. His racket, I remember, was a remarkably expensive one, and his flannels very becoming – and generally he looked very tidy and nice and all that; but his service was a feminine pat and he rushed about a lot without hitting anything, and as I was not much better than he, our game mainly consisted in retrieving damp green balls or throwing them back to players on the adjacent courts – all this under a steady drizzle. Yes, he was definitely poor at games.'

  'Did that upset him?'

  'It did in a way. In fact, his first term was quite poisoned by the thought of his inferiority in those matters. The first time he met Gorget – that was in my rooms – poor Sebastian talked so much about tennis that at last Gorget asked whether the game was played with a stick. This rather soothed Sebastian as he supposed that Gorget, whom he liked from the start, was bad at g
ames, too.'

  'And was he?'

  'Oh, well, he was a Rugby Blue, but perhaps he did not much care for lawn tennis. Anyway, Sebastian soon got over the game complex. And generally speaking – '

  We sat there in that dimly lit oak-panelled room, our armchairs so low that it was quite easy to reach the tea things which stood humbly on the' carpet, and Sebastian's spirit seemed to hover about us with the flicker of the fire reflected in the brass knobs of the hearth. My interlocutor had known him so intimately that I think he was right in suggesting that Sebastian's sense of inferiority was based on his trying to out-England England, and never succeeding, and going on trying, until finally he realized that it was not these outward things that betrayed him, not the mannerisms of fashionable slang, but the very fact of his striving to be and act like other people when he was blissfully condemned to the solitary confinement of his own self.

  Still, he had done his best to be a standard undergraduate. Clad in a brown dressing-gown and old pumps, carrying soap-box and sponge-bag, he had strolled out on winter mornings on his way to the Baths round the comer. He had had breakfast in Hall, with the porridge as grey and dull as the sky above Great Court and the orange marmalade of exactly the same hue as the creeper on its walls. He had mounted his 'pushbike', as my informant called it, and with his gown across his shoulder had pedalled to this or that lecture hall. He had lunched at the Pitt (which, I understood, was a kind of club, probably with horsey pictures on the walls and very old waiters asking their eternal riddle: thick or clear?). He had played fives (whatever that may be) or some other tame game, and then had had tea with two or three friends; the talk had hobbled along between crumpet and pipe, carefully avoiding anything that had not been said by others. There may have been another lecture or two before dinner, and then again Hall, a very fine place which I was duly shown. It was being swept at the moment, and the fat white calves of Henry the Eighth looked as if they might get tickled.

  'And where did Sebastian sit?'

  'Down there, against the wall.'

  'But how did one get there? The tables seem miles long.'

  'He used to step up 'on the outer bench and walk across the table. One trod on a plate now and then, but it was the usual method. '

  Then, after dinner, he would go back to his rooms, or perhaps make his way with some silent companion to the little cinema on the market place where a Wild West film would be shown, or Charlie Chaplin stiffly trotting away from the big wicked man and skidding on the street corner.

  Then, after three or four terms of this sort of thing a curious change came over Sebastian. He stopped enjoying what he thought he ought to enjoy and serenely turned to what really concerned him. Outwardly, this change resulted in his dropping out of the rhythm of college life. He saw no one except my informant, who remained perhaps the only man in his life with whom he had been perfectly frank and natural – it was a handsome friendship and I quite understood Sebastian, for that quiet scholar struck me as being the finest and gentlest soul imaginable. They were both interested in English literature, and Sebastian's friend was already then planning that first work of his, The Laws of Literary Imagination, which, two or three years later, won for him the Montgomery Prize.

  'I must confess,' said he as he stroked a soft blue cat with celadon eyes which had appeared from nowhere and now made itself comfortable in his lap, 'I must confess that Sebastian rather pained me at that particular period of our friendship. Missing him in the lecture hall, I would go to his rooms and find him still in bed, curled up like a sleeping child, but gloomily smoking, with cigarette ash all over his crumpled pillow and inkstains on the sheet which hung loosely to the floor. He would only grunt in reply to my energetic greeting, not deigning even to change his position, so after hovering around and satisfying myself that he was not ill, I would go off to lunch, and then call upon him again only to find him lying on his other side and using a slipper for an ashtray. I would suggest getting him something to eat, for his cupboard was always empty, and presently, when I brought him a bunch of bananas, he would cheer up like a monkey and immediately start to annoy me with a series of obscurely immoral statements, related to Life, Death, or God, which he specially relished making because he knew that they annoyed me – although I never believed that he really meant what he said.

  'At last, about three or four in the afternoon, he would put on his dressing-gown and shuffle into the sitting-room where, in disgust, I would leave him, huddled up by the fire and scratching his head. And next day, as I sat working in my digs, I would suddenly hear a great stamping up the stairs, and Sebastian would bounce into the room, clean, fresh, and excited, with the poem he had just finished.'

  All this, I trust, is very true to type, and one little detail strikes me as especially pathetic. It appears that Sebastian's English, though fluent and idiomatic, was decidedly that of a foreigner. His r's when beginning a word, rolled and rasped, he made queer mistakes, saying, for instance, 'I have seized a cold' or 'that fellow is sympathetic' – merely meaning that he was a nice Chap. He misplaced the accent in such words as 'interesting' or 'laboratory'. He mispronounced names like 'Socrates' or 'Desdemona'. Once corrected, he would never repeat the mistake, but the very fact of his not being quite sure about certain words distressed him enormously and he used to blush a bright pink when, owing to a chance verbal flaw, some utterance of his would not be quite understood by an obtuse listener. In those days, he wrote far better than he spoke, but still there was something vaguely un-English about his poems. None of them have reached me. True, his friend thought that perhaps one or two….

  He put down the cat and rummaged awhile among some papers in a drawer,' but he could not lay his hand on anything. 'Perhaps, in some trunk at my sister's place,' he said vaguely, 'but I'm not even sure…. Little things like that are the darlings of oblivion, and moreover I know Sebastian would have applauded their loss.'

  'By the way,' I said, 'the past you recall seems dismally wet meteorologically speaking – as dismal, in fact, as today's weather [it was a bleak day in February]. Tell me, was it never warm and sunny? Does not Sebastian himself refer somewhere to the "pink candlesticks of great chestnut trees" along the bank of some beautiful little river?'

  Yes, I was right, spring and summer did happen in Cambridge almost every year (that mysterious 'almost' was singularly pleasing). Yes, Sebastian quite liked to loll in a punt on the Cam. But what he liked above all was to cycle in the dusk along a certain path skirting meadows. There, he would sit on a fence looking at the wispy salmon-pink clouds turning to a dull copper in the pale evening sky and think about things. What things? That cockney girl with her soft hair still in plaits whom he once followed across the common, and accosted and kissed, and never saw again? The form of a particular cloud? Some misty sunset beyond a black Russian fir-wood (oh, how much I would give for such a memory coming to him!)? The inner meaning of grass blade and star? The unknown language of silence? The terrific weight of a dew-drop? The heartbreaking beauty of a pebble among millions and millions of pebbles, all making sense, but what sense? The old, old question of Who are you? to one's own self grown strangely evasive in the gloaming, and to God's world around to which one has never been really introduced. Or perhaps, we shall be nearer the truth in supposing that while Sebastian sat on that fence, his mind was a turmoil of words and fancies, incomplete fancies and insufficient words, but already he knew that this and only this was the reality of his life, and that his destiny lay beyond that ghostly battlefield which he would cross in due time.

  'Did I like his books? Oh, enormously. I didn't see much of him after he left Cambridge, and he never sent me any of his works. Authors, you know, are forgetful. But one day I got three of them at the library and read them in as many nights. I was always sure he would produce something fine, but I never expected it would be as fine as that. In his last year here – I don't know what's the matter with this cat, she does not seem to know milk all of a sudden.'

  In his last C
ambridge year Sebastian worked a good deal; his subject – English literature – was a vast and complicated one; but this same period was marked by his sudden trips to London, generally without the authorities' leave. His tutor, the late Mr Jefferson, had been, I learnt, a mighty dull old gentleman, but a fine linguist, who insisted upon considering Sebastian as a Russian. In other words, he drove Sebastian to the limit of exasperation by telling him all the Russian words he knew – a nice bagful collected on a journey to Moscow years ago – and asking him to teach him some more. One day, at last, Sebastian blurted out that there was some mistake – he had not been born in Russia really, but in Sofia. Upon which, the delighted old man at once started to speak Bulgarian. Sebastian lamely answered that it was not the special dialect he knew, and when challenged to furnish a sample, invented a new idiom on the spur of the moment, which greatly puzzled the old linguist until it dawned upon him that Sebastian -

  'Well, I think you have drained me now,' said my informant with a smile. 'My reminiscences are getting shallower and sillier – and I hardly think it worth while to add that Sebastian got a first and that we had our picture taken in full glory – I shall try and find it some day and send it to you if you like. Must you really leave now? Would you not like to see the Backs? Come along and visit the crocuses, Sebastian used to call them "the poet's mushrooms", if you see what he meant.'