The Real Life of Sebastian Knight   ::   Набоков Владимир Владимирович

Somehow or other he managed to go on with the writing of Lost Property: his easiest book, I think. Now, it ought to be understood in connexion with what follows that Clare had been solely responsible for the managing of his literary affairs. After her departure, these soon became wildly entangled. In many cases Sebastian had not the vaguest idea how things stood and what his exact relations with this or that publisher were. He was so muddled, so utterly incompetent, so hopelessly incapable of remembering a single name or address, or the place where he put things, that now he got into the most absurd predicaments. Curiously enough, Clare's girlish forgetfulness had been replaced by a perfect clarity and steadiness of purpose when handling Sebastian's affairs; but now it all went amuck. He had never learnt to use a typewriter and was much too nervous to begin now. The Funny Mountain was published simultaneously in two American magazines, and Sebastian was at a loss to remember how he had managed to sell it to two different people. Then there was a complicated affair with a man who wanted to make a film of Success and who had paid Sebastian in advance (without his noticing it, so absent-mindedly did he read letters) for a shortened and 'intensified' version, which Sebastian never even dreamt of making. The Prismatic Bezel was in the market again, but Sebastian hardly knew of it. Invitations were not even answered; Telephone numbers proved delusions, and the harassing search for the envelope where he had scrawled this or that number exhausted him more than the writing of a chapter. And then – his mind was elsewhere, following in the tracks of an absent mistress, waiting for her call – and presently the call would come, or he himself could stand the suspense no longer, and there he would be as Roy Carswell had once seen him: a gaunt man in a greatcoat and bedroom slippers getting into a Pullman car.

It was in the beginning of this period that Mr Goodman made his appearance. Little by little, Sebastian handed over to him all his literary affairs, and felt greatly relieved to meet so efficient a secretary. 'I usually found him', writes Mr Goodman, 'lying in bed like a sulky leopard' (which somehow reminds one of the nightcapped wolf in 'Little Red Riding Hood')…. 'Never in my life had I seen', he goes on in another passage, 'such a dejected-looking being…. I am told that the French author M. Proust, whom Knight consciously or subconsciously copied, also had a great inclination towards a certain listless "interesting" pose….' And further: 'Knight was very thin, with a pale countenance and sensitive hands, which he liked to display with feminine coquetry.