628
PARTISAN REVIEW
Very lovely, very lonesome. But what am
I
doing in this
stereoscopic dreamland? How did I get here? Somehow, the two
sleighs have slipped away, leaving behind a passportless spy standing
on the blue-white road in his New England snowboots and storm–
coat. The vibration in my ears is no longer their receding bells, but
only my own blood singing. All is still, spellbound, enthralled by the
moon, fancy's rear-vision mirror. The snow is real, though, and as
I
bend to it and scoop up a handful, sixty years crumble to glittering
frost-dust between my fingers.
In this instance, the status of the recalled scene as sheer invention is
flaunted from the start. In actuality, the child Vladimir was back at the
Vyra manor when this moonlit ride took place, and so Nabokov the
memoirist must recreate it as a fiction writer from Mademoiselle's point
of view, to a large extent using the clues of literary convention. The
following sleigh is wittily represented as a counterpart to those
"companionable phantoms of ships" sighted by polar explorers, and the
shimmer of oscillation between phantom or hallucination and real thing
runs through the whole scene. The moon cannot be left out, the narra–
tor ostentatiously announces, and it is thus introduced with suitable the–
atricality ("So there it comes"), providing iridescence for the clouds,
glitter and melodramatic shadows for the snow.
This magical landscape collapses with the interjection, "Very lovely,
very lonesome." It has all been a "stereoscopic dreamland," a term that
suggests still another guide of artifice for the composition of the scene -
the old stereoscopes with their "picturesque" black and white views that
were a common home amusement in the world of Nabokov's child–
hood. The Russia of 1906, in a kind of cinematic
faux raccord
(the op–
posite of a Proustian concordance), disappears into a New England
winterscape decades later in which the expatriate writer, "a passportless
spy" on the remembered Mademoiselle, is equally exiled from his home–
land and his past. But even here, the act of imaginative recollection is
dialectic. The New England moon is "fancy's rear-vision mirror." As the
chronophobic, chronophiliac imagination looks "back" into it, the
moon becomes the moon of 1906, no mere mechanism of
faux raccord,
and, in the last emblematic gesture, sixty years crumble to frost-dust,
dreamworld and real world change places.
The obtruded paradox of this extreme instance is submerged but
implicit in most of the evoked scenes of
Speak, Memory .
The memory of
Mademoiselle's sleigh-ride is an invention, directed by the principles of
internal coherence and mimetic aptness of literary, painterly, and perhaps
photographic artifice. And yet, artifice, whether dealing with past or
present, is our principal means of crystallizing experience, making it
