Stalking Nabokov (50 page)
There the transcript Elena Nabokov made from her son’s diary breaks off.
20.
Speak, Memory
: Nabokov, Mother, and Lovers
In the late 1990s Everyman and Knopf reissued major Nabokov titles with fresh introductions: Martin Amis for
Lolita
, David Lodge for
Pnin
, and Richard Rorty for
Pale Fire
. I was given
Speak, Memory
, which would be published, aptly, in 1999, the centennial of Nabokov’s birth. I persuaded Dmitri Nabokov that we should also publish the hitherto unread chapter sixteen, which Nabokov had intended as a key to the rest but withheld from publication, perhaps because the fiction he adopts there of being an outside reviewer of his own book seemed too much at odds with the commitment to accuracy as well as artistry in the previous fifteen chapters. It was a tricky task introducing
Speak, Memory
and avoiding the evocation of it in the introduction to
Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years
and the introduction to it in
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years
. In
this
introduction I focus on girls and women rather than fathers and sons, and on the chapter, the most important unit between the sentence and the structure of the whole, the two levels I had focused on in the biography.
Some facts, some figures. It is a hundred years since Vladimir Nabokov was born. It is fifty years since he wrote in his autobiography “I confess I do not believe in time” (
SM
139). It is just under fifty years since he wrote
Lolita
, which has gone on to sell some fifty million copies, and ten years since this most American of his books could be published in the Russia he loved. And it seems an eternity since the worlds he calls up for us in
Speak, Memory
disappeared.
Speak, Memory
is the one Nabokov work outside his finest novels—
The Gift
,
Lolita
,
Pale Fire
,
Ada—
that is a masterpiece on their level. Penelope Lively recently named it her book of the century. It has been rated the greatest of autobiographies, but since such judgments depend so much on the criteria we bring to them, I will call it only the most artistic of autobiographies. It lacks the probing self-analysis of Saint Augustine or Tolstoy or the overt and the inadvertent self-display of Rousseau, the historical and categorical aplomb of Henry Adams, or the sparkling anecdotal flow of Robert Graves, but more than these and any other autobiographies, it fuses truth to detail with perfection of form, the exact with the evocative, an acute awareness of time with intimations of timelessness.
Nabokov confided to his friend Edmund Wilson in April 1947: “I am writing two things now 1. a short novel about a man who liked little girls—and it’s going to be called
The Kingdom by the Sea—
and 2. a new type of autobiography— a scientific attempt to unravel and trace back all the tangled threads of one’s personality—and the provisional title is
The Person in Question”
(
DBDV
215). Adjacent in his mind and his bibliography, Nabokov’s autobiography and his most famous novel seem to demand comparison.
He had planned to call his new novel
The Kingdom by the Sea
because Humbert sees Lolita, the first time he meets her, as a reincarnation of the girl he loved at thirteen, whom he names “Annabel Leigh” in honor of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem (“It was many and many a year ago, / In a kingdom by the sea, / That a maiden there lived whom you may know / By the name of Annabel Lee”). Unlike the 1962 Stanley Kubrick film, Adrian Lyne’s recent (1998) movie remake of
Lolita
attempts the Annabel Leigh sequence but aspires no higher than the slickest of advertising clichés when it shows long-limbed young models, one male, one female, in coolly elegant 1920s summer cottons, strolling through a soft-focus palmy beach before they withdraw for a slow striptease.
Lost loves and holiday romances may invite clichés, but Humbert’s recollections could not be more idiosyncratic: “I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu” (
Lolita
15). He reports their “unsuccessful first tryst,” when one night Annabel managed “to deceive the vicious vigilance of her family” (16).The urgency and the moral muddle could only be Humbert’s: “with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion” (17).
In his novels, not only can Nabokov ventriloquize his voice into the jitter and twitch of someone like Humbert, but he can also have all the freedom his formidable imagination allows to invent incidents, characters, names, relationships. Humbert’s requited but still unfulfilled passion for Annabel can find a reprise in Lolita sunning herself on a lawn and then a mirage of promised consummation in the prospect of Lolita on the sands beside Hourglass Lake. But in his meticulously accurate autobiography Nabokov can draw only on facts, memories, and reflections, on his powers of expression and selection. He has often been rated the finest stylist of our times, and in
Speak, Memory
, more than in any other of his works, he has to rely on sheer style. No wonder anthologies of literary prose so often opt for
Speak, Memory
.
The particular “darling of the anthologists,” as Nabokov wryly notes in his foreword, has been the chapter “First Love,” since with its image of first love on a French beach early in the century, it prefigures and clearly inspires
Lolita
, especially its Annabel Leigh strain. Vladimir and his “Colette” are only ten, as opposed to the thirteen of Humbert and Annabel, and far more innocent, even though they elope, along with Colette’s fox terrier, and have to be retrieved by Vladimir’s tutor:
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.
