Stalking Nabokov (3 page)

But readers who stop there, and think that
he
stops there, in modernist irony or a postmodernist
abîme
, miss altogether his positive irony, his attempt to encompass all the negatives, as he suspects life itself does, and reverse their direction in the mirror of death. The search for that possibility is what makes Nabokov different and what makes him write. He believes that the fullness and the complexity of life suggest worlds within worlds within worlds, and he builds his own imagined universes to match. Although we cannot see his hidden worlds at first, he allows us to find our own way to them, just as he thinks whatever lies behind life invites us to an endless adventure of discovery in and beyond life. At this “synthetic” level, Nabokov writes books with titles like
The Gift
, whose hero in turn thinks of writing “a practical handbook:
How to Be Happy”
(
Gift
340).

“Examples,” Nabokov says, “are the stained-glass windows of knowledge” (
SO
312). I must offer at least one tiny example, not a stained-glass window, but a window even more out of the ordinary, in the opening of John Shade’s poem “Pale Fire,” in Nabokov’s most perfect novel:

I was the shadow of the waxwing 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.

Within this radiant image Nabokov epitomizes his lifelong attention to the particulars of this world and his lifelong desire to have the imagination suggest a way past the world’s limits. All his life Shade, like Nabokov, has enjoyed the things of this world and yet searched for something outside the prisons of the self and of time. Here he projects himself into another creature, as it flies, as it dies, and then as he imagines it soaring on in the blue beyond that, in fact, it is death to meet. But behind the immediate “thetic” pleasure of the image, we find ourselves as we
re-
read
Pale Fire
in the “pleasurable torments” of the antithetic phase, haunted and tantalized by the enigmatic relation between Shade’s reflected azure here and Kinbote’s “blue inenubilable Zembla,” that “land of reflections.” And if we peer still deeper, we can, as we
re-
re
-
read, reach the exhilarating discoveries of the synthetic level, as we gradually detect a dozen concealed patterns linking this opening couplet to the rest of the novel, each pattern with its own far-reaching implications.
⁵

Like life, Nabokov’s art dazzles on the surface, but, like life, it also hides far more behind. Far from mocking and frustrating his audience, he allows us the chance to discover more for ourselves in his work and in our world than any other author I have ever encountered. And his generosity to his readers matches and reenacts and pays tribute to what he senses is the generosity of our world.

Nabokov loved even the little things in life; he could be fascinated and entranced by a row of 9s turning into a row of 0s on an odometer in
Lolita
or, more elegantly, in the line 999 that leads back to line 1 or on to line 1000 of
Pale Fire
, whose three zeros ultimately become a triple infinity. Now that he has turned a hundred, now that he has reached triple figures in a year that will end by turning into a triple zero, it’s time to give him thanks:

Thanks for offering an unblinking optimism in this century of blinkered pessimism; for giving us, in Beckett’s bizarrely buoyant phrase, “such pleasure that pleasure was not the word”;
⁶
for extending the bounds of what had seemed possible in language and thought, in art and in life, in words and observations and images, in characters and stories and worlds; for making such demands on us and yet being so accessible to us, for inviting us in; for making us perform better than we thought we could and yet also showing us how we sometimes fall short, and how we might do still better; for reminding us how little any of us knows and yet how much we can discover, and how much we all, singly and as a species, still have to find out about life’s—and art’s—endless surprises.

At the age of twenty-two Nabokov sent his mother a little poem with the comment that it would prove to her “that my mood is as radiant as ever. If I live to be a hundred, my spirit will still go round in short trousers.”
⁷
Back at that age even Nabokov, for all his youthful ambition, would have been astonished to learn how much he would achieve by the time he turned one hundred. Let’s raise our glasses to the man whose spirit still wanders around in short trousers: to Vladimir Nabokov.

2. A Biographer’s Life

In the years after the Nabokov biography, I was often asked to talk about the experience of researching and writing it. The full talk reached its more or less final form when, on being awarded the Einhard Prize for Biography, on March 17, 2001, I spoke to citizens of the charming medieval town of Seligenstadt, Germany, to which Einhard, a courtier at Charlemagne’s court, had retired to write the first life of Charlemagne. I focused on the tribulations and trials of researching Nabokov’s life, especially in the unwelcoming world of Soviet Russia, and on the difficulties of intellectual biography. I had spent the previous few years researching the life of Karl Popper and did not realize how long a diversion from that project my work on literature and evolution, begun the previous year, would require.

As a little boy living in a small beach settlement twelve thousand miles from Europe I think I had heard of Charlemagne, but never would I have expected to be awarded a prize in memory of his first biographer.

Einhard not only knew and worked with Charlemagne for decades but also knew the Europe Charlemagne ruled over. I never met Vladimir Nabokov, whose biography I began working on twenty years ago, or another Karl der Grosse, Karl Popper, whose biography I am working on now. I suppose my life at least overlapped theirs, but they lived at the opposite end of the world from me, and they grew up, not in a sandy fibrolite cottage by the sea but at the center of the capitals of Europe’s two cosmopolitan continental empires, Russia and Austro-Hungary. Their fathers had libraries of over ten thousand volumes apiece; there was not even a public library in our little settlement. Nabokov and Popper were heirs to the best traditions of European art and thought; I grew up in a country that no humans had yet set eyes on at the time when Einhard gave his cathedral to Seligenstadt, and in the “modern” provincialism of the 1950s, I felt that anything not of the here and now, like the Ireland where I had been born or even the past itself, was not only remote but somehow embarrassing. How on earth did I become a biographer?

How does anyone? First, it might seem, you catch your hare, you choose your subject. But that already presupposes you want to be a biographer. There are distinguished biographers, like Michael Holroyd and Richard Holmes, who began with a passion for biography as a genre, a passion that led them sooner or later even to write biographies of biographers. But perhaps most of us who write biographies begin with a passionate interest in a particular person, and as we ask, what sort of work would best serve my interest in him or her, we suddenly wonder: why not a biography?

For Nabokov, that was certainly my case. I did not choose him; he chose me when I was sixteen. I wrote an essay on Nabokov in my first year at university, when I was seventeen, and then an MA thesis and a doctoral dissertation. I have published thousands of pages
on
him and edited thousands more
by
him. I have tried many times to stop writing about him, but although he has been dead for a quarter of a century, he keeps on setting me new assignments, making me offers I cannot refuse.

Popper, on the other hand, I decided to write about because I already had biography in mind. The two cases could not be more different. I have yet to publish a word on Popper, and although he has been called by one Nobel Prize winner “incomparably the greatest philosopher of science there has ever been,” I have never formally studied either philosophy or science.
¹
After enjoying so much writing the Nabokov biography, I looked around for another literary figure to write about: a twentieth-century writer, not yet the subject of a good biography, significant enough to keep me passionately interested for the years of work a biography takes. I thought of writer after writer I liked, but none seemed
quite
worth the effort. Popper I had thought of years before, but I had heard that someone else was writing his biography. And I was glad of the fact, as I knew that although I loved his work I didn’t have the preparation: German, philosophy, physics, for instance, not to mention Greek, mathematics, music. Somehow, though, his name wouldn’t go away, and when I learned that the person who had been writing his biography had died with the project still very far from completion, I found I had not the strength or the sense to resist.

Like Nabokov, Popper had fascinated me from my high school days. Just as well. It can be liberating but also perhaps limiting to have your mind colonized by somebody else at an early age. If you let it happen, you should make sure the person whose spell you fall under is someone with a multifaceted genius, like Nabokov, who worked in Russian, English, and French, as an artist, a scientist, and even a chess composer of world class. And
then
you need a corrective, an alternative, someone to expand your mental horizons in very different directions, and that I found in Popper. Nabokov has been called the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, ahead even of Joyce, and Popper, the greatest philosopher of the century, ahead of Russell or Wittgenstein. But although they overlapped for three quarters of the century they never knew each other and, as far as I know, never even knew
of
each other. Nabokov loved words and hated ideas, or so he said (he meant other people’s ideas); Popper loved ideas and hated words. Nabokov found step-by-step argument tiresome; Popper thought the firm tread of logic would always lead us to the brink of new questions, to challenge what we thought we knew. Nabokov loved the world of human experience but felt trapped by not knowing what lies beyond it; Popper insisted only on what was humanly knowable.

I have a student working on a Ph.D. on Nabokov and humor, for Nabokov, after all, was one of the funniest writers of all time. Popper, however, was one of the most serious of thinkers. My Ph.D. student brought me one day an account from a book he had been reading on humor. Someone recalled Popper launching straight into a lecture without the usual joke to relax the audience and not realizing, because he was so intent on the intellectual problem he was trying to solve, that he had failed to connect with the large crowd. Only when he made a slip of the tongue, halfway through the lecture, did the audience at last laugh and relax and open up. So if
I
seem unclear about where I’m headed, you’ll know why: Nabokov and Popper are tugging me in opposite directions.

Once you have decided you will write someone’s biography, you need to be sure about what others think and know and have written on the subject. What do you want to convince your audience of? Nabokov was widely accepted as one of the great stylists of all time but many thought him rather heartless, with nothing to say, only a brilliant way of saying it. For me, that was quite wrong: he seemed as dazzlingly new as he was because he had such an original and profound way of looking at and responding to his world and because he had gradually found ways original enough to express the full originality of his thought.

Popper was dismissed as either hopelessly radical, denying us any secure knowledge, or hopelessly conservative, rendered outmoded by those since him who showed the irrationality even of what had seemed our most rational pursuit, science. But for me, Popper is the first to describe accurately our state of constantly expanding but always fallible conjectural knowledge. We may sometimes think that we know what we know beyond question, but only because we have not yet discovered what we have not been imaginative enough to realize we do not yet know.

For all that I have stressed the differences between Nabokov and Popper, they also share a sense of gratitude for a world of inexhaustible discovery and endless surprise, a sense of how much has already been discovered and how little, how precarious all that is compared with what we still want to know. Although both were buffeted by the horrors of twentieth-century history, they always swam against the century’s prevailing current of fashionable pessimism. Because they were so much at odds with their times, they earned worldwide reputations yet seemed not to be appreciated at the level their work deserved. Biography would offer me a chance to invite the widest possible audience to consider or reconsider their work and their lives.

Once you know not only that you want to write a biography but
why
you want to write it, the real work starts. Although I have researched Popper’s life in sixteen countries so far, I know I have only scratched the surface, so from here on I will confine myself to Nabokov. First, you have to locate likely materials and try to obtain access to them.

In Nabokov’s case, that was easy. After I finished my Ph.D., I was obliged by the terms of my scholarship to return from Canada to New Zealand. During the Ph.D., I had needed to track down all that Nabokov had written and had discovered that the existing Nabokov bibliography, by Andrew Field, was terribly flawed.
²
As I completed the thesis, I thought that if I could now compile a full bibliography and could add to it whatever I could find about Nabokov’s circumstances at the time of writing each work, I could also compensate for the avoidance of fact in the existing Nabokov biography, also by Field.
³
So before returning to New Zealand, I visited the major research libraries in the northeastern United States. Nabokov always insisted that writers should destroy their manuscripts, since only the finished work counted. Scholars had taken that at face value and had not expected there would be anything to find, but I discovered rich materials in the Library of Congress and at Columbia, Cornell, Yale, and elsewhere.