‘Speak, Memory’

While enjoying “Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years,” the second volume of Brian Boyd’s monumental biography of perhaps the most important “international” author of our century, I felt the need of a refresher course in his earlier life. Instead of going back to the first volume, I hit upon listening to John McDonald’s reading of “Speak, Memory”--Nabokov’s twice-written autobiography that this master of prose rather academically described as a “systematically correlated assemblage of personal recollections ranging geographically from St. Petersburg to St. Nazaire, and covering thirty-seven years, from August 1903 to May 1940, with only a few sallies into later space-time.” McDonald reads this opening sentence with just the right balance of delicate irony as an introduction to the almost pedantic listing of all the original appearances of the individual sections.

But of course Nabokov is never the pedant, though he makes a fine effort on occasion at posing as one. Instead, he leads his reader--listener here--into an intimate self-portrait that includes the re-creation of the last years of Imperial Russia as seen by the favored son of an aristocratic family of boundless wealth and liberal political views. Its members are at their ease in the resorts of Western Europe, fluent in many languages, and able to indulge their individual tastes.

Nabokov was an obsessed boy and man--obsessed by sheer form, obsessed by language, obsessed by butterflies, obsessed by chess. That his most famous work, and the one that finally made him independently wealthy once again, combined most of these obsessions is not in itself surprising. But that “Lolita” gained its success because of its presumably prurient appeal carries its own irony, just as what might be called the ultimate irony of Nabokov’s life was that the wealth America finally gave him made it possible for him to leave the country and spend his last years in the international ambience of Montreux, with a view of what he called “Geneva Lake.”

But when Nabokov came to America he found himself at home for the first time in his life as an exile. He was ready for the West, for what has been called his “motel life” in pursuit of new species of lepidoptera, carring out one of his youthful dreams. He was ready because he had luxuriated in his boyhood in the splendid romances of Mayne Reid--particularly “Headless Horseman”--which had given him a vision of the prairies and the great open spaces and the overarching sky. He rediscovered his boyhood in the Rockies and on the Great Plains.

In America, Nabokov also made the kind of male friend one usually makes only much earlier in life, at school or the university. When he met Edmund Wilson in Palo Alto, the two men took to each other immediately, indulging in private jokes and lively verbal sparring. The friendship was to have its problems, especially when it came to Wilson’s Princetonian confidence in his knowledge of Russian and Russian writers. It came close to foundering for a time in a public dispute over Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin’s “Onegin.” Luckily for Nabokov’s sense of form, good feeling prevailed in the end, with a brief reunion celebration in Montreux.

A certain comfort exists for any native-born speaker of English in learning that Nabokov wished to call his autobiography “Speak, Mnemosyne” after it had been published in America to critical success and public indifference as “Convulsive Evidence.” He had to be convinced by his British publisher that it would be fatal to the sales of the book to give it a title that most book buyers would be unable to pronounce.

But certainly it is Mnemosyne, “goddess of memory and the mother of the Muses” who presides here. She evokes warm pictures of family life, memorable portraits of an indulgent mother and a courageous father. Yet there is usually something out of the ordinary, “Slavic” for convenience, that reminds one of Nabokov’s origin.

In what is for me one of the most moving passages of the book, the young Nabokov is at school, worried over the possible death of his father in a duel. The elder Nabokov, who disapproved of dueling, had been maneuvered into challenging the editor of a libelous paper. Home at last, the son hears cheerful voices. “I knew at once that there would be no duel, that the challenge had been met with an apology, that all was right. I brushed past my uncle and reached the landing. I saw my mother’s serene, everyday face, but I could not look at my father. And then it happened: My heart welled in me like (a) wave . . . and I had no handkerchief.”

No handkerchief, the final touch. But young Nabokov, always impeccably turned out, with no handkerchief? What are you up to, Vladimir? Listen, and you must find your own answer.

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