July 16, 2006
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” That is the first line from the book “Speak, Memory” by Vladimir Nabokov. It is in his son’s home where I am typing these words as the sun rises over Lake Geneva. By way of the path called “a friend, of a friend, of a friend,” I made my way by taxi yesterday evening to Dmitri Nabokov’s house high on the hill above Montreux, Switzerland. Arriving a few minutes early for dinner, I awaited my “new friend”, filling the time, as I always do in strange houses, by perusing the titles of the books in the room. This particular living room was brimming with books, walls lined with shelves, books from floor to ceiling. There are few things that raise girlhood giddiness in me like rooms walled with floor to ceiling bookshelves. The first time I saw the library from the movie musical “My Fair Lady”, I was both red with rapture and green with envy. What delight it would be to drown in such a room.
I excitedly crossed the room of Dmitri’s home to drink in his taste in literature. As I approached the shelves, I noticed that there were books in at least a dozen languages. Then it dawned on me that ALL these books, this entire room, filled floor to ceiling, boasted books by the same author – Vladimir Nabokov. “Vladimir Nabokov?” I said the name out loud to myself – butchering it I’m sure. I had never heard of Vladimir Nabokov. Looking more closely, skimming past Japanese, Russian, and other languages I couldn’t decipher in search of those I could, I sought a title I recognized. None.
I am often abashed by the great gaps in my literary experience. You would think having attended two of the top high-schools in the country, graduating University of Texas at Austin with a Liberal Arts degree, and from University of Miami with a Juris Doctorate degree, not to mention doing post-graduate work in Humanities and Literature of all things, I would have by now read “War and Peace”. I haven’t. It is packed in a box with dozens of other great classics that I was never forced by presumptuous English teachers to dance with nor found time to kick up my heels with at a beach or in an airplane. The gaps are embarrassing. Vogel, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Joyce, . How is it a woman who claims such a great love for books has not read these? How is it a woman who claims such a great love for books has not heard of this man before me whose writing and translations fill a room? I am ashamed.
Continuing to peruse the titles, I see one I recognize, “Lolita.” Wasn’t that a movie?” I ask myself. “Or was that Run, Lola, Run?” My awareness of pop culture is worse than my familiarity with Russian writers – what exactly do I do with my time? At last my host arrives. While I may at times be uneducated, and often downright ditzy, Socrates would nevertheless love me. His great issue with man was man’s inability to admit stupidity. He claimed he was intelligent not for what he knew, but for the fact he knew how much he didn’t know, and this made him smarter than all the fools who thought they knew it all. (Of course it also pissed off the powers that be of his time.) For so long I lived with the fear of others discovering me for the intellectual fake I always presumed myself to be, I finally learned to just start off with the premise that I’m clueless and work from there. Unfortunately, in topics of politics, most scientific inquiries, and Russian literature, it is quite true. So when my host arrived, I pointedly asked who is Vladimir Nobokov and why have I never heard of him (I did not know Dmitri’s last name and had not made the father/son connection). There was no good answer. Nabokov’s “Lolita” is the one made, not once but twice, into a movie to a fair amount of fanfare in the US and abroad. Vladimir Nabokov, much to my astonishment, wrote numerous classics in BOTH Russian and English. Sometimes I can hide behind the façade of being an American. After all, the whole world knows how poorly educated we are. But Nobokov not only lived in America for many years, but received the American National Medal for Literature in 1973. There was no justifiable excuse for my ignorance.
I spent a delightful evening talking with Dmitri about his life, his father’s writing, which he continues to translate, languages, and a variety of other subjects. He has piercing steel -blue eyes that roll upwards when he talks, an easiness for stories, and a direct manner. Though I wouldn’t say they resemble one another, I kept getting flashes of Alfred Hitchcock as he spoke. Something in his manner reminded me of the great movie director – perhaps just his intellectual intensity, though it was never intrusive and was most pleasantly softened by the lightness of conversation. He has had an astounding life. He speaks fluent Russian, Italian, English and French and when he was not writing in his own right, translating, and otherwise working on his father’s compendium, he was racing Ferraris and power boats, skiing, and, I would venture to guess, living the life of the quintessential playboy. He is still captivating in conversation though a rare disease has, for the moment, taken him out of his Ferrari and off the slopes. We talked for hours as we dined on his balcony overlooking Lake Geneva and the Alps off in the distance. The view is simply breathtaking, especially when the blues and pinks begin to dance in between the mountain tops reflected in the water. When the last rays of the sun had disappeared, we made our way indoors. I asked if I could borrow one of his father’s books. He suggested “Speak, Memory” and also gave me an article published just yesterday on a photo exhibition linking his father’s writing and butterfly studies (a field in which he was also acclaimed), and a piece he himself had written on his father and the book “Lolita”. His writing, in contrast to his easy conversation, is intellectually thick and intricate, crossing, and crossing back through intense imagery and intellectual parry until the mind is dizzy with the effort to follow. It was like trying to follow every movement of a world level fencing match – challenging, engaging, and exhausting all at the same time. I went to sleep feeling intellectually feeble.
This morning I awoke at 6am in the gentle pastel shades of the morning and began reading “Speak, Memory”. Nabokov’s writing has a lovely, lyrical quality yet traverses such intellectual ground, I felt, as I read, like a fly in the shadow of a giant – small, insignificant, and unable to have any affect on the shadow of greatness. I read things like this and wonder what right I have to even presume to be a writer. There is such great talent in this world and I can’t even learn how to not write I seven times in every sentence. These moments are crushing, and yet the first thing I want to do in the midst of a depressed sense of worthlessness, is turn on my computer and write. I fear, often, that my “brief crack of light” will be imperceptible in this turning of millennia, brushing only the lives of a few cherished friends. I envy the Nobokov’s who have touched and changed so many lives, including mine now. While I have yearned for greatness, I have always wallowed in mediocrity, caught somewhere between the fear of actually being as good as I could be or as bad as I am afraid I might be. I know greatness will never come if I stand in the shadow of fear, greatness probably won’t come no matter where I stand, but in its place I would happily accept the ability to simply do what I love for the passion of the love and pursuit of its betterment without regard to the light it shines upon the world in my moment between darknesses. That would be a life well-lived. (Though it would be nice if one day someone was ashamed they had not yet heard of me!)
Comments