Владимир Набоков - The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

I, for one, would have ignored that book altogether had it been just another bad book, doomed with the rest of its kind to oblivion by next spring. The Lethean Library, for all its incalculable volumes, is, I know, sadly incomplete without Mr Goodman's effort. But bad as the book may be, it is something else besides. Owing to the quality of its subject, it is bound to become quite mechanically the satellite of another man's enduring fame. As long as Sebastian Knight's name is remembered, there always will be some learned inquirer conscientiously climbing up a ladder to where The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight keeps half awake between Godfrey Goodman's Fall of Man and Samuel Goodrich's Recollections of a Lifetime. Thus, if I continue to harp on the subject, I do so for Sebastian Knight's sake.

Mr Goodman's method is as simple as his philosophy. His sole object is to show 'poor Knight' as the product and victim of what he calls 'our time' – though why some people are so keen to make others share in their chronometric concepts, has always been a mystery to me. 'Post-war Unrest'. 'Post-war Generation' are to Mr Goodman magic words opening every door. There is, however, a certain kind of 'open sesame' which seems less a charm than a skeleton-key, and this, I am afraid, is Mr Goodman's kind. But he is quite wrong in thinking that he found something once the lock had been forced. Not that I wish to suggest that Mr Goodman thinks. He could not if he tried. His book concerns itself only with such ideas as have been shown (commercially) to attract mediocre minds.

For Mr Goodman, young Sebastian Knight 'freshly emerged from the carved chrysalid of Cambridge' is a youth of acute sensibility in a cruel cold world. In this world, 'outside realities intrude so roughly upon one's most intimate dreams' that a young man's soul is forced into a state of siege before it is finally shattered. 'The War', says Mr Goodman without so much as a blush, 'had changed the face of the universe.' And with much gusto he goes on to describe those special aspects of post-war life which met a young man at 'the troubled dawn of his career': a feeling of some great deception; weariness of the soul and feverish physical excitement (such as the 'vapid lewdness of the foxtrot'); a sense of futility – and its result: gross liberty. Cruelty, too; the reek of blood still in the air; glaring picture palaces; dim couples in dark Hyde Park; the glories of standardization; the cult of machinery; the degradation of Beauty, Love, Honour, Art… and so on. It is really a wonder that Mr Goodman himself who, as far as I know, was Sebastian's coeval, managed to live through those terrific years.

But what Mr Goodman could stand, his Sebastian Knight apparently could not. We are given a picture of Sebastian restlessly pacing the rooms of his London flat in .1923, after a short trip to the Continent, which Continent 'shocked him indescribably by the vulgar glamour of its gambling hells'. Yes, 'pacing up and down… clutching at his temples… in a passion of discontent… angry with the world… alone… eager to do something, but weak, weak….' The dots are not Mr Goodman's tremolos, but denote sentences I have kindly left out. 'No,' Mr Goodman goes on, 'this was not the world for an artist to live in. It was all very well to flaunt a brave countenance, to make a great display of that cynicism which so irritates one in Knight's earlier work and so pains one in his last two volumes… it was all very well to appear contemptuous and ultrasophisticated, but the thorn was there, the sharp, poisonous thorn.' I don't know why, but the presence of this (perfectly mythical) thorn seems to give Mr Goodman a grim satisfaction.

It would be unfair of me if I let it seem that this first chapter of The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight consists exclusively of a thick flow of philosophical treacle. Word-pictures and anecdotes which form the body of the book (that is, when Mr Goodman arrives at the stage of Sebastian's life when he met him personally) appear here too, as rock cakes dotting the syrup. Mr Goodman was no Boswell; still, no doubt, he kept a notebook where he jotted down certain remarks of his employer – and apparently some of these related to his employer's past. In other words, we must imagine that Sebastian in between work would say: Do you know, my dear Goodman, this reminds me of a day in my life, some years ago, when… Here would come the story. Half a dozen of these seem to Mr Goodman sufficient to fill out what is to him a blank – Sebastian's youth in England.

The first of these stories (which Mr Goodman considers to be extremely typical of 'post-war undergraduate life} depicts Sebastian showing a girl friend from London the sights of Cambridge. 'And this is the Dean's window,' he said; then smashing the pane with a stone, he added: 'And this is the Dean.' Needless to say that Sebastian has been pulling Mr Goodman's leg: the story is as old as the University itself.

Let us look at the second one. During a short vacation trip to Germany (1921? 1922?) Sebastian, one night, being annoyed by the caterwauls in the street, started to pelt the offenders with miscellaneous objects including an egg. Presently, a policeman knocked at his door, bringing back all these objects minus the egg.

This is from an old (or, as Mr Goodman would say, pre-war') Jerome K. Jerome book. Leg-pulling again.

Third story: Sebastian speaking of his very first novel (unpublished and destroyed) explained that it was about a fat young student who travels home to find his mother married to his uncle; this uncle, an ear-specialist, had murdered the student's father.

Mr Goodman misses the joke.

Fourth: Sebastian in the summer of 1922 had overworked himself and, suffering from hallucinations, used to see a kind of optical ghost – a black-robed monk moving swiftly towards him from the sky.

This is a little harder: a short story by Chekhov.

Fifth:

But I think we had better stop, or else Mr Goodman might be in danger of becoming a centipede. Let us have him remain quadrupedal. I am sorry for him, but it cannot be helped. And if only he had not padded and commented these 'curious incidents and fancies' so ponderously, with such a rich crop of deductions! Churlish, capricious, mad Sebastian, struggling in a naughty world of Juggernauts, and aeronauts, and naughts, and what-nots…. Well, well, there may be something in all that.

I want to be scientifically precise. I should hate being baulked of the tiniest particle of truth only because at a certain point of my search I was blindly enraged by a trashy concoction…. Who is speaking of Sebastian Knight? His former secretary. Were they ever friends? No – as we shall see later. Is there anything real or possible in the contrast between a frail eager Sebastian and a wicked tired world? Not a thing. Was there perhaps some oilier kind of chasm, breach, fissure? There was.

It is enough to turn to the first thirty pages or so of Lost Property to see how blandly Mr Goodman (who incidentally never quotes anything that may clash with the main idea of his fallacious work) misunderstands Sebastian's inner attitude in regard to the outer world. Time for Sebastian was never 1914 or 1920 or 1936 – it was always year 1. Newspaper headlines, political theories, fashionable ideas meant to him no more than the loquacious printed notice (in three languages, with mistakes in at least two) on the wrapper of some soap or toothpaste. The lather might be thick and the notice convincing – but that was an end of it. He could perfectly well understand sensitive and intelligent thinkers not being able to sleep because of an earthquake in China; but being what he was, he could not understand why these same people did not feel exactly the same spasm of rebellious grief when thinking of some similar calamity that had happened as many years ago as there were miles to China. Time and space were to him measures of the same eternity, so that the very idea of his reacting in any special 'modem' way to what Mr Goodman calls 'the atmosphere of post-war Europe' is utterly preposterous. He was intermittently happy and uncomfortable in the world into which he came, just as a traveller may be exhilarated by visions of his voyage and be almost simultaneously sea-sick. Whatever age Sebastian might have been born in, he would have been equally amused and unhappy, joyful and apprehensive, as a child at a pantomine now and then thinking of tomorrow's dentist. And the reason of his discomfort was not that he was moral in an immoral age, or immoral in a moral one, neither was it the cramped feeling of his youth not blowing naturally enough in a world which was too rapid a succession of funerals and fireworks; it was simply his becoming aware that the rhythm of his inner being was so much richer than that of other souls. Even then, just at the close of his Cambridge period, and perhaps earlier too, he knew that his slightest thought or sensation had always at least one more dimension than those of his neighbours. He might have boasted of this had there been anything lurid in his nature. As there was not, it only remained for him to feel the awkwardness of being a crystal among glass, a sphere among circles (but all this was nothing when compared to what he experienced as he finally settled down to his literary task).