The Real Life of Sebastian Knight   ::   Набоков Владимир Владимирович

He confessed tome once that he liked to pour half a bottle of French perfume into his morning bath, but with all that he looked singularly badly got up…. Knight was extraordinarily vain, like most modernist authors. Once or twice I caught him pasting cuttings, most certainly reviews concerning his books, into a beautiful and expensive album which he kept locked up in his desk, feeling perhaps a little ashamed to let my critical eye consider the fruit of his human weakness…. He often went abroad, twice a year, I daresay, presumably to Gay Paree…. But he was very mysterious about it and made a great show of Byronic languor. I cannot help feeling that trips to the Continent formed part of his artistic programme… he was the perfect "poseur".'

But where Mr Goodman waxes really eloquent is when he starts to discourse upon deeper matters. His idea is to show. and explain the 'fatal split between Knight the artist and the great booming world about him' – (a circular fissure, obviously). 'Knight's uncongeniality was his undoing,' exclaims Goodman and clicks out three dots. 'Aloofness is a cardinal sin in an age when a perplexed humanity eagerly turns to its writers and thinkers, and demands of them attention to, if not the cure of, its woes and wounds…. The "ivory tower" cannot be suffered unless it is transformed into a lighthouse or a broadcasting station…. In such an age… brimming with burning problems when… economic depression… dumped… cheated… the man in the street… the growth of totalitarian… unemployment… the next supergreat war… new aspects of family life… sex… structure of the universe.' Mr Goodman's interests are wide, as we see. 'Now, Knight', he goes on, 'absolutely refused to take any interest whatsoever in contemporary questions…. When asked to join in this or that movement, to take part in; some momentous meeting, or merely to append his signature, among more famous names, to some manifest of undying truth or denunciation of great iniquity… he flatly refused in spite of all my admonishments and even pleadings…. True, in his last (and most obscure) book, he does survey the world… but the angle he chooses and the aspects he notes are totally different from what a serious reader naturally expects from a serious author…. It is as though a conscientious inquirer into the life and machinery of some great enterprise were shown, with elaborate circumlocution, a dead bee on a window sill….