Vladimir Nabokov. Time and Ebb
Vladimir Nabokov. Time and Ebb
© 1945 Copyright by Vladimir Nabokov
In the first floriferous days of convalescence after a
severe illness, which nobody, least of all the patient himself,
expected a ninety-year-old organism to survive, I was
admonished by my dear friends Norman and Nura Stone to prolong
the lull in my scientific studies and relax in the midst of
some innocent occupation such as brazzle or solitaire.
The first is out of the question, since tracking the name
of an Asiatic town or the title of a Spanish novel through a
maze of jumbled syllables on the last page of the evening
newsbook (a feat which my youngest great-granddaughter performs
with the utmost zest) strikes me as far more strenuous than
toying with animal tissues. Solitaire, on the other hand, is
worthy of consideration, especially if one is sensitive to its
mental counterpart; for is not the setting down of one's
reminiscences a game of the same order, wherein events and
emotions are dealt to oneself in leisurely retrospection?
Arthur Freeman is reported to have said of memoirists that
they are men who have too little imagination to write fiction
and too bad a memory to write the truth. In this twilight of
self-expression I too must float. Like other old men before me,
I have discovered that the near in time is annoyingly confused,
whereas at the end of the tunnel there are color and light. I
can discern the features of every month in 1944 or 1945, but
seasons are utterly blurred when I pick out 1997 or 2012. I
cannot remember the name of the eminent scientist who attacked
my latest paper, as I have also forgotten those other names
which my equally eminent defenders called him. I am unable to
tell offhand what year the Embryological Section of the
Association of Nature Lovers of Reykjavik elected me a
corresponding member, or when, exactly, the American Academy of
Science awarded me its choicest prize. (I remember, though, the
keen pleasure which both these honors gave me.) Thus a man
looking through a tremendous telescope does not see the cirri
of an Indian summer above his charmed orchard, but does see, as
my regretted colleague, the late Professor Alexander
lvanchenko, twice saw, the swarming of hesperozoa in a humid
valley of the planet Venus.
No doubt the "numberless nebulous pictures" bequeathed us
by the drab, flat, and strangely melancholic photography of the
past century exaggerate the impression of unreality which that
century makes upon those who do not remember it; but the fact
remains that the beings that peopled the world in the days of
my childhood seem to the present generation more remote than
the nineteenth century seemed to them. They were still up to
their waists in its prudery and prejudice. They clung to
tradition as a vine still clings to a dead tree. They had their
meals at large tables around which they grouped themselves in a
stiff sitting position on hard wooden chairs. Clothes consisted
of a number of parts, each of which, moreover, contained the
reduced and useless remnants of this or that older fashion (a
townsman dressing of a morning had to squeeze something like
thirty buttons into as many buttonholes besides tying three
knots and checking the contents of fifteen pockets).
In their letters they addressed perfect strangers by what
was-- insofar as words have sense-- the equivalent of "beloved
master" and prefaced a theoretically immortal signature with a
mumble expressing idiotic devotion to a person whose very
existence was to the writer a matter of complete unconcern.
They were atavistically prone to endow the community with
qualities and rights which they refused to the individual.
Economics obsessed them almost as much as theologies had
obsessed their ancestors. They were superficial, careless, and
shortsighted. More than other generations, they tended to
overlook outstanding men, leaving to us the honor of
discovering their classics (thus Richard Sinatra remained,
while he lived, an anonymous "ranger" dreaming under a
Telluride pine or reading his prodigious verse to the squirrels
of San Isabel Forest, whereas everybody knew another Sinatra, a
minor writer, also of Oriental descent).
Elementary allobiotic phenomena led their so-called
spiritualists to the silliest forms of transcendental surmise
and made so-called common sense shrug its broad shoulders in
equally silly ignorance. Our denominations of time would have
seemed to them "telephone" numbers. They played with
electricity in various ways without having the slightest notion
of what it really was-- and no wonder the chance revelation of
its true nature came as a most hideous surprise (I was a man by
that time and can well remember old Professor Andrews sobbing
his heart out on the campus in the midst of a dumbfounded
crowd).
But in spite of all the ridiculous customs and
complications in which it was entangled, the world of my young
days was a gallant and tough little world that countered
adversity with a bit of dry humor and would calmly set out for
remote battlefields in order to suppress the savage vulgarity
of Hitler or Alamillo. And if I let myself go, many would be
the bright, and kind, and dreamy, and lovely things which
impassioned memory would find in the past-- and then woe to the
present age, for there is no knowing what a still vigorous old
man might do to it if he tucked up his sleeves. But enough of
this. History is not my field, so perhaps I had better turn to
the personal lest I be told, as Mr. Saskatchewanov is told by
the most charming character in present-day fiction
(corroborated by my great-granddaughter, who reads more than I
do), that "ev'ry cricket ought keep to its picket"-- and not
intrude on the rightful domain of other "gads and
summersmiths."
I was born in Paris. My mother died when I was still an
infant, so that I can only recall her as a vague patch of
delicious lachrymal warmth just beyond the limit of
iconographie memory. My father taught music and was a composer
himself (I still treasure an ancient program where his name
stands next to that of a great Russian); he saw me through
my college stage and died of an obscure blood disease at
the time of the South American War.
I was in my seventh year when he and I, and the sweetest
grandmother a child has ever been blessed with, left Europe,
where indescribable tortures were being inflicted by a
degenerate nation upon the race to which I belong. A woman in
Portugal gave me the hugest orange I had ever seen. From the
stern of the liner two small cannon covered its portentously
tortuous wake. A party of dolphins performed solemn
somersaults. My grandmother read me a tale about a mermaid who
had acquired a pair of feet. The inquisitive breeze would join
in the reading and roughly finger the pages so as to discover
what was going to happen next. That is about all I remember of
the voyage. Upon reaching New York, travelers in space used to
be as much impressed as travelers in time would have been by
the old-fashioned "skyscrapers"; this was a misnomer, since
their association with the sky, especially at the ethereal
close of a greenhouse day, far from suggesting any grating
contact, was indescribably delicate and serene: to my childish
eyes looking across the vast expanse of park land that used to
grace the center of the city, they appeared remote and
lilac-colored, and strangely aquatic, mingling as they did
their first cautious lights with the colors of the sunset and
revealing, with a kind of dreamy candor, the pulsating inside
of their semitransparent structure.
Negro children sat quietly upon the artificial rocks. The
trees had their Latin binomials displayed upon their trunks,
just as the drivers of the squat, gaudy, scaraboid motorcabs
(generically allied in my mind to certain equally gaudy
automatic machines upon the musical constipation of which the
insertion of a small coin used to act as a miraculous laxative)
had their stale photographic pictures affixed to their backs;
for we lived in the era of Identification and Tabulation; saw
the personalities of men and things in terms of names and
nicknames and did not believe in the existence of anything that
was nameless.
In a recent and still popular play dealing with the quaint
America of the Flying Forties, a good deal of glamour is
infused into the part of the soda jerk, but the side-whiskers
and the starched shirtfront are absurdly anachronistic, nor was
there in my day such a continuous and violent revolving of tall
mushroom seats as is indulged in by the performers. We imbibed
our humble mixtures (through straws that were really much
shorter than those employed on the stage) in an atmosphere of
gloomy greed. I remember the shallow enchantment and the minor
poetry of the proceedings: the copious froth engendered above
the sunken lump of frozen synthetic cream, or the liquid brown
mud of "fudge" sauce poured over its polar pate. Brass and
glass surfaces, sterile reflections of electric lamps, the
whirr and shimmer of a caged propeller, a Global War poster
depicting Uncle Sam and his Rooseveltian tired blue eyes or
else a dapper uniformed girl with a hypertrophied nether lip
(that pout, that sullen kiss-trap, that transient fashion in
feminine charm-- 1939-1950), and the unforgettable tonality of
mixed traffic noises coming from the street-- these patterns
and melodic figures, for the conscious analysis of which time
is alone responsible, somehow connected the "drugstore" with a
world where men tormented metals and where metals hit back.
I attended a school in New York; then we moved to Boston;
and then we moved again. We seem always to have been shifting
quarters-- and some homes were duller than others; but no
matter how small the town, I was sure to find a place where
bicycle tires were repaired, and a place where ice cream was
sold, and a place where cinematographic pictures were shown.
Mountain gorges seemed to have been ransacked for echoes;
these were subjected to a special treatment on a basis of honey
and rubber until their condensed accents could be synchronized
with the labial movements of serial photographs on a moon-white
screen in a velvet-dark hall. With a blow of his fist a man
sent a fellow creature crashing into a tower of crates. An
incredibly smooth-skinned girl raised a linear eyebrow. A door
slammed with the kind of ill-fitting thud that comes to us from
the far bank of a river where woodsmen are at work.
I am also old enough to remember the coach trains: as a
babe I worshipped them; as a boy I turned away to improved
editions of speed. With their haggard windows and dim lights
they still lumber sometimes through my dreams. Their hue might
have passed for the ripeness of distance, for a blending
succession of conquered miles, had it not surrendered its
plum-bloom to the action of coal dust so as to match the walls
of workshops and slums which preceded a city as inevitably as a
rule of grammar and a blot precede the acquisition of
conventional knowledge. Dwarf dunce caps were stored at one end
of the car and could flabbily cup (with the transmission of a
diaphanous chill to the fingers) the grottolike water of an
obedient little fountain which reared its head at one's touch.
Old men resembling the hoary ferryman of still more
ancient fairy tales chanted out their intermittent "nextations"
and checked the tickets of the travelers, among whom there were
sure to be, if the journey was reasonably long, a great number
of sprawling, dead-tired soldiers and one live, drunken
soldier, tremendously peripatetic and with only his pallor to
connect him with death. He always occurred singly but he was
always there, a freak, a young creature of clay, in the midst
of what some very modern history textbooks glibly call
Hamilton's period-- after the indifferent scholar who put that
period into shape for the benefit of the brainless.
Somehow or other my brilliant but unpractical father never
could adapt himself to academic conditions sufficiently to stay
very long in this or that place. I can visualize all of them,
but one college town remains especially vivid: there is no need
to name it if I say that three lawns from us, in a leafy lane,
stood the house which is now the Mecca of a nation. I remember
the sun-splashed garden chairs under the apple tree, and a
bright copper-colored setter, and a fat, freckled boy with a
book in his lap, and a handy-looking apple that I picked up in
the shadow of a hedge.
And I doubt whether the tourists who nowadays visit the
birthplace of the greatest man of his time and peer at the
period furniture self-consciously huddled beyond the plush
ropes of enshrined immortality can feel anything of that proud
contact with the past which I owe to a chance incident. For
whatever happens, and no matter how many index cards librarians
may fill with the titles of my published papers, I shall go
down to posterity as the man who had once thrown an apple at
Barrett.
To those who have been born since the staggering
discoveries of the seventies, and who thus have seen nothing in
the nature of flying things save perhaps a kite or a toy
balloon (still permitted, I understand, in several states in
spite of Dr. de Sutton's recent articles on the subject), it is
not easy to imagine airplanes, particularly because old
photographic pictures of those splendid machines in full flight
lack the life which only art could have been capable of
retaining-- and oddly enough no great painter ever chose them
as a special subject into which to inject his genius and thus
preserve their image from deterioration.
I suppose I am old-fashioned in my attitude toward many
aspects of life that happen to be outside my particular branch
of science; and possibly the personality of the very old man I
am may seem divided, like those little European towns one half
of which is in France and the other in Russia. I know this and
proceed warily. Far from me is the intention to promote any
yearning and morbid regret in regard to flying machines, but at
the same time I cannot suppress the romantic undertone which is
inherent to the symphonie entirety of the past as I feel it.
In those distant days when no spot on earth was more than
sixty hours' flying time from one's local airport, a boy would
know planes from propeller spinner to rudder trim tab, and
could distinguish the species not only by the shape of the wing
tip or the jutting of a cockpit, but even by the pattern of
exhaust flames in the darkness; thus vying in the recognition
of characters with those mad nature-sleuths -- the post-Linnean
systematists. A sectional diagram of wing and fuselage
construction would give him a stab of creative delight, and the
models he wrought of balsa and pine and paper clips provided
such increasing excitement during the making that, by
comparison, their completion seemed almost insipid, as if the
spirit of the thing had flown away at the moment its shape had
become fixed.
Attainment and science, retainment and art-- the two
couples keep to themselves, but when they do meet, nothing else
in the world matters. And so I shall tiptoe away, taking leave
of my childhood at its most typical point, in its most plastic
posture: arrested by a deep drone that vibrates and gathers in
volume overhead, stock-still, oblivious of the meek bicycle it
straddles, one foot on the pedal, the toe of the other touching
the asphalted earth, eyes, chin, and ribs lifted to the naked
sky where a warplane comes with unearthly speed which only the
expanse of its medium renders unhurried as ventral view changes
to rear view, and wings and hum dissolve in the distance.
Admirable monsters, great flying machines, they have gone, they
have vanished like that flock of swans which passed with a
mighty swish of multitudinous wings one spring night above
Knights Lake in Maine, from the unknown into the unknown: swans
of a species never determined by science, never seen before,
never seen since-- and then nothing but a lone star remained in
the sky, like an asterisk leading to an undiscoverable
footnote.
Last-modified: Sun, 18-Jan-98 10:58:18 GMT