Vladimir Nabokov

half wonder & half remorse in Transparent Things

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 19 September, 2022

When Hugh Person (the main character in VN’s novel Transparent Things, 1972) revisits Switzerland in 1965, he experiences a sentimental thrill, half wonder and half remorse, by going to see a hotel in which he had stayed with his father ten years ago:

 

This was his fourth visit to Switzerland. The first one had been eighteen years before when he had stayed for a few days at Trux with his father. Ten years later, at thirty-two, he had revisited that old lakeside town and had successfully courted a sentimental thrill, half wonder and half remorse, by going to see their hotel. A steep lane and a flight of old stairs led to it from lake level where the local train had brought him to a featureless station. He had retained the hotel's name, Locquet, because it resembled the maiden name of his mother, a French Canadian, whom Person Senior was to survive by less than a year. He also remembered that it was drab and cheap, and abjectly stood next to another, much better hotel, through the rez-de-chaussée windows of which you could make out the phantoms of pale tables and underwater waiters. Both hotels had gone now, and in their stead there rose the Banque Bleue, a steely edifice, all polished surfaces, plate glass, and potted plants. (Chapter 4)

 

“Half wonder and half remorse” brings to mind Emily Dickinson’s poems “Wonder—is not precisely Knowing:”

 

Wonder—is not precisely Knowing
And not precisely Knowing not—
A beautiful but bleak condition
He has not lived who has not felt—

Suspense—is his maturer Sister—
Whether Adult Delight is Pain
Or of itself a new misgiving—
This is the Gnat that mangles men—

 

and Remorse:

 

Remorse is memory awake,
Her companies astir, —
A presence of departed acts
At window and at door.

 

It's past set down before the soul,
And lighted with a match,
Perusal to facilitate
Of its condensed despatch.

 

Remorse is cureless, — the disease
Not even God can heal;
For 't is his institution, —
The complement of hell.

 

“At window and at door” (the fourth line in Emily Dickinson's poem Remorse) makes one think of Figures in a Golden Window, Mr. R.’s novel that Armande is reading when Hugh Person meets her for the first time (on Thursday, July 29, 1965):

 

He made Armande's acquaintance in a Swiss railway carriage one dazzling afternoon between Thur and Versex on the eve of his meeting with Mr. R. He had boarded a slow train by mistake; she had chosen one that would stop at the small station from which a bus line went up to Witt, where her mother owned a chalet. Armande and Hugh had simultaneously settled in two window seats facing each other on the lake side of the coach. An American family occupied the corresponding four-seat side across the aisle. Hugh unfolded the Journal de Genève.

Oh, she was pretty and would have been exquisitely so had her lips been fuller. She had dark eyes, fair hair, a honey-hued skin. Twin dimples of the crescentic type came down her tanned cheeks on the sides of her mournful mouth. She wore a black suit over a frilly blouse. A book lay in her lap under her black-gloved hands. He thought, he recognized that flame-and-soot paperback. The mechanism of their first acquaintance was ideally banal.

They exchanged a glance of urbane disapproval as the three American kids began pulling sweaters and pants out of a suitcase in savage search for something stupidly left behind (a heap of comics - by now taken care of, with the used towels, by a brisk hotel maid). One of the two adults, catching Armande's cold eye, responded with a look of good-natured helplessness. The conductor came for the tickets.

Hugh, tilting his head slightly, satisfied himself that he had been right: it was indeed the paperback edition of Figures in a Golden Window.

"One of ours," said Hugh with an indicative nod.

She considered the book in her lap as if seeking in it some explanation of his remark. Her skirt was very short.

"I mean," he said, "I work for that particular publisher. For the American publisher of the hard-cover edition. Do you like it?"

She answered in fluent but artificial English that she detested surrealistic novels of the poetic sort. She demanded hard realistic stuff reflecting our age. She liked books about Violence and Oriental Wisdom. Did it get better farther on?

"Well, there's a rather dramatic scene in a Riviera villa, when the little girl, the narrator's daughter - "

"June."

"Yes. June sets her new dollhouse on fire and the whole villa burns down; but there's not much violence, I'm afraid; it is all rather symbolic, in the grand manner, and, well, curiously tender at the same time, as the blurb says, or at least said, in our first edition. That cover is by the famous Paul Plam."

She would finish it, of course, no matter how boring, because every task in life should be brought to an end like completing that road above Witt, where they had a house, a chalet de luxe, but had to trudge up to the Drakonita cableway until that new road had been finished. The Burning Window or whatever it was called had been given her only the day before, on her twenty-third birthday, by the author's stepdaughter whom he probably -

"Julia."

Yes. Julia and she had both taught in the winter at a school for foreign young ladies in the Tessin. Julia's stepfather had just divorced her mother whom he had treated in an abominable fashion. What had they taught? Oh, posture, rhythmics - things like that.

Hugh and the new, irresistible person had by now switched to French, which he spoke at least as well as she did English. Asked to guess her nationality he suggested Danish or Dutch. No, her father's family came from Belgium, he was an architect who got killed last summer while supervising the demolition of a famous hotel in a defunct spa; and her mother was born in Russia, in a very noble milieu, but of course completely ruined by the revolution. Did he like his job? Would he mind pulling that dark blind down a little? The low sun's funeral. Was that a proverb, she queried? No, he had just made it up. (Chapter 9)

 

June (the name of the narrator’s daughter in Figures in a Golden Window) and the book’s blurb may hint at “the livelong June” and “they'd advertise – you know!” in Emily Dickinson’s poem “I'm Nobody! Who are you?”:

 

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!

 

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

 

“They'd advertise – you know!” brings to mind “Easy, you know, does it, son” (the last sentence of VN’s novel):

 

At last, suffocation made him try to get out by climbing out and down, but there were no ledges or balconies on that side of the roaring house. As he reached the window a long lavender-tipped flame danced up to stop him with a graceful gesture of its gloved hand. Crumbling partitions of plaster and wood allowed human cries to reach him, and one of his last wrong ideas was that those were the shouts of people anxious to help him, and not the howls of fellow men. Rings of blurred colors circled around him, reminding him briefly of a childhood picture in a frightening book about triumphant vegetables whirling faster and faster around a nightshirted boy trying desperately to awake from the iridescent dizziness of dream life. Its ultimate vision was the incandescence of a book or a box grown completely transparent and hollow. This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another.

Easy, you know, does it, son. (Chapter 26)

 

Hugh Person chokes to death in a hotel's fire. In her poem "If your Nerve, deny you" Emily Dickinson mentions Oxygen:

 

If your Nerve, deny you—

Go above your Nerve—

He can lean against the Grave,

If he fear to swerve—

 

That's a steady posture—

Never any bend

Held of those Brass arms—

Best Giant made—

 

If — your Soul seesaw

Lift the Flesh door—

The Poltroon wants Oxygen—

Nothing more –

 

"Your Soul seesaw" reminds one of "the middle stretch of the seesaw" mentioned at the beginning of Transparent Things:

 

Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future. Persons might then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this or that object. It might be fun. (Chapter 1)

 

"The past is such a curious creature" is a poem by Emily Dickinson:

 

The past is such a curious creature,
To look her in the face
A transport may reward us,
Or a disgrace.

Unarmed if any meet her,
I charge him, fly!
Her rusty ammunition
Might yet reply!

 

Emily Dickinson is the author of "The Future—never spoke:"

 

The Future—never spoke—
Nor will He—like the Dumb—
Reveal by sign—a syllable
Of His Profound To Come—

But when the News be ripe—
Presents it—in the Act—
Forestalling Preparation—
Escape—or Substitute—

Indifference to Him—
The Dower—as the Doom—
His Office—but to execute
Fate’s—Telegram—to Him—