Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (50 page)

As if in response, for his next novel,
Look at the Harlequins!
, Nabokov turned to yet another mad narrator and the conflicting biographies that can exist for one person. Not surprisingly, the narrator Nabokov chose was a man very much like him—Vadim Vadimovich, a Russian exile and writer.

Fragments of the narrator’s life are fed back to him in strange form—others seem to know a good deal of information about someone they take him to be but whom he does not recognize as himself. But rather than making the supporting characters completely off-base in their descriptions about the narrator, Nabokov often gives them ammunition from his own life.

Vadim Vadimovich sees himself as distinct from the person that the characters in the book believe him to be, but those characters, with striking consistency, know
our
Nabokov. A bookstore owner recalls that the narrator attended operas with his brother and father, an illustrious member of the First Duma with an Anglophilic manner of speaking. But the mentally ill Vadim Vadimovich is spared the painful memories that Nabokov had about his own father—he maintains that the brother, the father, the opera, the Duma, none of it had anything to do with him. His father, he explains, died six months before his birth.
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The novel touches on bits of Nabokov’s plots and themes, pointing to a scattershot series of possibilities readers had missed in previous books, and showing that earlier hints he had dropped still preoccupied him decades later. In a nod to
Lolita
, the Russian narrator is
accused of betraying his genius and his country to write obscene stories about a little girl raped by a man who, he notes, tucked in among other things, may be “some Austrian Jew.”
²⁸
Twenty years on, Nabokov was still directing readers to details in
Lolita
that had not been explored.

On the same page, readers learn from the same character that two other people in the book—a couple living in the Soviet Union—were separated for years when one of them was sentenced to labor camps and psychiatric treatment for his “mystical mania.”
²⁹
The lovers, still wildly infatuated with each other, are reunited in the end, when the patient is “cured” and released. No one recognized this brief subplot in a late and minor Nabokov novel as an echo of an earlier storyline and a way to untangle the shattered wonderworld that is
Ada
.

The self-referential madness of the narrator crashes again and again against the rocks of Nabokov’s preoccupations from his own life and century. The gentle Jewish-Russian bookseller, with his tender memories of
our
Nabokov’s father, later dies trying to escape “in bloodstained underwear from the ‘experimental hospital’ of a Nazi concentration camp.”
³⁰
Near the close of the book, the narrator survives a clandestine re-entry into the Soviet Union, a quest another Nabokov character had embarked on four decades earlier.

If Nabokov meant these roundabout references as clues to the things readers had not yet found in his work, why did he conceal material that was important to him so deeply in the first place? If he was bearing witness to the atrocities of his century, what could be gained from this stealth method?

During his years as a professor, Nabokov himself had spoken on how to approach works of genius:

Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain—the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart,
squashed—then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.
³¹

In Nabokov’s universe, art which does not challenge, which does not draw blood, is not art. Out of the relics of tragedy, he created literature which calls on readers to examine not just history but also their own assumptions in their own place and time. But only by diving deep into the heart of his books, only by earning their secrets, is it possible to understand the most profound aspects of what he had expressed.

Near the end, perhaps because he did not know if some connections would ever be made, Nabokov let some tricks tumble out of his sleeves. But still he waited for readers to meet him halfway—he did not strip his art entirely of its deceptions. He repudiated the story Field had created from his life, but he did not have long left to fashion whatever he had left to say himself.
Look at the Harlequins!
was the last novel he would finish before his death.

An endless authorial loop of reflection and masks is appropriate as a final novel for Nabokov’s last years. Field noted later that Nabokov seemed occasionally to get lost in the many versions of himself he had created for his life and his books, to a degree that he may have ended up unsure whether or not any given statement was made in earnest. This was particularly apparent in Nabokov’s tendency to describe Edmund Wilson as a very old friend, “in certain ways my closest.”
³²
He used the same line repeatedly in a stylized bit of theater after which he would eye the recipient of the comment knowingly.

But for all the façade behind which he alternately hid and revealed himself, Nabokov seems to have missed the friendship with Wilson deeply. Years after his dream of a reunion, at a point when both friends had become very old men recording lists of illnesses in their journals, Nabokov wrote to Wilson after hearing he was sick. Saying that he had reread the whole of their long correspondence, Nabokov noted “the warmth of your many kindnesses, the various thrills of our friendship, the constant excitement of art and intellectual discovery.” He wanted his friend to know that he did not bear a grudge, and no longer held Wilson’s “incomprehensible incomprehension of Pushkin’s and Nabokov’s
Onegin
” against him.
³³

Wilson responded immediately with a note saying he would correct his own
Onegin
mistakes and point out more of Nabokov’s errors in a forthcoming volume on his Russian articles. He related that he had, in fact, had a stroke and now had trouble using his right hand. Warning Nabokov of another volume coming out which would revisit his 1957 trip to the Nabokovs’ home in Ithaca, Wilson hoped it would not further crimp relations between them. Despite the warmth of Nabokov’s letter and Wilson’s polite reply, after mailing his letter back to Nabokov, Wilson shared his feelings about Nabokov in a letter to a friend, writing about how “it always makes (Nabokov) cheerful to think that his friends are in bad shape.”
³⁴

Upstate
, Wilson’s account of his trip to Ithaca, came out later in 1971. The book provided vivid details with much interpretation by Wilson. Nabokov, he suggested, had triumphed despite “miseries, horrors, and handicaps” that “would have degraded or broken many.” He described drinking and exchanging erotic and pornographic literature with Nabokov during his visit. He wrote that Véra seemed to begrudge attention to anyone but her husband, and suggested that Nabokov had suffered humiliation due to some unfathomable combination of not being accepted by the real Russian nobility and because of his father’s assassination. Wilson also observed, perhaps more acutely, that Nabokov “has his characters at his mercy and at the same time subjects them to torments and identifies himself with them.”
³⁵

Infuriated by Wilson’s description of the visit, Nabokov wrote to the editor of
The New York Times Book Review
suggesting that if he had known Wilson’s thoughts at the time, he would have thrown him out of the house. The torments Wilson claimed Nabokov had suffered were “mostly figments of (Wilson’s) warped fancy.” Wilson had not lived Nabokov’s life (true enough) and had never read Nabokov’s autobiography (not true). Nabokov explained that
Speak, Memory
had detailed one long happy exile starting almost from birth—an interesting description of a book containing a line about “the things and beings” he loved most being “turned to ashes or shot through the heart.” In the interest of compassion, Nabokov noted that he would like to disregard statements made by an ailing “former friend,” but Wilson’s insults were a matter of “personal honor.”
³⁶

Mutual friends once again took sides. Nabokov had his partisans, but so, too, did Wilson. Katharine White, Nabokov’s former editor at
The New Yorker
, wrote to Wilson wondering what had happened to the Nabokov they had once known. Tut-tutting the idea of Nabokov’s honor being sullied, she described her sadness at seeing “how an overwhelming ego like his and worldwide success can change a man’s personality so shockingly.”
³⁷

The following spring Nabokov wrote again to the editor of the
Book Review
commenting on the feud, but Wilson had fallen into a precipitous decline. Early in May he had another stroke, and made his way back to his childhood home, where the Nabokovs had visited him in 1955. In his last days he sneaked off to a theater to watch
The Godfather
. With an oxygen tank and a phone for emergencies, he stayed focused on his next projects—more of his diaries awaiting publication, planned revised editions, and new writing.
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Sitting in his pajamas with his back to the corner and a view through the sheer curtains, he worked with his papers and pills laid out on a long table, his wispy hair splayed into a crown of feathers. By mid-June, he was dead.

But Wilson was not through with Nabokov. In A
Window on Russia
, which came out that fall, Wilson took on the writings of Vladimir
Nabokov as a whole for the first time. There is not much to the entry in terms of insight. He finds
Bend Sinister
sadomasochistic and admits his inability to finish
Ada
, but interestingly contrasts “one of Solzhenitsyn’s camps from which there can be no escape” with Nabokov allowing a character to escape prison and death.
³⁹

In another posthumous book, the revised edition of
To the Finland Station
published that August, Wilson finally gave ground on the history that had been the first bone of contention with Nabokov. “I have … been charged with having given a much too amiable picture of Lenin,” he says in the new introduction, “and I believe that this criticism has been made not without some justification.”
⁴⁰
He makes some excuses as to why the original version of the book had unfolded as it had, but then proceeds to acknowledge in a few pages the much more complicated character of Lenin.

It was not to Nabokov’s advantage to spar with Wilson’s ghost. A lukewarm survey of Nabokov’s writing could not touch him; he had trumped Wilson in the literary pantheon. But two years later, discussing a collaborative plan to publish the Wilson-Nabokov letters, he wrote Elena Wilson saying, “I need not tell you what agony it was rereading the exchanges belonging to the early radiant era of our correspondence.”
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Despite their many differences, the two men had not always disagreed. Even in their final private exchange, they had come to consensus on the matter of a celebrated author whom both found personally remarkable but uninspiring from a literary standpoint: Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In his last letter addressed to the Montreux Palace, Wilson wrote that perhaps these shortcomings were not surprising: “after all he has nothing to tell but his story of illness and imprisonment.”
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Wilson’s indictment is striking, because Solzhenitsyn was wrestling so directly with the intersection between literature and history, and Wilson had committed himself to the creation of a calculus that
could describe that region. But his words had little effect; by the time he dismissed Solzhenitsyn, Wilson was no longer a kingmaker in American literary circles, and Stockholm had awarded the novelist of the camps the Nobel Prize for Literature.

It had been a long five years for Solzhenitsyn between the loss of his archive to the KGB and the capture of the Nobel Prize. He had spent months stunned and depressed over what he felt to be this “greatest misfortune” of his life—a more significant blow than even his years in the camps.
⁴³
He chastised himself for losing all the survival skills that had preserved him through so much danger. When he was ready to unleash all the history he had collected all on the world, he reasoned, it would be different, but to be caught
now
, after so many had risked so much to tell him their stories, and then to know that perhaps those stories would never be told, and his countrymen would never be forced to come to terms with “the millions whose last whisper, last moan, had been cut short on some hut floor in some prison camp” was devastating. For a time, he had considered suicide.
⁴⁴

In the end, Solzhenitsyn had decided to adopt as public a profile as possible, in the hopes that high visibility would make it more difficult to silence him. At the same time, however, he refused to associate himself with any movement that might jeopardize his historic and literary missions. Like Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn was not a joiner. Even in the case of two dissidents convicted for the statements of their
fictional
characters—writers who had been arrested just as his archive had been seized—Solzhenitsyn would not sign a letter calling for the men’s release.
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