Early Nabokov

THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT (205 pp.)--Vladimir Nabokov--New Directions ($3.50).

When fame strikes a writer late, reprints of his earlier works sometimes become exciting discoveries. This is what Boris Pasternak's publishers hope for with his slim, 1934 story The Last Summer (see below); similarly, Vladimir Nabokov's literary handlers hope that The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) will acquire Lolita's gilt by association. The first book Nabokov wrote in English (his workshop was the bathroom of his one-room Paris flat), Sebastian Knight has a low sex quotient and no nymphets. Instead, it is devoted to themes that novelists seem to be born with: the question of identity, the nature of reality, the task of the writer. Nabokov's treatment of these themes is idiomorphic; his form is flashingly and immutably his own. He is a Pirandellphic oracle in that he sees life as just one damned trap door under another.

Sebastian Knight, a novelist, has fallen through the last trap door, death. His half brother, the nameless first-person narrator of the novel, feels the loss like a psychic amputation. It is as if a great secret had been buried with Sebastian, perhaps the meaning of life itself. The half brother determines to ferret out the secret by reconstructing Sebastian Knight's life in a biography. His quest takes him to a college chum of Sebastian's at Cambridge who recalls a miserable emigre trying desperately to be more pukka than the sahibs. (Nabokov graduated from Cambridge in 1922.) Next, the half brother interviews Sebastian's secretary and literary executor, a fatuous bundle of sociological cliches. Then there are Sebastian's two mistresses. As the investigator probes on, it is not one Sebastian Knight who emerges, but a different Sebastian for every relationship. The gist of the secret that the half brother learns is "that the soul is but a manner of being--not a constant state--that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations."

The argument suggests that Nabokov is applying The Method to writing. He occupies his characters like houses; they have the lived-in look. As early as Sebastian Knight, Nabokov's writing was rich in fringe benefits. There is his animistic imagery: a stopped clock face wears "the waxed moustache of ten minutes to two," the first spring zephyrs are "cold-limbed ballet-girls waiting in the wings." There is the unflinching refusal to sacrifice art to the urgencies of politics: "Time for Sebastian was never 1914 or 1920 or 1936--it was always year 1." There is the verbal clowning, e.g., "optimystics," "sexaphone." Wit and humor often sugar-coat horror in Nabokov's novels, but the poignance of exile haunts his pages like a vestigial memory of original sin. From Sebastian Knight to Lolita, Nabokov has sprung ever more fascinating trap doors, and his ambiguous hell, like Sartre's, has no exit.

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