This is the description of a novel written almost forty-five years ago and probably forgotten by the general public. I have never reread it because I reread (je relis, perechityvayu—I’m teasing an adorable mistress!) only the page proofs of my paperbacks; and for reasons which, I am sure, J. Lodge finds judicious, the thing is still in its hard-cover instar. But in rosy retrospect I feel it as a pleasurable event, and have completely dissociated it in my mind from the terrors and torments that attended the writing of that rather lightweight little satire.
Actually, its composition, despite the pleasure (maybe also noxious) that the iridescent bubbles in my alembics gave me after a night of inspiration, trial, and triumph (look at the harlequins, everybody look—Iris, Annette, Bel, Louise, and you, you, my ultimate and immortal one!), almost led to the dementia paralytica that I feared since youth.
In the world of athletic games there has never been, I think, a World Champion of Lawn Tennis and Ski; yet in two Literatures, as dissimilar as grass and snow, I have been the first to achieve that kind of feat. I do not know (being a complete non-athlete, whom the sports pages of a newspaper bore almost as much as does its kitchen section) what physical stress may be involved in serving one day a sequence of thirty-six aces at sea level and on the next soaring from a ski jump 136 meters through bright mountain air. Colossal, no doubt, and, perhaps, inconceivable. But I have managed to transcend the rack and the wrench of literary metamorphosis.
We think in images, not in words; all right; when, however, we compose, recall, or refashion at midnight in our brain something we wish to say in tomorrow’s sermon, or have said to Dolly in a recent dream, or wish we had said to that impertinent proctor twenty years ago, the images we think in are, of course, verbal—and even audible if we happen to be lonely and old. We do not usually think in words, since most of life is mimodrama, but we certainly do imagine words when we need them, just as we imagine everything else capable of being perceived in this, or even in a still more unlikely, world. The book in my mind appeared at first, under my right cheek (I sleep on my non-cardial side), as a varicolored procession with a head and a tail, winding in a general western direction through an attentive town. The children among you and all my old selves on their thresholds were being promised a stunning show. I then saw the show in full detail with every scene in its place, every trapeze in the stars. Yet it was not a masque, not a circus, but a bound book, a short novel in a tongue as far removed as Thracian or Pahlavi from the fata-morganic prose that I had willed into being in the desert of exile. An upsurge of nausea overcame me at the thought of imagining a hundred-thousand adequate words and I switched on the light and called to Annette in the adjacent bedroom to give me one of my strictly rationed tablets.
The evolution of my English, like that of birds, had had its ups and downs. A beloved Cockney nurse had looked after me from 1900 (when I was one year old) to 1903. She was followed by a succession of three English governesses (1903-1906, 1907-1909, and November, 1909, to Christmas of the same year) whom I see over the shoulder of time as representing,
mythologically, Didactic Prose, Dramatic Poetry, and the Erotic Idyll. My grand-aunt, a dear person with uncommonly liberal views, gave in, however, to domestic considerations, and discharged Cherry Neaple, my last shepherdess. After an interlude of Russian and French pedagogy, two English tutors more or less succeeded each other between 1912 and 1916, rather comically overlapping in the spring of 1914 when they competed for the favors of a young village beauty who had been my girl in the first place. English fairy tales had been replaced around 1910 by the B.O.P., immediately followed by all the Tauchnitz volumes that had accumulated in the family libraries. Throughout adolescence I read, in pairs, and both with the same rich thrill, Othello and Onegin, Tyutchev and Tennyson, Browning and Blok. During my three Cambridge years (1919-1922) and thereafter, till April 23, 1930, my domestic tongue remained English, while the body of my own Russian works started to grow and was soon to disorb my household gods.
So far so good. But the phrase itself is a glib clichи; and the question confronting me in Paris, in the late Thirties, was precisely could I fight off the formula and rip up the ready-made, and switch from my glorious self-developed Russian, not to the dead leaden English of the high seas with dummies in sailor suits, but an English I alone would be responsible for, in all its new ripples and changing light?
I daresay the description of my literary troubles will be skipped by the common reader; yet for my sake, rather than his, I wish to dwell mercilessly on a situation that was bad enough before I left Europe but almost killed me during the crossing.
Russian and English had existed for years in my mind as two worlds detached from one another. (It is only today that some interspatial contact has been established: «A knowledge of Russian,» writes George Oakwood in his astute essay on my Ardis, 1970, «will help you to relish much of the wordplay in the most English of the author’s English novels; consider for instance this: The champ and the chimp came all the way from Omsk to Neochomsk.' What a delightful link between a real round place andni-o-chyom,’ the About-Nothing land of modern philosophic linguistics!») I was acutely aware of the syntactic gulf separating their sentence structures. I feared (unreasonably, as was to transpire eventually) that my allegiance to Russian grammar might interfere with an apostatical courtship. Take tenses: how different their elaborate and strict minuet in English from the free and fluid interplay between the present and the past in their Russian counterpart (which Ian Bunyan has so amusingly compared in last Sunday’s NYT to «a dance of the veil performed by a plump graceful lady in a circle of cheering drunks»). The fantastic number of natural-looking nouns that the British and the Americans apply in lovely technical senses to very specific objects also distressed me. What is the exact term for the little cup in which you place the diamond you want to cut? (We call it «dop,» the pupal case of a butterfly, replied my informer, an old Boston jeweler who sold me the ring for my third bride). Is there not a nice special word for a pigling? («I am toying with snork' said Professor Noteboke, the best translator of Gogol's immortal The Carrick). I want the right word for the break in a boy's voice at puberty, I said to an amiable opera basso in the adjacent deck chair during my first transatlantic voyage. ("I think, he said, "it's calledponticello,’ a small bridge, un petit pont, mostik… Oh, you’re Russian too?»)
The traversal of my particular bridge ended, weeks after landing, in a charming New York apartment (it was leant to Annette and me by a generous relative of mine and faced the sunset flaming beyond Central Park). The neuralgia in my right forearm was a gray adumbration compared to the solid black headache that no pill could pierce. Annette rang up James Lodge, and he, out of the misdirected kindness of his heart, had an old little physician of Russian extraction examine me. The poor fellow drove me even crazier than I was by not only insisting on discussing my symptoms in an execrable version of the language I was trying to shed, but on translating into it various irrelevant terms used by the Viennese Quack and his apostles (simbolizirovanie, mortidnik). Yet his visit, I must confess, strikes me in retrospect as a most artistic coda.
PART THREE
1
Neither Slaughter in the Sun (as the English translation of Camera Lucida got retitled while I lay helplessly hospitalized in New York) nor The Red Topper sold well. My ambitious, beautiful, strange See under Real shone for a breathless instant on the lowest rung of the bestseller list in a West Coast paper, and vanished for good. In those circumstances I could not refuse the lectureship offered me in 1940 by Quirn University on the strength of my European reputation. I was to develop a plump tenure there and expand into a Full Professor by 1950 or 1955: I can’t find the exact date in my old notes.
Although I was adequately remunerated for my two weekly lectures on European Masterpieces and one Thursday seminar on Joyce’s Ulysses (from a yearly 5000 dollars in the beginning to 15,000 in the Fifties) and had furthermore several splendidly paid stories accepted by The Beau and the Butterfly, the kindest magazine in the world, I was not really comfortable until my Kingdom by the Sea (1962) atoned for a fraction of the loss of my Russian fortune (1917) and bundled away all financial worries till the end of worrisome time. I do not usually preserve cuttings of adverse criticism and envious abuse; but I do treasure the following definition: «This is the only known case in history when a European pauper ever became his own American uncle [amerikanskiy dyadyushka, oncle d’Amиrique],» so phrased by my faithful Zoilus,
