That many of the problems normally experienced by writers emigrating to America seem irrelevant to Nabokov is partly to be explained by his special background. Prior to the Revolution, his family were members of the Russian nobility, and there is a fascinating account of his early life in a series of autobiographical sketches published under the title Conclusive Evidence. There was extensive travel at an early age (Paris, Biarritz, Berlin, Abbazia), and this gave Nabokov an early familiarity with a number of foreign languages and a certain cosmopolitanism. There was also an Englishness surrounding his early existence (Pears Soap, imported Golden Syrup and English governesses). It would be wrong, however, to feel that this led to a “rootless” existence. There was Russia, always Russia. Nabokov says, however, that “the fertile emotion of nostalgia” for his country was liberated long ago in the writing of a novel. He now feels nostalgic only when confronted with a region of America strikingly reminiscent of Russia.
The “American Scene”—something most emigrant writers have attempted to analyze at some time—does not as an entity interest Nabokov. He has, he says, no idea even what the term means. I quoted as a guide an extract of W.H. Auden. In a preface to some essays of Henry James, Auden once listed such phenomena of American life as “the unspeakable jukeboxes, the horrible Rockettes, the insane salads, etc.” and added that without these things “the analyst and the emigrant alike would never understand by contrast the nature of the Good Place nor desire it with sufficient desperation to stand a chance of arriving.” The quotation, however, didn’t seem of very much use; Nabokov seemed more interested in the idea of insane salads than in any other part of the remark. Finally, he said that it was the generality of the statement that made him suspicious: “A little town in New England is so entirely different from a little town in Oregon. And a little town in one part of Oregon is so entirely different from a little town in another part.” The standardized and frequently ugly features connected with the mechanics of living simply do not trouble him. Quite the opposite, in fact; he has suggested in writing that “there is nothing more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.”
The reason for Nabokov’s fresh approach to such things as soda fountains and motels is, however, probably less the result of a certain temperament and more a matter of language. Even today, after eighteen years in America, he will experience difficulty with the inflection of an idiom and repeat it several times, varying the position of the emphasis (sometimes sadly abandoning the phrase altogether). He had, he recalled in conversation, not only to create his imaginative world out of America on arriving there; he had to form a new language. I asked him how he went about this: “I read Webster’s Dictionary for one thing,” he replied. And it is perhaps as a result of this that one occasionally meets such words as ‘alembic,’ ‘achromatic,’ ‘aquarelle’ and ‘ikontinct’ in the space of a couple of pages of his writing. The process of building a vocabulary was obviously a laborious one, but in his writing one often feels that Nabokov is actually building a language as he writes. There is a sense in which this is true of any major writer, but it is more obvious in one who is using a language which is not his native one. One of the ways in which this peculiar effect shows itself is in the slight distance existing between Nabokov’s personal use of words and the more conventional. He will criticize the word “skyscraper,” for example, and move into a beautiful description of the buildings, “remote and lilac colored, and strangely aquatic, mingling their first cautious lights with the colors of the sunset and revealing, with a kind of dreamy candor, the pulsating inside of their semi-transparent structure.” He makes Humbert, in Lolita, turn a neon sign advertising Gulfex Lubrication into one declaring Genuflexion Lubricity. To the English or American reader this verbal awareness and wit seems a full recompense for the loss Nabokov laments—the loss of his “untrammelled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue … the baffling mirror, the black-velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions.” Nabokov himself, however, is unwilling to acknowledge that the freshness of viewpoint and language that we notice results in any major way from his using a language other than his native one. “My Russian novels,” he said, “were just as far from the cliché.”
Nabokov’s position as a specifically American writer has a curious ambivalence about it. One critic, for example, has said of Lolita that it has “a style, an individuality, a brilliance which may yet create a tradition in American letters”—a strange notion by any standards and significant only in its expression of the need felt in America for a “tradition.” Nevertheless, Nabokov’s treatment of a concern which seems to preoccupy many American novelists at the moment is an interesting one. This concern has been defined by at least one English critic as an unfortunate obsession with the nervous system. “It becomes,” one critic has written, “a matter of nerves rather than of a finer and more rigorous perception.” This might conceivably make sense when applied to, let us say, a novel of Jack Kerouac. The Subterraneans, for example, begins with the statement: “Once I was young and had so much more orientation and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without so much literary preambling as this …” And the irony which may be evident here disappears as the novel advances; the interest is centered firmly in the protagonist’s nervous system. Nabokov’s own creation, Humbert, is certainly, by most people’s definition, neurotic. He twists, he turns, he shouts, he cries, he addresses his remarks in the course of the novel at a jury, at a doctor, at the reader, at “folks” in general. But the interest in Lolita is not restricted to Humbert’s nervous twitches. One often feels the pressure of his neuroticism, but there are also sections of the book where one is kept at an intentional distance from Humbert. One views his obsession in all its grotesqueness. It is in insuring this that Nabokov seems to me to differ from most American writers at the moment. In most novels we are invited to suffer and sympathize with the protagonist—perhaps because the novelist is afraid to relax his grasp even for a moment on the reader.
This liberation from Humbert’s neurotic viewpoint (which is paradoxically achieved by giving him many viewpoints) evokes in the reader the final emotion Nabokov says he should experience.
“For me a work of fiction exists only in so far as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss; that is, a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorky, at Mann.”
In our conversation Nabokov took a crack at a few more writers. I suggested that different periods seemed to me to call for different interests on the part of the writer and that there might be a period in which moral problems were especially relevant. Rashly, I hazarded the eighteenth century and mentioned Richardson. “A third-rate writer,” Nabokov retorted. “Such frigidity.” Pleased with the word, he repeated it several times, making it sound very chilling. “But there was Sterne,” he added. “Sterne was a firstrate writer.”
The instantaneous vision, the immediate which is also timeless—this is what interests Nabokov and makes him contemptuous of the social and didactic writer. The problem is, how to express the instantaneous vision in a sequence of words. I asked if he had tried to do this in Lolita by breaking down the language and by the frequent use of phrases instead of sentences. Nabokov was skeptical. “I sometimes think one could best describe lightning in a long, elaborately built sentence,” he said, simulating the quality of lightning by gestures. “But one could also do it by using two words. Truth is what matters, isn’t it?” There was a pause; and then, as often after a pause, Nabokov began talking about Russian writers. “Gorky,” he said, “once wrote: ‘The sea is laughing.’ But then Gorky was a bad writer. As Chekhov commented
, the only thing you can say about the sea is: ‘The sea is big.’”
However achieved, this attempt to communicate a sense of the instantaneous vision and to leave the reader with a single impression is something which, Nabokov feels, calls for peculiarly sensitive reading, as well as writing. “You see,” he said, “you cannot read a novel (there is all the physical effort of moving the eye from left to right—of turning over all the pages). No, you can only reread a novel. Or re-reread a novel.” We arrive at a single impression, it seems, by increasingly refining our separate impressions. Such an approach to reading a novel is obviously open to attack, but it is closely connected with Nabokov’s own achievement as a novelist. One isn’t asked to identify oneself with any of the characters in a novel; this, Nabokov says, is “a low pleasure—one for minor readers (you see, there must be minor readers because there are minor writers).” No, the good reader maintains a delicately suspended attitude: “He takes pleasure in his aloofness and yet enjoys the shivers along the spine and the tears …” With most novels, this can be achieved by rereading. But it seems to me that with Nabokov’s own work the changing focus ensures that a first reading is of this nature.
Nabokov enjoys talking about literature and he communicates this enjoyment in his university lectures on selected European novels as well as in his conversation. There are periods in a lecture when it is fortunately quite impossible for anyone to take notes. It is enough simply to sit back and follow the flow of imagery, the sudden changes in direction; to listen to controlled talk of shivers, enchantment, semicolons, passion and patience, patience and passion … and to stories of the birth of literature: “It was not,” Nabokov says, “when a boy saw an animal in a clearing and said: ‘That is a wolf.’ That was not the birth of literature. It was when a boy cried: ‘Wolf … wolf … wolf.’ And there was no wolf. That was the Birth of Literature.” In the early stages of the term his pupils may be a little uncertain about the tone of a remark. When he says: “Consider these eight sorts of readers”; the heads bow to their notebooks and an expectant list of figures is outlined in the margin. But soon the heads are raised and the faces have mystified expressions. For Nabokov has continued: “There is the reader who belongs to a book club. The reader who has seen the movie of the book he is reading. The budding-author-reader. The reader who approaches everything from the social and economic angle. The reader who has a dictionary. The reader with artistic sense. The reader with imagination. The reader with memory.”
Which are the good readers, he will ask. Why, the last four, of course. (A good dictionary is very important; “buy a dictionary the size of an elephant,” he urges his class.) Once again, one is made aware of Nabokov’s attitude to the reader and, with his university audience as with his reader, he creates the mood and attitude by which he can be understood and enjoyed. “The jaws stop chewing gum and the spine starts to shiver,” as one coed put it. “You stop taking notes and actually listen.” Nabokov, at any rate, is stimulating and original in everything he does. His occupation as a professional lepidopterist has even led to his discovering several previously unknown species of butterflies.
The Man Who Scandalized the World
Helen Lawrenson / 1960
From Esquire, August, 1960. © Johanna Lawrenson, Estate of Helen Lawrenson. Reprinted by permission.
One of the more diverting aspects of Lolita, the most controversial bestseller of the century, has been the considerable speculative curiosity about the private life and personality of Vladimir Nabokov, the virtually unknown university professor who now, at the age of sixty-one, finds himself world famous as the author of this nettlesome novel. The book, denounced in the British Parliament and formerly banned in France, has sold, midst a cacophonic medley of rapturous encomium and emetic distaste, an estimated three million copies in the United States, has been translated into fifteen foreign languages, including the Japanese, and is now, incredibly enough, being made into a Hollywood movie.
What manner of man is it whose mind could conceive a book like this? Among the wildly disparate views of the critics (“a great book,” “a distinguished book,” “the filthiest book I have ever read,” “exquisitely distilled sewage,” “the funniest book I have ever read,” “a sad book,” “undoubtedly one of the great comic novels of all time,” “dull, dull, dull”) there has been one point of unanimity: the subject matter is abnormal and decadent. J. Donald Adams, contributing editor of The New York Times Sunday book review section, who found the novel revolting but not pornographic, wrote that he was reminded of John Randolph’s excoriation of Edward Livingston: “He is a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. He shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight.”
By all rights, Nabokov could turn out to be in real life either a sort of priapic pundit with a frosty contempt for the homely virtues or a demoniac neurotic whose past history reveals a flair for the cruel and the shocking. He seems to be neither. Nor is he merely a merry grig with a peculiarly audacious imagination. Instead, he appears as a disarmingly pleasant and serene man whose personal life has been untouched by even a wisp of scandal. He is a loving and proud father, a faithful husband who leads a snugly domestic Darby-and-Joan existence with his wife—to whom he has been married for thirty-five years—and a gentleman scholar of simple, quiet tastes, whose wildest pleasure is chasing butterflies.
When I met him, he was staying with Mrs. Nabokov in a small residence hotel on the upper west side of Manhattan, comfortable but far from chic. More good-looking than his photographs indicate, he is a tall, well-built man with a strong nose, quizzical eyes, a dimple in his chin, and quite a resemblance to George Sanders, the movie star. One of his professorial colleagues has told me that when Nabokov first joined the Cornell University faculty in 1948, he was “an incredibly handsome man.” He must have been very attractive to women all his life, and still is, I imagine. There is no evidence, however, that he has availed himself of this attribute. His devotion to his wife, Véra, is something of a legend among their friends and is apparent even to the casual interviewer. Mrs. Nabokov is a slender woman with delicate wrists and ankles, snow-white hair worn unwaved in a cropped bob, an aquiline nose, and the bluest blue eyes I have ever seen. Her manner toward her husband is at once protective and admiring, tender and respectful—but no more so than is his toward her. One gets the feeling, almost immediately, of an unusual relationship.
During the interview, I found the Nabokovs friendly, charming and courteous. There was a cheerful unpretentiousness about them. They called each other “darling,” and seemed delighted to talk about their son, Dmitri, an only child, now a tall, handsome young man of twenty-five, who graduated from Harvard with honors. His ambition is to be an opera singer—he is a basso profundo—and his parents were planning to send him to study in Italy, going along themselves in order to be near him. With obvious parental pride, they told me about his proficiency in sports-car racing, tennis, waterskiing, mountain climbing—“He has led several climbing expeditions. We would encourage him, but then we would sit home and worry and wait and wait and wait!”—and the time when, on a youthful spree, he drove a pink hearse from Cambridge to Mexico in two days. (“You should have seen Nabokov when his boy was a child,” says a friend. “He was the most doting father in the world and bored everyone to death.”)
Our whole conversation was of such an innocent, sunshiny, wholesome nature that I hesitated even to bring up a subject like Lolita. I needn’t have. Both Nabokov and his wife reject with well-bred amusement any hint that they or their son or their professorial friends could regard the book with anything but proud delight and fond admiration. Between them, they manage to give the impression that anyone who would be so uncouth as to question Lolita’s value is indeed a yahoo and beneath civilized notice. In fact, said Nabokov, after the novel’s publication and the ensuing hullabaloo, he was even invited to address the woman’s auxiliary of the local Presbyterian Church in Ithaca, and he has received a whole slew of offers to lectur
e and teach, including one to give a course at the University of California in Berkeley. As to the situation at Cornell, he commented that not only the faculty but also the trustees and the students “were all quite interested in the book and its success,” which seems to me to have the earmarks of an understatement.
Mrs. Nabokov serves as her husband’s secretary and business manager. She writes his letters, makes his telephone calls for him, cuts out clippings about him and pastes them in scrapbooks, drives his car for him, keeps house and cooks for him, and even cuts his hair. During his tenure at Cornell, she went to class with him every day, sat on the platform while he lectured, cleaned the blackboard, collected the test papers, and, on occasion, gave his lectures for him when he was sick. After school, from three-thirty to five, they would go for a walk together, side by side, rain or shine. During summer vacations, for ten years, she chauffeured him around the western United States to pursue his scientific passion for butterfly chasing.
This idyllic domestic picture, with its almost folksy touches, is verified by their friends. No one, apparently, has ever seen them quarrel. The wife of one professor told me of an evening spent with the Nabokovs at the home of a third professor. During the evening, the host professor got in a snit at his wife and bawled her out in front of the guests. To assuage her embarrassment, the other wife said tactfully that her own husband often flew off the handle like that and she guessed all husbands were alike. “No,” said Mrs. Nabokov calmly, “Vladimir isn’t. Perhaps it is because when we were very poor in Paris I supported him by working as a milliner, and he has always been so grateful that he never gets angry at me.”
Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov Page 7