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Now Vladimir Nabokov – he had every right and warrant to attempt an autobiographical novel. His life was not ‘stranger than fiction’ (that phrase is very close to meaningless), but it was wildly eventful, and shot through with geohistorical glamour. You escape from Bolshevik Russia, and seek sanctuary in Weimar Berlin; you escape from Nazi Germany, and seek sanctuary in France, which Hitler promptly invades and occupies; you escape from the Wehrmacht, and seek – and find – sanctuary in America (‘sanctuary’ in those days being part of the American definition). No, Nabokov was a very rare case: a writer to whom things actually happened.
By the way I warn you that I’ll have a few things to say about Hitler in these pages, and about Stalin. When I was born, in 1949, the Little Moustache had been dead for four years and the Big Moustache (still called ‘Uncle Joe’ in our household Daily Mirror) had four years to live. I’ve written two books about Hitler and two books about Stalin, so I’ve already spent about eight years in their company. But there’s no escaping from either of them, I find.
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I never had the – no doubt terrifying – pleasure of meeting VN himself, but I had a memorable day with his widow, Véra, beautiful, goldenskinned, and Jewish, it is relevant to add; and I got to know his son, Dmitri Vladimirovich (a flamboyant prodigy and prodigal). It was a double sadness to me when Dmitri died, without issue, three or four years ago. Dmitri was the Nabokovs’ only child – born in Berlin in 1934, and officially a Mischling, or ‘half-breed’…At lunch, in Montreux, Switzerland, Véra and Dmitri were very fond and sweet with one another. There’ll be more about them later, in the section called ‘Oktober’ (it starts on this page). I sent Véra a photo of my first son, and received a charming reply which of course I’ve lost…
In general? Oh, I’m a ridiculously lax and indulgent parent – as my children have had occasion to point out to me. ‘You’re a very good father, Daddy,’ Eliza confided at the age of eight or nine, on a day when I was in sole charge: ‘Mummy’s a very good mother too. Though sometimes she can be just a little bit strict.’
Her meaning was clear. I’m incapable of embodying strictness, let alone enforcing it. You need genuine anger for that, and anger is something I almost never feel. I tried being an angry father, but just once and only for six or seven seconds. Not with my daughters but with my sons, Nat and Gus (who are now about thirty). One day – when they too were eight or nine – their mother, my first wife, Julia, came to my study in despair and said, ‘They’re being unusually impossible. I’ve tried everything. Now you go in there!’ Now you go in there, the suggestion was, and apply some masculine fire.
So I dutifully shouldered my way into their room and said in a raised voice,
‘Right. What the hell is all this?’
‘…Oh,’ said Nat, with a languid lift of his eyebrows. ‘Taste the wrath of Daddy.’
And that was that as far as anger was concerned.
The thing is I just don’t hold with it – anger. The Seven Deadly Sins ought to be revised and updated, but for now we should always remember that Anger rightly belongs in the classic septet. With anger – cui bono? Pity anger; pity those who radiate it as well as those on the other end of it. Anger: from Old Norse, angre ‘vex’, angr ‘grief’. Yes – grief. Anger is almost as transparently self-punitive as Envy.
In the parenting sphere I am innocent of anger, but the deadly sin I do own up to is Sloth – moral sloth. Giving the mother more to do…I warned Elena about this, slightly pleadingly (after all I was fifty by the time Inez was born). I said, ‘I’m going to be an emeritus parent’ (i.e., ‘retired but allowed to retain the title as an honour’). So in general a slothful father, though I’m quick – and eager and grateful – to accept the honour of it.
Three years ago I gave a talk at my middle daughter’s school, here in Brooklyn, at St Ann’s (where Inez also goes). Eliza was fifteen.
‘This could be embarrassing, Dad,’ said Gus (son number two), as I prepared to describe the occasion, and his older brother Nat said, ‘Definitely. Plenty of room for embarrassment here.’
‘Agreed,’ I said. ‘But it wasn’t embarrassing. Eliza wasn’t embarrassed. And I can prove it. Listen.’
The auditorium the school chose was an adjacent or maybe an adjoining house of worship – a real church (Protestant), with polished hardwood and stained glass. I stood at the pulpit facing a large congregation of humid young faces (I think attendance was compulsory for all in the ninth grade); these faces had an air of ‘sensitive expectancy’ (as Lawrence says of Gudrun and Ursula in the opening pages of Women in Love) when I tapped the microphone and greeted them and introduced myself, and asked: ‘Now. How many of you have ever thought of being a writer?’ And I’ll tell you the number of hands that went up in just a minute. I continued,
‘Well it so happens that you of all people know almost exactly what it’s like – to be a writer. You’re in your early-middle teens. The age when you come into a new level of self-awareness. Or a new level of self-communion. It’s as if you hear a voice, which is you but doesn’t sound like you. Not quite – it isn’t what you’ve been used to, it sounds more articulate and discerning, more
