I dipped, washed and rinsed and fished for knives and spoons and mulled over Pnin, his gestures and locutions and impersonations of, and other trivialities like lunch: an untried vegetarian sausage. Cooked and cold, inside it had been an off-putting salmon pink; it had tasted a little of salmon too (or maybe crab?), or had reminded me of that fishy article being somewhere between a flaked and paste texture. It certainly didn't have a 'sausage' flavour. It wasn't unpleasant but had detracted from my book as half my mind had been given to working out what it thought it was and what it was in actuality. The latter it seemed I still hadn't pinned down.
And Pnin it seemed, despite finishing with his business, was still causing me to mindfully pause whilst mindlessly going on with other tasks. Like considering as Laurence Clements has been, in advance of his book being published, the picture to use as his portrait. He had one in mind by an Old Master which bore a 'stunning likeness' but had been unable to locate it until Pnin's house-warming party. What a good idea, I thought. If I was in the fortunate position of having anything published, in bound form, whose portrait painting would I use in place of my own head and shoulders? Perhaps a van Gogh? Perhaps somebody obscure, like myself? Though I don't think I would look for likeness but liking. Why be truthful when a little white lie in this case wouldn't hurt anybody? And what you pick might give the reader some insight which is what some of them want isn't it? The words contained within not always enough; they want your soul. If you then proved to be a successful writer i.e. more was wanted of you, from you, you could use a different portrait picture for every new book, chosen for your present mood and not necessarily for any similarity in age or appearance.
It's definitely an idea writers who wish to remain pictorially anonymous but not an entire blank should pursue. There's something, in my humble (and unasked for) opinion, in it.
The other matter that had given me particular pause was Pnin's assertion that Cinderella's shoes were not made of glass, but of Russian squirrel fur, a 'beautiful, pale, winter-squirrel fur'. Was the girl herself then Russian too? Was there more than one Cinderella, and if so what shoes did these other Cinders' wear? A cloth slipper? A wedge, that would have made her tower over and totter before the Prince, and take minuscule steps for fear of falling over? Surely it could only have been the French that wore glass? Oh, but I'm forgetting the Italians... Perhaps a very finely crafted sandal? And in some country she must have worn boots, ankle, calf and thigh-high. Quite fascinating...perhaps if I liked shoes (what women doesn't I hear you cry? This one!) it would have fascinated me longer to imagine, because I hadn't now I thought about it exhausted the possibilities of fur. Hadn't Cinderella been around in times more primitive than now? How old was she?
It was at this point however my thoughts took a different Cinderella line, for I had started to reread a different book by a different Russian author, and had been struck by some passages in V. S Pritchett's introduction, which had led me to speculate that Turgenev's mother was perhaps the Russian Cinderella, or at least one of the Cinderellas. Russia it now seemed might have had more than one, though none, I surmised, were handsome or fortunate. They were not pretty and were disappointed in love - the suitors they were matched with were distinguished but penniless - and any charms they possessed (other than wealth) vanished upon their marriage. A Russian Cinderella once caught, netted, landed (pick your term) is a shrew: they rule. Or at least that was said to be the case with Turgenev's mother. A tyrannous Cinders who terrorized the household; now you won't see that in a storybook, but you might just read (if Professor Timofey Pnin is correct) of Russian squirrel fur shoes.
Picture credit: Young Woman with a Pink Shoe. Portrait of Berthe Morisot, 1868, Edouard Manet (source: WikiArt).
Further reading: Pnin, Vladimir
Nabokov, and First Love, Ivan Turgenev, translated from the Russian
by Isaiah Berlin (Penguin Classics).
Written in lockdown, May 2020.
