Владимир Набоков - Vladimir Nabokov Pnin

And still the College creaked on. Hard-working graduates, with pregnant wives, still wrote dissertations on Dostoyevsky and Simone de Beauvoir. Literary departments still laboured under the impression that Stendhal, Galsworthy, Dreiser, and Mann were great writers. Word plastics like 'conflict' and 'pattern' were still in vogue. As usual, sterile instructors successfully endeavoured to 'produce' by reviewing the books of more fertile colleagues, and, as usual, a crop of lucky faculty members were enjoying or about to enjoy various awards received earlier in the year. Thus, an amusing little grant was affording the versatile Starr couple--baby-faced Christopher Starr and his child-wife Louise--of the Fine Arts Department the unique opportunity of recording post-war folk-songs in East Germany, into which these amazing young people had somehow obtained permission to penetrate. Tristram W. Thomas ('Tom' to his friends), Professor of Anthropology, had obtained ten thousand dollars from the Mandoville Foundation for a study of the eating habits of Cuban fishermen and palm climbers. Another charitable institution had come to the assistance of Dr Bodo von Falternfels, to enable him to complete' a bibliography concerned with such published and manuscript material as has been devoted in recent years to a critical apprai5al of the influence of Nietzsche's disciples on Modem Thought'. And, last but not least, the bestowal of a particularly generous grant was allowing the renowned Waindell psychiatrist, Dr Rudolph Aura, to apply to ten thousand elementary school pupils the so-called Fingerbowl Test, in which the child is asked to dip his index in cups of coloured fluids whereupon the proportion between length of digit and wetted part is measured and plotted in all kinds of fascinating graphs.

The Fall Term had begun, and Dr Hagen was faced with a complicated situation. During the summer, he had been informally approached by an old friend about whether he might consider accepting next year a delightfully lucrative professorship at Seaboard, a far more important university than Waindell. This part of the problem was comparatively easy to solve. On the other hand, there remained the chilling fact that the department he had so lovingly built, with which Blorenge's French Department, although far richer in funds, could not vie in cultural impact, would be relinquished into the claws of treacherous Falternfels, whom he, Hagen, had obtained from Austria and who had turned against him--had actually managed to appropriate by underhand methods the direction of Europa Nova, an influential quarterly Hagen had founded in 1945. Hagen's proposed departure--of which, as yet, he had divulged nothing to his colleagues--would have a still more heart-rending consequence: Assistant Professor Pnin must be left in the lurch. There had never been any regular Russian Department at Waindell and my poor friend's academic existence had always depended on his being employed by the eclectic German Department in a kind of Comparative Literature extension of one of its branches. Out of pure spite, Bodo was sure to lop off that limb, and Pnin, who had no life tenure at Waindell, would be forced to leave--unless some other literature-and-language Department agreed to adopt him. The only departments that seemed flexible enough to do so were those of English and French. But Jack Cockerell, Chairman of English, disapproved of everything Hagen did, considered Pnin a joke, and was, in fact, unofficially but hopefully haggling for the services of a prominent Anglo-Russian writer who, if necessary, could teach all the courses that Pnin must keep in order to survive. As a last resort, Hagen turned to Blorenge.

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Two interesting characteristics distinguished Leonard Blorenge, Chairman of French Literature and Language; he disliked Literature and he had no French. This did not prevent him from travelling tremendous distances to attend Modern Language conventions, at which he would flaunt his ineptitude as if it were some majestic whim, and parry with great thrusts of healthy lodge humour any attempt to inveigle him into the subtleties of the parley-voo. A highly esteemed money-getter, he had recently induced a rich old man, whom three great universities had courted in vain, to promote with a fantastic endowment a riot of research conducted by graduates under the direction of Dr Slavski, a Canadian, toward the erection, on a hill near Waindell, of a 'French Village', two streets and a square, to be copied from those of the ancient little burg of Vandel in the Dordogne. Despite the grandiose element always present in his administrative illuminations, Blorenge personally was a man of ascetic tastes. He had happened to go to school with Sam Poore, Waindell's President, and for many years, regularly, even after the latter had lost his sight, the two would go fishing together on a bleak, wind-raked lake, at the end of a gravel road lined with fireweed, seventy miles north of Waindell, in the kind of dreary brush country--scrub oak and nursery pine--that, in terms of Nature, is the counterpart of a slum. His wife, a sweet woman of simple antecedents, referred to him at her club as 'Professor Blorenge'. He gave a course entitled 'Great Frenchmen', which he had had his secretary copy out from a set of The Hastings Historical and Philosophical Magazine for 1882-94, discovered by him in an attic and not represented in the College Library.

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Pnin had just rented a small house, and had invited the Hagens and the Clementses, and the Thayers, and Betty Bliss to a house-warming party. On the morning of that day, good Dr Hagen made a desperate visit to Blorenge's office and revealed to him, and to him alone, the whole situation. When he told Blorenge that Falternfels was a strong anti-Pninist, Blorenge dryly rejoined that so was he; in fact, after meeting Pnin socially, he 'definitely felt' (it is truly a wonder how prone these practical people are to feel rather than to think) that Pnin was not fit even to loiter in the vicinity of an American college. Staunch Hagen said that for several terms Pnin had been admirably dealing with the Romantic Movement and might surely handle Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo under the auspices of the French Department.

'Dr Slavski takes care of that crowd,' said Blorenge. 'In fact, I sometimes think we overdo literature. Look, this week Miss Mopsuestia begins the Existentialists, your man Bodo does Romain Rolland, I lecture on General Boulanger and De Bйranger. No, we have definitely enough of the stuff.'

Hagen, playing his last card, suggested Pnin could teach a French Language course: like many Russians, our friend had had a French governess as a child, and after the Revolution he lived in Paris for more than fifteen years.

'You mean,' asked Blorenge sternly, 'he can speak French?'

Hagen, who was well aware of Blorenge's special requirements, hesitated.

'Out with it, Herman! Yes or no?'

'I am sure he could adapt himself.'

'He does speak it, eh?'

'Well, yes.'

'In that case,' said Blorenge, 'we can't use him in First-Year French. It would be unfair to our Mr Smith, who gives the elementary course this term and, naturally, is required to be only one lesson ahead of his students. Now it so happens that Mr Hashimoto needs an assistant for his overflowing group in Intermediate French. Does your man read French as well as speak it?'

'I repeat, he can adapt himself,' hedged Hagen.

'I know what adaptation means,' said Blorenge, frowning. 'In 1950, when Hash was away, I engaged that Swiss skiing instructor and he smuggled in mimeo copies of some old French anthology. It took us almost a year to bring the class back to its initial level. Now, if what's-his-name does not read French--'

'I'm afraid he does,' said Hagen with a sigh.

'Then we can't use him at all. As you know, we believe only in speech records and other mechanical devices. No books are allowed.'