3

In this memoir my wives and my books are interlaced monogrammatically like some sort of watermark or ex libris design; and in writing this oblique autobiography—oblique, because dealing mainly not with pedestrian history but with the mirages of romantic and literary matters—I consistently try to dwell as lightly as inhumanly possible on the evolution of my mental illness. Yet Dementia is one of the characters in my story.

By the mid-Thirties little had changed in my health since the first half of 1922 and its awful torments. My battle with factual, respectable life still consisted of sudden delusions, sudden reshufflings—kaleidoscopic, stained-glass reshufflings!—of fragmented space. I still felt Gravity, that infernal and humiliating contribution to our perceptual world, grow into me like a monstrous toenail in stabs and wedges of intolerable pain (incomprehensible to the happy simpleton who finds nothing fantastic and agonizing in the escape of a pencil or penny under something—under the desk on which one will live, under the bed on which one will die). I still could not cope with the abstraction of direction in space, so that any given stretch of the world was either permanently “right-hand” or permanently “left-hand,” or at best the one could be changed to the other only by a spine-dislocating effort of the will. Oh, how things and people tortured me, my dear heart, I could not tell you! In point of fact you were not yet even born.

Sometime in the mid-Thirties, in black accursed Paris, I remember visiting a distant relative of mine (a niece of the LATH lady!). She was a sweet old stranger. She sat all day in a straight-back armchair exposed to the continuous attacks of three, four, more than four, deranged children, whom she was paid (by the Destitute Russian Noblewomen’s Aid Association) to watch, while their parents were working in places not so dreadful and dreary in themselves as dreary and difficult to reach by public conveyance. I sat on an old hassock at her feet. Her talk flowed on and on, smooth, untroubled, reflecting the image of radiant days, serenity, wealth, goodness. Yet all the time this or that poor little monster with a slavering mouth and a squint would move upon her from behind a screen or a table and rock her chair or clutch at her skirt. When the squealing became too loud she would only wince a little which hardly affected her reminiscent smile. She kept a kind of fly whisk within easy reach and this she occasionally brandished to chase away the bolder aggressors; but all the time, all the time, she continued her purling soliloquy and I understood that I, too, should ignore the rude turmoil and din around her.

I submit that my life, my plight, the voice of words that was my sole joy and the secret struggle with the wrong shape of things, bore some resemblance to that poor lady’s predicament. And mind you, those were my best days, with only a pack of grimacing goblins to hold at bay.

The zest, the strength, the clarity of my art remained unimpaired—at least to a certain extent. I enjoyed, I persuaded myself to enjoy, the solitude of work and that other, even more subtle solitude, the solitude of an author facing, from behind the bright shield of his manuscript, an amorphous audience, barely visible in its dark pit.

The jumble of spatial obstacles separating my bedside lamp from the illumined islet of a public lectern was abolished by the magic of thoughtful friends who helped me to get to this or that remote hall without my having to tussle with horribly small and thin, sticky, bus-ticket slips or to venture into the thunderous maze of the Métro. As soon as I was safely platformed with my typed or handwritten sheets at breastbone level on the desk before me, I forgot all about the presence of three hundred eavesdroppers. A decanter of watered vodka, my only lectorial whim, was also my only link with the material universe. Similar to a painter’s spotlight on the brown brow of some ecstatical ecclesiastic at the moment of divine revelation, the radiance enclosing me brought out with oracular accuracy every imperfection in my text. A memoirist has noted that not only did I slow down now and then while unclipping a pencil and replacing a comma by a semicolon, but that I had been known to stop and frown over a sentence and reread it, and cross it out, and insert a correction and “re-mouth the whole passage with a kind of defiant complacency.”

My handwriting was good in fair copies, but I felt more comfortable with a typescript before me, and I was again without an expert typist. To insert the same wanter in the same paper would have been foolhardy: what if it were to bring back Lyuba, flushed with renewed hope, and rewind that damned cycle all over again?

I rang up Stepanov, thinking he might help; he guessed he could, and after a muffled confabulation with his fussy wife, just on the brim of the membrane (all I made out was “mad people are unpredictable”), she took over. They knew a very decent girl who had worked at the Russian nursery school “Passy na Rousi” to which Dolly had gone four or five years ago. The girl’s name was Anna Ivanovna Blagovo. Did I know Oksman, the owner of the Russian bookshop on rue Cuvier?

“Yes, slightly. But I want to ask you—”

“Well,” she went on, interrupting me, “Annette sekre-tarstvovala for him while his regular typist was hospitalized, but she is now quite well again, and you might—”

“That’s fine,” I said, “but I want to ask you, Berta Abramovna, why did you accuse me of being an ‘unpredictable madman’? I can assure you that I am not in the habit of raping young women—”

“Gospod’ s vami, golubchik! (What an idea, my dear!)” exclaimed Mrs. Stepanov and proceeded to explain that she had been scolding her absentminded husband for sitting down on her new handbag when attending to the telephone.

Although I did not believe one word of her version (too quick! too glib!), I pretended to accept it and promised to look up her bookseller. A few minutes later as I was about to open the window and strip in front of it (at moments of raw widowerhood a soft black night in the spring is the most soothing voyeuse imaginable), Berta Stepanov telephoned to say that the oxman (what a shiver my Iris derived from Dr. Moreau’s island zoo—especially from such bits as the “screaming shape,” still half-bandaged, escaping out of the lab!) would be up till dawn in his shop, among nightmare-inherited ledgers. She knew, hey-hey (Russian chuckle), that I was a noctambule, so perhaps I might like to stroll over to the Boyan Bookshop sans tarder, without retardment, vile term. I might, indeed.

After that jarring call, I saw little to choose between the tossings of insomnia and a walk to rue Cuvier which leads to the Seine, where according to police statistics an average of forty foreigners and God knows how many unfortunate natives drown yearly between wars. I have never experienced the least urge to commit suicide, that silly waste of selfhood (a gem in any light). But I must admit that on that particular night on the fourth or fifth or fiftieth anniversary of my darling’s death, I must have looked pretty suspect, in my black suit and dramatic muffler, to an average policeman of the riparian department. And it is a particularly bad sign when a hatless person sobs as he walks, being moved not by lines he might have composed himself but by something he hideously mistakes for his own and presently flinches, yet is too much of a coward to make amends:

I am much bolder now, of course, much bolder and prouder than the ambiguous hoodlum caught progressing that night between a seemingly endless fence with its tattered posters and a row of spaced streetlamps whose light would delicately select for its heart-piercing game overhead a young emerald-bright linden leaf. I now confess that I was bothered that night, and the next and some time before, by a dream feeling that my life was the non-identical twin, a parody, an inferior variant of another man’s life, somewhere on this or another earth. A demon, I felt, was forcing me to impersonate that other man, that other writer who was and would always be incomparably greater, healthier, and crueler than your obedient servant.