Scenes We've Already Seen

Lately I have begun re-reading books that either I never read in high school and college, or did read but didn’t appreciate. I donate them as I finish them, blithely telling myself that thereby I also am making progress on my Great Project of banishing from my house thousands and thousands of things I don’t need. This week I plucked from a shelf a yellow-paged paperback edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel “King, Queen, Knave,” published in 1968 (cover price: 75 cents).

Well, the year 1968 gets an asterisk: It was published in 1968 in English. It was published in Russian in 1928. It’s a richly detailed psychological thriller, replete with the same kind of Nabokovian literary allusions and linguistic gymnastics that grace “Lolita.”

Finishing the book, I went straight to Wikipedia, to find out when “Psycho” came out. The Hitchcock movie “Psycho,” based on a 1959 novel by Robert Bloch, came out in 1960.

What does that have to do with Nabokov? Well, here’s what: At the end of the movie, there’s that scary-as-hell scene in which a woman is sitting in a swivel chair, with her back to the camera and only her wigged head visible, and then the chair is turned around and in the chair is no woman at all. Instead, it’s demented Norman Bates’s mummified “mother” (which I recall as looking like a desiccated apple with a wig, stuck on a stick and “clothed” in a shawl).

To me, that was just as spooky as the famed “shower scene,” after which, you’ll recall, protagonist Marion Crane did not need a towel.

And here I quote from the next-to-last paragraph of Chapter 11 of “King, Queen, Knave,” (published, don’t forget, in 1928):

“He … knocked hurriedly at the landlord’s bedroom door. No answer. He pushed the door and stepped in. The old woman whose face he had never seen sat with her back to him in her usual place. “I’m leaving; I want to say goodbye,” he said, advancing toward the armchair. There was no old woman at all — only a gray wig stuck on a stick, and a knitted shawl.”

YIKES! Somebody call Alfred Hitchcock: Forty years later, this will make a really scary movie!

Or, in a rare non-snarky note, I could point out that Nabokov’s son Dmitri, who did the 1968 translation of his father’s novel, may have seen that 1960 movie, and been inspired to add that scene to the book. Since I don’t read Russian, I guess I’ll never know.

The cover ironically relates to recurring references to a steamy movie of that name that’s showing in Berlin. The book is anything but a bodice-ripping romance novel: It’s an erudite Nabokov offering that does, however, share one scene with a very famous movie.