Radical Shadows

by Bradford Morrow

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  BORN IN THE HAGUE, Louis Marie Anne Couperus (1863-1923) can fittingly be seen as the (only slightly delayed) Dutch answer to Oscar Wilde. Like Wilde, Couperus was well known as a dandy. Couperus also spent much time abroad: as a teenager he lived for a few years in the Dutch East Indies, as an adult he made frequent voyages to the Far East and lived in France and Italy for more than ten years. The most important—and striking—similarity between the two writers is their delightful ability to ironize philosophy by foregrounding the fascinating idiosyncrasies of character to be found in their narrator(s). Such is the case with “Of Monotony,” a piece which, like many which Couperus wrote in serial form for Dutch newspapers, mixes autobiography with armchair philosophy. After reading only a few of the serials, however, a certain coyness quickly becomes apparent: the biographical references suddenly seem less reliable, and the philosophy accordingly less casual. Many of Couperus’s novels and travelogues were skillfully and generously translated into English during the first quarter of the twentieth century, while his short stories, arabesques and serials—among which some of his best work is to be found—prove much more scarce. This is “Of Monotony”’s first appearance in English.

  THIS IS ABOUT the monotony of hours and days, of people and things, of souls and their emotions. This is about gruesome monotony which the gods, just as people after them, have invented and arranged, in order to make our lives unbearable with regularity and natural laws and such.

  This is about the monotony of the seasons, which alternate with the most unrelenting monotony. Never does spring suddenly blossom, like a wonder, in the month of December. Never does the beauty of a landscape of ice surprise us just after we have eaten a peach. The seasons follow on the heels of one another as they have done throughout the ages since the earth has orbited the sun. Never has the sun orbited the earth, for instance, or so it is alleged …

  The seasons bring neither wonder nor surprise. They bring the monotonous days which pile up on us. Every day begins with morning, and each morning I am compelled to take my shower and put on my clothes …

  Monotony paralyzes every spontaneous flight of my soul in the morning. How then to give her flight during the remainder of the day? Like a slave, my corporality, already often stronger than my soul, has bathed and clothed itself. A breakfast awaits me every morning, at the same hour—just about—. If only, for once, a supper awaited me, with oysters, game and champagne! Oh well, it probably wouldn’t appeal to me anyway …

  I am monotony’s slave. Monotony is the gray, shrouded matron who regulates my entire life with boredom. She allows me, once I have dressed myself—and not before—to go out into the street. The street rises around me like yesterday. Never once has the street become an enchanted wood, and why after all doesn’t the street turn into an enchanted wood? Hoogstraat always remains Hoogstraat and Scheveningsche Weg never leads to any other surprise than the sea. The sea is never monotonic—she is always different—but how monotonous she is in her changeability! Her changeability is monotony: she never does anything but change in tint and tone. I can’t stand her these days because of this repetitious whimsicality …

  My hours revolve with monotonous occupations, activities and recreations. If my lunch isn’t ready at one o’clock, I’m unsatisfied with that breach of monotony in my life, and if it is ready, the undisturbed regularity of monotony irritates me. We have divided the day into columns of mornings, afternoons, evenings, nights. The nights are always dark. At twelve o’clock it is always twelve o’clock.

  I am always myself. It’s hopelessly monotonous always to be myself. Why don’t I live a hundred existences? If only I were someone else every day! If only tomorrow morning were presently to become a party, a night of orgy, and if, for once, as soon as I opened my eyes in the morning, I were to find myself a Roman emperor being worshipped, with incense burning, or … a young goat-herder who lets his goats graze along the ancient coasts of Laconia… Or a bird in flight, a flower blooming, a waterdrop… Good heavens, I would even like to be a cricket, a normal cricket chirping in the garden, or, if necessary, Lucrezia Borgia in an imaginary Renaissance. But I am always myself. The same chains bind me: every day, every hour. I even have a fairly enviable existence, but I find it hopelessly monotonous. Every once in a while I can get up a bit earlier or go to bed a bit later, but that changes nothing about the monotony which tyrannically rules and regulates my poor life. I also bear my name for my entire life. I have sometimes taken on another name on my travels, in order to put up some resistance to the unrelenting monotony of my name, but … then I couldn’t pick up my letters at the post office. That was very annoying, and I cursed my infringement upon monotony …

  Actually, I’ve always inhabited the same body. It has grown somewhat since childhood and changed slightly over the years, but, closely inspected, it has remained the same. In this body I have always dragged along the same soul.

  I wouldn’t want to trade my body-and-soul for some other physical-psychic combination. But I would want to adopt thousands of other appearances and still remain myself. I’m so used to my body-and-soul-monotony that I would take on the variousness of existence-and-being as if it were just a masquerade. I am the servant, the slave of my monotony.

  I am, monotonously and unchangeably, always a man, a Dutchman, a writer, someone from a good family, and I always have the same vices and virtues. Sometimes they bore me very much with their monotony. They sound in me again and again with the same tone; they never change in tint. Now, today, for once I would like not to be a man, a Dutchman, a writer or from a good family… But I am such a servant and slave to my monotony that I cannot now say what I would want to be and how I would want my vices and virtues changed in tint and tone.

  I think I would most like to be a magician. If I only knew where magic is studied! I would sell my soul to devil or demon to get magical powers. To become invisible now and then by a flick of the wrist… To conjure up a sudden Moorish palace in the clouds in which only myself and my love of the moment would be allowed to live. To disallow the pillars to stand immovable in monotonous rows but, with a gesture of my staff, to make them dance a cracking tango around us. To have stiff pillars bend and turn with agile voluptuousness. To transform the rational monotony of life and world, with a magic word, into the glorious madness of ceaseless metamorphosis. To make waves out of clouds, and to make a crystal palace floor out of the unbearable sea, over which the true, varying choruses of multiplicity and thousandtonality would float. To bathe my tired soul filled with spleen—a spleen resulting from monotony—in the prismatic-colored bath of endless change.

  The tiresomeness, the boredom of being what one is on the day after yesterday, to go down the unrelenting road and have to be thankful, one’s whole life, for monotony, for it usually demands thankfulness. It rings the monotonous bell of our small prosperity, our minimal luck; it doesn’t want the wonder and the various ecstasies, and if we dare not to be thankful, it breaks its baker’s melody, its nursery rhyme—which is supposed to make us drowsy in our shrill longings—off, with a false tone, and leaves us standing in desperation and cowardly nostalgia for it and its oppressive gifts and goodnesses. Oh, to break with monotony forever!

  Come with me; I am the magician! Come with me, you tired and bored! I have now sold my soul: I know the magic which will conjure up eternal change for you, the change of tint, the change of tone, the luxury of eternal surprise. Together we will be who we want to be, we will have what we will have, repeatedly, our loves and our desires will change, repeatedly; our magic castles will flow in and through each other, repeatedly; we will pick grapes among the Northern Lights on icebergs which float in the Mediterranean Sea; we will be mad with changing moods; the stars will rain through each other, and the sea will celebrate her ascension and drift among the clouds. The moon will lie down at our feet like a pale mirror and reflect every metamorphosis of our selves and our being. We will have reached what we longed for: we wil
l be various and powerful through my magic: mornings will shine fantastically with thick masses of clouds and nights will be luxurious with the darkness of thousands of shining suns; every change that you desire I will conjure up for you! I will change you from prince to beggar and from beggar to fakir, from man to woman and woman to man, I will make rubies bloom from lotus stems, and in your feelings, passions and emotions you won’t recognize your own soul! I will make the universe, the world, life, change, alter, swarm and transform for you until Monotony itself shall resound with millions of tones and glitter with billions of tints.

  However, I will not be able to make this variation in your soul, which will after all still remain your own:

  I will not be able to give you Satisfaction and Luck. And you will still continue, as will I, who was your magician, to long for the one inaccessible change—in air, in light, in yourself or in whom, or whatever—which would give you, not the magic dazzle, but true happiness and contentment.

  You tired and bored, I have deceived you: I was a powerless magician. Tomorrow, along with me, you will get out of your bed a little earlier or later than today, you will have breakfast as always and clothe yourself as always and your occupations and recreations will await you as always and it will be summer if it is summer and it will become evening when evening must come and the air and the sea and the clouds and the waves will surely change, but your soul will feel the same as it always has and it will, after the dazzlement with which I deceived you, be piously, cowardly thankful to Monotony, that matron in her makeshift cloak who cannot be dispelled, for returning and taking you by the hand to the gray path of days and hours which unfurls before you—to the pale, vague Unknown, which you cannot know or see through, to the End, to the mysterious End…

  The House Was There

  Vladimir Nabokov

  —With an afterword by Sarah Funke

  THE HOUSE WAS there. Right there. I never imagined the place would have changed so completely. How dreadful—I don’t recognize a thing. No use walking any farther. Sorry, Hopkinson, to have made you come such a long way. I had been looking forward to a perfect orgy of nostalgia and recognition! That man over there seems to be growing suspicious. Speak to him. Turisti’. Amerikantsi’. Oh, wait a minute. Tell him I am a ghost. You surely know the Russian for “ghost”! Mechta. Prizrak. Metafizicheskiy kapitalist. Run, Hopkinson!

  ***

  AFTERWORD

  ON THE UNPUBLISHED PREFACE

  TO CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE

  THE TYPESCRIPT OF this never-before published introduction to Conclusive Evidence (1951) was found clipped to the title page of the dedication copy of that book, in the Nabokov family library. Conclusive Evidence was first serialized in various periodicals, primarily the New Yorker. This series of articles provided the foundation for what grew to be a series of memoirs; each new installment confirmed Nabokov as the foremost mnemaniac writing in English. A revised and translated Russian version, Drugie Berega [Other Shores] followed in 1954, with a foreword in Russian. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, retranslated and further revised, appeared in 1966 with a new foreword explaining the work’s evolution. Nabokov planned a sequel, Speak On, Memory, to cover his twenty-year sojourn in the States, but at his death in 1977 he had completed only jottings on note cards, now in the archive at the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. The original poetic introduction, published here for the first time in English, is unlike the explanatory forewords he would write for many subsequent works, and projects a return to Russia that Nabokov never undertook.

  The “house” was the Nabokovs’ country retreat at Vyra, fifty miles outside St. Petersburg, vividly described in Conclusive Evidence as Nabokov remembered it and depicted by his sketched map on the endpapers of the 1966 revision. The estate was converted into an orphanage and school after Nabokov and his family joined the Russian emigration. During World War II the Germans commandeered it for their headquarters, and burned it to the ground when they abandoned it in 1944. Brian Boyd writes, “Today where Vyra stood there is nothing but a scraggly clump of trees” (The Russian Years).

  “The House Was There” was just one among many potential titles Nabokov proposed to Victor Gollancz, who planned to bring out the first English edition of Conclusive Evidence under a new title that same year. Nabokov had titled the first edition as “conclusive evidence of my having existed”; he admitted to a Gollancz representative that “none of my friends liked ‘Conclusive Evidence,’” and offered the following new suggestions: “Clues”; “The Rainbow Edge”; “The Prismatic Edge”; “The Moulted Feather”; “Nabokov’s Opening”; “Emblemata”; and Nabokov’s own favorite, “Speak, Mnemosyne!,” which was ultimately rejected on the grounds that readers wouldn’t buy what they couldn’t pronounce.

  Nabokov inscribed to his wife, Vèra, the copy of Conclusive Evidence to which this typescript was affixed. Like many of the scores of books he inscribed to Vèra, this copy bears a hand-drawn butterfly, reproduced here. The unique species is named “Eugenia onegini,” for Pushkin’s classic, and betrays Nabokov’s life-long study of lepidoptera as well as his attachment to the father of Russian literature: after spending nearly a decade preparing his first controversial translation of Eugene Onegin (1964), he had to wait ten more years to see his revised edition in print, enduring interminable publication delays each time.

  Words Nabokov underlined in his “discarded introduction” have been italicized here. While the Russian words “Turisti’” and “Amerikantsi’” need no translation, “Mechta. Prizrak. Metafizicheskiy kapitalist” may be translated, “A dream. A specter. A metaphysical capitalist.”

  Three Stories

  Federigo Tozzi

  —Translated from Italian with an afterword by Minna Proctor

  THE IDIOT

  FIOCCO, THE IDIOT—THIRTY years old and still fighting with the other children because they wouldn’t leave him alone in the courtyard to cut figures out of playing cards with a pair of scissors—fell into a deep sleep.

  It was two in the afternoon. None of the residents of the five-story apartment building were peering out their windows, and Fiocco’s parents weren’t home. Most of the men were still at work in their stores or offices, and the children and women were napping on account of the heat. Sounds of servants working in the kitchens drifted through the windows left open just a crack. That was all.

  Fiocco dreamed and even believed that the King of Spades had married the Queen of Hearts. They had always been his two favorite cards.

  So he asked permission to enter their domain and tell them how happy he was for them.

  —I know you love each other very much! But I’ve known that for a long time. Whenever I shuffled the deck and you two were next to each other, I was sure I saw some kind of movement, and I’d even stop playing. Now, here I find you alone together in this pile of trash? Tell me everything. What are you doing in there?

  The two cards had been rained on and then dried by the sun. Fiocco loved them no matter how faded they were. Although he would rather have spoken with the Queen, the King was more willing to talk to humans. Looking right into Fiocco’s eyes, the King of Spades began to speak. “The only card games you know how to play are gin rummy, slap-jack and briscola, so let me tell you a little about what happens when you go off to bed and your family plays without you. Then you’ll see what a great memory I have. Cecilia and Laura are your sisters, Arturo is Laura’s fiancé, Matilde is your mama, Ugo is your father, Enrico and Giulio are friends of the family. And I’ll tell you something else that you should know but would never figure out on your own: the Ace of Clubs was in love with Cecilia. The Ace of Hearts, one of my own subjects, was in love with Laura. The Three of Diamonds was Arturo’s good friend, and the Queen of Clubs was in love with Arturo. The Jack of Hearts and the Jack of Diamonds both liked Matilde. Neither the Three of Clubs nor the Three of Spades liked your father much, and none of the cards ever wanted to be in his hand. The Queen of Diamonds was crazy ab
out Enrico. Pay attention, so you don’t get confused. We cards know more about what’s going on during a game than the people who are playing. It would be quite impossible for me to explain what lengths we go to in order to help our patrons. But in the end we have no control over the luck of the draw, and if we wind up together, we must refrain from expressing either joy or disappointment. You humans have no idea! And for what it’s worth, neither my esteemed wife nor I have ever taken sides against anyone. When we are placed face down in the dark, all we can do is try to sneak an embrace. How could you possibly understand our love? Not even the moths dancing in the light know about us!

  “Once, convinced she was doing the Three of Diamonds a favor, the Queen of Clubs desperately tried to help Arturo win. Oh, what tension this created every time Arturo and Laura—your sister, Arturo’s fiancé—touched. The Queen was so jealous of Laura! The Queen kept slipping from Laura’s grasp and finally fell face-up on the table so that the other players could see her. The Three of Diamonds called in all his debts from the other cards in order to please the Queen, and even won the assistance of my esteemed consort. On the third round, the Queen of Clubs fell to Cecilia, your other sister. And throughout the entire game, Cecilia nibbled on her cards—you know how people do that when they are deep in thought, waiting for their turn. The Queen of Clubs was so caught up in the game her heart was racing. And Cecilia is always such a careless player. She puts all her energy into building up points. Very well. The card understood right away that both she and Cecilia were rooting for Arturo. Fortunately, the Ace of Clubs, who I’ve explained was in love with Cecilia, hadn’t been played yet. And so the Queen still had a chance to be useful. But Arturo loves Laura, and he wasn’t paying attention to these goings on.