Writers in seclusion

As I was recently re-reading Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight I found myself in a strongly felt connection to a phenomenon — though it is one I have never witnessed, involving people I have never known.

When novels become famous they are often reprinted with an introduction. I never read it (or if I do, only afterwards), fearing that they could spoil the experience. But as I opened this book I could not help but notice a phrase on the introduction’s first page. This novel, Nabokov’s first in English, was written in Paris, 1938 — in the bathroom of a one-room flat.

It reminded me at once of Pascal, who also lived in Paris, and whose work in mathematics is still remembered, some of it even so-named (‘Pascal’s triangle’). I know Pascal as a logician, as a mystic, as a romantic 17th century figure. But he was also the captive of the Jansenists of Port Royal, a Catholic group entirely Calvinist in its demeanor and tight-lipped constraint. From them he learned that mathematics is just another form of sexual self-indulgence. So he gave it up. Or tried … Eventually he allowed himself to engage in mathematics still, but only in time wasted with respect to the intellect: time spent in the bathroom.

More tragically, there is the story of the logician, Leopold Loewenheim, originator of the Loewenheim-Skolem paradox (which I love inordinately much). The story is part of logicians’ folklore and may be apocryphal. What is true it that in the 1930s Loewenheim’s professional life as a high school teacher in Berlin came to an abrupt (though temporary) end, when he had to accept forced retirement as a 25 percent non-Aryan. Tarski visited him in that period, but after the war Tarski, like every one else, was convinced (wrongly) that Loewenheim had died in a Nazi concentration camp. It was during that time of rumors too, I think, that the story went about that Loewenheim had managed to continued doing logic in the camp, but only when he could hide in a bathroom.

Neither Jansenist convictions nor external pressures have ever pushed me this far. But isn’t exile in a bathroom for writing just one example of how writing, once writing takes hold of a person, is irrepressible? And therefore goes on in the most unlikely times and places, regardless?

In the middle of reading Sebastian Knight some idea occurred to me and I turned to the back, to scribble notes inside the back cover. There was writing there already: “Tranquillity Variation 5.8, Quien Sabe 5.7, ? Lolita 5.9, between Tranquillity Variation and Quien Sabe”. A list of climbing routes in Joshua Tree, written while I was there with a guide, Jim Hammerle, in 1993. At lunch Hammerle, who lived in a trailer nearby, told me how he planned to earn money by making avocado sandwiches for climbers, and asked me what I was reading. A book by Nabokov, I said, you know, he wrote Lolita, it was a movie too. He had never heard of Lolita. Then, the next day he took us up a new route, and said that he would log it in at the climbing store as “Lolita” — a first ascent. I doubt he ever did. I was just as unreliable in my intentions — my notes in the back of Sebastian Knight were for a long story I meant to write about this time in Joshua Tree, and I never did.

But Sebastian Knight illustrates another phenomenon for me: that when writing, there is also to urge to write about that writing, to bear witness to how, when, and where it was written. Nabokov’s novel is extreme in this respect: asked what The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is about, I can only answer: about the writing of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

I don’t mean it is a novel about a novel being written in a bathroom, worse … or better … (?) it is about it’s own being-written.

The author who appears as the narrator is not the author of the book here on my lap. Of course not. Italo Calvino said that when he writes a novel, the first character he must create is the author of that novel, even if that is a character which never appears therein. Umberto Eco called it the constructed author, and insisted that the second (or simultaneous) construction is the constructed reader. He elaborated: that is the ‘model reader’ that you pretend to be when reading the book, the reader who is more knowledgeable and more intelligent than you will ever be.

The narrator, who is the author researching his famous brother Sebastian Knight, in the process of writing Sebastian’s life, lives in Paris, comfortably as far as I can tell. He dashes about England, Germany, and France, diligently recording all the places in which he did the writing — the writing of this very book. Much more constrained than he or any novelist, I could still not resist doing the same — in prefaces I list places where I wrote; in one, Scotland and Italy, in another Bologna, Assisi, Jerusalem, Tiberias, and London.

Maybe the summing up is just this. The phenomenon I never witnessed but glimpsed in Nabokov, Pascal, and Loewenheim, was, in itself, just that suffered constraint of having to write which forced them into exile in a bathroom. But what it pointed to was the self-conscious, embarrassingly self-preoccupied, obsessive, writer-being that writing creates.