Look at the Harlequins!: The Turn Vadim Cannot Make
Spoiler warning: This essay discusses the whole novel, including its ending.
On a sunlit wharf, the novelist Vadim asks Iris, his future first wife, to close her eyes and imagine the avenue leading to her villa. He needs a stable arrangement of right and left for the confession he is about to make. Iris immediately replaces his last tree with an ivy-covered lamppost and adds the crooked stone of a dog’s grave among the blackberries.
Nabokov gives the description two contributors: the man directing the experiment and the woman whose memories keep entering it. Each correction makes the place more particular and his control of the account less complete.
Vadim can turn his body as easily as Iris can. What he cannot imagine is the continuous instant of reversal, when the view ahead becomes the view behind. His directions can produce an avenue in convincing detail without carrying him through that simple movement. The discrepancy is funny and frightening because the same fluent voice supplies both the world and the report of its failure to move within it. In Look at the Harlequins! (1974), Nabokov keeps giving that voice someone to address. A listener’s interruption, a skipped passage or an unexpected judgment changes what Vadim’s elaborate composition can accomplish. The turn becomes an intimate difficulty whose meaning depends on how it is shared.
A memoir unsettled by its own precision
Vadim begins his memoir as a Russian émigré novelist by counting “three or four” wives. Soon he admits inventing the grand-aunt who taught him to invent reality, then brings her down the steps of memory with the exact movements of her cane. The confession of fabrication occurs inside a description persuasive enough to keep the woman before us. Nabokov makes the reader’s pleasure depend on an ability whose authority the narrator has just compromised. We can enjoy the precision without mistaking it for a guarantee that the life has been faithfully accounted for.
The comedy repeatedly draws on that freedom to arrange a biography. Vadim treasures a hostile critic’s joke that success has made him “his own American uncle”: the émigré pauper has supplied himself with the rich benefactor his story seemed to require. His invented book titles glance at Nabokov’s, and other people confuse him with another writer. During his later illness, the slurred Russian forms of Vadim Vadimych and Vladimir Vladimirovich become frighteningly close while he struggles to recover his surname. Nabokov lets the language of personal identity behave with the unsettling freedom Vadim usually enjoys as a writer. The joke reaches the person who expects to tell it.
The sexual candor, abrasive intimacy and comic self-exposure often recall a Philip Roth narrator for me. Here that pleasure accompanies an unusually exact attention to how a view is composed and offered to another mind. Vadim’s imagined avenue can be corrected; the women to whom he confesses can decide what to do with the confession. Their replies prevent the virtuosity from settling into a single, comfortably admired performance.
What the listeners do to the confession
In the proposal letter to Annette, the woman who becomes his second wife, Vadim tries to make his difficulty intelligible by building an invented street. A bookshop, a café and a forgotten umbrella provide a reason to cross and turn back. As the scene becomes too elaborate, he restarts it in the name of greater simplicity, adding still more conditions about his body in bed and the figure he imagines upright. Nabokov gives the explanation the same trouble it describes: the writer keeps adjusting the surroundings while the decisive movement remains obstructed. The letter’s sincere obligation—to tell Annette what frightens him before she accepts him—takes longer and longer to discharge.
Annette has read the beginning and the end and skipped the long middle. Her response changes the proportions of the document we have just followed so patiently: the elaborate experiment becomes the dispensable portion of a proposal whose meaning she has grasped. She recognizes love without having absorbed the account Vadim thought necessary to explain himself. The scene permits affection and incomplete understanding to coexist, making the failed explanation funny without requiring Annette to become a fool. Later, her departure letter gives an account of his treatment of her and forbids contact with their daughter. Vadim must reproduce terms of separation he has not chosen. His framing leaves the accusation’s full factual scope uncertain, while her words impose a consequence on the life he narrates.
When he presents the condition to party guests as the affliction of a supposed friend, the interruptions become a problem of timing. A guest turns his body while Vadim is trying to describe a mental turn; other people offer misleading comparisons or try to get another drink. His directions snag in the activity of the room, and his sentence loses its way in a remark about nymphets. The demonstration becomes an event that its speaker cannot keep moving at his chosen pace. Nabokov’s dark sarcasm works through these exact collisions, although the scene also taxes the reader’s patience. We already know the difficulty being explained, and several further turns of the conversation renew the joke without sufficiently changing it. The local brilliance of the gestures does not remove that drag.
Description, grief and Bel’s room
Vadim’s descriptive patience becomes more painful when placed beside his treatment of Iris’s writing. He tears up her translation after finding two errors, without reading further. After her death, he gives her clothes and books the independent activity they could never possess while she was there to handle them. Their familiar order has become intolerable, and he leaves the flat because he cannot watch the belongings being taken away. The prose makes grief palpable by transferring action from the absent woman to the things she used. Reading that attention beside his quick destruction of her pages lets us feel the loss while remembering how little room he allowed her work. The tenderness and the injury remain attributable to the same person.
The rooms he prepares for Bel, his daughter with Annette, attempt a more hopeful use of description. Years of separation have made the infant and the older girl seem to him almost two different children. He revises the house as though it were prose, selecting books, strong reading lights, a desk, a manicure set and a photograph of her mother. The inventory accumulates care in advance of her arrival, filling the time he has not spent with her with objects he can choose now. Its length makes the anxious preparation tangible, though some of the furnishing detail keeps us waiting after the emotional purpose is clear.
Bel’s replies give the inventory a second use. She likes the room and questions the poets he has selected, then asks for a television; she recognizes his hands and hair, supplying a continuity his divided memory could not confidently provide. The carefully appointed rooms acquire a reader with preferences of her own. Her poems extend that independence into writing of her own. The scene grants his welcome genuine warmth while letting her choices alter its arrangement.
Nabokov makes that warmth harder to inhabit when Vadim’s attention to Bel’s beauty takes on the familiarity of descriptions he has given fictional girls. At their last meeting, his calling her “Dolly” draws a protest from Bel and recalls Lolita for us. He can offer an apology for the verbal slip, but her questions remain in the scene he tells. The interruption gives us a specific limit to his command of the account: an intimate name intended for one person has exposed a troubling association to another. Bel’s own voice holds the moment open beyond his explanation.
The last beloved’s reading
The last beloved, addressed as “you,” receives a different kind of space in the memoir. Vadim withholds much of their shared life from the audience he has entertained with his earlier relationships. His refusal to turn every private detail into available material gives the egotism a real interval of modesty. He also imagines what he can offer her in his work, with a longing that makes the literary performance vulnerable to her response. The woman herself knew Bel at school and can bring him photographs and memories he does not possess.
That desire for a shared world reaches its fullest expression when he leaves her thirty manuscript cards from Ardis and takes a walk. He internally rereads the pages at what he imagines to be her pace, accompanying the lines with the position of her hand, the movement of her pencil and a possible mark beside an error. The remembered text gives him a sequence precise enough to synchronize two separated bodies in his mind. Description here produces the felt nearness for which he longs. His happiness is convincing because the imagined acts of reading make it something he can inhabit moment by moment.
Brian Boyd’s reading of the scene finds a passage beyond solitude through art and married love.[1] The shared movement through the cards gives that interpretation its force, while Vadim’s own uncertainty already complicates the apparent accord: during the walk he wonders whether she likes or loathes Ardis. He can picture a small editorial mark without knowing her judgment of the work. Nabokov places the exuberant intimacy and the unanswered question within the same excursion, preserving the difference between feeling accompanied and having received an answer.
The answer comes after his attempted turn at the end of the road and the collapse that follows. Once he has recovered, the beloved wants to read more of Ardis but thinks the fragment should be discarded. She has done the attentive reading Vadim hoped for and found a flaw in the passage carrying his most urgent disclosure. The earlier listeners had corrected the setting, skipped the argument or disrupted its presentation. This reader follows the argument closely enough to reject it. Her attention fulfills his hope of being read while making agreement impossible to assume.
Her explanation distinguishes direction from the time accumulated in an imagined walk. On her account, Vadim has treated successive events as though they were pieces of scenery that could be rearranged, and his impossible reversal attempts to undo duration. The distinction is not without a difference, it is persuasive, yet I find its completeness costly. The novel has made the difficulty change its emotional character through speech, writing, bodily distress and another person’s response; the extended explanation gives that unstable experience a tidier shape than I want it to have. Vadim calls her solution an exquisite quibble and drifts toward sleep while she helps him back. His affection and dissent keep the ending from closing entirely, although the explanation remains more emphatic than the hesitation it leaves behind.
The loss of pace in some demonstrations and the neatness of that final account do little to diminish my sense that this is one of Nabokov’s most compelling novels. Its precision can make us laugh at a narrator’s vanity, then hold us beside the belongings he cannot bear to remove. The last beloved’s refusal carries both experiences forward: she cares for him, wants the rest of his book and asks him to discard these pages.
Continue with Pnin: The Man on the Wrong Train, where another Nabokov narrator gradually loses the sole right to explain the joke.
Sources
Vladimir Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins! (1974), Parts I–VII. Vintage edition information.
[1] Brian Boyd, “Wholes and Holes: The Nabokov Archive and the Nabokov Biography”, The Nabokovian 27 (Fall 1991). Boyd reads Vadim’s imagined joint reading of the Ardis cards as a virtual entry into the beloved’s mind and links the scene to art and married love. In the novel, the same reader later rejects the Ardis passage.
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