Butterflies Are Free

By John Skow

LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS

by VLADIMIR NABOKOV 253 pages. McGraw-Hill. $7.95.

At 75 the old artificer has written one of his slyest and funniest books. Admirers who sloped off muttering after a struggle with the intricacies of Ada are urged to reopen their hearts. Look at the Harlequins comes in the form of memoirs by the distinguished Russian-born novelist Vadim Vadimych N., a cranky exquisite who laments piteously the high initial cost and outrageous maintenance expense of owning an artistic soul. This gent, at the time of writing, is a formidable old illusion-monger with a high, rounded forehead and the vanity of a borzoi. He was born a prince. Bounced from home and privilege by the revolution, he studied at Cambridge, and then, under the pseudonym V. Irisin, wrote in Russian a number of novels "of not altogether displeasing preciosity" while living in Paris as an exile. These books took such themes as a voyeur's cruel peep at blindness, a beheading, and the defenestration of a chess master. Vadim Vadimych emigrated to the U.S. and taught Russian literature at Quirn University. Transforming himself by an astounding feat of linguistic ability into a master of English, he began to turn out a second shelf of glittering novels, the most notorious of which, A Kingdom by the Sea, examined the perversion of a scoundrel carnally attracted to little girls.

Is this anyone we know? That question constantly haunts Vadim Vadimych: "I now confess that I was bothered ... by a dream feeling that my life was the nonidentical 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."

The first name and patronymic "Vadim Vadimych" do not exist in Russian, but they could, the memoirist feels uneasily, be blurred rendering of "Vladimir Vladimirovich." As to his own surname, poor Vadim cannot remember it, though he feels fairly sure it begins with "N" --Naborcroft, he wonders? Nablize? (The experienced reader, meanwhile, notices that Vadim's pseudonym "V. Irisin" sounds a lot like "Sirin," the pen name of one Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, an emigre Russian of illustrious but not aristocratic background who wrote in Berlin, not Paris, after the revolution. This Sirin, Nabokov has been heard to assert, is a writer to be ranked with Pushkin, Tolstoy and Gogol, and well above Dostoyevsky.)

Forefeel of Fame. "Apart from incipient lunacy," writes Vadim, "I have been in excellent health throughout adulthood." He can be pleased with a literary career, which brought him in youth the heady "forefeel of fame" and later allowed him to strut as "a fat, famous writer in his powerful forties." Lechery has been a constant, though a Humbert-Lolita relationship with his daughter never flowered to the extent that he, in damp imagining, would have liked. Yet to each of four prospective brides, he has had to admit that he is cracked: "I have a confession to make, Iris, concerning my mental health."

Vadim Vadimych's problem, the reader may feel, is excessively rarefied. He can imagine that he is walking up a village street from his house, for instance, to the post office, but he cannot then imagine himself turning around and facing the same street in the opposite direction. Rather than pivot easily on toe and heel, he must with hideous effort swing his entire dream street, post office, taxis, stray dogs and all, 180DEG around on the axis of his own mad self. Eventually, obsession invades reality. He walks to the end of a real village street, cannot turn, and falls in a paralytic fit. Thus does Nabokov poke dignified fun at himself. The novel is wholly lighthearted, a sunny absurdity that offers a mocking bow to the author's own worst possibilities, unfollowed bad impulses, and uncracked weak spots. His capering in Russian and French seems more playful than usual, and less pointedly designed to exclude readers so boorish as not to have been born Russian.

Fake or Freak. The author has warned that there must be no critical truffling in his works for deep-lying meanings. His word games in Harlequins justify the warning. Butterflies, however, may be chased. Nabokov, for instance, taught at Cornell University after emigrating to the U.S., and his clownish alter ego taught at "Quirn." The Oxford English Dictionary directs the student to "Quern," which derives in its first definition from a variety of languages, including old High German, Swedish and Russian ("Zhernov"), and means "a simple apparatus for grinding corn." The second definition is "a large piece of ice." These are not illuminating; but "obsolete variant of kern" leads directly to "corn," and to "kernel," of which "cornel" is a disused form. Has the butterfly been caught? Not necessarily. It should not be overlooked that "kern" in its old Celtic sense means "a band of foot soldiers," which suggests "infantry," which (by a leap of sound past sense) suggests "infants": slack freshman faces staring in sweet stupefaction as an exiled genius speaks subtly of Lermontov. Snagged in the net, this dubious flutterer is obviously fake or freak. No matter. Pin it to the board and name it after poor old VadimVadimych.

qed John Skow

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