'And the Memory I Started At—'

“My memory is the best guardian of my past.” 

That’s Nabokov, speaking with a defiant certainty almost arrogant. His boast is self-protective. He was remembering his paradisial life in pre-Soviet Russia and wished to preserve it from the predations of the Bolsheviks, for whom even the past could be destroyed. Memory – of bliss, of horror -- is sacred. We dwell in the past as certainly as we do in the present, and more so than in the future. Think of Robert Browning in “Memorabilia” (1855):

 

“Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,

And did he stop and speak to you?

And did you speak to him again?

How strange it seems, and new!

 

“But you were living before that,

And you are living after,

And the memory I started at—

My starting moves your laughter!

 

“I crossed a moor, with a name of its own

And a certain use in the world no doubt,

Yet a hand’s-breadth of it shines alone

’Mid the blank miles round about:

 

“For there I picked up on the heather

And there I put inside my breast

A moulted feather, an eagle-feather—

Well, I forget the rest.”

 

Browning was age nine when Shelley died in 1822. Browning’s stand-in spoke with a man who met the older poet. The linkage in memory [Shelleyàstand-inàspeaker (Browning)] causes him to “start,” a reaction the storyteller finds amusing. Kinship is no respecter of bloodlines. Linkage to nominal strangers, those with a distant genotype, can prove more vital than mere phenotype. Who wouldn’t wish to prune one’s family tree? Here's one of my pleasing sets of elective affinities:

 

I shook hands with Guy Davenport, who shook hands with Ezra Pound, who shook hands with Henry James, who shook hands with George Eliot and Gustave Flaubert. Davenport also shook the hand of Samuel Beckett, who had shaken the hand of James Joyce, who had shaken the hand of Italo Svevo, who shook the hand of Eugenio Montale. Likewise, I shook hands with William H. Gass who shook hands with many worthies; foremost among them, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

 

And here's a pleasingly closed loop: I shook hands with Steven Millhauser, who shook hands with Lionel Trilling, who shook hands with Whitaker Chambers, who shook hands with Louis Zukofsky, who shook hands with Davenport, who shook hands with me (many sub-loops could be traced, leading us to Auden, Barzun and Bellow, among others). I’m tempted to start another such chain of affinity beginning with my introduction to Ralph Ellison but that’s enough phantom associations for now.

 

[Nabokov was speaking with an Italian journalist, Claudio Gorlier of Corriere della Sera, on October 30, 1969. The interview is collected in Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor (eds. Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, 2019.)]