I’m stuck doing sewer-work under LAX this week, so you won’t be getting much in the way of original, personalized content from me (some people aren’t aware that I try my best to write personalized posts for every visitor, and that these posts display only on that visitor’s computer). But this is a good part of Speak, Memory:
The recollection of my crib, with its lateral nets of fluffy cotton cords, brings back, too, the pleasure of handling a certain beautiful, delightfully solid, garnet-dark crystal egg left over from some unremembered Easter; I used to chew a corner of the bedsheet until it was thoroughly soaked and then wrap the egg in it tightly, so as to admire and re-lick the warm, ruddy glitter of the snugly enveloped facets that came seeping through with a miraculous completeness of glow and color.
Another good part is when Nabokov writes that he had always remembered the Nabokov coat of arms as two bears playing chess. But when he tracked it down for the book, it turned out to be two lions on and a shield, with the motto Za hrabrost’: “for valour.”
“Wikipedia tells me” Nabokov was going to write another volume called “Speak On, Memory” or “Speak, America,” but stopped because he didn’t like Andrew Field’s biographies of him. I guess Field had been his official biographer but then something happened and Nabokov withdrew his support. Nabokov’s son Dmitri made it sound as if Field were a scoundrel, and I read one of his biographies and it made Nabokov seem almost boorish. But who knows, because one summer I had a job that involved reading lots of Harvard Alumni Reports, and this was a quote from Dmitri’s passage written for his 5 year reunion:
“My avid interests in such fields as mountaineering, skiing, tennis, sports cars and females have continued undiminished and I have managed to find time here and there for all of them.”
In his next report, he talks more about racing and has also become an opera singer.