Speak Memory - a review

Vladimir Nabokov's memory certainly does respond to his injunction that he gives it to speak. His memory is amazing. The book was originally published in 1947 when he was 48 and deals most extensively with the first 16 years of his life while he was still in Russia, along with a more cursory treatment of his time in exile in Great Britain, Germany, and France. He actually begins with an examination of his awakening consciousness! The real beginning of his sentient life he dates to an exact moment when on his fourth birthday he went for a walk, holding his parents' hands. Maybe this is what writers need in order to fill their store of material for writing. Nabokov's is brimming over with extraordinary detail.

His memory tells the story of his parents, their parents, along with a whole tree of aristocratic ancestors that anyone would be proud to be descended from. He has particular love for his parents and great admiration for his father. The rumble of the coming storm of communism is heard from the beginning of the book. Given the precipitous fall from all the comforts and excesses of the richly aristocratic life he was privilged to have, it is amazing that he recalls that fall with little more than a shrug. It is also amazing that given the long time that the storm clouds were seen that the family didn't have more foresight in preparing for the inevitable exile than to rely on a maid's gathering up of a few loose jewels.

Two impressions of this book: first of all the extraordinary vocabulary Nabokov trots out - a reader's vocabulary can be enhanced by reading this book. See how many of these words, gentle reader, you know the definitions of: hypnagogic, photism, synesthete, chromatism, lamellate, serfage, regardant, ophryon, decalcomania, tarlatan, tabanid, dipterist, anastomosis, nicitating, massacrous, breloque, amelus, syncopal, and inanition.

Secondly, and more interestingly, his extraordinary insights. First of all his capturing of the confidence and rightness of childhood: "A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee enters the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die." His insights into the positional nature of poetry: " . . . the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. Lost in thought he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same time a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screendoor of a neighboring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-gray sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Doctor Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur--all forming an instananeous and transparent organism of events of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair in Ithica, N.Y) is the nucleus." And finally and most touching his thoughts on the radiant nature of love: "Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love--to monstrously remote points of the universe. Somethings impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behavior of nebulae (whose very remoteness seems a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helpessness, the cold, the sickening involutions and interpenetrations of space and time. It is a pernicious habit, but I can do nothing about it. . . . I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence."

This is a memoir of exquisite precision, of uncanny insights, of remembrance without nostalgia. Reading it puts you in the company of an extraordinary writer with a unique history and equally unique view of existence: " . . . a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."