Stalking Nabokov Read Online Free

the kinds of clues sober reality would never have provided. At the end of one chapter, V has visited a friend of his brother’s at Cambridge. Just as he leaves his brother’s friend, a sudden voice calls out from the mist: “Sebastian Knight? Who is speaking of Sebastian Knight?” There the chapter ends, and the next begins:
    The stranger who uttered these words now approached—Oh, how I sometimes yearn for the easy swing of a well-oiled novel! How comfortable it would have been had the voice belonged to some cheery old don with long downy ear-lobes and that puckering about the eyes which stands for wisdom and humour. . . . A handy character, a welcome passer-by who had also known my hero, but from a different angle. “And now,” he would say, “I am going to tell you the real story of Sebastian Knight’s college years.” And then and there he would have launched on that story. But alas, nothing of the kind really happened. That Voice in the Mist rang out in the dimmest passage of my mind. It was but the echo of some possible truth, a timely reminder: don’t be too certain of learning the past from the lips of the present. Beware of the most honest broker. Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale.
    ( RLSK 52)
    This was advice I kept in mind. One of the most distinguished of American literary scholars told me of the time he was walking along the corridors of Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall with his arm in a sling. Other colleagues joshed him about skiing accidents and the like; Nabokov hailed him with an ebullient and delighted “Ah! a duel!” And then I found out that the incident had not happened to this particular professor at all because another professor almost as well known told me in minute detail of the circumstances—and the first professor, I had noticed, had a memory that seemed fuzzy in the extreme away from the books he still remembered with wonderful lucidity. He had simply heard the tale told and in the retelling had forgotten it was not his own memory. And yet this was a great scholar, and Nabokov’s colleague for years. You can imagine that along with the masses of anecdote I garnered for Nabokov’s American years from those who had stood at the toilet beside him (I kid you not) or heard him in the lecture hall or passed him in the corridor or knew somebody who had passed him once, I was also treated to masses of garbling, misconstruction, and decomposing gossip.
    In his last two decades—from 1959 to 1977, to be precise—Nabokov could afford to retire from Cornell and live in a Swiss luxury hotel. He was an international celebrity, his face on the cover of Newsweek and Time , his books the hottest property on the high literary market, but at the same time he withdrew from the public gaze to the controlled seclusion of his retreat in Montreux, Switzerland. He constructed a literary persona of intimidating arrogance and protested in letters to editors against factual inaccuracies or infringements of his privacy. And although he was interviewed for Vogue , Life , Playboy , People , and American and European TV, he agreed to interviews only if the questions were submitted in writing well ahead of time so that he could craft his answers in writing, too. There were advantages of the steadiness of his life in these years—I could interview his secretary and the concierge and under-concierge and under-under-concierge at the Montreux Palace Hotel and use his own private library and sift through the ton of paper that had now accumulated in his archive.
    But Nabokov had a reputation for arrogance and aloofness that the rococo fortress of the Montreux Palace Hotel seemed to bear out. I remember dressing for my first meeting with Véra Nabokov there. During the last eight of my nine years as a student, I had worn nothing but purple, tangerine, lime green, or scarlet overalls. Knowing of the