Vladimir Nabokov. Lance
© 1952 Copyright by Vladimir Nabokov
The name of the planet, presuming it has already received
one, is immaterial. At its most favorable opposition, it may
very well be separated from the earth by only as many miles as
there are years between last Friday and the rise of the
Himalayas-- a million times the reader's average age. In the
telescopic field of one's fancy, through the prism of one's
tears, any particularities it presents should be no more
striking than those of existing planets. A rosy globe, marbled
with dusky blotches, it is one of the countless objects
diligently revolving in the infinite and gratuitous awfulness
of fluid space.
My planet's maria (which are not seas) and its
lacus (which are not lakes) have also, let us suppose,
received names; some less jejune, perhaps, than those of garden
roses; others, more pointless than the surnames of their
observers (for, to take actual cases, that an astronomer should
have been called Lampland is as marvelous as that an
entomologist should have been called Krautwurm); but most of
them of so antique a style as to vie in sonorous and corrupt
enchantment with place names pertaining to romances of
chivalry.
Just as our Pinedales, down here, have often little to
offer beyond a shoe factory on one side of the tracks and the
rusty inferno of an automobile dump on the other, so those
seductive Arcadias and Icarias and Zephyrias on planetary maps
may quite likely turn out to be dead deserts lacking even the
milkweed that graces our dumps. Selenographers will confirm
this, but then, their lenses serve them better than ours do. In
the present instance, the greater the magnification, the more
the mottling of the planet's surface looks as if it were seen
by a submerged swimmer peering up through semitranslucent
water. And if certain connected markings resemble in a shadowy
way the line-and-hole pattern of a Chinese-checkers board, let
us consider them geometrical hallucinations.
I not only debar a too definite planet from any role in my
story-- from the role every dot and full stop should play in my
story (which I see as a kind of celestial chart)-- 1 also
refuse to have anything to do with those technical prophecies
that scientists are reported to make to reporters. Not for me
is the rocket racket. Not for me are the artificial little
satellites that the earth is promised; landing starstrips for
spaceships ("spacers")-- one, two, three, four, and then
thousands of strong castles in the air each complete with
cookhouse and keep, set up by terrestrial nations in a frenzy
of competitive confusion, phony gravitation, and savagely
flapping flags.
Another thing I have not the slightest use for is the
special-equipment business-- the airtight suit, the oxygen
apparatus-- suchlike contraptions. Like old Mr. Boke, of whom
we shall hear in a minute, I am eminently qualified to dismiss
these practical matters (which anyway are doomed to seem
absurdly impractical to future spaceshipmen, such as old Boke's
only son), since the emotions that gadgets provoke in me range
from dull distrust to morbid trepidation. Only by a heroic
effort can I make myself unscrew a bulb that has died an
inexplicable death and screw in another, which will light up in
my face with the hideous instancy of a dragon's egg hatching in
one's bare hand.
Finally, I utterly spurn and reject so-called science
fiction. I have looked into it, and found it as boring as the
mystery-story magazines-- the same sort of dismally pedestrian
writing with oodles of dialogue and loads of commutational
humor. The clichès are, of course, disguised; essentially, they
are the same throughout all cheap reading matter, whether it
spans the universe or the living room. They are like those
"assorted" cookies that differ from one another only in shape
and shade, whereby their shrewd makers ensnare the salivating
consumer in a mad Pavlovian world where, at no extra cost,
variations in simple visual values influence and gradually
replace flavor, which thus goes the way of talent and truth,
So the good guy grins, and the villain sneers, and a noble
heart sports a slangy speech. Star tsars, directors of Galactic
Unions, are practically replicas of those peppy, red-haired
executives in earthy earth jobs, that illustrate with their
little crinkles the human interest stories of the well-thumbed
slicks in beauty parlors. Invaders of Denebola and Spica,
Virgo's finest, bear names beginning with Mac; cold scientists
are usually found under Steins; some of them share with the
supergalactic gals such abstract labels as Biola or Vala.
Inhabitants of foreign planets, "intelligent" beings, humanoid
or of various mythic makes, have one remarkable trait in
common: their intimate structure is never depicted. In a
supreme concession to biped propriety, not only do centaurs
wear loincloths; they wear them about their forelegs.
This seems to complete the elimination-- unless anybody
wants to discuss the question of time? Here again, in order to
focalize young Emery L. Boke, that more or less remote
descendant of mine who is to be a member of the first
interplanetary expedition (which, after all, is the one humble
postulate of my tale), I gladly leave the replacement by a
pretentious "2" or "3" of the honest "1" in our "1900" to the
capable paws of Starzan and other comics and atomics.
Let it be 2145 A. D. or 200 A. A., it does not matter. I have
no desire to barge into vested interests of any kind. This is
strictly an amateur performance, with quite casual stage
properties and a minimum of scenery, and the quilled remains of
a dead porcupine in a corner of the old barn. We are here among
friends, the Browns and the Bensons, the Whites and the
Wilsons, and when somebody goes out for a smoke, he hears the
crickets, and a distant farm dog (who waits, between barks, to
listen to what we cannot hear). The summer night sky is a mess
of stars. Emery Lancelot Boke, at twenty-one, knows
immeasurably more about them than I, who am fifty and
terrified.
Lance is tall and lean, with thick tendons and greenish
veins on his suntanned forearms and a scar on his brow. When
doing nothing-- when sitting all at ease as he sits now,
leaning forward from the edge of a low armchair, his shoulders
hunched up, his elbow's propped on his big knees-- he has a way
of slowly clasping and unclasping his handsome hands, a gesture
I borrow for him from one of his ancestors. An air of gravity,
of uncomfortable concentration (all thought is uncomfortable,
and young thought especially so), is his usual expression; at
the moment, however, it is a manner of mask, concealing his
furious desire to get rid of a long-drawn tension. As a rule,
he does not smile often, and besides, "smile" is too smooth a
word for the abrupt, bright contortion that now suddenly
illumes his mouth and eyes as the shoulders hunch higher, the
moving hands stop in a clasped position, and he lightly stamps
the toe of one foot. His parents are in the room, and also a
chance visitor, a fool and a bore, who is not aware of what is
happening-- for this is an awkward moment in a gloomy house on
the eve of a fabulous departure.
An hour goes by. At last the visitor picks up his top hat
from the carpet and leaves. Lance remains alone with his
parents, which only serves to increase the tension. Mr. Boke I
see plainly enough. But I cannot visualize Mrs. Boke with any
degree of clarity, no matter how deep I sink into my difficult
trance. I know that her cheerfulness-- small talk, quick beat
of eyelashes-- is something she keeps up not so much for the
sake of her son as for that of her husband, and his aging
heart, and old Boke realizes this only too well and, on top of
his own monstrous anguish, he has to cope with her feigned
levity, which disturbs him more than would an utter and
unconditional collapse. I am somewhat disappointed that I
cannot make out her features. All I manage to glimpse is an
effect of melting light on one side of her misty hair, and in
this, I suspect, I am insidiously influenced by the standard
artistry of modern photography and I feel how much easier
writing must have been in former days when one's imagination
was not hemmed in by innumerable visual aids, and a
frontiersman looking at his first giant cactus or his first
high snows was not necessarily reminded of a tire company's
pictorial advertisement.
In the case of Mr. Boke, I find myself operating with the
features of an old professor of history, a brilliant
medievalist, whose white whiskers, pink pate, and black suit
are famous on a certain sunny campus in the Deep South, but
whose sole asset in connection with this story (apart from a
slight resemblance to a long-dead great-uncle of mine) is that
his appearance is out of date. Now if one is perfectly honest
with oneself, there is nothing extraordinary in the tendency to
give to the manners and clothes of a distant day (which happens
to be placed in the future) an old-fashioned tinge, a badly
pressed, badly groomed, dusty something, since the terms "out
of date," "not of our age," and so on are in the long run the
only ones in which we are able to imagine and express a
strangeness no amount of research can foresee. The future is
but the obsolete in reverse.
In that shabby room, in the tawny lamplight, Lance talks
of some last things. He has recently brought from a desolate
spot in the Andes, where he has been climbing some as
yet unnamed peak, a couple of adolescent
chinchillas-- cinder-gray, phenomenale furry, rabbit-sized
rodents (Hystricomorpha), with long whiskers, round
rumps, and petal-like ears. He keeps them indoors in a
wire-screened pen and gives them peanuts, puffed rice, raisins
to eat, and, as a special treat, a violet or an aster. He hopes
they will breed in the fall. He now repeats to his mother a few
emphatic instructions-- to keep his pets' food crisp and their
pen dry, and never forget their daily dust bath (fine sand
mixed with powdered chalk) in which they roll and kick most
lustily. While this is being discussed, Mr. Boke lights and
relights a pipe and finally puts it away. Every now and then,
with a false air of benevolent absent-mindedness, the old man
launches upon a series of sounds and motions that deceive
nobody; he clears his throat and, with his hands behind his
back, drifts toward a window; or he begins to produce a
tight-lipped tuneless humming; and seemingly driven by that
small nasal motor, he wanders out of the parlor. But no sooner
has he left the stage than he throws off, with a dreadful
shiver, the elaborate structure of his gentle, bumbling
impersonation act. In a bedroom or bathroom, he stops as if to
take, in abject solitude, a deep spasmodic draft from some
secret flask, and presently staggers out again, drunk with
grief.
The stage has not changed when he quietly returns to it,
buttoning his coat and resuming that little hum. It is now a
matter of minutes. Lance inspects the pen before he goes, and
leaves Chin and Chilla sitting on their haunches, each holding
a flower. The only other thing that I know about these last
moments is that any such talk as "Sure you haven't forgotten
the silk shirt that came from the wash?" or "You remember where
you put those new slippers?" is excluded. Whatever Lance takes
with him is already collected at the mysterious and
unmentionable and absolutely awful place of his zero-hour
departure; he needs nothing of what we need; and he steps out
of the house, empty-handed and hatless, with the casual
lightness of one walking to the newsstand-- or to a glorious
scaffold.
Terrestrial space loves concealment. The most it yields to
the eye is a panoramic view. The horizon closes upon the
receding traveler like a trap door in slow motion. For those
who remain, any town a day's journey from here is invisible,
whereas you can easily see such transcendencies as, say, a
lunar amphitheater and the shadow cast by its circular ridge.
The conjuror who displays the firmament has rolled up his
sleeves and performs in full view of the little spectators.
Planets may dip out of sight (just as objects are obliterated
by the blurry curve of one's own cheekbone); but they are back
when the earth turns its head. The nakedness of the night is
appalling. Lance has left; the fragility of his young limbs
grows in direct ratio to the distance he covers. From their
balcony, the old Bokes look at the infinitely perilous night
sky and wildly envy the lot of fishermen's wives.
If Boke's sources are accurate, the name "Lanceioz del
Lac" occurs for the first time in Verse 3676 of the
twelfth-century Roman de la Charrette. Lance, Lancelin,
Lancelotik-- diminutives murmured at the brimming, salty, moist
stars. Young knights in their teens learning to harp, hawk, and
hunt; the Forest Dangerous and the Dolorous Tower; Aldebaran,
Betelgeuse-- the thunder of Saracenic war cries. Marvelous
deeds of arms, marvelous warriors, sparkling within the awfill
constellations above the Bokes' balcony: Sir Percard the Black
Knight, and Sir Perimones the Red Knight, and Sir Pertolepe the
Green Knight, and Sir Persant the Indigo Knight, and that bluff
old party Sir Grummore Grummurslim, muttering northern oaths
under his breath. The field glass is not much good, the chart
is all crumpled and damp, and: "You do not hold the flashlight
properly"-- this to Mrs. Boke.
Draw a deep breath. Look again.
Lancelot is gone; the hope of seeing him in life is about
equal to the hope of seeing him in eternity. Lancelot is
banished from the country of L'Eau Grise (as we might call the
Great Lakes) and now rides up in the dust of the night sky
almost as far as our local universe (with the balcony and the
pitch-black, optically spotted garden) speeds toward King
Arthur's Harp, where Vega burns and beckons-- one of the few
objects that can be identified by the aid of this goddam
diagram. The sidereal haze makes the Bokes dizzy-- gray
incense, insanity, infinity-sickness. But they cannot tear
themselves away from the nightmare of space, cannot go back to
the lighted bedroom, a corner of which shows in the glass door.
And presently the planet rises, like a tiny bonfire.
There, to the right, is the Bridge of the Sword leading to
the Otherworld ("dont nus estranges ne retorne").
Lancelot crawls over it in great pain, in ineffable anguish.
"Thou shalt not pass a pass that is called the Pass Perilous."
But another enchanter commands: "You shall. You shall even
acquire a sense of humor that will tide you over the trying
spots." The brave old Bokes think they can distinguish Lance
scaling, on crampons, the verglased rock of the sky or silently
breaking trail through the soft snows of nebulae. Bootes,
somewhere between Camp X and XI, is a great glacier all rubble
and icefall. We try to make out the serpentine route of ascent;
seem to distinguish the light leanness of Lance among the
several roped silhouettes. Gone! Was it he or Denny (a young
biologist. Lance's best friend)? Waiting in the dark valley at
the foot of the vertical sky, we recall (Mrs. Boke more clearly
than her husband) those special names for crevasses and Gothic
structures of ice that Lance used to mouth with such
professional gusto in his alpine boyhood (he is several
light-years older by now); the sèracs and the
schrunds, the avalanche and its thud; French echoes and
Germanic magic hobnailnobbing up there as they do in medieval
romances.
Ah, there he is again! Crossing through a notch between
two stars; then, very slowly, attempting a traverse on a cliff
face so sheer, and with such delicate holds that the mere
evocation of those groping fingertips and scraping boots fills
one with acrophobic nausea. And through streaming tears the old
Bokes see Lance now marooned on a shelf of stone and now
climbing again and now, dreadfully safe, with his ice axe and
pack, on a peak above peaks, his eager profile rimmed with
light.
Or is he already on his way down? I assume that no news
comes from the explorers and that the Bokes prolong their
pathetic vigils. As they wait for their son to return, his
every avenue of descent seems to run into the precipice of
their despair. But perhaps he has swung over those high-angled
wet slabs that fall away vertically into the abyss, has
mastered the overhang, and is now blissfully glissading down
steep celestial snows?
As, however, the Bokes' doorbell does not ring at the
logical culmination of an imagined series of footfalls (no
matter how patiently we space them as they come nearer and
nearer in our mind), we have to thrust him back and have him
start his ascent all over again, and then put him even farther
back, so that he is still at headquarters (where the tents are,
and the open latrines, and the begging, black-footed children)
long after we had pictured him bending under the tulip tree to
walk up the lawn to the door and the doorbell. As if tired by
the many appearances he has made in his parents' minds, Lance
now plows wearily through mud puddles, then up a hillside, in
the haggard landscape of a distant war, slipping and scrambling
up the dead grass of the slope. There is some routine rock work
ahead, and then the summit. The ridge is won. Our losses are
heavy. How is one notified? By wire? By registered letter? And
who is the executioner-- a special messenger or the regular
plodding, florid-nosed postman, always a little high (he has
troubles of his own)? Sign here. Big thumb. Small cross. Weak
pencil. Its dull-violet wood. Return it. The illegible
signature of teetering disaster.
But nothing comes. A month passes. Chin and Chilla are in
fine shape and seem very fond of each other-- sleep together in
the nest box, cuddled up in a fluffy ball. After many tries,
Lance had discovered a sound with definite chinchillan appeal,
produced by pursing the lips and emitting in rapid succession
several soft, moist surpths, as if taking sips from a
straw when most of one's drink is finished and only its dregs
are drained. But his parents cannot produce it-- the pitch is
wrong or something. And there is such an intolerable silence in
Lance's room, with its battered books, and the spotty white
shelves, and the old shoes, and the relatively new tennis
racquet in its preposterously secure press, and a penny on the
closet floor-- and all this begins to undergo a prismatic
dissolution, but then you tighten the screw and everything is
again in focus. And presently the Bokes return to their
balcony. Has he reached his goal-- and if so, does he see us?
The classical ex-mortal leans on his elbow from a flowered
ledge to contemplate this earth, this toy, this teetotum
gyrating on slow display in its model firmament, every feature
so gay and clear-- the painted oceans, and the praying woman of
the Baltic, and a still of the elegant Americas caught in their
trapeze act, and Australia like a baby Africa lying on its
side. There may be people among my coevals who half expect
their spirits to look down from heaven with a shudder and a
sigh at their native planet and see it girdled with latitudes,
stayed with meridians, and marked, perhaps, with the fat,
black, diabolically curving arrows of global wars; or, more
pleasantly, spread out before their gaze like one of those
picture maps of vacational Eldorados, with a reservation Indian
beating a drum here, a girl clad in shorts there, conical
conifers climbing the cones of mountains, and anglers all over
the place.
Actually, I suppose, my young descendant on his first
night out, in the imagined silence of an inimaginable world,
would have to view the surface features of our globe through
the depth of its atmosphere; this would mean dust, scattered
reflections, haze, and all kinds of optical pitfalls, so that
continents, if they appeared at all through the varying clouds,
would slip by in queer disguises, with inexplicable gleams of
color and unrecognizable outlines.
But all this is a minor point. The main problem is: Will
the mind of the explorer survive the shock? One tries to
perceive the nature of that shock as plainly as mental safety
permits. And if the mere act of imagining the matter is fraught
with hideous risks, how, then, will the real pang be endured
and overcome?
First of all, Lance will have to deal with the atavistic
moment. Myths have become so firmly entrenched in the radiant
sky that common sense is apt to shirk the task of getting at
the uncommon sense behind them. Immortality must have a star to
stand on if it wishes to branch and blossom and support
thousands of blue-plumed angel birds all singing as sweetly as
little eunuchs. Deep in the human mind, the concept of dying is
synonymous with that of leaving the earth. To escape its
gravity means to transcend the grave, and a man upon finding
himself on another planet has really no way of proving to
himself that he is not dead-- that the naive old myth has not
come true.
I am not concerned with the moron, the ordinary hairless
ape, who takes everything in his stride; his only childhood
memory is of a mule that bit him; his only consciousness of the
future a vision of board and bed. What I am thinking of is the
man of imagination and science, whose courage is infinite
because his curiosity surpasses his courage. Nothing will keep
him back. He is the ancient curieux, but of a hardier
build, with a ruddier heart. When it comes to exploring a
celestial body, his is the satisfaction of a passionate desire
to feel with his own fingers, to stroke, and inspect, and smile
at, and inhale, and stroke again-- with that same smile of
nameless, moaning, melting pleasure-- the never-before-touched
matter of which the celestial object is made. Any true
scientist (not, of course, the fraudulent mediocrity, whose
only treasure is the ignorance he hides like a bone) should be
capable of experiencing that sensuous pleasure of direct and
divine knowledge. He may be twenty and he may be eighty-five
but without that tingle there is no science. And of that stuff
Lance is made.
Straining my fancy to the utmost, I see him surmounting
the panic that the ape might not experience at all. No doubt
Lance may have landed in an orange-colored dust cloud somewhere
in the middle of the Tharsis desert (if it is a desert) or near
some purple pool-- Phoenicis or Oti (if these are lakes after
all). But on the other hand. . . You see, as things go in such
matters, something is sure to be solved at once, terribly and
irrevocably, while other things come up one by one and are
puzzled out gradually. When I was a boy. . .
When I was a boy of seven or eight, I used to dream a
vaguely recurrent dream set in a certain environment, which I
have never been able to recognize and identify in any rational
manner, though I have seen many strange lands. I am inclined to
make it serve now, in order to patch up a gaping hole, a raw
wound in my story. There was nothing spectacular about that
environment, nothing monstrous or even odd: just a bit of
noncommittal stability represented by a bit of level ground and
filmed over with a bit of neutral nebulosity; in other words,
the indifferent back of a view rather than its face. The
nuisance of that dream was that for some reason I could not
walk around the view to meet it on equal terms. There
lurked in the mist a mass of something-- mineral matter or the
like-- oppressively and quite meaninglessly shaped, and, in the
course of my dream, I kept filling some kind of receptacle
(translated as "pail") with smaller shapes (translated as
"pebbles"), and my nose was bleeding but I was too impatient
and excited to do anything about it. And every time I had that
dream, suddenly somebody would start screaming behind me, and I
awoke screaming too, thus prolonging the initial anonymous
shriek, with its initial note of rising exultation, but with no
meaning attached to it any more-- if there had been a
meaning. Speaking of Lance, I would like to submit that
something on the lines of my dream-- But the funny thing is
that as I reread what I have set down, its background, the
factual memory vanishes-- has vanished altogether by now-- and
I have no means of proving to myself that there is any personal
experience behind its description. What I wanted to say was
that perhaps Lance and his companions, when they reached their
planet, felt something akin to my dream-- which is no longer
mine.
And they were back! A horseman, clappity-clap, gallops up
the cobbled street to the Bokes' house through the driving rain
and shouts out the tremendous news as he stops short at the
gate, near the dripping liriodendron, while the Bokes come
tearing out of the house like two hystricomorphic rodents. They
are back! The pilots, and the astrophysicists, and one of the
naturalists, are back (the other, Denny, is dead and has been
left in heaven, the old myth scoring a curious point there).
On the sixth floor of a provincial hospital, carefully
hidden from newspapermen, Mr. and Mrs. Boke are told that their
boy is in a little waiting room, second to the right, ready to
receive them; there is something, a kind of hushed deference,
about the tone of this information, as if it referred to a
fairy-tale king. They will enter quietly; a nurse, a Mrs.
Coover, will be there all the time. Oh, he's all right, they
are told-- can go home next week, as a matter of fact. However,
they should not stay more than a couple of minutes, and no
questions, please-- just chat about something or other.
You know. And then say you will be coming again tomorrow
or day after tomorrow.
Lance, gray-robed, crop-haired, tan gone, changed,
unchanged, changed, thin, nostrils stopped with absorbent
cotton, sits on the edge of a couch, his hands clasped, a
little embarrassed. Gets up wavily, with a beaming grimace, and
sits down again. Mrs. Coover, the nurse, has blue eyes and no
chin.
A ripe silence. Then Lance: "It was wonderful. Perfectly
wonderful. I am going back in November."
Pause.
"I think," says Mr. Boke, "that Chilla is with child."
Quick smile, little bow of pleased acknowledgment. Then,
in a narrative voice: "Je vais dire ca en franãais. Nous
venions d'arriver-- "
"Show them the President's letter," says Mrs. Coover.
"We had just got there," Lance continues, "and Denny was
still alive, and the first thing he and I saw-- "
In a sudden flutter, Nurse Coover interrupts: "No, Lance,
no. No, Madam, please. No contacts, doctor's orders, please"
Warm temple, cold ear.
Mr. and Mrs. Boke are ushered out. They walk swiftly--
although there is no hurry, no hurry whatever, down the
corridor, along its shoddy, olive-and-ochre wall, the lower
olive separated from the upper ochre by a continuous brown line
leading to the venerable elevators. Going up (glimpse of
patriarch in wheelchair). Going back in November (Lancelin).
Going down (the old Bokes). There are, in that elevator, two
smiling women and, the object of their bright sympathy, a girl
with a baby, besides the gray-haired, bent, sullen elevator
man, who stands with his back to everybody.
Last-modified: Wed, 21-Jan-98 15:54:15 GMT