Stalking Nabokov (72 page)

But Nabokov’s openings are still more extraordinary, from “In the second place, because he was possessed by a mad hankering after Russia” (“The Circle”) to “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins,” to the parodic mistranslation and reversal of Tolstoy’s famous first sentence of
Anna Karenina
in the first sentence of
Ada
, to the bizarre address from a dead narrator to a living character at the start of
Transparent Things
: “Here’s the person I want. Hullo, person. Doesn’t hear me” (
TT
1).

And here’s the opening sentence of
The Original of Laura
: “Her husband, she answered, was a writer, too—at least, after a fashion” (1). After those other famous first lines, what is it that strikes me as just as remarkable about this succession of individually unremarkable words?

Let me unpack my pleasure. The first word, “Her,” a third-person possessive pronoun, already implies a female possessor we do not know and cannot identify as the narrator. “She” comes along at the third word, but she remains unidentified.

Over the last couple of centuries, fiction has tended to shorten exposition and even to begin in medias res. For that reason, direct speech as a more immediate and dramatic entry has become increasingly common in twentieth-century fiction. But indirect speech implies a narrator doing the reporting, and usually follows the narrator’s establishment of the character’s identity. Here we have neither the identity of the character nor the confident establishment of the narrator. Over the next few sentences the volubility of the still-unnamed woman continues to hold the narrator at bay.

As Tadashi Wakashima has also explained, we can infer what provokes “her” response: a preceding “I am a writer.”
³
“She” then answers: “My husband is a writer, too—at least, after a fashion.” Later in the long first paragraph we discover that “she” is Flora, that she is at a party, that she is drunk, that she “wished to be taken home or preferably to some cool quiet place with a clean bed and room service.” Within another paragraph she has been offered and has eagerly accepted the apartment of friends and has begun to undress there to make love with someone whom she has picked up at the party, someone whom we cannot see clearly. As the lovemaking scene enfolds us and unfolds itself, we recognize Flora’s sexual partner as the narrator, yet we also see that he avoids identifying or describing himself or reporting his actions as his, by dint of referring to them only through nonfinite verbs. The narrator, we infer, is the writer whom Flora has just met at the party, when she is already drunk, when she has asked what he does, when he has replied, and when she in turn answers, in the opening line of the novel. There she refers disparagingly to her husband—the very husband this new lover will return her to late in the chapter, after dawn, to add another rank flower to his “anthology of humiliation.” She refers to her husband’s being a writer, a profession she casually insults four short sentences later, despite being already in the process of picking up this other self-effacing writer—who in writing this very scene, in these very words, in his roman à clef
My Laura
, has his revenge on her heartlessness.

No one has ever packed so much story into the choice of the opening word (“Her”), the opening mode (indirect speech), and the opening declaration and its antecedents and consequences in terms of narrative action, narrative voice, and narrative aim. At the same time as he manages all this, Nabokov also shows the narrator
effacing
himself and
deleting
Flora as he portrays her (before killing her off fictively later in
My Laura
) mentioning her husband as “a writer of sorts,” whose “mysterious manuscript” itself recounts how he
erases
himself, in another doomed attempt at transcending, or expunging, the self.

After reading Martin Amis’s negative review of
The Original of Laura
on the day we were to appear in New York on the eve of the novel’s publication, I gave him to read the printout of a review I had written for publication later that week. Handing it back, he had to say he disagreed with my claim that the opening shows Nabokov “at the peak of his powers.” I stand by, and I can now explain, my claim.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1
.   Cornell Lepidoptera Collection, Cornell University.

2
.   Page numbers for
Lolita
are to the first edition of
The Annotesed Lolita
, ed. Alfred Appel Jr. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), whose page numbers are the same as the first U.S. edition (New York: Putnam, 1958). Page numbers of the 1989 edition (New York: Vintage) and the second edition of
The Annotated Lolita
(New York: Vintage, 1991) are always two less than the pages of these other editions.

3
.   See also Paisley Livingston,
Art and Intention
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Peter Swirski,
Literature, Analytically Speaking: Explorations in the Theory of Interpretation, Analytic Aesthetics, and Evolution
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010); and
Of Literature and Knowledge: Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments, Evolution, and Game Theory
(New York and London: Routledge, 2007).

4
.   VN to Roman Grynberg, 19 January 1957, VNA.

1. A CENTENNIAL TOAST

1
.   On the wall behind the high table stood a copy of the Holbein portrait of Henry VIII, founder of Trinity College, in doublet and hose.

2
.   Letter from John C. Downey to Kurt Johnson, 1997, private collection.

3
.   Zsolt Bálint and Kurt Johnson had been working together for a decade on the Latin American Blues, which Nabokov revised in a prescient paper of 1945. Although they had coauthored many papers and had named scores of butterflies after Nabokovian characters and places, they had met only the day before attending this memorial evening at New York’s Town Hall. For a study of the context and consequences of Nabokov’s 1945 paper, see Kurt Johnson and Steven L. Coates,
Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius
(Cambridge, Mass.: Zoland Books, 1999). The naming of newly discovered Latin American Blues in honor of Nabokov continues as I proofread this book in January 2011.

4
.   
CE
217: “His best works are those in which he condemns his people to the solitary confinement of their souls”;
SM
20: “Initially, I was unaware that time, so boundless at first blush, was a prison.”

5
.   The patterns include the winged imagery that Shade weaves covertly into the poem, including the
Vanessa atalanta
, also with a red streak on its wing; the anticipation by Shade of the “azure” reflections in a puddle outside the bar on Hazel’s last night; the homage by Shade to his parents, after whom a waxwing has been named; the “slain”-“pane” rhyme that permeates and punctuates Shade’s poem; the color blue running through the novel, not least in “blue inenubilable Zembla”; the reflections, including Zembla as a “land of reflections”; the glass (glass pane, glass pain) imagery associated with Gradus; the winged imagery repeatedly flapping around Gradus; the “shadow” of a creature killed against glass and Gradus’s being chosen to kill Charles II in a meeting of the Shadows, at the Onhava Glassworks, at the very moment this line is set down; the flight into the side of a building that results in death for Alfin, Charles II’s father; the butterfly Blues (Icarus, implicit in the “waxwing,” is the Common Blue,
Icaricia icarioides
, a genus named by Nabokov; the Azures are a subgroup of the Blues). For more on these patterns and their implications, see my
NPFMAD
.

6
.   Samuel Beckett,
Murphy
, in
Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition
, ed. Paul Auster, Vol. 1:
Novels
(New York: Grove, 2006), 4.

7
.   VN to Elena Ivanovna Nabokov, November 25, 1921, Elena Sikorski Collection.

2. A BIOGRAPHER’S LIFE

1
.   Peter Medawar, BBC Radio 3, July 28, 1972, cited in Bryan Magee,
Popper
(London: Fontana, 1973), 9.

2
.   Andrew Field,
Nabokov: A Bibliography
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973).

3
.   Andrew Field,
Nabokov: His Life in Part
(New York: Viking, 1977).

3. WHO IS “MY NABOKOV”?

1
.   See his comments on Proust in
chapter 14
of this volume, and his contrast of three perspectives on a patch of countryside in
chapter 24
.

2
.   See “Books,”
Time
, May 23, 1969, 48–49, available from
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,900891,00.html
.

3
.   
The Nabokovian
, 1993–;
Ada
Online,
http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/
.

4. THE NABOKOV BIOGRAPHY AND THE NABOKOV ARCHIVE

1
.   MS of
LRL
, VNA.

2
.   Published in
Rul’
, June 24, 1923, rept., Nabokov,
Stikhi
(Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1979), 106–7.

3
.   On becoming dissatisfied with the title
Conclusive Evidence
, Nabokov had wanted to call his autobiography
Speak, Mnemosyne
, after Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, mother of the muses, and after the butterfly
Parnassius mnemosyne
, which he used to catch near his summer estate.
Look at the Harlequins!
repeats not only
Speak, Memory’
s imperative but also its oblique butterfly: harlequin is the popular name for a number of butterfly species.

4
.   Writing of himself in the third person, Nabokov declares that “his best works are those in which he condemns his people to the solitary confinement of their souls” (
CE
217).

5
.   A later reflection: in this tribute to Véra as reader Nabokov seems to be endorsing in advance the thesis of Stephen Blackwell’s fine
Zina’s Paradox: The Figured Reader in Nabokov’s
Gift (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), which proposes that Fyodor shapes the novel to position Zina, by now his wife, as his ideal reader.

6
.   Julian Moynahan, “Cards of Identity,” review of Andrew Field,
Nabokov: His
Life in Art
,
Partisan Review
(Summer 1968): 487.

7
.   Julian Moynahan, “Lolita and Related Memories,”
Triquarterly
17 (1970): 251.

5. FROM THE NABOKOV ARCHIVE: NABOKOV’S LITERARY LEGACY

1
.   Nabokov, “Professor Woodbridge in an Essay on Nature Postulates the Reality of the World,”
New York Sun
, December 10, 1940, 15.

2
.   Nabokov, interview with George Feifer.

3
.   Unpublished lecture notes, VNA.

4
.   David Sexton, review of
VNAY
,
Sunday Telegraph
, January 5, 1992.

5
.   Roger Vila, Charles D. Bell, Richard McNiven, Benjamin Goldman-Huertas, Richard H. Ree, Charles R. Marshall, Zsolt Bálint, Kurt Johnson, Dubi Benyamini, and Naomi E. Pierce, “Phylogeny and Palaeocology of
Polyommatus
Blue Butterflies Show Beringia Was a Climate-Regulated Gateway to the New World,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society B
(2011): 1–8, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2010.2213. See this volume,
chapter 8
, for more information on this research.

6
.   Nabokov,
Poems and Problems
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1971), 147.

7
.   Nabokov,
Stikhotvoreniya
, ed. Maria Malikova (St. Petersburg: Akademiches kiy Proekt, 2002);
Sobranie sochineniy russkogo perioda
, 5 vols. (St. Petersburg: Symposium, 1999–2000),
Sobranie sochineniy amerikanskogo perioda
, 5 vols. (St. Petersburg: Symposium, 1999);
Tragediya gospodina Morna, P’esy, Lektsii o drame
, ed. Andrey Babikov (St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2008).

6. RETROSPECTS AND PROSPECTS

1
.   D. Barton Johnson,
Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov
(Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1985); Pekka Tammi,
Problems of Nabokov’s Poetics
(Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1985); Sergey Davydov,
Teksty-Matryoshki Vladimira Nabokova
(Munich: Otto Sagner, 1982).

2
.   “Nabokov and
Ada
,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1979; “Nabokov’s Philosophical World,”
Southern Review
14 (November 1981): 260–301;
NAPC
, chapters 4–5. In 1977 I sent what became chapters 1 through 5 of
NAPC
to Carl Proffer of Ardis, who sent a copy on to Véra Nabokov.

3
.   Nabokov,
Stikhi
(Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1979), 3.

4
.   Dana Dragunoiu,
Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Liberalism
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2011).

5
.   Vladimir E. Alexandrov,
Nabokov’s Otherworld
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991).