Pursuing those hazel eyes described in
Nabokov's "passport," I was led, by mistake, to a different document
and identity, following a short-story, written by Nabokov in 1945,
"Conversation Piece," from which I selected a group of
sentences because, although there was no reference to Nabokov's own eye-color,
we come across Doubles, triptyches, Nice, Kinbotean twists, a Shoe and even
a certain Sybil (Hall).
"I happen to have a disreputable namesake, complete from nickname to
surname, a man whom I have never seen in the flesh but whose vulgar personality
I have been able to deduce
from his chance intrusions into the castle of my life. The tangle began
in Prague...A letter came to me there from a small library...In exasperated
tones, it demanded that I return at once a copy of the Protocols of the Wise Men
of Zion. ...One spring day, in Nice, a poker-faced girl with long earrings
called at my hotel...took one look at me, apologized, and went away. In Paris, I
received a telegram ...and l admit deriving a certain grim satisfaction from the
vision of my frivolous double inevitably bursting in, flowers in hand, upon
Alphonse and his wife. A few years later, when I was lecturing in Zurich, I was
suddenly arrested on a charge of smashing three mirrors in a restaurant - a kind
of triptych featuring my namesake drunk (the first mirror), very drunk (the
second), and roaring drunk (the third). Finally, in 1938, a French consul rudely
refused to stamp my tattered sea-green Nansen passport because, he said, I had
entered the country once before without a permit. In the fat dossier which was
eventually produced, I caught a glimpse of my namesake's face. He had a clipped
mustache and a crew haircut, the bastard. When, soon after that, I came over to
the United States and settled down in Boston, I felt sure I had shaken off my
absurd shadow. Then - last month, to be precise - there came a telephone call.
In a hard and glittering voice, a woman said she was Mrs. Sybil
Hall." *
*- Also from the internet, there's an informative article by
Tim Conley ( jsse.revues.org > Issues > 45), in which the author discusses
those elements that are used to identify Nabokov, his signature and his
style, now set side by side to a narrative analysis of what "the
literature of social intent" means.
"Originally
published as "Double Talk" in The New Yorker and retitled in Nabokov's Dozen
(1958), "Conversation Piece, 1945" does have some "signature" traits, such as
the émigré narrator and the fascination with doubles, but, fascinatingly, it is
exactly these customary "Nabokovian" features which the story both expects will
be taken for granted and employs to subvert, even contradict the narrative
itself."[...] ..."The narrator, who begins by saying he has
"a disreputable namesake" ... accepts an invitation to one "Mrs. Hall's
apartment house"...where he discovers a dozen middle-class people (mostly women)
calmly despairing the fate of Nazi Germany...When the guest speaker, a professor
whom the narrator calls Dr. Shoe when he "did not catch his name, finally
proposes to play "The Star-Spangled Banner," the narrator confesses to being
overcome with physical nausea and leaves....He takes the wrong hat, however, and
the next morning Dr. Shoe materializes at his door and returns the narrator's
larger hat. The narrator only finds Shoe's hat (Nabokov chuckling again there)
when the man has left, but he tosses the hat four storeys down to
him...Beginning with the opening anecdote about the overdue copy of the
Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, the narrator's account attempts to conceal
himself, to deny that he is "the bastard", the drinker, antisemite, and "author
of those depraved, decadent writings." This is Hyde ascribing his own monstrous
crimes to Jekyll, with the exact nature of those crimes obscured and the names
removed...These inversions may be Nabokovian games, but they are being played
with dangerously high stakes. The turns of the narratological screw in
"Conversation Piece, 1945" do more than reveal the narrator's abhorrent
character in the manner that the surplus and substance of endnotes to Shade's
poem reveal Kinbote's monomania in Pale Fire. ..For readers to accept the role
of the narrator in "Conversation Piece, 1945" as a morally benign reporter of
the banality of evil, they must also accept that Nabokov is capable of writing a
fiction which offers unmediated and (literally) self-evident truth, besides the
unsettling contradictions I have pointed out within the story itself. On the
other hand, in detecting contradictions within the "liberal" facade of the
narrator and finding reason to doubt his series of denials and negations ( he is
not the "vulgar personality" ...he is not at the party by choice, he is not in
agreement with the notions expressed there, and so on), the reader is confronted
with stark questions about the relation of political ideology to historical
truth.From this vantage point we can better appreciate Nabokov's contempt for
"the literature of social intent" as a rejection of the purity of any ideology
or intention -liberalism included- which necessarily reifies "History" or
"Truth." In "Conversation Piece, 1945," we as readers are witness to such
"grisly and ironic reversals" as leave us without an ideological viewpoint that
we can call innocent.History and Denial in Nabokov's "Conversation Piece,
1945"