JULIAN MOYNAHAN
and in
Speak Memory
he speaks of descrying a hidden watermark
(obviously a planted, encoded message) "whose unique design becomes
visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap."
Spies not only snoop in documents, they may also find themselves looking
through windows: thus the past in
Speak M emory
is
recovered in terms
of a series of viewings through framed apertures opening directly, and
magically, into the childhood world from which the narrator has been
separated by the Russian Revolution and by twenty years and more of
adulthood. Train windows, a magic-lantern slide show, the miniaturized,
irridescent universe revealed by peeping into a microscope, and the
stained-glass window on the staircase of the Nabokov house outside St.
Petersburg, all have important roles to play in evoking the "vivid
patches of the past" recovered, frame by frame and chapter by chapter,
in
Speak Memory.
Spying through windows presents the spy business at its riskiest
and most abject. The agent is out there in the cold and the dark, liable
to detection, and cuts a pathetic and absurd figure. One remembers
Kinbote cursing the drawn shades of Shade's house as he falls about in
Shade's shrubbery and one remembers, above all, Humbert's great
fantasia (II, 164-65, in the Olympia Press edition of
Lolita)
on
"rnes
fenetres."
There he remembers being misled by "a jewel-bright window
wherein my lurking eye ... would make out from afar a half-naked
nymphet stilled in the act of combing her
Alice-in~W'onderland
hair."
Unfortunately, it is a trick of the eye - "whereupon the lighted image
would move and there would be nothing in the window but an obese
partly clad man reading the paper."
Trick of the eye or evidence of a counter-conspiracy? Is either view
in the window frame true or is the whole affair a frame-up? The man
outside the window is at the mercy of what he sees or supposes he sees.
He cannot break the glass without giving himself away and the history
of all intelligence work shows that espionage agents are invariably spied
upon. Spies in Nabokov, like spies in real life, become increasingly
paranoid as they attempt to carry out their secret projects and may
succumb, finally, to a condition of "self-referential mania," wherein all
parts of reality - clouds moving in the sky, water dripping from a tap,
noises in the street - are felt to be engaged in a busy, loquacious, yet
impenetrable conspiracy against the spy-maniac. So tormented and
chivvied about, it is small wonder that the spy turns in anguished
nostalgia, like the prisoner in
Invitation to a Beheading,
to relive
imaginatively the apparently unequivocal joys of childhood - to "the
garden where we used to roam and hide" - else thirsts for death as the
supreme moment when the prison walls will dissolve, when all the
