"I do not know if anyone will ever go to Cambridge in search of the
imprints which the teat-cleats on my soccer-boots have left in the black mud
before a gaping goal or follow the shadow of my cap across the quadrangle to my
tutor’s stairs; but I know that I thought of Milton, and Marvell, and Marlowe,
with more than a tourist’s thrill as I passed beside the reverend walls."
— Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory
"Nabokov
was at Cambridge University from 1919 to 1922. He stayed in Trinity College
lodgings. In the early 1980s, that college was a Bastille-like edifice
overlooking a dingy street—Trinity Lane—which was only fleetingly, in my memory
at least, brought into the light of day by wheeling car head-lamps....Nabokov’s
dressing-gowned and sponge-bag carrying shade was not yet a feature of the
place...Today (April 1st, 2005), I see that he had to pass along Trinity Lane
each morning on his way to the Baths (there were no bathrooms in his digs),
eschewing woolly underwear and unmanly overcoats. Nearly thirty years after the
event, his bones, he insists, have not forgotten the bleakness of that walk, nor
its English fatuity.
While at Trinity, Nabokov was distracted by
memories of his lost homeland, its blue snow-freighted firs and humid
lepidopteral summers...Cambridge would make on his life in the artful
reconstructions of his retrospective. (That sentence, by the way, is how I see
him writing his prose, a linear text arcing through space like the line that is
said to link the light of one star to another, finally turning back on itself,
ending not in its beginning but in some tropic verisimilitude of a pig’s tail.
Himself, he likened the trick, or treat, to a spiral.) In his final year, his
father died, murdered by two ‘Russian Fascists’ in Berlin, which perhaps
accounts both for the druggy wistfulness of his memories of punting on the Cam
(‘Now and then, shed by a blossoming tree, a petal would come down, down, down,
and with the odd feeling of seeing something neither worshiper nor casual
spectator ought to see, one would manage to glimpse its reflection which
swiftly—more swiftly than the petal fell—rose to meet it; and, for a fraction of
a second, one feared the trick would not work, that the blessed oil would not
catch fire, that the reflection might miss and the petal float away alone, but
every time the delicate union did take place, with the magic precision of a
poet’s word meeting halfway his, or his reader’s, recollection’) and the
tetchiness of his encounters with a recently Leninised ur-Cannon & ur-Ball,
cunningly pseudonomised and palindromised, in his narrative, as ‘Nisbet’ and
‘Ibsen’.
Nisbet or Ibsen was an English socialist. He thought that Lenin
was a sophisticated patron of the arts, gentling its nervous curiosities with a
horse-whisperer’s hand and promoting its latest trends. Nabokov felt that this
was overstating things somewhat, and blamed Nisbet’s or Ibsen’s credulity on his
English ignorance and lack of discrimination...
Nabokov’s favourite spot appears to have been the
goal-mouth on the football field at St John’s or Christ. Here, he could indulge
his love of goal-keeping, or enjoy the reflection of its attendant glamour—for
goal-keepers, he states periphrastically, were celebrities in the non-Anglophone
world, heroic as matadors and flying aces and much-adulated by small boys. At
the same time, he could nurse in neuralgic solitude the nostalgia that came with
late-night Russian versifying and insomnia. Here, while the game went on...he
could think of himself, not so much as a precursor of the great Lev Yashin, but
as ‘a fabulous exotic being in an English footballer’s disguise, composing verse
in a tongue nobody understood about a remote country nobody knew’.
...Nabokov returned only once to Cambridge, seventeen years later. He
was looking for a job and had decided to meet up with Nisbet or Ibsen who might
prove helpful. Not so. Everything was wrong, out-of-kilter. The February weather
was scaldingly cold, Nisbet or Ibsen was distracted, and the ‘little place’
they’d arranged to meet in had changed.
I’ve returned to Cambridge
several times, always in search of shoes. Ball and Cannon have long moved
on...So, rather like Nabokov, who went for a rainy walk along the Backs, casting
doleful glances at the rooks in the elms and the crocuses in ‘the mist-beaded
turf’, I went off in the drizzle to examine, with very little interest, a new
range of pimple creams and the prophylactics in Boots.
...Nabokov has a
way with words. His prose, with its ability to bring the world, in all its
subtle clunkiness, up against your nose, is all that you could wish for (or, of
course, not, if of too delicate a disposition). Another example, this time from
the piece ‘Mademoiselle O’: Nabokov describes his Swiss governess’s room as
‘reeking, among other effluvia, of the brown smell of oxidised apple peel’. For
me, the trick lies not so much in the crisp synaesthesic image, or the oddly
satisfying pinch of chemical knowledge Nabokov stirs into it, or even in the
suppressed bourgeois history (Mademoiselle first peeling her apple, rather than
biting directly through the skin) he flirts with; it lies in the artless-seeming
placement of the adverbial phrase that precedes it. Amongst other effluvia.
Everybody says something like that (though, of course, not everybody says
‘effluvia’). This is what grounds the image in the rest of the world, and then
releases each into the ether on tenuous cords. Through Nabokov’s closely worked
verbal sensuousness, language finally fulfils Wittgenstein’s logical
prescriptiveness: it not only reveals the world, it is happy to show itself
doing it; and it is that sinuously doubled unfolding that can elude prescription
altogether, hinting at the troublesome perversity of great art. Other examples
might be the evocations of the nymphet’s knee hairs (fine and golden as
watch-springs) in Lolita and what Kinbote thinks of Gradus in Pale Fire.
A story that currently drifts on the scummy surface of memory’s
gradually accelerating millpond is ‘Torpid Smoke’ in which the narrator
observes: ‘it dawned upon me that exactly as I recalled such images of the past
as the way my dead mother had of making a weepy face and clutching her temples
when mealtime squabbles became too loud, so one day I would recall, with
merciless, irreparable sharpness, the hurt look of my father’s shoulders as he
leaned over that torn map, morose, wearing his warm indoor jacket powdered with
ashes and dandruff; and all this mingled creatively with the recent vision of
blue smoke clinging to dead leaves on a wet roof’. Mingled creatively, brothers.
I have already alluded to Despair and a game of chess.
I can’t
let this go without one last citation: the description of reviving a dying fire
in his Trinity digs. Nabokov would spread a sheet of the London Times over the
jaws of the fireplace, making sure no air could enter from the room. This
technique was supposed to ensure a powerful up draught, which would suck air
through the embers, setting the coals alight, and so restoring vigour to a dying
fire. But that is a dull—an offensively dull—evocation. This is what Nabokov
writes: ‘A humming noise would start behind the taut paper, which would acquire
the smoothness of drumskin and the beauty of luminous parchment’. Exactly. I
have seen this too... Nabokov watches an orange spot form in the middle of the
paper and sees how the print that happens to be there take on ‘ominous clarity’.
Then, suddenly, the spot bursts into flame and the sheet whirrs up the chimney
like ‘a liberated phoenix’. .
How does such art work? Why is it that a
single image can occupy the heart and mind more completely than a lover or an
army? And why is it that, when done, when the plunder has been accomplished, and
all the riches of response have been exhausted, it can as completely decamp,
leaving an immense bewildered panic? What will I do? Where will I
go?
Nabokov went to Berlin, then to Paris, then to New York. I went to
London, then to Paris, then to Mexico. In Pale Fire, Kinbote, in the
midst of interpolating into Shade’s epic poem another autobiographical
monstrosity imagines his own shadow and would-be nemesis Gradus,
arch-incompetent and slouching botcher of assassinations, setting out on a
transatlantic journey in search of a crowning kill. At the book’s end, Gradus
makes it to Kinbote’s Arcadian North American fastness but only succeeds in
shooting, with his customary ineptitude, the wrong man. In the same way, let me
conclude by imagining a missile, this time fired by an older version of myself
from another remote country, or its semblance, which then falls invisibly from
the dull grey heavens, to burst through and demolish, accompanied by a shower of
dust and mouse-droppings, the roof-tiles of this, my own house of cards.
Posted by Piers Smith