Look at the Harlequins! (3 page)

There were nights, of course, when my reason returned at once and I rearranged the curtains and presently slept. But at other, more critical times, when I was far from well yet and would experience that nobleman’s nimbus, it took
me up to several hours to abolish the optical spasm which even the light of day could not overcome. My first night in any new place never fails to be hideous and is followed by a dismal day. I was racked with neuralgia, I was jumpy, and pustulous, and unshaven, and I refused to accompany the Blacks to a seaside party to which I had been, or was told I had been, also invited. In fact, those first days at Villa Iris are so badly distorted in my diary, and so blurred in my mind, that I am not sure if, perhaps, Iris and Ivor were not absent till the middle of the week. I remember, however, that they were kind enough to arrange an appointment for me with a doctor in Cannice. This presented itself as a splendid opportunity to check the incompetence of my London luminary against that of a local one.

The appointment was with Professor Junker, a double personage, consisting of husband and wife. They had been practicing as a team for thirty years now, and every Sunday, in a secluded, though consequently rather dirty, corner of the beach, the two analyzed each other. They were supposed by their patients to be particularly alert on Mondays, but I was not, having got frightfully tight in one or two pubs before reaching the mean quarter where the Junkers and other doctors lived, as I seemed to have gathered. The front entrance was all right being among the flowers and fruit of a market place, but wait till you see the back. I was received by the female partner, a squat old thing wearing trousers, which was delightfully daring in 1922. That theme was continued immediately outside the casement of the WC. (where I had to fill an absurd vial large enough for a doctor’s purpose but not for mine) by the performance that a breeze was giving above a street sufficiently narrow for three pairs of long drawers to cross over on a string in as many strides or leaps. I commented on this and on a stained-glass window in the consulting room featuring a mauve lady exactly similar to the one on the
stairs of Villa Iris. Mrs. Junker asked me if I liked boys or girls, and I looked around saying guardedly that I did not know what she had to offer. She did not laugh. The consultation was not a success. Before diagnosing neuralgia of the jaw, she wanted me to see a dentist when sober. It was right across, she said. I know she rang him up to arrange my visit but do not remember if I went there the same afternoon or the next. His name was Molnar with that
n
like a grain in a cavity; I used him some forty years later in
A Kingdom by the Sea
.

A girl whom I took to be the dentist’s assistant (which, however, she was much too holidayish in dress to be) sat cross-legged talking on the phone in the hallway and merely directed me to a door with the cigarette she was holding without otherwise interrupting her occupation. I found myself in a banal and silent room. The best seats had been taken. A large conventional oil, above a cluttered bookshelf, depicted an alpine torrent with a fallen tree lying across it. From the shelf a few magazines had already wandered at some earlier consultation hour onto an oval table which supported its own modest array of things, such as an empty flower vase and a watch-size
casse-tête
. This was a wee circular labyrinth, with five silvery peas inside that had to be coaxed by judicious turns of the wrist into the center of the helix. For waiting children.

None were present. A corner armchair contained a fat fellow with a nosegay of carnations across his lap. Two elderly ladies were seated on a brown sofa—strangers to each other, if one took into account the urbane interval between them. Leagues away from them, on a cushioned stool, a cultured-looking young man, possibly a novelist, sat holding a small memoranda book in which he kept penciling separate items—possibly the description of various objects his eyes roved over in between notes—the ceiling, the wallpaper, the picture, and the hairy nape of a
man who stood by the window, with his hands clasped behind him, and gazed idly, beyond flapping underwear, beyond the mauve casement of the Junkers’ W.C., beyond the roofs and foothills, at a distant range of mountains where, I idly thought, there still might exist that withered pine bridging the painted torrent.

Presently a door at the end of the room flew open with a laughing sound, and the dentist entered, ruddy-faced, bow-tied, in an ill-fitting suit of festive gray with a rather jaunty black armband. Handshakes and congratulations followed. I started reminding him of our appointment, but a dignified old lady in whom I recognized Madame Junker interrupted me saying it was her mistake. In the meantime Miranda, the daughter of the house whom I had seen a moment ago, inserted the long pale stems of her uncle’s carnations into a tight vase on the table which by now was miraculously draped. A soubrette placed upon it, amid much applause, a great sunset-pink cake with “50” in calligraphic cream. “What a charming attention!” exclaimed the widower. Tea was served and several groups sat down, others stood, glass in hand. I heard Iris warning me in a warm whisper that it was spiced apple juice, not liquor, so with raised hands I recoiled from the tray proffered by Miranda’s fiancé, the person whom I had caught using a spare moment to check certain details of the dowry. “We were not expecting you to turn up,” said Iris, giving the show away, for this could not be the
partie de plaisir
to which I had been invited (“They have a lovely place on a rock”). No, I believe that much of the confused impressions listed here in connection with doctors and dentists must be classed as an oneiric experience during a drunken siesta. This is corroborated scriptorially. Glancing through my oldest notes in pocket diaries, with telephone numbers and names elbowing their way among reports on events, factual or more or less fictional, I
notice that dreams and other distortions of “reality” are written down in a special left-slanted hand—at least in the earlier entries, before I gave up following accepted distinctions. A lot of the pre-Cantabrigian stuff displays that script (but the soldier really did collapse in the path of the fugitive king).

I know I have been called a solemn owl but I do detest practical jokes and am bored stiff (“Only humorless people use that phrase,” according to Ivor) by a constant flow of facetious insults and vulgar puns (“A stiff borer is better than a limp one”—Ivor again). He was a good chap, however, and it was not really respite from his banter that made me welcome his regular week-day absences. He worked in a travel agency run by his Aunt Betty’s former
homme d’affaires
, an eccentric in his own right, who had promised Ivor a bonus in the form of an Icarus phaeton if he was good.

My health and handwriting very soon reverted to normal, and I began to enjoy the South. Iris and I lounged for hours (she wearing a black swimsuit, I flannels and blazer) in the garden, which I preferred at first, before the inevitable seduction of seabathing, to the flesh of the
plage
. I translated for her several short poems by Pushkin and Lermontov, paraphrasing and touching them up for better effect. I told her in dramatic detail of my escape from my country. I mentioned great exiles of old. She listened to me like Desdemona.

“I’d love to learn Russian,” she said with the polite wistfulness which goes with that confession. “My aunt
was practically born in Kiev and at seventy-five still remembered a few Russian and Rumanian words, but I am a rotten linguist. How do you say ‘eucalypt’ in your language?”

“Evkalipt.
”

“Oh, that would make a nice name for a man in a short story. ‘F. Clipton.’ Wells has a ‘Mr. Snooks’ that turns out to derive from ‘Seven Oaks.’ I adore Wells, don’t you?”

I said that he was the greatest romancer and magician of our time, but that I could not stand his sociological stuff.

Nor could she. And did I remember what Stephen said in
The Passionate Friends
when he left the room—the neutral room—where he had been allowed to see his mistress for the very last time?

“I can answer that. The furniture there was slip-covered, and he said, ‘It’s because of the flies.’ ”

“Yes! Isn’t that marvelous! Just blurting out something so as not to cry. It makes one think of the housefly an old Master would paint on a sitter’s hand to show that the person had died in the meantime.”

I said I always preferred the literal meaning of a description to the symbol behind it. She nodded thoughtfully but did not seem convinced.

And who was our favorite modern poet? How about Housman?

I had seen him many times from afar and once, plain. It was in the Trinity Library. He stood holding an open book but looking at the ceiling as if trying to remember something—perhaps, the way another author had translated that line.

She said she would have been “terribly thrilled.” She uttered those words thrusting forward her earnest little face and vibrating it, the face, with its sleek bangs, rapidly.

“You ought to be thrilled
now
! After all, I’m
here
, this is the summer of 1922, this is your brother’s house—”

“It is not,” she said, sidestepping the issue (and at the twist of her speech I felt a sudden overlap in the texture of time as if this had happened before or would happen again); “It is
my
house, Aunt Betty left it to
me
as well as some money, but Ivor is too stupid or proud to let me pay his appalling debts.”

The shadow of my rebuke was more than a shadow. I actually believed even then, in my early twenties, that by mid-century I would be a famous and free author, living in a free, universally respected Russia, on the English quay of the Neva or on one of my splendid estates in the country, and writing there prose and poetry in the infinitely plastic tongue of my ancestors: among them I counted one of Tolstoy’s grand-aunts and two of Pushkin’s boon companions. The forefeel of fame was as heady as the old wines of nostalgia. It was remembrance in reverse, a great lakeside oak reflected so picturesquely in such clear waters that its mirrored branches looked like glorified roots. I felt this future fame in my toes, in the tips of my fingers, in the hair of my head, as one feels the shiver caused by an electric storm, by the dying beauty of a singer’s dark voice just before the thunder, or by one line in
King Lear
. Why do tears blur my glasses when I invoke that phantasm of fame as it tempted and tortured me then, five decades ago? Its image was innocent, its image was genuine, its difference from what actually was to be breaks my heart like the pangs of separation.

No ambition, no honors tainted the fanciful future. The President of the Russian Academy advanced toward me to the sound of slow music with a wreath on the cushion he held—and had to retreat growling as I shook my graying head. I saw myself correcting the page proof of a new novel which was to change the destiny of Russian literary style as a matter of course—
my
course (with no self-love, no smugness, no surprise on my part)—and reworking so much of it in the margin—where inspiration finds its
sweetest clover—that the whole had to be set anew. When the book made its belated appearance, as I gently aged, I might enjoy entertaining a few dear sycophantic friends in the arbor of my favorite manor of Marevo (where I had first “looked at the harlequins”) with its alley of fountains and its shimmering view of a virgin bit of Volgan steppe-land. It
had
to be that way.

From my cold bed in Cambridge I surveyed a whole period of new Russian literature. I looked forward to the refreshing presence of inimical but courteous critics who would chide me in the St. Petersburg literary reviews for my pathological indifference to politics, major ideas in minor minds, and such vital problems as overpopulation in urban centers. No less amusing was it to envisage the inevitable pack of crooks and ninnies abusing the smiling marble, and ill with envy, maddened by their own mediocrity, rushing in pattering hordes to the lemming’s doom but presently all running back from the opposite side of the stage, having missed not only the point of my book but also their rodential Gadara.

The poems I started composing after I met Iris were meant to deal with her actual, unique traits—the way her forehead wrinkled when she raised her eyebrows, waiting for me to see the point of her joke, or the way it developed a totally different set of soft folds as she frowned over the Tauchnitz in which she searched for the passage she wanted to share with me. My instrument, however, was still too blunt and immature; it could not express the divine detail, and
her
eyes,
her
hair became hopelessly generalized in my otherwise well-shaped strophes.

None of those descriptive and, let us be frank, banal pieces, were good enough (particularly when nakedly Englished without rhyme or treason) to be shown to Iris; and, besides, an odd shyness—which I had never felt before when courting a girl in the brisk preliminaries of my carnal youth—kept me back from submitting to Iris a tabulation
of her charms. On the night of July 20, however, I composed a more oblique, more metaphysical little poem which I decided to show her at breakfast in a literal translation that took me longer to write than the original. The title, under which it appeared in an
émigré
daily in Paris (October 8, 1922, after several reminders on my part and one please-return request) was, and is, in the various anthologies and collections that were to reprint it in the course of the next fifty years,
Vlyublyonnost
’, which puts in a golden nutshell what English needs three words to express.