Clockless Eden

...The image helps explain many of the author's prejudices and passions...

...Has Nabokov mellowed with advancing years...

...The rearranging of normal time sequences is the heart of image-making in art, and it is fascinating to see with what a high degree of consistency and consciousness Nabokov thinks in these patterns...

...With the insect collector's eye for detail and the miniaturist's appreciation of its intrinsic artistic value, Nabokov at his best can create passages of extraordinary beauty, a world at rest, still lifes in the literal sense...

...pram-pushing his way through the parks of Central Europe...

...as the poet John Shade puts it in Pale Fire...

...Like the frozen lake of chess pieces, the enchanted forest of butterflies overcomes the wall of time surrounding consciousness: ". . . the highest enjoyment of time-lessness—in a landscape selected at random—is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants...

...Natural Selection' in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, 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...

...Chess problems appeal to the artist in Nabokov rather than the memoirist: "A brooklet of time in comparison to its frozen lake on the chessboard, my watch showed half-past three...

...More humburgers to come...

...His quarrel with Freud and "the career boys in biometrics or in the rat-maze racket" is that they make a too neat distinction between reality and illusion...

...From the days before teenagers passed so effortlessly from puberty to consenting adulthood, Nabokov gives us three early models for Lolita...

...Nothing of the sort...

...This is the rationale behind all the abstruse ironies, obscure metaphors, sly non sequitors and multi-lingual riddles, rhymes, puns and anagrams which populate Nabokov's novels...

...But, alas, class conflicts (her father was the steward of a large estate and "her mother's first name and patronymic had merchant-class or clerical connotations") had marred the affair even before the final rupture...

...Petersburg (scaled map down to the last tree dot provided...

...Speak, Memory has the familiar asides ('"I am now going to do something quite difficult, a kind of double somersault with a Welsh waggle . . . and I want complete silence, please'') but also the pretense to full consciousness, or at least as total a recall as memory aided by "specific documentation" can provide...

...Though warned in past prefaces never to look for the author in his fiction, we ingenuously take Nabokov's word that he can be found in his autobiography...

...Friends, relatives, family acquaintances, even retired nannies turn up in the text to spur memory on its way...

...side trips to Nice...

...shows all the kiddies how it's done at the end of his routine, is the master conjurer setting aside his bag of literary false bottoms, trick mirrors and marked cards...

...Then there is a succession of sharply-etched miniatures of tutors and governesses, the best of them being Mademoiselle, who made the one mispronounced Russian word she knew do for a whole language: "a stranger, shipwrecked, penniless, ailing, in search of the blessed land where at last she would be understood...

...Nabokov is merely running low on traditional literary genres to parody...

...Reality is not just illusive for Nabokov, but illusion itself...

...Nabokov can only approach the world through description rather than analysis, through effects and not causes...

...Unlike the prefaces to the English versions of Nabokov's Russian novels in recent years, no pot shots are taken at "the Viennese witchdoctor," progressive educators, "fourth-rate" novelists (Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Balzac, Conrad), the Russian Revolution, translators, reviewers or the 20th century in general ("Primitive folk-masks...

...In the prodigious effort to shuffle the three-by-five cards of memory into place, Nabokov, the book flap assures us, "has been gently [sic] checking facts, collecting additional material and tracking down family photographs in order to present a fuller picture of the background from which he sprang...

...The paradox is that after "the lamp of art" sheds its immortalizing grace on "life's foolscap" there are no living beings left to live forever...

...The best parts of the book result from an attempt to recapture that unique and remarkably wholesome turn-of-the-century childhood in Petersburg townhouses, country estates and various European watering holes then frequented by wealthy Russians...

...All sorts of sins can be forgiven an author who repeatedly comes up with precision-tooled imagery and language...

...Biarritz and Wiesbaden...

...Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception...

...To calm "jittery critics" the complex genesis of this autobiography is described in loving detail...

...Freed from the prison of time, Nabokov becomes the prisoner of his own art...

...Better than in any disdainful quip, his disinterest in psychology is apparent in the two-dimensional grotesques of his novels, whose distortions both underscore the distortions of reality and point out the hand of the artist fashioning his clockless Eden of art out of the crudities of life in time...

...No Baedeker and certainly not a five-dollar-a-day man...

...A butterfly that the boy of 10 chased in a wood near the family estate is finally caught "one night in 1943 on a picture window of James Laughlin's Alta Lodge in Utah...

...Having used up the detective novel in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the women's magazine formula in Laughter in the Dark, critical exegesis in Pale Fire and his own annotated Pushkin, the academic novel in Pnin and the psychological novel in Lolita, Nabokov now turns to parodying Nabokov in an autobiography...

...Petersburg to Pau...

...A description of the family's escape from Russia during the Revolution is typical of his approach to history...

...Old books are wrong," he writes...

...Speak, Memory ends with the Nabokovs about to set sail for New York in 1940...

...One of Nabokov's early poems is carried homeward, "still unwritten, but so complete that even its punctuation marks were impressed on my brain like a pillow crease on a sleeper's flesh...

...emigre years writing and teaching English and tennis in Berlin and Paris, then, after the birth of his son...

...But beauty demands a high price, perhaps too high in a work which purports to be autobiography...

...Nabokov's other passion—chess problems—occupies almost as large a place as butterflies in Speak, Memory, and his approach to these problems could double for an artistic credo: "Deceit, to the point of diabolism, and originality, verging upon the grotesque, were my notions of strategy...

...has a very disarming foreword...

...and Tamara, she of the lost love letters, whom the author met in the summer of 1915 ("August 9, 1915, to be Petrarchal-ly exact, at half-past four . . .") only to lose through the intervention of "that trite deus ex machina," the Russian Revolution...

...There is, for example, versifying, eccentric Uncle Ruka: "Pink-coated, he rode to hounds in England or Italy...

...Nabokov's magic carpet is, of course, art and its equivalent in a work of non-fiction, memory...

...Recalling the specific moment, at the age of four, when he first entered full consciousness with the sudden discovery of his parents' ages in relation to his own, he writes: "I felt myself plunged abruptly into a radiant and mobile medium that was none other than the pure element of time . . . an environment quite different from the spatial world, which not only man but apes and butterflies can perceive...

...and there is much moving around in this book—early summers on the "Nabokov lands" near St...

...Like everything Nabokov has set his pen to, the final worth of Speak, Memory is in the quality of its writing...

...When the magic carpet is folded the carefully courted sequences of memory fall out of place...

...The implied equation—as butterflies are to their unappreciative predators so the author is to his unappreciative readers—is more than just backbiting...

...The limited consciousness of a first-person narrator and the author's "watch-me-now" asides provide the esthetic distance that Nabokov's anti-realism calls for in his novels...

...The last chapter, a paean to the passing years, is addressed throughout to her and, with exquisite taste, manages to avoid the mawkish in its presentation of a deep understanding and an enviable marriage...

...The expression of this experience is for Nabokov the ultimate purpose of art...

...The author's admiration for his mother becomes a beautiful elegy to a woman who, from early mushroom picking on the family estate to her last years in Prague surrounded by dachshunds and family albums, always tried to instill in her son a proper awe for the wonders of nature, the value of "unreal estate...

...I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern on another...

...progressive schools;/Music in supermarkets...

...wearing an opera cloak, he almost lost his life in an airplane crash on a beach near Bayonne...

...The catch is not just that memory naturally speaks very haltingly over a span of 40 years, but that the lapses as well as the too perfect reconstructions are deliberately sought to provide the distancing effect of the novels...

...it was as if life had impinged upon my creative rights by wriggling on beyond the subjective limits so elegantly and economically set by childhood memories that I thought I had signed and sealed...

...By March of 1919 Bolshevik troops had just broken through the ranks of Deni-kin's army in the Crimea, and the port of Sebastopol was under heavy machine-gun fire when the family boarded a Greek ship heading for Constantinople: "I remember trying to concentrate, as we were zigzagging out of the bay, on a game of chess with my father—one of the knights had lost its head, and a poker chip replaced a missing rook—and the sense of leaving Russia was totally eclipsed by the agonizing thought that Reds or no Reds, letters from Tamara would be still coming, miraculously and needlessly, to southern Crimea, and would search there for a fugitive addressee, and weakly flap about like bewildered butterflies set loose in an alien zone, at the wrong altitude, among unfamiliar flora...

...Because Nabokov never finally opts between the man and the fictionalist, Speak, Memory fails either to delineate that figure moving through an historical St...

...And, to choose one example among many, what a wonderful word "cacologist" is for a person who uses poor diction...

...Nabokov has written several works of fiction posing as biography...

...All of the facts, we learn, have been checked and rechecked and "any lapses are due to the frailty of memory, not to the trickery of art...

...the horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence...

...Memory is another curious blend: not the mem-oires of a novelist so much as a novelistic autobiography...

...The world was made on Sunday...

...lacking their essential grotesqueness, less interesting...

...Two contradictory senses of time run through Speak, Memory, one proper for the memoirist, the other permissible to the novelist...

...Any autobiography which is not a journey of the soul is simply a journey...

...swimming pools...

...Nabokov believes that art must match nature deception for deception, weaving a "web of sense" (John Shade again) out of "topsy-turvical coincidence...

...Let visitors trip...

...Nabokov the novelist and poet treats time in a very different manner...

...O my Lolita," laments that artist-manque Humbert Humbert, "I have only words to work with...

...I confess I do not believe in time," he says...

...Time is the medium in which the memoirist works, and Nabokov the memoirist treats it with respect, even reverence...

...Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov's "re-Englishing of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling [Conclusive Evidence, 1951] of Russian memoirs...

...His obsession (Nabokov's term) with butterflies is largely explained by the fact that they exemplify so well the infinite deceptions of nature: "When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in...

...Because reality and illusion are one...

...A second and even more affecting love story involves the book's dedicatee, Nabokov's wife Vera...

...This reader, for one, eagerly awaits the appearance of Speak On, Memory...

...The problem boils down to a confusion in chronometry...

...I was always ready to sacrifice purity of form to the exigencies of fantastic content, causing form to bulge and burst like a sponge-bag containing a small furious devil...

...If not straight autobiography, just what does lie cushioned between foreword and index (whose presence, the author tells us, "will annoy the vulgar, but may please the discerning...

...Polenka, the "dirt-caked and stale-smelling" daughter of the family's head coachman...

...Petersburg, Berlin or Paris identifiable in the accompanying photographs, or to create a fictional character moving through worlds of his own...

...Like the party magician who, palms up...

...One disclaimer explains that certain names have been changed "to avoid hurting the living or distressing the dead," and another tells us that the author probably never should have tried to become an autobiographer in the first place...

...The next 20 years of teaching, writing and traveling around America's billboard jungle will be described, we learn, in a sequel...

...Tenderness is not the quality that comes immediately to mind when one thinks of Nabokov...

...What I still have not been able to rework through want of specific documentation," Nabokov writes in the foreword, "I have now preferred to delete for the sake of over-all truth...

...Reviewed by RICHARD LEVINE A good lepidopterist-novelist knows the advantages of sugar-coating his bait to attract both readers and moths...

...Commenting on the discovery that his "humble drawing master" married a young girl at about the time he himself married, Nabokov writes: "When I learned these later developments, I experienced a queer shock...

...Colette, the unloved daughter of "des bourgeois de Paris," whom the 10-year-old Nabokov met on a "plage" at Biarritz and "knew at once that this was the real thing...

...seed-sowing undergraduate years at Cambridge...

...Nabokov only occasionally peeps out from behind his shield of art, and the result is that he comes across just as two-dimensional as his fictional characters and finally...

...Nabokov the memoirist tells us that "the nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood...

...Wrongly, perhaps—for Speak, Memory is, among other things, a series of love stories...

...By this point in the book the reader can well believe that young Vladimir was playing chess and thinking about butterflies in the midst of all that mayhem...

...A colored spiral in a small ball of glass," is Nabokov's wonderfully apt image for his own life: the sickening involutions of space and time caught in the prism of art...

...and although in matters of construction I tried to conform, whenever possible, to classical rules...

...Speak...

...Fortunately for the reader, such examples of life's untidiness occur often enough to provide some wonderful portraits of family and friends...

...Yet the "real life" of Vladimir Nabokov remains as much a mystery to us at the close of Speak, Memory as the "real life" of that other artist-conjurer, Sebastian Knight, remains to his half-brother and would-be biographer V. "The man in me revolts against the fictionalist," Nabokov writes in reference to memories that he has "lent" and thereby lost to characters in his novels...

...He speaks of "chrono-phobia" and refers to time in images of nausea and prison: "the sickening involutions and interpenetra-tions of space and time...

...But the reverse is equally true: The fictionalist revolts against the man that the autobiographer would summon up from memories of his Russian and emigre past...

...fur-coated, he attempted to motor from St...

...I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art...

...Nabokov rarely lets a gust of history enter the etherialized atmosphere of his imagination...

...When a fly would occasionally settle on Mademoiselle's forehead, "its three wrinkles would instantly leap up all together like three runners over three hurdles...