Stalking Nabokov

by Brian Boyd

  Since my parents were not keen to meet hers, I saw her only on the beach; but I thought of her constantly. If I noticed she had been crying, I felt a surge of helpless anguish that brought tears to my own eyes. I could not destroy the mosquitoes that had left their bites on her frail neck, but I could, and did, have a successful fistfight with a red-haired boy who had been rude to her. She used to give me warm handfuls of hard candy. One day, as we were bending together over a starfish, and Colette’s ringlets were tickling my ear, she suddenly turned toward me and kissed me on the cheek. So great was my emotion that all I could think of saying was, “You little monkey.”

  I had a gold coin that I assumed would pay for our elopement. Where did I want to take her? Spain? America? The mountains above Pau? “Là-bas, là-bas, dans la montagne,” as I had heard Carmen sing at the opera. One strange night, I lay awake, listening to the recurrent thud of the ocean and planning our flight. The ocean seemed to rise and grope in the darkness and then heavily fall on its face.

  Of our actual getaway, I have little to report. My memory retains a glimpse of her obediently putting on rope-soled canvas shoes, on the lee side of a flapping tent, while I stuffed a folding butterfly net into a brown-paper bag. The next glimpse is of our evading pursuit by entering a pitch-dark cinéma near the Casino (which, of course, was absolutely out of bounds). There we sat, holding hands across the dog, which now and then gently jingled in Colette’s lap, and were shown a jerky, drizzly, but highly exciting bullfight at San Sebastián. My final glimpse is of myself being led along the promenade by Linderovski. His long legs move with a kind of ominous briskness and I can see the muscles of his grimly set jaw working under the tight skin. My bespectacled brother, aged nine, whom he happens to hold with his other hand, keeps trotting out forward to peer at me with awed curiosity, like a little owl.

  (SM 150–51)

  The tenderness, the boy’s total surprise at the sudden kiss, his absurd off-guard response, the naïve romanticism of the escape plan, the haunting duration of that night of solitary scheming to the sound of the sea, the flashes of unforgotten detail (rope-soled shoes, flapping tent, butterfly net in paper bag), the spaced glimpses of memory, so much truer to recollection than a glibly sustained narrative, the owl-like swiveling of the shamelessly curious younger brother’s head—all these are worlds away from Humbert’s lurid complaints, let alone Lyne’s anodyne gloss.

  In Lolita, Humbert attempts to consolidate his past by imposing it on what should be Lolita’s fluid future. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov lets us feel the poignancy of his final parting from Colette in 1909. But as a healthy boy rather than a monster in the making, he accepts the reality of growth and change, and a succession of females stir his fancy: a young American woman at a Berlin skating rink in 1910, who suddenly loses her enchantment when he discovers she is a dancer on a music-hall stage, or Polenka, the daughter of the Nabokovs’ head coachman, in 1911, or at last Tamara, his first real love, in 1915 and 1916, the subject of his first book of passionate poems, the object of his heartrending nostalgia when his family flees into the Crimea at the end of 1917 and her letters somehow reach him through the turmoil of the Russian civil war:

  Tamara, Russia, the wildwood grading into old gardens, my northern birches and firs, the sight of my mother getting down on her hands and knees to kiss the earth every time we came back to the country from town for the summer, et la montagne et le grand chêne—these are things that fate one day bundled up pell-mell and tossed into the sea, completely severing me from my boyhood. I wonder, however, whether there is really much to be said for more anesthetic destinies, for, let us say, a smooth, safe, small-town continuity of time, with its primitive absence of perspective, when, at fifty, one is still dwelling in the clapboard house of one’s childhood, so that every time one cleans the attic one comes across the same pile of old brown schoolbooks, still together among later accumulations of dead objects, and where, on summery Sunday mornings, one’s wife stops on the sidewalk to endure for a minute or two that terrible, garrulous, dyed, church-bound McGee woman, who, way back in 1915, used to be pretty, naughty Margaret Ann of the mint-flavored mouth and nimble fingers.

  The break in my own destiny affords me in retrospect a syncopal kick that I would not have missed for worlds.

  (SM 249–50)

  The incident of young Vladimir’s attempted elopement with Colette is not quite typical of Speak, Memory. Nabokov can recall scenes from his past with perfect framing, focus, and lighting, but for the most part incidents are subordinate, as here, to epochs, phases of his life, pulses of feeling, and the sudden shifts of thought these phases and pulses can engender. Here his sense of loss is still more wistful than in the case of Colette, and like so many of his losses it has been, as it were, repeatedly rehearsed: in his verse that claims nothing could ever match the magic of his first summer with Tamara; in their frustrations over their first winter in St. Petersburg; in their discovery that their second summer indeed cannot relive the first; in their realization that they have drifted apart, even before the revolution sends them to different corners of Russia and then somehow revives the spell they cast over each other.

  But even as he evokes loss layered upon anticipations of loss and a kind of recovery that only sharpens the initial loss, Nabokov cannot keep to the one plaintive note. Part of the special spell of Speak, Memory is the gap between his “perfect past” and the losses that would follow. Nabokov here registers the pain, the sharp severance from the past that would be characteristic of his destiny, yet affirms with wonderful humor that he would not have missed this shift, “this syncopal kick,” for worlds. At the same time, by dint of the very gap between Russian exoticism and his homely image of the McGee woman, the old “naughty Margaret Ann,” he shows how much he has now learned to feel at home in America—and incidentally anticipates the contrast between stay-at-home Shade and the wild romantic nostalgia of Kinbote in Pale Fire. Although Speak, Memory stops just when Nabokov and his family are about to leave Europe, America repeatedly shows through the scenery of his European past, like the foreglimpse of a second home, a solution to the problem of exile, a fulfillment of some of the fondest dreams of his childhood. He records the pangs of nostalgia, the anticipations of future loss that preceded them, and the compensations of memory, yet even here affirms the poignancy of his loss as a gain, a gain still more generously repaid once his destiny makes that surprise swerve toward America.

  In the passage just quoted it is no accident that Nabokov’s loss of Tamara and Russia stands beside the never-to-be-repeated but never-to-be-forgotten image of his mother kissing the earth on their return to the countryside for the summer. For the women in his life form a pattern that pervades his autobiography, starting long before Tamara or even Colette. Beginning with his mother, it moves, by way of the first governesses and pretty cousins he adored, to Colette’s precursor, Zina, to Colette herself, to Polenka, Tamara, and ultimately to his wife, to whom he turns directly in the closing chapters (“the years are passing, my dear, and presently nobody will know what you and I know. Our child is growing” [SM 295]) and to whom he dedicated this and almost all his books.

  While Véra stands as the crown of the series, Nabokov’s sense of the privacy to which any living person is entitled—even “Colette” and “Tamara” are pseudonyms—keeps her both prominent and safely shielded behind that “you,” leaving his mother to anchor and dominate the theme of the women who have mattered to him most.

  When I addressed Nabokov’s autobiography in the course of writing his biography, I focused especially on the roles of his father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, and his son, Dmitri Vladimirovich Nabokov. Introducing Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, I lingered over the extraordinary sentence at the end of Speak, Memory’s first chapter that pays tribute to Nabokov’s father, anticipates his death, and seems to leave him suspended in the timelessness that the very shape of the autobiography’s sentences somehow impart to their subjects. Introducing Vladimir Nab
okov: The American Years, I drew together the patterns that converge on Dmitri at the end of Speak, Memory’s last chapter to suggest the intimation of America looming ahead as a solution to the problem of exile from Russia and even as a metaphor for the solution to the problem of our inevitable exile from our past.

  Nabokov reflects his hunch that there must be something beyond time in both the texture of Speak, Memory’s individual sentences and the structure of the whole. Midway between these extremes stands the chapter. At this level, too, he finds ways to resist the relentless linearity of time, time as mere succession, time as implacable cause and effect. By exploring chapter 2 of the autobiography, entitled in its original New Yorker version “Portrait of My Mother,” we can turn from the role of the males in his family (father and son as standard and stand-in) to the role of the females (his mother as source and stimulus, prefiguring the even richer role his wife will one day play as a kind of second self) and see how Nabokov shapes a single chapter to acknowledge and yet transcend time.

  Speak, Memory’s first chapter, “Perfect Past,” revolves around his first memory, which he thinks may date from one of his mother’s birthdays. As he walks along an avenue at Vyra, holding his parents’ hands, he feels his first awareness of his self as distinct from theirs and his first awareness of time, when he discovers their age in relation to his and becomes “acutely aware that the twenty-seven-year-old being, in soft white and pink, holding my left hand, was my mother, and that the thirty-three-year-old being, in hard white and gold, holding my right hand, was my father” (SM 22).

  Eschewing strict chronology, Speak, Memory strives to be less the slave of time than its master. True, each chapter introduces a new phase of his life: his first inklings of consciousness; his mother; his wider family; his early English governesses (from 1902 to 1905); his French governess (from 1905); his passion for butterflies (from 1906); his first love (1909); his Russian tutors (from 1906 to 1915); his school (from 1911 to 1917); his adolescent pursuit of his own masculinity and others’ femininity; his first poem (1914); his first love affair and first taste of exile (from 1915 to 1919); his Cambridge years (1919 to 1922); his years in the Russian emigration (from 1922); his watching over the growth of his son (from 1934). Yet within each essay-like chapter Nabokov moves fluidly about in time.

  “Portrait of My Mother” starts with a constant in Nabokov’s psychic life; pauses for a second at a moment when he was six; shifts to summarize his mother’s solicitude for him in his early childhood; lingers over another day when he was seven; leads to an overview of his mother’s metaphysics; returns to her minute attention to the physical; shades naturally into a luminous but typical and timeless scene; summarizes her passions for games and gathering mushrooms; shifts to a portrait of the family’s housekeeper, Elena Nabokov’s old nurse; retraces the disappointment he caused his mother one Christmas morning; and glides forward to picture her as a wartime volunteer nurse, as a devotee of her dachshunds, as an exile in Berlin and in desolate bereavement in Prague. In the course of the chapter he surveys his life, zooms in on a moment, expands an incident, revives a setting, traces a passion or habit or quirk, scans ahead to a later loss, and gazes out toward timelessness.

  Although organized around the subject the original titles announce, each chapter also has its riddling quality, especially in the melting vista with which so many end. Chapter 2 even begins with a double riddle: first, with the mild but inexplicable hallucinations that Nabokov can always remember being subject to, some aural, some optical, especially just before sleep, and then with the question why he should start a chapter called “Portrait of My Mother” with these solitary idiosyncracies. From there he segues into his colored hearing—an account that has become a classic, cited in scientific studies of synesthesia ever since its first publication—and toward his mother. For after spelling out and filling in the colors each sound of the alphabet evokes in him, he concedes that the

  confessions of a synesthete must sound tedious and pretentious to those who are protected from such leakings and drafts by more solid walls than mine are. To my mother, though, this all seemed quite normal. The matter came up, one day in my seventh year, as I was using a heap of old alphabet blocks to build a tower. I casually remarked to her that their colors were all wrong. We discovered then that some of her letters had the same tint as mine and that, besides, she was optically affected by musical notes. These evoked no chromatisms in me whatsoever.

  (SM 35)

  Not only does he inherit special sensitivities from her, but he also then becomes the special object of her understanding and encouragement. Noticing his sharp responsiveness to the visual, she paints him aquarelle after aquarelle and even brings out her jewels for him to play with.

  “My numerous childhood illnesses brought my mother and me still closer together,” he declares (SM 36), before describing the strangest experience of his childhood. As he lies in bed while delirium ebbs, he seems to watch or accompany his mother as she enters a stationery shop and emerges with her footman, behind her, carrying the pencil she has purchased. Nabokov renders his vision so uncannily vividly and precisely that he seems to relive it now and allow us to relive it with him, as if we can transcend time and personality just as he seemed then to transcend space. As he watches the scene roll on, he cannot fathom why his mother does not herself carry something as small as a pencil, until she walks through his bedroom door, in reality now, carrying a four-feet-long model display pencil that he has often coveted and that the rational part of his mind has apparently “corrected” in size within his clairvoyant trance. “ ‘Oh, yes,’ she would say as I mentioned this or that unusual sensation. ‘Yes, I know all that,’ and with a somewhat eerie ingenuousness she would discuss such things as double sight, and little raps in the woodwork of tripod tables, and premonitions, and the feeling of the déjà vu” (SM 39).

  Suddenly we can see why Nabokov starts this “Portrait of My Mother” with his own moments at the margins of consciousness: they, more than anything, link him to what is innermost in his mother. At the end of section 2, he describes her peculiar faith, in a way that recalls his own quirks of consciousness at the beginning of the chapter:

  Her intense and pure religiousness took the form of her having equal faith in the existence of another world and in the impossibility of comprehending it in terms of earthly life. All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.

  (SM 39)

  Section 3 turns from the metaphysical to the physical as it opens with Elena Nabokov’s instructions to her son:

  “Vot zapomni [now remember],” she would say in conspiratorial tones as she drew my attention to this or that loved thing in Vyra—a lark ascending the curds-and-whey sky of a dull spring day, heat lightning taking pictures of a distant line of trees in the night, the palette of maple leaves on brown sand, a small bird’s cuneate footprints on new snow. As if feeling that in a few years the tangible part of her world would perish, she cultivated an extraordinary consciousness of the various time marks distributed throughout our country place.

  (SM 40)

  No wonder he thinks of entitling his autobiography Speak, Mnemosyne—until he is told it is unpronounceable—as if he were formally invoking Mnemosyne, memory, the mother of the muses. For it is his mother who teaches him to treasure Vyra, the home of her childhood, too, and to notice its fleeting details because they can be hoarded only within the sanctum of the mind. Just as she fosters his senses and his extrasensory intuitions, she trains him in memory and in her sense of the preciousness and precariousness of the world around, even as her love and her wealth enfold him in such security.

  As so often, a stroll through the park turns a corner from space into time, as a glimpse of the overgrown old tennis court calls u
p the new court and the elaborately protracted picture of a typical game, Vladimir partnering his mother against his father and his younger brother, Sergey, with character sketches of principals and extras, action shots and comedy, landscapes and melting effects of light and shade, the seemingly effortless recreation of the presence of the past.

  From this scene Nabokov slides into a summary—“She loved all games of skill and gambling” (SM 42)—that again suggests how much his passion for play owes to her, then leads into her zeal for the “very Russian sport of . . . looking for mushrooms” (SM 43), a drive that he understands and that enables her to understand when his own compulsion for collecting butterflies develops.

  The fourth and final section of “Portrait of My Mother” opens with Nabokov’s explanation of his mother’s remoteness from the running of their large household (“fifty servants and no questions asked” [SM 46]). “Nominally,” he explains, “the housekeeping was in the hands of her former nurse,” but Elena Borisovna’s encroaching senility means that the real organization of the household has to carry on behind her back, “with my mother deriving considerable comfort from the hope that her old nurse’s illusory world would not be shattered” (SM 45–46). A little Christmas incident when Vladimir and Sergey shatter her illusions fades out into a picture of the First World War, with Elena Nabokov setting up a private hospital for wounded soldiers and playing the part of nurse. Another natural transition takes us to her fondness for dachshunds, and when we follow that to the end we find her in 1930 in Prague with her last dackel waddling far behind her “in a huff, tremendously old and furious with his long Czech muzzle of wire—an émigré dog in a patched and ill-fitting coat” (SM 48).

  Rewinding a few years, Nabokov recalls sitting with his mother in the family apartment in Berlin, while on vacation from Cambridge, and reading her “Blok’s verse on Italy—had just got to the end of the little poem about Florence, which Blok compares to the delicate, smoky bloom of an iris, and she was saying over her knitting, ‘Yes, yes, Florence does look like a dïmnïy iris, how true! I remember—‘ when the telephone rang” (SM 49). He does not linger, does not explain, but the attentive reader can deduce: the call that interrupts them comes from the hall where Nabokov senior has just been assassinated. As I wrote in the biography and the previous chapter of this book, throughout Speak, Memory Nabokov returns obliquely to his father’s death as if it were a wound he cannot leave alone but can hardly bear to touch.