Âëàäèìèð Íàáîêîâ. Ñìîòðè íà Àðëåêèíîâ (engl)
Vladimir Nabokov. Look at the Harlequins!
McGraw-Hill, NY, 1974.
* * *
To Vèra
Look at the Harlequins!
<1>
I. Other books by the narrator
In Russian:
Tamara 1925
Pawn Takes Queen 1927
Plenilune 1929
Camera Lucida (Slaughter in the Sun) 1931
The Red Top Hat 1934
The Dare 1950
In English:
See under Real 1939
Esmeralda and Her Parandrus 1941
Dr. Olga Repnin 1946
Exile from Mayda 1947
A Kingdom by the Sea 1962
Ardis 1970
<2>
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 <3> title, actually come from the French for `dream,' réve?" 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 Còte 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 <4> 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 èmigrè 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 <5> 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. <6>
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 <7> exploration--and her outspread five fingers dripping
with pearls of surprise. A house tutor let me share with him the ingènue 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
raisonnè 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 a most
outrageous fashion.
"Stop moping!" she would cry: "Look at the harlequins!
"What harlequins? Where?" <8>
"Oh, everywhere. All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are
harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together--jokes,
images--and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world!
Invent reality!"
I did. By Jove, I did. I invented my grand-aunt in honor of my first
daydreams, and now, down the marble steps of memory's front porch, here she
slowly comes, sideways, sideways, the poor lame lady, touching each step
edge with the rubber tip of her black cane.
(When she cried out those four words, they came out in a breathless
dactylic line with a swift lispy lilt, as if it were "lookaty," assonating
with "lickety" and introducing tenderly, ingratiatingly those "harlequins"
who arrived with festive force, the "bar" richly stressed in a burst of
inspired persuasion followed by a liquid fall of sequin-like syllables).
I was eighteen when the Bolshevist revolution struck--a strong and
anomalous verb, I concede, used here solely for the sake of narrative
rhythm. The recurrence of my childhood's disarray kept me in the Imperial
Sanatorium at Tsarskoe for most of the next winter and spring. In July,
1918, I found myself recuperating in the castle of a Polish landowner, a
distant relation of mine, Mstislav Charnetski (1880-1919?). One autumn
evening poor Mstislav's young mistress showed me a fairy-tale path winding
through a great forest where a last aurochs had been speared by a first
Charnetski under John III (Sobieski). I followed that path with a knapsack
on my back and--why not confess--a tremor of remorse and anxiety in my young
heart. Was I right in abandoning my cousin in the blackest hour of Russia's
black history? Did I know how to exist alone in strange lands? Was the
diploma I had received after being examined by a special committee (presided
by Mstislav's father, a venerable and corrupt mathematician) in all the
subjects of an ideal lyceum, which I had never attended bodily, sufficient
for Cambridge without some infernal entrance test? <9> I trudged all night,
through a labyrinth of moonlight, imagining the rustlings of extinct
animals. Dawn at last miniated my ancient map. I thought I had crossed the
frontier when a bare-headed Red Army soldier with a Mongol face who was
picking whortleberries near the trail challenged me: "And whither," he asked
picking up his cap from a stump, "may you be rolling (kotishsya), little
apple (yablochko)? Pokazyvay-ka dokumentiki (Let me see your papers)."
I groped in my pockets, fished out what I needed, and shot him dead, as
he lunged at me; then he fell on his face, as if sunstruck on the parade
ground, at the feet of his king. None of the serried tree trunks looked his
way, and I fled, still clutching Dagmara's lovely little revolver. Only half
an hour later, when I reached at last another part of the forest in a more
or less conventional republic, only then did my calves cease to quake.
After a period of loafing through unremembered German and Dutch towns,
I crossed over to England. The Rembrandt, a little hotel in London, was my
next address. The two or three small diamonds that I kept in a chamois pouch
melted away faster than hailstones. On the gray eve of poverty, the author,
then a self-exiled youth (I transcribe from an old diary), discovered an
unexpected patron in the person of Count Starov, a grave old-fashioned Mason
who had graced several great Embassies during a spacious span of
international intercourse, and who since 1913 had resided in London. He
spoke his mother tongue with pedantic precision, yet did not spurn rotund
folksy expressions. He had no sense of humor whatever. His man was a young
Maltese (I loathe tea but dared not call for brandy). Nikifor Nikodimovich,
to use his tongue-twisterish Christian name cum patronymic, was rumored to
have been for years on end an admirer of my beautiful and bizarre mother,
whom I knew mainly from stock phrases in an anonymous memoir. A grande
passion can be a convenient mask, but on the other hand, a gentlemanly
devotion to her memory can <10> alone explain his paying for my education in
England and leaving me, after his death in 1927, a modest subsidy (the
Bolshevist coup had ruined him as it had all our clan). I must admit,
however, that I felt embarrassed by the sudden live glances of his otherwise
dead eyes set in a large, pasty, dignified face, of the sort that Russian
writers used to call "carefully shaven" (tshchatel'no vybritoe), no doubt
because the ghosts of patriarchal beards had to be laid, in the presumed
imagination of readers (long dead by now). I did my best to put down those
interrogatory flashes to a search for some traits of the exquisite woman
whom once upon a time he had handed into a calõche, and whom, after waiting
for her to settle down and open her parasol, he would heavily join in the
springy vehicle; but at the same time I could not help wondering if my old
grandee had escaped a perversion that was current in so-called circles of
high diplomacy. N.N. sat in his easy chair as in a voluminous novel, one
pudgy hand on the elbow-rest griffin, the other, signet-ringed, fingering on
the Turkish table beside him what looked like a silver snuffbox but
contained, in fact, a small supply of bead-like cough drops or rather
droplets, colored lilac, green, and, I believe, coral. I should add that
some information obtained later showed me to be detestably wrong in
conjecturing on his part anything but a quasi-paternal interest in me, as
well as in another youth, the son of a notorious St. Petersburg courtesan
who preferred an electric brougham to a calõche; but enough of those edible
beads. <11>
3
To return to Carnavaux, to my luggage, to Ivor Black carrying it, with
a big show of travail, and muttering comedy stuff in some rudimentary role.
The sun had regained full control, when we entered a garden, separated
from the road by a stone wall and a row of cypresses. Emblematic irises
surrounded a green pondlet presided over by a bronze frog. From under a
curly holm oak a graveled path ran between two orange trees. At one end of
the lawn a eucalypt cast its striate shade across the canvas of a lounge
chair. This is not the arrogance of total recall but an attempt at fond
reconstruction based on old snapshots in an old bonbon box with a
fleur-de-lis on its lid.
It was no use ascending the three steps of the front entrance, "hauling
two tons of stones," said Ivor Black: he had forgotten the spare key, had no
servants to answer bells on Saturday afternoons, and as he had explained
earlier could not communicate by normal means with his sister though she had
to be somewhere inside, almost certainly crying in her bedroom as she
usually would whenever guests were expected, especially weekenders who might
be around at all hours, well into Tuesday. So we walked round the house,
skirting prickly-pear shrubs that caught at the raincoat over my arm. I
suddenly heard a <12> horrible subhuman sound and glanced at Ivor, but the
cur only grinned.
It was a large, lemon-breasted, indigo-blue ara with striped white
cheeks squawking intermittently on its bleak back-porch perch. Ivor had
dubbed it Mata Hari partly because of its accent but chiefly by reason of
its political past. His late aunt, Lady Wimberg, when already a little gaga,
around Nineteen Fourteen or Fifteen, had been kind to that tragic old bird,
said to have been abandoned by a shady stranger with a scarred face and a
monocle. It could say allò, Otto, and pa-pa, a modest vocabulary, somehow
suggestive of a small anxious family in a hot country far from home.
Sometimes when I work too late and the spies of thought cease to relay
messages, a wrong word in motion feels somehow like the dry biscuit that a
parrot holds in its great slow hand.
I do not remember seeing Iris before dinner (or perhaps I glimpsed her
standing at a stained window on the stairs with her back to me as I popped
back from the salle d'eau and its hesitations to my ascetic room across the
landing). Ivor had taken care to inform me that she was a deaf-mute and such
a shy one, too, that even now, at twenty-one, she could not make herself
learn to read male lips. That sounded odd. I had always thought that the
infirmity in question confined the patient in an absolutely safe shell as
limpid and strong as shatterproof glass, within which no shame or sham could
exist. Brother and sister conversed in sign language using an alphabet which
they had invented in childhood and which had gone through several revised
editions. The present one consisted of preposterously elaborate gestures in
the low relief of a pantomime that mimicked things rather than symbolized
them. I barged in with some grotesque contribution of my own but Ivor asked
me sternly not to play the fool, she easily got offended. The whole affair
(with a sullen maid, an old Canniãoise slapping down plates in the margin of
the scene) <13> belonged to another life, to another book, to a world of
vaguely incestuous games that I had not yet consciously invented.
Both were small, but exquisitely formed, young people, and the family
likeness between them could not escape one though Ivor was quite plain
looking, with sandy hair and freckles, and she a suntanned beauty with a
black bob and eyes like clear honey. I do not recall the dress she wore at
our first meeting, but I know that her thin arms were bare and stung my
senses at every palm grove and medusa-infested island that she outlined in
the air while her brother translated for me her patterns in idiotic asides.
I had my revenge after dinner. Ivor had gone to fetch my whisky. Iris and I
stood on the terrace in the saintly dusk. I was lighting my pipe while Iris
nudged the balustrade with her hip and pointed out with mermaid
undulations--supposed to imitate waves--the shimmer of seaside lights in a
parting of the india-ink hills. At that moment the telephone rang in the
drawing room behind us, and she quickly turned around--but with admirable
presence of mind transformed her dash into a nonchalant shawl dance. In the
meantime Ivor had already skated phoneward across the parquetry to hear what
Nina Lecerf or some other neighbor wanted. We liked to recall, Iris and I,
in our later intimacy that revelation scene with Ivor bringing us drinks to
toast her fairy-tale recovery and she, without minding his presence, putting
her light hand on my knuckles: I stood gripping the balustrade in
exaggerated resentment and was not prompt enough, poor dupe, to acknowledge
her apology by a Continental hand kiss. <14>
4
A familiar symptom of my complaint, not its gravest one but the
toughest to get rid of after every relapse, belongs to what Moody, the
London specialist, was the first to term the "numerical nimbus" syndrome.
His account of my case has been recently reprinted in his collected works.
It teems with ludicrous inaccuracies. That "nimbus" means nothing. "Mr. N.,
a Russian nobleman" did not display any "signs of degeneracy." He was not
"32" but 22 when he consulted that fatuous celebrity. Worst of all, Moody
lumps me with a Mr. V.S. who is less of a postscriptum to the abridged
description of my "nimbus" than an intruder whose sensations are mixed with
mine throughout that learned paper. True, the symptom in question is not
easy to describe, but I think I can do better than either Professor Moody or
my vulgar and voluble fellow sufferer.
At its worst it went like this: An hour or so after falling asleep
(generally well after midnight and with the humble assistance of a little
Old Mead or Chartreuse) I would wake up (or rather "wake in") momentarily
mad. The hideous pang in my brain was triggered by some hint of faint light
in the line of my sight, for no matter how carefully I might have topped the
well-meaning efforts of <15> a servant by my own struggles with blinds and
purblinds, there always remained some damned slit, some atom or dimmet of
artificial streetlight or natural moonlight that signaled inexpressible
peril when I raised my head with a gasp above the level of a choking dream.
Along the dim slit brighter points traveled with dreadful meaningful
intervals between them. Those dots corresponded, perhaps, to my rapid
heartbeats or were connected optically with the blinking of wet eyelashes
but the rationale of it is inessential; its dreadful part was my realizing
in helpless panic that the event had been stupidly unforeseen, yet had been
bound to happen and was the representation of a fatidic problem which had to
be solved lest I perish and indeed might have been solved now if I had given
it some forethought or had been less sleepy and weak-witted at this
all-important moment. The problem itself was of a calculatory order: certain
relations between the twinkling points had to be measured or, in my case,
guessed, since my torpor prevented me from counting them properly, let alone
recalling what the safe number should be. Error meant instant
retribution--beheading by a giant or worse; the right guess, per contra,
would allow me to escape into an enchanting region situated just beyond the
gap I had to wriggle through in the thorny riddle, a region resembling in
its idyllic abstraction those little landscapes engraved as suggestive
vignettes--a brook, a bosquet--next to capital letters of weird, ferocious
shape such as a Gothic B beginning a chapter in old books for easily
frightened children. But how could I know in my torpor and panic that this
was the simple solution, that the brook and the boughs and the beauty of the
Beyond all began with the initial of Being?
There were nights, of course, when my reason returned at once and I
rearranged the curtains and presently slept. But at other, more critical
times, when I was far from well yet and would experience that nobleman's
nimbus, it took <16> me up to several hours to abolish the optical spasm
which even the light of day could not overcome. My first night in any new
place never fails to be hideous and is followed by a dismal day. I was
racked with neuralgia, I was jumpy, and pustulous, and unshaven, and I
refused to accompany the Blacks to a seaside party to which I had been, or
was told I had been, also invited. In fact, those first days at Villa Iris
are so badly distorted in my diary, and so blurred in my mind, that I am not
sure if, perhaps, Iris and Ivor were not absent till the middle of the week.
I remember, however, that they were kind enough to arrange an appointment
for me with a doctor in Cannice. This presented itself as a splendid
opportunity to check the incompetence of my London luminary against that of
a local one.
The appointment was with Professor Junker, a double personage,
consisting of husband and wife. They had been practicing as a team for
thirty years now, and every Sunday, in a secluded, though consequently
rather dirty, corner of the beach, the two analyzed each other. They were
supposed by their patients to be particularly alert on Mondays, but I was
not, having got frightfully tight in one or two pubs before reaching the
mean quarter where the Junkers and other doctors lived, as I seemed to have
gathered. The front entrance was all right being among the flowers and fruit
of a market place, but wait till you see the back. I was received by the
female partner, a squat old thing wearing trousers, which was delightfully
daring in 1922. That theme was continued immediately outside the casement of
the WC (where I had to fill an absurd vial large enough for a doctor's
purpose but not for mine) by the performance that a breeze was giving above
a street sufficiently narrow for three pairs of long drawers to cross over
on a string in as many strides or leaps. I commented on this and on a
stained-glass window in the consulting room featuring a mauve lady exactly
similar to the one on the <17> stairs of Villa Iris. Mrs. Junker asked me if
I liked boys or girls, and I looked around saying guardedly that I did not
know what she had to offer. She did not laugh. The consultation was not a
success. Before diagnosing neuralgia of the jaw, she wanted me to see a
dentist when sober. It was right across, she said. I know she rang him up to
arrange my visit but do not remember if I went there the same afternoon or
the next. His name was Molnar with that n like a grain in a cavity; I used
him some forty years later in A Kingdom by the Sea.
A girl whom I took to be the dentist's assistant (which, however, she
was much too holidayish in dress to be) sat cross-legged talking on the
phone in the hallway and merely directed me to a door with the cigarette she
was holding without otherwise interrupting her occupation. I found myself in
a banal and silent room. The best seats had been taken. A large conventional
oil, above a cluttered bookshelf, depicted an alpine torrent with a fallen
tree lying across it. From the shelf a few magazines had already wandered at
some earlier consultation hour onto an oval table which supported its own
modest array of things, such as an empty flower vase and a watch-size
casse-téte. This was a wee circular labyrinth, with five silvery peas inside
that had to be coaxed by judicious turns of the wrist into the center of the
helix. For waiting children.
None were present. A corner armchair contained a fat fellow with a
nosegay of carnations across his lap. Two elderly ladies were seated on a
brown sofa--strangers to each other, if one took into account the urbane
interval between them. Leagues away from them, on a cushioned stool, a
cultured-looking young man, possibly a novelist, sat holding a small
memoranda book in which he kept penciling separate items--possibly the
description of various objects his eyes roved over in between notes--the
ceiling, the wallpaper, the picture, and the hairy nape of a <18> man who
stood by the window, with his hands clasped behind him, and gazed idly,
beyond flapping underwear, beyond the mauve casement of the Junkers' W.C.,
beyond the roofs and foothills, at a distant range of mountains where, I
idly thought, there still might exist that withered pine bridging the
painted torrent.
Presently a door at the end of the room flew open with a laughing
sound, and the dentist entered, ruddy-faced, bow-tied, in an ill-fitting
suit of festive gray with a rather jaunty black armband. Handshakes and
congratulations followed. I started reminding him of our appointment, but a
dignified old lady in whom I recognized Madame Junker interrupted me saying
it was her mistake. In the meantime Miranda, the daughter of the house whom
I had seen a moment ago, inserted the long pale stems of her uncle's
carnations into a tight vase on the table which by now was miraculously
draped. A soubrette placed upon it, amid much applause, a great sunset-pink
cake with "50" in calligraphic cream. "What a charming attention!" exclaimed
the widower. Tea was served and several groups sat down, others stood, glass
in hand. I heard Iris warning me in a warm whisper that it was spiced apple
juice, not liquor, so with raised hands I recoiled from the tray proffered
by Miranda's fiancè, the person whom I had caught using a spare moment to
check certain details of the dowry. "We were not expecting you to turn up,"
said Iris, giving the show away, for this could not be the partie de plaisir
to which I had been invited ("They have a lovely place on a rock"). No, I
believe that much of the confused impressions listed here in connection with
doctors and dentists must be classed as an oneiric experience during a
drunken siesta. This is corroborated scriptorially. Glancing through my
oldest notes in pocket diaries, with telephone numbers and names elbowing
their way among reports on events, factual or more or less fictional, I <19>
notice that dreams and other distortions of "reality" are written down in a
special left-slanted hand--at least in the earlier entries, before I gave up
following accepted distinctions. A lot of the pre-Cantabrigian stuff
displays that script (but the soldier really did collapse in the path of the
fugitive king). <20>
5
I know I have been called a solemn owl but I do detest practical jokes
and am bored stiff ("Only humorless people use that phrase," according to
Ivor) by a constant flow of facetious insults and vulgar puns ("A stiff
borer is better than a limp one"--Ivor again). He was a good chap, however,
and it was not really respite from his banter that made me welcome his
regular week-day absences. He worked in a travel agency run by his Aunt
Betty's former homme d'affaires, an eccentric in his own right, who had
promised Ivor a bonus in the form of an Icarus phaeton if he was good.
My health and handwriting very soon reverted to normal, and I began to
enjoy the South. Iris and I lounged for hours (she wearing a black swimsuit,
I flannels and blazer) in the garden, which I preferred at first, before the
inevitable seduction of seabathing, to the flesh of the plage. I translated
for her several short poems by Pushkin and Lermontov, paraphrasing and
touching them up for better effect. I told her in dramatic detail of my
escape from my country. I mentioned great exiles of old. She listened to me
like Desdemona.
"I'd love to learn Russian," she said with the polite wistfulness which
goes with that confession. "My aunt <21> was practically born in Kiev and at
seventy-five still remembered a few Russian and Rumanian words, but I am a
rotten linguist. How do you say `eucalypt' in your language?"
"Evkalipt."
"Oh, that would make a nice name for a man in a short story. `F.
Clipton.' Wells has a `Mr. Snooks' that turns out to derive from `Seven
Oaks.' I adore Wells, don't you?"
I said that he was the greatest romancer and magician of our time, but
that I could not stand his sociological stuff.
Nor could she. And did I remember what Stephen said in The Passionate
Friends when he left the room--the neutral room--where he had been allowed
to see his mistress for the very last time?
"I can answer that. The furniture there was slipcovered, and he said,
`It's because of the flies.' "
"Yes! Isn't that marvelous! Just blurting out something so as not to
cry. It makes one think of the housefly an old Master would paint on a
sitter's hand to show that the person had died in the meantime."
I said I always preferred the literal meaning of a description to the
symbol behind it. She nodded thoughtfully but did not seem convinced.
And who was our favorite modern poet? How about Housman?
I had seen him many times from afar and once, plain. It was in the
Trinity Library. He stood holding an open book but looking at the ceiling as
if trying to remember something--perhaps, the way another author had
translated that line.
She said she would have been "terribly thrilled." She uttered those
words thrusting forward her earnest little face and vibrating it, the face,
with its sleek bangs, rapidly. "You ought to be thrilled now! After all, I'm
here, this is the summer of 1922, this is your brother's house--" <22>
"It is not," she said, sidestepping the issue (and at the twist of her
speech I felt a sudden overlap in the texture of time as if this had
happened before or would happen again); "It is my house. Aunt Betty left it
to me as well as some money, but Ivor is too stupid or proud to let me pay
his appalling debts."
The shadow of my rebuke was more than a shadow. I actually believed
even then, in my early twenties, that by mid-century I would be a famous and
free author, living in a free, universally respected Russia, on the English
quay of the Neva or on one of my splendid estates in the country, and
writing there prose and poetry in the infinitely plastic tongue of my
ancestors: among them I counted one of Tolstoy's grand-aunts and two of
Pushkin's boon companions. The forefeel of fame was as heady as the old
wines of nostalgia. It was remembrance in reverse, a great lakeside oak
reflected so picturesquely in such clear waters that its mirrored branches
looked like glorified roots. I felt this future fame in my toes, in the tips
of my fingers, in the hair of my head, as one feels the shiver caused by an
electric storm, by the dying beauty of a singer's dark voice just before the
thunder, or by one line in King Lear. Why do tears blur my glasses when I
invoke that phantasm of fame as it tempted and tortured me then, five
decades ago? Its image was innocent, its image was genuine, its difference
from what actually was to be breaks my heart like the pangs of separation.
No ambition, no honors tainted the fanciful future. The President of
the Russian Academy advanced toward me to the sound of slow music with a
wreath on the cushion he held--and had to retreat growling as I shook my
graying head. I saw myself correcting the page proof of a new novel which
was to change the destiny of Russian literary style as a matter of
course--my course (with no self-love, no smugness, no surprise on my
part)--and reworking so much of it in the margin--where inspiration finds
its <23> sweetest clover--that the whole had to be set anew. When the book
made its belated appearance, as I gently aged, I might enjoy entertaining a
few dear sycophantic friends in the arbor of my favorite manor of Marevo
(where I had first "looked at the harlequins") with its alley of fountains
and its shimmering view of a virgin bit of Volgan steppe-land. It had to be
that way.
From my cold bed in Cambridge I surveyed a whole period of new Russian
literature. I looked forward to the refreshing presence of inimical but
courteous critics who would chide me in the St. Petersburg literary reviews
for my pathological indifference to politics, major ideas in minor minds,
and such vital problems as overpopulation in urban centers. No less amusing
was it to envisage the inevitable pack of crooks and ninnies abusing the
smiling marble, and ill with envy, maddened by their own mediocrity, rushing
in pattering hordes to the lemming's doom but presently all running back
from the opposite side of the stage, having missed not only the point of my
book but also their rodential Gadara.
The poems I started composing after I met Iris were meant to deal with
her actual, unique traits--the way her forehead wrinkled when she raised her
eyebrows, waiting for me to see the point of her joke, or the way it
developed a totally different set of soft folds as she frowned over the
Tauchnitz in which she searched for the passage she wanted to share with me.
My instrument, however, was still too blunt and immature; it could not
express the divine detail, and her eyes, her hair became hopelessly
generalized in my otherwise well-shaped strophes.
None of those descriptive and, let us be frank, banal pieces, were good
enough (particularly when nakedly Englished without rhyme or treason) to be
shown to Iris; and, besides, an odd shyness--which I had never felt before
when courting a girl in the brisk preliminaries of my carnal youth--kept me
back from submitting to Iris a tabulation <24> of her charms. On the night
of July 20, however, I composed a more oblique, more metaphysical little
poem which I decided to show her at breakfast in a literal translation that
took me longer to write than the original. The title, under which it
appeared in an èmigrè daily in Paris (October 8, 1922, after several
reminders on my part and one please-return request) was, and is, in the
various anthologies and collections that were to reprint it in the course of
the next fifty years, Vlyublyonnost', which puts in a golden nutshell what
English needs three words to express.
My zabyvàem chto vlyublyñnnost'
Ne prñsto povorñt litsà,
A pod kupàvami bezdñnnost',
Nochnàya pànika plovtsà.
Pokçda snìtsya, snìs', vlyublyñnnost',
No probuzhdèniem ne mçch',
I lçchshe nedogovoryñnnost'
Chem èta shchèl' i ètot lçch.
Napominàyu chto vlyublyñnnost'
Ne yàv', chto mètiny ne tè,
Chto mñzhet-byt' potustorñnnost'
Priotvorìlas' v temnotè.
"Lovely," said Iris. "Sounds like an incantation. What does it mean?"
"I have it here on the back. It goes like this. We forget--or rather
tend to forget--that being in love (vlyublyonnost') does not depend on the
facial angle of the loved one, but is a bottomless spot under the nenuphars,
a swimmer's panic in the night (here the iambic tetrameter happens to be
rendered--last line of the first stanza, nochnàya pànika plovtsà). Next
stanza: While the dreaming is good--in the sense of `while the going is
good'--do keep appearing to us in our dreams, vlyublyonnost', but do not
torment us <25> by waking us up or telling too much: reticence is better
than that chink and that moonbeam. Now comes the last stanza of this
philosophical love poem."
"This what?"
"Philosophical love poem. Napominàyu, I remind you, that vlyublyonnost'
is not wide-awake reality, that the markings are not the same (a
moon-striped ceiling, polosatyy ot luny potolok, is, for instance, not the
same kind of reality as a ceiling by day), and that, maybe, the hereafter
stands slightly ajar in the dark. Voilþ."
"Your girl," remarked Iris, "must be having a jolly good time in your
company. Ah, here comes our breadwinner. Bonjour, Ives. The toast is all
gone, I'm afraid. We thought you'd left hours ago."
She fitted her palm for a moment to the cheek of the teapot. And it
went into Ardis, it all went into Ardis, my poor dead love. <26>
6
After fifty summers, or ten thousand hours, of sunbathing in various
countries, on beaches, benches, roofs, rocks, decks, ledges, lawns, boards,
and balconies, I might have been unable to recall my novitiate in sensory
detail had not there been those old notes of mine which are such a solace to
a pedantic memoirist throughout the account of his illnesses, marriages, and
literary life. Enormous amounts of Shaker's Cold Cream were rubbed by
kneeling and cooing Iris into my back as I lay prone on a rough towel in the
blaze of the plage. Beneath my shut eyelids pressed to my forearm swam
purple photomatic shapes: "Through the prose of sun blisters came the poetry
of her touch--," thus in my pocket diary, but I can improve upon my young
preciosity. Through the itch of my skin, and in fact seasoned by that itch
to an exquisite degree of rather ridiculous enjoyment, the touch of her hand
on my shoulder blades and along my spine resembled too closely a deliberate
caress not to be deliberate mimicry, and I could not curb a hidden response
to those nimble fingers when in a final gratuitous flutter they traveled
down to my very coccyx, before fading away.
"There," said Iris with exactly the same intonation as that used, at
the end of a more special kind of treatment, <27> by one of my Cambridge
sweethearts, Violet McD., an experienced and compassionate virgin.
She, Iris, had had several lovers, and as I opened my eyes and turned
to her, and saw her, and the dancing diamonds in the blue-green inward of
every advancing, every tumbling wave, and the wet black pebbles on the sleek
forebeach with dead foam waiting for live foam--and, oh, there it comes, the
crested wave line, trotting again like white circus ponies abreast, I
understood, as I perceived her against that backdrop, how much adulation,
how many lovers had helped form and perfect my Iris, with that impeccable
complexion of hers, that absence of any uncertainty in the profile of her
high cheekbone, the elegance of the hollow beneath it, the accroche-coeur of
a sleek little flirt.
"By the way," said Iris as she changed from a kneeling to a
half-recumbent position, her legs curled under her, "by the way, I have not
apologized yet for my dismal remark about that poem. I now have reread your
"Valley Blondies" (vlyublyonnost') a hundred times, both the English for the
matter and the Russian for the music. I think it's an absolutely divine
piece. Do you forgive me?"
I pursed my lips to kiss the brown iridescent knee near me but her
hand, as if measuring a child's fever, palmed my forehead and stopped its
advance.
"We are watched," she said "by a number of eyes which seem to look
everywhere except in our direction. The two nice English schoolteachers on
my right--say, twenty paces away--have already told me that your resemblance
to the naked-neck photo of Rupert Brooke is a-houri-sang--they know a little
French. If you ever try to kiss me, or my leg, again, I'll beg you to leave.
I've been sufficiently hurt in my life."
A pause ensued. The iridescence came from atoms of quartz. When a girl
starts to speak like a novelette, all you need is a little patience. <28>
Had I posted the poem to that èmigrè paper? Not yet; my garland of
sonnets had had to be sent first. The two people (lowering my voice) on my
left were fellow expatriates, judging by certain small indices. "Yes,"
agreed Iris, "they practically got up to stand at attention when you started
to recite that Pushkin thing about waves lying down in adoration at her
feet. What other signs?"
"He kept stroking his beard very slowly from top to tip as he looked at
the horizon and she smoked a cigarette with a cardboard mouthpiece."
There was also a child of ten or so cradling a large yellow beach ball
in her bare arms. She seemed to be wearing nothing but a kind of frilly
harness and a very short pleated skirt revealing her trim thighs. She was
what in a later era amateurs were to call a "nymphet." As she caught my
glance she gave me, over our sunny globe, a sweet lewd smile from under her
auburn fringe.
"At eleven or twelve," said Iris, "I was as pretty as that French
orphan. That's her grandmother all in black sitting on a spread
Cannice-Matin with her knitting. I let smelly gentlemen fondle me. I played
indecent games with Ivor--oh nothing very unusual, and anyway he now prefers
dons to donnas--at least that's what he says."
She talked a little about her parents who by a fascinating coincidence
had died on the same day, she at seven A.M. in New York, he at noon in
London, only two years ago. They had separated soon after the war. She was
American and horrible. You don't speak like that of your mother but she was
really horrible. Dad was Vice President of the Samuels Cement Company when
he died. He came from a respectable family and had "good connections." I
asked what grudge exactly did Ivor bear to "society" and vice versa? She
vaguely replied he disliked the "fox-hunting set" and the "yachting crowd."
I said those were abominable clichès used only by Philistines. In my set, in
my world, in the opulent Russia of my boyhood we stood <29> so far above any
concept of "class" that we only laughed or yawned when reading about
"Japanese Barons" or "New England Patricians." Yet strangely enough Ivor
stopped clowning and became a normal serious individual only when he
straddled his old, dappled, bald hobbyhorse and started reviling the English
"upper classes"--especially their pronunciation. It was, I remonstrated, a
speech superior in quality to the best Parisian French, and even to a
Petersburgan's Russian; a delightfully modulated whinny, which both he and
Iris were rather successfully, though no doubt unconsciously, imitating in
their everyday intercourse, when not making protracted fun of a harmless
foreigner's stilted or outdated English. By the way what was the nationality
of the bronzed old man with the hoary chest hair who was wading out of the
low surf preceded by his bedrabbled dog--I thought I knew his face.
It was, she said, Kanner, the great pianist and butterfly hunter, his
face and name were on all the Morris columns. She was getting tickets for at
least two of his concerts; and there, right there, where his dog was shaking
itself, the P. family (exalted old name) had basked in June when the place
was practically empty, and cut Ivor, though he knew young L.P. at Trinity.
They'd now moved down there. Even more select. See that orange dot? That's
their cabana. Foot of the Mirana Palace. I said nothing but I too knew young
P. and disliked him.
Same day. Ran into him in the Mirana Men's Room. Was effusively
welcomed. Would I care to meet his sister, tomorrow is what? Saturday.
Suggested they stroll over tomorrow afternoon to the foot of the Victoria.
Sort of cove to your right. I'm there with friends. Of course you know Ivor
Black. Young P. duly turned up, with lovely, long-limbed sister.
Ivor--frightfully rude. Rise, Iris, you forget we are having tea with
Rapallovich and Chicherini. That sort of stuff. Idiotic feuds. Lydia P.
screamed with laughter. <30>
Upon discovering the effect of that miracle cream, at my boiled-lobster
stage, I switched from a conservative caleãon de bain to a briefer variety
(still banned at the time in stricter paradises). The delayed change
resulted in a bizarre stratification of tan. I recall sneaking into Iris's
room to contemplate myself in a full-length looking glass--the only one in
the house--on a morning she had chosen for a visit to a beauty salon, which
I called up to make sure she was there and not in the arms of a lover.
Except for a Provenãal boy polishing the banisters, there was nobody around,
thus allowing me to indulge in one of my oldest and naughtiest pleasures:
circulating stark naked all over a strange house.
The full-length portrait was not altogether a success, or rather
contained an element of levity not improper to mirrors and medieval pictures
of exotic beasts. My face was brown, my torso and arms caramel, a carmine
equatorial belt undermargined the caramel, then came a white, more or less
triangular, southward pointed space edged with the redundant carmine on both
sides, and (owing to my wearing shorts all day) my legs were as brown as my
face. Apically, the white of the abdomen, brought out in frightening
repoussè, with an ugliness never noticed before, a man's portable zoo, a
symmetrical mass of animal attributes, the elephant proboscis, the twin sea
urchins, the baby gorilla, clinging to my underbelly with its back to the
public.
A warning spasm shot through my nervous system. The fiends of my
incurable ailment, "flayed consciousness," were shoving aside my harlequins.
I sought first-aid distraction in the baubles of my love's lavender-scented
bedroom: a Teddy bear dyed violet, a curious French novel (Du còtè de chez
Swann) that I had bought for her, a trim pile of freshly laundered linen in
a Moîse basket, a color photograph of two girls in a fancy frame, obliquely
inscribed as "The Lady Cressida and thy sweet Nell, <31> Cambridge 1919"; I
mistook the former for Iris herself in a golden wig and a pink make-up; a
closer inspection, however, showed it to be Ivor in the part of that highly
irritating girl bobbing in and out of Shakespeare's flawed farce. But, then,
Mnemosyne's chromodiascope can also become a bore.
In the music room the boy was now cacophonically dusting the keys of
the Bechstein as with less zest I resumed my nudist rambles. He asked me
what sounded like "Hora?," and I demonstrated my wrist turning it this way
and that to reveal only a pale ghost of watch and watch bracelet. He
completely misinterpreted my gesture and turned away shaking his stupid
head. It was a morning of errors and failures.
I made my way to the pantry for a glass or two of wine, the best
breakfast in times of distress. In the passage I trod on a shard of crockery
(we had heard the crash on the eve) and danced on one foot with a curse as I
tried to examine the imaginary gash in the middle of my pale sole.
The litre of rouge I had visualized was there all right, but I could
not find a corkscrew in any of the drawers. Between bangs the macaw could be
heard crying out something crude and dreary. The postman had come and gone.
The editor of The New Aurora (Novaya Zarya) was afraid (dreadful poltroons,
those editors) that his "modest èmigrè venture (nachinanie)" could not
etc.--a crumpled "etc." that flew into the garbage pail. Wineless, wrathful,
with Ivor's Times under my arm, I slapped up the back stairs to my stuffy
room. The rioting in my brain had now started.
It was then that I resolved, sobbing horribly into my pillow, to
preface tomorrow's proposal of marriage with a confession that might make it
unacceptable to my Iris. <32>
7
If one looked from our garden gate down the asphalted avenue leading
through leopard shade to the village some two hundred paces east, one saw
the pink cube of the little post office, its green bench in front, its flag
above, all this limned with the numb brightness of a color transparency,
between the last two plane trees of the twin files marching on both sides of
the road.
On the right (south) side of the avenue, across a marginal ditch,
overhung with brambles, the intervals between the mottled trunks disclosed
patches of lavender or lucerne and, farther away, the low white wall of a
cemetery running parallel to our lane as those things are apt to do. On the
left (north) side, through analogous intervals, one glimpsed an expanse of
rising ground, a vineyard, a distant farm, pine groves, and the outline of
mountains. On the penult tree trunk of that side somebody had pasted, and
somebody else partly scraped off, an incoherent notice.
We walked down that avenue nearly every morning, Iris and I, on our way
to the village square and--from there by lovely shortcuts--to Cannice and
the sea. Now and then she liked to return on foot, being one of those small
but strong lassies who can hurdle, and play hockey, and climb rocks, and
then shimmy till any pale mad hour <33> ("do bezçmnogo blèdnogo chàsa"--to
quote from my first direct poem to her). She usually wore her "Indian"
frock, a kind of translucent wrap, over her skimpy swimsuit, and as I
followed close behind, and sensed the solitude, the security, the
all-permitting dream, I had trouble walking in my bestial state. Fortunately
it was not the none-so-very-secure solitude that held me back but a moral
decision to confess something very grave before I made love to her.
As seen from those escarpments, the sea far below spread in majestic
wrinkles, and, owing to distance and height, the recurrent line of foam
arrived in rather droll slow motion because we knew it was sure, as we had
been sure, of its strapping pace, and now that restraint, that
stateliness...
Suddenly there came from somewhere within the natural jumble of our
surroundings a roar of unearthly ecstasy.
"Goodness," said Iris, "I do hope that's not a happy escapee from
Kanner's Circus." (No relation--at least, so it seemed--to the pianist.)
We walked on, now side by side: after the first of the half-dozen times
it crossed the looping main road, our path grew wider. That day as usual I
argued with Iris about the English names of the few plants I could
identify--rock roses and griselda in bloom, agaves (which she called
"centuries"), broom and spurge, myrtle and arbutus. Speckled butterflies
came and went like quick sun flecks in the occasional tunnels of foliage,
and once a tremendous olive-green fellow, with a rosy flush somewhere
beneath, settled on a thistlehead for an instant. I know nothing about
butterflies, and indeed do not care for the fluffier night-flying ones, and
would hate any of them to touch me: even the prettiest gives me a nasty
shiver like some floating spider web or that bathroom pest on the Riviera,
the silver louse.
On the day now in focus, memorable for a more important matter but
carrying all kinds of synchronous trivia <34> attached to it like burrs or
incrustated like marine parasites, we noticed a butterfly net moving among
the beflowered rocks, and presently old Kanner appeared, his panama swinging
on its vest-button string, his white locks flying around his scarlet brow,
and the whole of his person still radiating ecstasy, an echo of which we no
doubt had heard a minute ago.
Upon Iris immediately describing to him the spectacular green thing,
Kanner dismissed it as eine "Pandora" (at least that's what I find jotted
down), a common southern Falter (butterfly). "Aber (but)," he thundered,
raising his index, "when you wish to look at a real rarity, never before
observed west of Nieder-Æsterreich, then I will show what I have just
caught."
He leant his net against a rock (it fell at once, Iris picked it up
reverently) and, with profuse thanks (to Psyche? Baalzebub? Iris?) that
trailed away accompanimentally, produced from a compartment in his satchel a
little stamp envelope and shook out of it very gently a folded butterfly
onto the palm of his hand.
After one glance Iris told him it was merely a tiny, very young Cabbage
White. (She had a theory that houseflies, for instance, grow.)
"Now look with attention," said Kanner ignoring her quaint remark and
pointing with compressed tweezers at the triangular insect. "What you see is
the inferior side--the under white of the left Vorderflýgel (`fore wing')
and the under yellow of the left Hinterflýgel (`hind wing'). I will not open
the wings but I think you can believe what I'm going to tell you. On the
upper side, which you can't see, this species shares with its nearest
allies--the Small White and Mann's White, both common here--the typical
little spots of the fore wing, namely a black full stop in the male and a
black Doppelpunkt (`colon') in the female. In those allies the punctuation
is reproduced on the underside, and only in the species of which you see
<35> a folded specimen on the flat of my hand is the wing blank beneath--a
typographical caprice of Nature! Ergo it is an Ergane."
One of the legs of the reclining butterfly twitched.
"Oh, it's alive!" cried Iris.
"No, it can't fly away--one pinch was enough," rejoined Kanner
soothingly, as he slipped the specimen back into its pellucid hell; and
presently, brandishing his arms and net in triumphant farewells, he was
continuing his climb.
"The brute!" wailed Iris. She brooded over the thousand little
creatures he had tortured, but a few days later, when Ivor took us to the
man's concert (a most poetical rendition of Grýnberg's suite Les Cháteaux)
she derived some consolation from her brother's contemptuous remark: "All
that butterfly business is only a publicity stunt." Alas, as a fellow madman
I knew better.
All I had to do when we reached our stretch of plage in order to absorb
the sun was to shed shirt, shorts, and sneakers. Iris shrugged off her wrap
and lay down, bare limbed, on the towel next to mine. I was rehearsing in my
head the speech I had prepared. The pianist's dog was today in the company
of a handsome old lady, his fourth wife. The nymphet was being buried in hot
sand by two young oafs. The Russian lady was reading an èmigrè newspaper.
Her husband was contemplating the horizon. The two English women were
bobbing in the dazzling sea. A large French family of slightly flushed
albinos was trying to inflate a rubber dolphin.
"I'm ready for a dip," said Iris.
She took out of the beach bag (kept for her by the Victoria concierge)
her yellow swim bonnet, and we transferred our towels and things to the
comparative quiet of an obsolete wharf of sorts upon which she liked to dry
afterwards.
Already twice in my young life a fit of total cramp--the physical
counterpart of lightning insanity--had all but <36> overpowered me in the
panic and blackness of bottomless water. I see myself as a lad of fifteen
swimming at dusk across a narrow but deep river with an athletic cousin. He
is beginning to leave me behind when a special effort I make results in a
sense of ineffable euphoria which promises miracles of propulsion, dream
prizes on dream shelves--but which, at its satanic climax, is replaced by an
intolerable spasm first in one leg, then in the other, then in the ribs and
both arms. I have often attempted to explain, in later years, to learned and
ironical doctors, the strange, hideous, segmental quality of those pulsating
pangs that made a huge worm of me with limbs transformed into successive
coils of agony. By some fantastic fluke a third swimmer, a stranger, was
right behind me and helped to pull me out of an abysmal tangle of water-lily
stems.
The second time was a year later, on the West-Caucasian coast. I had
been drinking with a dozen older companions at the birthday party of the
district governor's son and, around midnight, a dashing young Englishman,
Allan Andoverton (who was to be, around 1939, my first British publisher!)
had suggested a moonlight swim. As long as I did not venture too far in the
sea, the experience seemed quite enjoyable. The water was warm; the moon
shone benevolently on the starched shirt of my first evening clothes spread
on the shingly shore. I could hear merry voices around me; Allan, I
remember, had not bothered to strip and was fooling with a champagne bottle
in the dappled swell; but presently a cloud engulfed everything, a great
wave lifted and rolled me, and soon I was too upset in all senses to tell
whether I was heading for Yalta or Tuapse. Abject fear set loose instantly
the pain I already knew, and I would have drowned there and then had not the
next billow given me a boost and deposited me near my own trousers.
The shadow of those repellent and rather colorless recolections (mortal
peril is colorless) remained always present <37> in my "dips" and "splashes"
(another word of hers) with Iris. She got used to my habit of staying in
comfortable contact with the bed of shallows, while she executed "crawls"
(if that is what those overarm strokes were called in the Nineteen-Twenties)
at quite a distance away; but that morning I nearly did a very stupid thing.
I was gently floating to and fro in line with the shore and sinking a
probing toe every now and then to ascertain if I could still feel the oozy
bottom with its unappetizing to the touch, but on the whole friendly,
vegetables, when I noticed that the seascape had changed. In the middle
distance a brown motorboat manned by a young fellow in whom I recognized
L.P. had described a foamy half-circle and stopped beside Iris. She clung to
the bright brim, and he spoke to her, and then made as if to drag her into
his boat, but she flipped free, and he sped away, laughing.
It all must have lasted a couple of minutes, but had the rascal with
his hawkish profile and white cable-stitched sweater stayed a few seconds
longer or had my girl been abducted by her new beau in the thunder and
spray, I would have perished; for while the scene endured, some virile
instinct rather than one of self-preservation had caused me to swim toward
them a few insensible yards, and now when I assumed a perpendicular position
to regain my breath I found underfoot nothing but water. I turned and
started swimming landward--and already felt the ominous foreglow, the
strange, never yet described aura of total cramp creeping over me and
forming its deadly pact with gravity. Suddenly my knee struck blessed sand,
and in a mild undertow I crawled on all fours onto the beach. <38>
8
"I have a confession to make, Iris, concerning my mental health."
"Wait a minute. Must peel this horrid thing off--as far down--as far
down as it can decently go."
We were lying, I supine, she prone, on the wharf. She had torn off her
cap and was struggling to shrug off the shoulder straps of her wet swimsuit,
so as to expose her entire back to the sun; a secondary struggle was taking
place on the near side, in the vicinity of her sable armpit, in her
unsuccessful efforts not to show the white of a small breast at its tender
juncture with her ribs. As soon as she had wriggled into a satisfactory
state of decorum, she half-reared, holding her black bodice to her bosom,
while her other hand conducted that delightful rapid monkey-scratching
search a girl performs when groping for something in her bag--in this
instance a mauve package of cheap Salammbòs and an expensive lighter;
whereupon she again pressed her bosom to the spread towel. Her earlobe
burned red through her black liberated "Medusa," as that type of bob was
called in the young twenties. The moldings of her brown back, with a
patch-size beauty spot below the left shoulder blade and a long spinal
hollow, which redeemed all the errors of animal evolution, distracted me
painfully <39> from the decision I had taken to preface my proposal with a
special, tremendously important confession. A few aquamarines of water still
glistened on the underside of her brown thighs and on her strong brown
calves, and a few grains of wet gravel had stuck to her rose-brown ankles.
If I have described so often in my American novels (A Kingdom by the Sea,
Ardis) the unbearable magic of a girl's back, it is mainly because of my
having loved Iris. Her compact little nates, the most agonizing, the
fullest, and sweetest bloom of her puerile prettiness, were as yet unwrapped
surprises under the Christmas tree.
Upon resettling in the waiting sun after this little flurry, Iris
protruded her fat underlip as she exhaled smoke and presently remarked:
"Your mental health is jolly good, I think. You are sometimes strange and
somber, and often silly, but that's in character with ce qu'on appelle
genius."
"What do you call `genius'?"
"Well, seeing things others don't see. Or rather the invisible links
between things."
"I am speaking, then, of a humble morbid condition which has nothing to
do with genius. We shall start with a specific example and an authentic
decor. Please close your eyes for a moment. Now visualize the avenue that
goes from the post office to your villa. You see the plane trees converging
in perspective and the garden gate between the last two?"
"No," said Iris, "the last one on the right is replaced by a
lamppost--you can't make it out very clearly from the village square--but it
is really a lamppost in a coat of ivy."
"Well, no matter. The main thing is to imagine we're looking from the
village here toward the garden gate there. We must be very careful about our
here's and there's in this problem. For the present `there' is the
quadrangle of green sunlight in the half-opened gate. We now start to walk
up the avenue. On the second tree trunk of the right-side file we notice
traces of some local proclamation--" <40>
"It was Ivor's proclamation. He proclaimed that things had changed and
Aunt Betty's protègès should stop making their weekly calls."
"Splendid. We continue to walk toward the garden gate. Intervals of
landscape can be made out between the plane trees on both sides. On your
right--please, close your eyes, you will see better--on your right there's a
vineyard; on your left, a churchyard--you can distinguish its long, low,
very low, wall--"
"You make it sound rather creepy. And I want to add something. Among
the blackberries, Ivor and I discovered a crooked old tombstone with the
inscription Dors, Mèdor! and only the date of death, 1889; a found dog, no
doubt. It's just before the last tree on the left side."
"So now we reach the garden gate. We are about to enter--but you stop
all of a sudden: you've forgotten to buy those nice new stamps for your
album. We decide to go back to the post office."
"Can I open my eyes? Because I'm afraid I'm going to fall asleep."
"On the contrary: now is the moment to shut your eyes tight and
concentrate. I want you to imagine yourself turning on your heel so that
`right' instantly becomes `left,' and you instantly see the `here' as a
`there,' with the lamppost now on your left and dead Mèdor now on your
right, and the plane trees converging toward the post office. Can you do
that?"
"Done," said Iris. "About-face executed. I now stand facing a sunny
hole with a little pink house inside it and a bit of blue sky. Shall we
start walking back?"
"You may, I can't! This is the point of the experiment. In actual,
physical life I can turn as simply and swiftly as anyone. But mentally, with
my eyes closed and my body immobile, I am unable to switch from one
direction to the other. Some swivel cell in my brain does not work. I can
cheat, of course, by setting aside the mental snapshot of <41> one vista and
leisurely selecting the opposite view for my walk back to my starting point.
But if I do not cheat, some kind of atrocious obstacle, which would drive me
mad if I persevered, prevents me from imagining the twist which transforms
one direction into another, directly opposite. I am crushed, I am carrying
the whole world on my back in the process of trying to visualize my turning
around and making myself see in terms of `right' what I saw in terms of
`left' and vice versa."
I thought she had fallen asleep, but before I could entertain the
thought that she had not heard, not understood anything of what was
destroying me, she moved, rearranged her shoulder straps, and sat up.
"First of all, we shall agree," she said, "to cancel all such
experiments. Secondly, we shall tell ourselves that what we had been trying
to do was to solve a stupid philosophical riddle--on the lines of what does
`right' and `left' mean in our absence, when nobody is looking, in pure
space, and what, anyway, is space; when I was a child I thought space was
the inside of a nought, any nought, chalked on a slate and perhaps not quite
tidy, but still a good clean zero. I don't want you to go mad or to drive me
mad, because those perplexities are catching, and so we'll drop the whole
business of revolving avenues altogether. I would like to seal our pact with
a kiss, but we shall have to postpone that. Ivor is coming in a few minutes
to take us for a spin in his new car, but perhaps you do not care to come,
and so I propose we meet in the garden, for a minute or two, just before
dinner, while he is taking his bath."
I asked what Bob (L.P.) had been telling her in my dream. "It was not a
dream," she said. "He just wanted to know if his sister had phoned about a
dance they wanted us all three to come to. If she had, nobody was at home."
We repaired for a snack and a drink to the Victoria bar, and presently
Ivor joined us. He said, nonsense, he <42> could dance and fence beautifully
on the stage but was a regular bear at private affairs and would hate to
have his innocent sister pawed by all the rastaquouõres of the Còte.
"Incidentally," he added, "I don't much care for P.'s obsession with
moneylenders. He practically ruined the best one in Cambridge but has
nothing but conventional evil to repeat about them."
"My brother is a funny person," said Iris, turning to me as in play.
"He conceals our ancestry like a dark treasure, yet will flare up publicly
if someone calls someone a Shylock."
Ivor prattled on: "Old Maurice (his employer) is dining with us
tonight. Cold cuts and a macèdoine au kitchen rum. I'll also get some tinned
asparagus at the English shop; it's much better than the stuff they grow
here. The car is not exactly a Royce, but it rolls. Sorry Vivian is too
queasy to come. I saw Madge Titheridge this morning and she said French
reporters pronounce her family name `Si c'est riche.' Nobody's laughing
today." <43>
9
Being too excited to take my usual siesta, I spent most of the
afternoon working on a love poem (and this is the last entry in my 1922
pocket diary--exactly one month after my arrival in Carnavaux). In those
days I seemed to have had two muses: the essential, hysterical, genuine one,
who tortured me with elusive snatches of imagery and wrung her hands over my
inability to appropriate the magic and madness offered me; and her
apprentice, her palette girl and stand-in, a little logician, who stuffed
the torn gaps left by her mistress with explanatory or meter-mending fillers
which became more and more numerous the further I moved away from the
initial, evanescent, savage perfection. The treacherous music of Russian
rhythms came to my specious rescue like those demons who break the black
silence of an artist's hell with imitations of Greek poets and prehistorical
birds. Another and final deception would come with the Fair Copy in which,
for a short while, calligraphy, vellum paper, and India ink beautified a
dead doggerel. And to think that for almost five years I kept trying and
kept getting caught--until I fired that painted, pregnant, meek, miserable
little assistant!
I dressed and went downstairs. The trench window giving on the terrace
was open. Old Maurice, Iris, and <44> Ivor sat enjoying Martinis in the
orchestra seats of a marvelous sunset. Ivor was in the act of mimicking
someone, with bizarre intonations and extravagant gestures. The marvelous
sunset has not only remained as a backdrop of a life-transforming evening,
but endured, perhaps, behind the suggestion I made to my British publishers,
many years later, to bring out a coffee-table album of auroras and sunsets,
in the truest possible shades, a collection that would also be of scientific
value, since some learned celestiologist might be hired to discuss samples
from various countries and analyze the striking and never before discussed
differences between the color schemes of evening and dawn. The album came
out eventually, the price was high and the pictorial part passable; but the
text was supplied by a luckless female whose pretty prose and borrowed
poetry botched the book (Allan and Overton, London, 1949).
For a couple of moments, while idly attending to Ivor's strident
performance, I stood watching the huge sunset. Its wash was of a classical
light-orange tint with an oblique bluish-black shark crossing it. What
glorified the combination was a series of ember-bright cloudlets riding
along, tattered and hooded, above the red sun which had assumed the shape of
a pawn or a baluster. "Look at the sabbath witches!" I was about to cry, but
then I saw Iris rise and heard her say: "That will do, Ives. Maurice has
never met the person, it's all lost on him."
"Not at all," retorted her brother, "he will meet him in a minute and
recognize him (the verb was an artist's snarl), that's the point!"
Iris left the terrace via the garden steps, and Ivor did not continue
his skit, which a swift playback that now burst on my consciousness
identified as a clever burlesque of my voice and manner. I had the odd
sensation of a piece of myself being ripped off and tossed overboard, of my
being separated from my own self, of flying forward and at the same time
turning away. The second action <45> prevailed, and presently, under the
holm oak, I joined Iris.
The crickets were stridulating, dusk had filled the pool, a ray of the
outside lamp glistened on two parked cars. I kissed her lips, her neck, her
necklace, her neck, her lips. Her response dispelled my ill humor; but I
told her what I thought of the idiot before she ran back to the festively
lit villa.
Ivor personally brought up my supper, right to my bedside table, with
well-concealed dismay at being balked of his art's reward and charming
apologies for having offended me, and "had I run out of pyjamas?" to which I
replied that, on the contrary, I felt rather flattered, and in fact always
slept naked in summer, but preferred not to come down lest a slight headache
prevent me from not living up to that splendid impersonation.
I slept fitfully, and only in the small hours glided into a deeper
spell (illustrated for no reason at all with the image of my first little
inamorata in the grass of an orchard) from which I was rudely roused by the
spattering sounds of a motor. I slipped on a shirt and leant out of the
window, sending a flock of sparrows whirring out of the jasmin, whose
luxuriant growth reached up to the second floor, and saw, with a sensual
start, Ivor putting a suitcase and a fishing rod into his car which stood,
throbbing, practically in the garden. It was a Sunday, and I had been
expecting to have him around all day, but there he was getting behind the
wheel and slamming the door after him. The gardener was giving tactical
directions with both arms; his pretty little boy was also there, holding a
yellow and blue feather duster. And then I heard her lovely English voice
bidding her brother have a good time. I had to lean out a little more to see
her; she stood on a patch of cool clean turf, barefooted, barecalved, in an
ample-sleeved peignoir, repeating her joyful farewell, which he could no
longer hear.
I dashed to the W.C. across the landing. A few moments <46> later, as I
left my gurgling and gulping retreat, I noticed her on the other side of the
staircase. She was entering my room. My polo shirt, a very short,
salmon-colored affair, could not hide my salient impatience.
"I hate to see the stunned look on the face of a clock that has
stopped," she said, as she stretched a slender brovm arm up to the shelf
where I had relegated an old egg timer lent me in lieu of a regular alarm.
As her wide sleeve fell back I kissed the dark perfumed hollow I had longed
to kiss since our first day in the sun.
The door key would not work, that I knew; still I tried, and was
rewarded by the silly semblance of recurrent clicks that did not lock
anything. Whose step, whose sick young cough came from the stairs? Yes of
course that was Jacquot, the gardener's boy who rubbed and dusted things
every morning. He might butt in, I said, already speaking with difficulty.
To polish, for instance, that candlestick. Oh, what does it matter, she
whispered, he's only a conscientious child, a poor foundling, as all our
dogs and parrots are. Your tum, she said, is still as pink as your shirt.
And please do not forget, darling, to clear out before it's too late.
How far, how bright, how unchanged by eternity, how disfigured by time!
There were bread crumbs and even a bit of orange peel in the bed. The young
cough was now muted, but I could distinctly hear creakings, controlled
footfalls, the hum in an ear pressed to the door. I must have been eleven or
twelve when the nephew of my grand-uncle visited the Moscow country house
where I was spending that hot and hideous summer. He had brought his
passionate bride with him--straight from the wedding feast. Next day at the
siesta hour, in a frenzy of curiosity and fancy, I crept to a secret spot
under the second-floor guest-room window where a gardener's ladder stood
rooted in a jungle of jasmin. It reached only to the top of the closed
first-floor shutters, and though I found a foothold <47> above them, on an
ornamental projection, I could only just grip the sill of a half-open window
from which confused sounds issued. I recognized the jangle of bedsprings and
the rhythmic tinkle of a fruit knife on a plate near the bed, one post of
which I could make out by stretching my neck to the utmost; but what
fascinated me most were the manly moans coming from the invisible part of
the bed. A superhuman effort afforded me the sight of a salmon-pink shirt
over the back of a chair. He, the enraptured beast, doomed to die one day as
so many are, was now repeating her name with ever increasing urgency, and by
the time my foot slipped he was in full cry, thus drowning the noise of my
sudden descent into a crackle of twigs and a snowstorm of petals. <48>
10
Just before Ivor returned from his fishing trip, I moved to the
Victoria, where she visited me daily. That was not enough; but in the autumn
Ivor migrated to Los Angeles to join his half-brother in directing the
Amenic film company (for which, thirty years later, long after Ivor's death
over Dover, I was to write the script of Pawn Takes Queen, my most popular
at the time, but far from best, novel), and we returned to our beloved
villa, in the really quite nice blue Icarus, Ivor's thoughtful wedding
present.
Sometime in October my benefactor, now in the last stage of majestic
senility, came for his annual visit to Mentone, and, without warning, Iris
and I dropped in to see him. His villa was incomparably grander than ours.
He staggered to his feet to take between his wax-pale palms Iris's hand and
stare at her with blue bleary eyes for at least five seconds (a little
eternity, socially) in a kind of ritual silence, after which he embraced me
with a slow triple cross-kiss in the awful Russian tradition.
"Your bride," he said, using, I knew, the word in the sense of fiancèe
(and speaking an English which Iris said later was exactly like mine in
Ivor's unforgettable version) "is as beautiful as your wife will be!"
I quickly told him--in Russian--that the maire of <49> Cannice had
married us a month ago in a brisk ceremony. Nikifor Nikodimovich gave Iris
another stare and finally kissed her hand, which I was glad to see she
raised in the proper fashion (coached, no doubt, by Ivor who used to take
every opportunity to paw his sister).
"I misunderstood the rumors," he said, "but all the same I am happy to
make the acquaintance of such a charming young lady. And where, pray, in
what church, will the vow be sanctified?"
"In the temple we shall build, Sir," said Iris--a trifle insolently, I
thought.
Count Starov "chewed his lips," as old men are wont to do in Russian
novels. Miss Vrode-Vorodin, the elderly cousin who kept house for him, made
a timely entrance and led Iris to an adjacent alcove (illuminated by a
resplendent portrait by Serov, 1896, of the notorious beauty, Mme. de
Blagidze, in Caucasian costume) for a nice cup of tea. The Count wished to
talk business with me and had only ten minutes "before his injection."
What was my wife's maiden name?
I told him. He thought it over and shook his head. What was her
mother's name?
I told him that, too. Same reaction. What about the financial aspect of
the marriage?
I said she had a house, a parrot, a car, and a small income--I didn't
know exactly how much.
After another minute's thought, he asked me if I would like a permanent
job in the White Cross? It had nothing to do with Switzerland. It was an
organization that helped Russian Christians all over the world. The job
would involve travel, interesting connections, promotion to important posts.
I declined so emphatically that he dropped the silver pill box he was
holding and a number of innocent gum drops were spilled all over the table
at his elbow. He swept them onto the carpet with a gesture of peevish
dismissal. <50>
What then was I intending to do?
I said I'd go on with my literary dreams and nightmares. We would spend
most of the year in Paris. Paris was becoming the center of èmigrè culture
and destitution.
How much did I think I could earn?
Well, as N.N. knew, currencies were losing their identities in the
whirlpool of inflation, but Boris Morozov, a distinguished author, whose
fame had preceded his exile, had given me some illuminating "examples of
existence" when I met him quite recently in Cannice where he had lectured on
Baratynski at the local literaturnyy circle. In his case, four lines of
verse would pay for a bifsteck pommes, while a couple of essays in the
Novosti emigratsii assured a month's rent for a cheap chambre garnie. There
were also readings, in large auditoriums, at least twice a year, which might
bring him each time the equivalent of, say, one hundred dollars.
My benefactor thought this over and said that as long as he lived I
would receive a check for half that amount every first of the month, and
that he would bequeath me a certain sum in his testament. He named the sum.
Its paltriness took me aback. This was a foretaste of the disappointing
advances publishers were to offer me after a long, promising, pencil-tapping
pause.
We rented a two-room apartment in the 16th arrondissement, rue
Desprèaux, 23. The hallway connecting the rooms led, on the front side, to a
bathroom and kitchenette. Being a solitary sleeper by principle and
inclination, I relinquished the double bed to Iris, and slept on the couch
in the parlor. The concierge's daughter came to clean up and cook. Her
culinary capacities were limited, so we often broke the monotony of
vegetable soups and boiled meat by eating at a Russian restoranchik. We were
to spend seven winters in that little flat.
Owing to the foresight of my dear guardian and benefactor
(1850?--1927), an old-fashioned cosmopolitan with <51> a lot of influence in
the right quarters, I had become by the time of my marriage the subject of a
snug foreign country and thus was spared the indignity of a nansenskiy
pasport (a pauper's permit, really), as well as the vulgar obsession with
"documents," which provoked such evil glee among the Bolshevist rulers, who
perceived some similarity between red tape and Red rule and a certain
affinity between the civil plight of a hobbled expatriate and the political
immobilization of a Soviet slave. I could, therefore, take my wife to any
vacational resort in the world without waiting several weeks for a visa, and
then being refused, perhaps, a return visa to our accidental country of
residence, in this case France, because of some flaw in our precious and
despicable papers. Nowadays (1970), when my British passport has been
superseded by a no less potent American one, I still treasure that 1922
photo of the mysterious young man I then was, with the mysteriously smiling
eyes and the striped tie and the wavy hair. I remember spring trips to Malta
and Andalusia, but every summer, around the first of July, we drove to
Carnavaux and stayed there for a month or two. The parrot died in 1925, the
footboy vanished in 1927. Ivor visited us twice in Paris, and I think she
saw him also in London where she went at least once a year to spend a few
days with "friends," whom I did not know, but who sounded harmless--at least
to a certain point.
I should have been happier. I had planned to be happier. My health
continued patchy with ominous shapes showing through its flimsier edges.
Faith in my work never wavered, but despite her touching intentions to
participate in it, Iris remained on its outside, and the better it grew the
more alien it became to her. She took desultory lessons in Russian,
interrupting them regularly, for long periods, and finished by developing a
dull habitual aversion to the language. I soon noticed that she had ceased
trying to look attentive and bright when Russian, and Russian only, was <52>
spoken in her presence (after some primitive French had been kept up for the
first minute or two of the party in polite concession to her disability).
This was, at best, annoying; at worst, heartrending; it did not,
however, affect my sanity as something else threatened to do.
Jealousy, a masked giant never encountered before in the frivolous
affairs of my early youth, now stood with folded arms, confronting me at
every corner. Certain little sexual quirks in my sweet, docile, tender Iris,
inflections of lovemaking, felicities of fondling, the easy accuracy with
which she adapted her flexible frame to every pattern of passion, seemed to
presuppose a wealth of experience. Before starting to suspect the present, I
felt compelled to get my fill of suspecting her past. During the
examinations to which I subjected her on my worst nights, she dismissed her
former romances as totally insignificant, without realizing that this
reticence left more to my imagination than would the most luridly overstated
truth.
The three lovers (a figure I wrested from her with the fierceness of
Pushkin's mad gambler and with even less luck) whom she had had in her teens
remained nameless, and therefore spectral; devoid of any individual traits,
and therefore identical. They performed their sketchy pas in the back of her
lone act like the lowliest members of the corps de ballet, in a display of
mawkish gymnastics rather than dance, and it was clear that none of them
would ever become the male star of the troupe. She, the ballerina, on the
other hand, was a dim diamond with all the facets of talent ready to blaze,
but under the pressure of the nonsense around her had, for the moment, to
limit her steps and gestures to an expression of cold coquetry, of
flirtatious evasion--waiting as she was for the tremendous leap of the
marble-thighed athlete in shining tights who was to erupt from the wings
after a decent prelude. We thought I had been chosen for that part but we
were mistaken. <53>
Only by projecting thus on the screen of my mind those stylized images,
could I allay the anguish of carnal jealousy centered on specters. Yet not
seldom I chose to succumb to it. The trench window of my studio in Villa
Iris gave on the same red-tiled balcony as my wife's bedroom did, and could
be set half-open at such an angle as to provide two different views melting
into one another. It caught obliquely, through the monastic archway leading
from room to room, part of her bed and of her--her hair, a shoulder--which
otherwise I could not see from the old-fashioned lectern at which I wrote;
but the glass also held, at arm's length as it were, the green reality of
the garden with a peregrination of cypresses along its sidewall. So half in
bed and half in the pale hot sky, she would recline, writing a letter that
was crucified on my second-best chessboard. I knew that if I asked, the
answer would be "Oh, to an old schoolmate," or "To Ivor," or "To old Miss
Kupalov," and I also knew that in one way or another the letter would reach
the post office at the end of the plane-tree avenue without my seeing the
name on the envelope. And still I let her write as she comfortably floated
in the life belt of her pillow, above the cypresses and the garden wall,
while all the time I gauged--grimly, recklessly--to what depths of dark
pigment the tentacled ache would go. <54>
11
Most of those Russian lessons consisted of her taking one of my poems
or essays to this or that Russian lady, Miss Kupalov or Mrs. Lapukov
(neither of whom had much English) and having it paraphrased orally for her
in a kind of makeshift Volapýk. On my pointing out to Iris that she was
losing her time at this hit-and-miss task, she cast around for some other
alchemic method which might enable her to read everything I wrote. I had
begun by then (1925) my first novel (Tamara) and she coaxed me into letting
her have a copy of the first chapter, which I had just typed out. This she
carried to an agency that dealt in translations into French of utilitarian
texts such as applications and supplications addressed by Russian refugees
to various rats in the ratholes of various commissariats. The person who
agreed to supply her with the "literal version," which she paid for in
valuta, kept the typescript for two months and warned her when delivering it
that my "article" had presented almost insurmountable difficulties, "being
written in an idiom and style utterly unfamiliar to the ordinary reader."
Thus an anonymous imbecile in a shabby, cluttered, clattering office became
my first critic and my first translator.
I knew nothing of that venture, until I found her one <55> day bending
her brown curls over sheets of foolscap almost perforated by the violence of
the violet characters that covered it without any semblance of margin. I
was, in those days, naively opposed to any kind of translation, partly
because my attempts to turn two or three of my first compositions into my
own English had resulted in a feeling of morbid revolt--and in maddening
headaches. Iris, her cheek on her fist and her eyes rolling in languid
doubt, looked up at me rather sheepishly, but with that gleam of humor that
never left her in the most absurd or trying circumstances. I noticed a
blunder in the first line, a boo-boo in the next, and without bothering to
read any further, tore up the whole thing--which provoked no reaction, save
a neutral sigh, on the part of my thwarted darling.
In compensation for being debarred from my writings, she decided to
become a writer herself. Beginning with the middle Twenties and to the end
of her short, squandered, uncharmed life, my Iris kept working on a
detective novel in two, three, four successive versions, in which the plot,
the people, the setting, everything kept changing in bewildering bursts of
frantic deletions--everything except the names (none of which I remember).
Not only did she lack all literary talent, but she had not even the
knack of imitating the small number of gifted authors among the prosperous
but ephemeral purveyors of "crime fiction" which she consumed with the
indiscriminate zest of a model prisoner. How, then, did my Iris know why
this had to be altered, that rejected? What instinct of genius ordered her
to destroy the whole heap of her drafts on the eve, practically on the eve,
of her sudden death? All the odd girl could ever visualize, with startling
lucidity, was the crimson cover of the final, ideal paperback on which the
villain's hairy fist would be shown pointing a pistol-shaped cigarette
lighter at the reader--who was not supposed to guess until everybody in the
book had died that it was, in fact, a pistol. <56>
Let me pick out several fatidic points, cleverly disguised at the time,
within the embroidery of our seven winters.
During a lull in a magnificent concert for which we had not been able
to obtain adjacent seats, I noticed Iris eagerly welcoming a
melancholy-looking woman with drab hair and thin lips; I certainly had met
her, somewhere, quite recently, but the very insignificance of her
appearance canceled the pursuit of a vague recollection, and I never asked
Iris about it. She was to become my wife's last teacher.
Every author believes, when his first book is published, that those
that acclaim it are his personal friends or impersonal peers, while its
revilers can only be envious rogues and nonentities. No doubt I might have
had similar illusions about the way Tamara was reviewed in the
Russian-language periodicals of Paris, Berlin, Prague, Riga, and other
cities; but by that time I was already engrossed in my second novel, Pawn
Takes Queen, and my first one had dwindled to a pinch of colored dust in my
mind.
The editor of Patria, the èmigrè monthly in which Pawn Takes Queen had
begun to be serialized, invited "Irida Osipovna" and me to a literary
samovar. I mention it only because this was one of the few salons that my
unsociability deigned to frequent. Iris helped with the sandwiches. I smoked
my pipe and observed the feeding habits of two major novelists, three minor
ones, one major poet, five minor ones of both sexes, one major critic
(Demian Basilevski), and nine minor ones, including the inimitable
"Prostakov-Skotinin," a Russian comedy name (meaning "simpleton and brute")
applied to him by his archrival Hristofor Boyarski.
The major poet, Boris Morozov, an amiable grizzly bear of a man, was
asked how his reading in Berlin had gone, and he said: "Nichevo" (a "so-so"
tinged with a "well enough") and then told a funny but not memorable story
about the new President of the Union of Èmigrè <57> Writers in Germany. The
lady next to me informed me she had adored that treacherous conversation
between the Pawn and the Queen about the husband and would they really
defenestrate the poor chess player? I said they would but not in the next
issue, and not for good: he would live forever in the games he had played
and in the multiple exclamation marks of future annotators. I also heard--my
hearing is almost on a par with my sight--snatches of general talk such as
an explanatory, "She is an Englishwoman," murmured from behind a hand five
chairs away by one guest to another.
All that would have been much too trivial to record unless meant to
serve as the commonplace background, at any such meeting of exiles, against
which a certain reminder flickered now and then, between the shoptalk and
the tattle--a line of Tyutchev or Blok, which was cited in passing, as well
as an everlasting presence, with the familiarity of devotion and as the
secret height of art, and which ornamented sad lives with a sudden cadenza
coming from some celestial elsewhere, a glory, a sweetness, the patch of
rainbow cast on the wall by a crystal paperweight we cannot locate. That was
what my Iris was missing.
To return to the trivia: I recall regaling the company with one of the
howlers I had noticed in the "translation" of Tamara. The sentence vidnelos'
neskol'ko barok ("several barges could be seen") had become la vue ètait
assez baroque. The eminent critic Basilevski, a stocky, fair-haired old
fellow in a rumpled brown suit, shook with abdominal mirth--but then his
expression changed to one of suspicion and displeasure. After tea he
accosted me and insisted gruffly that I had made up that example of
mistranslation. I remember answering that, if so, he, too, might well be an
invention of mine.
As we strolled home. Iris complained she would never learn to cloud a
glass of tea with a spoonful of cloying raspberry jam. I said I was ready to
put up with her deliberate <58> insularity but implored her to cease
announcing þ la ronde: "Please, don't mind me: I love the sound of Russian."
That was an insult, like telling an author his book was unreadable but
beautifully printed.
"I am going to make reparations," she gaily replied. "I've never been
able to find a proper teacher, I always believed you were the only one--and
you refused to teach me, because you were busy, because you were tired,
because it bored you, because it was bad for your nerves. I've discovered at
last someone who speaks both languages, yours and mine, as two natives in
one, and can make all the edges fit. I am thinking of Nadia Starov. In fact
it's her own suggestion."
Nadezhda Gordonovna Starov was the wife of a leytenant Starov
(Christian name unimportant), who had served under General Wrangel and now
had some office job in the White Cross. I had met him in London recently, as
fellow pallbearer at the funeral of the old Count, whose bastard or "adopted
nephew" (whatever that meant), he was said to be. He was a dark-eyed,
dark-complexioned man, three or four years my senior; I thought him rather
handsome in a brooding, gloomy way. A head wound received in the civil war
had left him with a terrifying tic that caused his face to change suddenly,
at variable intervals, as if a paper bag were being crumpled by an invisible
hand. Nadezhda Starov, a quiet, plain woman with an indefinable Quakerish
look about her, clocked those intervals for some reason, no doubt of a
medical nature, the man himself being unconscious of his "fireworks" unless
he happened to see them in a mirror. He had a macabre sense of humor,
beautiful hands, and a velvety voice.
I realized now that it was Nadezhda Gordonovna whom Iris had been
talking to in that concert hall. I cannot say exactly when the lessons began
or how long that fad lasted; a month or two months at the most. They took
place either in Mrs. Starov's lodgings or in one of the <59> Russian
tearooms both ladies frequented. I kept a little list of telephone numbers
so that Iris might be warned that I could always make sure of her
whereabouts if, say, I felt on the brink of losing my mind or wanted her to
buy on the way home a tin of my favorite Brown Prune tobacco. She did not
know, on the other hand, that I would never have dared ring her up, lest her
not being where she said she would be cause me even a few minutes of an
agony that I could not face.
Sometime around Christmas, 1929, she casually told me that those
lessons had been discontinued quite a while ago: Mrs. Starov had left for
England, and it was rumored that she would not return to her husband. The
lieutenant, it seemed, was quite a dasher. <60>
12
At a certain mysterious point toward the end of our last winter in
Paris something in our relationship changed for the better. A wave of new
warmth, new intimacy, new tenderness, swelled and swept away all the
delusions of distance--tiffs, silences, suspicions, retreats into castles of
amour-propre and the like--which had obstructed our love and of which I
alone was guilty. A more amiable, merrier mate I could not have imagined.
Endearments, love names (based in my case on Russian forms) reentered our
customary exchanges. I broke the monastic rules of work on my novella in
verse Polnolunie (Plenilune) by riding with her in the Bois or dutifully
escorting her to fashion-show teases and exhibitions of avant-garde frauds.
I surmounted my contempt for the "serious" cinema (depicting heartrending
problems with a political twist), which she preferred to American buffoonery
and the trick photography of Germanic horror films. I even gave a talk on my
Cambridge days at a rather pathetic English Ladies Club, to which she
belonged. And to top the treat, I told her the plot of my next novel (Camera
Lucida).
One afternoon, in March or early April, 1930, she peeped into my room
and, being admitted, handed me the duplicate of a typewritten sheet,
numbered 444. It was, she <61> said, a tentative episode in her interminable
tale, which would soon display more deletions than insertions. She was
stuck, she said. Diana Vane, an incidental but on the whole nice girl,
sojourning in Paris, happened to meet, at a riding school, a strange
Frenchman, of Corsican, or perhaps Algerian, origin, passionate, brutal,
unbalanced. He mistook Diana--and kept on mistaking her despite her amused
remonstrations--for his former sweetheart, also an English girl, whom he had
last seen ages ago. We had here, said the author, a sort of hallucination,
an obsessive fancy, which Diana, a delightful flirt with a keen sense of
humor, allowed Jules to entertain during some twenty riding lessons; but
then his attentions grew more realistic, and she stopped seeing him. There
had been nothing between them, and yet he simply could not be dissuaded from
confusing her with the girl he once had possessed or thought he had, for
that girl, too, might well have been only the afterimage of a still earlier
romance or remembered delirium. It was a very bizarre situation.
Now this page was supposed to be a last ominous letter written by that
Frenchman in a foreigner's English to Diana. I was to read it as if it were
a real letter and suggest, as an experienced writer, what might be the next
development or disaster.
Beloved!
I am not capable to represent to myself that you really desire to tear
up any connection with me. God sees, I love you more than life--more than
two lives, your and my, together taken. Are you not ill? Or maybe you have
found another? Another lover, yes? Another victim of your attraction? No,
no, this thought is too horrible, too humiliating for us both.
My supplication is modest and just. Give only one more interview to me!
One interview! I am <62> prepared to meet with you it does not matter
where--on the street, in some cafe, in the Forest of Boulogne--but I must
see you, must speak with you and open to you many mysteries before I will
die. Oh, this is no threat! I swear that if our interview will lead to a
positive result, if, otherwise speaking, you will permit me to hope, only to
hope, then, oh then, I will consent to wait a little. But you must reply to
me without retardment, my cruel, stupid, adored little girl!
Your Jules
"There's one thing," I said, carefully folding the sheet and pocketing
it for later study, "one thing the little girl should know. This is not a
romantic Corsican writing a crime passionnel letter; it is a Russian
blackmailer knowing just enough English to translate into it the stalest
Russian locutions. What puzzles me is how did you, with your three or four
words of Russian--kak pozhivaete and do svidaniya--how did you, the author,
manage to think up those subtle turns, and imitate the mistakes in English
that only a Russian would make? Impersonation, I know, runs in the family,
but still--"
Iris replied (with that quaint non sequitur that I was to give to the
heroine of my Ardis forty years later) that, yes, indeed, I was right, she
must have had too many muddled lessons in Russian and she would certainly
correct that extraordinary impression by simply giving the whole letter in
French--from which, she had been told, incidentally, Russian had borrowed a
lot of clichès.
"But that's beside the point," she added. "You don't understand--the
point is what should happen next--I mean, logically? What should my poor
girl do about that bore, that brute? She is uncomfortable, she is perplexed,
she is frightened. Should this situation end in slapstick or tragedy?" <63>
"In the wastepaper basket," I whispered, interrupting my work to gather
her small form onto my lap as I often did, the Lord be thanked, in that
fatal spring of 1930.
"Give me back that scrap," she begged gently, trying to thrust her hand
into the pocket of my dressing gown, but I shook my head and embraced her
closer.
My latent jealousy should have been fanned up to a furnace roar by the
surmise that my wife had been transcribing an authentic letter--received,
say, from one of the wretched, unwashed èmigrè poeticules, with smooth
glossy hair and eloquent liquid eyes, whom she used to meet in the salons of
exile. But after reexamining the thing, I decided that it just might be her
own composition with some of the planted faults, borrowed from the French
(supplication, sans tarder), while others could be subliminal echoes of the
Volapýk she had been exposed to, during sessions with Russian teachers,
through bilingual or trilingual exercises in tawdry textbooks. Thus, instead
of losing myself in a jungle of evil conjectures, all I did was preserve
that thin sheet with its unevenly margined lines so characteristic of her
typing in the faded and cracked briefcase before me, among other mementos,
other deaths. <64>
13
On the morning of April 23, 1930, the shrill peal of the hallway
telephone caught me in the act of stepping into my bathwater.
Ivor! He had just arrived in Paris from New York for an important
conference, would be busy all afternoon, was leaving tomorrow, would like
to--
Here intervened naked Iris, who delicately, unhurriedly, with a radiant
smile, appropriated the monologizing receiver. A minute later (her brother
with all his defects was a mercifully concise phoner), she, still beaming,
embraced me, and we moved to her bedroom for our last "fairelamourir" as she
called it in her tender aberrant French.
Ivor was to fetch us at seven P.M. I had already put on my old dinner
jacket; Iris stood sideways to the hallway mirror (the best and brightest in
the whole flat) veering gently as she tried to catch a clear view of the
back of her silky dark bob in the hand glass she held at head level.
"If you're ready," she said, "I'd like you to buy some olives. He'll be
coming here after dinner, and he likes them with his `postbrandy.' "
So I went downstairs and crossed the street and shivered (it was a raw
cheerless night) and pushed open the door of the little delicatessen shop
opposite, and a man behind <65> me stopped it from closing with a strong
hand. He wore a trench coat and a beret, his dark face was twitching. I
recognized Lieutenant Starov.
"Ah!" he said. "A whole century we did not meet!" The cloud of his
breath gave off an odd chemical smell. I had once tried sniffing cocaine
(which only made me throw up), but this was some other drug.
He removed a black glove for one of those circumstantial handshakes my
compatriots think proper to use at every entry and exit, and the liberated
door hit him between the shoulder blades.
"Pleasant meeting!" he went on in his curious English (not parading it
as might have seemed but using it by unconscious association). "I see you
are in a smoking. Banquet?"
I bought my olives, replying the while, in Russian, that, yes, my wife
and I were dining out. Then I skipped a farewell handshake, by taking
advantage of the shopgirl's turning to him for the next transaction.
"What a shame," exclaimed Iris--"I wanted the black ones, not the
green! "
I told her I refused to go back for them because I did not want to run
into Starov again.
"Oh, that's a detestable person," she said. "I'm sure he'll try now to
come and see us, hoping for some vaw-dutch-ka. I'm sorry you spoke to him."
She flung the window open and leant out just as Ivor was emerging from
his taxi. She blew him an exuberant kiss and shouted, with illustrative
gestures, that we were coming down.
"How nice it would be," she said as we hurried downstairs, "if you'd be
wearing an opera cloak. You could wrap it around both of us as the Siamese
twins do in your story. Now, quick!"
She dashed into Ivor's arms, and was the next moment in the safety of
the cab. <66>
"Paon d'Or," Ivor told the driver. "Good to see you, old boy," he said
to me, with a distinct American intonation (which I shyly imitated at dinner
until he growled: "Very funny").
The Paon d'Or no longer exists. Although not quite tops, it was a nice
clean place, much patronized by American tourists, who called it "Pander" or
"Pandora" and always ordered its "putty saw-lay," and that, I guess, is what
we had. I remember more clearly a glazed case hanging on the gold-figured
wall next to our table: it displayed four Morpho butterflies, two huge ones
similar in harsh sheen but differently shaped, and two smaller ones beneath
them, the left of a sweeter blue with white stripes and the right gloaming
like silvery satin. According to the headwaiter, they had been caught by a
convict in South America.
"And how's my friend Mata Hari?" inquired Ivor turning to us again, his
spread hand still flat on the table as he had placed it when swinging toward
the "bugs" under discussion.
We told him the poor ara sickened and had to be destroyed. And what
about his automobile, was she still running? She jolly well was--
"In fact," Iris continued, touching my wrist, "we've decided to set off
tomorrow for Cannice. Pity you can't join us, Ives, but perhaps you might
come later."
I did not want to object, though I had never heard of that decision.
Ivor said that if ever we wanted to sell Villa Iris he knew someone who
would snap it up any time. Iris, he said, knew him too: David Geller, the
actor. "He was (turning to me) her first beau before you blundered in. She
must still have somewhere that photo of him and me in Troilus and Cressida
ten years ago. He's Helen of Troy in it. I'm Cressida."
"Lies, lies," murmured Iris.
Ivor described his own house in Los Angeles. He proposed <67>
discussing with me after dinner a script he wished me to prepare based on
Gogol's Inspector (we were back at the start, so to speak). Iris asked for
another helping of whatever it was we were eating.
"You will die," said Ivor. "It's monstrously rich. Remember what Miss
Grunt (a former governess to whom he would assign all kinds of gruesome
apothegms) used to say: `The white worms lie in wait for the glutton.' "
"That's why I want to be burned when I die," remarked Iris.
He ordered a second or third bottle of the indifferent white wine I had
had the polite weakness to praise. We drank to his last film--I forget its
title--which was to be shown tomorrow in London, and later in Paris, he
hoped.
Ivor did not look either very well or very happy; he had developed a
sizable bald spot, freckled. I had never noticed before that his eyelids
were so heavy and his lashes so coarse and pale. Our neighbors, three
harmless Americans, hearty, flushed, vociferous, were, perhaps, not
particularly pleasant, but neither Iris nor I thought Ivor's threat "to make
those Bronxonians pipe down" justified, seeing that he, too, was talking in
fairly resonant tones. I rather looked forward to the end of the dinner--and
to coffee at home--but Iris on the contrary seemed inclined to enjoy every
morsel and drop. She wore a very open, jet-black frock and the long onyx
earrings I had once given her. Her cheeks and arms, without their summer
tan, had the mat whiteness that I was to distribute--perhaps too
generously--among the girls of my future books. Ivor's roving eyes, while he
talked, tended to appraise her bare shoulders, but by the simple trick of
breaking in with some question, I managed to keep confusing the trajectory
of his gaze.
At last the ordeal came to a close. Iris said she would be back in a
minute; her brother suggested we "repair for a leak." I declined--not
because I did not need it--I did--but <68> because I knew by experience that
a talkative neighbor and the sight of his immediate stream would inevitably
afflict me with urinary impotence. As I sat smoking in the lounge of the
restaurant I pondered the wisdom of suddenly transferring the established
habit of work on Camera Lucida to other surroundings, another desk, another
lighting, another pressure of outside calls and smells--and I saw my pages
and notes flash past like the bright windows of an express train that did
not stop at my station. I had decided to talk Iris out of her plan when
brother and sister appeared from opposite sides of the stage, beaming at one
another. She had less than fifteen minutes of life left.
Numbers are bleary along rue Desprèaux, and the taximan missed our
front porch by a couple of house lengths. He suggested reversing his cab,
but impatient Iris had already alighted, and I scrambled out after her,
leaving Ivor to pay the taxi. She cast a look around her; then started to
walk so fast toward our house that I had trouble catching up with her. As I
was about to cup her elbow, I heard Ivor's voice behind me, calling out that
he had not enough change. I abandoned Iris and ran back to Ivor, and just as
I reached the two palm readers, they and I heard Iris cry out something loud
and brave, as if she were driving away a fierce hound. By the light of a
streetlamp we glimpsed the figure of a mackintoshed man stride up to her
from the opposite sidewalk and fire at such close range that he seemed to
prod her with his large pistol. By now our taximan, followed by Ivor and me,
had come near enough to see the killer stumble over her collapsed and curled
up body. Yet he did not try to escape. Instead he knelt down, took off his
beret, threw back his shoulders, and in this ghastly and ludicrous attitude
lifted his pistol to his shaved head.
The story that appeared among other faits-divers in the Paris dailies
after an investigation by the police--whom Ivor and I contrived to mislead
thoroughly--amounted to what follows--I translate: a White Russian, Wladimir
<69> Blagidze, alias Starov, who was subject to paroxysms of insanity, ran
amuck Friday night in the middle of a calm street, opened fire at random,
and after killing with one pistol shot an English tourist Mrs. [name
garbled], who chanced to be passing by, blew his brains out beside her.
Actually he did not die there and then, but retained in his remarkably tough
brainpan fragments of consciousness and somehow lingered on well into May,
which was unusually hot that year. Out of some perverse dream-like
curiosity, Ivor visited him at the very special hospital of the renowned Dr.
Lazareff, a very round, mercilessly round, building on the top of a hill,
thickly covered with horse chestnut, wild rose, and other poignant plants.
The hole in Blagidze's mind had caused a complete set of recent memories to
escape; but the patient remembered quite clearly (according to a Russian
male nurse good at decoding the tales of the tortured) how at six years of
age he was taken to a pleasure park in Italy where a miniature train
consisting of three open cars, each seating six silent children, with a
battery-operated green engine that emitted at realistic intervals puffs of
imitation smoke, pursued a circular course through a brambly picturesque
nightmare grove whose dizzy flowers nodded continuous assent to all the
horrors of childhood and hell.
From somewhere in the Orkneys, Nadezhda Gordonovna and a clerical
friend arrived in Paris only after her husband's burial. Moved by a false
sense of duty, she attempted to see me so as to tell me "everything." I
evaded all contact with her, but she managed to locate Ivor in London before
he left for the States. I never asked him, and the dear funny fellow never
revealed to me what that "everything" was; I refuse to believe that it could
have amounted to much--and I knew enough, anyway. By nature I am not
vindictive; yet I like to dwell in fancy on the image of that little green
train, running on, round and round, forever. <70>
PART TWO
<71> <72>
1
A curious form of self-preservation moves us to get rid, instantly,
irrevocably, of all that belonged to the loved one we lost. Otherwise, the
things she touched every day and kept in their proper context by the act of
handling them start to become bloated with an awful mad life of their own.
Her dresses now wear their own selves, her books leaf through their own
pages. We suffocate in the tightening circle of those monsters that are
misplaced and misshapen because she is not there to tend them. And even the
bravest among us cannot meet the gaze of her mirror.
How to get rid of them is another problem. I could not drown them like
kittens; in fact, I could not drown a kitten, let alone her brush or bag.
Nor could I watch a stranger collect them, take them away, come back for
more. Therefore, I simply abandoned the flat, telling the maid to dispose in
any manner she chose of all those unwanted things. Unwanted! At the moment
of parting they appeared quite normal and harmless; I would even say they
looked taken aback.
At first I tried putting up in a third-rate hotel in the center of
Paris. I would fight terror and solitude by working all day. I completed one
novel, began another, wrote forty poems (all robbers and brothers under
their motley <73> skin), a dozen short stories, seven essays, three
devastating reviews, one parody. The business of not losing my mind during
the night was taken care of by swallowing an especially potent pill or
buying a bedmate.
I remember a dangerous dawn in May (1931? or 19
