Владимир Набоков. Смотри на Арлекинов (engl)
страница №6
...the carbon copy that I found pinned,"just in case," to the blotter in my study. Netty would have been totally
incapable of producing such a clean typescript--especially with the New
Orthography machine used by her friend.
* 4.
The term in the text is durovskiy zveryok, meaning a small animal
trained by the famous Russian clown Durov, a reference <150> less familiar
to my wife than to a person of the older generation to which her friend
belonged.
* 5.
Contemptuous transliteration of "Quirn."
* 6.
Symptomatic misspelling of train. Annette's French was excellent.
Ninette's French (as well as her English) was a joke.
* 7.
My wife coming as she did from an obscurant Russian milieu was no
paragon of racial tolerance; but she would never have used the vulgar
anti-Semitic phraseology typical of her friend's character and upbringing.
* 8.
The interpolation of those "lovely old churches" is a stock platitude
of Soviet patriotism.
* 9.
Actually my wife rather liked to upset her people on every possible
occasion.
* 10.
I might have done something about it had I known for sure whose wish it
was. To spite her parents--a strange but constant policy on her
part--Annette never went to church, not even at Easter. As to Mrs. Langley,
devotional decorum was the motto; the woman made the sign of the cross every
time American Jupiter split the black clouds.
* 11.
"Neurasthenia" indeed!
* 12.
A totally new character--this mother. Myth? Impersonation act? I turned
to Bridget for some explanation; she said there was no such person around
(the real Mrs. Todd died long ago) and advised me "to drop the subject" with
the irritating curtness of one dismissing a topic as the product of
another's delirium. I am ready to agree that my recollection of the scene at
her apartment is tainted by the state I was in, but that "saintly mother"
must remain an enigma.
* 13.
En Anglais dans le texte.
* 14.
The little Muscovite must have been around forty at the time.
* 15.
En Anglais dans le texte.
* 16.
This I did not dream of doing before my lease expired, which it did on
August 1, 1946.
* 17.
Let us refrain from a final comment.
Good-bye, Netty and Nelly. Good-bye, Annette and Ninette. Good-bye,
Nonna Anna. <151> <152>
PART FOUR
<153> <154>
1
Learning to drive that "Caracal" (as I fondly called my new white
coupи) had its comic as well as dramatic side, bat after two flunks and a
few little repairs, I found myself legally and physically fit at last to
spin off West on a protracted tour. There was, true, a moment of acute
distress, as the first distant mountains disowned suddenly any likeness to
lilac clouds, when I recalled the trips Iris and I used to make to the
Riviera in our old Icarus. If she did occasionally allow me to take the
wheel, it was only in a spirit of fun, for she was such a sportive girl.
With what sobs I now remembered the time when I managed to hit the postman's
bicycle which had been left leaning against a pink wall at the entrance of
Carnavaux, and how my Iris doubled up in beautiful mirth as the thing
slithered off in front of us!
I spent what remained of the summer exploring the incredibly lyrical
Rocky Mountain states, getting drunk on whiffs of Oriental Russia in the
sagebrush zone and on the North Russian fragrances so faithfully reproduced
above timberline by certain small bogs along trickles of sky between the
snowbank and the orchid. And yet--was that all? What form of mysterious
pursuit caused me to get my feet wet like a child, to pant up a talus, to
stare <155> every dandelion in the face, to start at every colored mote
passing just beyond my field of vision? What was the dream sensation of
having come empty-handed--without what? A gun? A wand? This I dared not
probe lest I wound the raw fell under my thin identity.
Skipping the academic year, in a kind of premature "sabbatical leave"
that left the Trustees of Quirn University speechless, I wintered in Arizona
where I tried to write The Invisible Lath, a book rather similar to that in
the reader's hands. No doubt I was not ready for it and perhaps foiled too
much over inexpressible shades of emotion; anyway I smothered it under too
many layers of sense as a Russian peasant woman, in her stuffy log house,
might overlay (zaspat') her baby in heavy oblivion after making hay or being
thrashed by her drunken husband.
I pushed on to Los Angeles--and was sorry to learn that the cinema
company I had counted upon was about to fold after Ivor Black's death. On my
way back, in early spring, I rediscovered the dear phantasmata of my
childhood in the tender green of aspen groves at high altitudes here and
there, on conifer-clothed ridges. For almost six months I roamed again from
motel to motel, several times having my car scratched and cracked by
cretinous rival drivers and finally trading it in for a sedate Bellargus
sedan of a celestial blue that Bel was to compare with that of a Morpho.
Another odd thing: with prophetic care I took down in my diary all my
stops, all my motels (Mes Moteaux as Verlaine might have said!), the
Lakeviews, the Valley Views, the Mountain Views, the Plumed Serpent Court in
New Mexico, the Lolita Lodge in Texas, Lone Poplars, that if recruited might
have patrolled a whole river, and enough sunsets to keep all the bats of the
world--and one dying genius--happy. LATH, LATH, Look At The Harlequins! Look
at that strange fever rash of viatic tabulation in which I persevered as if
I knew that those <156> motor courts prefigured the stages of my future
travels with my darling daughter.
In late August, 1947, suntanned, and more edgy than ever, I returned to
Quirn and transferred my belongings from storage to the new dwelling (1
Larchdell Road) found for me by efficient and cute Miss Soloway. This was a
charming two-storied gray-stone house, with a picture window and a white
grand in the long drawing-room, three virginal bedrooms upstairs and a
library in the basement. It had belonged to the late Alden Landover, the
greatest American belle-lettrist of the half-century. With the help of the
beaming Trustees--and rather taking advantage of their joy at welcoming me
back to Quirn--I resolved to buy that house. I loved its scholarly odor, a
treat seldom granted to my exquisitely sensitive Brunn's membrane, and I
also loved its picturesque isolation amidst a tremendous unkempt garden
above a larched and golden-rodded steep slope.
To keep Quirn grateful, I also decided to reorganize completely my
contribution to its fame. I scrapped my Joyce seminar which in 1945 had
attracted (if that is the word) only six students--five grim graduates and
one not quite normal sophomore. In compensation I added a third lecture in
Masterpieces (now including Ulysses) to my weekly quota. The chief
innovation, however, lay in my bold presentation of knowledge. During my
first years at Quirn I had accumulated two thousand pages of literary
comments typed out by my assistant (I nonce I have not introduced him yet:
Waldemar Exkul, a brilliant young Balt, incomparably more learned than I;
dixi, Ex!). These I had the Photostat people multiply to accommodate at
least three hundred students. At the end of every week each received a batch
of the forty pages that I had recited to them, with certain addenda, in the
lecture hall. The "certain addenda" were a concession to the Trustees who
reasonably remarked that without this catch nobody would <157> need to
attend my classes. The three hundred copies of the two thousand typed pages
were to be signed by the readers and returned to me before the final
examination. There were flaws at first in the system (for example, only 153
incomplete sets, many unsigned, were returned in 1948) but on the whole it
worked, or should have worked.
Another decision I took was to make myself more available to faculty
members than I had been before. The red needle of my dial scale now
quiver-stopped at a very conservative figure, when, stark naked, arms
hanging like those of a clumsy troglodyte, I stood on the fatal platform and
with the help of my new housemaid, an enchanting black girl with an Egyptian
profile, managed to make out what lay midway in the blur between my reading
glasses and my long-distance ones: a great triumph, which I marked by
acquiring several new "costumes," as my Dr. Olga Repnin says in the novel of
that name--"I don't know (all `o's' as in `don' and `anon') why your
horseband wears such not modern costumes." I visited quite frequently the
Pub, a college tavern, where I tried to mix with white-shoed young males,
but somehow ended up by getting involved with professional barmaids. And I
entered in my pocket diary the addresses of some twenty fellow professors.
Most treasured among my new friends was a frail-looking, sad-looking,
somewhat monkey-faced man with a shock of black hair, gray-streaked at
fifty-five, the enchantingly talented poet Audace whose paternal ancestor
was the eloquent and ill-fated Girondist of that name ("Bourreau, fais ton
devoir envers la Libertи!") but who did not know a word of French and spoke
American with a flat Midwestern accent. Another interesting glimpse of
descent was provided by Louise Adamson, the young wife of our Chairman of
English: her grandmother, Sybil Lanier, had won the Women's National Golf
Championship in 1896 at Philadelphia! <158>
Gиrard Adamson's literary reputation was immensely superior to that of
the immensely more important, bitter, and modest Audace. Gerry was a big
flabby hulk of a man who must have been nearing sixty when after a life of
aesthetic asceticism he surprised his special coterie by marrying that
porcelain-pretty and very fast girl. His famous essays--on Donne, on Villon,
on Eliot--his philosophic poetry, his recent Laic Litanies and so forth
meant nothing to me, but he was an appealing old drunk, whose humor and
erudition could break the resistance of the most unsociable outsider. I
caught myself enjoying the frequent parties at which good old Noteboke and
his sister Phoneme, the delightful Kings, the Adamsons, my favorite poet,
and a dozen other people did all they could to entertain and comfort me.
Louise, who had an inquisitive aunt at Honeywell, kept me informed, at
tactful intervals, of Bel's well-being. One spring day in 1949 or 1950 I
happened to stop at the Plaza Liquor Store in Rosedale after a business
meeting with Horace Peppermill and was about to back out of the parking lot
when I saw Annette bending over a baby carriage in front of a grocery store
at the other end of the shopping area. Something about her inclined neck,
her melancholy concentration, the ghost of a smile directed at the child in
the stroller, sent such a pang of pity through my nervous system that I
could not resist accosting her. She turned toward me and even before I
uttered some wild words--of regret, of despair, of tenderness--there she was
shaking her head, forbidding me to come near. "Nikogda," she murmured,
"never," and I could not bear to decipher the expression on her pale drawn
face. A woman came out of the shop and thanked her for tending the little
stranger--a pale and thin infant, looking almost as ill as Annette. I
hurried back to the parking lot, scolding myself for not realizing at once
that Bel must be a girl of seven or eight by <159> this time. Her mother's
moist starry stare kept pursuing me for several nights; I even felt too ill
to attend an Easter party at one of the friendly Quirn houses.
During this or some other period of despondency, I heard one day the
hall bell tinkle, and my Negro maid, little Nefertitty as I had dubbed her,
hasten to open the front door. Slipping out of bed I pressed my bare flesh
to the cool window ledge but was not in time to glimpse the entrant or
entrants, no matter how far I leant out into a noisy spring downpour. A
freshness of flowers, clusters and clouds of flowers, reminded me of some
other time, some other casement. I made out part of the Adamsons' glossy
black car beyond the garden gate. Both? She alone? Solus rex? Both, alas--to
judge by the voices reaching me from the hallway through my transparent
house. Old Gerry, who disliked unnecessary stairs and had a morbid fear of
contagion, remained in the living room. Now his wife's steps and voice were
coming up. We had kissed for the first time a few days before, in the
Notebokes' kitchen--rummaging for ice, finding fire. I had good reason to
hope that the intermission before the obligatory scene would be brief.
She entered, set down two bottles of port for the invalid, and pulled
off her wet sweater over her tumbled chestnut-brown, violet-brown curls and
naked clavicles. Artistically, strictly artistically, I daresay she was the
best-looking of my three major loves. She had upward-directed thin eyebrows,
sapphire eyes registering (and that's the right word) constant amazement at
earth's paradise (the only one she would ever know, I'm afraid),
pink-flushed cheekbones, a rosebud mouth, and a lovely concave abdomen. In
less time than it took her husband, a quick reader, to skim down two columns
of print, we had "attired" him. I put on blue slacks and a pink shirt and
followed her downstairs.
Her husband sat in a deep armchair, reading a London <160> weekly
bought at the Shopping Center. He had not bothered to take off his horrible
black raincoat--a voluminous robe of oilskin that conjured up the image of a
stagecoach driver in a lashing storm. He now removed however his formidable
spectacles. He cleared his throat with a characteristic rumble. His purple
jowls wobbled as he tackled the ordeal of rational speech:
GERRY Do you ever see this paper, Vadim (accenting "Vadim" incorrectly
on the first syllable)? Mister (naming a particularly lively criticule) has
demolished your Olga (my novel about the professorsha; it had come out only
now in the British edition).
VADIM May I give you a drink? We'll toast him and roast him.
GERRY Yet he's right, you know. It is your worst book. Chute complхte,
says the man. Knows French, too.
LOUISE No drinks. We've got to rush home. Now heave out of that chair.
Try again. Take your glasses and paper. There. Au revoir, Vadim. I'll bring
you those pills tomorrow morning after I drive him to school.
How different it all was, I mused, from the refined adulteries in the
castles of my early youth! Where was the romantic thrill of a glance
exchanged with one's new mistress in the presence of a morose colossus--the
Jealous Husband? Why did the recollection of the recent embrace not blend
any longer as it used to do with the certainty of the next one, forming a
sudden rose in an empty flute of crystal, a sudden rainbow on the white
wallpaper? What did Emma see a fashionable woman drop into that man's silk
hat? Write legibly. <161>
2
The mad scholar in Esmeralda and Her Parandrus wreathes Botticelli and
Shakespeare together by having Primavera end as Ophelia with all her
flowers. The loquacious lady in Dr. Olga Repnin remarks that tornadoes and
floods are really sensational only in North America. On May 17, 1953,
several papers printed a photograph of a family, complete with birdcage,
phonograph, and other valuable possessions, riding it out on the roof of
their shack in the middle of Rosedale Lake. Other papers carried the picture
of a small Ford caught in the upper branches of an intrepid tree with a man,
a Mr. Byrd, whom Horace Peppermill said he knew, still in the driver's seat,
stunned, bruised, but alive. A prominent personality in the Weather Bureau
was accused of criminally delayed forecasts. A group of fifteen
schoolchildren who had been taken to see a collection of stuffed animals
donated by Mrs. Rosenthal, the benefactor's widow, to the Rosedale Museum,
were safe in the sudden darkness of that sturdy building when the twister
struck. But the prettiest lakeside cottage got swept away, and the drowned
bodies of its two occupants were never retrieved.
Mr. Peppermill, whose natural faculties were no match for his legal
acumen, warned me that if I desired to relinquish the child to her
grandmother in France, certain <162> formalities would have to be complied
with. I observed quietly that Mrs. Blagovo was a half-witted cripple and
that my daughter, whom her schoolteacher harbored, should be brought by that
person to my house AT ONCE. He said he would fetch her himself early next
week.
After weighing and reweighing every paragraph of the house, every
parenthesis of its furniture, I decided to lodge her in the former bedroom
of the late Landover's companion whom he called his nurse or his fiancиe
depending on his mood of the moment. This was a lovely chamber, east of
mine, with lilac butterflies enlivening its wallpaper and a large, low,
flouncy bed. I peopled its white bookshelf with Keats, Yeats, Coleridge,
Blake, and four Russian poets (in the New Orthography). Although I told
myself with a sigh that she would, no doubt, prefer "comics" to my dear
bespangled mimes and their wands of painted lath, I felt compelled in my
choice by what is termed the "ornamental instinct" among ornithologists.
Moreover, knowing well how essential a pure strong light is to reading in
bed, I asked Mrs. O'Leary, my new charwoman and cook (borrowed from Louise
Adamson who had left with her husband for a long sojourn in England) to
screw a couple of hundred-watt bulbs into a tall bedside lamp. Two
dictionaries, a writing pad, a little alarm clock, and a Junior Manicure Set
(suggested by Mrs. Noteboke, who had a twelve-year-old daughter) were
attractively placed on a spacious and stable bedtable. All this was but a
rough, naturally. The fair copy would come in due time.
Landover's nurse or fiancиe could rush to his assistance either along a
short passage or through the bathroom between the two bedrooms: Landover had
been a large man and his long deep tub was a soaker's delight. Another,
narrower bathroom followed Bel's bedroom easterly--and here I really missed
my dainty Louise when racking my brain for the correct epithet between
well-scrubbed and perfumed. Mrs. Noteboke could not help me: her daughter,
<163> who used the messy parental facilities, had no time for silly
deodorants and loathed "foam." Wise old Mrs. O'Leary, on the other hand,
held before her mind's eye Mrs. Adamson's creams and crystals in a Flemish
artist's detail and made me long for her employer's speedy return by
conjuring up that picture, which she then proceeded to simplify, but not
vulgarize, while retaining such major items as the huge sponge, the jumbo
cake of lavender soap, and a delicious toothpaste.
Walking still farther sunriseward, we reach the corner guest room
(above the round dining room at the east end of the first floor); this I
transformed with the help of a handyman, Mrs. O'Leary's cousin, into an
efficiently furnished studio. It contained, when I finished with it, a couch
with boxy pillows, an oak desk with a revolving chair, a steel cabinet, a
bookcase, Klingsor's Illustrated Encyclopedia in twenty volumes, crayons,
writing tablets, state maps, and (to cite the School Buyer's Guide for
1952-1953) "a globe ball that lifts out of a cradle so that every child can
hold the world in his or her lap."
Was that all? No. I found for the bedroom a framed photograph of her
mother, Paris, 1934, and for the studio a reproduction in color of Levitan's
Clouds above a Blue River (the Volga, not far from my Marevo), painted
around 1890.
Peppermill was to bring her on May 21, around four P.M. I had to fill
somehow the abyss of the afternoon. Angelic Ex had already read and marked
the entire batch of exams, but he thought I might want to see some of the
works he had reluctantly failed. He had dropped in some time on the eve and
had left them downstairs on the round table in the round room next to the
hallway at the west end of the house. My poor hands ached and trembled so
dreadfully that I could hardly leaf through those poor cahiers. The round
window gave on the driveway. It was <164> a warm gray day. Sir! I need a
passing mark desperately. Ulysses was written in Zurich and Greece and
therefore consists of too many foreign words. One of the characters in
Tolstoy's Death of Ivan is the notorious actress Sarah Bernard. Stern's
style is very sentimental and illiterative. A car door banged. Mr.
Peppermill came with a duffel bag in the wake of a tall fair-haired girl in
blue jeans carrying, and slowing down, to change from hand to hand, an
unwieldy valise.
Annette's moody mouth and eyes. Graceful but plain. Fortified by a
serenacin tablet, I received my daughter and lawyer with the neutral dignity
for which effusive Russians in Paris used to detest me so heartily.
Peppermill accepted a drop of brandy. Bel had a glass of peach juice and a
brown biscuit. I indicated to Bel--who was displaying her palms in a polite
Russian allusion--the dining-room toilet, an old-fashioned touch on the
architect's part. Horace Peppermill handed me a letter from Bel's teacher
Miss Emily Ward. Fabulous Intelligence Quotient of 180. Menses already
established. Strange, marvelous child. One does not quite know whether to
curb or encourage such precocious brilliance. I accompanied Horace halfway
back to his car, fighting off, successfully, the disgraceful urge to tell
him how staggered I was by the bill his office had recently sent me.
"Let me now show you your apartаmenty. You speak Russian, don't you?"
"I certainly do, but I can't write it. I also know a little French."
She and her mother (whom she mentioned as casually as if Annette were
in the next room copying something for me on a soundless typewriter) had
spent most of last summer at Carnavaux with babushka. I would like to have
learned what room exactly Bel had occupied in the villa, but an oddly
obtrusive, though irrelevant-looking, recollection <165> somehow prevented
me from asking: shortly before her death Iris had dreamed one night that she
had given birth to a fat boy with dusky red cheeks and almond eyes and the
blue shadow of mutton chops: "A horrible Omarus K."
Oh yes, said Bel, she had loved it. Especially the path down, down to
the sea and the aroma of rosemary (chudnyy zapakh rozmarina). I was tortured
and charmed by her "shadowless" иmigrи Russian, untainted, God bless
Annette, by the Langley woman's fruity Sovietisms.
Did Bel recognize me? She looked me over with serious gray eyes.
"I recognize your hands and your hair."
"On se tutoie in Russian henceforward. All right. Let's go upstairs."
She approved of the studio: "A schoolroom in a picture book." She
opened the medicine chest in her bathroom. "Empty--but I know what I'll put
there." The bedroom "enchanted" her. Ocharovatel'no! (Annette's favorite
praise word.) She criticized, though, the bedside bookshelf: "What, no
Byron? No Browning? Ah, Coleridge! The little golden sea snakes. Miss Ward
gave me an anthology for Russian Easter: I can recite your last duchess--I
mean `My Last Duchess' "
I caught my breath with a moan. I kissed her. I wept. I sat, shaking,
on a fragile chair that creaked in response to my hunched-up paroxysm. Bel
stood looking away, looking up at a prismatic reflection on the ceiling,
looking down at her luggage, which Mrs. O'Leary, a dumpy but doughty woman,
had already brought up.
I apologized for my tears. Bel inquired in a socially perfect
let's-change-the-subject manner if there was a television set in the house.
I said we'd get one tomorrow. I would leave her now to her own devices.
Dinner in half-an-hour. She had noticed, she said, that a picture she'd like
<166> to see was being shown in town. After dinner we drove to The Strand
Theater.
Says a scribble in my diary: Does not much care for boiled chicken. The
Black Widow. With Gene, Ginger, and George. Have passed the "illiterative"
sentimentalist and all the rest. <167>
3
If Bel is alive today, she is thirty-two--exactly your age at the
moment of writing (February 15, 1974). The last time I saw her, in 1959, she
was not quite seventeen; and between eleven and a half and seventeen and a
half she has changed very slightly in the medium of memory, where blood does
not course through immobile time as fast as it does in the perceptual
present. Especially unaffected by linear growth is my vision of her
pertaining to 1953-1955, the three years in which she was totally and
uniquely mine: I see it today as a composite portrait of rapture, in which a
mountain in Colorado, my translating Tamara into English, Bel's high school
accomplishments, and an Oregon forest intergrade in patterns of transposed
time and twisted space that defy chronography and charting.
One change, one gradational trend I must note, however. This was my
growing awareness of her beauty. Scarcely a month after her arrival I was
already at a loss to understand how she could have struck me as "plain."
Another month elapsed and the elfin line of her nose and upper lip in
profile came as an "expected revelation"--to use a formula I have applied to
certain prosodic miracles in Blake and Blok. Because of the contrast between
her pale-gray iris and very black lashes, her eyes seemed rimmed <168> with
kohl. Her hollowed cheek and long neck were pure Annette, but her fair hair,
which she wore rather short, gave off a richer sheen as if the tawny strands
were mixed with gold-olive ones in thick straight stripes of alternate
shades. All this is easily described and this also goes for the regular
striation of bright bloom along the outside of forearm and leg, which, in
fact, smacks of self-plagiarism, for I had given it both to Tamara and
Esmeralda, not counting several incidental lassies in my short stories (see
for example page 537 of the Exile from Mayda collection, Goodminton, New
York, 1947). The general type and bone structure of her pubescent radiance
cannot be treated, however, with a crack player's brio and chalk-biting
serve. I am reduced--a sad confession!--to something I have also used
before, and even in this book--the well-known method of degrading one
species of art by appealing to another. I am thinking of Serov's
Five-petaled Lilac, oil, which depicts a tawny-haired girl of twelve or so
sitting at a sun-flecked table and manipulating a raceme of lilac in search
of that lucky token. The girl is no other than Ada Bredow, a first cousin of
mine whom I flirted with disgracefully that very summer, the sun of which
ocellates the garden table and her bare arms. What hack reviewers of fiction
call "human interest" will now overwhelm my reader, the gentle tourist, when
he visits the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, where I have seen with my own
rheumy eyes, on a visit to Sovietland a few years ago, that picture which
belonged to Ada's grandmother before being handed over to the People by a
dedicated purloiner. I believe that this enchanting little girl was the
model of my partner in a recurrent dream of mine with a stretch of parquetry
between two beds in a makeshift demonic guest room. Bel's resemblance to
her--same cheekbones, same chin, same knobby wrists, same tender flower--can
be only alluded to, not actually listed. But enough of this. I have been
trying to do something very difficult and I will tear <169> it up if you say
I have succeeded too well, because I do not want, and never wanted, to
succeed, in this dismal business of Isabel Lee--though at the same time I
was intolerably happy.
When asked--at last!--had she loved her mother (for I could not get
over Bel's apparent indifference to Annette's terrible death) she thought
for such a long time that I decided she had forgotten my question, but
finally (like a chessplayer resigning after an abyss of meditation), she
shook her head. What about Nelly Langley? This she answered at once: Langley
was mean and cruel and hated her, and only last year whipped her; she had
welts all over (uncovering for display her right thigh, which now, at least,
was impeccably white and smooth).
The education she got in Quirn's best private school for Young Ladies
(you, her coeval, were there for a few weeks, in the same class, but you and
she somehow missed making friends with each other) was supplemented by the
two summers we spent roaming all over the Western states. What memories,
what lovely smells, what mirages, near-mirages, substantiated mirages,
accumulated along Highway 138--Sterling, Fort Morgan (El. 4325), Greeley,
well-named Loveland--as we approached the paradise part of Colorado!
From Lupine Lodge, Estes Park, where we spent a whole month, a path
margined with blue flowers led through aspen groves to what Bel drolly
called The Foot of the Face. There was also the Thumb of the Face, at its
southern corner. I have a large glossy photograph taken by William Garrell
who was the first, I think, to reach The Thumb, in 1940 or thereabouts,
showing the East Face of Longs Peak with the checkered lines of ascent
superimposed in a loopy design upon it. On the back of this picture--and as
immortal in its own little right as the picture's subject--a poem by Bel,
neatly copied in violet ink, is <170> dedicated to Addie Alexander, "First
woman on Peak, eighty years ago." It commemorates our own modest hikes:
Longs' Peacock Lake:
the Hut and its Old Marmot;
Boulder field and its Black Butterfly;
And the intelligent trail.
She had composed it while we were sharing a picnic lunch, somewhere
between those great rocks and the beginning of The Cable, and after testing
the result mentally a number of times, in frowning silence, she finally
scribbled it on a paper napkin which she handed to me with my pencil.
I told her how wonderful and artistic it was--particularly the last
line. She asked: what's "artistic"? I said: "Your poem, you, your way with
words."
In the course of that ramble, or perhaps on a latter occasion, but
certainly in the same region, a sudden storm swept upon the glory of the
July day. Our shirts, shorts, and loafers seemed to dwindle to nothing in
the icy mist. A first hailstone hit a tin can, another my bald spot. We
sought refuge in a cavity under a jutting rock. Thunderstorms to me are
agony. Their evil pressure destroys me; their lightning forks through my
brain and breast. Bel knew this; huddling against me (for my comfort rather
than hers!), she kept giving me a quick little kiss on the temple at every
bang of thunder, as if to say: That one's over, you're still safe. I now
felt myself longing for those crashes never to cease; but presently they
turned to halfhearted rumbles, and the sun found emeralds in a patch of wet
turf. She could not stop shivering, though, and I had to thrust my hands
under her skirt and rub her thin body, till it glowed, so as to ward off
"pneumonia" which she said, laughing jerkily, was a "new," was a "moon," was
<171> a "new moon" and a "moan," a "new moan," thank you.
There is a hollow of dimness again in the sequence, but it must have
been soon after that, in the same motor court, or in the next, on the way
home, that she slipped into my room at dawn, and sat down on my bed--move
your legs--in her pyjama top to read me another poem:
In the dark basement, I stroked
the silky head of a wolf.
When the light returned
and all cried: "Ah!,"
it turned out to be only
Mиdor, a dead dog.
I again praised her talent, and kissed her more warmly, perhaps, than
the poem deserved; for, actually, I found it rather obscure, but did not say
so, and presently she yawned and fell asleep on my bed, a practice I usually
did not tolerate. Today, however, on rereading those strange lines, I see
through their starry crystal the tremendous commentary I could write about
them, with galaxies of reference marks and footnotes like the reflections of
brightly lit bridges spanning black water. But my daughter's soul is hers,
and my soul is mine, and may Hamlet Godman rot in peace. <172>
4
As late as the start of the 1954-1955 school year, with Bel nearing her
thirteenth birthday, I was still deliriously happy, still seeing nothing
wrong or dangerous, or absurd or downright cretinous, in the relationship
between my daughter and me. Save for a few insignificant lapses--a few hot
drops of overflowing tenderness, a gasp masked by a cough and that sort of
stuff--my relations with her remained essentially innocent. But whatever
qualities I might have possessed as a Professor of Literature, nothing but
incompetence and a reckless laxity of discipline can I see today in the
rearview reflection of that sweet wild past.
Others forestalled me in perspicacity. My first critic happened to be
Mrs. Noteboke, a stout dark lady in suffragettish tweeds, who instead of
keeping her Marion, a depraved and vulgar nymphet, from snooping on a
schoolmate's home life, lectured me on the upbringing of Bel and strongly
advised my hiring an experienced, preferably German, governess to look after
her day and night. My second critic--a much more tactful and understanding
one--was my secretary, Myrna Soloway, who complained that she could not keep
track of the literary magazines and clippings in my mail--because of their
being intercepted by an unscrupulous and avid little reader--and who <173>
gently added that Quirn High School, the last refuge of common sense in my
incredible plight, was astounded by Bel's lack of manners almost as much as
by her intelligence and familiarity with "Proust and Prиvost." I spoke to
Miss Lowe, the rather pretty petite headmistress, and she mentioned
"boarding facilities," which sounded like some kind of wooden jail, and the
even more dismal ("with all those rippling birdcalls and wickering trills in
the woods, Miss Lowe--in the woods"!) "summer instruction" to replace the
"eccentricities of an artist's (`A great artist's, Professor') household."
She pointed out to the giggling and apprehensive artist that a young
daughter should be treated as a potential component of our society and not
as a fancy pet. Throughout that talk I could not shake off the feeling of
its all being a nightmare that I had had or would have in some other
existence, some other bound sequence of numbered dreams.
An atmosphere of vague distress was gathering (to speak in verbal
clichиs about a clichи situation) around my metaphorical head, when there
occurred to me a simple and brilliant solution of all my problems and
troubles.
The tall looking glass before which many of Landover's houris had
onduled in their brief brown glory now served me to behold the image of a
lion-hued fifty-five-year-old would-be athlete performing waist-slimming and
chest-expanding exercises by means of an "Elmago" ("Combines the mechanical
know-how of the West with the magic of Mithra"). It was a good image. An old
telegram (found unopened in an issue of Artisan, a literary review, filched
by Bel from the hallway table), was addressed to me by a Sunday paper in
London, asking me to comment on the rumors--which I had already heard--to
the effect that I was the main candidate in the abstract scramble for what
our American kid brothers called "the most prestigious prize in the world."
This, too, might impress the rather success-minded person I had in view.
<174> Finally, I knew that in the vacational months of 1955 a series of
strokes had killed off in London poor old Gerry Adamson, a great guy, and
that Louise was free. Too free in fact. An urgent letter I now wrote her,
summoning her back to Quirn at once, for a serious Discussion of a matter
concerning both her and me, reached her only after describing a comic circle
via four fashionable spots on the Continent. I never saw the wire she said
she sent me from New York on October 1.
On October 2, an abnormally warm day, the first of a week-long series,
Mrs. King telephoned in the afternoon to invite me with rather enigmatic
little laughs to an "impromptu soirиe, in a few hours, say at nine P.M.
after you have tucked in your adorable daughter. I agreed to come because
Mrs. King was an especially nice soul, the kindest on the campus.
I had a black headache and decided that a two-mile walk in the cool
clear night would do me good. My dealings with space and spatial transitions
are so diabolically complicated that I do not recall whether I really
walked, or drove, or limited myself to pacing up and down the open gallery
running along the front side of our second floor, or what.
The first person to whom my hostess introduced me--with a subdued
fanfare of social clarion--was the "English" cousin with whom Louise had
been staying in Devonshire, Lady Morgain, "daughter of our former Ambassador
and widow of the Oxford medievalist"--shadowy figures on a briefly lit
screen. She was a rather deaf and decidedly dotty witch in her middle
fifties, comically coiffured and dowdily dressed, and she and her belly
advanced upon me with such energetic eagerness that I scarcely had time to
sidestep the well-meant attack before getting wedged "between the books and
the bottles" as poor Gerry used to say in reference to academic cocktails. I
passed into a different, far more stylish world as I bent to kiss Louise's
<175> expertly swanned cool little hand. My dear old Audace welcomed me with
the kind of Latin accolade that he had especially developed to mark the
highest degree of spiritual kinship and mutual esteem. John King, whom I had
seen on the eve in a college corridor, greeted me with raised arms as if the
fifty hours elapsed since our last chat had been magically blown-up into
half a century. We were only six people in a spacious parlor, not counting
two painted girl-children in Tyrolean dress, whose presence, identity, and
very existence have remained to this day a familiar mystery--familiar,
because such zigzag cracks in the plaster are typical of the prisons or
palaces into which recrudescent derangement merrily leads me whenever I have
prepared to make, as I was to do now, a difficult, climactic announcement
that demanded absolute clarity of concentration. So, as I just said, we were
only six animal people in that room (and two little phantoms), but through
the translucid unpleasant walls I could make out--without looking!--rows and
tiers of dim spectators, with the sense of a sign in my brain meaning
"standing room only" in the language of madness.
We were now sitting at a round clockfaced table (practically
undistinguishable from the one in the Opal Room of my house, west of the
albino Stein), Louise at twelve o'clock, Professor King at two, Mrs. Morgain
at four, Mrs. King in green silk at eight, Audace at ten, and I at six,
presumably, or a minute past, because Louise was not quite opposite, or
maybe she had pushed her chair a sixty-second space closer to Audace
although she had sworn to me on the Social Register as well as on a Who's
Who that he had never made that pass at her somehow suggested by his
magnificent little poem in the Artisan.
Speaking of, ah, yesternights,
I had you, dear, within earshot <176>
of that party downstairs,
on the broad bed of my host
piled with the coats of your guests,
old macks, mock minks,
one striped scarf (mine),
a former flame's furs
(more rabbit than flipperling),
yea, a mountain of winters,
like that upon which flunkeys sprawl
in the vestibule of the Opera,
Canto One of Onegin,
where under the chandeliers
of a full house, you, dear,
should have been the dancer
flying, like fluff, in a decor
of poplars and fountains.
I started to speak in the high, clear, insolent voice (taught me by
Ivor on the beach of Cannice) by which I instilled the fear of Phoebus when
inaugurating a recalcitrant seminar in my first years of teaching at Quirn:
"What I plan to discuss is the curious case of a close friend of mine whom I
shall call--"
Mrs. Morgain set down her glass of whisky and leaned toward me
confidentially: "You know I met little Iris Black in London, around 1919, I
guess. Her father was a business friend of my father, the Ambassador. I was
a starry-eyed American gal. She was a fantastic beauty and most
sophisticated. I remember how thrilled I was later to learn that she had
gone and married a Russian Prince!"
"Fay," cried Louise from twelve to four: "Fay! His Highness is making
his throne speech."
Everyone laughed, and the two bare-thighed Tyrolean children chasing
each other around the table bounced across my knees and were gone again.
<177>
"I shall call this close friend of mine, whose case we are about to
examine, Mr. Twidower, a name with certain connotations, as those of you who
remember the title story in my Exile from Mayda will note."
(Three people, the Kings and Audace, raised three hands, looking at one
another in shared smugness.)
"This person, who is in the mighty middle of life, thinks of marrying a
third time. He is deeply in love with a young woman. Before proposing to
her, however, honesty demands that he confess he is suffering from a certain
ailment. I wish they would stop jolting my chair every time they run by.
`Ailment' is perhaps too strong a term. Let's put it this way: there are
certain flaws, he says, in the mechanism of his mind. The one he told me
about is harmless in itself but very distressing and unusual, and may be a
symptom of some imminent, more serious disorder. So here goes. When this
person is lying in bed and imagining a familiar stretch of street, say, the
right-hand sidewalk from the Library to, say--"
"The Liquor Store," put in King, a relentless wag.
"All right, Recht's Liquor Store. It is about three hundred yards
away--"
I was again interrupted, this time by Louise (whom, in fact, I was
solely addressing). She turned to Audace and informed him that she could
never visualize any distance in yards unless she could divide it by the
length of a bed or a balcony.
"Romantic," said Mrs. King. "Go on, Vadim."
"Three hundred paces away along the same side as the College Library.
Now comes my friend's problem. He can walk in his mind there and back but he
can't perform in his mind the actual about-face that transforms `there' into
`back.' "
"Must call Rome," muttered Louise to Mrs. King, and was about to leave
her seat, but I implored her to hear me <178> out. She resigned herself,
warning me however that she could not understand a word of my peroration.
"Repeat that bit about twisting around in your mind," said King.
"Nobody understood."
"I did," said Audace: "We suppose the Liquor Store happens to be
closed, and Mr. Twidower, who is a friend of mine too, turns on his heel to
go back to the Library. In the reality of life he perfoms this action
without a hitch or hiatus, as simply and unconsciously as we all do, even if
the artist's critical eye does see--A toi, Vadim."
"Does see," I said, accepting the relay-race baton, "that, depending on
the speed of one's revolution, palings and awnings pass counterwise around
you either with the heavy lurch of a merry-go-round or (saluting Audace) in
a single brisk flip like that of the end of a striped scarf (Audace smiled,
acknowledging the Audacianism) that one flings over one's shoulder. But when
one lies immobile in bed and rehearses or rather replays in one's mind the
process of turning, in the manner described, it is not so much the pivotal
swing which is hard to perceive mentally--it is its result, the reversion of
vista, the transformation of direction, that's what one vainly strives to
imagine. Instead of the liquor-store direction smoothly turning into the
opposite one, as it does in the simplicity of waking life, poor Twidower is
baffled--"
I had seen it coming but had hoped that I would be allowed to complete
my sentence. Not at all. With the infinitely slow and silent movement of a
gray tomcat, which he resembled with his bristly whiskers and arched back,
King left his seat. He started to tiptoe, with a glass in each hand, toward
the golden glow of a densely populated sideboard. With a dramatic slap of
both hands against the edge of the table I caused Mrs. Morgain to jump (she
had either dozed off or aged tremendously in the last few minutes) and
stopped old King in his tracks; he silently <179> turned like an automaton
(illustrating my story) and as silently stole back to his seat with the
empty Arabesque glasses.
"The mind, my friend's mind, is baffled, as I was saying, by something
dreadfully strainful and irksome in the machinery of the change from one
position to another, from east to west or west to east, from one damned
nymphet to another--I mean I'm losing the thread of my tale, the zipper of
thought has stuck, this is absurd--"
Absurd and very embarrassing. The two cold-thighed, cheesy-necked
girleens were now engaged in a quarrelsome game as to who should sit on my
left knee, that side of my lap where the honey was, trying to straddle Left
Knee, warbling in Tyrolese and pushing each other off, and cousin Fay kept
bending toward me and saying with a macabre accent: "Elles vous aiment
tant!" Finally I pinched and twisted the nearest buttock, and with a squeal
they resumed their running around, like that eternal little pleasure-park
train, brushing the brambles.
I still could not disentangle my thoughts, but Audace came to my
rescue.
"To conclude," he said (and an audible ouf! was emitted by cruel
Louise), "our patient's trouble concerns not a certain physical act but the
imagining of its performance. All he can do in his mind is omit the
swiveling part altogether and shift from one visual plane to another with
the neutral flash of a slide change in a magic lantern, whereupon he finds
himself facing in a direction which has lost, or rather never contained, the
idea of `oppositeness.' Does anybody wish to comment?"
After the usual pause that follows such offers, John King said: "My
advice to your Mr. Twitter is to dismiss that nonsense once for all. It's
charming nonsense, it's colorful nonsense, but it's also harmful nonsense.
Yes, Jane?" <180>
"My father," said Mrs. King, "a professor of botany, had a rather
endearing quirk: he could memorize historical dates and telephone
numbers--for example our number 9743--only insofar as they contained primes.
In our number he remembered two figures, the second and last, a useless
combination; the other two were only black gaps, missing teeth."
"Oh, that's good," cried Audace, genuinely delighted. I remarked it was
not at all the same thing. My friend's affliction resulted in nausea,
dizziness, kegelkugel headache.
"Well yes, I understand, but my father's quirk also had its side
effects. It was not so much his inability to memorize, say, his house number
in Boston, which was 68 and which he saw every day, but the fact that he
could do nothing about it; that nobody, but nobody could explain why all he
could make out at the far end of his brain was not 68 but a bottomless
hole."
Our host resumed his vanishing act with more deliberation than before.
Audace lidded his empty glass with his palm. Though swine-drunk, I longed
for mine to be refilled, but was bypassed. The walls of the round room had
grown more or less opaque again, God bless them, and the Dolomite Dollies
were no longer around.
"In the days when I longed to be a ballerina," said Louise, "and was
Blanc's little favorite, I always rehearsed exercises in my mind lying in
bed, and had no difficulty whatever in imagining swirls and whirls. It is a
matter of practice, Vadim. Why don't you just roll over in bed when you want
to see yourself walking back to that Library? We must be going now, Fay,
it's past midnight."
Audace glanced at his wristwatch, uttered the exclamation which Time
must be sick of hearing, and thanked me for a wonderful evening. Lady
Morgain's mouth mimicked the pink aperture of an elephant's trunk as it
mutely formed the word "loo" to which Mrs. King, fussily <181> swishing in
green, immediately took her. I remained alone at the round table, then
struggled to my feet, drained the rest of Louise's daiquiri, and joined her
in the hallway.
She had never melted and shivered so nicely in my embrace as she did
now.
"How many quadruped critics," she asked after a tender pause in the
dark garden, "would accuse you...
