страница №1
Владимир Набоков. Смотри на Арлекинов (engl)
Vladimir Nabokov. Look at the Harlequins!
McGraw-Hill, NY, 1974.
* * *
To Vиra
Look at the Harlequins!
<1>
I. Other books by the narrator
In Russian:
Tamara 1925
Pawn Takes Queen 1927
Plenilune 1929
Camera Lucida (Slaughter in the Sun) 1931
The Red Top Hat 1934
The Dare 1950
In English:
See under Real 1939
Esmeralda and Her Parandrus 1941
Dr. Olga Repnin 1946
Exile from Mayda 1947
A Kingdom by the Sea 1962
Ardis 1970
<2>
PART ONE
1
I met the first of my three or four successive wives in somewhat odd
circumstances, the development of which resembled a clumsy conspiracy, with
nonsensical details and a main plotter who not only knew nothing of its real
object but insisted on making inept moves that seemed to preclude the
slightest possibility of success. Yet out of those very mistakes he
unwittingly wove a web, in which a set of reciprocal blunders on my part
caused me to get involved and fulfill the destiny that was the only aim of
the plot.
Some time during the Easter Term of my last Cambridge year (1922) I
happened to be consulted, "as a Russian," on certain niceties of make-up in
an English version of Gogol's Inspector which the Glowworm Group, directed
by Ivor Black, a fine amateur actor, intended to stage. He and I had the
same tutor at Trinity, and he drove me to distraction with his tedious
miming of the old man's mincing ways--a performance he kept up throughout
most of our lunch at the Pitt. The brief business part turned out to be even
less pleasant. Ivor Black wanted Gogol's Town Mayor to wear a dressing gown
because "wasn't it merely the old rascal's nightmare and didn't Revizor, its
Russian <3> title, actually come from the French for `dream,' rйve?" I said
I thought it a ghastly idea.
If there were any rehearsals, they took place without me. In fact, it
occurs to me now that I do not really know if his project ever saw the
footlights.
Shortly after that, I met Ivor Black a second time--at some party or
other, in the course of which he invited me and five other men to spend the
summer at a Cтte d'Azur villa he had just inherited, he said, from an old
aunt. He was very drunk at the moment and seemed surprised when a week or so
later on the eve of his departure I reminded him of his exuberant
invitation, which, it so happened, I alone had accepted. We both were
unpopular orphans, and should, I remarked, band together.
Illness detained me in England for another month and it was only at the
beginning of July that I sent Ivor Black a polite postcard advising him that
I might arrive in Cannes or Nice some time next week. I am virtually sure I
mentioned Saturday afternoon as the likeliest date.
Attempts to telephone from the station proved futile: the line remained
busy, and I am not one to persevere in a struggle with faulty abstractions
of space. But my afternoon was poisoned, and the afternoon is my favorite
item of time. I had been coaxing myself into believing, at the start of my
long journey, that I felt fairly fit; by now I felt terrible. The day was
unseasonably dull and damp. Palm trees are all right only in mirages. For
some reason, taxis, as in a bad dream, were unobtainable. Finally I boarded
a small smelly bus of blue tin. Up a winding road, with as many turns as
"stops by request," the contraption reached my destination in twenty
minutes--about as long as it would have taken me to get there on foot from
the coast by using an easy shortcut that I was to learn by heart, stone by
stone, broom by brush, in the course of that magic summer. It appeared
anything but magic during that dismal drive! The main reason I had agreed to
come was <4> the hope of treating in the "brillant brine" (Bennett?
Barbellion?) a nervous complaint that skirted insanity. The left side of my
head was now a bowling alley of pain. On the other side an inane baby was
staring at me across its mother's shoulder over the back of the seat in
front of me. I sat next to a warty woman in solid black and pitted nausea
against the lurches between green sea and gray rockwall. By the time we
finally made it to the village of Carnavaux (mottled plane trunks,
picturesque hovels, a post office, a church) all my senses had converged
into one golden image; the bottle of whisky which I was bringing Ivor in my
portmanteau and which I swore to sample even before he glimpsed it. The
driver ignored the question I put to him, but a tortoise-like little priest
with tremendous feet who was getting off before me indicated, without
looking at me, a transverse avenue. The Villa Iris, he said, was at three
minutes of march. As I prepared to carry my two bags up that lane toward a
triangle of sudden sunlight my presumptive host appeared on the opposite
pavement. I remember--after the passing of half a century!--that I wondered
fleetingly if I had packed the right clothes. He wore plus fours and brogues
but was incongruously stockingless, and the inch of shin he showed looked
painfully pink. He was heading, or feigned to be heading, for the post
office to send me a telegram suggesting I put off my visit till August when
a job he now had in Cannice would no longer threaten to interfere with our
frolics. He hoped, furthermore, that Sebastian--whoever that was--might
still be coming for the grape season or lavender gala. Muttering thus under
his breath, he relieved me of the smaller of my bags--the one with the
toilet things, medical supplies, and an almost finished garland of sonnets
(which would eventually go to a Russian иmigrи magazine in Paris). Then he
also grabbed my portmanteau that I had set down in order to fill my pipe.
Such lavishness in the registration of trivialities is due, I suppose, to
their being accidentally caught <5> in the advance light of a great event.
Ivor broke the silence to add, frowning, that he was delighted to welcome me
as a house guest, but that he should warn me of something he ought to have
told me about in Cambridge. I might get frightfully bored by the end of a
week or so because of one melancholy fact. Miss Grunt, his former governess,
a heartless but clever person, liked to repeat that his little sister would
never break the rule of "children should not be heard" and, indeed would
never hear it said to anybody. The melancholy fact was that his sister--but,
perhaps, he had better postpone the explanation of her case till we and the
bags were installed more or less. <6>
2
"What kind of childhood did you have, McNab" (as Ivor insisted on
calling me because I looked, he thought, like the haggard yet handsome young
actor who adopted that name in the last years of his life or at least fame)?
Atrocious, intolerable. There should be a natural, internatural, law
against such inhuman beginnings. Had my morbid terrors not been replaced at
the age of nine or ten by more abstract and trite anxieties (problems of
infinity, eternity, identity, and so forth), I would have lost my reason
long before finding my rhymes. It was not a matter of dark rooms, or
one-winged agonizing angels, or long corridors, or nightmare mirrors with
reflections overflowing in messy pools on the floor--it was not that
bedchamber of horrors, but simply, and far more horribly, a certain
insidious and relentless connection with other states of being which were
not exactly "previous" or "future," but definitely out of bounds, mortally
speaking. I was to learn more, much more about those aching links only
several decades later, so "let us not anticipate" as the condemned man said
when rejecting the filthy old blindfold.
The delights of puberty granted me temporary relief. I was spared the
morose phase of self-initiation. Blest be my first sweet love, a child in an
orchard, games of <7> exploration--and her outspread five fingers dripping
with pearls of surprise. A house tutor let me share with him the ingиnue in
my grand-uncle's private theater. Two lewd young ladies rigged me up once in
a lacy chemise and a Lorelei wig and laid me to sleep between them, "a shy
little cousin," as in a ribald novella, while their husbands snored in the
next room after the boar hunt. The great houses of various relatives with
whom I dwelt on and off in my early teens under the pale summer skies of
this or that province of old Russia offered me as many compliant handmaids
and fashionable flirts as might have done closets and bowers a couple of
centuries earlier. In a word, if the years of my infancy might have provided
the subject for the kind of learned thesis upon which a paedopsychologist
founds a lifetime of fame, my teens, on the other hand, could have yielded,
and in fact did yield, quite a number of erotic passages scattered like
rotting plums and brown pears throughout an aging novelist's books. Indeed,
the present memoir derives much of its value from its being a catalogue
raisonnи of the roots and origins and amusing birth canals of many images in
my Russian and especially English fiction.
I saw my parents infrequently. They divorced and remarried and
redivorced at such a rapid rate that had the custodians of my fortune been
less alert, I might have been auctioned out finally to a pair of strangers
of Swedish or Scottish descent, with sad bags under hungry eyes. An
extraordinary grand-aunt, Baroness Bredow, born Tolstoy, amply replaced
closer blood. As a child of seven or eight, already harboring the secrets of
a confirmed madman, I seemed even to her (who also was far from normal)
unduly sulky and indolent; actually, of course, I kept daydreaming in a most
outrageous fashion.
"Stop moping!" she would cry: "Look at the harlequins!
"What harlequins? Where?" <8>
"Oh, everywhere. All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are
harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together--jokes,
images--and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world!
Invent reality!"
I did. By Jove, I did. I invented my grand-aunt in honor of my first
daydreams, and now, down the marble steps of memory's front porch, here she
slowly comes, sideways, sideways, the poor lame lady, touching each step
edge with the rubber tip of her black cane.
(When she cried out those four words, they came out in a breathless
dactylic line with a swift lispy lilt, as if it were "lookaty," assonating
with "lickety" and introducing tenderly, ingratiatingly those "harlequins"
who arrived with festive force, the "bar" richly stressed in a burst of
inspired persuasion followed by a liquid fall of sequin-like syllables).
I was eighteen when the Bolshevist revolution struck--a strong and
anomalous verb, I concede, used here solely for the sake of narrative
rhythm. The recurrence of my childhood's disarray kept me in the Imperial
Sanatorium at Tsarskoe for most of the next winter and spring. In July,
1918, I found myself recuperating in the castle of a Polish landowner, a
distant relation of mine, Mstislav Charnetski (1880-1919?). One autumn
evening poor Mstislav's young mistress showed me a fairy-tale path winding
through a great forest where a last aurochs had been speared by a first
Charnetski under John III (Sobieski). I followed that path with a knapsack
on my back and--why not confess--a tremor of remorse and anxiety in my young
heart. Was I right in abandoning my cousin in the blackest hour of Russia's
black history? Did I know how to exist alone in strange lands? Was the
diploma I had received after being examined by a special committee (presided
by Mstislav's father, a venerable and corrupt mathematician) in all the
subjects of an ideal lyceum, which I had never attended bodily, sufficient
for Cambridge without some infernal entrance test? <9> I trudged all night,
through a labyrinth of moonlight, imagining the rustlings of extinct
animals. Dawn at last miniated my ancient map. I thought I had crossed the
frontier when a bare-headed Red Army soldier with a Mongol face who was
picking whortleberries near the trail challenged me: "And whither," he asked
picking up his cap from a stump, "may you be rolling (kotishsya), little
apple (yablochko)? Pokazyvay-ka dokumentiki (Let me see your papers)."
I groped in my pockets, fished out what I needed, and shot him dead, as
he lunged at me; then he fell on his face, as if sunstruck on the parade
ground, at the feet of his king. None of the serried tree trunks looked his
way, and I fled, still clutching Dagmara's lovely little revolver. Only half
an hour later, when I reached at last another part of the forest in a more
or less conventional republic, only then did my calves cease to quake.
After a period of loafing through unremembered German and Dutch towns,
I crossed over to England. The Rembrandt, a little hotel in London, was my
next address. The two or three small diamonds that I kept in a chamois pouch
melted away faster than hailstones. On the gray eve of poverty, the author,
then a self-exiled youth (I transcribe from an old diary), discovered an
unexpected patron in the person of Count Starov, a grave old-fashioned Mason
who had graced several great Embassies during a spacious span of
international intercourse, and who since 1913 had resided in London. He
spoke his mother tongue with pedantic precision, yet did not spurn rotund
folksy expressions. He had no sense of humor whatever. His man was a young
Maltese (I loathe tea but dared not call for brandy). Nikifor Nikodimovich,
to use his tongue-twisterish Christian name cum patronymic, was rumored to
have been for years on end an admirer of my beautiful and bizarre mother,
whom I knew mainly from stock phrases in an anonymous memoir. A grande
passion can be a convenient mask, but on the other hand, a gentlemanly
devotion to her memory can <10> alone explain his paying for my education in
England and leaving me, after his death in 1927, a modest subsidy (the
Bolshevist coup had ruined him as it had all our clan). I must admit,
however, that I felt embarrassed by the sudden live glances of his otherwise
dead eyes set in a large, pasty, dignified face, of the sort that Russian
writers used to call "carefully shaven" (tshchatel'no vybritoe), no doubt
because the ghosts of patriarchal beards had to be laid, in the presumed
imagination of readers (long dead by now). I did my best to put down those
interrogatory flashes to a search for some traits of the exquisite woman
whom once upon a time he had handed into a calхche, and whom, after waiting
for her to settle down and open her parasol, he would heavily join in the
springy vehicle; but at the same time I could not help wondering if my old
grandee had escaped a perversion that was current in so-called circles of
high diplomacy. N.N. sat in his easy chair as in a voluminous novel, one
pudgy hand on the elbow-rest griffin, the other, signet-ringed, fingering on
the Turkish table beside him what looked like a silver snuffbox but
contained, in fact, a small supply of bead-like cough drops or rather
droplets, colored lilac, green, and, I believe, coral. I should add that
some information obtained later showed me to be detestably wrong in
conjecturing on his part anything but a quasi-paternal interest in me, as
well as in another youth, the son of a notorious St. Petersburg courtesan
who preferred an electric brougham to a calхche; but enough of those edible
beads. <11>
3
To return to Carnavaux, to my luggage, to Ivor Black carrying it, with
a big show of travail, and muttering comedy stuff in some rudimentary role.
The sun had regained full control, when we entered a garden, separated
from the road by a stone wall and a row of cypresses. Emblematic irises
surrounded a green pondlet presided over by a bronze frog. From under a
curly holm oak a graveled path ran between two orange trees. At one end of
the lawn a eucalypt cast its striate shade across the canvas of a lounge
chair. This is not the arrogance of total recall but an attempt at fond
reconstruction based on old snapshots in an old bonbon box with a
fleur-de-lis on its lid.
It was no use ascending the three steps of the front entrance, "hauling
two tons of stones," said Ivor Black: he had forgotten the spare key, had no
servants to answer bells on Saturday afternoons, and as he had explained
earlier could not communicate by normal means with his sister though she had
to be somewhere inside, almost certainly crying in her bedroom as she
usually would whenever guests were expected, especially weekenders who might
be around at all hours, well into Tuesday. So we walked round the house,
skirting prickly-pear shrubs that caught at the raincoat over my arm. I
suddenly heard a <12> horrible subhuman sound and glanced at Ivor, but the
cur only grinned.
It was a large, lemon-breasted, indigo-blue ara with striped white
cheeks squawking intermittently on its bleak back-porch perch. Ivor had
dubbed it Mata Hari partly because of its accent but chiefly by reason of
its political past. His late aunt, Lady Wimberg, when already a little gaga,
around Nineteen Fourteen or Fifteen, had been kind to that tragic old bird,
said to have been abandoned by a shady stranger with a scarred face and a
monocle. It could say allт, Otto, and pa-pa, a modest vocabulary, somehow
suggestive of a small anxious family in a hot country far from home.
Sometimes when I work too late and the spies of thought cease to relay
messages, a wrong word in motion feels somehow like the dry biscuit that a
parrot holds in its great slow hand.
I do not remember seeing Iris before dinner (or perhaps I glimpsed her
standing at a stained window on the stairs with her back to me as I popped
back from the salle d'eau and its hesitations to my ascetic room across the
landing). Ivor had taken care to inform me that she was a deaf-mute and such
a shy one, too, that even now, at twenty-one, she could not make herself
learn to read male lips. That sounded odd. I had always thought that the
infirmity in question confined the patient in an absolutely safe shell as
limpid and strong as shatterproof glass, within which no shame or sham could
exist. Brother and sister conversed in sign language using an alphabet which
they had invented in childhood and which had gone through several revised
editions. The present one consisted of preposterously elaborate gestures in
the low relief of a pantomime that mimicked things rather than symbolized
them. I barged in with some grotesque contribution of my own but Ivor asked
me sternly not to play the fool, she easily got offended. The whole affair
(with a sullen maid, an old Canniгoise slapping down plates in the margin of
the scene) <13> belonged to another life, to another book, to a world of
vaguely incestuous games that I had not yet consciously invented.
Both were small, but exquisitely formed, young people, and the family
likeness between them could not escape one though Ivor was quite plain
looking, with sandy hair and freckles, and she a suntanned beauty with a
black bob and eyes like clear honey. I do not recall the dress she wore at
our first meeting, but I know that her thin arms were bare and stung my
senses at every palm grove and medusa-infested island that she outlined in
the air while her brother translated for me her patterns in idiotic asides.
I had my revenge after dinner. Ivor had gone to fetch my whisky. Iris and I
stood on the terrace in the saintly dusk. I was lighting my pipe while Iris
nudged the balustrade with her hip and pointed out with mermaid
undulations--supposed to imitate waves--the shimmer of seaside lights in a
parting of the india-ink hills. At that moment the telephone rang in the
drawing room behind us, and she quickly turned around--but with admirable
presence of mind transformed her dash into a nonchalant shawl dance. In the
meantime Ivor had already skated phoneward across the parquetry to hear what
Nina Lecerf or some other neighbor wanted. We liked to recall, Iris and I,
in our later intimacy that revelation scene with Ivor bringing us drinks to
toast her fairy-tale recovery and she, without minding his presence, putting
her light hand on my knuckles: I stood gripping the balustrade in
exaggerated resentment and was not prompt enough, poor dupe, to acknowledge
her apology by a Continental hand kiss. <14>
4
A familiar symptom of my complaint, not its gravest one but the
toughest to get rid of after every relapse, belongs to what Moody, the
London specialist, was the first to term the "numerical nimbus" syndrome.
His account of my case has been recently reprinted in his collected works.
It teems with ludicrous inaccuracies. That "nimbus" means nothing. "Mr. N.,
a Russian nobleman" did not display any "signs of degeneracy." He was not
"32" but 22 when he consulted that fatuous celebrity. Worst of all, Moody
lumps me with a Mr. V.S. who is less of a postscriptum to the abridged
description of my "nimbus" than an intruder whose sensations are mixed with
mine throughout that learned paper. True, the symptom in question is not
easy to describe, but I think I can do better than either Professor Moody or
my vulgar and voluble fellow sufferer.
At its worst it went like this: An hour or so after falling asleep
(generally well after midnight and with the humble assistance of a little
Old Mead or Chartreuse) I would wake up (or rather "wake in") momentarily
mad. The hideous pang in my brain was triggered by some hint of faint light
in the line of my sight, for no matter how carefully I might have topped the
well-meaning efforts of <15> a servant by my own struggles with blinds and
purblinds, there always remained some damned slit, some atom or dimmet of
artificial streetlight or natural moonlight that signaled inexpressible
peril when I raised my head with a gasp above the level of a choking dream.
Along the dim slit brighter points traveled with dreadful meaningful
intervals between them. Those dots corresponded, perhaps, to my rapid
heartbeats or were connected optically with the blinking of wet eyelashes
but the rationale of it is inessential; its dreadful part was my realizing
in helpless panic that the event had been stupidly unforeseen, yet had been
bound to happen and was the representation of a fatidic problem which had to
be solved lest I perish and indeed might have been solved now if I had given
it some forethought or had been less sleepy and weak-witted at this
all-important moment. The problem itself was of a calculatory order: certain
relations between the twinkling points had to be measured or, in my case,
guessed, since my torpor prevented me from counting them properly, let alone
recalling what the safe number should be. Error meant instant
retribution--beheading by a giant or worse; the right guess, per contra,
would allow me to escape into an enchanting region situated just beyond the
gap I had to wriggle through in the thorny riddle, a region resembling in
its idyllic abstraction those little landscapes engraved as suggestive
vignettes--a brook, a bosquet--next to capital letters of weird, ferocious
shape such as a Gothic B beginning a chapter in old books for easily
frightened children. But how could I know in my torpor and panic that this
was the simple solution, that the brook and the boughs and the beauty of the
Beyond all began with the initial of Being?
There were nights, of course, when my reason returned at once and I
rearranged the curtains and presently slept. But at other, more critical
times, when I was far from well yet and would experience that nobleman's
nimbus, it took <16> me up to several hours to abolish the optical spasm
which even the light of day could not overcome. My first night in any new
place never fails to be hideous and is followed by a dismal day. I was
racked with neuralgia, I was jumpy, and pustulous, and unshaven, and I
refused to accompany the Blacks to a seaside party to which I had been, or
was told I had been, also invited. In fact, those first days at Villa Iris
are so badly distorted in my diary, and so blurred in my mind, that I am not
sure if, perhaps, Iris and Ivor were not absent till the middle of the week.
I remember, however, that they were kind enough to arrange an appointment
for me with a doctor in Cannice. This presented itself as a splendid
opportunity to check the incompetence of my London luminary against that of
a local one.
The appointment was with Professor Junker, a double personage,
consisting of husband and wife. They had been practicing as a team for
thirty years now, and every Sunday, in a secluded, though consequently
rather dirty, corner of the beach, the two analyzed each other. They were
supposed by their patients to be particularly alert on Mondays, but I was
not, having got frightfully tight in one or two pubs before reaching the
mean quarter where the Junkers and other doctors lived, as I seemed to have
gathered. The front entrance was all right being among the flowers and fruit
of a market place, but wait till you see the back. I was received by the
female partner, a squat old thing wearing trousers, which was delightfully
daring in 1922. That theme was continued immediately outside the casement of
the WC (where I had to fill an absurd vial large enough for a doctor's
purpose but not for mine) by the performance that a breeze was giving above
a street sufficiently narrow for three pairs of long drawers to cross over
on a string in as many strides or leaps. I commented on this and on a
stained-glass window in the consulting room featuring a mauve lady exactly
similar to the one on the <17> stairs of Villa Iris. Mrs. Junker asked me if
I liked boys or girls, and I looked around saying guardedly that I did not
know what she had to offer. She did not laugh. The consultation was not a
success. Before diagnosing neuralgia of the jaw, she wanted me to see a
dentist when sober. It was right across, she said. I know she rang him up to
arrange my visit but do not remember if I went there the same afternoon or
the next. His name was Molnar with that n like a grain in a cavity; I used
him some forty years later in A Kingdom by the Sea.
A girl whom I took to be the dentist's assistant (which, however, she
was much too holidayish in dress to be) sat cross-legged talking on the
phone in the hallway and merely directed me to a door with the cigarette she
was holding without otherwise interrupting her occupation. I found myself in
a banal and silent room. The best seats had been taken. A large conventional
oil, above a cluttered bookshelf, depicted an alpine torrent with a fallen
tree lying across it. From the shelf a few magazines had already wandered at
some earlier consultation hour onto an oval table which supported its own
modest array of things, such as an empty flower vase and a watch-size
casse-tйte. This was a wee circular labyrinth, with five silvery peas inside
that had to be coaxed by judicious turns of the wrist into the center of the
helix. For waiting children.
None were present. A corner armchair contained a fat fellow with a
nosegay of carnations across his lap. Two elderly ladies were seated on a
brown sofa--strangers to each other, if one took into account the urbane
interval between them. Leagues away from them, on a cushioned stool, a
cultured-looking young man, possibly a novelist, sat holding a small
memoranda book in which he kept penciling separate items--possibly the
description of various objects his eyes roved over in between notes--the
ceiling, the wallpaper, the picture, and the hairy nape of a <18> man who
stood by the window, with his hands clasped behind him, and gazed idly,
beyond flapping underwear, beyond the mauve casement of the Junkers' W.C.,
beyond the roofs and foothills, at a distant range of mountains where, I
idly thought, there still might exist that withered pine bridging the
painted torrent.
Presently a door at the end of the room flew open with a laughing
sound, and the dentist entered, ruddy-faced, bow-tied, in an ill-fitting
suit of festive gray with a rather jaunty black armband. Handshakes and
congratulations followed. I started reminding him of our appointment, but a
dignified old lady in whom I recognized Madame Junker interrupted me saying
it was her mistake. In the meantime Miranda, the daughter of the house whom
I had seen a moment ago, inserted the long pale stems of her uncle's
carnations into a tight vase on the table which by now was miraculously
draped. A soubrette placed upon it, amid much applause, a great sunset-pink
cake with "50" in calligraphic cream. "What a charming attention!" exclaimed
the widower. Tea was served and several groups sat down, others stood, glass
in hand. I heard Iris warning me in a warm whisper that it was spiced apple
juice, not liquor, so with raised hands I recoiled from the tray proffered
by Miranda's fiancи, the person whom I had caught using a spare moment to
check certain details of the dowry. "We were not expecting you to turn up,"
said Iris, giving the show away, for this could not be the partie de plaisir
to which I had been invited ("They have a lovely place on a rock"). No, I
believe that much of the confused impressions listed here in connection with
doctors and dentists must be classed as an oneiric experience during a
drunken siesta. This is corroborated scriptorially. Glancing through my
oldest notes in pocket diaries, with telephone numbers and names elbowing
their way among reports on events, factual or more or less fictional, I <19>
notice that dreams and other distortions of "reality" are written down in a
special left-slanted hand--at least in the earlier entries, before I gave up
following accepted distinctions. A lot of the pre-Cantabrigian stuff
displays that script (but the soldier really did collapse in the path of the
fugitive king). <20>
5
I know I have been called a solemn owl but I do detest practical jokes
and am bored stiff ("Only humorless people use that phrase," according to
Ivor) by a constant flow of facetious insults and vulgar puns ("A stiff
borer is better than a limp one"--Ivor again). He was a good chap, however,
and it was not really respite from his banter that made me welcome his
regular week-day absences. He worked in a travel agency run by his Aunt
Betty's former homme d'affaires, an eccentric in his own right, who had
promised Ivor a bonus in the form of an Icarus phaeton if he was good.
My health and handwriting very soon reverted to normal, and I began to
enjoy the South. Iris and I lounged for hours (she wearing a black swimsuit,
I flannels and blazer) in the garden, which I preferred at first, before the
inevitable seduction of seabathing, to the flesh of the plage. I translated
for her several short poems by Pushkin and Lermontov, paraphrasing and
touching them up for better effect. I told her in dramatic detail of my
escape from my country. I mentioned great exiles of old. She listened to me
like Desdemona.
"I'd love to learn Russian," she said with the polite wistfulness which
goes with that confession. "My aunt <21> was practically born in Kiev and at
seventy-five still remembered a few Russian and Rumanian words, but I am a
rotten linguist. How do you say `eucalypt' in your language?"
"Evkalipt."
"Oh, that would make a nice name for a man in a short story. `F.
Clipton.' Wells has a `Mr. Snooks' that turns out to derive from `Seven
Oaks.' I adore Wells, don't you?"
I said that he was the greatest romancer and magician of our time, but
that I could not stand his sociological stuff.
Nor could she. And did I remember what Stephen said in The Passionate
Friends when he left the room--the neutral room--where he had been allowed
to see his mistress for the very last time?
"I can answer that. The furniture there was slipcovered, and he said,
`It's because of the flies.' "
"Yes! Isn't that marvelous! Just blurting out something so as not to
cry. It makes one think of the housefly an old Master would paint on a
sitter's hand to show that the person had died in the meantime."
I said I always preferred the literal meaning of a description to the
symbol behind it. She nodded thoughtfully but did not seem convinced.
And who was our favorite modern poet? How about Housman?
I had seen him many times from afar and once, plain. It was in the
Trinity Library. He stood holding an open book but looking at the ceiling as
if trying to remember something--perhaps, the way another author had
translated that line.
She said she would have been "terribly thrilled." She uttered those
words thrusting forward her earnest little face and vibrating it, the face,
with its sleek bangs, rapidly. "You ought to be thrilled now! After all, I'm
here, this is the summer of 1922, this is your brother's house--" <22>
"It is not," she said, sidestepping the issue (and at the twist of her
speech I felt a sudden overlap in the texture of time as if this had
happened before or would happen again); "It is my house. Aunt Betty left it
to me as well as some money, but Ivor is too stupid or proud to let me pay
his appalling debts."
The shadow of my rebuke was more than a shadow. I actually believed
even then, in my early twenties, that by mid-century I would be a famous and
free author, living in a free, universally respected Russia, on the English
quay of the Neva or on one of my splendid estates in the country, and
writing there prose and poetry in the infinitely plastic tongue of my
ancestors: among them I counted one of Tolstoy's grand-aunts and two of
Pushkin's boon companions. The forefeel of fame was as heady as the old
wines of nostalgia. It was remembrance in reverse, a great lakeside oak
reflected so picturesquely in such clear waters that its mirrored branches
looked like glorified roots. I felt this future fame in my toes, in the tips
of my fingers, in the hair of my head, as one feels the shiver caused by an
electric storm, by the dying beauty of a singer's dark voice just before the
thunder, or by one line in King Lear. Why do tears blur my glasses when I
invoke that phantasm of fame as it tempted and tortured me then, five
decades ago? Its image was innocent, its image was genuine, its difference
from what actually was to be breaks my heart like the pangs of separation.
No ambition, no honors tainted the fanciful future. The President of
the Russian Academy advanced toward me to the sound of slow music with a
wreath on the cushion he held--and had to retreat growling as I shook my
graying head. I saw myself correcting the page proof of a new novel which
was to change the destiny of Russian literary style as a matter of
course--my course (with no self-love, no smugness, no surprise on my
part)--and reworking so much of it in the margin--where inspiration finds
its <23> sweetest clover--that the whole had to be set anew. When the book
made its belated appearance, as I gently aged, I might enjoy entertaining a
few dear sycophantic friends in the arbor of my favorite manor of Marevo
(where I had first "looked at the harlequins") with its alley of fountains
and its shimmering view of a virgin bit of Volgan steppe-land. It had to be
that way.
From my cold bed in Cambridge I surveyed a whole period of new Russian
literature. I looked forward to the refreshing presence of inimical but
courteous critics who would chide me in the St. Petersburg literary reviews
for my pathological indifference to politics, major ideas in minor minds,
and such vital problems as overpopulation in urban centers. No less amusing
was it to envisage the inevitable pack of crooks and ninnies abusing the
smiling marble, and ill with envy, maddened by their own mediocrity, rushing
in pattering hordes to the lemming's doom but presently all running back
from the opposite side of the stage, having missed not only the point of my
book but also their rodential Gadara.
The poems I started composing after I met Iris were meant to deal with
her actual, unique traits--the way her forehead wrinkled when she raised her
eyebrows, waiting for me to see the point of her joke, or the way it
developed a totally different set of soft folds as she frowned over the
Tauchnitz in which she searched for the passage she wanted to share with me.
My instrument, however, was still too blunt and immature; it could not
express the divine detail, and her eyes, her hair became hopelessly
generalized in my otherwise well-shaped strophes.
None of those descriptive and, let us be frank, banal pieces, were good
enough (particularly when nakedly Englished without rhyme or treason) to be
shown to Iris; and, besides, an odd shyness--which I had never felt before
when courting a girl in the brisk preliminaries of my carnal youth--kept me
back from submitting to Iris a tabulation <24> of her charms. On the night
of July 20, however, I composed a more oblique, more metaphysical little
poem which I decided to show her at breakfast in a literal translation that
took me longer to write than the original. The title, under which it
appeared in an иmigrи daily in Paris (October 8, 1922, after several
reminders on my part and one please-return request) was, and is, in the
various anthologies and collections that were to reprint it in the course of
the next fifty years, Vlyublyonnost', which puts in a golden nutshell what
English needs three words to express.
My zabyvаem chto vlyublyсnnost'
Ne prсsto povorсt litsа,
A pod kupаvami bezdсnnost',
Nochnаya pаnika plovtsа.
Pokзda snмtsya, snмs', vlyublyсnnost',
No probuzhdиniem ne mзch',
I lзchshe nedogovoryсnnost'
Chem иta shchиl' i иtot lзch.
Napominаyu chto vlyublyсnnost'
Ne yаv', chto mиtiny ne tи,
Chto mсzhet-byt' potustorсnnost'
Priotvorмlas' v temnotи.
"Lovely," said Iris. "Sounds like an incantation. What does it mean?"
"I have it here on the back. It goes like this. We forget--or rather
tend to forget--that being in love (vlyublyonnost') does not depend on the
facial angle of the loved one, but is a bottomless spot under the nenuphars,
a swimmer's panic in the night (here the iambic tetrameter happens to be
rendered--last line of the first stanza, nochnаya pаnika plovtsа). Next
stanza: While the dreaming is good--in the sense of `while the going is
good'--do keep appearing to us in our dreams, vlyublyonnost', but do not
torment us <25> by waking us up or telling too much: reticence is better
than that chink and that moonbeam. Now comes the last stanza of this
philosophical love poem."
"This what?"
"Philosophical love poem. Napominаyu, I remind you, that vlyublyonnost'
is not wide-awake reality, that the markings are not the same (a
moon-striped ceiling, polosatyy ot luny potolok, is, for instance, not the
same kind of reality as a ceiling by day), and that, maybe, the hereafter
stands slightly ajar in the dark. Voilю."
"Your girl," remarked Iris, "must be having a jolly good time in your
company. Ah, here comes our breadwinner. Bonjour, Ives. The toast is all
gone, I'm afraid. We thought you'd left hours ago."
She fitted her palm for a moment to the cheek of the teapot. And it
went into Ardis, it all went into Ardis, my poor dead love. <26>
6
After fifty summers, or ten thousand hours, of sunbathing in various
countries, on beaches, benches, roofs, rocks, decks, ledges, lawns, boards,
and balconies, I might have been unable to recall my novitiate in sensory
detail had not there been those old notes of mine which are such a solace to
a pedantic memoirist throughout the account of his illnesses, marriages, and
literary life. Enormous amounts of Shaker's Cold Cream were rubbed by
kneeling and cooing Iris into my back as I lay prone on a rough towel in the
blaze of the plage. Beneath my shut eyelids pressed to my forearm swam
purple photomatic shapes: "Through the prose of sun blisters came the poetry
of her touch--," thus in my pocket diary, but I can improve upon my young
preciosity. Through the itch of my skin, and in fact seasoned by that itch
to an exquisite degree of rather ridiculous enjoyment, the touch of her hand
on my shoulder blades and along my spine resembled too closely a deliberate
caress not to be deliberate mimicry, and I could not curb a hidden response
to those nimble fingers when in a final gratuitous flutter they traveled
down to my very coccyx, before fading away.
"There," said Iris with exactly the same intonation as that used, at
the end of a more special kind of treatment, <27> by one of my Cambridge
sweethearts, Violet McD., an experienced and compassionate virgin.
She, Iris, had had several lovers, and as I opened my eyes and turned
to her, and saw her, and the dancing diamonds in the blue-green inward of
every advancing, every tumbling wave, and the wet black pebbles on the sleek
forebeach with dead foam waiting for live foam--and, oh, there it comes, the
crested wave line, trotting again like white circus ponies abreast, I
understood, as I perceived her against that backdrop, how much adulation,
how many lovers had helped form and perfect my Iris, with that impeccable
complexion of hers, that absence of any uncertainty in the profile of her
high cheekbone, the elegance of the hollow beneath it, the accroche-coeur of
a sleek little flirt.
"By the way," said Iris as she changed from a kneeling to a
half-recumbent position, her legs curled under her, "by the way, I have not
apologized yet for my dismal remark about that poem. I now have reread your
"Valley Blondies" (vlyublyonnost') a hundred times, both the English for the
matter and the Russian for the music. I think it's an absolutely divine
piece. Do you forgive me?"
I pursed my lips to kiss the brown iridescent knee near me but her
hand, as if measuring a child's fever, palmed my forehead and stopped its
advance.
"We are watched," she said "by a number of eyes which seem to look
everywhere except in our direction. The two nice English schoolteachers on
my right--say, twenty paces away--have already told me that your resemblance
to the naked-neck photo of Rupert Brooke is a-houri-sang--they know a little
French. If you ever try to kiss me, or my leg, again, I'll beg you to leave.
I've been sufficiently hurt in my life."
A pause ensued. The iridescence came from atoms of quartz. When a girl
starts to speak like a novelette, all you need is a little patience. <28>
Had I posted the poem to that иmigrи paper? Not yet; my garland of
sonnets had had to be sent first. The two people (lowering my voice) on my
left were fellow expatriates, judging by certain small indices. "Yes,"
agreed Iris, "they practically got up to stand at attention when you started
to recite that Pushkin thing about waves lying down in adoration at her
feet. What other signs?"
"He kept stroking his beard very slowly from top to tip as he looked at
the horizon and she smoked a cigarette with a cardboard mouthpiece."
There was also a child of ten or so cradling a large yellow beach ball
in her bare arms. She seemed to be wearing nothing but a kind of frilly
harness and a very short pleated skirt revealing her trim thighs. She was
what in a later era amateurs were to call a "nymphet." As she caught my
glance she gave me, over our sunny globe, a sweet lewd smile from under her
auburn fringe.
"At eleven or twelve," said Iris, "I was as pretty as that French
orphan. That's her grandmother all in black sitting on a spread
Cannice-Matin with her knitting. I let smelly gentlemen fondle me. I played
indecent games with Ivor--oh nothing very unusual, and anyway he now prefers
dons to donnas--at least that's what he says."
She talked a little about her parents who by a fascinating coincidence
had died on the same day, she at seven A.M. in New York, he at noon in
London, only two years ago. They had separated soon after the war. She was
American and horrible. You don't speak like that of your mother but she was
really horrible. Dad was Vice President of the Samuels Cement Company when
he died. He came from a respectable family and had "good connections." I
asked what grudge exactly did Ivor bear to "society" and vice versa? She
vaguely replied he disliked the "fox-hunting set" and the "yachting crowd."
I said those were abominable clichиs used only by Philistines. In my set, in
my world, in the opulent Russia of my boyhood we stood <29> so far above any
concept of "class" that we only laughed or yawned when reading about
"Japanese Barons" or "New England Patricians." Yet strangely enough Ivor
stopped clowning and became a normal serious individual only when he
straddled his old, dappled, bald hobbyhorse and started reviling the English
"upper classes"--especially their pronunciation. It was, I remonstrated, a
speech superior in quality to the best Parisian French, and even to a
Petersburgan's Russian; a delightfully modulated whinny, which both he and
Iris were rather successfully, though no doubt unconsciously, imitating in
their everyday intercourse, when not making protracted fun of a harmless
foreigner's stilted or outdated English. By the way what was the nationality
of the bronzed old man with the hoary chest hair who was wading out of the
low surf preceded by his bedrabbled dog--I thought I knew his face.
It was, she said, Kanner, the great pianist and butterfly hunter, his
face and name were on all the Morris columns. She was getting tickets for at
least two of his concerts; and there, right there, where his dog was shaking
itself, the P. family (exalted old name) had basked in June when the place
was practically empty, and cut Ivor, though he knew young L.P. at Trinity.
They'd now moved down there. Even more select. See that orange dot? That's
their cabana. Foot of the Mirana Palace. I said nothing but I too knew young
P. and disliked him.
Same day. Ran into him in the Mirana Men's Room. Was effusively
welcomed. Would I care to meet his sister, tomorrow is what? Saturday.
Suggested they stroll over tomorrow afternoon to the foot of the Victoria.
Sort of cove to your right. I'm there with friends. Of course you know Ivor
Black. Young P. duly turned up, with lovely, long-limbed sister.
Ivor--frightfully rude. Rise, Iris, you forget we are having tea with
Rapallovich and Chicherini. That sort of stuff. Idiotic feuds. Lydia P.
screamed with laughter. <30>
Upon discovering the effect of that miracle cream, at my boiled-lobster
stage, I switched from a conservative caleгon de bain to a briefer variety
(still banned at the time in stricter paradises). The delayed change
resulted in a bizarre stratification of tan. I recall sneaking into Iris's
room to contemplate myself in a full-length looking glass--the only one in
the house--on a morning she had chosen for a visit to a beauty salon, which
I called up to make sure she was there and not in the arms of a lover.
Except for a Provenгal boy polishing the banisters, there was nobody around,
thus allowing me to indulge in one of my oldest and naughtiest pleasures:
circulating stark naked all over a strange house.
The full-length portrait was not altogether a success, or rather
contained an element of levity not improper to mirrors and medieval pictures
of exotic beasts. My face was brown, my torso and arms caramel, a carmine
equatorial belt undermargined the caramel, then came a white, more or less
triangular, southward pointed space edged with the redundant carmine on both
sides, and (owing to my wearing shorts all day) my legs were as brown as my
face. Apically, the white of the abdomen, brought out in frightening
repoussи, with an ugliness never noticed before, a man's portable zoo, a
symmetrical mass of animal attributes, the elephant proboscis, the twin sea
urchins, the baby gorilla, clinging to my underbelly with its back to the
public.
A warning spasm shot through my nervous system. The fiends of my
incurable ailment, "flayed consciousness," were shoving aside my harlequins.
I sought first-aid distraction in the baubles of my love's lavender-scented
bedroom: a Teddy bear dyed violet, a curious French novel (Du cтtи de chez
Swann) that I had bought for her, a trim pile of freshly laundered linen in
a Moоse basket, a color photograph of two girls in a fancy frame, obliquely
inscribed as "The Lady Cressida and thy sweet Nell, ...
