Nabokov's 'Speak, Memory'

It took me a few weeks to cover the distance from front to the back cover of this book. It demanded attention, and lengths of uninterrupted time. The initial part was swift, and I read and kept a lot of notes which pretty much form this post. The last few chapters were slow for me. There came a few days of not attending to this book and rather read a lot of other stuff - essays, a lot of utilitarian research, not literature really. The flow had been interrupted, and the magic was undone. But I do have the memory of the magic. Hope the post still shows how enamored I am, and hope to read it again some time! And hope to read more from Nabokov soon.

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Speak, Memory is Nabokov's memoir, a selective autobiography of the first 40 or so years of his life. A lot of the writing here has been published elsewhere as essays, stand-alone narratives. But he revisited them in compiling this collection. Put them in the broadly natural flow of his life.

He writes about time. He writes about themes. He writes about his earliest memories, and makes us see them, vivid. There's beauty dripping from every page. Words and words! One can keep collecting Nabokov’s words the way he collected butterflies. Beautiful words and phrases making what he says his own. The thought that it leads me to is that there is little new to be said under the sun, but the way he says it, Oh! Such beauty. Makes you wonder why bother to read anything else. He writes like a poet. There is so much heartbreaking beauty in his prose. His words, his phrases and what he sets up for you. What he shows you. How he sees things and what he chooses to interlace and this beautifully, detailed, intricate, yet, such fine account.

The book accounts for the years 1903 - 1940. Nabokov was born in 1899 and broadly kept in step with the century’s years. From his earliest memories in Russia - 

“The old and the new, the liberal touch and the patriarchal one, fatal poverty and fatalistic wealth got fantastically interwoven in that strange first decade of our century.”

Little that I can add, just quote. And a lot so quotes I have. 

He talks about time, and his philosophy is perhaps what lends weight to his beautiful prose. 

"I have journeyed back in thought — with thought hopelessly tapering off as I went — to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits."

"Initially, I was unaware that time, so boundless at first blush, was a prison."

"How small the cosmos (a kangaroo’s pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!"

"I felt myself purged abruptly into a radiant and mobile medium that was none other than the pure element of time. One shared it - just as excited bathers share shining seawater - with creatures that were not oneself but that were joined to one by time’s common flow, an environment quite different from the spatial world, which not only man but apes and butterflies can perceive."

"One night during a trip abroad...I recall kneeling on my pillow at the window of a sleeping car and seeing with an inexplicable pang, a handful of fabulous lights that beckoned to me from a distant hillside, and then slipped into a pocket of black velvet: diamonds that I later gave away to my characters to alleviate the burden of my wealth.”

“The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.”

It has something perhaps to do with the way English is his language but not the first tongue. English, learnt in different surroundings. It is a medium which opens up a wealth and treasure of thought and books, but it is an acquired medium. The original medium was something else. Does it affect the way we relate to words and language?

The way Nabokov writes, he defines, he collects, he classifies. He talks about mushrooms, about his family tree, and despite some of these being tedious, in his hands they flow like poetry. I don’t know is this a bias because reading him seems like a win - a delight of words, of phrases, of sentences, of ways of seeing, and of philosophy. You get everything in one book. And because there is so much to be gleaned, I re-read the chapters I’ve just finished reading to revel again in those beautiful sentences. True pleasure and joy.

His initial years in Russia were very comfortable. Perhaps very few people live like that. The extremely rich perhaps. And I was intrigued at the places where he talks about the family tree going back to 1300s and the way his mother managed to live without getting into kitchen or household admin! Very few women have managed that in their lifetimes.

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What you take away from books is the number of things or imagery that is vividly created for you. Some books leave you with a few, but the really successful ones with you leave you with a lot of those. The way Katherine Mansfield sees things. Some of the early bits of Mrs Dalloway. And so much from Nabokov.

May be it is a product of the attention you can bestow on the book. The openness with which you let it affect you. It is your openness, your eagerness to receive and seek, and the author’s dealing with the subject, in this case his memories make them stand true for you.

“It is certainly not then - not in dreams - but when one is wise awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement , on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow that blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.”

The eye of the artist. The memories of a writer. As he says, he has lent so many of his memories to his characters. The eye that traces the past from a dim fog and makes it come alive for us. The way the perspective is drawn is that of a visual artist. So much more than just a writer.

Even shadows moving through the garden path bring alive a summer afternoon - “Eyed shadows moved through the garden paths. On the white window ledges, on the long window seats covered with faded calico, the sun breaks into geometrical gems after passing through rhomboids and squares of stained glass”

About the nonutlitarian delights of art:

“When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but marking mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in. ‘Natural Selection’ , in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behaviour, nor could one appeal to the theory of ‘the struggle for life’ when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.”

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However, as he moves out of Russia, the book loses a bit of vibrancy. And although I enjoyed it, I felt that joy was a little bit lacking from that writing. May be it was a byproduct of the attention I had on reading. I do not have much to quote from final sections of the book.

Sometime, perhaps when I read it again.

The final section of the book is a pseudo-review by Nabokov of his own book. I am glad that most of this post was drafted as I was still reading through the initial bits. Because once you read the final section, it is a recap, and a light thrown on his thinking process, on the mechanics and it is a nice wrap and little is to be said after that.

But let me close this post with another quote of his. Here, he reminds us again of the elasticity of time:

“ I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness - in a landscape selected at random - is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern - to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”