I am somewhat saddened by the fact that it’s been five years since I last read Nabokov. Over all that time, could I really not have carved out a few gentle hours to enjoy the work of an author who never disappoints?
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight initially seems to be cut from a similar cloth to other Nabokov classics – the reader must piece together the fictional reality from the account of a narrator whose reliability is highly questionable: Kinbote in Pale Fire, Hermann in Despair, and of course Humbert Humbert in Lolita. The parallel to Pale Fire is notable; in both The Real Life and Pale Fire we have a narrator, writing a biographical account of a more successful literary counterpart, who can’t resist projecting their own story onto that of the subject. However, it turns out that The Real Life is markedly less sinister. Rather than being primarily a psychoanalysis of the narrator, unwittingly revealed by the narrator themselves, the novel is a study of the revisionist nature of memory and the contrast between lived experience and external appearance.
don’t be too certain of learning the past from the lips of the present. Beware of the most honest broker. Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale. Who is speaking of Sebastian Knight? repeats that voice in my conscience. Who indeed? His best friend and his half-brother. A gentle scholar, remote from life, and an embarrassed traveller visiting a distant land. And where is the third party? Rotting peacefully in the cemetery of St Damier. Laughingly alive in five volumes. Peering unseen over my shoulder as I write this.
Unlike Kinbote, The Real Life’s narrator V. is somewhat self-aware – he is not only struggling to paint a clear picture of his half-brother Sebastian Knight, he is recounting his struggle and exploring the fallibility of his own rose-tinted memories. But V. is not perfect either. His obsessive investigations reveal deep insecurity, perhaps even seeing Sebastian as a father figure of sorts after their traumatic upbringing.
I have not yet commented on the astonishing beauty of Nabokov’s prose, because that is table stakes in a Nabokov novel.
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.
It’s remarkable to me that The Real Life was one of Nabokov’s first English novels, given its deep maturity and thematic complexity (of the ones I have read, it is perhaps second only to Pale Fire in this regard). While several Nabokov novels make allusions to the author’s own life (e.g. the Russian emigré we see in Pnin, but hopefully not Humbert in Lolita), even by Nabokovian standards, The Real Life is deeply self-referential, with lines between author, narrator, and narrated blurring before ultimately coming to delightful fusion in the novel’s climax. On a side note, reading this has made me want to revisit Calvino’s If on a winter night a traveller – after reading a metafictional exploration of the writing progress, perhaps a metafictional exploration of the reading process would be a good complement?
My father’s first marriage had not been happy. A strange woman, a restless reckless being – but not my father’s kind of restlessness. His was a constant quest which changed its object only after having attained it. Hers was a half-hearted pursuit, capricious and rambling, now swerving wide off the mark, now forgetting it midway, as one forgets one’s umbrella in a taxicab. (loc 74)
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In his last published book, The Doubtful Asphodel (1936), Sebastian depicts an episodical character who has just escaped from an unnamed country of terror and misery. ‘What can I tell you of my past, gentlemen [he is saying], I was born in a land where the idea of freedom, the notion of right, the habit of human kindness were things coldly despised and brutally outlawed. Now and then, in the course of history, a hypocrite government would paint the walls of the nation’s prison a comelier shade of yellow and loudly proclaim the granting of rights familiar to happier states; but either these rights were solely enjoyed by the jailers or else they contained some secret flaw which made them even more bitter than the decrees of frank tyranny … Every man in the land was a slave, if he was not a bully; since the soul and everything pertaining to it were denied to man, the infliction of physical pain came to be considered as sufficient to govern and guide human nature … From time to time a thing called revolution would occur, turning the slaves into bullies and vice versa … A dark country, a hellish place, gentlemen, and if there is anything of which I am certain in life it is that I shall never exchange the liberty of my exile for the vile parody of home …’ Owing to there being in this character’s speech a chance reference to ‘great woods and snow-covered plains’, Mr Goodman promptly assumes that the whole passage tallies with Sebastian Knight’s own attitude to Russia. This is a grotesque misconception; it should be quite clear to any unbiased reader that the quoted words refer rather to a fanciful amalgamation of tyrannic iniquities than to any particular nation or historical reality. (loc 274)
Narrator bias creeps in – it has been established that V. has rosy memories of their time in Russia, and some of the facts of Knight’s life like his early escape to England and his reluctance to use the Russian tongue do lean in favour of Goodman’s interpretation.
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I find it impossible to believe that Sebastian, no matter how gruesome the aspect of Russia was at the time of our escape, did not feel the wrench we all experienced. All things considered, it had been his home, and the set of kindly, well-meaning, gentle-mannered people driven to death or exile for the sole crime of their existing, was the set to which he too belonged. (loc 293)
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‘Good luck,’ he said, ‘cheerio’ – and shook my hand in the limp self-conscious fashion he had acquired in England. 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. (loc 355)
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As I looked about me, all things in that bedroom seemed to have just jumped back in the nick of time as if caught unawares, and now were gradually returning my gaze, trying to see whether I had noticed their guilty start. (loc 407)
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don’t be too certain of learning the past from the lips of the present. Beware of the most honest broker. Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale. Who is speaking of Sebastian Knight? repeats that voice in my conscience. Who indeed? His best friend and his half-brother. A gentle scholar, remote from life, and an embarrassed traveller visiting a distant land. And where is the third party? Rotting peacefully in the cemetery of St Damier. Laughingly alive in five volumes. Peering unseen over my shoulder as I write this (although I dare say he mistrusted too strongly the commonplace of eternity to believe even now in his own ghost). (loc 594)
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‘I cannot help feeling there is something essentially wrong about love. Friends may quarrel or drift apart, close relations too, but there is not this pang, this pathos, this fatality which clings to love. Friendship never has that doomed look. Why, what is the matter? I have not stopped loving you, but because I cannot go on kissing your dim dear face, we must part, we must part. Why is it so? What is this mysterious exclusiveness? One may have a thousand friends, but only one love-mate. (loc 1320)
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Good-bye. Go away, go away. Don’t write. Marry Charlie or any other good man with a pipe in his teeth. Forget me now, but remember me afterwards, when the bitter part is forgotten. (loc 1332)
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He would not mind perhaps having a bite at the apple of sin because, apart from solecisms, he was indifferent to the idea of sin; but he did mind apple-jelly, potted and patented. (loc 1783)
Avoidance of cliched sin.
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‘Oh-la-la!’ she exclaimed getting very red in the face. ‘Mon Dieu! The Russian gentleman died yesterday, and you’ve been visiting Monsieur Kegan …’ So I did not see Sebastian after all, or at least I did not see him alive. But those few minutes I spent listening to what I thought was his breathing changed my life as completely as it would have been changed, had Sebastian spoken to me before dying. Whatever his secret was, I have learnt one secret too, and namely: that the soul is but a manner of being – not a constant state – that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations. The hereafter may be the full ability of consciously living in any chosen soul, in any number of souls, all of them unconscious of their interchangeable burden. Thus – I am Sebastian Knight. I feel as if I were impersonating him on a lighted stage, with the people he knew coming and going – the dim figures of the few friends he had, the scholar, and the poet; and the painter – smoothly and noiselessly paying their graceful tribute; (loc 2475)
The interaction between subjective experience and external reality… perhaps also a comment on the literary experience? We are made to feel deeply about a character that is merely a construction. The protagonist’s soul becomes ours.
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