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PARTISAN REVIEW
basket-shod, overcoated , umbrella-holding style of Bobby Riggs 's tennis
game , or a novel entitled
See under Real?
Where would he have drawn the
line'
Yet there are those aforesaid episodes and passages , moments when
Nabokov's game on the English grass is very good indeed. There is a parrot in
Look at the Harlequins ,
a metaphysical bird magnificent in the conceit it gives
Nabokov. " It was a large , lemon-breasted, indigo-blue ara with striped white
cheeks squawking intermittently on its bleak back-porch perch . Ivor had
dubbed it Mata Hari partly because of its accent but chiefly by reason of its
political past. His late aunt , Lady Wimberg , when already a little gaga,
around Nineteen Fourteen or Fifteen , had been kind to that tragic old bird ,
said to have been abandoned by a shady stranger with a scarred face and a
monocle. It could say
a116,
Otto , and pa-pa , a modest vocabulary , somehow
suggestive of a small anxious family in a hot country far from home.
Sometimes when I work too late and the spies of thought cease to relay
messages, a wrong word in motion feels somehow like the dry biscuit that a
parrot holds in its great slow hand. " And there is the Dean's farewell at Quirn
College. "He grasped my hand in a burst of brutal effusion . Certain
fastidious blue-blooded animals prefer surrendering a limb to the predator
rather than suffer ignoble contact . I left the Dean encumbered with a marble
arm that he kept carrying in his prowlings like a trayed trophy , not knowing
where to put it down." But from the title of the narrator's first novel in
Russian ,
Tamara ,
to the false name (Dumbert Dumbert) he hastily inscribes
in the ledger when courting Dolly von Borg in New York , almost everything
else in the book is tautly referential. At times these keys fall with a heavy
clunk , other times with a subtle clink, but in any case they are omnipresent.
The doors they open , moreover, do not lead inward to the narrator' s narrator ,
the unmasked harlequin , but rather disclose only the same puzzles and
perplexities this figure created in other guises, the
Pnin
that might have been
Dr. Olga Repnin,
the Kin bote who is "real" and the Shade he invents. Thus
numerous variations are played , all sorts of literary connections and opinions
offered , but they distract more than they engage , and in their allusive
superabundance disguise the constancy ofNabokov' s themes , the sameness of
his topics , the considerable limitation of his fiction.
The passions that link Nabokov's novels, as his various narrators insist ,
are pathological. In
Look at the Harlequins
Vadim is always trying to explain
his madness to friends and lovers who live comfortably and superficially in the
present tense , in the real world. They do not understand his Shandian sense of
how the self is created , that mania for turning back to recreate and improve
the past. But the real world , particularly the Marxist-Leninist version , has not
been kind to displaced Russian aristocrats in the twentieth century . "Stop
moping
I "
the Baroness Bredow declares . "Look at the harlequins! " Which?
Where? " All around you . Trees are harlequins , words are harlequins . So are
