The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

by Vladimir Nabokov

  11

  I am fast approaching the crucial point of Sebastian's sentimental life and as I consider the work already done in the pale light of the task still before me I feel singularly ill at ease. Have I given as fair an idea of Sebastian's life up to now as I had hoped, and as I now hope to do, in regard to its final period? The dreary tussle with a foreign idiom and a complete lack of literary experience do not predispose one to feeling over-confident. But badly as I may have blundered over my task in the course of the preceding chapters I am determined to persevere and in this I am sustained by the secret knowledge that in some unobtrusive way Sebastian's shade is trying to be helpful.

  I have received less abstract help too. P. G. Sheldon, the poet, who saw a great deal of Clare and Sebastian between 1927 and 1930 was kindly willing to tell me anything he might know, when I called upon him very soon after my strange half-meeting with Clare. And it is he again who a couple of months later (when I had already begun upon this book) informed me of poor Clare's fate. She had seemed to be such a normal and healthy young woman, how was it that she bled to death next to an empty cradle? He told me of her delight when Success lived up to its title. For it was a success this time. Why it is so, why this excellent book should flop and that other, as excellent, receive its due, will always remain something of a mystery. As had been the case, too, with his first novel, Sebastian had not moved a finger, not pulled the least string in order to have Success brightly heralded and warmly acclaimed. When a press-cutting agency began to pepper him with samples of praise, he refused either to subscribe to the clippings or thank the kindly critics. To express his gratitude to a man who by saying what he thought of a book was merely doing his duty, seemed to Sebastian improper and even insulting as implying a tepidly human side to the frosty serenity of dispassionate judgement. Moreover, once having begun he would have been forced to go on thanking and thanking for every folowing line lest the man should be hurt by a sudden lapse; and finally, such a damp dizzy warmth would develop that, in spite of this or that critic's well-known honesty, the grateful author might never be quite, quite certain that here or there personal sympathy had not tiptoed in.

  Fame in our day is too common to be confused with the enduring glow around a deserving book. But whatever it was, Clare meant to enjoy it. She wanted to see people who wanted to see Sebastian, who emphatically did not want to see them. She wanted to hear strangers talk about Success but Sebastian said he was no longer interested in that particular book. She wanted Sebastian to join a literary club and mix with other authors. And once or twice Sebastian got into a starched shirt and got out of it again without having uttered one single word at the dinner arranged in his honour. He was not feeling too well. He slept badly. He had dreadful fits of temper – and this was a thing new to Clare. One afternoon as he was working at The Funny Mountain in his study and trying to keep to a steep slippery track among the dark crags of neuralgia, Clare entered and in her gentlest voice inquired whether he would not mind seeing a visitor.

  'No,' he said, baring his teeth at the word he had just written.

  'But you asked him to come at five and…'

  'Now you've done it…' cried Sebastian, and dashed his fountain-pen at the shocked white wall. 'Can't you let me work in peace,' he shouted in such a crescendo that P. G. Sheldon who had been playing chess with Clare in the next room got up and closed the door leading to the hall, where a meek little man was waiting.

  Now and then, a wild frolicsome mood came over him. One afternoon with Clare and a couple of friends, he devised a beautiful practical joke to be played on a person they were going to meet after dinner. Sheldon curiously enough had forgotten what it was exactly, that scheme. Sebastian laughed and turned on his heel knocking his fists together as he did when genuinely amused. They were all about to start and very eager and all that, and Clare had 'phoned for a taxi and her new silver shoes glittered and she had found her bag, when suddenly Sebastian seemed to lose all interest in the proceedings. He looked bored and yawned almost without opening his mouth in a very annoying manner and presently said he would take the dog out and then go to bed. In those days he had a little black bulldog; eventually it fell ill and had to be destroyed.

  The Funny Mountain was completed, then Albinos in Black and then his third and last short story, The Back of the Moon. You remember that delightful character in it – the meek little man waiting for a train who helped three miserable travellers in three different ways? This Mr Siller is perhaps the most alive of Sebastian's creatures and is incidentally the final representative of the 'research theme', which I have discussed in conjunction with The Prismatic Bezel and Success. It is as though a certain idea steadily growing through two books has now burst into real physical existence, and so Mr Siller makes his bow, with every detail of habit and manner, palpable and unique – the bushy eyebrows and the modest moustache, the soft collar and the Adam's apple 'moving like the bulging shape of an arrased eavesdropper', the brown eyes, the wine-red veins on the big strong nose, 'whose form made one wonder whether he had not lost his hump somewhere'; the little black tie and the old umbrella ('a duck in deep mourning); the dark thickets in the nostrils; the beautiful surprise of shiny perfection when he removes his hat. But the better Sebastian's work was the worse he felt – especially in the intervals. Sheldon thinks that the world of the last book he was to write several years later (The Doubtful Asphodel) was already casting its shadow on all things surrounding him and that his novels and stories were but bright masks, sly tempters under the pretence of artistic adventure leading him unerringly towards a certain imminent goal. He was presumably as fond of Clare as he had always been, but the acute sense of mortality which had begun to obsess him, made his relations with her appear more brittle than they perhaps were. As for Clare, she had quite inadvertently in her well-meaning innocence dallied at some pleasant sunlit corner of Sebastian's life, where Sebastian himself had not paused; and now she was left behind and did not quite know whether to try and catch up with him or attempt to call him back. She was kept cheerfully busy, what with looking after Sebastian's literary affairs and keeping his life tidy in general, and although she surely felt that something was awry, that it was dangerous to lose touch with his imaginative existence, she probably comforted herself by presuming it to be a passing restlessness, and that 'it would all settle down by-and-by'. Naturally, I cannot touch upon the intimate side of their relationship, firstly, because it would be ridiculous to discuss what no one can definitely assert, and secondly because the very sound of the word 'sex' with its hissing vulgarity and the 'ks, ks' catcall at the end, seems so inane to me that I cannot help doubting whether there is any real idea behind the word, Indeed, I believe that granting 'sex' a special situation when tackling a human problem, or worse still, letting the 'sexual idea', if such a thing exists, pervade and 'explain' all the test is a grave error of reasoning. 'The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea, from its moon to its serpent; but a pool in the cup of a rock and the diamond-rippled road to Cathay are both water,' (The Back of the Moon.)

  'Physical love is but another way of saying the same thing and not a special sexophone note, which once heard is echoed in every other region of the soul,' (Lost Property, page 82,) 'All things belong to the same order of things, for such is the oneness of human perception, the oneness of individuality, the oneness of matter, whatever matter may be, The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition,' (ibid, page 83.) Had I even known from some reliable source that Clare was not quite up to the standards of Sebastian's love-making I would still never dream of selecting this dissatisfaction as the reason for his general feverishness and nervousness. But being dissatisfied with things in general, he might have been dissatisfied with the colour of his romance too. And mind you, I use the word dissatisfaction very loosely, for Sebastian's mood at that period of his life was something far more complicated than mere Weltschmerz or the blues. It can only be grasped through the medium of his last book The Doubtful A
sphodel. That book was as yet but a distant haze. Presently it would become the outline of a shore. In 1929, a famous heart-specialist, Dr Oates, advised Sebastian to spend a month at Blauberg, in Alsace, where a certain treatment had proved beneficial in several similar cases. It seems to have been tacitly agreed that he would go alone. Before he left, Miss Pratt, Sheldon, Clare, and Sebastian had tea together at his Hat and he was cheerful and talkative, and teased Clare for having dropped her own crumpled handkerchief among the things she had been packing for him in his fussy presence. Then he made a dart at Sheldon's cuff (he never wore a wristwatch himself), peeped at the time and suddenly began to rush, although there was almost an hour to spare. Clare did not suggest seeing him to the train – she knew he disliked that. He kissed her on the temple and Sheldon helped him carry out his bag (have I already mentioned that, apart from a vague charwoman and the waiter who brought him his meals from a neighbouring restaurant, Sebastian did not employ servants?). When he had gone, the three of them sat in silence for a while.

  All at once Clare put down the teapot and said: 'I think that handkerchief had wanted to go with him, I've a great mind to take that hint. '

  'Don't be silly,' said Mr Sheldon.

  'Why not?' she asked.

  If you mean that you want to catch the same train,' began Miss Pratt…

  'Why not,' Clare repeated. 'I have forty minutes in which to do it. I'll dash to my place, pack a thing or two, bolt into a taxi…

  And she did it. What happened at Victoria is not known, but an hour or so later she rang up Sheldon who had gone home, and told him with a rather pathetic little laugh that Sebastian had not even wanted her to stay on the plaform until his train left. I have a very definite vision somehow of her arriving there, with her bag, her lips ready to part in a humorous smile, her dim eyes peering through the windows of the train, looking for him, then finding him, or perhaps he saw her first…. 'Hullo, here I am,' she must have said brightly, a little too brightly perhaps…

  He wrote to her, a few days later, to tell her that the place was very pleasant and that he felt remarkably well. Then there was a silence, and only when Clare had sent an anxious telegram did a card arrive with the information that he was curtailing his stay at Blauberg and would spend a week in Paris before coming home.

  Towards the end of that week he rang me up and we dined together at a Russian restaurant. I had not seen him since '1924 and this was 1929. He looked worn and ill, and owing to his pallor seemed unshaven although he had just been to the barber. There was a boil at the back of his neck patched up with pink plaster.

  After he had asked me a few questions about myself, we both found it a strain to carry on the conversation. I asked him what had become of the nice girl with whom I had seen him last time. 'What girl?' he asked. 'Oh, Clare. Yes, she's all right. We're sort of married.'

  'You look a bit seedy,' I said.

  'And I don't give a damn if I do. Will you have "pelmenies" now?'

  'Fancy your still remembering what they taste like,' I said.

  'Why shouldn't I?' he said drily.

  We ate in silence for some minutes. Then we had coffee.

  'What did you say the place was called? Blauberg?'

  'Yes, Blauberg.'

  'Was it nice there?'

  'It depends on what you call nice,' he said and his jaw-muscles moved as he scrunched a yawn. 'Sorry,' he said, 'I hope I get some sleep in the train.'

  He suddenly fumbled at my wrist.

  'Half past eight,' I replied.

  'I've got to telephone,' he muttered and strode across the restaurant with his napkin in his hand. Five minutes later he was back with the napkin half-stuffed into his coat-pocket. I pulled it out.

  'Look here,' he said, 'I'm dreadfully sorry, I must be going. I forgot I had an appointment.'

  'It has always distressed me', writes Sebastian Knight in Lost Property, 'that people in restaurants never notice the animated mysteries, who bring them their food and check their overcoats and push doors open for them. I once reminded a businessman with whom I had lunched a few weeks before, that the woman who had handed us our hats had had cotton wool in her ears. He looked puzzled and said he hadn't been aware of there having been any woman at all…. A person who fails to notice a taxi-driver's hare-lip because he is in a hurry to get somewhere, is to me a monomaniac. I have often felt as if I were sitting among blind men and madmen, when I thought that I was the only one in the crowd to wonder about the chocolate-girl's slight, very slight limp.'

  As we left the restaurant and were making our way towards the taxi-rank, a bleary-eyed old man wetted his thumb and offered Sebastian or me or both, one of the printed advertisements he was distributing. Neither of us took it, both looked straight ahead, sullen dreamers ignoring the offer. 'Well, good-bye,' I said to Sebastian, as he beckoned to a cab.

  'Come and see me one day in London,' he said and glanced over his shoulder. 'Wait a1minute,' he added, 'this won't do. I have cut a beggar….' He left me and presently returned, a small sheet of paper in his hand. He read it carefully before throwing it away.

  'Want a lift?' he asked.

  I felt he was madly anxious to get rid of me.

  'No, thanks,' I said. I did not catch the address he gave to the chauffeur, but I recall his telling him to go fast.

  When he returned to London…. No, the thread of the narrative breaks off and I must ask others to tie up the threads again.

  Did Clare notice at once that something had happened? Did she suspect at once what that something was? Shall we try to guess what she asked Sebastian, and what he answered, and what she said then? I think we will not…. Sheldon saw them soon after Sebastian's return and found that Sebastian looked queer. But he had looked queer before, too…

  'Presently it began to worry me,' said Mr Sheldon. He met Clare alone and asked her whether she thought Sebastian was all right. 'Sebastian?' said Clare with a slow dreadful smile, 'Sebastian has gone mad. Quite mad,' she repeated, widely opening her pale eyes.

  'He has stopped talking to me,' she added in a small voice.

  Then Sheldon saw Sebastian and asked him what was amiss.

  'Is it any of your business?' inquired Sebastian with a kind of wretched coolness.

  'I like Clare,' said Sheldon, 'and I want to know why she walks about like a lost soul.' (She would come to Sebastian every day and sit in odd comers where she never used to sit. She brought sweets sometimes or a tie for Sebastian. The sweets remained uneaten and the tie hung lifelessly on the back of a chair. She seemed to pass through Sebastian like a ghost. Then she would fade away as silently as she had come.)

  'Well,' said Sheldon, 'out with it, man. What have you done to her?'

  12

  Sheldon learnt nothing from him whatsoever. What he did learn was from Clare herself; and this amounted to very little. After his return to London Sebastian had been getting letters in Russian from a woman he had met at Blauberg. She had been living at the same hotel as he. Nothing else was known.

  Six weeks later (in September 1929) Sebastian left England again and was absent until January of the following year. Nobody knew where he had been. Sheldon suggested it might have been Italy 'because lovers usually go there'. He did not cling to his suggestion.

  Whether Sebastian had some final explanation with Clare, or whether he left a letter for her when he departed, is not clear. She wandered away as quietly as she had come. She changed her lodgings: they were too close to Sebastian's flat. On a certain gloomy November day Miss Pratt met her in the fog on her way home from a life-insurance office where she had found work. After that, the two girls saw each other fairly often, but Sebastian's name was seldom mentioned. Five years later, Clare married.

  Lost Property which Sebastian had begun at that time appears as a kind of halt in his literary journey of discovery: a summing up, a counting of the things and souls lost on the way, a setting of bearings; the clinking sound of unsaddled horses browsing in the dark; the glow of a camp fire;
stars overhead. There is in it a short chapter dealing with an aeroplane crash (the pilot and all the passengers but one were killed); the survivor, an elderly Englishman, was discovered by a farmer some way from the place of the accident, sitting on a stone. He sat huddled up – the picture of misery and pain. 'Are you badly hurt?' asked the farmer. 'No,' answered the Englishman, 'toothache. I've had it all the way.' Half a dozen letters were found scattered in a field: remnants of the air-mail bag. Two of these were business letters of great importance; a third was addressed to a woman, but began: 'Dear Mr Mortimer, in reply to yours of the 6th inst…' and dealt with the placing of an order; a fourth was a birthday greeting; a fifth was the letter of a spy with its steely secret hidden in a haystack of idle prattle; and the last was an envelope directed to a firm of traders with the wrong letter inside, a love letter. 'This will smart, my poor love. Our picnic is finished; the dark road is bumpy and the smallest child in the car is about to be sick. A cheap fool would tell you: you must be brave. But then, anything I might tell you in the way of support or consolation is sure to be milk-puddingy – you know what I mean. You always knew what I meant. Life with you was lovely – and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies, and velvet, and that soft pink "v" in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, lingering "l". Our life together was alliterative, and when I think of all the little things which will die, now that we cannot share them, I feel as if we were dead too. And perhaps we are. You see, the greater our happiness was, the hazier its edges grew, as if its outlines were melting, and now it has dissolved altogether. I have not stopped loving you; but something is dead in me, and I cannot see you in the mist…. This is all poetry. I am lying to you. Lily-livered. There can be nothing more cowardly than a poet beating about the bush. I think you have guessed how things stand: the damned formula of "another woman". I am desperately unhappy with her – here is one thing which is true. And I think there is nothing much more to be said about that side of the business.