Writing in English
"The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" was the first book that Vladimir Nabokov wrote in English. That was in 1938, by the way, when Nabokov realized, with war clouds gathering, that he'd have to leave Paris and find refuge somewhere safer. Britain and America beckoned so the writer began to get to grips with the English language. The results were exquisite.
The narrator, V (V for Victor), is engrossed in the writing of his first literary work, a biography of his half-brother the famous English novelist, Sebastian Knight. As in a chess game, V repeats the "moves" made by his sibling. Here, he finds a scrap of paper that reveals how Knight composed his sentences:
"As he a heavy A heavy sleeper, Roger Rogerson, old Rogerson bought old Rogers bought, so afraid, Being a heavy sleeper, old Rogers was so afraid of missing tomorrow. He was a heavy sleeper. He was mortally afraid of missing tomorrow's event glory early train glory so what he did was to buy and bring home in a to buy that evening and bring home not one but eight alarm clocks of different sizes and vigour of ticking nine eight eleven alarm clocks of different sizes ticking which alarm clocks nine alarm clocks as a cat has nine which he placed which made his bedroom look like a"
And that's exactly how it's done, although copy and paste and the other miracles of word processing have, paradoxically, rendered this creative process less transparent. In 1941, Nabokov told Edmund Wilson that he wrote his first novel in English using "the implement called bidet as a writing desk — because we lived in one room and I had to use our small bathroom as a study." Harsh times and hard circumstances spur creativity, one is forced to conclude.
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