The morning turned up a few more interesting specimens, but still no wood nymph, Nabokov noted sadly. Once he swished the net triumphantly and trapped two butterflies. He grinned savagely. “Lygdamus Blue—female,” he said. “This other, by freakish chance, is a male blue of another species that was flying with it. That’s adultery. Or a step toward adultery.” He let the offending male fly free, unpunished.
Another time, Nabokov swung and netted three butterflies, one an angle wing. “It has a curiously formed letter C. It mimics a chink of light through a dead leaf. Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t that humorous?”
Still shy of a bona fide wood nymph, the Nabokovs headed south to Sedona for lunch. “I lost two butterfly collections,” Nabokov recalled, as the car sped along. “One to the Bolsheviks, one to the Germans. I have another I gave to Cornell. I dream of stealing it back.”
Lunch over, the Nabokovs drove farther south. Nabokov’s eyes wallowed in the gorgeous windswept buttes. “It looks like a giant chess game is being played around us.” At 2:20, Mrs. Nabokov parked the car by the side of the road. Nabokov, net at the ready, was off like an eager boy. Mrs. Nabokov, retrieving another net from the rear seat, joined him. “You should see my wife catch butterflies,” he said. “One little movement and they’re in the net.”
The grove was disappointing. “Rien,” he muttered. He probed some bushes. “There is nothing,” he said. “A hopeless place.” They gave up the hunt and drove back to Sedona to shop. Vladimir followed Mrs. Nabokov into the supermarket. “When I was younger I ate some butterflies in Vermont to see if they were poisonous,” he said, as his wife hovered over the cold cuts counter. “I didn’t see any difference between a monarch butterfly and a Viceroy. The taste of both was vile, but I had no ill effects. They tasted like almonds and perhaps a green cheese combination. I ate them raw. I held one in one hot little hand and one in the other. Will you eat some with me tomorrow for breakfast?” His visitor declined.
That night, still not surfeited with the day’s steady diet of butterflies, Nabokov burrowed into a pile of scientific papers and pulled out the thickest one, his article on the Nearctic members of the genus Lycaeides Hubner. “This work took me several years and undermined my health for quite a while. Before, I never wore glasses. This is my favorite work. I think I really did well there.” Yes, the Soviets were aware of his work on butterflies. As recently as last November, one Lubimov had attacked him in the Literary Gazette. “He said that I was starving in America, ‘compelled to earn a precarious existence selling butterflies.’” Nabokov laughed merrily.
The next morning, Nabokov was as chipper and as restless as ever. “Come on, darling,” he called to Mrs. Nabokov during breakfast. “The sun is wasting away! It’s a quarter to ten.” Mrs. Nabokov took her time. “He doesn’t know that everyone is wise to him,” she said. At 10:10, Nabokov at last succeeded in luring her behind the wheel. “We are going to Jerome,” he said happily. “The wood nymph should be out, I hope, on Mingus Mountain.” While the car sped swiftly through a veritable Lolitaland, Nabokov said, “Butterflies help me in my writing. Very often when I go and there are no butterflies, I am thinking. I wrote most of Lolita this way. I wrote it in motels or parked cars.”
The Nabokovs reached Jerome (“Welcome to Ghost City. Three places to eat”) at 11:10. “Shall we catch my butterfly today?” Nabokov asked.
At a marker announcing the elevation to be 7,023 feet, Mrs. Nabokov parked. Both took nets from the back seat and walked up a dirt road bordered by pines. A yellow butterfly danced crazily by. Nabokov swung and missed. “Common,” he said. “I’m just getting warmed up.” Unfortunately, a fifteen minute search of the terrain revealed nothing. Nabokov turned toward an iris-covered meadow. “I can’t believe there won’t be butterflies here,” he said. He was mistaken. “I’m very much disappointed,” Nabokov said after searching the meadow. “Rien. Rien.”
Nabokov returned to the car. “It was very sad. ‘And then I saw that strong man put his head on his forearms and sob like a woman.’” At 12:40, Mrs. Nabokov stopped again. “This will be our last stop today,” Nabokov said. “It is this kind of place that my wood nymph should be flying, but with the exception of three cows and a calf, there is nothing.” “Do we have to mix with cows?” asked Mrs. Nabokov.
They got back in the car and drove toward Jerome. “Sad,” said Nabokov. “‘His face was now a tear-stained mask.’” Five minutes later, he had Mrs. Nabokov stop at Mescal Canyon. “We may be in for a surprise here,” he said. Alas, there was none. He walked up a dirt road alone. Mrs. Nabokov lent her net to their visitor. With a whoop of joy, the visitor snared a white-winged beauty. Cupping it in his hands, he showed it to Nabokov who dismissed it airily. “A winged cliché.” It had been a poor day for hunting. There would be other days to come, but the visitor wouldn’t be there. As the car swung out for the journey home, Nabokov spread his arms and said sadly, “What can I say? What is there to say? I am ashamed for the butterflies. I apologize for the butterflies.”
The apology was, of course, gracefully rejected.
The Author of Lolita
Neil Hickey / 1959
From American Weekly, October 4, 1959. © Neil Hickey, Adjunct Professor, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Reprinted by permission.
There’s a new word in the English language, one that inspires a welter of reaction from uncontrolled indignation to sly, surreptitious laughter. The word is “Lolita” and it’s the title of the most wildly controversial bestseller since James Joyce’s Ulysses.
So far-reaching has been its influence that Paris high-fashion designers are now displaying dresses for the fall of 1959 with the titles “Lolita” and “Nymphet.”
The man who started it all is a bit surprised by the fuss it has stirred up. Russian-born, balding, good-humored, professor of European literature at a staid Ivy League university: this is Vladimir Nabokov (pronounced Na-bowkov), whose vivid tale of a gum-chewing, comic-book-reading American schoolgirl and her unsavory adventures with a middle-aged émigré writer has earned for him descriptions ranging all the way from: “an artist of rare comic genius” to “a doddering and willful pornographer.”
Whatever the truth, readers, critics, educators and parents have stormed the author ever since the novel’s appearance early last year and, with a collective, open-armed gesture, inquired, “Why have you done this thing?” To which Nabokov replies, with a shake of the head, “What did I do? I’m no messenger boy. If the novel conveys some kind of moral, then God bless those who find it.”
But more important than messages or Paris fashions for the fall is the matter of pornography and whether Lolita qualifies as such. Many critics insist that the tale of Humbert Humbert’s passion for a twelve-year-old schoolgirl is a tale of pure satiric genius, written in a new, marvelously inventive kind of language; that the unwholesome situation it describes detracts not at all from its importance as a work of art. (It was still lodged firmly on the bestseller lists a year after publication.)
Vladimir Nabokov took time out recently to discuss Lolita with The American Weekly. He reviewed the details of his celebrated novel, which appeared first, illegally, in France in [1955]. Humbert Humbert (a nonsense name that sets the tone of the book) contrives to become the guardian of one Dolores (Lolita) Haze, a pre-teener for whom he has developed an uncommon yen. He embarks with her on a cross-country debauch unprecedented in American literature.
Lolita is no innocent, however. In her own precocious way she knows more about the game of love and how to win it than does the cloying Humbert, who appears to her little more than a comic, pathetic figure. “Modern coeducation, juvenile mores, the campfire racket and so forth had utterly and hopelessly depraved her,” says the author.
She deserts Humbert, finally, for a goon-like husband and manages to attain something like conventional respectability. In a terrifying, farcical finale, Humbert collars a wealthy writer with whom Lolita had an earlier affair and shoots him. Lo
lita dies in childbirth. Humbert succumbs to a heart attack while awaiting trial.
Does all this add up to pornography? A majority of the reviewers say no, but the untidy spectacle of love between a fifty-year-old neurotic and a gum-chewing sub-teen has thrust the book into international fame—even among the habitués of Paris dress salons.
Says Nabokov, “My definition of pornography is ‘a copulation of clichés’ in which an author puts the reader on familiar ground and then makes a direct attempt at provoking the most basic response. This is not the case with Lolita.”
How did he go about gathering such detailed information on nymphets (Nabokov’s own word for young love sprites)? Is there anything personal in his interest in them? He laughs at this.
“My knowledge of nymphets is purely scholarly, I assure you,” he says. “In fact, I don’t much care for little girls. I have a twenty-five-year-old son, so I’m probably better qualified to write about little boys.”
Sometime around the fall of 1960, a motion picture on the adventures of Lolita will go into production (Harris and Kubrick, who made Paths of Glory and The Killing, will produce) and Nabokov is not at all concerned with the obvious difficulties of translating his rather explicit tale into manageable fare for the “family” moviegoer. “A motion picture has a life of its own,” he says. “As to who should play the main roles, I’m not movie fan enough to say.”
At sixty, Nabokov lives the quiet life of a university professor at Cornell, in Ithaca, New York. His chief interest, outside of writing and teaching, is chasing butterflies, a passion he indulges with enormous energy to the far reaches of the American continent. It’s a pastime that dates from his childhood in Russia, where his father (later assassinated by Russian monarchists) was the founder and leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party, the liberal party of Russia.
Despite censorship problems, particularly in Great Britain, where L’affaire Lolita has become a political football involving a seat in Parliament, the British obscenity laws and heated words between major literary figures, Nabokov is firmly in favor of censorship to protect the public from pornography, an unusual attitude for a man whose career has been bedeviled by censors.
What about the American sex symbols—Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield? Do they represent sex for the author of Lolita?
Says Nabokov: “Well, first of all, Miss Marilyn Monroe is one of the greatest comedy actresses of our time. She is simply superb. Miss Mansfield I’ve never seen. But the usual concept of the bosomy female does not represent sex from my point of view. Sexual appeal seems, to me, something far more subtle than that.”
As an educator, Nabokov is firmly against coeducation on any but the grade-school level. “Young girls,” he says, “mature so much faster than boys. They become voluptuous and get into the habit of wearing tight woolen sweaters that make for enormous distraction. That just defeats the whole process of education.”
Beginning a year’s leave of absence from his post at Cornell to hunt butterflies in Arizona, Nabokov insisted he plans no Son of Lolita to capitalize on the earlier novel’s notoriety. (Grace Metalious, author of Peyton Place, will soon publish Return to Peyton Place.) “Lolita is dead,” he says. “I have no plans to resurrect her.”
Nabokov
John Coleman / 1959
From The Spectator, November 6, 1959. © The Spectator. Reprinted by permission.
Lolita rolls slowly down its London slipway this week and the author and his wife are here with us to preside over what practically everyone except John Gordon hopes will be a serene launching. I talked to Mr. Nabokov at his hotel a few days ago, a Mr. Nabokov disappointingly free of the “five bodyguards” accredited to him by one of our more inflamed dailies. Mrs. Nabokov, a charming, elegant woman with a fine profile and white hair, assisted at the interview but showed no signs of carrying a gun. It was an occasion without formality, rather like a supervision with the unusually sympathetic don that Mr. Nabokov not surprisingly resembles: after all, no one really expected Humbert Humbert. The twenty-year-old Vladimir left Russia with his family in 1919 and has never been back. In his autobiographical volume Speak, Memory, he writes of his beloved St. Petersburg and the surrounding countryside with longing (it is typical of their absolute rejection of “that trite deus ex machina the Russian Revolution” that Leningrad exists for neither Mr. Nabokov nor his wife). “Sometimes I fancy myself revisiting them with a false passport, under an assumed name. It could be done.” But it never will be now. That Russia has gone: all he needs of it he has preserved in the lavishly furnished nostalgia of Speak, Memory, that magnificent succession of Proustian madeleines, and his eight Russian novels and many stories; “my artificial but beautifully exact Russian world.” He was at Cambridge till 1922, reading Modern Languages; then in Berlin, where he taught English and tennis, translated Alice in Wonderland into Russian, helped to compile a Russian grammar for foreigners (“Madam, I am a doctor, here is a banana”), and produced a daily crossword puzzle for an émigré paper. He left Paris for America in 1940.
Why did he choose America? It seems America chose him. “I came to Cambridge again in 1938 to give some lectures and readings, a disappointing visit in bad weather. I went to see my old tutor”—the story is in his memoirs—“whose tea things I had crushed underfoot at our first meeting sixteen years before, and, walking into a dark room, stepped on them again.” Recognition was, apparently, immediate. There was unfulfilled talk of a post at Leeds and nothing doing at Oxford or Cambridge. “Then I had the offer of some lecturing in America. In fact, I went in place of a friend of mine, and in 1942 was taken on at Wellesley College. It’s funny how that happened. I’m certain it was because of that Alice translation, not the first in Russian, but the best.” You believe Mr. Nabokov. There is nothing immodest about the delight he shows in some of his achievements. “They have a unique collection of Aliceana of which they’re very proud. So they wanted me in it, I suppose. I was very happy there, but it was an exhausting time. I was also curator of Lepidoptera at Harvard!” From Wellesley he went to Cornell as Professor of Russian and European Literature. They have a champion soccer team and he relived his goalkeeping days (“I had the Mediterranean, primadonna style, out of place in England”) on the touchline. Mr. Nabokov as Mr. Nabokov obviously feels warmly towards America: the slanting gibes of H. H. and Pnin are not to be taken out of context. “It’s such a receptive country. Lolita went to four publishers who turned it down in horror—there had been all that fuss over Edmund Wilson’s Hecate County—then, of course, it came out in Paris in the Olympia Press edition. But it was able to be published in America, finally, because critics of Trilling’s calibre have helped to create the climate of opinion over there. You feel they really have some influence.” Mr. Nabokov politely refused to be drawn when I invited his opinion of our greater squeamishness. “Perhaps because you’re so close to France.” The dubious reputation of Olympia Press hadn’t helped. Yes, there should certainly be some forms of censorship against commercial pornography.
We turned to language. “My English is getting better.” Mr. Nabokov’s English is impeccable, spoken with a gentle accent. “I have no ear for dialogue, you know. Yes, I managed the American rhythms in the end in Lolita, but it was exacting work. I’d be at sea if I had to do, oh, Dorsetshire farmers, or Londoners even … even harder—London is very difficult. He turned to his wife and chuckled. “The hardest of all for me now, of course, would be two Soviet farmers. Yes, the language has changed a great deal. It is Basic Russian now; provincial.” I asked him which of his three languages (French is the other) he commonly thought and spoke in these days; all of them, he decided. And, after all, a lot of thinking was done in images, not words. But he always spoke Russian when he was at home and, when he hurt himself, swore in Russian anywhere. Talk of debased speech currency led us to the Russian literary language today. Could Zhivago conceivably be called “provincial?” Had he liked the book—and its translation? “The English was better.” It was a
poor book. Mr. Nabokov invoked the word “bourgeois,” lending it a solid Flaubertian emphasis while I caught my breath. “All that about the Bolsheviks—so confused. And the symbolism—what is it supposed to be doing?” (Mr. Nabokov, as I already knew, is a stout foe of symbols and allegory, “partly due to my old feud with Freudian voodooism and partly to my loathing of generalizations devised by literary mythists and sociologists.” In the margin, I might add that, when I taxed him later with his confessed admiration for Kafka, he refused to accept him as a wielder of symbols, darkly hinting it had been a put-up job by an early aficionado, after which the world had followed suit.) No, Zhivago’s reputation astonished him. He sighed. “All those artificial snow storms!” We agreed there was certainly a lot of weather in Pasternak and passed on.
We may expect to read at least one of Mr. Nabokov’s Russian novels soon. His son Dmitri—“he speaks beautiful English”—has just completed a translation. “It has really come out wonderfully. And my translation into English of Eugene Onegin is finished at last—in five volumes. One of poem, four of annotations!” Mr. Nabokov has erratic writing habits. “Sometimes I’ll do nothing for days or weeks, then, suddenly, all through the night. And always in longhand. I use these file cards.” He pulled some out of an inside pocket and began reading one. “Yes, here’s a note about the etiquette in giving your name or someone else’s to a new subspecies of butterfly. A delicate business.” He cheerfully acknowledged that there was more certainty of posterity for Nabokov’s Wood Nymph, netted twenty years ago, than for Nabokov’s nymphet, and read some wittily appropriate stanzas from a very slim volume of verse (“my fourteen collected English poems”).
The conversation grew increasingly discursive. “When I lecture my students, I make them examine even Madame Bovary’s hairstyle—details are important … I don’t believe at all in didactic art. There seem to be three levels of readership: at the bottom, those who go after ‘human interest’; in the middle, the people who want ideas, packaged thought about Life and Truth; at the top, the proper readers, who go for style. Tolstoy’s books suffer from injections of ideas … English writers who have moved my pen to the right or left? No one, really. I don’t believe in movements. But, of course, I enormously admire Shakespeare, Keats—not Shelley, not Swinburne.” Little was said about contemporary English letters, but the feeling communicated itself somehow that our new comic novelists are not exactly Mr. Nabokov’s idea of fun. “The literary achievements that most satisfy me now are a paper I wrote on South American Blue Butterflies—and Lolita.” Inevitably, the “event” of Lolita rounded off the questioning. “It hasn’t really changed our lives much. I was going to retire from Cornell, in any case. You can say, oh, two shirts instead of one—and lots of trouble with the taxmen.”
Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov Page 5