Nabokov’s Craft and the Order of Attention

Part of: The Deep Reader

Spoiler warning. This essay discusses a late chapter of Lolita, including its account of child sexual abuse, and the ending of the poem in Pale Fire.

Albinus has to reach his own front door before Nabokov tells us what he is prepared to do there. On the way, three clauses bring a household into view. The longer we spend with what the man stands to lose, the less he seems willing to give up.

Nabokov can arrange a novel to produce that inequality of attention. A character gives a picture a glance that a reader has reason to prolong. A commentator proposes an ending to a poem whose last lines we can go back and read. In each case we get a chance to judge something that has already passed under an assured eye. When the prose leaves us with little beyond that first appraisal, a long sentence can have very little distance to travel.

What happens while the verb waits

In chapter 9 of Laughter in the Dark, Albinus returns home after spending the night with Margot. He is afraid his wife, Elisabeth, has read a letter that would expose him. Nabokov lets him approach the door in a single sentence. [1]

When he saw again the house in which he had lived for so long with Elisabeth; when he went up in the lift in which the nurse with his baby in her arms, and his wife, looking very pale and happy, had gone up eight years before; when he stood before the door upon which his scholarly name gleamed sedately, Albinus was almost prepared to renounce any repetition of the previous night, if only a miracle had happened.

— Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark, chapter 9, in his English version [1]

Each when moves the body closer to the door. The relative clauses attached to the house, the lift, and the door keep changing what the approach contains. The house holds years of living with Elisabeth. In the lift, went up makes way for had gone up, the same movement eight years earlier, with the nurse carrying the baby and Elisabeth pale and happy beside her. The door brings him up to his own name. It gleams with a composure he has every reason to envy.

The semicolons give each stage a pause and leave its grammar unfinished. By the time we reach the main clause, the sentence has made room for a shared life, a memory of bringing the baby home, and the standing advertised by a nameplate. Its main clause yields only almost prepared. The last if makes even that willingness conditional on something already beyond his control. The miracle he has in mind is that Elisabeth has yet to read the letter. His very next thought is to explain the night away with a story about opium.

The lift memory can move us even if the man remembering it is more anxious about being found out. Nabokov has spent enough of the sentence on what Albinus might regret to make the terms of his regret sound meager. A shorter version could report that he was afraid to go in. It would give us his fear without letting us take the measure of what he is afraid of losing.

A sentence that stays where it started

Earlier in the novel, three recollected affairs establish Albinus’s sense that romance always disappoints him. The first woman sends him socks and long letters during the war. The second interests him in the right light and at the right angle. The third gets this whole sentence. [1]

Finally, in Berlin, just before his marriage, there had been a lean dreary woman with a homely face who used to come every Saturday night and was wont to relate all her past in detail, repeating the same damned thing over and over again, sighing wearily in his embraces and always rounding off with the one French phrase she knew: “C’est la vie.”

— Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark, chapter 2, in his English version [1]

The main clause settles into a familiar shape at there had been. The woman is already marked as dreary when the relative clause begins. Used to and was wont to make her visits and her telling of her past habitual. Then three participles keep the evenings going. Repeating and rounding off tell us what he has heard before. Even sighing, which might tell us how tired she is, gets lodged between his estimate of her story and the one line of speech we hear from her.

The sentence loses pace as soon as we are told she talks about her history. A fact from that history could give some resistance to Albinus’s estimate of her. There is a joke in forcing us to sit through the intervals he found tedious. The joke is already working by the time we get to the participles. Going straight from the weekly visit to the French phrase would cost the sentence some of its irritable rhythm and very little of its meaning. The last of the three affairs takes longer to dismiss, and we finish it without a single event from the life she keeps telling him about.

The judgment is local. Albinus’s complaints belong in the portrait, and his boredom prepares the distinction he makes between women he has known and those who can still exercise his imagination. Later in the same chapter, Elisabeth catches our attention by scooping up snow and eating it when she thinks nobody is looking. We can be curious about the habit for reasons of our own. The Berlin sentence gives its woman no equivalent moment. Its abundance makes an estimate linger without giving it much to contend with.

When an image changes hands

The order of attention changes again when Nabokov takes an action from one scene and gives it to somebody else to look at. In chapter 3 of Laughter in the Dark, Margot poses in a studio. Her feet curl under her on a rug, one arm supports her, and a shoulder comes up toward her cheek. She hears pencils against paper and tries to catch a student’s eye. He keeps drawing. She thought being looked at would be exciting. It makes her stiff. [1]

Three chapters later, Albinus is watching the clock while he waits for her. Between half past four and ten to five, the narrative returns to the pose. His family doctor had once shown him charcoal drawings by the doctor’s son. The account of one drawing gives us the feet under her, the supporting arm, and the shoulder at her cheek. Albinus had turned back to another sheet he preferred. He has yet to connect the woman he is waiting for with the figure he passed over.

If the drawing came first, the pose might give us the pleasure of identifying the model when she appeared. Nabokov gives us the hours of posing first and puts the picture inside a man’s impatient wait. We know what it was like for her to sit there. Now we see how quickly a man with the finished drawing in front of him can go on to the next sheet. The old preference survives on the page next to the new longing. It is the same girl in the same posture, and the recognition can be made without a corresponding change in Albinus.

Who gets to finish the poem?

Pale Fire builds that difference into the physical parts of a book. John Shade’s poem can be read apart from Charles Kinbote’s commentary. We can follow an annotation and still go back to the very words that were supposed to call it into being.

Shade opens with “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain,” then lets the windowpane supply the rhyme and the cause of death. The bird takes a reflection for sky, and the speaker imagines a life continuing in that reflected space. Kinbote’s note to lines 1–4 gives a plausible account of the collision. He then pictures a young Shade handling the dead bird. The scene is easy to visualize, and the poem has supplied no boy picking up a body. Soon Kinbote is remembering the birds around Shade’s house, a gardener who helped him identify them, and a creature resembling the waxwing on a Zemblan king’s coat of arms. The note can travel this far because he starts with something a reader genuinely wants explained. [2]

The final lines of the poem revisit the materials with a difference. Sun reaches a neighbor’s windows. Shade can see part of his wife’s shadow. A butterfly settles in the low light, and a man passes without heeding it, pushing an empty barrow up the lane. In the opening, a bird takes reflected space for a place it can fly into. Here the failure to notice belongs to a passing man, and the winged creature has the space to settle. The poem has already brought glass, shadow, and wings back into view in a different relation. [2]

Kinbote’s opening note sends us forward to his note on line 998. Shade guesses at who employs the passing man. Kinbote claims him as his gardener. He first suggests that Shade made the man sound unfamiliar for poetic effect, then allows that the light could have made him hard to identify. The numbered reference lets the reader trace the gardener through both texts. We can still hear the guess in Shade’s line after we have heard Kinbote’s reasons for wanting to correct it.

That last lane is the end of line 999. It also rhymes with slain. Kinbote proposes the first line as line 1000 in his foreword, and his last note is headed with the proposed line. The addition would give the poem two halves of five hundred lines each. The rhyme gives the suggestion force at the level of the ear, too. A reader who supplies it hears the poem’s first image return just as it closes. We can see why an editor might want that completion, and we can see where the proposed line is printed. It heads the annotation and never becomes a line of Shade’s poem on the page.

Read on in that last note and Kinbote recalls his first look through the manuscript. He searched with increasing fury for the kingdom and adventures he had expected to find. The poem was plainly about other things. On rereading he began to find echoes of his own story, especially in variants. The last note thus does two jobs. It offers us a way to make the poem more satisfying, and it records the difficulty Kinbote had in taking the poem as it came to him. We can hear the rhyme and still leave the barrow going up the lane. [2]

What a speaking voice lets through

Humbert Humbert has an advantage Kinbote lacks. In Lolita, Dolores Haze has no sustained text of her own that we can read beside his account. He opens by making the reader’s mouth part of the performance. His instructions send the tongue to the teeth. The stops in “Lo. Lee. Ta.” give the name three distinct beats, even to a silent reader. Then the names change as he moves her through home, clothes, school, and the official line on which she is Dolores. The name he keeps for his own use closes the list. By the time he addresses a jury at the end of the chapter, the reader has already had a part to play. [3]

Late in Part Two, chapter 32, he recalls a day on which he decided to ignore what he could see about her feelings. He goes on to another recollection. He has withdrawn what he calls a “functional promise.” The adjective suits something he can put to use one evening and withdraw the next day. Its content goes into a parenthesis. He shrinks the wish to the size of her “funny little heart” before telling us what it might have been. A roller rink perhaps, or a movie matinee she wanted to attend alone. We cannot tell which outing he promised. We can see how much power he has over a wish as ordinary as going to a film by herself. [4]

The action that gets the main verb is his chance glimpse of her face. The act he has already performed, his withdrawal of the promise, goes into a dependent phrase. From there he asks us to consider how much it took for him to keep from weeping. That appeal can express real remorse. Its phrasing draws us toward the man looking back, just as the grammar gives the main clause to the man who saw her in a mirror. The parenthesis gives us a brief view of what life with him made it necessary to ask for. Nabokov leaves that question of permission inside a sentence whose speaker has his own reasons to want us to look at the face.

What to steal from Nabokov

In a long sentence, give the waiting something to do. If the main clause expresses a decision or an inclination, each subordinate clause can change the material on which it will be judged. Read the sentence through once stopping at each clause boundary. Check whether a new pressure has appeared, as it does when Albinus moves from the house to the lift, or whether a new detail has merely extended an adjective you supplied at the start.

When a detail returns, give it a use on both occasions. Margot’s pose is a position she has to maintain before it is an image Albinus can dismiss. A writer can preserve the small relations that make the detail recognizable and change the person who gets to interpret it. Decide who recognizes the return, who can pass over it, and what that difference lets the reader know.

What not to steal from Nabokov

Humbert’s rhythm and Kinbote’s erudition have particular jobs. A self-serving narrator can be written in the ordinary language of someone making a reasonable-sounding arrangement. Suppose he casually moves an appointment without asking. Give us enough of the other person’s afternoon to see what has to be rearranged. If all the ingenuity goes into his way of explaining the change, his language will have very little to conceal.

Where Nabokov falls short

The long sentence in chapter 2 makes a woman’s speech memorable chiefly for the man who wanted it to stop. The cost can be different when Nabokov elaborates records that ought to give us more to go on. At the start of Ada, or Ardor, two children compare a newspaper’s wedding date with a different date written on a photograph of the same wedding. Nabokov has put a discrepancy into their hands. Before they get to the pressed flowers and dated notes in Marina’s album, the chapter pauses over Dan’s travel microfilm, which they also find. We get bazaars, painted cherubs, three trips rendered in different tints, and several details of the film’s later use. [5]

The film belongs to the household’s store of records, and the repetitions register Dan’s three journeys. Its accumulation nevertheless softens the immediate pressure of the conflicting dates. For the span of the film description, the children have little to do beyond finding another object, and the reader has a fresh set of particulars with no clear bearing on the question the photograph raised. The album gives them something more diagnostic to examine. How much force the film acquires later is a different question from how long it takes us away from the two dates at this moment.

After Nabokov

Read the end of “Combray” I in Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. A familiar taste produces a feeling the narrator cannot at first place. He keeps trying until he remembers where he tasted it before, and then the remembered town acquires streets and houses. Put this beside the studio and drawing in Laughter in the Dark. Proust makes recognition itself the event. Nabokov lets the reader make a connection Albinus is still in a position to miss. [6]

For an entry into Nabokov’s books, see How to Read Nabokov. Laughter in the Dark: A Thriller of Unequal Sight follows the novel’s larger distribution of knowledge.

FAQ

What should I study if I want to write a long sentence with pace?

Read the sentences in chapters 2 and 9 of Laughter in the Dark aloud. Stop at the end of each finite clause and ask what you are waiting to know. In chapter 2, the sentence quickly tells you how Albinus remembers the woman. In chapter 9, the delay lets you form an expectation about what he might be prepared to sacrifice, and his answer changes that expectation.

Does the last note prove how Shade meant to end his poem?

It gives Kinbote’s proposed ending. Read lines 985–999 and then supply the first line yourself. The rhyme works, and the return makes a different ending from the quiet passage of the barrow. You can judge that effect from the words on the page. The poem as printed leaves line 999 where it is.

Is Humbert’s first person the only place to study this technique?

Start with the two Albinus sentences if your own story uses third person. The narration can be close enough to catch a man’s impatience and still stay with a household or a gesture long enough for a reader to form a judgment the man would miss.

Sources

[1] Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark, Nabokov’s English version, Vintage International ebook, eISBN 9780307787675, chapters 2, 3, 6, and 9. Edition

[2] Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, Lancer Books, undated U.S. edition. Foreword (p. 8), Canto One lines 1–4 (p. 23), Canto Four lines 985–999 (p. 49), and notes to lines 1–4 (pp. 53–54), 998 (pp. 205–206), and 1000 (pp. 206–213). Digitized edition

[3] Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Vintage International, Part One, chapter 1. Publisher excerpt

[4] Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Part Two, chapter 32. Vintage Books’ authorized digital excerpt, first page and continuation.

[5] Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, Part One, chapter 1, wedding photograph, travel microfilm, and flower album. AdaOnline annotated edition

[6] Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, “Combray” I, the madeleine episode. Project Gutenberg edition