I had been intending for some time to go back to reading Vladimir Nabokov, a writer I seem to have consumed a fair chunk of back in the early 1970s. The only book of his that I still have on my shelves is Pale Fire, a Penguin paperback where I have written ‘Jan. 1974’ on the inside cover, but I have definitely read not only Lolita but also Transparent Things, Pnin, Despair … and the novel I have just re-read, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, first published in 1941 in the US.
It is now a few weeks since that re-reading: another bout of Covid has intervened, and then it was Christmas – so I’m not sure I can do justice to what is already beginning to fade from my memory, as it did after my first reading. What I did remember from around 50 years ago was that it was a novel about a novelist and that, like quite a few other Nabokov novels, the first-person narrator was perhaps not altogether reliable. But in fact ‘V’, the narrator, who is trying to give a truthful picture of his dead half-brother Sebastian Knight, makes a point of telling us when his memory fails – which somehow makes him more reliable than not. For instance he says that forming a ‘coherent picture’ of his half-brother’s youth is a ‘task [that] eludes me’ (p12 in the Penguin edition). (I’m reminded of James Wood’s remark that ‘Actually, first-person narration is generally more reliable than unreliable’.)
Early on, we learn of the raison d’etre of the novel. Mr Goodman, a ‘kind of secretary’ to Sebastian in his final years, has written ‘a slapdash and very misleading’ biography which The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is at pains to correct. Especially since, as we learn from the start of ch 7, it has been praised for its ‘deep insight’: V’s view, however, is that ‘Mr Goodman has been patted on the back when he ought to have been rapped on the knuckles’ – a neat phrase that is a reminder that although English was not his first language, Nabokov had a command of idiom even here, in the first novel of his not written in his native Russian. Sometimes, though, a sentence reads as if it had travelled from one language to another without making the necessary adjustment, as it were – for instance:
Suddenly for no earthly reason I felt immensely sorry for him and longed to say something real, something with wings and a heart but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders and head only later when I was alone and not in need of words. (end of chapter 4)
Of course the narrator, V, makes a point of saying that, unlike Sebastian Knight, he is no writer. We won’t get from him ‘the easy swing of a well-oiled novel’, he says (ch 6). All the same, it is an artfully constructed novel that in a quest for the truth about Sebastian’s life and romantic attachments travels around Europe – France, Germany, England – in addition to recalling a childhood in pre-revolutionary Russia.
It can be problematical to write a novel about a novelist: a few years back I was somewhat sceptical about Maugham’s Cakes and Ale, which was also about a recently deceased novelist and was not convincing (in my opinion) about the merits of its fictional subject. Similarly, Nabokov’s portrait of the artist does not convince. Sebastian Knight is said to be ‘laughingly alive’ in the five books that he wrote – but the long quotations from his books that V provides didn’t convince me of his half-brother’s quality. Or might that be the point? That both the unreliable Goodman and his opponent are not to be trusted? I suppose the Penguin blurb has got it right, that the novel is an ‘enigmatic portrayal of the conflict between the real and the unreal, and the futile quest for human truth’ (oh, that depressing adjective ‘futile’). Which provokes an uneasy feeling: have I, a fairly intelligent reader, failed to notice subtleties that a really intelligent reading of the novel might produce?
But back to the plot, such as it is. There’s one incident I did remember from my first reading of The Real Life … all those years ago. It’s after the narrator has finally reached the hospital on the outskirts of Paris where Sebastian, in a ‘hopeless’ state near death, has been taken: it’s night, and he bribes his way into the room where (he is told) his half-brother is. It’s only the following morning that he learns that he was in the wrong room: the ‘faint sound of breathing’ he has been listening to in the dark was not Sebastian’s but another patient’s, and Sebastian is already dead. This happens on the last-but-one page of the novel – but what I enjoyed most were the pages leading up to this: a quite gripping account of the narrator’s hurried journey from Marseille to Paris after he gets news of Sebastian’s illness. In his haste to get a train he forgets to bring with him the letter that would tell him the hospital’s address, and then he finds himself in a ‘crowded compartment … dark, stuffy and full of legs’. Not only that, but the train runs late ‘owing to the night blizzard or something’. It all reads like an anxiety dream – one where the dreamer is struggling but failing to get somewhere in time for a crucial appointment – and is all the more effective for that.
So was my re-reading worthwhile? Even if, as I said, the novel had the capacity to make me uneasy, it still has passages that are worth treasuring. Perhaps what V says about his half-brother’s ‘favourite’ book applies here too:
I don’t know whether it makes one ‘think’, and I don’t much care if it does not. I like it for its own sake. I like it for its manners. And sometimes I tell myself that it would not be inordinately hard to translate it into Russian. (end of ch. 18)
Old geezer re-reading 