A Paragraph of Nabokov

"Grouping a type of horse-drawn cab with a type of beard style and a type of butterfly: this is not the kind of sentence one reads every day."

In my last post here, about the tension between writerly versatility and originality, I used Vladimir Nabokov’s famous quip about the matter¹ to give my own situation a little think. The post also mentioned the academic Clarence Brown having found a ‘unity’ in Nabokov’s work. Brown quotes a line from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight to stress that this unity, and its inevitable copying, is fully intentional: “The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition.” The upshot of this was that I started reading, in the search for that ‘one’, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov’s first novel in English.

I have read the masterpiece, Lolita, four times, and have read once two relatively minor works, Mary and Transparent Things. The unity Brown mentions is somewhat deducible from this sample alone. But it is clearer to me today after just six chapters of RLSK. Brown’s assertion that ‘He can neither think nor see without etymologising the universe’ is apparent in alliterations, assonance and comic constructions (in a delightful characterisation nugget, Nabokov has Sebastian pronounce Sorbonne as Sour-bones); similarly, the claim that fate is the ‘muse of Nabokov’ is supported in a certain proclivity for employing the words ‘fate’ and ‘chance’ as pure personified agents, or as providers of preamble or summary to narrative pulses (often with an accompanying tone of resignation that I cannot but equate with Russian fatalism, commented on by Tolstoy in War and Peace and liberally used, till today, as a point of difference between Enlightened Europe and Asiatic Russia)². These elements are in their apogee in Lolita, but RLSK is cut from the same cloth. It is performance no. 1.

Nabokov can, of course, take the reader’s breath away with the music and detail in a sentence. I had a peak reading experience last midnight, in the opening paragraph of the fifth chapter of RLSK, which I intend to share in this post, and which does not require you to have read the novel in question. Just a little context will do. Sebastian Knight, half-Russian half-English author of novels, is dead. His step-brother, V., is retracing his life, for reasons best known to himself. V. is also our narrator. In the paragraph I am to expound upon, V. details Knight’s entry to England—more specifically, to Cambridge—a country that Knight feels he somehow recognises (presumably because of his dead mother, who was English). This is how the paragraph (and also the chapter) begins:

Sebastian Knight's college years were not particularly happy. To be sure he enjoyed many of the things he found at Cambridge—he was in fact quite overcome at first to see and smell and feel the country for which he had always longed.

The summarising first sentence hints what the chapter might be about. It is only in the second half of the second sentence that we begin to move towards the specific. Nabokov foregrounds sensorial perception—the emphasis is mine—and the reader almost expects a detailing of what was seen and smelt and felt in Cambridge at first.

The next sentence does offer a sight, along with a sudden overloading of detail which is then thematised through clausal chicanery. The detail becomes a historical marker (the action’s taking place in 1913), of the kind that a writer of historical novels would be proud of:

A real hansom cab took him from the station to Trinity College: the vehicle, it seemed, had been waiting there especially for him, desperately holding out against extinction till that moment, and then gladly dying out to join side whiskers and the Large Copper.

In terms of sound, ‘gladly dying’ does its work. But the real winner here is the cab.

This is what a hansom cab, already moving towards extinction in early 20th century, looked like:

That Nabokov remarks on the outdatedness of the cab is something I find other novelists capable of, but it is what he groups the cab with, through the theme of extinction, that is an outright signature move. Side whiskers is, of course, a beard style more prevalent in the 19th century. The Large Copper is a butterfly, an extinct butterfly.

Grouping a type of horse-drawn cab with a type of beard style and a type of butterfly: this is not the kind of sentence one reads every day. My back straightened when I read it last night.

After describing the mode of transport, one moves to the next logical step: street-view:

The slush of streets gleaming wet in the misty darkness with its promised counterpoint—a cup of strong tea and a generous fire—formed a harmony which somehow he knew by heart.

After noting the exception of a hansom cab in the previous sentence—betokening an English essentialism—we turn into a solid-er cloud of good feeling, the abstraction of harmony, which is seemingly known to Knight a priori. But the delight in this sentence is the clip in the middle: already, in the middle of a wet cab ride, filled with the first flickers of irrational recognition (this will come more fully just a couple of lines later), our man thinks of warmth and, well, another English essentialism: tea.

The next sentence now is a zone of possibility. We expect more sensorial perception, and Nabokov can stick to sight and show us more of Cambridge. He chooses, instead, to move to a different sense: hearing. Here, too, it would behove the current flow of the paragraph to offer something distinctly English. So it goes, indeed; and, in fact, Nabokov offers us two distinct features, in a way that clearly signals, provided we are alert to it, the time of day when this is happening:

The pure chimes of tower-clocks, now hanging over the town, now overlapping and echoing afar, in some odd, deeply familiar way blended with the piping cries of the newspaper vendors.

It can be argued that the acuity of perception in the last two sentences signify (in Nabokov’s effort, or in Nabokov’s rendering of V’s effort, or in V’s imposition of his own experience to Sebastian (this is a theme of the novel)) a foreigner come to a foreign land. A native would not notice these things. But the counterpoint of recognition is already set up, ‘somehow he [Knight] knew by heart.’ The paragraph comes more fully to recognition—spells the word, even—in its very next sentence, which jumps to the cab ride as having ended and Knight entering the Great Court of Trinity College, Cambridge.

And as he entered the stately gloom of Great Court with gowned shadows passing in the mist and the porter's bowler hat bobbing in front of him, Sebastian felt that he somehow recognized every sensation…

I have deliberately presented the sentence in half. Having already given two objects in sight—the gowned shadows and the porter’s bowler hat—a novelist may consider their job done, and rest easy with the feeling of recognition, emphasised here. But in (good) fiction, abstractions are seldom shorn of specificity of perception, even if the latter be in surplus. Note that the list of sensations that is to follow isn’t in any objective way buffeting the point made, but it will still feel like it is doing so. Nabokov goes through this listing exercise in a simple order—smell (offered for the first time in the paragraph), sound, sight. And with the simplest phrasing scheme—the [adjective] [noun] of [adjective] [noun]. You will notice, though, just how unique, and how meaning-laden, his choice of adjective 1 tends to be:

the wholesome reek of damp turf, the ancient sonority of stone slabs under heel, the blurred outlines of dark walls overhead — everything.

Up to this point in the paragraph, Nabokov has given us a scene of arrival: what-happens is simple enough: a man comes to town. This man’s mode of transport, his first impressions, and his arrival to the destination—these, along with perceptions along the way, give the sentences their content. But in rendering all this Nabokov also loads Knight’s presentiment and recognition, which he, in the very next sentence, qualifies as a ‘special feeling of elation’. The rest of the paragraph goes in a summarising movement towards another abstraction, the like of which was promised in the opening of the paragraph, and which now readies the reader for further narrative pulses.

That special feeling of elation probably endured for quite a long time, but there was something else intermingled with it, and later on predominant. Sebastian in spite of himself realized with perhaps a kind of helpless amazement (for he had expected more from England than she could do for him) that no matter how wisely and sweetly his new surroundings played up to his old dreams, he himself, or rather still the most precious part of himself, would remain as hopelessly alone as it had always been. The keynote of Sebastian's life was solitude and the kindlier fate tried to make him feel at home by counterfeiting admirably the things he thought he wanted, the more he was aware of his inability to fit into the picture — into any kind of picture. When at last he thoroughly understood this and grimly started to cultivate self-consciousness as if it had been some rare talent or passion, only then did Sebastian derive satisfaction from its rich and monstrous growth, ceasing to worry about his awkward uncongeniality — but that was much later.

And yes, fate comes in here, as an agent that is kind, that can counterfeit things admirably, often in gestures that are opposed to the keynote of one’s life. In the case of Sebastian Knight, fate and personality are already at odds.

1. “Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.”

2. The word ‘fatal’ is also proffered, and the etymological impulse works to add ‘fat’ as a preference, too, to complete the troika of ‘fat’, ‘fate’, ‘fatal’.

I have also noticed a passion for words starting with ‘ob-’: ‘obtain’, ‘oblong’, ‘obese’, so on.