Stalking Nabokov Read Online Free Page B
Author: Brian Boyd
Tags: Literary Criticism/European/General
Nabokov papers are now the most frequently consulted in the Berg Collection.
In Flaubert’s Parrot Julian Barnes writes:
You can define a net in one of two ways…. Normally, you would say that it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define a net as … a collection of holes tied together with string.
And then, for some strange reason, he proceeds to talk about biography.
In the case of Nabokov’s biography, it’s a wonder that we’re left with anything but holes. He had a hypertrophied sense of privacy. “I hate tampering with the precious lives of great writers and I hate Tom peeping over the fence of those lives—I hate the vulgarity of ‘human interest.’ I hate the rustle of skirts and giggles in the corridors of time—and no biographer will ever catch a glimpse of my private life” ( LRL 38). He would deplore the fact that I was allowed to see the manuscript from which I have just quoted, and he would especially deplore the fact that I am about to quote what he first wrote: “no biographer will ever catch a glimpse of my private life—I hope”; he then crossed out the hope, lest a biographer think that there might be some hope of peeking behind the scenes. 1 He placed a fifty-year restriction on the papers he deposited at the Library of Congress. He hid behind literary masks and then retreated entirely from the public gaze to the tranquility of Montreux. Ensconced there, he fired off brusque letters to various editors protesting against factual inaccuracies or infringements of his privacy.
In his books Nabokov turned biography upside-down and inside-out. His critical biography of Nikolay Gogol begins with Gogol’s death and ends with his birth. His last Russian novel, The Gift , contains as an insert the young narrator’s 120-page biography of the real writer Nikolay Chernyshevsky, full of genuine scholarly detail but exuberantly defiant of every biographical decorum. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight the narrator’s comically frustrated search for the facts of his half-brother’s life becomes not only all we can have of Sebastian Knight’s biography but also a handbook for all biographers, crammed with precepts and cautionary tales.
Nabokov had least time of all for the biographies of writers, and trying to compose his biography seemed at times like preparing a lovingly executed portrait for a Byzantine iconoclast. “Remember that what you are told is really threefold,” he intones in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight : “shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale” ( RLSK 52). Shrewd advice, wise caution. Much more chilling for a potential biographer of Nabokov is this comment that V. makes on Sebastian Knight:
I soon found out that except for a few odd pages dispersed among other papers, he himself had destroyed [his manuscripts] long ago, for he belonged to that rare type of writer who knows that nothing ought to remain except the perfect achievement: the printed book; that its actual existence is inconsistent with that of its spectre, the uncouth manuscript flaunting its imperfections like a revengeful ghost carrying its own head under its arm, and that for this reason the litter of the workshop, no matter its sentimental or commercial value, must never subsist.
(36)
In his own person, Nabokov stressed “the plain truth of the documents…. That, and only that, is what I would ask of my biographer—plain facts, no symbol-searching, no jumping at attractive but preposterous conclusions” ( SO 156).
All this makes my presence here something of a miracle. I happen to be in North America at the moment for two main reasons: for the publication of the second volume of my Nabokov biography, and for this announcement that the Nabokov Archive has become part of the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection. But Nabokov says he wants a biographer to stick to
In Flaubert’s Parrot Julian Barnes writes:
You can define a net in one of two ways…. Normally, you would say that it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define a net as … a collection of holes tied together with string.
And then, for some strange reason, he proceeds to talk about biography.
In the case of Nabokov’s biography, it’s a wonder that we’re left with anything but holes. He had a hypertrophied sense of privacy. “I hate tampering with the precious lives of great writers and I hate Tom peeping over the fence of those lives—I hate the vulgarity of ‘human interest.’ I hate the rustle of skirts and giggles in the corridors of time—and no biographer will ever catch a glimpse of my private life” ( LRL 38). He would deplore the fact that I was allowed to see the manuscript from which I have just quoted, and he would especially deplore the fact that I am about to quote what he first wrote: “no biographer will ever catch a glimpse of my private life—I hope”; he then crossed out the hope, lest a biographer think that there might be some hope of peeking behind the scenes. 1 He placed a fifty-year restriction on the papers he deposited at the Library of Congress. He hid behind literary masks and then retreated entirely from the public gaze to the tranquility of Montreux. Ensconced there, he fired off brusque letters to various editors protesting against factual inaccuracies or infringements of his privacy.
In his books Nabokov turned biography upside-down and inside-out. His critical biography of Nikolay Gogol begins with Gogol’s death and ends with his birth. His last Russian novel, The Gift , contains as an insert the young narrator’s 120-page biography of the real writer Nikolay Chernyshevsky, full of genuine scholarly detail but exuberantly defiant of every biographical decorum. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight the narrator’s comically frustrated search for the facts of his half-brother’s life becomes not only all we can have of Sebastian Knight’s biography but also a handbook for all biographers, crammed with precepts and cautionary tales.
Nabokov had least time of all for the biographies of writers, and trying to compose his biography seemed at times like preparing a lovingly executed portrait for a Byzantine iconoclast. “Remember that what you are told is really threefold,” he intones in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight : “shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale” ( RLSK 52). Shrewd advice, wise caution. Much more chilling for a potential biographer of Nabokov is this comment that V. makes on Sebastian Knight:
I soon found out that except for a few odd pages dispersed among other papers, he himself had destroyed [his manuscripts] long ago, for he belonged to that rare type of writer who knows that nothing ought to remain except the perfect achievement: the printed book; that its actual existence is inconsistent with that of its spectre, the uncouth manuscript flaunting its imperfections like a revengeful ghost carrying its own head under its arm, and that for this reason the litter of the workshop, no matter its sentimental or commercial value, must never subsist.
(36)
In his own person, Nabokov stressed “the plain truth of the documents…. That, and only that, is what I would ask of my biographer—plain facts, no symbol-searching, no jumping at attractive but preposterous conclusions” ( SO 156).
All this makes my presence here something of a miracle. I happen to be in North America at the moment for two main reasons: for the publication of the second volume of my Nabokov biography, and for this announcement that the Nabokov Archive has become part of the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection. But Nabokov says he wants a biographer to stick to
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