danielingebrigtsen

One of the first things you're likely to learn from a review, at least an American one, of Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory is something he never mentions in so many words: the economic circumstances of his youth. The prominence given to those circumstances may be an acceptable shortcut in a review--after all, it's an impression many readers of the book will come away with--and Nabokov had no need to tell us what his story shows us well enough. Yet it's mostly taken for granted, a part of the background, hardly among the major impressions given by this memoir; for me, those had more to do with such writerly skills as portraiture and scene-setting and the telling detail, as well as deeper matters of flux and loss and recollection. Nabokov even issues a sort of warning (intended, he says, not for the general reader but for "the particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he understands me"). He explains, "The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes." Nabokov lived a divided life, so clearly bifurcated that Nabokov scholar Brian Boyd split his two-volume biography across the line. (By curious coincidence, a similar sense of divided worlds underlies my current taste for two fantastical TV programs, Fringe and The Walking Dead, so there was a peculiar fitness to my discovery of this book at this moment.) The division was not, however, between the "fabulous wealth and privilege" of Nabokov's youth that reviewers are quick to point out and everything later; it was between what Boyd's biography calls the Russian years, which extended beyond the revolution and were partly spent in Europe, and the American years, which again led back to Europe. Scattered here and there in Speak, Memory are glances at America, the vantage point from which Nabokov wrote and later revised it, but the book is concerned essentially with the first half of his life, beginning with a single moment of recognition in 1903 and ending very neatly in 1940 with a view of the ship which was to take Nabokov, his wife, Vera, and their son, Dmitri, across the Atlantic. What comes between those two points is far from a straightforward, linear narrative, though. It's structured instead by way of subjects and themes. Among them: the pursuit of butterflies and the devising of chess puzzles; poetry and the Russian language; Nabokov's mother, with whom he shared, among other things, a form of synaesthesia; his early loves—one I think of as "Colette at the Beach" (despite the irrelevant echo of an Eric Rohmer film), and Polenka, daughter of the family's head coachman, and Tamara, whose letters sometimes reached Nabokov even in the midst of revolution; the history of various branches of his family, in which some readers will detect, in a mention of Nova Zembla, the origin of an invented country in Pale Fire; a governess, and his tutors, and his time at Cambridge. One is seldom thinking, in the midst of life, how a certain prior circumstance led to this one, and where, beyond an immediate goal, this one is heading; what flits through consciousness are, as much as anything else, perceptions, and associations that bridge distances, and the feelings that lend color to scenes. Yet such is our fondness for this-led-to-that stories (particularly after the rise of historicism in the 19th century, which gave historians a useful tool and the rest of us the illusion of knowing how we got where we are) that experience is often turned into such a tale in our retelling—what had been a wandering becomes a line. Nabokov's memory, or his sense of art, or more likely both, are more resourceful and canny than that. His memory is clearly prodigious, as are his powers of evocation, but his art is highly selective and compositional. He declares at the end of chapter six, "I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip." And his book works much like that, although I never tripped. It has something in common with earlier styles of portraiture that will array about a subject numerous signs of character and position, and a little in common with Cubism as well, in which multiple perspectives are present in a single view. There's even an incident that may remind one of the late works of Ibsen, in which the dreams within may sometimes (like the helpers and servers of The Master Builder) appear to affect the world without, though that incident, involving an anticipatory vision of Nabokov's mother, could equally well be read in light of Keats's comparison of the imagination to Adam's dream—"he awoke and found it truth." Nonetheless, Speak, Memory has much to do with time. A photograph may be true to a moment but also false to time because it has frozen the moment out of time's flow; similarly, one is aware in many ways while reading this book that what Nabokov has recaptured is nonetheless lost—or perhaps it's the other way around. All this is mere commentary; the texture of the text is better conveyed by a quotation. Picking one more or less at random among many that call out to be shared: "Tamara, Russia, the wildwood grading into old gardens, my northern birches and firs, the sight of my mother getting down on her hands and knees to kiss the earth every time we came back to the country from town for the summer, et la montagne et le grand chêne--these are things that fate one day bundled up pell-mell and tossed into the sea, completely severing me from my boyhood. I wonder, however, whether there is really much to be said for more anesthetic destinies, for, let us say, a smooth, safe, small-town continuity of time, with its primitive absence of perspective, when, at fifty, one is still dwelling in the clapboard house of one's childhood, so that every time one cleans the attic one comes across the same pile of old brown schoolbooks, still together among later accumulations of dead objects, and where, on summery Sunday mornings, one's wife stops on the sidewalk to endure for a minute or two that terrible, garrulous, dyed, church-bound McGee woman, who, way back in 1915, used to be pretty, naughty Margaret Ann of the mint-flavored mouth and nimble fingers. "The break in my own destiny affords me in retrospect a syncopal kick that I would not have missed for worlds." It would require a writer more daring than I am to venture very much after that. One sees in miniature the folds of the magic carpet, and one realizes that here, geography and the clock have met their match.

2022-09-03 17:06