Vladimir Nabokov's Spectral Merriment

...Doting and distracted, he accepts her rebuffs with bear-like good humor, and even poeticizes in a burst of inspired generosity about her frigidity: "There should be a cold shiver in the sensation of true happiness...

...But what is most flattering, he violates, with our connivance, the traditional humanitarian feeling that an artist ought to be compassionate...

...Dreyer could easily represent the normal male (as opposed to the abnormal Humbert of Lolita), and Nabokov shows him as infinitely more tolerant in matters of sex than women, who tend to be finicky and demanding...

...Martha's passion, no more plausible than Titania's for her ass in A Midsummer Night's Dream, is the product of an abstract need to endow something inert with life, and a real need to devitalize her husband...

...He was young, his backhand was as good as his forehand, his digestion was a dream, he would go to Brazil or Zanzibar next winter...

...In the mirrors of Nabokov's light dry mockery, compassion dwindles to that half of the truth we usually want to hear about ourselves, and we are almost willing to take from him the unsavory other half...

...Though she pets and praises him and sews monograms on his underwear, Franz longs, like any knave, to run away, and this is the other classic fact of adultery: Embarked on in the spirit of breaking loose, it leads, one way or another, to the sense of being trapped...

...The gloomy mind of Franz drifts occasionally to the river in his home town with "rafts gently singing in the shadow of the willows...

...Martha is an orderly woman who considers Dreyer much too comical and bouncy to fit in with her sense of decorum...

...To show us how subjective a matter is Franz' delegability, Nabokov presents him as a very unappetizing young man, amoral, witless, and rarely clean, taking time to study the corns on his toes before he makes love to his uncoy mistress...

...Like Franz' rumpled old landlord who can turn himself into all sorts of animals, conjure up a wife out of a wig and a stick, and banish his lodgers into non-existence when he tires of them, Nabokov can hold us in partial suspension, too inebriated by the nectar of his talent to make the customary moral judgments on bourgeois ambitions, adultery, or even murder...

...Nabokov writes like some permanent Traveler, and in King, Queen, Knave (McGraw-Hill, 272 pp., $5.95), just as in Pnin and Lolita, he is obsessed with lodgings: their price, their furnishings, the toilets in the hall, and almost demonically, with landlords and landladies...

...Fumbling Franz becomes a boulevardier...

...Dreyer's mustache is tawny, his hands freckled, the wheel of his fortunes golden...

...A passionate profiteer, Martha postpones his extinction, catches a chill and dies herself...

...Here, as in most of Nabokov's novels, characters live in a mechanical universe, manipulate one another like pawns or cards, respond only to their own instinctual promptings, and never experience a serious conflict between idealism and self-interest...

...Readers may have shuddered at similar cruelties in Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark, but they will never mourn for this king or queen of hearts, designated as playing cards mainly because the roles they play are classic...

...She is self-contained, static...

...Martha carps at taking a walk in the rain, Franz loathes dogs...

...She needed a dead husband...

...The coldly radiant Martha, too, is totally unlike the heroines of American fiction who become familiar to us through their spirit and their mobility...

...Still, one senses that his cynicism is not a very deep or bitter phenomenon—it might have been concocted on some vacationer's terrace while Nabokov was sipping a cool drink, even as his formidable knowledge of the American nymphet materialized out of innocent bus-rides during which he took assiduous notes on teen-age jargon...

...This book is only a bright exercise in domestic trigonometry for Nabokov, who wants to say the angles are always the same...

...No matter if we are provincial and hearthbound, Nabokov's fiction speaks to the tourist in all of us, and we see every rain puddle or figure in the street in a heightened, exaggerated way, as if we were on a trip...

...Each participant makes the pretense of being the person he or she would like to be accustomed to seeing in the mirror...

...In any case, it is the structure of feelings and the design of behavior, not their throb or tragedy that are dwelt on in King, Queen, Knave...

...That is, one may see the same personal logic at work not only in this but in any adultery, and one may perennially observe the same curious interactions in certain types of marriage...

...even his pajamas are yellow...

...A subdued and grave husband...

...Even when it is appealing to his lowest interests, it addresses him in high style...

...They both let themselves go to seed while Dreyer flourishes, treating us to a lurid version of Denis de Rougement's notion (in Love in the Western World) that self-destructiveness is the true Grail of the romantic quest...

...while, taking unfair advantage of us, he is juggling paradoxes and surprises to play tricks upon our wits...

...Dreyer, the businessman who thinks he should have been an artist, is dazzled by the spring air: "A purposeful gaiety, a dash of excitement now marked the rains...

...his aunt Martha with lessons in love-making...

...She and Franz plunge into sinister investigations of firearms, poisons that kill after one sneeze, death by water...

...What is more, we often feel that Nabokov's diabolical plots of murder and treachery are only streamlined means to his limited and self-indulging sensory ends...

...Eager for girls and advancement, unformed and characterless, Franz turns like warm wax into a mold that fits the egos of his suburban middle-class relations, the Dreyers...

...But neither really feels at home in his pretenses...

...Two fat taxi drivers, a garbage collector in his sand-colored apron, a housemaid with golden hair ablaze in the sun, a white baker with glistening rubbers on his bare feet...

...The one touching aspect of King, Queen, Knave, is the tremendous contrast between Frau Dreyer's image of her husband as a gross and reckless buffoon, and our impression of him as a man of boundless zest, with a yearning for culture and an exuberant capacity for throwing himself into new projects (like the invention of a pair of automannequins, made of a rippling fleshlike material, who will walk about in his store window with a fetching gait...

...Sniffing nervously and spreading his hands in helplessness, he has scarcely learned to handle boxes and tissue paper, to change his underwear once in 10 days and use nice lotions, when he finds himself in grisly collusion with his beautiful aunt to dispose of her husband...

...Nabokov applies only sunny adjectives to this character who radiates heat and health...

...Ironically, it is the murderous couple who are morbid and squeamish, full of petulance and discomfort...

...But just as they are on the brink of a perfect drowning, Dreyer mentions that he expects to make a hundred thousand dollars at one stroke the next day...

...Frau Dreyer is the critical wife ready to sacrifice even her own pleasure if she can put her husband in the wrong...

...The old boy was aflame with rich life...

...Things and sensations are also in the saddle for Nabokov, who leavens the dismal doings of King, Queen, Knave with the surprising felicities of the physical scene...

...His uncle plies him with rough jokes, expensive ties and tennis rackets...

...To keep her bank account and personal habits undisturbed, she needs "a sedentary husband...

...cold capricious Martha turns motherly and tender...

...His mere physical presence is an obstacle, his overtures a threat...

...Very probably we are getting a Nabokovian law of adultery here: The Queen is as eager to deprive her King as to nourish the knave with her tarts...

...He really should not be in much disharmony with Martha, who is only at ease in the world of her possessions and sensations, irritated by an imperfect cafe au lait, glowing over a Westphalian ham, and finding her true emotional climaxes in systematizing Things: Even the paraphernalia of her adultery, her drawer of contraceptive implements and her bedroom slippers with the crimson pompoms, are tidily arranged in her lover's shabby quarters...

...In his intellectual pack the cards are stacked, the number of tricks circumscribed, and the winner takes nothing...

...a score of swallows swarmed...

...Deceit, perversity, illicit love, murder—this sleazy music is played with perfect tone upon an Olympian instrument, in notes of astonishing and spectral merriment...

...The novel ends with her husband sobbing...

...Marriage, seemingly the ultimate form of bondage, is a much freer arrangement, and every marriage is in a sense a marriage of convenience, because in it people are allowed, indeed are forced, to be themselves...

...but from the room where Franz has been left alone come sounds of roaring laughter, a frenzy of youthful mirth...

...King, Queen, Knave is an early novel, now revised and reissued, written when Nabokov was 28 and already concentrating on the nastier side of personal relations...

...Nabokov's world is made up of brilliant, scattered images that cause an ethereal flutter in all our senses...

...and it is precisely through her physical embodiment that we come to know her—her sloe eyes, emerald earrings and black chignon...

...It is about a nearsighted and inarticulate young man who comes from a small town in south Germany to work in his uncle's clothing and sporting-goods emporium in Berlin...

...And it is precisely all this light and levity that so vex his wife that she works herself into a positive fever to snuff out his animation...

...and he cannot be sure of her compliance even on Christmas...