Vladimir Nabokov - Speak, Memory

The only game we both liked was tennis. We played a lot of it together, especially in England, on an erratic grass court in Kensington, on a good clay court in Cambridge. He was left-handed. He had a bad stammer that hampered discussions of doubtful points. Despite a weak service and an absence of any real backhand, he was not easy to beat, being the kind of player who never double-faults, and returns everything with the consistency of a banging wall. In Cambridge, we saw more of each other than anywhere before and had, for once, a few friends in common. We both graduated in the same subjects, with the same honors, after which he moved to Paris where, during the following years, he gave lessons of English and Russian, just as I did in Berlin.

We again met in the nineteen-thirties, and were on quite amiable terms in 1938–1940, in Paris. He often dropped in for a chat, rue Boileau where I lodged in two shabby rooms with you and our child, but it so happened (he had been away for a while) that he learned of our departure to America only after we had left. My bleakest recollections are associated with Paris, and the relief of leaving it was overwhelming, but I am sorry he had to stutter his astonishment to an indifferent concierge. I know little of his life during the war. At one time he was employed as translator at an office in Berlin. A frank and fearless man, he criticized the regime in front of colleagues, who denounced him. He was arrested, accused of being a “British spy” and sent to a Hamburg concentration camp where he died of inanition, on January 10, 1945. It is one of those lives that hopelessly claim a belated something—compassion, undestanding, no matter what—which the mere recognition of such a want can neither replace nor redeem.

The beginning of my first term in Cambridge was inauspicious. Late in the afternoon of a dull and damp October day, with the sense of indulging in some weird theatricals, I put on my newly acquired, dark-bluish academic gown and black square cap for my first formal visit to E. Harrison, my college tutor. I went up a flight of stairs and knocked on a massive door that stood slightly ajar. “Come in,” said a distant voice with hollow abruptness. I crossed a waiting room of sorts and entered my tutor’s study. The brown dusk had forestalled me. There was no light in the study save for the glow of a large fireplace near which a dim figure sat in a dimmer chair. I advanced saying: “My name is—” and stepped into the tea things that stood on the rug beside Mr. Harrison’s low wicker armchair. With a grunt, he bent sideways from his seat to right the pot, and then scooped up and dumped back into it the wet black mess of tea leaves it had disgorged. Thus the college period of my life began on a note of embarrassment, a note that was to recur rather persistently during my three years of residence.

Mr. Harrison thought it a fine idea to have one “White Russian” lodge with another, and so, at first, I shared an apartment in Trinity Lane with a puzzled compatriot. After a few months he left college, and I remained sole occupant of those lodgings. They seemed intolerably squalid in comparison with my remote and by now nonexistent home. Well do I remember the ornaments on the mantelpiece (a glass ashtray, with the Trinity crest, left by some former lodger; a seashell in which I found the imprisoned hum of one of my own seaside summers), and my landlady’s old mechanical piano, a pathetic contraption, full of ruptured, crushed, knotted music, which one sampled once and no more. Narrow Trinity Lane was a staid and rather sad little street, with almost no traffic, but with a long, lurid past beginning in the sixteenth century, when it used to be Findsilver Lane, although commonly called at the time by a coarser name because of the then abominable state of its gutters. I suffered a good deal from the cold, but it is quite untrue, as some have it, that the polar temperature in Cambridge bedrooms caused the water to freeze solid in one’s washstand jug. As a matter of fact, there would be hardly more than a thin layer of ice on the surface, and this was easily broken by means of one’s toothbrush into tinkling bits, a sound which, in retrospect, has even a certain festive appeal to my Americanized ear. Otherwise, getting up was no fun at all. I still feel in my bones the bleakness of the morning walk up Trinity Lane to the Baths, as one shuffled along, exuding pallid puffs of breath, in a thin dressing gown over one’s pajamas and with a cold, fat sponge-bag under one’s arm. Nothing in the world could induce me to wear next to my skin the “woolies” that kept Englishmen secretly warm. Overcoats were considered sissy. The usual attire of the average Cambridge undergraduate, whether athlete or leftist poet, struck a sturdy and dingy note: his shoes had thick rubber soles, his flannel trousers were dark gray, and the buttoned sweater, called a “jumper,” under his Norfolk jacket was a conservative brown. What I suppose might be termed the gay set wore old pumps, very light gray flannel trousers, a bright-yellow “jumper,” and the coat part of a good suit. By that time my youthful preoccupation with clothes was on the wane, but it did seem rather a lark, after the formal fashions in Russia, to go about in slippers, eschew garters, and wear one’s collar sewn onto one’s shirt—a daring innovation in those days.

The mild masquerade in which I indolently joined has left such trifling impressions upon my mind that it would be tedious to continue in this strain. The story of my college years in England is really the story of my trying to become a Russian writer. I had the feeling that Cambridge and all its famed features—venerable elms, blazoned windows, loquacious tower clocks—were of no consequence in themselves but existed merely to frame and support my rich nostalgia. Emotionally, I was in the position of a man who, having just lost a fond kinswoman, realized—too late—that through some laziness of the routine-drugged human soul, he had neither troubled to know her as fully as she deserved, nor had shown her in full the marks of his not quite conscious then, but now unrelieved, affection. As with smarting eyes I meditated by the fire in my Cambridge room, all the potent banality of embers, solitude and distant chimes pressed against me, contorting the very folds of my face as an airman’s face is disfigured by the fantastic speed of his flight. And I thought of all I had missed in my country, of the things I would not have omitted to note and treasure, had I suspected before that my life was to veer in such a violent way.

To some of the several fellow émigrés I met in Cambridge the general trend of my feelings was so obvious and familiar a thing that it would have fallen flat and seemed almost improper if put into words. With the whiter of those White Russians I soon found out that patriotism and politics boiled down to a snarling resentment which was directed more against Kerenski than against Lenin and which proceeded solely from material discomforts and losses. Then, too, I ran into some quite unexpected difficulties with such of my English acquaintances as were considered to be cultured and subtle, and humane, but who, for all their decency and refinement, would lapse into the most astonishing drivel when Russia was being discussed. I want to single out here a young Socialist I knew, a lanky giant whose slow and multiple manipulations of a pipe were horribly aggravating when you did not agree with him and delightfully soothing when you did. With him, I had many political wrangles, the bitterness of which invariably dissolved when we turned to the poets we both cherished. Today he is not unknown among his peers, which is, I readily admit, a pretty meaningless phrase, but then, I am doing my best to obscure his identity; let me refer to him by the name of “Nesbit” as I dubbed him (or affirm now having dubbed him), not only because of his alleged resemblance to early portraits of Maxim Gorki, a regional mediocrity of that era, one of whose first stories (“My Fellow Traveler”—another apt note) had been translated by a certain R. Nesbit Bain, but also because “Nesbit” has the advantage of entering into a voluptuous palindromic association with “Ibsen,” a name I shall have to evoke presently.