Владимир Набоков. Смотри на Арлекинов (engl)
страница №4
...rinity College muffler. I hesitated between a side door on my right--markedMagazin--and the main entrance, with a chess coronet above the bell. Finally
I chose the coronet. We were playing a Blitz game: my opponent moved at
once, lighting the vestibule fan at d6. One could not help wondering if
under the house there might not exist the five lower floors which would
complete the chessboard and that somewhere, in subterranean mystery, new men
might not be working out the doom of a fouler tyranny.
Oks, a tall, bony, elderly man with a Shakespearean pate, started to
tell me how honored he was at getting a chance to welcome the author of
Camera--here I thrust the note I carried into his extended palm and prepared
to leave. He had dealt with hysterical artists before. None could resist his
bland bookside manner.
"Yes, I know all about it," he said, retaining and patting my hand.
"She'll call you; though, to tell the truth, I do not envy anybody having to
use the services of that capricious, absentminded young lady. We'll go up to
my study, unless you prefer--no, I don't think so," he continued, opening a
double door on the left and dubiously switching on the light for a moment to
reveal a chilly reading room in which a long baize-covered table, dingy
chairs, and the cheap busts of Russian classics contradicted a lovely
painted ceiling swarming with naked children among purple, pink, and amber
clusters of grapes. On the right (another tentative light snapped) a short
passage led to the shop proper <91> where I recalled having once had a row
with a pert old female who objected to my not wishing to pay for a few
copies of my own novel. So we walked up the once noble stairs, which now had
something seldom seen even in Viennese dream comics, namely disparate
balustrades, the sinistral one an ugly new ramp-and-railing affair and the
other, the original ornate set of battered, doomed, but still charming
carved wood with supports in the form of magnified chess pieces.
"I am honored--" began Oks all over again, as we reached his so-called
Kabinet (study), at e7, a room cluttered with ledgers, packed books,
half-unpacked books, towers of books, heaps of newspapers, pamphlets,
galleys, and slim white paperback collections of poems--tragic offals, with
the cool, restrained titles then in fashion--Prokhlada ("coolness"),
Sderzhannost' ("restraint").
He was one of those persons who for some reason or other are often
interrupted, but whom no force in our blessed galaxy will prevent from
completing their sentence, despite new interruptions, of an elemental or
poetical nature, the death of his interlocutor ("I was just saying to him,
doctor--"), or the entrance of a dragon. In fact it would seem that those
interruptions actually help to polish the phrase and give it its final form.
In the meantime the agonizing itch of its being unfinished poisons the mind.
It is worse than the pimple which cannot be sprung before one gets home, and
is almost as bad as a lifer's recollection of that last little rape nipped
in the sweet bud by the intrusion of an accursed policeman.
"I am deeply honored," finished at last Oks, "to welcome to this
historic house the author of Camera Obscura, your finest book in my modest
opinion!"
"It ought to be modest," I said, controlling myself (opal ice in Nepal
before the avalanche), "because, you idiot, the title of my novel is Camera
Lucida."
"There, there," said Oks (really a very dear man and <92> a gentleman),
after a terrible pause during which all the remainders opened like
fairy-tale flowers in a fancy film, "A slip of the tongue does not deserve
such a harsh rebuke. Lucida, Lucida, by all means! A propos--concerning Anna
Blagovo (another piece of unfinished business--or, who knows, a touching
attempt to divert and pacify me with an interesting anecdote), I am not sure
you know that I am Berta's first cousin. Thirty-five years ago in St.
Petersburg she and I worked in the same student organization. We were
preparing the assassination of the Premier. How far all that is! His daily
route had to be closely established; I was one of the observers. Standing at
a certain corner every day in the disguise of a vanilla-ice-cream vendor!
Can you imagine that? Nothing came of our plans. They were thwarted by Azef,
the great double agent."
I saw no point in prolonging my visit, but he produced a bottle of
cognac, and I accepted a drink, for I was beginning to tremble again.
"Your Camera," he said, consulting a ledger "has been selling not badly
in my shop, not badly at all: twenty-three--sorry, twenty-five--copies in
the first half of last year, and fourteen in the second. Of course, genuine
fame, not mere commercial success, depends on the behavior of a book in the
Lending Department, and there all your titles are hits. Not to leave this
unsubstantiated, let us go up to the stacks."
I followed my energetic host to the upper floor. The lending library
spread like a gigantic spider, bulged like a monstrous tumor, oppressed the
brain like the expanding world of delirium. In a bright oasis amidst the dim
shelves I noticed a group of people sitting around an oval table. The colors
were vivid and sharp but at the same time remote-looking as in a
magic-lantern scene. A good deal of red wine and golden brandy accompanied
the animated discussion. I recognized the critic Basilevski, his sycophants
Hristov and Boyarski, my friend Morozov, the novelists <93> Shipogradov and
Sokolovski, the honest nonentity Suknovalov, author of the popular social
satire Geroy nashey ery ("Hero of Our Era") and two young poets, Lazarev
(collection Serenity) and Fartuk (collection Silence). Some of the heads
turned toward us, and the benevolent bear Morozov even struggled to his
feet, grinning--but my host said they were having a business meeting and
should be left alone.
"You have glimpsed," he added, "the parturition of a new literary
review, Prime Numbers; at least they think they are parturiating: actually,
they are boozing and gossiping. Now let me show you something."
He led me to a distant corner and triumphantly trained his flashlight
on the gaps in my shelf of books.
"Look," he cried, "how many copies are out. All of Princess Mary is
out, I mean Mary--damn it, I mean Tamara. I love Tamara, I mean your Tamara,
not Lermontov's or Rubinstein's. Forgive me. One gets so confused among so
many damned masterpieces."
I said I was not feeling well and would like to go home. He offered to
accompany me. Or would I like a taxi? I did not. He kept furtively directing
at me the electric torch through his incarnadined fingers to see if I was
not about to faint. With soothing sounds he led me down a side staircase.
The spring night, at least, felt real.
After a moment of rumination and an upward glance at the lighted
windows, Oks beckoned to the night watchman who was stroking the sad little
dog of a dog-walking neighbor. I saw my thoughtful companion shake hands
with the gray-cloaked old fellow, then point to the light of the revelers,
then look at his watch, then tip the man, and shake hands with him in
parting, as if the ten-minute walk to my lodgings were a perilous
pilgrimage.
"Bon," he said upon rejoining me. "If you don't want a taxi, let us set
out on foot. He will take care of my imprisoned visitors. There are heaps of
things I want you to <94> tell me about your work and your life. Your
confrхres say you are `arrogant and unsocial' as Onegin describes himself to
Tatiana but we can't all be Lenskis, can we? Let me take advantage of this
pleasant stroll to describe my two meetings with your celebrated father. The
first was at the opera in the days of the First Duma. I knew, of course, the
portraits of its most prominent members. From high up in the gods I, a poor
student, saw him appear in a rosy loge with his wife and two little boys,
one of which must have been you. The other time was at a public discussion
of current politics in the auroral period of the Revolution; he spoke
immediately after Kerenski, and the contrast between our fiery friend and
your father, with his English sangfroid and absence of gesticulation--"
"My father," I said, "died six months before I was born."
"Well, I seem to have goofed again (opyat' oskandalisya)," observed
Oks, after taking quite a minute to find his handkerchief, blow his nose
with the grandiose deliberation of Varlamov in the role of Gogol's Town
Mayor, wrap up the result, and pocket the swaddle. "Yes, I'm not lucky with
you. Yet that image remains in my mind. The contrast was truly remarkable."
I was to run into Oks again, three or four times at least, in the
course of the dwindling years before World War Two. He used to welcome me
with a knowing twinkle as if we shared some very private and rather naughty
secret. His superb library was eventually grabbed by the Germans who then
lost it to the Russians, even better grabbers in that time-honored game.
Osip Lvovich himself was to die when attempting an intrepid escape--when
almost having escaped--barefoot, in bloodstained underwear, from the
"experimental hospital" of a Nazi concentration camp. <95>
5
My father was a gambler and a rake. His society nickname was Demon.
Vrubel has portrayed him with his vampire-pale cheeks, his diamond eyes, his
black hair. What remained on the palette has been used by me, Vadim, son of
Vadim, for touching up the father of the passionate siblings in the best of
my English romaunts, Ardis (1970).
The scion of a princely family devoted to a gallery of a dozen Tsars,
my father resided on the idyllic outskirts of history. His politics were of
the casual, reactionary sort. He had a dazzling and complicated sensual
life, but his culture was patchy and commonplace. He was born in 1865,
married in 1896, and died in a pistol duel with a young Frenchman on October
22, 1898, after a card-table fracas at Deauville, some resort in gray
Normandy.
There might be nothing particularly upsetting about a well-meaning,
essentially absurd and muddled old duffer mistaking me for some other
writer. I myself have been known, in the lecture hall, to say Shelley when I
meant Schiller. But that a fool's slip of the tongue or error of memory
should establish a sudden connection with another world, so soon after my
imagining with especial dread that I might be permanently impersonating
somebody living as a real being beyond the constellation of my tears and
<96> asterisks--that was unendurable, that dared not happen!
As soon as the last sound of poor Oksman's farewells and excuses had
subsided, I tore off the striped woollen snake strangling me and wrote down
in cipher every detail of my meeting with him. Then I drew a thick line
underneath and a caravan of question marks.
Should I ignore the coincidence and its implications? Should I, on the
contrary, repattern my entire life? Should I abandon my art, choose another
line of achievement, take up chess seriously, or become, say, a
lepidopterist, or spend a dozen years as an obscure scholar making a Russian
translation of Paradise Lost that would cause hacks to shy and asses to
kick? But only the writing of fiction, the endless re-creation of my fluid
self could keep me more or less sane. All I did finally was drop my pen
name, the rather cloying and somehow misleading "V. Irisin" (of which my
Iris herself used to say that it sounded as if I were a villa), and revert
to my own family name.
It was with this name that I decided to sign the first installment of
my new novel The Dare for which the иmigrи magazine Patria was waiting. I
had finished rewriting in reptile-green ink (a placebo to enliven my task) a
second or third fair copy of the opening chapter, when Annette Blagovo came
to discuss hours and terms.
She came on May 2, 1934, half-an-hour late, and as persons do who have
no sense of duration, laid the blame for her lateness on her innocent watch,
an object for measuring motion, not time. She was a graceful blonde of
twenty-six years or so, with very attractive though not exceptionally pretty
features. She wore a gray tailor-made jacket over a white silk blouse that
looked frilly and festive because of a kind of bow between the lapels, to
one of which was pinned a bunchlet of violets. Her short smartly cut gray
skirt had a nice dash about it, and all in all she was far more chic and
soignиe than an average Russian young lady. <97>
I explained to her (in what struck her--so she told me much later--as
the unpleasantly bantering tone of a cynic sizing up a possible conquest)
that I proposed to dictate to her every afternoon "right into the
typewriter" (pryamo v mashinku) heavily corrected drafts or else chunks and
sausages of fair copy that I would probably revise "in the lonely hours of
night," to quote A. K. Tolstoy, and have her retype next day. She did not
remove her close-fitting hat, but peeled off her gloves and, pursing her
bright pink freshly painted mouth, put on large tortoiseshell-rimmed
glasses, and the effect somehow enhanced her looks: she desired to see my
machine (her icy demureness would have turned a saint into a salacious
jester), had to hurry to another appointment but just wanted to check if she
could use it. She took off her green cabochon ring (which I was to find
after her departure) and seemed about to tap out a quick sample but a second
glance satisfied her that my typewriter was of the same make as her own.
Our first session proved pretty awful. I had learned my part with the
care of a nervous actor, but did not reckon with the kind of fellow
performer who misses or fluffs every other cue. She asked me not to go so
fast. She put me off by fatuous remarks: "There is no such expression in
Russian," or "Nobody knows that word (vzvoden', a welter)--why don't you
just say "big wave" if that's what you mean? When anger affected my rhythm
and it took me some time to unravel the end of a sentence in its no longer
familiar labyrinth of cancellations and carets, she would sit back and wait
like a provocative martyr and stifle a yawn or study her fingernails. After
three hours of work, I examined the result of her dainty and impudent
rattle. It teemed with misspellings, typos, and ugly erasures. Very meekly I
said that she seemed unaccustomed to deal with literary (i.e. non-humdrum)
stuff. She answered I was mistaken, she loved literature. In fact, she said,
in just the past five months she had read Galsworthy (in Russian), <98>
Dostoyevski (in French), General Pudov-Usurovski's huge historical novel
Tsar Bronshteyn (in the original), and L'Atlantide (which I had not heard of
but which a dictionary ascribes to Pierre Benoнt, romancier franгais nи ю
Albi, a hiatus in the Tarn). Did she know Morozov's poetry? No, she did not
much care for poetry in any form; it was inconsistent with the tempo of
modern life. I chided her for not having read any of my stories or novels,
and she looked annoyed and perhaps a little frightened (fearing, the little
goose, I might dismiss her), and presently was giving me a curiously erotic
satisfaction by promising me that now she would look up all my books and
would certainly know by heart The Dare.
The reader must have noticed that I speak only in a very general way
about my Russian fictions of the Nineteen-Twenties and Thirties, for I
assume that he is familiar with them or can easily obtain them in their
English versions. At this point, however, I must say a few words about The
Dare (Podarok Otchizne was its original title, which can be translated as "a
gift to the fatherland"). When in 1934 I started to dictate its beginning to
Annette, I knew it would be my longest novel. I did not foresee however that
it would be almost as long as General Pudov's vile and fatuous "historical"
romance about the way the Zion Wisers usurped St. Rus. It took me about four
years in all to write its four hundred pages, many of which Annette typed at
least twice. Most of it had been serialized in иmigrи magazines by May,
1939, when she and I, still childless, left for America; but in book form,
the Russian original appeared only in 1950 (Turgenev Publishing House, New
York), followed another decade later by an English translation, whose title
neatly refers not only to the well-known device used to bewilder noddies but
also to the daredevil nature of Victor, the hero and part-time narrator.
The novel begins with a nostalgic account of a Russian childhood (much
happier, though not less opulent than <99> mine). After that comes
adolescence in England (not unlike my own Cambridge years); then life in
иmigrи Paris, the writing of a first novel (Memoirs of a Parrot Fancier) and
the tying of amusing knots in various literary intrigues. Inset in the
middle part is a complete version of the book my Victor wrote "on a dare":
this is a concise biography and critical appraisal of Fyodor Dostoyevski,
whose politics my author finds hateful and whose novels he condemns as
absurd with their black-bearded killers presented as mere negatives of Jesus
Christ's conventional image, and weepy whores borrowed from maudlin romances
of an earlier age. The next chapter deals with the rage and bewilderment of
иmigrи reviewers, all of them priests of the Dostoyevskian persuasion; and
in the last pages my young hero accepts a flirt's challenge and accomplishes
a final gratuitous feat by walking through a perilous forest into Soviet
territory and as casually strolling back.
I am giving this summary to exemplify what even the poorest reader of
my Dare must surely retain, unless electrolysis destroys some essential
cells soon after he closes the book. Now part of Annette's frail charm lay
in her forgetfulness which veiled everything toward the evening of
everything, like the kind of pastel haze that obliterates mountains, clouds,
and even its own self as the summer day swoons. I know I have seen her many
times, a copy of Patria in her languid lap, follow the printed lines with
the pendulum swing of eyes suggestive of reading, and actually reach the "To
be continued" at the end of the current installment of The Dare. I also know
that she had typed every word of it and most of its commas. Yet the fact
remains that she retained nothing--perhaps in result of her having decided
once for all that my prose was not merely "difficult" but hermetic ("nastily
hermetic," to repeat the compliment Basilevski paid me the moment he
realized--a moment which came in due time--that his manner and mind were
being ridiculed in Chapter Three <100> by my gloriously happy Victor). I
must say I forgave her readily her attitude to my work. At public readings,
I admired her public smile, the "archaic" smile of Greek statues. When her
rather dreadful parents asked to see my books (as a suspicious physician
might ask for a sample of semen), she gave them to read by mistake another
man's novel because of a silly similarity of titles. The only real shock I
experienced was when I overheard her informing some idiot woman friend that
my Dare included biographies of "Chernolyubov and Dobroshevski"! She
actually started to argue when I retorted that only a lunatic would have
chosen a pair of third-rate publicists to write about--spoonerizing their
names in addition! <101>
6
I have noticed, or seem to have noticed, in the course of my long life,
that when about to fall in love or even when still unaware of having fallen
in love, a dream would come, introducing me to a latent inamorata at morning
twilight in a somewhat infantile setting, marked by exquisite aching
stirrings that I knew as a boy, as a youth, as a madman, as an old dying
voluptuary. The sense of recurrence ("seem to have noticed") is very
possibly a built-in feeling: for instance I may have had that dream only
once or twice ("in the course of my long life") and its familiarity is only
the dropper that comes with the drops. The place in the dream, per contra,
is not a familiar room but one remindful of the kind we children awake in
after a Christmas masquerade or midsummer name day, in a great house,
belonging to strangers or distant cousins. The impression is that the beds,
two small beds in the present case, have been put in and placed against the
opposite walls of a room that is not a bedroom at heart, a room with no
furniture except those two separate beds: property masters are lazy, or
economical, in one's dreams as well as in early novellas.
In one of the beds I find myself just awoken from some secondary dream
of only formulary importance; and in the far bed against the right-hand wall
(direction also <102> supplied), a girl, a younger, slighter, and gayer
Annette in this particular variant (summer of 1934 by daytime reckoning), is
playfully, quietly talking to herself but actually, as I understand with a
delicious quickening of the nether pulses, is feigning to talk, is talking
for my benefit, so as to be noticed by me.
My next thought--and it intensifies the throbbings--concerns the
strangeness of boy and girl being assigned to sleep in the same makeshift
room: by error, no doubt, or perhaps the house was full and the distance
between the two beds, across an empty floor, might have been deemed wide
enough for perfect decorum in the case of children (my average age has been
thirteen all my life). The cup of pleasure is brimming by now and before it
spills I hasten to tiptoe across the bare parquet from my bed to hers. Her
fair hair gets in the way of my kisses, but presently my lips find her cheek
and neck, and her nightgown has buttons, and she says the maid has come into
the room, but it is too late, I cannot restrain myself, and the maid, a
beauty in her own right, looks on, laughing.
That dream I had a month or so after I met Annette, and her image in
it, that early version of her voice, soft hair, tender skin, obsessed me and
amazed me with delight--the delight of discovering I loved little Miss
Blagovo. At the time of the dream she and I were still on formal terms,
super-formal in fact, so I could not tell it to her with the necessary
evocations and associations (as set down in these notes); and merely saying
"I dreamt of you" would have amounted to the thud of a platitude. I did
something much more courageous and honorable. Before revealing to her what
she called (speaking of another couple) "serious intentions"--and before
even solving the riddle of why really I loved her--I decided to tell her of
my incurable illness. <103>
7
She was elegant, she was languid, she was rather angelic in one sense,
and dismally stupid in many others. I was lonely, and frightened, and
reckless with lust--not sufficiently reckless, however, not to warn her by
means of a vivid instance--half paradigm and half object lesson--or what she
laid herself open to by consenting to marry me.
Milostivaya Gosudarynya
Anna Ivanovna!
[Anglice Dear Miss Blagovo]
Before entertaining you viva-voce of a subject of the utmost
importance, I beg you to join me in the conduct of an experiment that will
describe better than a learned article would one of the typical facets of my
displaced mental crystal. So here goes.
With your permission it is night now and I am in bed (decently clad, of
course, and with every organ in decent repose), lying supine, and imagining
an ordinary moment in an ordinary place. To further protect the purity of
the experiment, let the visualized spot be an invented one. I imagine myself
coming out of a bookshop and <104> pausing on the curb before crossing the
street to the little sidewalk cafи directly opposite. No cars are in sight.
I cross. I imagine myself reaching the little cafи. The afternoon sun
occupies one of its chairs and the half of a table, but otherwise its
open-air section is empty and very inviting: nothing but brightness remains
of the recent shower. And here I stop short as I recollect that I bad an
umbrella.
I do not intend to bore you, glubokouvazhaemaya (dear) Anna Ivanova,
and still less do I wish to crumple this third or fourth poor sheet with the
crashing sound only punished paper can make; but the scene is not
sufficiently abstract and schematic, so let me retake it.
I, your friend and employer Vadim Vadimovich, lying in bed on my back
in ideal darkness (I got up a minute ago to recurtain the moon that peeped
between the folds of two paragraphs), I imagine diurnal Vadim Vadimovich
crossing a street from a bookshop to a sidewalk cafи. I am encased in my
vertical self: not looking down but ahead, thus only indirectly aware of the
blurry front of my corpulent figure, of the alternate points of my shoes,
and of the rectangular form of the parcel under my arm. I imagine myself
walking the twenty paces needed to reach the opposite sidewalk, then
stopping with an unprintable curse and deciding to go back for the umbrella
I left in the shop.
There is an affliction still lacking a name; there is, Anna (you must
permit me to call you that, I am ten years your senior and very ill),
something dreadfully wrong with my sense of direction, or rather my power
over conceived space, because at this juncture I am unable to <105> execute
mentally, in the dark of my bed, the simple about-face (an act I perform
without thinking in physical reality!) which would allow me to picture
instantly in my mind the once already traversed asphalt as now being before
me, and the vitrine of the bookshop being now within sight and not somewhere
behind.
Let me dwell briefly on the procedure involved; on my inability to
follow it consciously in my mind--my unwieldy and disobedient mind! In order
to make myself imagine the pivotal process I have to force an opposite
revolution of the decor: I must try, dear friend and assistant, to swing the
entire length of the street, with the massive faгades of its houses before
and behind me, from one direction to another in the slow wrench of a half
circle, which is like trying to turn the colossal tiller of a rusty
recalcitrant rudder so as to transform oneself by conscious degrees from,
say, an east-facing Vadim Vadimovich into a west-sun-blinded one. The mere
thought of that action leads the bedded recliner to such a muddle and
dizziness that one prefers scrapping the about-face altogether, wiping, so
to speak, the slate of one's vision, and beginning the return journey in
one's imagination as if it were an initial one, without any previous
crossing of the street, and therefore without any of the intermediate
horror--the horror of struggling with the steerage of space and crushing
one's chest in the process!
Voilю. Sounds rather tame, doesn't it, en fait de dиmence, and, indeed,
if I stop brooding over the thing, I decrease it to an insignificant
flaw--the missing pinkie of a freak born with nine fingers. Considering it
closer, however, I cannot <106> help suspecting it to be a warning symptom,
a foreglimpse of the mental malady that is known to affect eventually the
entire brain. Even that malady may not be as imminent and grave as the storm
signals suggest; I only want you to be aware of the situation before
proposing to you, Annette. Do not write, do not phone, do not mention this
letter, if and when you come Friday afternoon; but, please, if you do, wear,
in propitious sign, the Florentine hat that looks like a cluster of wild
flowers. I want you to celebrate your resemblance to the fifth girl from
left to right, the flower-decked blonde with the straight nose and serious
gray eyes, in Botticelli's Primavera, an allegory of Spring, my love, my
allegory.
On Friday afternoon, for the first time in two months she came "on the
dot" as my American friends would say. A wedge of pain replaced my heart,
and little black monsters started to play musical chairs all over my room,
as I noticed that she wore her usual recent hat, of no interest or meaning.
She took it off before the mirror and suddenly invoked Our Lord with rare
emphasis.
"Ya idiotka," she said. "I'm an idiot. I was looking for my pretty
wreath, when papa started to read to me something about an ancestor of yours
who quarreled with Peter the Terrible."
"Ivan," I said.
"I didn't catch the name, but I saw I was late and pulled on
(natsepila) this shapochka instead of the wreath, your wreath, the wreath
you ordered."
I was helping her out of her jacket. Her words filled me with
dream-free wantonness. I embraced her. My mouth sought the hot hollow
between neck and clavicle. It was a brief but thorough embrace, and I boiled
over, discreetly, deliciously, merely by pressing myself against <107> her,
one hand cupping her firm little behind and the other feeling the harp
strings of her ribs. She was trembling all over. An ardent but silly virgin,
she did not understand why my grip had relaxed with the suddenness of sleep
or windlorn sails.
Had she read only the beginning and end of my letter? Well, yes, she
had skipped the poetical part. In other words, she had not the slightest
idea what I was driving at? She promised, she said, to reread it. She had
grasped, however, that I loved her? She had, but how could she be sure that
I really loved her? I was so strange, so, so--she couldn't express it--yes,
STRANGE in every respect. She never had met anyone like me. Whom then did
she meet, I inquired: trepanners? trombonists? astronomists? Well, mostly
military men, if I wished to know, officers of Wrangel's army, gentlemen,
interesting people, who spoke of danger and duty, of bivouacs in the steppe.
Oh, but look here, I too can speak of "deserts idle, rough quarries,
rocks"--No, she said, they did not invent. They talked of spies they had
hanged, they talked of international politics, of a new film or book that
explained the meaning of life. And never one unchaste joke, not one horrid
risquи comparison... As in my books? Examples, examples! No, she would not
give examples. She would not be pinned down to whirl on the pin like a
wingless fly.
Or butterfly.
We were walking, one lovely morning, on the outskirts of Bellefontaine.
Something flicked and lit.
"Look at that harlequin," I murmured, pointing cautiously with my
elbow.
Sunning itself against the white wall of a suburban garden was a flat,
symmetrically outspread butterfly, which the artist had placed at a slight
angle to the horizon of his picture. The creature was painted a smiling red
with yellow intervals between black blotches; a row of blue crescents ran
along the inside of the toothed wing margins. <108> The only feature to rate
a shiver of squeamishness was the glistening sweep of bronzy silks coming
down on both sides of the beastie's body.
"As a former kindergarten teacher I can tell you," said helpful
Annette, "that it's a most ordinary nettlefly (krapivnitsa). How many little
hands have plucked off its wings and brought them to me for approval!"
It flicked and was gone. <109>
8
In view of the amount of typing to be done, and of her doing it so
slowly and badly, she made me promise not to bother her with what Russians
call "calf cuddlings" during work. At other times all she allowed me were
controlled kisses and flexible holds: our first embrace had been "brutal"
she said (having caught on very soon after that in the matter of certain
male secrets). She did her best to conceal the melting, the helplessness
that overwhelmed her in the natural course of caresses when she would begin
to palpitate in my arms before pushing me away with a puritanical frown.
Once the back of her hand chanced to brush against the taut front of my
trousers; she uttered a chilly "pardon" (Fr.), and then went into a sulk
upon my saying I hoped she had not hurt herself.
I complained of the ridiculous obsolete turn our relationship was
taking. She thought it over and promised that as soon as we were "officially
engaged," we would enter a more modern era. I assured her I was ready to
proclaim its advent any day, any moment.
She took me to see her parents with whom she shared a two-room
apartment in Passy. He had been an army surgeon before the Revolution and,
with his close-cropped gray head, clipped mustache, and neat imperial, bore
a <110> striking resemblance (abetted no doubt by the eager spirit that
patches up worn parts of the past with new impressions of the same order) to
the kindly but cold-fingered (and cold-earlobed) doctor who treated the
"inflammation of the lungs" I had in the winter of 1907.
As with so many Russians иmigrиs of declining strength and lost
professions, it was hard to say what exactly were Dr. Blagovo's personal
resources. He seemed to spend life's overcast evening either reading his way
through sets of thick magazines (1830 to 1900 or 1850 to 1910), which
Annette brought him from Oksman's Lending Library, or sitting at a table and
filling by means of a regularly clicking tobacco injector the
semitransparent ends of carton-tubed cigarettes of which he never consumed
more than thirty per day to avoid intercadence at night. He had practically
no conversation and could not retell correctly any of the countless
historical anecdotes he found in the battered tomes of Russkaya Starina
("Russian ancientry")--which explains where Annette got her inability to
remember the poems, the essays, the stories, the novels she had typed for me
(my grumble is repetitious, I know, but the matter rankles--a word which
comes from dracunculus, a "baby dragon"). He was also one of the last
gentlemen I ever met who still wore a dickey and elastic-sided boots.
He asked me--and that remained his only memorable question--why I did
not use in print the title which went with my thousand-year-old name. I
replied that I was the kind of snob who assumes that bad readers are by
nature aware of an author's origins but who hopes that good readers will be
more interested in his books than in his stemma. Dr. Blagovo was a stupid
old bloke, and his detachable cuffs could have been cleaner; but today, in
sorrowful retrospect, I treasure his memory: he was not only the father of
my poor Annette, but also the grandfather of my adored and perhaps still
more unfortunate daughter. <111>
Dr. Blagovo (1867-1940) had married at the age of forty a provincial
belle in the Volgan town of Kineshma, a few miles south from one of my most
romanic country estates, famous for its wild ravines, now gravel pits or
places of massacre, but then magnificent evocations of sunken gardens. She
wore elaborate make-up and spoke in simpering accents, reducing nouns and
adjectives to over-affectionate forms which even the Russian language, a
recognized giant of diminutives, would only condone on the wet lips of an
infant or tender nurse ("Here," said Mrs. Blagovo "is your chaishko s
molochishkom [teeny tea with weeny milk]"). She struck me as an
extraordinarily garrulous, affable, and banal lady, with a good taste in
clothes (she worked in a salon de couture). A certain tenseness could be
sensed in the atmosphere of the household. Annette was obviously a difficult
daughter. In the brief course of my visit I could not help noticing that the
voice of the parent addressing her developed little notes of obsequious
panic (notki podobostrastnoy paniki). Annette would occasionally curb with
an opaque, almost ophidian, look, her mother's volubility. As I was leaving,
the old girl paid me what she thought was a compliment: "You speak Russian
with a Parisian grasseyement and your manners are those of an Englishman."
Annette, behind her, uttered a low warning growl.
That same evening I wrote to her father informing him that she and I
had decided to marry; and on the following afternoon, when she arrived for
work, I met her in morocco slippers and silk dressing gown. It was a
holiday--the Festival of Flora--I said, indicating, with a not wholly normal
smile, the carnations, camomiles, anemones, asphodels, and blue cockles in
blond corn, which decorated my room in our honor. Her gaze swept over the
flowers, champagne, and caviar canapиs; she snorted and turned to flee; I
plucked her back into the room, locked the door and pocketed its key. <112>
I do not mind recalling that our first tryst was a flop. It took me so
long to persuade her that this was the day, and she made such a fuss about
which ultimate inch of clothing could be removed and which parts of her body
Venus, the Virgin, and the maire of our arrondissement allowed to be
touched, that by the time I had her in a passably convenient position of
surrender, I was an impotent wreck. We were lying naked, in a loose clinch.
Presently her mouth opened against mine in her first free kiss. I regained
my vigor. I hastened to possess her. She exclaimed I was disgustingly
hurting her and with a vigorous wriggle expulsed the blooded and thrashing
fish. When I tried to close her fingers around it in humble substitution,
she snatched her hand away, calling me a dirty dиbauchи (gryaznyy
razvratnik). I had to demonstrate myself the messy act while she looked on
in amazement and sorrow.
We did better next day, and finished the flattish champagne; I never
could quite tame her, though. I remember most promising nights in Italian
lakeside hotels when everything was suddenly botched by her misplaced
primness. But on the other hand I am happy now that I was never so vile and
inept as to ignore the exquisite contrast between her irritating prudery and
those rare moments of sweet passion when her features acquired an expression
of childish concentration, of solemn delight, and her little moans just
reached the threshold of my undeserving consciousness. <113>
9
By the end of the summer, and of the next chapter of The Dare, it
became clear that Dr. Blagovo and his wife were looking forward to a regular
Greek-Orthodox wedding--a taper-lit gold-and-gauze ceremony, with high
priest and low priest and a double choir. I do not know if Annette was
astonished when I said I intended to cut out the mummery and prosaically
register our union before a municipal officer in Paris, London, Calais, or
on one of the Channel Islands; but she certainly did not mind astonishing
her parents. Dr. Blagovo requested an interview in a stiffly worded letter
("Prince! Anna has informed us that you would prefer--"); we settled for a
telephone conversation: two minutes of Dr. Blagovo (including pauses caused
by his deciphering a hand that must have been the despair of apothecaries)
and five of his wife, who after rambling about irrelevant matters entreated
me to reconsider my decision. I refused, and was set upon by a go-between,
good old Stepanov, who rather unexpectedly, given his liberal views, urged
me in a telephone call from somewhere in England (where the Borgs now lived)
to keep up a beautiful Christian tradition. I changed the subject and begged
him to arrange a beautiful literary soirиe for me upon his return to Paris.
<114>
In the meantime some of the gayer gods came with gifts. Three windfalls
scatter-thudded around me in a simultaneous act of celebration: The Red
Topper was bought for publication in English with a two-hundred-guinea
advance; James Lodge of New York offered for Camera Lucida an even handsomer
sum (one's sense of beauty was easily satisfied in those days); and a
contract for the cinema rights to a short story was being prepared by Ivor
Black's half-brother in Los Angeles. I had now to find adequate surroundings
for completing The Dare in greater comfort than that in which I wrote its
first part; and immediately after that, or concurrently with its last
chapter, I would have to examine, and, no doubt, revise heavily, the English
translation now being made of my Krasnyy Tsilindr by an unknown lady in
London (who rather inauspiciously had started to suggest, before a roar of
rage stopped her, that "certain passages, not quite proper or too richly or
obscurely phrased, would have to be toned down, or omitted altogether, for
the benefit of the sober-minded English reader"). I also expected to have to
face a business trip to the United States.
For some odd psychological reason, Annette's parents, who kept track of
those developments, were now urging her to go through no matter what form of
marriage, civil or pagan (grazhdanskiy ili basurmanskiy), without delay.
Once that little tricolor farce over, Annette and I paid our tribute to
Russian tradition by traveling from hotel to hotel during two months, going
as far as Venice and Ravenna, where I thought of Byron and translated
Musset. Back in Paris, we rented a three-room apartment on the charming rue
Guevara (named after an Andalusian playwright of long ago) a two-minute walk
from the Bois. We usually lunched at the nearby Le Peut Diable Boiteux, a
modest but excellent restaurant, and had cold cuts for dinner in our
kitchenette. I had somehow expected Annette to be a versatile cook, and she
did improve later, in rugged <115> America. On rue Guevara her best
achievement remained the Soft-Boiled Egg: I do not know how she did it, but
she managed to prevent the fatal crack that produced an ectoplasmic swell in
the dancing water when I took over.
She loved long walks in the park among the sedate beeches and the
prospective-looking babes; she loved cafиs, fashion shows, tennis matches,
circular bike races at the Vиlodrome, and especially the cinema. I soon
realized that a little recreation put her in a lovemaking mood--and I was
frightfully amorous and strong in our four last years in Paris, and quite
unable to stand capricious denials. I drew the line, however, at an overdose
of athletic sports--a metronomic tennis ball twanging to and fro or the
ghastly hairy legs of hunchbacks on wheels.
The second part of the Thirties in Paris happened to be marked by a
marvelous surge of the exiled arts, and it would be pretentious and foolish
of me not to admit that whatever some of the more dishonest critics wrote
about me, I stood at the peak of that period. In the halls where readings
took place, in the back rooms of famous cafиs, at private literary parries,
I enjoyed pointing out to my quiet and stylish companion the various ghouls
of the inferno, the crooks and the creeps, the benevolent nonentities, the
groupists, the guru nuts, the pious pederasts, the lovely hysterical
Lesbians, the gray-locked old realists, the talented, illiterate, intuitive
new critics (Adam Atropovich was their unforgettable leader).
I noted with a sort of scholarly pleasure (like that of tracking down
parallel readings) how attentive, how eager to honor her were the three or
four, always black-suited, grandmasters of Russian letters (people I admired
with grateful fervor, not only because their high-principled art had
enchanted my prime, but also because the banishment of their books by the
Bolshevists <116> represented the greatest indictment, absolute and
immortal, of Lenin's and Stalin's regime). No less empressиs around her
(perhaps in subliminal zeal to earn some of the rare praise I deigned to
bestow on the pure voice of the impure) were certain younger writers whom
their God had created two-faced: despicably corrupt or inane on one side of
their being and shining with poignant genius on the other. In a word, her
appearance in the beau monde of иmigrи literature echoed amusingly Chapter
Eight of Eugene Onegin with Princess N.'s moving coolly through the fawning
ballroom throng.
I might have been displeased by the tolerance she showed Basilevski
(knowing none of his works and only vaguely aware of his preposterous
reputation) had it not occurred to me that the theme of her sympathy was
repeating, as it were, the friendly phase of my own initial relations with
that faux bonhomme. From behind a more or less Doric column I overheard him
asking my naоve gentle Annette had she any idea why I hated so fiercely
Gorki (for whom he cultivated total veneration). Was it because I resented
the world fame of a proletarian? Had I really read any of that wonderful
writer's books? Annette had looked puzzled but all at once a charming
childish smile illumined her whole face and she recalled The Mother, a corny
Soviet film that I had criticized, she said, "because the tears rolling down
the faces were too big and too slow."
"Aha! That explains a lot," proclaimed Basilevski with gloomy
satisfaction. <117>
10
I received the typed translations of The Red Topper (sic) and Camera Lucida
virtually at the same time, in the autumn of 1937. They proved to be even
more ignoble than I expected. Miss Haworth, an Englishwoman, had spent three
happy years in Moscow where her father had been Ambassador; Mr. Kulich was
an elderly Russian-born New Yorker who signed his letters Ben. Both made
identical mistakes, choosing the wrong term in their identical dictionaries,
and with identical recklessness never bothering to check the treacherous
homonym of a familiar-looking word. They were blind to contextual shades of
color and deaf to nuances of noise. Their classification of natural objects
seldom descended from the class to the family; still more seldom to the
genus in the strict sense. They confused the specimen with the species; Hop,
Leap, and Jump wore in their minds the drab uniform of regimented
synonymity; and not one page passed without a boner. What struck me as
especially fascinating, in a dreadful diabolical way, was their taking for
granted that a respectable author could have written this or that
descriptive passage, which their ignorance and carelessness had reduced to
the cries and grunts of a cretin. In all their habits of expression Ben
Kulich and Miss Haworth were so close that I now think <118> they might have
been secretly married to one another and had corresponded regularly when
trying to settle a tricky paragraph; or else, maybe, they used to meet
midway for lexical picnics on the grassy lip of some crater in the Azores.
It took me several months to revise those atrocities and dictate my
revisions to Annette. She derived her English from the four years she had
spent at an American boarding school in Constantinople (1920-1924), the
Blagovos' first stage of westward expatriation. I was amazed to see how fast
her vocabulary grew and improved in the performance of her new functions and
was amused by the innocent pride she took in correctly taking down the
blasts and sarcasms I directed in letters to Allan & Overton, London, and
James Lodge, New York. In fact, her doigtи in English (and French) was
better than in the typing of Russian texts. Minor stumbles were, of course,
bound to occur in any language. One day, in referring to the carbon copy of
a spate of corrections already posted to my patient Allan, I discovered a
trivial slip she had made, a mere typo ("here" instead of "hero," or perhaps
"that" instead of "hat," I don't even remember--but there was an "h"
somewhere, I think) which, however, gave the sentence a dismally flat, but,
alas, not implausible sense (verisimilitude has been the undoing of many a
conscientious proofreader). A telegram could eliminate the fault
incontinently, but an overworked edgy author finds such events jarring--and
I voiced my annoyance with unwarranted vehemence. Annette started looking
for a telegram form in the (wrong) drawer and said, without rasing her head:
"She would have helped you so much better than I, though I really am
doing my best (strashno starayus', trying terribly)."
We never referred to Iris--that was a tacit condition in the code of
our marriage--but I instantly understood that Annette meant her and not the
inept English girl <119> whom an agency had sent me several weeks before and
got back with wrappage and string. For some occult reason (overwork again) I
felt the tears welling and before I could get up and leave the room, I found
myself shamelessly sobbing and hitting a fat anonymous book with my fist.
She glided into my arms, also weeping, and that same evening we went to see
Renи Clair's new film, followed by supper at the Grand Velour.
During those months of correcting and partly rewriting The Red Topper
and the other thing, I began to experience the pangs of a strange
transformation. I did not wake up one Central European morning as a great
scarab with more legs than...
