The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

by Vladimir Nabokov

  'I cannot help feeling there is something essentially wrong about love. Friends may quarrel or drift apart, close relations too, but there is not this pang, this pathos, this fatality which clings to love. Friendship never has that doomed look. Why, what is the matter? I have not stopped loving you, but because I cannot go on kissing your dim dear race, we must part, we must part. Why is it so? What is this mysterious exclusiveness? One may have a thousand friends, but only one love-mate. Harems have nothing to do with this matter: I am speaking of dance, not gymnastics. Or can one imagine a tremendous Turk loving every one of his four hundred wives as I love you? For if I say "two" I have started to count and there is no end to it. There is only one real number: One. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.

  'Good-bye, my poor love. I shall never forget you and never replace you. It would be absurd of me to try and persuade you that you were the pure love, and that this other passion is but a comedy of the flesh. All is flesh and all is purity. But one thing is certain: I have been happy with you and now I am miserable with another. And so life will go on. I shall joke with the chaps at the office and enjoy my dinners (until I get dyspepsia), and read novels, and write verse, and keep an eye on the stocks – and generally behave as I have always behaved. But that does not mean that I shall be happy without you…. Every small thing which will remind me of you – the look of disapproval about the furniture in the rooms where you have patted cushions and spoken to the poker, every small thing which we have descried together – will always seem to me one half of a shell, one half of a penny, with the other half kept by you. Good-bye. Go away, go away. Don't write. Marry Charlie or any other good man with a pipe in his teeth. Forget me now, but remember me afterwards, when the bitter part is forgotten. This blot is not due to a tear. My fountain-pen has broken down and I am using a filthy pen in this filthy hotel room. The heat is terrific and I have not been able to clinch the business I was supposed to bring "to a satisfactory close", as that ass Mortimer says. I think you have got a book or two of mine – but that is not really important. Please, don't write. L.'

  If we abstract from this fictitious letter everything that is personal to its supposed author, I believe that there is much in it that may have been felt by Sebastian, or even written by him, to Clare. He had a queer habit of endowing even his most grotesque characters with this or that idea, or impression, or desire which he himself might have toyed with. His hero's letter may possibly have been a kind of code in which he expressed a few truths about his relations with Clare. But I fail to name any other author who made use of his art in such a baffling manner – baffling to me who might desire to see the real man behind the author. The light of personal truth is hard Jo perceive in the shimmer of an imaginary nature, but what is still harder to understand is the amazing fact that a man writing of things which he really felt at the time of writing, could have had the power to create simultaneously – and out of the very things which distressed his mind – a fictitious and faintly absurd character.

  Sebastian returned to London in the beginning of 1930 and took to his bed after a very bad heart attack. Somehow or other he managed to go on with the writing of Lost Property: his easiest book, I think. Now, it ought to be understood in connexion with what follows that Clare had been solely responsible for the managing of his literary affairs. After her departure, these soon became wildly entangled. In many cases Sebastian had not the vaguest idea how things stood and what his exact relations with this or that publisher were. He was so muddled, so utterly incompetent, so hopelessly incapable of remembering a single name or address, or the place where he put things, that now he got into the most absurd predicaments. Curiously enough, Clare's girlish forgetfulness had been replaced by a perfect clarity and steadiness of purpose when handling Sebastian's affairs; but now it all went amuck. He had never learnt to use a typewriter and was much too nervous to begin now. The Funny Mountain was published simultaneously in two American magazines, and Sebastian was at a loss to remember how he had managed to sell it to two different people. Then there was a complicated affair with a man who wanted to make a film of Success and who had paid Sebastian in advance (without his noticing it, so absent-mindedly did he read letters) for a shortened and 'intensified' version, which Sebastian never even dreamt of making. The Prismatic Bezel was in the market again, but Sebastian hardly knew of it. Invitations were not even answered; Telephone numbers proved delusions, and the harassing search for the envelope where he had scrawled this or that number exhausted him more than the writing of a chapter. And then – his mind was elsewhere, following in the tracks of an absent mistress, waiting for her call – and presently the call would come, or he himself could stand the suspense no longer, and there he would be as Roy Carswell had once seen him: a gaunt man in a greatcoat and bedroom slippers getting into a Pullman car.

  It was in the beginning of this period that Mr Goodman made his appearance. Little by little, Sebastian handed over to him all his literary affairs, and felt greatly relieved to meet so efficient a secretary. 'I usually found him', writes Mr Goodman, 'lying in bed like a sulky leopard' (which somehow reminds one of the nightcapped wolf in 'Little Red Riding Hood')…. 'Never in my life had I seen', he goes on in another passage, 'such a dejected-looking being…. I am told that the French author M. Proust, whom Knight consciously or subconsciously copied, also had a great inclination towards a certain listless "interesting" pose….' And further: 'Knight was very thin, with a pale countenance and sensitive hands, which he liked to display with feminine coquetry. He confessed to me once that he liked to pour half a bottle of French perfume into his morning bath, but with all that he looked singularly badly got up…. Knight was extraordinarily vain, like most modernist authors. Once or twice I caught him pasting cuttings, most certainly reviews concerning his books, into a beautiful and expensive album which he kept locked up in his desk, feeling perhaps a little ashamed to let my critical eye consider the fruit of his human weakness…. He often went abroad, twice a year, I daresay, presumably to Gay Paree…. But he was very mysterious about it and made a great show of Byronic languor. I cannot help feeling that trips to the Continent formed part of his artistic programme… he was the perfect "poseur".'

  But where Mr Goodman waxes really eloquent is when he starts to discourse upon deeper matters. His idea is to show. and explain the 'fatal split between Knight the artist and the great booming world about him' – (a circular fissure, obviously). 'Knight's uncongeniality was his undoing,' exclaims Goodman and clicks out three dots. 'Aloofness is a cardinal sin in an age when a perplexed humanity eagerly turns to its writers and thinkers, and demands of them attention to, if not the cure of, its woes and wounds…. The "ivory tower" cannot be suffered unless it is transformed into a lighthouse or a broadcasting station…. In such an age… brimming with burning problems when… economic depression… dumped… cheated… the man in the street… the growth of totalitarian… unemployment… the next supergreat war… new aspects of family life… sex… structure of the universe.' Mr Goodman's interests are wide, as we see. 'Now, Knight', he goes on, 'absolutely refused to take any interest whatsoever in contemporary questions…. When asked to join in this or that movement, to take part in; some momentous meeting, or merely to append his signature, among more famous names, to some manifest of undying truth or denunciation of great iniquity… he flatly refused in spite of all my admonishments and even pleadings…. True, in his last (and most obscure) book, he does survey the world… but the angle he chooses and the aspects he notes are totally different from what a serious reader naturally expects from a serious author…. It is as though a conscientious inquirer into the life and machinery of some great enterprise were shown, with elaborate circumlocution, a dead bee on a window sill…. Whenever I called his attention to this or that just published book which had fascinated me because it was of general and vital interest, he childishly replied that it was "claptrap", or made some other completely irrelevant remark…. He confused s
olitude with altitude and the Latin for sun. He failed to realize that it was merely a dark corner…. However, as he was hypersensitive (I remember how he used to wince when I pulled my fingers to make the joints crack – a bad habit I have when meditating), he could not help feeling that something was wrong… that he was steadily cutting himself away from Life… and that the switch would not function in his solarium. The misery which had begun as an earnest young man's reaction to the rude world into which his temperamental youth had been thrust, and which later continued to be displayed as a fashionable mask in the days of his Success as a writer, now took on a new and hideous reality. The board adorning his breast read no more "I am the lone artist"; invisible fingers had changed it into "I am blind".'

  It would be an insult to the reader's acumen were I to comment on Mr Goodman's glibness. If Sebastian was blind, his secretary, in any case, plunged lustily into the part of a barking and pulling .leader. Roy Carswell, who in 1933 was painting Sebastian's portrait, told me he remembered roaring with laughter at Sebastian's accounts of his relations with Mr Goodman. Very possibly he would never have been energetic enough to get rid of that pompous person had the latter not become a shade too enterprising. In 1934 Sebastian wrote to Roy Carswell from Cannes telling him that he had found out by chance (he seldom re-read his own books) that Goodman had changed an epithet in the Swan edition of The Funny Mountain. 'I have given him the sack,' he added. Mr Goodman modestly refrains from mentioning this minor detail. After exhausting his stock of impressions, and concluding that the real cause of Sebastian's death was the final realization of having been 'a human failure, and therefore an artistic one too', he cheerfully mentions that his work as secretary came to an end owing to his entering another branch of business. I shall not refer any more to Goodman's book. It is abolished.

  But as I look at the portrait Roy Carswell painted I seem to see a slight twinkle in Sebastian's eyes, for all the sadness of their expression. The painter has wonderfully rendered the moist dark greenish-grey of their iris, with a still darker rim and a suggestion of gold dust constellating round the pupil. The lids are heavy and perhaps a little inflamed, and a vein or two seems to have burst on the glossy eyeball. These eyes and the face itself are painted in such a manner as to convey the impression that they are mirrored Narcissus-like in clear water – with a very slight ripple on the hollow cheek, owing to the presence of a water-spider which has just stopped and is floating backward. A withered leaf has settled on the reflected brow, which is creased as that of a man peering intently. The crumpled dark hair over it is partly suffused by another ripple, but one strand on the temple has caught a glint of humid sunshine. There is a deep furrow between the straight eyebrows, and another down from the nose to the tightly shut dusky lips. There is nothing much more than this head. A dark opalescent shade clouds the neck, as if the upper part of the body were receding. The general background is a mysterious blueness with a delicate trellis of twigs in one corner. Thus Sebastian peers into a pool at himself.

  'I wanted to hint at a woman somewhere behind him or over him – the shadow of a hand, perhaps… something…. But then I was afraid of story-telling instead of painting.'

  'Well, nobody seems to know anything about her. Not even Sheldon.'

  'She smashed his life, that sums her up, doesn't it?'

  'No, I want to know more. I want to know all. Otherwise he will remain as incomplete as your picture. Oh, it is very good, the likeness is excellent, and I love that floating spider immensely. Especially its club-footed shadow at the bottom. But the face is only a chance reflection. Any man can look into water.

  'But don't you think that he did it particularly well?'

  'Yes, I can see your point. But all the same I must find that woman. She is the missing link in his evolution, and I must obtain her – it's a scientific necessity.'

  'I'll bet you this picture that you won't find her,' said Roy Carswell.

  13

  The first thing was to learn her identity. How should I start upon my quest? What data did I possess? In June 1929, Sebastian had dwelt at the Beaumont Hotel at Blauberg, and there he had met her. She was Russian. No other clue was available.

  I have Sebastian's aversion for postal phenomena. It seems easier to me to travel a thousand miles than to write the shortest letter, then find an envelope, find the right address, buy the right stamp, post the letter (and rack my brain trying to remember whether I have signed it). Moreover, in the delicate affair I was about to tackle, correspondence was out of the question. In March 1936, after a month's stay in England, I consulted a tourist office and set out for Blauberg.

  So here he has passed, I reflected, as I looked at wet fields with long trails of white mist where upright poplar trees dimly floated. A small red-tiled town crouched at the foot of a soft grey mountain. I left my bag in the cloakroom of a forlorn little station where invisible cattle lowed sadly in some shunted truck, and went up a gentle slope towards a cluster of hotels and sanatoriums beyond a damp-smelling park. There were very few people about, it was not 'the height of the season', and I suddenly realized with a pang that I might find the hotel shut.

  But it was not; thus far, luck was with me.

  The house seemed fairly pleasant with its well kept garden and budding chestnut trees. It looked as if it could not hold more than some fifty people – and this braced me: I wanted my choice restricted. The hotel manager was a grey-haired man with a trimmed beard and velvet black eyes. I proceeded very carefully.

  First I said that my late brother, Sebastian Knight, a celebrated English author, had greatly liked his stay and that I was thinking of staying at the hotel myself in the summer. Perhaps I ought to have taken a room, sliding in, ingratiating myself, so to speak, and postponing my special request until a more favourable moment; but somehow I thought that the matter might be settled on the spot. He said yes, he remembered the Englishman who had stayed in 1929 and had wanted a bath every morning.

  'He did not make friends readily, did he?' I asked with sham casualness. 'He was always alone?'

  'Oh, I think he was here with his father,' said the hotel manager vaguely.

  We wrestled for some time disentangling the three or four Englishmen who had happened to have stayed at Hotel Beaumont during the last ten years. I saw that he did not remember Sebastian any too clearly.

  'Let me be frank,' I said off-handedly, 'I am trying to find the address of a lady, my brother's friend, who had stayed here at the same time as he.'

  The hotel manager lifted his eyebrows slightly, and I had the uneasy feeling that I had committed some blunder.

  'Why?' he said. ('Ought I to bribe him?' I thought quickly.)

  'Well,' I said, 'I'm ready to pay you for the trouble of finding the information I want.'

  'What information?' he asked. (He was a stupid and suspicious old party – may he never read these lines.)

  'I was wondering,' I went on patiently, 'whether you would be so very, very kind as to help me to find the address of a lady who stayed here at the same time as Mr Knight, that is in June 1929?'

  'What lady?' he asked in the elenctic tones of Lewis Carroll's caterpillar.

  'I'm not sure of her name,' I said nervously.

  'Then how do you expect me to find her?' he said with a shrug.

  'She was Russian,' I said. 'Perhaps you remember a Russian lady – a young lady – and well… good looking?'

  'Nous avons eu beaucoup de jolies dames,' he replied getting more and more distant. 'How should I remember?'

  'Well,' said I, 'the simplest way would be to have a look at your books and sort out the Russian names for June 1929.'

  'There are sure to be several,' he said. 'How will you pick out the one you need, if you do not know it?'

  'Give me the names and addresses,' I said desperately, 'and leave the rest to me.'