This week, guest contributor Nick Cody looks back to a time when a literary heavyweight seldom left his thoughts. 

I was told shortly after I had arrived, and believed it to be true, that the country I was living in had the highest population density in the world. And that the city with the greatest density in Taiwan was my city, Taichung. Furthermore, in Taichung, nowhere were people packed, stacked, and living more closely together than in downtown. And that is exactly where my apartment was.

Into this thick-as-molasses, swirling, buzzing, intoxicating sea of humanity dropped, as if one day from an eyedropper, two more interlopers: me and the ghost of Vladimir Nabokov. But maybe I should explain the use of the word intoxicating. Cities in general, and Asian cities in particular, always sparked in me a kind of natural high. I identify the same invigorating stimulant praised in the poems of Walt Whitman. I felt the same way about Taichung that Whitman felt about Manhattan. A look through the online archives of his Leaves of Grass will reveal many poems like this:

CITY OF ORGIES.

CITY of orgies, walks and joys,
City whom that I have lived and sung in your midst will one day
make you illustrious,
Not the pageants of you, not your shifting tableaus, your specta-
cles, repay me,
Not the interminable rows of your houses, nor the ships at the
wharves,
Nor the processions in the streets, nor the bright windows with
goods in them,
Nor to converse with learn’d persons, or bear my share in the soiree
or feast;
Not those, but as I pass O Manhattan, your frequent and swift
flash of eyes offering me love,
Offering response to my own—these repay me,
Lovers, continual lovers, only repay me.

But it was not Whitman who I carried with me daily on the “walks and joys” of my new life in Taiwan. After having read and reread Nabokov continuously for the previous two years, I lived, for lack of a better phrase, under his spell. More precisely yet, it was my understanding of this great writer gained from the superb two-volume biography by Brian Boyd, that kept me alert, quick, and sensitive to any ironic event or fluttering detail of daily life that could portend some significance. Without Boyd, I doubt I would have understood Nabokov at all. For Lolita, I had already read and found amusing, and almost immediately dismissed as frivolous word play. And the same goes for his greatest work, Pale Fire. I had simply missed most of it– meaning the significance of many details– and remained unaware of the ingenious intricacies of both novels until I read the Boyd biography.

It was through Boyd that I learned about one of the major themes and obsessions in Nabokov’s life and work: details, especially camouflaged or innocuous ones, are not only significant. They might be winks from beyond. If one is alert to them, and can connect the dots so to speak to figure out what ironies they might offer, life can be a thrilling bit of detective work. Ultimately, I had hoped to capture some of the magic I felt playing peek-a-boo with me throughout my days and weeks in Taichung so that I could pin them to some future storyboard or pen them in a novel.

I carried with me, among other things essential to an English teacher, a notepad for copying the details of these surprising coincidences. One night I misplaced my pen and only a few minutes after thinking, “I lost my pen. I have to find another.” There, at the top of the subway station steps, was a pen waiting for me. When I met a cute Taiwanese girl at the language academy, and found that her English nickname was Alice, I smiled. Nabokov had translated Alice In Wonderland, and might have been the first to do so, into Russian during his early years when he still lived in Russia. And when Alice told me she was studying Russian, it went straight into my notepad, with a double underline for emphasis!

One key event convinced me that these were charmed days. Another instructor at the language academy, an American whom I had had some good discussions with in the past, asked me about books. What was I reading? I told him as much as I could in the time allowed about Nabokov and specifically mentioned the Boyd biography. He must have been infected with some of my enthusiasm because a few days later he approached me with a book and a wry smile. “Remember you were telling me about Nabokov and that biography?” And then he opened the English conversation textbook he was holding and plopped it on the staff room table. “Check out that photo.”

On the page, framed with text of the dialogue, were two people standing in a bookstore. In the background of the photo, on a table, sat the two-volume biography of Nabokov by Brian Boyd. My jaw dropped. My hands slapped my knees. And then I jumped straight into the air as if electrocuted via cattle prod. That was my first entry in the notepad.

Where is that notepad now? And where is the magic? The scrawled notes were grubs and caterpillars that never became the butterflies of poetic insight. Even a quick glance at online resources finds that I had been living a delusion about at least one fact: Taiwan does not have the highest population density in the world. Looking back, I wonder how much my days were clouded with delusion: I am a writer; I am in the Land of Plenty; things have significance.

Next week, Andrew Oberg takes a look at Crime & Punishment.