Владимир Набоков: Vladimir Nabokov Pnin

'The contents are fine,' said Laurence Clements.

'This beverage is certainly delicious,' said Margaret Thayer.

('I always thought "columbine" was some sort of flower,' said Thomas to Betty, who lightly acquiesced.)

The respective ages of several children were then passed in review. Victor would be fifteen soon. Eileen, the granddaughter of Mrs Thayer's eldest sister, was five. Isabel was twenty-three and greatly enjoying a secretarial job in New York. Dr Hagen's daughter was twenty-four, and about to return from Europe, where she had spent a wonderful summer touring Bavaria and Switzerland with a very gracious old lady, Dorianna Karen, famous movie star of the twenties.

The telephone rang. Somebody wanted to talk to Mrs Sheppard. With a precision quite unusual for him in such matters, unpredictable Pain not only rattled off the woman's new address and telephone number, but also supplied those of her eldest son.

9

By ten o'clock, Pnin's Punch and Betty's Scotch were causing some of the guests to talk louder than they thought they did. A carmine flush had spread over one side of Mrs Thayer's neck, under the little blue star of her left ear-ring, and, sitting very straight, she regaled her host with an account of the feud between two of her co-workers at the library. It was a simple office story, but her changes of tone from Miss Shrill to Mr Basso, and the consciousness of the soiree going on so nicely, made Pain bend his head and guffaw ecstatically behind his hand. Roy Thayer was weakly twinkling to himself as he looked into his Punch, down his grey porous nose, and politely listened to Joan Cements who, when she was a little high as she was now, had a fetching way of rapidly blinking, or even completely dosing her black-lashed blue eyes, and of interrupting her sentences, to punctuate a clause or gather new momentum, by deep hawing pants: 'But don't you think--haw--that what he is trying to do--haw--practically in all his novels--haw--is--haw--to express the fantastic recurrence of certain situations?' Betty remained her controlled little self, and expertly looked after the refreshments. In the bay end of the room, Clements kept morosely revolving the slow globe as Hagen, carefully avoiding the traditional intonations he would have used in more congenial surroundings, told him and grinning Thomas the latest story about Mrs Idelson, communicated by Mrs Blorenge to Mrs Hagen. Pnin came up with a plate of nougat.

'This is not quite for your chaste ears, Timofey,' said Hagen to Pnin, who always confessed he never could see the point of any' scabrous anecdote'. 'However--'

Clements moved away to rejoin the ladies. Hagen began to retell the story, and Thomas began to re-grin. Pnin waved a hand at the raconteur in a Russian disgusted 'oh-go-on-with-you' gesture and said: 'I have heard quite the same anecdote thirty-five years ago in Odessa, and even then I could not understand what is comical in it.'

10

At a still later stage of the party, certain rearrangements had again taken place. In a corner of the davenport, bored Clements was flipping through an album of Flemish Masterpieces that Victor had been given by his mother and had left with Pnin. Joan sat on a footstool, at her husband's knee, a plate of grapes in the lap of her wide skirt, wondering when would it be time to go without hurting Timofey's feelings. The others were listening to Hagen discussing modern education: 'You may laugh,' he said, casting a sharp glance at Clements--who shook his head, denying the charge, and then passed the album to Joan, pointing out something in it that had suddenly provoked his glee.

'You may laugh, but I affirm that the only way to escape from the morass--just a drop, Timofey: that will do--is to lock up the student in a soundproof cell and eliminate the lecture room.'

'Yes, that's it,' said Joan to her husband under her breath, banding the album back to him.

'I am glad you agree, Joan,' continued Hagen. 'However, I have been called an enfant terrible for expounding this theory, and perhaps you will not go on agreeing so easily when you hear me out. Phonograph records on every possible subject will be at the isolated student's disposal...'

'But the personality of the lecturer,' said Margaret Thayer. 'Surely that counts for something.'

'It does not!' shouted Hagen. 'That is the tragedy! Who, for example, wants him'--he pointed to radiant Pnin--'who wants his personality? Nobody! They will reject Timofey's wonderful personality without a quaver. The world wants a machine, not a Timofey.'

'One could have Timofey televised,' said Cements.

'Oh, I would love that,' said Joan, beaming at her host, and Betty nodded vigorously. Pnin bowed deeply to them with an 'I-am-disarmed' spreading of both hands.

'And what do you think of my controversial plan?' asked Hagen of Thomas.

'I can tell you what Tom thinks,' said Cements, still contemplating the same picture in the book that lay open on his knees. 'Tom thinks that the best method of teaching anything is to rely on discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss for fifty minutes something that neither their teacher nor they know. Now, for the last three months,' he went on, without any logical transition. 'I have been looking for this picture, and here it is. The publisher of my new book on the Philosophy of Gesture wants a portrait of me, and Joan and I knew we had seen somewhere a stunning likeness by an Old Master but could not even recall his period. Well, here it is, here it is. The only retouching needed would be the addition of a sport shirt and the deletion of this warrior's hand.'

'I must really protest,' began Thomas.

Clements passed the open book to Margaret Thayer, and she burst out laughing.

'I must protest, Laurence,' said Tom. 'A relaxed discussion in an atmosphere of broad generalizations is a more realistic approach to education than the old-fashioned formal lecture.'

'Sure, sure,' said Clements.

Joan scrambled up to her feet and covered her glass with her narrow palm when Pnin offered to replenish it. Mrs Thayer looked at her wrist-watch, and then at her husband. A soft yawn distended Laurence's mouth. Betty asked Thomas if he knew a man called Fogelman, an expert in bats, who lived in Santa Clara, Cuba. Hagen asked for a glass of water or beer. Whom does he remind me of? thought Pnin suddenly. Eric Wind? Why? They are quite different physically.

11

The setting of the final scene was the hallway. Hagen could not find the cane he had come with (it had fallen behind a trunk in the closet).

'And I think I left my purse where I was sitting,' said Mrs Thayer, pushing her pensive husband ever so slightly toward the living-room.

Pnin and Clements, in last-minute discourse, stood on either side of the living-room doorway, like two well-fed caryatides, and drew in their abdomens to let the silent Thayer pass. In the middle of the room Professor Thomas and Miss Bliss--he with his hands behind his back and rising up every now and then on his toes, she holding a tray--were standing and talking of Cuba, where a cousin of Betty's fiancй had lived for quite a while, Betty understood. Thayer blundered from chair to chair, and found himself with a white bag, not knowing really where he picked it up, his mind being occupied by the adumbrations of lines he was to write down later in the night: We sat and drank, each with a separate past locked up in him, and fate's alarm clocks set at unrelated futures--when, at last, a wrist was cocked, and eyes of consorts met...

Meanwhile, Pnin asked Joan Clements and Margaret Thayer if they would care to see how he had embellished the upstairs rooms. The idea enchanted them. He led the way. His so-called kabinet now looked very cosy, its scratched floor snugly covered with the more or less Pakistan rug which he had once acquired for his office and had recently removed in drastic silence from under the feet of the surprised Falternfels. A tartan lap robe, under which Pnin had crossed the ocean from Europe in 1940, and some endemic cushions disguised the unremovable bed. The pink shelves, which he had found supporting several generations of children's books--from Tom the Bootblack, or the Road to Success by Horatio Alger, Jr, 1889, through Rolf in the Woods by Ernest Thompson Seton, 1911, to a 1928 edition of Compton's Pictured Encyclopedia in ten volumes with foggy little photographs--were now loaded with three hundred sixty-five items from the Waindell College Library.