JК
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight :: Набоков Владимир Владимирович
Страница: 71 из 124Whenever I called his attention to this or that just published book which had fascinated me because it was of general and vital interest, he childishly replied that it was "claptrap", or made some other completely irrelevant remark…. He confused solitude with altitude and the Latin for sun. He failed to realize that it was merely a dark corner…. However, as he was hypersensitive (I remember how he used to wince when I pulled my fingers to make the joints crack – a bad habit I have when meditating), he could not help feeling that something was wrong… that he was steadily cutting himself away from Life… and that the switch would not function in his solarium. The misery which had begun as an earnest young man's reaction to the rude world into which his temperamental youth had been thrust, and which later continued to be displayed as a fashionable mask in the days of his Success as a writer, now took on a new and hideous reality. The board adorning his breast read no more "I am the lone artist"; invisible fingers had changed it into "I am blind".'
It would be an insult to the reader's acumen were I to comment on Mr Goodman's glibness. If Sebastian was blind, his secretary, in any case, plunged lustily into the part of a barking and pulling .leader. Roy Carswell, who in 1933 was painting Sebastian's portrait, told me he remembered roaring with laughter at Sebastian's accounts of his relations with Mr Goodman. Very possibly he would never have been energetic enough to get rid of that pompous person had the latter not become a shade too enterprising. In 1934 Sebastian wrote to Roy Carswell from Cannes telling him that he had found out by chance (he seldom re-read his own books) that Goodman had changed an epithet in the Swan edition of The Funny Mountain. 'I have given him the sack,' he added. Mr Goodman modestly refrains from mentioning this minor detail. After exhausting his stock of impressions, and concluding that the real cause of Sebastian's death was the final realization of having been 'a human failure, and therefore an artistic one too', he cheerfully mentions that his work as secretary came to an end owing to his entering another branch of business. I shall not refer any more to Goodman's book. It is abolished.
But as I look at the portrait Roy Carswell painted I seem to see a slight twinkle in Sebastian's eyes, for all the sadness of their expression. The painter has wonderfully rendered the moist dark greenish-grey of their iris, with a still darker rim and a suggestion of gold dust constellating round the pupil. The lids are heavy and perhaps a little inflamed, and a vein or two seems to have burst on the glossy eyeball.
It would be an insult to the reader's acumen were I to comment on Mr Goodman's glibness. If Sebastian was blind, his secretary, in any case, plunged lustily into the part of a barking and pulling .leader. Roy Carswell, who in 1933 was painting Sebastian's portrait, told me he remembered roaring with laughter at Sebastian's accounts of his relations with Mr Goodman. Very possibly he would never have been energetic enough to get rid of that pompous person had the latter not become a shade too enterprising. In 1934 Sebastian wrote to Roy Carswell from Cannes telling him that he had found out by chance (he seldom re-read his own books) that Goodman had changed an epithet in the Swan edition of The Funny Mountain. 'I have given him the sack,' he added. Mr Goodman modestly refrains from mentioning this minor detail. After exhausting his stock of impressions, and concluding that the real cause of Sebastian's death was the final realization of having been 'a human failure, and therefore an artistic one too', he cheerfully mentions that his work as secretary came to an end owing to his entering another branch of business. I shall not refer any more to Goodman's book. It is abolished.
But as I look at the portrait Roy Carswell painted I seem to see a slight twinkle in Sebastian's eyes, for all the sadness of their expression. The painter has wonderfully rendered the moist dark greenish-grey of their iris, with a still darker rim and a suggestion of gold dust constellating round the pupil. The lids are heavy and perhaps a little inflamed, and a vein or two seems to have burst on the glossy eyeball.