Look at the Harlequins! Vladimir Nabokov
To Véra
Look at the Harlequins!
PART ONE
1
I met the first of my three or four successive wives in somewhat odd circumstances, the development of which resembled a clumsy conspiracy, with nonsensical details and a main plotter who not only knew nothing of its real object but insisted on making inept moves that seemed to preclude the slightest possibility of success. Yet out of those very mistakes he unwittingly wove a web, in which a set of reciprocal blunders on my part caused me to get involved and fulfill the destiny that was the only aim of the plot.
Some time during the Easter Term of my last Cambridge year (1922) I happened to be consulted, «as a Russian,» on certain niceties of make-up in an English version of Gogol’s Inspector which the Glowworm Group, directed by Ivor Black, a fine amateur actor, intended to stage. He and I had the same tutor at Trinity, and he drove me to distraction with his tedious miming of the old man’s mincing ways—a performance he kept up throughout most of our lunch at the Pitt. The brief business part turned out to be even less pleasant. Ivor Black wanted Gogol’s Town Mayor to wear a dressing gown because «wasn’t it merely the old rascal’s nightmare and didn’t Revizor, its Russian title, actually come from the French for `dream,’ rйve?» I said I thought it a ghastly idea.
If there were any rehearsals, they took place without me. In fact, it occurs to me now that I do not really know if his project ever saw the footlights.
Shortly after that, I met Ivor Black a second time—at some party or other, in the course of which he invited me and five other men to spend the summer at a Cтte d’Azur villa he had just inherited, he said, from an old aunt. He was very drunk at the moment and seemed surprised when a week or so later on the eve of his departure I reminded him of his exuberant invitation, which, it so happened, I alone had accepted. We both were unpopular orphans, and should, I remarked, band together.
Illness detained me in England for another month and it was only at the beginning of July that I sent Ivor Black a polite postcard advising him that I might arrive in Cannes or Nice some time next week. I am virtually sure I mentioned Saturday afternoon as the likeliest date.
Attempts to telephone from the station proved futile: the line remained busy, and I am not one to persevere in a struggle with faulty abstractions of space. But my afternoon was poisoned, and the afternoon is my favorite item of time. I had been coaxing myself into believing, at the start of my long journey, that I felt fairly fit; by now I felt terrible. The day was
unseasonably dull and damp. Palm trees are all right only in mirages. For some reason, taxis, as in a bad dream, were unobtainable. Finally I boarded a small smelly bus of blue tin. Up a winding road, with as many turns as «stops by request,» the contraption reached my destination in twenty minutes—about as long as it would have taken me to get there on foot from the coast by using an easy shortcut that I was to learn by heart, stone by stone, broom by brush, in the course of that magic summer.
It appeared anything but magic during that dismal drive! The main reason I had agreed to come was the hope of treating in the «brillant brine» (Bennett? Barbellion?) a nervous complaint that skirted insanity. The left side of my head was now a bowling alley of pain. On the other side an inane baby was staring at me across its mother’s shoulder over the back of the seat in front of me. I sat next to a warty woman in solid black and pitted nausea against the lurches between green sea and gray rockwall. By the time we finally made it to the village of Carnavaux (mottled plane trunks, picturesque hovels, a post office, a church) all my senses had converged into one golden image; the bottle of whisky which I was bringing Ivor in my portmanteau and which I swore to sample even before he glimpsed it. The driver ignored the question I put to him, but a tortoise-like little priest with tremendous feet who was getting off before me indicated, without looking at me, a transverse avenue. The Villa Iris, he said, was at three minutes of march.
As I prepared to carry my two bags up that lane toward a triangle of sudden sunlight my presumptive host appeared on the opposite pavement. I remember—after the passing of half a century!—that I wondered fleetingly if I had packed the right clothes. He wore plus fours and brogues but was incongruously stockingless, and the inch of shin he showed looked painfully pink. He was heading, or feigned to be heading, for the post office to send me a telegram suggesting I put off my visit till August when a job he now had in Cannice would no longer threaten to interfere with our frolics. He hoped, furthermore, that Sebastian—whoever that was—might still be coming for the grape season or lavender gala. Muttering thus under his breath, he relieved me of the smaller of my bags—the one with the toilet things, medical supplies, and an almost finished garland of sonnets (which would eventually go to a Russian émigré magazine in Paris). Then he also grabbed my portmanteau that I had set down in order to fill my pipe. Such lavishness in the registration of trivialities is due, I suppose, to their being accidentally caught in the advance light of a great event. Ivor broke the silence to add, frowning, that he was delighted to welcome me as a house guest, but that he should warn me of something he ought to have told me about in Cambridge. I might get frightfully bored by the end of a week or so because of one melancholy fact. Miss Grunt, his former governess, a heartless but clever person, liked to repeat that his little sister would never break the rule of «children should not be heard» and, indeed would never hear it said to anybody. The melancholy fact was that his sister—but, perhaps, he had better postpone the explanation of her case till we and the bags were installed more or less.
2
«What kind of childhood did you have, McNab» (as Ivor insisted on calling me because I looked, he thought, like the haggard yet handsome young actor who adopted that name in the last years of his life or at least fame)? Atrocious, intolerable. There should be a natural, internatural, law against such inhuman beginnings. Had my morbid terrors not been replaced at the age of nine or ten by more abstract and trite anxieties (problems of infinity, eternity, identity, and so forth), I would have lost my reason long before finding my rhymes. It was not a matter of dark rooms, or one-winged agonizing angels, or long corridors, or nightmare mirrors with reflections overflowing in messy pools on the floor—it was not that bedchamber of horrors, but simply, and far more horribly, a certain insidious and relentless connection with other states of being which were not exactly «previous» or «future,» but definitely out of bounds, mortally speaking. I was to learn more, much more about those aching links only several decades later, so «let us not anticipate» as the condemned man said
when rejecting the filthy old blindfold.
The delights of puberty granted me temporary relief. I was spared the morose phase of self-initiation. Blest be my first sweet love, a child in an orchard, games of exploration—and her outspread five fingers dripping with pearls of surprise. A house tutor let me share with him the ingиnue in my grand-uncle’s private theater. Two lewd young ladies rigged me up once in a lacy chemise and a Lorelei wig and laid me to sleep between them, «a shy little cousin,» as in a ribald novella, while their husbands snored in the next room after the boar hunt. The great houses of various relatives with whom I dwelt on and off in my early teens under the pale summer skies of this or that province of old Russia offered me as many compliant handmaids and fashionable flirts as might have done closets and bowers a couple of centuries earlier. In a word, if the years of my infancy might have provided the subject for the kind of learned thesis upon which a paedopsychologist founds a lifetime of fame, my teens, on the other hand, could have yielded, and in fact did yield, quite a number of erotic passages scattered like rotting plums and brown pears throughout an aging novelist’s books. Indeed, the present memoir derives much of its value from its being a catalogue raisonnи of the roots and origins and amusing birth canals of many images in my Russian and especially English fiction.
I saw my parents infrequently. They divorced and remarried and redivorced at such a rapid rate that had the custodians of my fortune been less alert, I might have been auctioned out finally to a pair of strangers of Swedish or Scottish descent, with sad bags under hungry eyes. An extraordinary grand-aunt, Baroness Bredow, born Tolstoy, amply replaced closer blood. As a child of seven or eight, already harboring the secrets of a confirmed madman, I seemed even to her (who also was far from normal) unduly sulky and indolent; actually, of course, I kept daydreaming in
