Laurence Hochard refers
to Michaël Wood's article on Nabokov:... "He says in a letter to his wife, rather oddly, that
'I myself don't fully
register all the grief and bitterness of my situation." "I don't think
anyone who hasn't experienced these feelings can properly appreciate them,
the torment, the tragedy." The
implication, clearly, is that a writer
cannot have two languages, ..." ahd he
adds: " ... as a man cannot have two
loves/ V quotes Sebastian Knight's
Lost Property quoting a love letter to a woman misdirected to a firm of
traders (and which never reached its destination because of a plane crash) The
anonymous author of the love letter experiences the same grief at leaving his
love for another woman as VN at leaving Russian for another
language.
"I cannot help feeling
there is something essentially wrong about love.
Friends may quarrel or drift apart, close relations too, but there is not
this pang, this pathos, this fatality which clings to love ... Why, what is the matter?
What is this mysterious exclusiveness? ... One may have a thousand friends but only one love-mate
... For if I say 'two', I have started to
count and there is no end to it. There is only one real number: One. And
love, apparently, is
the best exponent of this singularity." (ch
12)
Jansy Mello: L.Hochard must have located the source for Michael Wood's
conclusion about a (good) writer's impossibility to "have two
languages" by connecting it to certain lines in RLSK and the singularity of
love... L. Hochard's juxtaposition almost extracts Sebastian's musings
from their fictional dimension, thus adding credibility and
weight to Nabokov's love relation to one language.I expect
that this kind of fidelity is part of what, somewhere else,
Nabokov has written about his "serial souls."*
...........................................................................
* "'Good-bye, my poor love. I shall never forget you and never replace you.
It would be absurd of me to try and persuade you that you were the pure love,
and that this other passion is but a comedy of the flesh. All is flesh and all
is purity."