144
PARTISAN REVIEW
Fi eld 's purpose is to restore the fl es h and blood fi gure of Vl adimir
Nabokov to all the pl aces and occasions th rough whi ch he passed in
reaching "right now" in the Montreux Palace Ho tel in Montreux,
Switzerl and. Thi s aim is achi eved with a kin d of eccentric brilliance
from which nothing else in the book can rea ll y detract. I have read
what seem in retrospect to be hundreds of interviews with Nabo kov
and , as it chanced, saw a rerun of the 1966 televi sion interview on the
very eve of receivin g thi s book for review. No t even the la tter can vie
with the sense of immedi acy to be ga ined from the pages of Fi eld 's
biography.
In
order to make Na bokov come ali ve, Field focu sses o n two
subj ects. One of them is naturall y Na bokov. T he o ther is "Andrew,"
wh o is writing Nabokov's life, who engages Naboko v and hi s wife in a
kind of con versati on that ex tends th rougho ut the book, and who, in
the intervals tha t coil about the perpetual present of thi s conversa ti on ,
has indefa ti gabl y retraced Na bo kov's foo tstep s from hi s ances tral
es ta tes in Russia, through the T enishev Schoo l in Petersburg, th rough
Cambridge, Berlin , Pari s, New York , Stanford, the o ther Cambridge,
Cornell , and now to Montreux , intervi ewed whoever once for a
moment passed through the orbit of the grea t man , read every ava il able
bit of correspondence, every entomo logical arti cle, chess p roblem,
juvenile poem-everything. Like Fi eld, he is an Ameri can scho lar who
h as learned Russian , and he now teaches in Australi a.
He is more than a littl e of a popinj ay, thi s "Andrew," about whose
name inverted commas sho uld h enceforth be imagin ed, and the
irksome qualities of the book all deri ve from the imperfecti ons of hi s
character and background. His ch aracter, in brief, is marked by a
ludicrously self-satisfi ed compl acency, and hi s background by tha t
insuffi ciency of educati on and general culture for whi ch pompousn ess
is commonl y the mas k. He is widely travell ed and widely read, bu t
much of thi s has been los t upon him. For one thing, hi s grasp of
Engli sh prose is uncertain . Spellin g itself is a pro bl em. He uses British
spelling whenever he can remember to do so (not always), and by way
of overcompensation can occasionall y be
plus britann ique que la reine:
telegramme!
(p . 262). The editor a t Viking was, I must say, amaz ingly
indul gent-either that, or in on the joke. Andrew can write, " hi s sense
of measure and hi s
methodo logical
[methodi cal?] way o f looking at
things ," (54), or " the reli ability of the two women ... is
vouchsafed
[confirmed?] for me," (56), or call u pholstery
"ungain ly
[?} and almos t
desiccated" (3). His incuriosity about the meaning of simpl e words can
cause him to lurch into a kind of gra tuitous ill ogic: "T o lstoy has
