Nabokov's The Vane Sisters

Say you're an alien on a mission of intergalactic discovery to sample the art and culture of worlds throughout the universe. In this expedition of yours you've got a lot of planets to hit (one of which is a small, blue planet off in the outskirts of the Milky Way) and even though you have major tools and all kinds of super-enhanced capabilities, it's still inevitable that from time to time you're going to give someone short shrift. Now say that one of the Earthlings you decide to shortchange is Vladimir Nabokov (bad choice, by the way). You want the flavor of Nabokov, his essence, his peculiar way of writing, but you want it quick. Where do you turn? Page 619 of The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov would be a good choice. It is there that you will find Nabokov's story "The Vane Sisters."

Nabokov penned this story in 1950, still years before he was to become a sensation via Lolita, but after he had found a measure of critical success and was writing regularly for The New Yorker. The story's plot is simple. The protagonist, a French professor, is taken one winter day with the beautiful icicles dripping from the eaves of neighborhood houses. He follows them to a diner, decides to eat dinner there, and when he comes out is taken by the vision of a parking-meter's shadow in the evening snow. The professor lingers over the shadow and suddenly a car pulls up. It is his friend D., a man he hads't seen in years, and as they exchange smalltalk, D. says that their old friend Cynthia Vane died the week before.

Cynthia Vane was the sister of Sybil Vane, a former student of the professor's whom D. had an affair with (while she was a student). During the course of the affair Sybil committed suicide, and the professor came to know her grieving sister. He discovered that Cynthia was deeply engrossed with the paranormal, and she dragged him out to seances, parties of other paranormal enthusiasts, and such. Cynthia was convinced that friends and relatives were continually contacting her in obtuse ways from the other world. The professor dismissed all this and eventually stopped seeing Cynthia.

The story ends with one tense night as the professor, home from his meeting with D.,  reminisces over Cynthia and Sybil. Despite himself, the professor feels an eerie aura that is magnified by his solitude and the perfect silence of his street. He stays up the night determined to fight Cynthia's memory, to renounce her belief in the paranormal, but he is frustrated, and the story ends with these lines:

I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies--every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.

These lines are a little joke of Nabokov's. Taking the first letter of each word yields the code: Icicles by Cyn. Meter from me Sybil. It is a message to us, the reader, that Cynthia and Sybil, reunited in the other world, reached out to the professor so that he would chance upon D.

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So what makes this story so prototypically Nabokovian? Five things:

1. The paranormal. Nabokov was infantuated with the paranormal, and his works are saturated with penetration between worlds. Nabokov believed that something (not necessarily a deity) helped this world hold together, that coincidences were not always just coincidences, but the agency of something beyond. "The Vane Sisters" is a very clear statement of this idea, which plays key roles in Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift, Pale Fire, Ada, and Look at the Harlequins!, among others.

2. Metafiction. Nabokov delighted in playing games to break down the borders between writer, reader, and text. The last lines of "The Vane Sisters" throw into question the authorship of the story (as in Pale Fire) and also reinforce the fact that this is a text that creates an imaginary world.

3. Deep detail. Nabokov was a reader for reading's sake, and paid extremely close attention to the smallest of details (he once asked on an exam what the wallpaper in Kitty's (from Anna Karenina) hospital room looked like). His works are similarly suffused with the most interesting details. Here's one from "The Vane Sisters" describing a party Cynthia dragged the professor to:

From some vantage point where she had been sitting in a stranded mermaid pose on the pale carpet with one or two younger fellows, Cynthia, her face varnished with a film of beaming sweat, would creep up on her knees, a proffered plate of nuts in one hand, and crisply tap with the other the athletic leg of Cochran or Corcoran, an art dealer, ensconced, on a pearl-gray sofa, between two flushed, happily disintegrating ladies.

4. The stodgy, professorial protagonist. Pale Fire, Lolita, and Pnin have given us a certain brand of anti-social, odd, and quietly, almost whisperingly contemptuous, professor as a protagonist. This is one of Nabokov's best known character types, and one that appears in other books, such as The Defense (although not as a professor).

5. Big words. Nabokov was a lover and compiler of large and/or obscure words. They are sprinkled liberally throughout this story: meretricious, hyaline, frowzy, intervenient, and solarium are just a few. Being as precise a writer as he was, though, Nabokov did not employ these words for show, or for their own sake, but because he believed them to be necessary--the only word that could do the job.

Comments

[Michael]

In the very least, your review has made me really want to read the story (it does more than that, of course, but one of my initial thoughts was: I need to get a copy). The fact that it involves a Nabokovian professor-type makes it an even bigger draw. He was so adept at creating full, fascinating, even devastating, portraits of academics.

[nomad]

I love how he leaves the clue about her acrostics in the ending. Now I have to start reading Nabakov.