Bend Sinister

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Number two shows the rustic (now clad in the clothes of the gentleman) removing from the head of the gentleman (now writing at a desk) a kind of shapska. Scribbled underneath in the same hand: “Ham-let, or Homelette au Lard.”

  Finally, number three has a road, a traveller on foot (wearing the stolen shapska) and a road sign “To High Wycombe.”

  His name is protean. He begets doubles at every corner. His penmanship is unconsciously faked by lawyers who happen to write a similar hand. On the wet morning of November 27, 1582, he is Shaxpere and she is a Wately of Temple Grafton. A couple of days later he is Shagspere and she is a Hathway of Stratford-on-Avon. Who is he? William X, cunningly composed of two left arms and a mask. Who else? The person who said (not for the first time) that the glory of God is to hide a thing, and the glory of man is to find it. However, the fact that the Warwickshire fellow wrote the plays is most satisfactorily proved on the strength of an applejohn and a pale primrose.

  There are two themes here: the Shakespearian one rendered in the present tense, with Ember presiding in his ruelle; and another theme altogether, a complex mixture of past, present, and future, with Olga’s monstrous absence causing dreadful embarrassment. This was, this is, their first meeting since she died. Krug will not speak of her, will not even inquire about her ashes; and Ember, who feels the shame of death too, does not know what to say. Had he been able to move about freely, he might have embraced his fat friend in silence (a miserable defeat in the case of philosophers and poets accustomed to believe that words are superior to deeds), but this is not feasible when one of the two lies in bed. Krug, semi-intentionally, keeps out of reach. He is a difficult person. Describe the bedroom. Allude to Ember’s bright brown eyes. Hot punch and a touch of fever. His strong shining blue-veined nose and the bracelet on his hairy wrist. Say something. Ask about David. Relate the horror of those rehearsals.

  “David is also laid up with a cold [ist auk beterkeltet] but that is not why we had to come back [zueruk]. What [shto bish] were you saying about those rehearsals [repetitia]?”

  Ember gratefully adopts the subject selected. He might have asked: “Why then?” He will learn the reason a little later. Vaguely he perceives emotional dangers in that dim region. So he prefers to talk shop. Last chance of describing the bedroom.

  Too late. Ember gushes. He exaggerates his own gushing manner. In a dehydrated and condensed form Ember’s new impressions as Literary Adviser to the State Theatre may be rendered thus:

  “The two best Hamlets we had, indeed the only respectable ones, have both left the country in disguise and are now said to be fiercely intriguing in Paris after having almost murdered each other en route. None of the youngsters we have interviewed are any good, though one or two have at least the full habit of body required for the part. For reasons I shall presently make clear Osric and Fortinbras have acquired a tremendous ascendancy over the rest of the cast. The Queen is with child. Laertes is constitutionally unable to learn the elements of fencing. I have lost all interest in the staging of the thing as I am helpless to change the grotesque course it has taken. My sole poor object now is to have the players adopt my own translation instead of the abominable one to which they are used. On the other hand this work of love commenced long ago is not yet quite finished and the fact of having to speed it up for what is a rather incidental purpose (to say the least) causes me intense irritation, which, however, is nothing to the horror of hearing the actors lapse with a kind of atavistic relief into the gibberish of the traditional version (Kronberg’s) whenever Wern, who is weak and prefers ideas to words, allows them to behind my back.”

  Ember goes on to explain why the new Government found it worth while to suffer the production of a muddled Elizabethan play. He explains the idea on which the production is based. Wern, who humbly submitted the project, took his conception of the play from the late Professor Hamm’s extraordinary work “The Real Plot of Hamlet.”

  “ ‘Iron and ice’ (wrote the Professor) ‘—this is the physical amalgamation suggested by the personality of the strangely rigid and ponderous Ghost. Of this union Fortinbras (Ironside) will be presently born. According to the immemorial rules of the stage what is boded must be embodied: the eruption must come at all cost. In Hamlet the exposition grimly promises the audience a play founded upon young Fortinbras’ attempt to recover the lands lost by his father to King Hamlet. This is the conflict, this is the plot. To surreptitiously shift the stress from this healthy, vigorous and clearcut Nordic theme to the chameleonic moods of an impotent Dane would be, on the modern stage, an insult to determinism and common sense.

  “ ‘Whatever Shakespeare’s or Kyd’s intentions were, there can be no doubt that the keynote, the impelling power of the action, is the corruption of civil and military life in Denmark. Imagine the morale of an army where a soldier, who must fear neither thunder nor silence, says that he is sick at heart! Consciously or unconsciously, the author of Hamlet has created the tragedy of the masses and thus has founded the sovereignty of society over the individual. This, however, does not mean that there is no tangible hero in the play. But he is not Hamlet. The real hero is of course Fortinbras, a blooming young knight, beautiful and sound to the core. With God’s sanction, this fine Nordic youth assumes the control of miserable Denmark which had been so criminally misruled by degenerate King Hamlet and Judeo-Latin Claudius.

  “ ‘As with all decadent democracies, everybody in the Denmark of the play suffers from a plethora of words. If the state is to be saved, if the nation desires to be worthy of a new robust government, then everything must be changed; popular commonsense must spit out the caviar of moonshine and poetry, and the simple words, verbum sine ornatu, intelligible to man and beast alike, and accompanied by fit action, must be restored to power. Young Fortinbras possesses an ancient claim and hereditary rights to the throne of Denmark. Some dark deed of violence or injustice, some base trick on the part of degenerate feudalism, some masonic manoeuvre engendered by the Shylocks of high finance, has dispossessed his family of their just claims, and the shadow of this crime keeps hanging in the dark background until, with the closing scene, the idea of mass justice impresses upon the whole play its seal of historical significance.

  “ ‘Three thousand crowns and a week or so of available time would not have been sufficient to conquer Poland (at least in those days); but they proved amply sufficient for another purpose. Wine-besotted Claudius is completely deceived by young Fortinbras’ suggestion, that he, Fortinbras, pass through the dominion of Claudius on his (singularly roundabout) way to Poland with an army levied for quite a different purpose. No, the bestial Polacks need not tremble: that conquest will not take place; it is not their bogs and forests that our hero covets. Instead of proceeding to the port, Fortinbras, that soldier of genius, will be lying in waiting and the “go softly on” (which he whispers to his troops after sending a captain to greet Claudius) can only mean one thing: go softly into hiding while the enemy (the Danish King) thinks you have embarked for Poland.

  “ ‘The real plot of the play will be readily grasped if the following is realized: the Ghost on the battlements of Elsinore is not the ghost of King Hamlet. It is that of Fortinbras the Elder whom King Hamlet has slain. The ghost of the victim posing as the ghost of the murderer—what a wonderful bit of farseeing strategy, how deeply it excites our intense admiration! The glib and probably quite untrue account of old Hamlet’s death which this admirable imposter gives is intended solely to create innerliche Unruhe in the state and to soften the morale of the Danes. The poison poured into the sleeper’s ear is a symbol of the subtle injection of lethal rumours, a symbol which the groundlings of Shakespeare’s day could hardly have missed. Thus, old Fortinbras, disguised as his enemy’s ghost, prepares the peril of his enemy’s son and the triumph of his own offspring. No, the “judgments” were not so accidental, the “slaughters” not so casual as they seemed to Horatio the Recorder, and there is a note of deep satisfaction (which the audience cannot h
elp sharing) in the young hero’s guttural exclamation—Ha-ha, this quarry cries on havoc (meaning: the foxes have devoured one another)—as he surveys the rich heap of dead bodies, all that is left of the rotten state of Denmark. We can easily imagine him adding in an outburst of rough filial gratitude: Yah, the old mole has done a good job!

  “ ‘But to return to Osric. Garrulous Hamlet has just been speaking to the skull of a jester; now it is the skull of jesting death that speaks to Hamlet. Note the remarkable juxtaposition: the skull—the shell; “Runs away with a shell on his head.” Osric and Yorick almost rhyme, except that the yolk of one has become the bone (os) of the other. Mixing as he does the language of the shop and the ship, this middleman, wearing the garb of a fantastic courtier, is in the act of selling death, the very death that Hamlet has just escaped at sea. The winged doublet and the aureate innuendoes mask a deep purpose, a bold and cunning mind. Who is this master of ceremonies? He is young Fortinbras’ most brilliant spy.’ Well, this gives you a fair sample of what I have to endure.”

  Krug cannot help smiling at little Ember’s complaints. He remarks that somehow or other the whole business reminds him of Paduk’s mannerisms. I mean these intricate convolutions of sheer stupidity. To stress the artist’s detachment from life, Ember says he does not know and does not care to know (a telltale dismissal) who this Paduk or Padock—bref, la personne en question—is. By way of explanation Krug tells Ember about his visit to the Lakes and how it all ended. Naturally Ember is aghast. He vividly visualizes Krug and the child wandering through the rooms of the deserted cottage whose two clocks (one in the dining-room, the other in the kitchen) are probably still going, alone, intact, pathetically sticking to man’s notion of time after man has gone. He wonders whether Maximov had time to receive the well-written letter he sent him about Olga’s death and Krug’s helpless condition. What shall I say? The priest mistook a blear-eyed old man belonging to Viola’s party for the widower and while making his oration, and while the beautiful big body was burning behind a thick wall, kept addressing himself to that person (who nodded back). Not even an uncle, not even her mother’s lover.

  Ember turns his face to the wall and bursts into tears. In order to bring things back to a less emotional level Krug tells him about a curious character with whom he once travelled in the States, a man who was fanatically eager to make a film out of Hamlet.

  “We’d begin, he had said, with

  Ghostly apes swathed in sheets

  haunting the shuddering Roman streets.

  And the mobled moon …

  Then: the ramparts and towers of Elsinore, its dragons and florid ironwork, the moon making fish scales of its shingle tiles, the integument of a mermaid multiplied by the gable roof, which shimmers in an abstract sky, and the green star of a glowworm on the platform before the dark castle. Hamlet’s first soliloquy is delivered in an unweeded garden that has gone to seed. Burdock and thistle are the main invaders. A toad breathes and blinks on the late king’s favourite garden seat. Somewhere the cannon booms as the new king drinks. By dream law and screen law the cannon is gently transformed into the obliquity of a rotten tree trunk in the garden. The trunk points cannonwise at the sky where for one instant the deliberate loops of canescent smoke form the floating word “self-slaughter.”

  “Hamlet at Wittenberg, always late, missing G. Bruno’s lectures, never using a watch, relying on Horatio’s timepiece which is slow, saying he will be on the battlements between eleven and twelve and turning up after midnight.

  “The moonlight following on tiptoe the Ghost in complete steel, a gleam now settling on a rounded pauldron, now stealing along the taces.

  “We shall also see Hamlet dragging the dead Ratman from under the arras and along the floor and up the winding stairs, to stow him away in an obscure passage, with some weird light effects anon, when the torch-bearing Switzers are sent to find the body. Another thrill will be provided by Hamlet’s sea-gowned figure, unhampered by the heavy seas, heedless of the spray, clambering over bales and barrels of Danish butter and creeping into the cabin where Rosenstern and Guildenkranz, those gentle interchangeable twins ‘who came to heal and went away to die,’ are snoring in their common bunk. As the sagebrush country and leopard-spotted hills sped past the window of the men’s lounge, more and more pictorial possibilities were evolved. We might be shown, he said (he was a hawkfaced shabby man whose academic career had been suddenly brought to a close by an awkwardly timed love affair), R. following young L. through the Quartier Latin, Polonius in his youth acting Caesar at the University Playhouse, the skull in Hamlet’s gloved hands developing the features of a live jester (with the censor’s permission); perhaps even lusty old King Hamlet smiting with a poleaxe the Polacks skidding and sprawling on the ice. Then he produced a flask from his hip pocket and said: ‘take a shot.’ He added he had thought she was eighteen at least, judging by her bust, but, in fact, she was hardly fifteen, the little bitch. And then there was Ophelia’s death. To the sounds of Liszt’s Les Funérailles she would be shown wrestling—or, as another rivermaid’s father would have said, ‘wrustling’—with the willow. A lass, a salix. He recommended here a side shot of the glassy water. To feature a phloating leaph. Then back again to her little white hand, holding a wreath trying to reach, trying to wreathe a phallacious sliver. Now comes the difficulty of dealing in a dramatic way with what had been in prevocal days the pièce de résistance of comic shorts—the getting-unexpectedly-wet stunt. The hawk-man in the toilet lounge pointed out (between cigar and cuspidor) that the difficulty might be neatly countered by showing only her shadow, her falling shadow, falling and glancing across the edge of the turfy bank amid a shower of shadowy flowers. See? Then: a garland afloat. That puritanical leather (on which they sat) was the very last remnant of a phylogenetic link between the modern highly differentiated Pullman idea and a bench in the primitive stagecoach: from oats to oil. Then—and only then—we see her, he said, on her back in the brook (which table-forks further on to form eventually the Rhine, the Dnepr and the Cottonwood Canyon or Nova Avon) in a dim ectoplastic cloud of soaked, bulging bombast-quilted garments and dreamily droning hey non nonny nonny or any other old laud. This is transformed into a tinkling of bells, and now we are shown a liberal shepherd on marshy ground where Orchis mascula grows: period rags, sun-margined beard, five sheep and one cute lamb. An important point this lamb, despite the brevity—one heartthrob—of the bucolic theme. Song moves to Queen’s shepherd, lamb moves to brook.”

  Krug’s anecdote has the desired effect. Ember stops sniffling. He listens. Presently he smiles. Finally, he enters into the spirit of the game. Yes, she was found by a shepherd. In fact her name can be derived from that of an amorous shepherd in Arcadia. Or quite possibly it is an anagram of Alpheios, with the “S” lost in the damp grass—Alpheus the rivergod, who pursued a long-legged nymph until Artemis changed her into a stream, which of course suited his liquidity to a tee (cp. Winnipeg Lake, ripple 585, Vico Press edition). Or again we can base it on the Greek rendering of an old Danske serpent name. Lithe, lithping, thin-lipped Ophelia, Amleth’s wet dream, a mermaid of Lethe, a rare water serpent, Russalka letheana of science (to match your long purples). While he was busy with German servant maids, she at home, in an embayed window, with the icy spring wind rattling the pane, innocently flirted with Osric. Her skin was so tender that if you merely looked at it a rosy spot would appear. The uncommon cold of a Botticellian angel tinged her nostrils with pink and suffused her upperlip—you know, when the rims of the lips merge with the skin. She proved to be a kitchen wench too—but in the kitchen of a vegetarian. Ophelia, serviceableness. Died in passive service. The fair Ophelia. A first Folio with some neat corrections and a few bad mistakes. “My dear fellow” (we might have Hamlet say to Horatio), “she was as hard as nails in spite of her physical softness. And slippery: a posy made of eels. She was one of those thin-blooded pale-eyed lovely slim slimy ophidian maidens that are both hotly hysterical and hopelessly frigid.
Quietly, with a kind of devilish daintiness she minced her dangerous course the way her father’s ambition pointed. Even mad, she went on teasing her secret with the dead man’s finger. Which kept pointing at me. Oh, of course I loved her like forty thousand brothers, as thick as thieves (terracotta jars, a cypress, a fingernail moon) but we all were Lamord’s pupils, if you know what I mean.” He might add that he had caught a cold in the head during the dumb show. Undine’s pink gill, iced watermelon, l’aurore grelottant en robe rose et verte. Her sleazy lap.

  Speaking of the word-droppings on a German scholar’s decrepit hat, Krug suggests tampering with Hamlet’s name too. Take “Telemachos,” he says, which means “fighting from afar”—which again was Hamlet’s idea of warfare. Prune it, remove the unnecessary letters, all of them secondary additions, and you get the ancient “Telmah.” Now read it backwards. Thus does a fanciful pen elope with a lewd idea and Hamlet in reverse gear becomes the son of Ulysses slaying his mother’s lovers. Worte, worte, worte. Warts, warts, warts. My favourite commentator is Tschischwitz, a madhouse of consonants—or a soupir de petit chien.

  Ember, however, has not quite finished with the girl. After hurriedly noting that Elsinore is an anagram of Roseline, which has possibilities, he returns to Ophelia. He likes her, he says. Quite apart from Hamlet’s notions about her, the girl had charm, a kind of heartbreaking charm: those quick grey-blue eyes, the sudden laugh, the small even teeth, the pause to see whether you were not making fun of her. Her knees and calves, though quite shapely, were a little too sturdy in comparison with her thin arms and light bosom. The palms of her hands were like a damp Sunday and she wore a cross round her neck where a tiny raisin of flesh, a coagulated but still transparent bubble of dove’s blood, seemed always in danger of being sliced off by that thin golden chain. Then too, there was her morning breath, it smelled of narcissi before breakfast and of curdled milk after. She had something the matter with her liver. The lobes of her ears were naked, though they had been minutely pierced for small corals—not pearls. The combination of these details, her sharp elbows, very fair hair, tight glossy cheekbones and the ghost of a blond fluff (most delicately bristly to the eye) at the corners of her mouth, remind him (says Ember remembering his childhood) of a certain anaemic Esthonian housemaid, whose pathetically parted poor little breasts palely dangled in her blouse when she went low, very low, to pull on for him his striped socks.