ROBERT ALTER
church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light
up to make a swarm of minute flames of incense, and the priest chants
of eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies
there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin.
625
Nabokov's prose often has the look of working out carefully cal–
culated effects, but here, one may venture to guess, he seems to have
given himself over to the free-associative momentum of metaphor,
and with startling consequences. The narration of the father tossed in
a blanket by boisterous peasants ends - it is also the chapter-ending
- in a kind of freeze-frame that stresses the timeless thereness ("there
he would be") of the horizontal figure "reclining" against the sum–
mer sky "as if for good." Father, day, and year, are all at a lofty
stillpoint (it is noon, and close to the summer solstice). Characteris–
tically, Nabokov realizes this moment in part through recourse to a
painterly term, "the cobalt blue of the summer noon." This imme–
diately leads associatively to the elaborate simile of the painted image
of the divine or saintly figures on the church ceiling . That simile is
"Homeric" not merely in its length but in its power to effect a large
movement between two disparate realms. The living image of the
father in midair is transposed into painting on plaster, the painted
figures linked with a more ecclesiastic paradise than the boy experi–
enced in his childhood world. In a macabre turn of wit, the wonderful
suspension on air turns into the "eternal repose" of the priestly chant,
and with the rightness of dream-logic, the dead person's face is con–
cealed. As the perspective moves from life to iconography and from
outside to inside, the lighting appropriately switches from solar bril–
liance to flickering wax tapers that cast their faint gleam, as we spiral
down through the last clause from ceiling to ground, on an open
coffin. This concluding image of a body recumbent in death does not,
I think, subvert or cancel the image of a splendidly living body re–
cumbent in air, as one school of contemporary criticism would au–
tomatically conclude. What it seems to me to do is to add a dimension
of terrible poignancy to the captured timeless moment of the soaring
father. As surely as the memoirist is aware that his father was cut
down by an assassin's bullet in 1922, he knows, and his figurative
language dramatizes visually, that the cobalt blue of the remembered
summer sky is drawn against a shadowy background of extinction–
precisely like the crack of light at the beginning of the book set
between two eternities of darkness.
Memories of a happy, forever lost childhood can easily decline into
the cheap coin of nostalgia. What partly makes
Speak, Memory
one of
the most remarkable of modem autobiographies is Nabokov's ability to
etch in prose the precious vividness of his past while keeping steadily in
