Nabokov in America (38 page)

From Kinbote’s arch, circumlocutory speech, images leap to the reader. His style is one source of fun: it recalls Humbert Humbert’s brainy, lurid speech but with more cluelessness. Only a few days in town, Kinbote meets Shade for the first time at the faculty club:

His laconic
¹⁰⁰
suggestion that I “try the pork” amused me. I am a strict vegetarian… . Shade said that with him it was the other way around: he must make a definite effort to partake of a vegetable… . I was not yet used to the rather fatiguing jesting and teasing that goes on among American intellectuals of the inbreeding academic type and so abstained from telling John Shade in front of all those grinning old males how much I admired his work lest a serious discussion of literature degenerate into mere facetiation.

Kinbote is under stress, despite his poise. Desperate words escape him: “
Dear Jesus
¹⁰¹
, do something,” he exclaims at the end of a lyrical description of the college grounds. He is above all things confessional: hungry to contact a listener, a reader, to do so intimately. “There is
a very loud amusement park
¹⁰²
right in front of my present lodgings,” and later, “damn that music,” he says, fairly tearing his hair. Though a king, he frequently stoops. The combination of Old World formality, incomprehension of the New, fear, desperate purpose, and sadness makes him appealing despite his unreliability. Shade, if Kinbote’s reports of him can be trusted, treats him with simple kindness. They often walk together. Shade is a university poet but not quite academic: his final work, the poem that he writes in the last weeks of his life, struggles to break through, to speak with a full throat, to consummate. Yet
he chooses Popian prosody
¹⁰³
as his vehicle, the very mode of learning-stuffed, intellectualized verse that Wordsworthian effusions came into being to supersede. With his scientific precision he cannot quite conquer heaven, after all. The poem finds
wisdom in its own failure
¹⁰⁴
; there can be no fiery word from on high, no communication with the other side, but
the poet’s creation, in the intricacy of its correspondences, suggests the structure of the cosmos.

Kinbote is no Pope. “I notice a whiff of Swift in some of my notes,” he confesses, but on balance his temperament is more Romantic than Augustan. Though a “
desponder
¹⁰⁵
” by nature, with “
frozen mud
¹⁰⁶
and horror” in his heart, he also has “
moments of volatility
¹⁰⁷
and
fou rire
.” Early on, thrilled to be knowing Shade, he says,

My
admiration for him
¹⁰⁸
was for me a sort of alpine cure. I experienced a grand sense of wonder whenever I looked at him … enhanced by my awareness of [other people] not feeling what I felt, of their not seeing what I saw, of their taking Shade for granted, instead of drenching every nerve … in the romance of his presence.

Shade is an artist: while he stands there chewing a piece of celery, he is taking in and recombining impressions so as to produce “
an organic miracle
¹⁰⁹
, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse” at some later time. After Shade’s murder, Kinbote is still in awe:

Clink-clank, came the horseshoe
¹¹⁰
music from [a nearby game]. In the large envelope I carried I could feel the hard-cornered, rubberbanded batches of index cards [of Shade’s final manuscript]. We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery… . In a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats.

Deeply respectful of this lineage, he goes on:

Solemnly I weighed
¹¹¹
in my hand what I was carrying under my left armpit, and for a moment I found myself enriched with an indescribable amazement as if informed that fireflies were making decodable signals on behalf of stranded spirits, or that a bat was writing a legible tale of torture in the bruised and branded sky.

Kinbote resembles his author, who also is prone to wonderment. Upon first coming to America—parachuting into a field near Baltimore—Kinbote looks around him with “
enchantment and
¹¹²
physical wellbeing.”
The commentary is seeded with Nabokov’s enduring love of mountains. Zembla is a high kingdom, a peninsula with a mountain range forming its spine, and the king escapes only by climbing into that range and then down the other side. At an “eerie altitude, in the heady blue,” he enters the mental zone “where the mountaineer becomes aware of a
phantom companion
¹¹³
”—a friend, an imaginary ally, who can lead him to safety.
†

Shade is
such a friend
¹¹⁴
to Kinbote. Shade’s poem, incorporating Zemblan material, is casually
mountain-minded
¹¹⁵
, making reference to famous peaks (Mont Blanc, the Matterhorn) and making much of a confusion between a mountain and a fountain. “
How serene were the mountains, how tenderly painted on the western vault of the sky,” Kinbote enthuses, and the commentary, as it relates the king’s escape, paints in all manner of alpine life, from “the first full cowbell of dawn” to the “lacy resilience” of bracken underfoot, to dangerous boulderfields (“Mr. Campbell had once twisted an ankle and had to be carried down, smoking his pipe, by two husky attendants”) to mountain huts where exhausted climbers are saved by friendly rustics who provide them with nourishing food, a “bowl of mountain mead” thrown in, and whose unwashed daughters lead them on tricky parts of the route and then strip naked
¹¹⁶
, offering themselves.

Motifs of the poem, many, appear again up high, transformed, as believable parts of the mountain world. The “
pinhead light
¹¹⁷
” of the TV becomes a “pinhead light” from a distant hut. A butterfly that skelters through the poem, called “
dark Vanessa
¹¹⁸
” by Shade and associated with his wife, Sybil, greets the king as sunlight reaches him on a dawn mountainside. His journey to freedom evokes Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” about ecstasies had in nature (“
I came among these hills
¹¹⁹
; when like a roe / I bounded o’er the mountains”); and
a beautiful passage
¹²⁰
from “Pale Fire,” a borrowing from Goethe’s “The Erlking,” expressing Shade’s grief over his daughter’s death, is echoed by Charles’s
repetition of similar lines
¹²¹
as he tries to escape.

Maybe Shade
was
writing about Zembla, after all. Or maybe Kinbote, the sole possessor of the manuscript following the poet’s death (at the hands of a misfiring assassin, à la Nabokov’s father), is inspired to write
a fantastic gloss that takes off
¹²²
from Shade’s poem and that begins with
the useful fiction that the inspiration went the other way, critic to poet. Kinbote says of himself,

I am capable
¹²³
, after long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world (but singularly enough not verse—I am a miserable rhymester)… . I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do—pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web.

Nabokov might have said this about himself. To see things fresh, to combine freely: this was his artistic way. The result is a body of work full of metaphor and comparison.
Pale Fire
, deriving Zembla from staid
transcendental verses
¹²⁴
, is itself a metaphor, one thing for another, a conjunction absurd on its face but enchanting, if read a certain way. Kinbote spells that out:

Gradually I regained
¹²⁵
my usual composure [after a first look through the manuscript]. I reread
Pale Fire
more carefully. I liked it better when expecting less. And what was … that dim music, those vestiges of color in the air? Here and there I discovered … echoes and spangles of my mind, a long ripplewake of my glory. I now felt a new, pitiful tenderness toward the poem.

The book shows other aspects, intimate aspects, of Nabokov. Whether in Shade’s costumery or in another’s, the author seems helpless not to portray himself:

A
large, sluggish man
¹²⁶
with no passions save poetry, he seldom moved from his warm castle and its fifty thousand crested books, and had been known to spend two years in bed reading and writing after which, much refreshed, he went for the first and only time to London, but the weather was foggy … and so went back to bed for another year.

As the commentary literally overcomes the poem—seventy-five thousand words to a mere seventy-five hundred—the romantic impulse overwhelms the transcendental. The grounds for metaphysical belief
that Shade had advanced, developing a cosmology based on the artist—who alone senses the workings of creation, who alone resembles the Creator—come to seem paltry. Many mortals who believe fervently do so with a sense of inadequacy, not with exultant superiority. Often terrified or disheartened, they seek mercy, not recognition; are moved not by their own genius so much as by acts of compassion, tales of martyrs’ sufferings. Kinbote seems to be of this humble, numerically vast human category at times. He
disagrees with Shade’s skepticism
¹²⁷
about sin and God. He is a churchgoer, a serious churchgoer, and one Sunday he strolls home “
in an elevated state
¹²⁸
of mind” after having prayed in not one but two congregations (feeling “in my bones that there is a chance yet of my not being excluded from Heaven”). He hears a disembodied voice in the summer air, Shade’s voice seemingly, speaking to him, saying something that moves him very much: “Come tonight, Charlie,” meaning,
Come over for a walk and some friendly talk
. Later, speaking to Shade on the phone, Kinbote “
all at once
¹²⁹
, with no reason at all, burst into tears”—he is an emotional man; he needs this friend and his simple kindness. They are, after all, connected.

*
They also saw Harry Levin and his Russian-born wife, Elena, who introduced them to the novelist John Dos Passos; the Mikhail Karpoviches; Arthur and Marian Schlesinger; and the painter Billy James, son of the philosopher William and nephew of novelist Henry.

†
This well-documented delusion among climbers is usually associated with extreme exhaustion. Dmitri may have told his father about it. The son writes in his memoir that he “read of the ghostly ‘third man’ that accompanied early Himalayan climbers at high altitudes.”

16.

In
their last years in America, the Nabokovs traveled west faithfully, as if trying to visit every corner of the country, to tick off all the attractive areas (all those promising for collecting, that is). Vladimir amassed a library of maps and guides, with his notes scribbled in. He could tell that there would come a time when he would want to read them again and remember.

After they moved to Switzerland in late 1960, a “well-meaning maid would empty forever a butterfly-adorned gift wastebasket of its contents,” Dmitri later recorded. The wastebasket’s treasures included “a
thick batch of U.S. roadmaps
¹
on which my father had meticulously marked the roads and towns that he and my mother had traversed. Chance comments of his were [noted] there, as well as names of butterflies and their habitats.”

Nabokov’s
Speak On, Memory
, the continuation volume to
Speak, Memory
, thus had an unlucky fate. There are other reasons to think that he would never have written it, though. He told first biographer Andrew Field that he had had a plan in mind for twenty years but that when he sat down to write it, the book turned into a mere collection of anecdotes, something that promised “not … 
violins but trombones
²
.” The only parts still attended by throbs of inspiration for him were the MCZ period and his butterfly adventures in the Rockies.

Maynard Dixon cabin, Mt. Carmel, Utah