The Tragedy of Mister Morn (2 page)

In
Morn
Nabokov gave these themes a political significance more explicit than any we find in his later work. Against the revolutionary politics, grounded in the ideals of equality, sameness, and even death, that Tremens and Klian embody, Nabokov postulates a conservative politics, animated by an ideal of happiness. As Morn says, he

… created

an age of happiness, an age of harmony … God,

give me strength … Playfully, lightly I ruled;

I appeared in a black mask in the ringing hall,

before my cold, decrepit senators … masterfully

I revived them—and left again, laughing …

(III.i.
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)

Morn’s example has aestheticized the world, restoring order by turning it into a fairy tale or a play: if even the King is an actor, then all identity is not something sovereign but something performed, and he shows people how to act as they would wish to be. He is a fantasy of the Foreigner, a mysterious figure who enters at the beginning and the end of the play and comes from the real world of revolutionary Russia:

… In our country all is not well,

not well … When I wake up, I will tell them

what a magnificent king I dreamt of …

(Vii.
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)

The implicit argument of
Morn
is that for the sake of order, morality, and happiness in the real world, people must make-believe in the possibility of an ideal world. The play takes place in an imaginary kingdom repeatedly described as having the air of a
skazka
or fairy tale. In a synopsis of the play, Nabokov described this atmosphere as “neoromanticism,” saying that the setting of the play took “something from the 18th Century Venice of Casanova and from the 30s [the 1830s] of the Petersburg epoch.” It also borrows from Shakespeare, for in
Morn
, as in Shakespeare’s history plays such as
Richard III
, the state is, necessarily, a play or pageant; a secret passage leads from the throne-room to the theatre. This is one of the many details that Nabokov would reuse nearly forty years later in his most metafictive work,
Pale Fire
(1962), in which an imaginary poet and imaginary king conjure with each other’s existences. Kinbote, the imaginary King of Zembla, or semblance, may have assassinated Shade, the imaginary poet, just as in
Morn
Tremens says: “it’s a shame, Dandilio, that the imaginary/thief did not destroy the made-up king!” (Vi.
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). But in
Morn
, as later in
Pale Fire
, this kingdom of imagination is all too precarious: Tremens is determined to unmask Morn’s happy reign of make-believe as a cynical fraud, and to tear down the civic order it supports. He succeeds in doing so, until a false rumour that Morn fled for love, not cowardice, reignites the romanticism of the people. It is to defend that illusion that Morn, ultimately, must kill himself.

This idea of kingship as theatre, or as a work of imagination, is one of the many respects in which
Morn
is indebted to Shakespeare. The heavy crown is a symbol of the burdensomeness of power, as it is in Shakespeare’s history plays, such as
Henry IV, Part 2
, towards the end of which Prince Henry stares uneasily at the crown lying on his dying father’s pillow, “so troublesome a bedfellow,” which, he says, “dost pinch thy bearer,” and “dost sit/Like a rich armour worn in heat of day,/That scalds with safety” (IV.v.22, 29–31). In
Morn
, too, the “fiery crown” burns and squeezes with “its diamond pain,” and Morn complains that

… The stupefied mob

does not know that the knight’s body is dark

and sweaty, locked in its fairy tale armour …

(Vii.
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)

From Shakespeare, too, Nabokov drew a series of metaphors for civic order which could be deployed to warn against the rash alterations of Bolshevism. The kingdom is like the human body, so that Tremens’s fever symbolizes the convulsions he wishes upon the state, as, again, in
Henry IV
,
Part 2
, where the Archbishop of York declares that

… we are all diseased,

And with our surfeiting and wanton hours

Have brought ourselves into a burning fever,

And we must bleed for it.

(IV.i.54–57)

Or the kingdom is like music, as Ganus argues when he says that “The power of the King/is living and harmonious, it moves me now/like music” (I.i.
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), echoing an idea most famously expressed in a speech given by Ulysses in Shakespeare’s
Troilus and Cressida
, The same idea is implicit in
The Tempest
, a play with which
Morn
is associated through the kinship between Prospero and Morn, both of them magician-kings. But the Shakespeare play most obviously linked to
Morn
is
Othello
: Ella dresses Ganus up as Othello so that he can visit Midia unobserved, and she twice quotes the lines Desdemona utters when Othello is about to smother her (the first time slightly misquoting them).
The Tragedy of Mister Morn
is less concerned with doubling, and with the duality of human nature, than Nabokov’s later works. But here already, it is clear that when Ganus wears Othello’s face, he discovers in himself a shadow side, a dark jealousy like that which blackened and distorted Othello. Conversely, Morn, by wearing a mask, becomes a nameless sovereign, King X, as Nabokov calls him in the synopsis, the variable upon which a lucky people can project their fantasies of happiness and order; and when he is unmasked by his cowardice, he betrays not only the ideals of his people and his own self-respect but even the identity and integrity he had once seen when he gazed into the healing silver of the mirror.

But in
Morn
Nabokov was trying to emulate Shakespeare not only at the level of image and symbol, but also of character and drama, register and rhythm. The simplest expression of this is that
Morn
is written in the iambic pentameter of Shakespearean tragedy, though Nabokov is more strictly regular in his rhythmic patterns than Shakespeare. Though
Morn’
s prosody alludes to Shakespeare, it does so through the mediation of Pushkin’s “little tragedies” (all written in 1830, the most famous of which is
Mozart and Salieri
). More specifically Shakespearean—and un-Pushkinian—is the language of
Morn
, which, especially in the philosophic speeches of Tremens, Klian, Morn and Dandilio, is densely metaphorical and highly compressed in the manner of late Shakespeare. So Morn, saying farewell to Midia, justifies the aberrations of fate by comparing life to music, before suddenly shifting the already difficult metaphor into another key, comparing the music of existence to the structure of a building whose details can detract from an appreciation of its overall harmony:

But, you see—the moulded whimsy of a frieze

on a portico keeps us from recognizing,

sometimes, the symmetry of the whole …

(IV.
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)

Or Dandilio compares moments of life, good and bad, to pearls which a deep-sea diver must clutch up indiscriminately in his brief breathless moments at the bottom of the ocean, and pursues the metaphor to a visionary limit far beyond any which the mind can easily grasp:

And he who seeks only pearls, setting aside

shell after shell, that man shall come to

the Creator, to the Master, with empty hands—

and he will find that he is deaf and dumb

in heaven …

(I.ii.
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)

The conceits are often as whimsical as those in Shakespeare, defying that Enlightenment ideal of rhetorical decorum according to which Shakespeare’s imagination was deplored as savage and untutored. So Tremens declares that

… The soul is like a tooth, God

wrenches out the soul—crunch!—and it is over …

What comes next? Unthinkable nausea and then—

the void, spirals of madness—and the feeling of being

a swirling spermatozoid—and then darkness,

darkness—the velvety abyss of the grave …

(II.
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)

Or, earlier, he remembers an evening in which he “shook with fever,/rippling like a reflection in an ice-hole” (I.i.
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). One is reminded of a line in Chapter 26 of Nabokov’s penultimate novel,
Transparent Things
, which was finished nearly fifty years after
Morn
, in 1972, about “an African nun in an arctic convent touching with delight the fragile clock of her first dandelion.” Such wild conceits, yoking together hot fancy and cold reason, are common in Nabokov’s mature style. They derive, as
Morn
helps us to see, from Shakespeare, and mark the rebellion of Nabokov’s genius against the decorousness of the Age of Reason.

Equally Shakespearean is Nabokov’s subtly reasoned orchestration of many different voices and registers. At one extreme, we have the high-toned rhetoric of Tremens, Klian, Morn, Dandilio, and Ganus, each of whom Nabokov endows with an individual voice that speaks of their desires, values, and condition. The first note struck is that of Tremens’s feverish rhetoric, tightly coiled upon itself, thickly patterned with spite and self-pity, and embroidered with antique curses: “Begone, fever, you snake!” (I.i.
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). In Klian, the court poet of Tremens’s revolution, that destructiveness finds a sexual urgency which takes his rhetoric to the very limit of intelligibility. In our translation, we have allowed many of his speeches to remain as obscure in English as they are in the original Russian, where they seem to evince his commitment to the revolutionary poetics of violence upon the word associated with such poets as Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), on whom he may be modelled.

At the other pole of the play’s rhetoric are Morn and Dandilio: in Morn there is a noble purity and simplicity of speech—“radiant,” to identify it by one of Morn’s own favourite words. Although Morn is not a poet, he has the champagne-like effervescence he himself identifies with creativity, and it is definitive of him that when Ganus attacks him he responds with the carefree laughter which gives him his power. Dandilio shares with Morn this equanimity, which is not to be mistaken for a Buddhist absence of will or desire: on the contrary, Dandilio urges that life be embraced without scruple or discrimination. He is a snuff-taking eighteenth-century Optimist of the kind Voltaire famously satirized in
Candide
, and whom Nabokov would reprise in the figure of
Pale Fire
’s John Shade. He believes that all in the world is well, good and evil, Morn and Tremens alike. In the compressed aphorisms of his speeches the sententious gravity of the Age of Reason is combined with the intermittently childlike and singsong tenor of its thought.

Indeed, memories of childhood, and especially of the pains and illnesses of childhood, stud the play, introducing into it a domestic counterpoint to the stagy rhetoric, in something like the way that Shakespeare typically sets tavern against court, and prose against verse. (The Old Man who enters to clean up after Edmin and Morn have fled is, with his rustic speech, closely reminiscent of such Shakespearean characters as the Porter in
Macbeth
.) Dandilio says that life assuages all pain, like a mother rushing in to kiss better a child who has scratched itself (11.340–45); Midia says her soul is attached to Morn like a child’s tongue to the metal it has licked on a frosty day (I.ii.253–56); and the feel of a cold gun muzzle pressing up against his chest reminds Morn, at a moment when he is considering suicide, of the “lacquer tube” a doctor once pressed against his chest (III.i.
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). In Ella that domesticity is articulated with a freshness that is essential to the total effect of the play, and it is telling that she often expresses herself in gestures—twirling, stroking the air—rather than in the destructive speechifying of Tremens, Klian, and Ganus.

As all of the above indicates,
Morn
presents some extraordinary difficulties to its translators. The task of translating it is all the more daunting because Nabokov was himself one of the most prominent modern critics of lazy and careless translation. As a young man, Nabokov had written elegant, readable translations of a range of English and French authors, from Carroll and Keats to Ronsard, Byron, and Shakespeare. In America, in the 1940s, he also produced verse translations into English of some of Pushkin’s little tragedies, of Fyodor Tyutchev, Mikhail Lermontov, and Afanasy Fet. Yet he began to stress the near-impossibility of successful translation, describing it in Chapter 7 of his 1947 novel
Bend Sinister
by the following extravagant analogy: