Nabokov in America (37 page)

These include musty crotchets: “I loathe such things as jazz” and also bullfighting, a “white-hosed moron torturing” an animal. Like his creator, Shade detests

abstract bric-a-brac
⁷²
;

Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;

Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;

Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,

Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.

Shade develops the nonreligious metaphysic that Nabokov hints at in some other books. In
Pnin
the hero reflects that he “did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a
democracy of ghosts
⁷³
. The souls of the dead … formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended to the destinies of the quick”—as Mira, the murdered girl, does, sending antic squirrels into the world to cheer Pnin.

Speak, Memory
is partly a communion with the dead, and while portraying his own life, explaining the development of his artistic consciousness, Nabokov reveals how it all makes sense for him. “The
cradle rocks
⁷⁴
above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” He has made “
colossal efforts
⁷⁵
to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers” in the darkness, and though séances did not work for him, nor did “ransack[ing] my oldest dreams for keys and clues,” he rejects the “common sense” view—common sense by its very commonness being displeasing. There is a realm of timelessness, he confidently asserts. He can access it through his imagination, a feature of artistic imagination being the ability to feel “
everything that happens
⁷⁶
in one point of time.” The poet, lost in creative thought,

taps his knee
⁷⁷
with his wandlike pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighboring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-gray sand is rolled by the wind on Venus … and trillions of other such trifles occur—all
forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair, at Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus.

John Shade, writing “Pale Fire” in fictionalized Ithaca (“New Wye”), has authentic powers. Some lines of his poem attest to it, and Nabokov, although having fun at his expense (Shade is “behind” Robert Frost, and Frost is himself no Pushkin or Shakespeare),
seems present in
⁷⁸
Shade. “Pale Fire” as a whole is a demonstration, an instance of the “
plexed artistry
⁷⁹
” that Shade, speaking for himself but also for Nabokov, finds meaningful, because in the artist’s ability to master time, to unite a childhood memory with the old man in Turkestan, and with other events of this specific instant, also with a likely future (one that includes a book in which the verse will appear), there is a richness far beyond the brief crack of light. Shade feels that he understands

Existence, or
⁸⁰
at least a minute part

Of my existence, only through my art,

In terms of combinational delight;

And if my private universe scans right,

So does the verse of galaxies divine

Which I suspect is an iambic line.

I’m reasonably sure that we survive

And that my darling somewhere is alive,

As I am reasonably sure that I

Shall wake at six tomorrow, on July

The twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine,

And that the day will probably be fine.

As it happens, he shall not awake then. He is shot to death the evening before.

Shade’s darling is his late daughter, Hazel. The poet’s life has been harrowed by, has been obsessed with, death:

There was a time
⁸¹
in my demented youth

When somehow I suspected that the truth

About survival after death was known

To every human being: I alone

Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy

Of books and people hid the truth from me.

There
was the day when I began to doubt

Man’s sanity: How could he live without

Knowing for sure what dawn, what death, what doom

Awaited consciousness beyond the tomb?

And finally there was the sleepless night

When I decided to explore and fight

The foul, the inadmissible abyss,

Devoting all my twisted life to this

One task.

Hazel, dying young, is a pitiable case. Shade presents her in terms mostly of her unattractiveness: she is heavy-limbed, her eyes are funny, etc. “She
may not be a beauty
⁸²
, but she’s cute,” the parents tell each other, fearing it isn’t so.

“It was
no use, no use
⁸³
,” the poet laments. “And like a fool I sobbed in the men’s room,” his tears provoked by seeing his daughter in a Christmas pageant. Appearance means much, if not everything. In a poem that tries to speak of ultimate matters, to offer plainness as a tragic fate seems ill considered. “Alas, the dingy cygnet never turned / Into a wood duck,” Shade writes, and the girl becomes a depressive, with wounds that cannot heal:

And
still the demons
⁸⁴
of our pity spoke:

No lips would share the lipstick of her smoke;

The telephone that rang before a ball

Every two minutes in Sorossa Hall

For her would never ring; and, with a great

Screeching of tires on gravel, to the gate

Out of the lacquered night, a white-scarfed beau

Would never come for her.

Hazel has a blind date. The young man, upon first seeing her in person, remembers he has something else to do. This is the last straw. She goes directly to a half-frozen lake and throws herself in. The unwitting parents are channel-surfing at home at the time, finding not much on, already the artistry of fate throwing forth unrecognized signs, ironies:

“
Are we quite sure
⁸⁵
she’s acting right?” you asked.

“It’s technically a blind date, of course.

Well, shall we try the preview of
Remorse
?”

And
we allowed, in all tranquility,

The famous film to spread its charmed marquee;

The famous face flowed in, fair and inane … .

Your
ruby ring
⁸⁶
made life and laid the law.

Oh, switch it off! And as life snapped we saw

A pinhead light dwindle and die in black

Infinity.

This
contrapuntal movement
⁸⁷
—daughter drowning while parents watch TV—is echoed in several parts of the novel. Disparate stories reflect one another. The most disparate, and the source of most of the mad humor of the book, is Kinbote’s commentary to the poem and how it appears to us: Kinbote’s scholia are insanely off, a classic case of a reader stealing a text for his own purpose, and it seems that we are in the presence of another absurd Nabokovian solipsist, like Hermann of the early novel
Despair
, who kills a man he doesn’t resemble, thinking that he is his exact double, or Humbert, or the scheming lovers of
King, Queen, Knave
, or Albinus of
Laughter in the Dark
, a man so blind that he does go blind.

Kinbote believes himself to be—may even be—not an unhappy, lonely language instructor at a Cornell-ish university but
Charles Xavier Vseslav
⁸⁸
, “The Beloved,” the last king of Zembla, a “
distant northern land
⁸⁹
” near Russia. He has come to America to escape the revolutionaries who deposed him, who want to murder him. A devotee of Shade’s poetry, which he tried once to translate, he attaches himself to the poet in the last months of Shade’s life. Together they ramble of an evening in New Wye, in a neighborhood like Ithaca’s professor ghetto, Cayuga Heights. Kinbote feeds the poet story lines from the life of Charles II. Shade, he hopes, will feature them in his poem in progress.

“Pale Fire” may end up cluttered with “sundry Americana,” Kinbote knows. But Zembla will dominate:

Oh, I did not expect
⁹⁰
him to devote himself
completely
to [my] theme! … But I was sure his poem would contain the wonderful incidents I had described… . [But once he reads the actual poem] nothing of it was there! … Instead of the wild glorious romance—what did I have? An autobiographical, eminently Appalachian, rather old-fashioned narrative in a neo-Popian prosodic style … void of my magic, of that special rich streak of magical madness which I was sure would run through it.

The
novel, like the poem, is solidly American—replete with
Lolita
-style,
Pnin
-style imagery, offering reports on scenes of contemporary academic life, summoning the natural surroundings with affectionate precision. All of the poem, and all of the novel, grow out of an image of a common perching bird seen year-round in Ithaca yards:

I was the shadow of the waxwing
⁹¹
slain

By the false azure in the windowpane;

I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I

Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

Birds fly head-on into picture windows: sad, but true. Shade’s parents were ornithologists. Like Nabokov, and like Fyodor, hero of
The Gift
, Shade has inherited a semi-scientific way of looking at the world:

All colors made me
⁹²
happy: even gray.

My eyes were such that literally they

Took photographs. Whenever I’d permit,

Or, with a silent shiver, order it,

Whatever in my field of vision dwelt—

An indoor scene, hickory leaves, the svelte

Stilettos of a frozen stillicide—

Was printed on my eyelids’ nether side … .

How fully I felt nature
⁹³
glued to me

And how my childish palate loved the taste

Half-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste!

The cedar waxwing announces that doubling worlds exist, that they interpenetrate, project upon each other:

And from the inside, too
⁹⁴
, I’d duplicate

Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:

Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass

Hang all the furniture above the grass,

And how delightful when a fall of snow

Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so

As to make chair and bed exactly stand

Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!

Kinbote
declares that he has “
no desire to twist
⁹⁵
and batter an … 
apparatus criticus
into the monstrous semblance of a novel”—no, absolutely not. But he does have an ungovernable urge to comment. He tells his tale by ventriloquizing the poet and by composing just such an independent apparatus. In the end, the question of whether he is Charles II or a delusional paranoid is undetermined. On the side of believing him, in addition to narrative passages that enthrall and are logical and detailed, is his blithe kingliness, the majestic manner of his condescension and of his confident, ever active homosexuality:

I turned to go
⁹⁶
… . I explained I could not stay long as I was about to have a kind of little seminar at home followed by some table tennis, with two charming identical twins and another boy, another boy.

We shall now go back
⁹⁷
from mid-August 1958 to a certain afternoon in May three decades earlier… . He had several dear playmates but none could compete with Oleg, Duke of Rahl. In those days growing boys of high-born families wore on festive occasions … sleeveless jerseys, white anklesocks with black buckle shoes, and very tight, very short shorts… . [Oleg’s] soft blond locks had been cut since his last visit to the palace, and the young Prince thought: Yes, I knew he would be different.

How
would
a deposed king, homosexual to boot, forced to flee and hide alone on a distant continent, conduct himself? The combination of fear and superiority is finely calibrated, and Charles the Beloved replies to sometimes savage mockery, often based in homophobia, with the sweaty aplomb of an out-of-shape fencer:

Well did I know
⁹⁸
that among certain youthful instructors whose advances I had rejected there was at least one evil practical joker; I knew it ever since the time I came home from a very enjoyable and successful meeting of students and teachers (at which I had exuberantly thrown off my coat and shown several willing pupils a few of the amusing holds employed by Zemblan wrestlers) and found in my coat pocket a brutal anonymous note saying: “You have hal… . . s real bad, chum,” meaning evidently “hallucinations.”

One day I happened
⁹⁹
to enter the English Literature office … when I overheard a young instructor in a green velvet jacket,
whom I shall mercifully call Gerald Emerald, carelessly saying in answer to something the secretary had asked: “I guess Mr. Shade has already left with the Great Beaver.” Of course, I am quite tall, and my brown beard is of a rather rich tint and texture; the silly cognomen evidently applied to me, but was not worth noticing, and … I contented myself on my way out with pulling Gerald Emerald’s bowtie loose.