I, X Does Not Equal Nabokov One also notices that the text of Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, which amends Conclusive Evidence and the short story on a number of points, tends to be more detailed. For example, at the beginning of the second part, Nabokov replaces "A kerosene lamp" with "A large, alabaster-based kerosene lamp."12 Two sentences are added to describe the drawing room, after an introductory phrase that is identical in both versions but for a single word. Several lines are added in the third part concerning the almost sensual pleasure which Nabokov experienced as a child when being drawn on a sleigh. Having compared his own recollections with those of his family, or perhaps having remembered other things in the meantime, Nabokov evidently felt the need to correct and complete his text to make it more faithful to his past. Do these added details boost the autobiographical effect of the book? For Nabokov, perhaps, but not necessarily for the reader. A bald style like that of Hemingway in Fiesta is neither more nor less inherently autobiographical than an ornate, hypotactic style like Proust's in Remembrance of Things Past. Detail is as precious, or as superfluous, in autobiography as in fiction. It would thus be useless to pursue the comparison, for it is evidently of little use to distinguish fiction from autobiography. At the time he was writing Conclusive Evidence, Nabokov explained to one of his correspondents that the book he was working on belonged to a new genre: This will be a new kind of autobiography, or rather a new hybrid between that and a novel. To the latter it will be affiliated by having a definite plot. Various strata of personal past will form as it were the banks between which will flow a torrent of physical and mental adventure.13In another letter he explains that he is unable to label the book, in other words, unable to impose a narrative and reading contract upon it. All the titles that occurred to him for the British edition have a clearly literary coloration: "'Clues,' 'The Rainbow Edge,' 'Speak Mnemosyne!' (this one my favorite), 'The Prismatic Edge,' 'The Moulted Feather' (from Browning's poem), 'Nabokov's Opening' (a chess term), 'Emblemata.'"14 Only the penultimate one makes a clear reference to the author, not so much to the writer, however, as to the composer of chess problems. "The Prismatic Edge" is surprisingly reminiscent of the title of a fictitious book, The Prismatic Bezel, in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. One also notes the phonetic similarity between "The Moulted Feather" and "The Moulted/Moulded Father," the son turning into a father, and the father being fashioned by his son. The last sentence of "La Veneziana," an early short story written two years after his father's death, and which has only recently been published, reads: "'I'm proud of my son,' calmly said the Colonel."15 This sentence is curiously echoed at the end of the father-son chain in the last letter Nabokov wrote to his son Dmitri: "I hug you, I'm proud of you, be well, my beloved."16 These two sentences were written a half century apart by the same author: in the first, which belongs to a work of fiction, one seems to hear the budding artist pleading with his dead father for recognition;17 the second concludes the last letter Nabokov wrote to his own son, then an opera singer. One notes too that Conclusive Evidence begins with an evocation of Nabokov's parents and ends with a chapter dealing essentially with his son. This last chapter, originally entitled "Second Person" because it is addressed to Véra, was not meant to be the last. Nabokov intended to write a fifteenth chapter entitled "Third Person," which he had discussed in a letter to Katharine A. White: The last is, from my own point of view, the most important one of the series (indeed, the whole book was written with this conclusion and summit in view) since therein are carefully gathered and analyzed (by a fictitious reviewer) the various themes running through the book-all the intricate threads that I have been at pains to follow through each piece.18This unpublished chapter is to be found among the manuscripts deposited at the Library of Congress.19 It reads like a fictitious book review of two autobiographies, Nabokov's being the more important of the two, of course; a similar strategy is used with appreciable effect at the end of Ada. Here are two brief fragments from the chapter: A unique freak as autobiographies go, Mr. Nabokov's book is easier to define in terms of what it is not than in terms of what it is.Nabokov's attempt to turn his autobiography into a work of fiction are obvious. Having written this chapter, Nabokov was not sure it should be published. In a letter to John Fischer written in 1950, he explained: "I am sending it to you mainly because it contains, among other matter, all that is necessary to say in the blurb."21 The completed autobiography was evidently making him restless; after a thirty-year-long writing career, he may have been having difficulty distinguishing between his fiction and the written story of his own life. By means of this additional narrative break, he is apparently making another effort to deprive his autobiographical text of its discursive dimension, and to promote it to the rank of poetic fiction, ultimately deciding, perhaps, that the text sounded fictitious enough as it was. In the course of the book, he often breaks his narrative contract by addressing Véra in the second person ("you and I"22), a strategy he exploits extensively in his last novel, Look at the Harlequins!. These enunciative breaks are considerably more effective than the spurious review in promoting a fictional effect, informing the reader as they do that he or she is not the privileged addressee of the book but a kind of interloper. Andrew Field paid dearly for having tried to tell, and tamper with, Nabokov's life story. Nabokov had perhaps confided too much to him, providing him with precise information concerning himself and his family. When he read Field's manuscript, he was appalled to find many strange details, some of which may have been provided or suggested by him, for all I know, others having been dug up from other sources or even concocted by Field himself, if Nabokov's subsequent criticisms of the book are to be believed. Field quotes (whether faithfully or not, I have no way to tell) from conversations he had with Nabokov while preparing the biography. One, concerning the book's title, is especially relevant here. Field claims that Nabokov wanted him to entitle the book Nabokov-His Life and Parts but that Véra scolded him on that score: "Volodya, leave him alone. It's his book. Let him call it what he wants."23 This conversation, assuming that it really took place, seems to suggest that Nabokov wanted to impose his own version of his life, and also that Field may have resented this authoritarianism, which perhaps induced him to play games with the truth as he knew it or could have known it. Nabokov tried hard to have the manuscript amended before publication. Here is what he wrote on the subject in a letter: If Field insists on telling the "history of bastardy and buggery" inherent in the Nabokov family, as well as publishing bits of my working notes toward a novel, and distorting information I gave him in idiotic ways (by asking strangers to check details of incidents that I alone could know), then I shall do everything to stop him in his stride, besides composing for a sympathizing periodical a special article about his dishonest behaviour and blunders.24Brian Boyd, Nabokov's second biographer, finds it hard at times to distinguish between what Field made up and what the biographee may have tried to suppress after reading the manuscript.25 That Nabokov was authoritarian, sometimes bullying, appears clearly in his letters. He once derided Field somewhat ruthlessly after the latter had sent him a copy of his own novel, Fractions.26 That may also explain why Field, to take his revenge and free himself from the author's (alleged?) tyranny, drifted toward slander of the Nabokov family. An unscholarly reaction, no doubt, but one which is almost understandable after all that had occured between Nabokov and his biographer. Field, who had begun his career as a critic of Nabokov's works, was apparently acting as if he enjoyed the same freedom in his presentation of the author's life as he did in his interpretation of his novels: he tried not only to tell the story as he knew it but to identify the sources of Nabokov's desires and frustrations, to describe the authorial figure beyond the known facts.
Notes 12. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, (New York: Capricon Books, 1970), p. 100; Nabokov's Dozen, p. 180. 13. Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters, 1940-1977 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), p. 69. 14. Ibid., pp. 118-9. 15. The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, Dmitri Nabokov, ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p. 115. 16. Selected Letters, p. 565. 17. Nabokov's father was assassinated in 1922 [Editor's note]. 18. Ibid., p. 95. 19. Vladimir Nabokov Papers, container 5. (This final, previously unpublished chapter recently [1999] appeared in The New Yorker [Editor's note]). 20. Respectively p. 1 and p. 6 of the manuscript. 21. Selected Letters, p. 105. 22. Speak, Memory, p. 129. 23. Andrew Field, Nabokov: His Life in Part (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977), p. 6. 24. Selected Letters, p. 536. 25. See Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, pp. 602-622. In a trial held in London in January 1994, Boyd testified as a witness against Field, who was suing an English journalist. Field had to withdraw his complaint before the case was resolved; the entire affair cost him £20000. I owe this information to Brian Boyd. 26. Ibid., p. 452.
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