Stalking Nabokov

by Brian Boyd

  Despite Nabokov’s own hunch that natural mimicry could be explained only as the invention “of some waggish artist precisely for the intelligent eyes of man”—a hunch he gives to the lepidopterist Konstantin Godunov-Cherydntsev in The Gift—he knew to keep this kind of explanation out of his science. In the fictional addendum to The Gift published in English as “Father’s Butterflies,” Godunov-Cherdynstev, though a distinguished scientist, proposes an explanation for evolution that passes beyond material causes. But once Nabokov himself became a research scientist, his own papers remain resolutely within the parameters of science, eschewing any appeals to ultimate agents or metaphysical drives.

  I’ve tried to suggest why, from an evolutionary perspective, libraries store fictions and scriptures as well as nonfictions in their stacks. I’ve also suggested that without the capacity we have to understand and imagine other minds, without the capacity to move about in imaginative space that we develop in pretend play and story, without the confidence that we can shape things to please ourselves as we do in art generally and in fiction in particular, we might not have libraries or books to put in them.

  Or to put this in Nabokovian rather than Darwinian terms: without freedom from incessant competition, without lolling and loafing in ideas, without the play of the mind, we would not have Nabokov’s Lolita or his Lepidoptera papers or his speculations about what might lie behind and beyond life. Room to play matters to us as human beings, even if for those of us who have the privilege of working primarily with information, playing with ideas can become compulsive hard work—ninety hours a week for Nabokov in his prime. The Nobel Prize–winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, perhaps the most distinguished of those to have learned from Nabokov, writes ten hours a day: “Yes, I’m a hard worker… . I’m in love with what I do. I enjoy sitting at my desk like a child playing with his toys. It’s work, essentially, but it’s fun and games also.”7 Few filmmakers have produced such searing explorations of the human condition as Ingmar Bergman, but he described film-making as like returning to childhood, a game, a kind of play.8 And not just art needs play. Nabokov would have been delighted with the work of Robert Root-Bernstein, who shows that leading scientists in many fields insist on the element of play that they need to be able to invent new ideas and on the element of imaginative identification that makes them able if they are chemists, say, to imagine themselves as one kind of molecule interacting with others.9 Without the unruliness of play we would not have the hush and the order of libraries.

  One of the great libraries in fiction, by the greatest librarian among fiction writers, is Jorge Luis Borges’s “Library of Babel.” Borges imagines a universe that is an infinite library. The philosopher and evolutionary theorist Daniel Dennett takes Borges’s story as a way of picturing the infinity, what he calls the Vastness with a capital V, of “Design Space,” as he calls it, or possibility space.10 Imagine that one section of the library contained copies of only Moby Dick but contained copies with just the first letter different, in each of fifty-one different ways (not the capital C of “Call me Ishmael,” but any other capital or minuscule), or the second, or the third, and so on, or with any combination of the first letter and any other letter in the novel different, or any two combinations, or any number of combinations. And other sections of the library would include every other actual or possible book, in every possible variant. That suggests the space of possibility, and as Dennett observes, once we start to concretize that as a library with books, with endlessly trivially different variants of books, it’s actually mostly empty or uninteresting.

  Evolution doesn’t roam through infinite possibility space. It cannot venture into the void but starts with variations on what it has already generated so far. And in our human case, it works with a highly social primate, with minds shaped for social understanding, stretching them through the pretend play and story that fine-tune social understanding.

  Evolution needs to conserve to be able to innovate. DNA appears to be fantastically well conserved for as far back as we can trace life, yet it can recombine into many trillions of possibilities even from the same two sexually reproducing parents. And natural selection automatically tracks each of those possibilities actually realized, favoring whatever yields more descendants.

  Humans, too, need to accumulate to innovate. Our genome has accumulated our unique predisposition for sharing attention for others, for social learning, for culture. Individually we store experiences that provide the elements we can recombine in imagination. Not for nothing did Nabokov call his autobiography Speak, Memory, an invocation to Mnemosyne, to Memory as the mother of the muses. And socially, humanly accumulated traditions, like the traditions of the sonnet or the novel, the fresco, the canvas, the installation, become the basis for innovation.

  Libraries, like memories at the individual level, preserve our accumulated possibilities to date and become the basis for new variations. Nabokov, with his sense of the evanescence of things in time and his passion for the particular, saw this preservation of fleeting particulars as the role of art. In his 1925 story “A Guide to Berlin” he writes:

  The horse-drawn tram has vanished, and so will the trolley, and some eccentric Berlin writer in the twenties of the twenty-first century, wishing to portray our time, will go to a museum of technological history and locate a hundred-year-old streetcar, yellow, uncouth, with old-fashioned curved seats, and in a museum of old costumes dig up a black, shiny-buttoned conductor’s uniform. Then he will go home and compile a description of Berlin streets in bygone days. Everything, every trifle, will be valuable and meaningful: the conductor’s purse, the advertisement over the window, that peculiar jolting motion which our great-grandchildren will perhaps imagine—everything will be ennobled and justified by its age.

  (SoVN 157)

  He adds: “I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”

  Unlike Borges, who likes to hover near infinity, with its rather rarefied atmosphere, Nabokov prefers the here and now as a springboard for infinite possibility. Once he demolished a critic who looked for sexual undersides of every innocent Nabokovian detail, explaining that “the fatal flaw in Mr Rowe’s treatment of recurrent words, such as ‘garden’ or ‘water,’ is his regarding them as abstractions, and not realizing that the sound of a bath being filled, say, in the world of Laughter in the Dark, is as different from the limes rustling in the rain of Speak, Memory as the Garden of Delights in Ada is from the lawns in Lolita” (SO 305–6). Libraries for Nabokov vary as much from work to work as gardens or water. He offers accurate information, he observes and he conserves, he “portrays ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times,” but he also plays. He plants exact details into the unique imaginative ecologies of different novels. He recombines observed facts and invented fictions, preserving the details in a clear light but transforming them under the special illumination of a new fictional world, to offer a basis for further recombination and innovation as long as libraries remain. A few more examples to close.

  In the rich fact-based realism of The Gift, the writer-hero first resorts to the Berlin Library for material to construct a biography of his father, a naturalist-explorer of Central Asia who never returned from his last expedition: “Scientific books (with the Berlin Library’s stamp always on the ninety-ninth page), such as the familiar volumes of The Travels of a Naturalist in unfamiliar black and green bindings, lay side by side” (110): notice the familiar volumes—familiar from his father’s prerevolutionary library—in unfamiliar library bindings. Fyodor has to abandon the project but decides, unexpectedl
y to himself and everyone else, to write a biography not of the father he idealized but of the father of so-called socialist realist fiction, the real nineteenth-century novelist Nikolay Chernyshevksy, whom he derided:

  But now, taught by experience, he did not allow himself his former slovenliness in the use of sources and provided even the smallest note with an exact label of its origin. In front of the national library, near a stone pool, pigeons strolled cooing among the daisies on the lawn. The books to be taken out arrived in a little wagon along sloping rails at the bottom of the apparently small premises, where they awaited distribution, and where there seemed to be only a few books lying around on the shelves when in fact there was an accumulation of thousands.

  (Gift 211)

  In the stylized hyperliterary world of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the narrator V. addresses and dismisses the previous biography of his half-brother, the writer Sebastian Knight, by a vacuous hack called Goodman:

  I, for one, would have ignored that book altogether had it been just another bad book, doomed with the rest of its kind to oblivion by next spring. The Lethean Library, for all its incalculable volumes, is, I know, sadly incomplete without Mr Goodman’s effort. But bad as the book may be, it is something else besides. Owing to the quality of its subject, it is bound to become quite mechanically the satellite of another man’s enduring fame. As long as Sebastian Knight’s name is remembered, there always will be some learned inquirer conscientiously climbing up a ladder to where The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight keeps half awake between Godfrey Goodman’s Fall of Man and Samuel Goodrich’s Recollections of a Lifetime.

  (61)

  Both of these books, by the way, happen to be real: Nabokov knows how to use a library catalogue. Sebastian leaves his true love for a femme fatale shortly before his heart gives out, but when V. meets the woman, he does not yet know she is the one: “I had wished to ask her whether she ever realized that the wan-faced man, whose presence she had found so tedious, was one of the most remarkable writers of his time. What was the use of asking! Books mean nothing to a woman of her kind; her own life seems to her to contain the thrills of a hundred novels. Had she been condemned to spend a whole day shut up in a library, she would have been found dead about noon” (174).

  Nabokov says he learned most of what he knew about literature from the 11,000 volumes in his father’s library, whose catalogue was twice published by their private librarian. But in his autobiography he records that “not once in my three years of Cambridge—repeat: not once—did I visit the University Library, or even bother to locate it (I know its new place now), or find out if there existed a college library where books might be borrowed for reading in one’s digs” (SM 268). In fact, he never kept much of a personal library after leaving Russia, reading books and journals he could not afford to pay for while standing up browsing in Russian émigré bookstores in Berlin or later luxuriating in American university libraries but mostly just consulting the books in the ample library in his head.

  I’ll skip Humbert’s almost hallucinatory self-referential prison library and poor Pnin lugging back a heavy tome that has been recalled, only to find that the person who issued the recall was himself. Let’s move to Pale Fire and the Wordsmith University Library, into whose stacks mad Charles Kinbote thinks the shadowy Zemblan agent and would-be regicide Jakob Gradus has pursued him—the real him, as he thinks, Charles the Beloved, the last king of Zembla:

  “I don’t know where he lives,” said the girl at the desk. “But I know he is here right now. You’ll find him, I’m sure, in North West Three where we have the Icelandic Collection. You go south [waving her pencil] and turn west, and then west again where you see a sort of, a sort of [pencil making a circular wiggle—round table? round bookshelf?]—No, wait a minute, you better just keep going west till you hit the Florence Houghton Room, and there you cross over to the north side of the building. You cannot miss it” [returning pencil to ear].

  Not being a mariner or a fugitive king, he promptly got lost and after vainly progressing through a labyrinth of stacks, asked about the Icelandic Collection of a stern-looking mother librarian who was checking cards in a steel cabinet on a landing. Her slow and detailed directions promptly led him back to the main desk.

  “Please, I cannot find,” he said, slowly shaking his head.

  “Didn’t you—” the girl began, and suddenly pointed up: “Oh, there he is!”

  Along the open gallery that ran above the hall, parallel to its short side, a tall bearded man was crossing over at a military quick march from east to west. He vanished behind a bookcase but not before Gradus had recognized the great rugged frame, the erect carriage, the high-bridged nose, the straight brow, and the energetic arm swing, of Charles Xavier the Beloved.

  Our pursuer made for the nearest stairs—and soon found himself among the bewitched hush of Rare Books. The room was beautiful and had no doors; in fact, some moments passed before he could discover the draped entrance he himself had just used. The awful perplexities of his quest blending with the renewal of impossible pangs in his belly, he dashed back—ran three steps down and nine steps up, and burst into a circular room where a bald-headed suntanned professor in a Hawaiian shirt sat at a round table reading with an ironic expression on his face a Russian book. [This is Pnin, offered a happier fate in Pale Fire than he was ever allowed in Pnin itself.—BB] He paid no attention to Gradus who traversed the room, stepped over a fat little white dog without awakening it, clattered down a helical staircase and found himself in Vault P. Here, a well-lit, pipe-lined, white-washed passage led him to the sudden paradise of a water closet for plumbers or lost scholars where, cursing, he hurriedly transferred his automatic from its precarious dangle-pouch to his coat and relieved himself of another portion of the liquid hell inside him. He started to climb up again, and noticed in the temple light of the stacks an employee, a slim Hindu boy, with a call card in his hand. I had never spoken to that lad but had felt more than once his blue-brown gaze upon me, and no doubt my academic pseudonym was familiar to him but some sensitive cell in him, some chord of intuition, reacted to the harshness of the killer’s interrogation and, as if protecting me from a cloudy danger, he smiled and said: “I do not know him, sir.”

  (PF 281–82)

  There’s more—like the library of forbidden books administered by a comically unforbidding librarian in the erotic paradise of the Ardis Manor library in Ada—much, much more. But you see what libraries, and agents and the work of accumulation and the play of the imagination, can offer up for our past, our present, and our creative futures.

  NABOKOV AS WRITER

  12. Nabokov’s Humor

  The intensity and variety of Nabokov’s humor have always been among his chief appeals for me, as for others, but humor does not yield easily to academic analysis. Nevertheless I was supervising an Auckland doctoral dissertation on Nabokov’s humor when I was invited to speak at the Mercantile Library in New York on November 19, 1996. The main reason for that trip to New York was to launch the three Library of America volumes of Nabokov’s English-language novels and memoirs that I had edited. The launch was celebrated by a reading of Lolita from start to finish. When Dmitri Nabokov, despite elaborate planning and precautions, could not find his limousine in time to arrive for the unpostponable start of the reading, Stanley Crouch opened, reciting part 1, chapter 1 of the novel from memory. I chose to read the chapter of the Enchanted Hunters scene from which I quote here.

  I tend to want to connect everything with everything else, and hence, here, to connect Nabokov’s humor with his personality, his thought, and his art. I hope that doesn’t detract from the fun. A few years later I investigated laughter from an evolutionary perspective, and later still, in On the Origin of Stories, made play central to my explanation of art and storytelling.

  “Van,” said Lucette, “it will make you smile” (it did not: that prediction is seldom fulfilled)… .

  —Ada, 371

  I’ve written th
e odd thing about Nabokov, but there are times when I don’t get to read him for a long stretch. Some chance circumstance or stray impulse will send my hand toward a page of Nabokov—I have a number of his books in my study—and I dip in and purr and chuckle and wonder: Why does he write so well? Why is he so funny, line for line? Why are his humor and his style so inextricable when he is not simply a “humorist”? Why is the magic of his work so inseparable from its humor?

  Nabokov stressed that we should remember that the difference between the comic and the cosmic depends on just one little sibilant (NG 142). In one story, which was to have been part of his last, unfinished, Russian novel, Solus Rex, he has his narrator write in a letter to his dead wife—and already we’re very much in Nabokov’s world:

  My angel, oh my angel, perhaps our whole earthly existence is now but a pun to you, or a grotesque rhyme, something like “dental” and “transcendental” (remember?), and the true meaning of reality, of that piercing term, purged of all our strange, dreamy, masquerade interpretations, now sounds so pure and sweet that you, angel, find it amusing that we could have taken the dream seriously (although you and I did have an inkling of why everything disintegrated at one furtive touch—words, conventions of everyday life, systems, persons—so, you know, I think laughter is some chance little ape of truth astray in our world).