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Speak,Émigré: Nabokov's First Forays Into English ...
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Speak, Émigré: Nabokov's First Forays Into English
Books | Review of: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
By BENJAMIN LYTAL | July 9, 2008
In the late 1930s, when Vladimir Nabokov realized that he would have to leave Paris, he saw two probable refuges, England and America, and accordingly began to write in English.
GRANGER / Copyright © Rue des Archives / The Granger Collection
LOOKING BACK Vladimir Nabokov, photographed in Montreaux, Switzerland, 1970.
"The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" (New Directions, 205 pages, $12.95), his first English-language novel, was written on top of a suitcase. Its reissue, accompanied by a new edition of "Laughter in the Dark" (New Directions, 292 pages, $12.95), reminds us how Nabokov organized his entry into English.
"Laughter in the Dark" was originally published in 1932, in Russian, as "Kamera Obskura," and was first translated into English by Winifred Roy in 1936. But Nabokov was unhappy with the translation. He called it "loose, shapeless, sloppy, full of blunders and gaps, lacking vigour and spring, and plumped down in such dull, flat English that I could not read it to the end." He undertook his own English translation, publishing it in 1938, the same year he began his first English-only novel.
Set in Berlin, "Laughter in the Dark" is a highly entertaining but mean-spirited portrait of the German people, with whom Nabokov was forced to live, in exile, after his college graduation. Its hero, an art critic named Albinus who "was not a particularly gifted man," lives in Berlin, a city that seems soggy with perpetually falling wet snow. Albinus falls in love with Margot, the young ticket girl at a local cinema, and leaves his pale wife and pitiful daughter. But Margot plays Albinus for a fool, and conspires with the cartoonist Axel Rex to deprive him of his solid bourgeois fortune. Axel Rex — a model for Quilty in "Lolita" — has the best line on Berlin, "where people were, as they always had been, at the mother-in-law stage of humor."
Though "Laughter in the Dark" is an initial version of the story told in "Lolita," Nabokov didn't know that at the time. He was merely trying to write a book that would make a good movie. A great fan of movies in the early part of his life, he wrote "Laughter in the Dark" in a clear, headlong prose that reads faster than perhaps any of his other books. It is highly visual: "Yonder a small villa, whose rent was enormous, gleamed white as sugar between the black cypresses. Great, beautiful crickets skidded across the gravel. Margot tried to catch them."
In the original Russian, Margot had been Magda, but Nabokov changed the names to better suit an American audience. He very much wanted Hollywood to notice the book. Hollywood was silent, but with "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight," and his critical study "Nikolai Gogol" — a spin-off of the lectures he wrote for American universities — it constituted an impressive, three-pronged advance into the American market.
"The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" is a very different, more writerly book. For one thing, it would be impossible to film. Written for the deadline of a British literary competition, "Sebastian Knight" is a story about an author. Born in St. Petersburg, Sebastian Knight left Russia after the revolution, attended Cambridge (like Nabokov himself), and settled in London. He died young, and was immediately served with a backbiting biographical study authored by his former assistant, Goodman. Now his half-brother, known to the reader as V., sets out to write a better book, but in doing so he also records his own search, circling around the lacunae in Knight's life.
Hardly designed to win a literary contest, "Sebastian Knight" is a recherché lament for an exile's life. V., though more of a Frenchman than his elder brother, has decided to write in English, and his self-conscious nostalgia for Russian mirrors Nabokov's own. V. calls his English "miserable," and confesses that he even enrolled in a "be-an-author" course to prepare.
As V. travels from Cambridge to London to Paris and eventually to Berlin, seeking out Knight's former colleagues, friends, and lovers, he covers territory very similar to that of Nabokov's exile. His memories of St. Petersburg are intense, and he calls a chance informant's description of Knight's adolescent courtship, during one Russian summer, "one of the most precious pages of Sebastian's life." As he wanders the continent in search of his brother's ghost, he often visits Paris, which he sadly calls "a more or less permanent home."
"Sebastian Knight" can be read many ways, but in the context of Nabokov's impending departure for the English-speaking world, it appears that Knight's early death serves to compartmentalize Nabokov's years in Europe. And V., who is in a sense taking over for his brother, and writing in English for the first time in spite of his many reservations, represents Nabokov's future.
Recalling one of Knight's last handwritten letters, V. notes that even after five masterful novels Knight's Russian is "purer and richer than his English ever was." Nabokov must have looked on his future in America with great uncertainty. But he met it with sharp, concerted effort, producing two books — "Sebastian Knight" and the translation of "Laughter in the Dark" — that still seem necessary and beautiful.
blytal@nysun.com
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