I loved Grammy and Papa Joe separately. Divorce, however sanctioned by their broader culture, did not represent an option in their particular world. Unlike Hal and Nettie Huxley, I’m not at all sure that they would have done it again. But they stuck together and prevailed, at least in peace, respect, and toleration, perhaps even in fondness. Had they not done so, I would not be here—and for this particular twig of evolutionary continuity I could not be more profoundly grateful in the most ultimate of all conceivable ways. I also loved them fiercely, and I reveled in the absolute certainty of their unquestioned blessing and unvarying support (not always deserved of course, for I really did throw that rock at Harvey, even though Grammy slammed our front door on Harvey’s father, after delivering a volley of Yiddish curses amid proclamations that her Stevele would never do such a thing—while knowing perfectly well that I surely could).
The tree of all life and the genealogy of each family share the same topology and the same secret of success in blending two apparently contradictory themes of continuity without a single hair’s breadth of breakage, and change without a moment’s loss of a potential that need not be exploited in all episodes but must remain forever at the ready. These properties may seem minimal, even derisory, in a universe of such stunning complexity (whatever its inexplicable eternity or infinity). But this very complexity exalts pure staying power (and the lability that facilitates such continuity). Showy statues of Ozymandias quickly become lifeless legs in the desert; bacteria have scuttled around all the slings and arrows of outrageous planetary fortune for 3.5 billion years and running.
I believe in the grandeur of this view of life, the continuity of family lines, and the poignancy of our stories: Nettie Heathorn passing Tasso’s torch as Granmoo two generations later; Papa Joe’s ungrammatical landing as a stranger in a strange land and my prayer that, in some sense, he might see my work as a worthy continuation, also two generations later, of a hope that he fulfilled in a different way during his own lifetime. I suspect that we feel the poignancy in such continuity because we know that our little realization of an unstated family promise somehow mirrors the larger way of all life, and therefore becomes “right” in some sense too deep for words or tears. I can therefore write the final essay in this particular series because I know that I will never run out of unkept promises, or miles to walk; and that I may even continue to sprinkle the journey remaining before sleep with a new idea or two. This view of life continues, flowing ever forward, while the current patriarch of one tiny and insignificant twig pauses to honor the inception of the twig’s centennial in a new land, by commemorating the first recorded words of a fourteen-year-old forebear.
Grammy and Papa Joe, soon after their wedding, circa 1915.
Dear Papa Joe, I have been faithful to your dream of persistence, and attentive to a hope that the increments of each worthy generation may buttress the continuity of evolution. You could speak those wondrous words right at the joy and terror of inception. I dared not repeat them until I could fulfill my own childhood dream—something that once seemed so mysteriously beyond any hope of realization to an insecure little boy in a garden apartment in Queens—to become a scientist and to make, by my own effort, even the tiniest addition to human knowledge of evolution and the history of life. But now, with my step 300, so fortuitously coincident with the world’s new 1,000 and your own 100,3 perhaps I have finally won the right to restate your noble words, and to tell you that their inspiration still lights my journey: I have landed. But I also can’t help wondering what comes next!
II
Disciplinary Connections: Scientific Slouching Across a Misconceived Divide
2
No Science Without Fancy, No Art Without Facts: The Lepidoptery of Vladimir Nabokov
The Paradox of Intellectual Promiscuity
NO ONE EVER ACCUSED FRANCIS BACON OF MODESTY, BUT when England’s lord chancellor proclaimed his “great instauration” of human understanding and vowed to take all knowledge as his province, the stated goal did not seem ludicrously beyond the time and competence of a great thinker in Shakespeare’s age. But as knowledge exploded, and then fragmented into disciplines with increasingly rigid and self-policed boundaries, the restless scholar who tried to operate in more than one domain became an object of suspicion—either a boastful pretender across the board (“jack of all and master of none,” in the old cliché), or a troublesome dilettante in an alien domain, attempting to impose the methods of his genuine expertise upon inappropriate subjects in a different world.
We tend toward benign toleration when great thinkers and artists pursue disparate activities as a harmless hobby, robbing little time from their fundamental achievements. Goethe (and Churchill, and many others) may have been lousy Sunday painters, but Faust and Werther suffered no neglect thereby. Einstein (or so I have heard from people with direct experience) was an indifferent violinist, but his avocation fiddled little time away from physics.
However, we grieve when we sense that a subsidiary interest stole precious items from a primary enterprise of great value. Dorothy Sayers’s later theological writings may please aficionados of religion, but most of her devout fans would have preferred a few more detective novels featuring the truly inimitable Lord Peter Wimsey. Charles Ives helped many folks by selling insurance, and Isaac Newton must have figured out a thing or two by analyzing the prophetic texts of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation—but, all in all, a little more music or mathematics might have conferred greater benefit upon humanity.
Therefore, when we recognize that a secondary passion took substantial time from a primary source of fame, we try to assuage our grief over lost novels, symphonies, or discoveries by convincing ourselves that a hero’s subsidiary love must have informed or enriched his primary activity—in other words, that the loss in quantity might be recompensed by a gain in quality. But such arguments may be very difficult to formulate or sustain. In what sense did Paderewski become a better pianist by serving as prime minister of Poland (or a better politician by playing his countryman Chopin)? How did a former career in major-league baseball improve (if we give a damn, in this case) Billy Sunday’s evangelical style as a stump preacher? (He sometimes began sermons—I am not making this up—by sliding into the podium as an entering gesture.)
No modern genius has inspired more commentary in this mode than Vladimir Nabokov, whose “other” career as a taxonomist of butterflies has inspired as much prose in secondary criticism as Nabokov ever lavished upon Ada, Lolita, and all his other characters combined. In this case in particular—because Nabokov was no dilettante spending a few harmless Sunday hours in the woods with his butterfly net, but a serious scientist with a long list of publications and a substantial career in entomology—we crave some linkage between his two lives, some way to say to ourselves, “We may have lost several novels, but Nabokov spent his entomological time well, developing a vision and approach that illuminated, or even transformed, his literary work.” (Of course, speaking parochially, professional taxonomists, including the author of this essay, might regret even more the loss of several monographs implied by Nabokov’s novels!)
To allay any remaining suspicions among the literati, let me assure all readers about a consensus in my professional community: Nabokov was no amateur (in the pejorative sense of the term), but a fully qualified, clearly talented, duly employed professional taxonomist, with recognized “world class” expertise in the biology and classification of a major group, the Latin American Polyommatini, popularly known to butterfly aficionados as “blues.”
No passion burned longer, or more deeply, in Nabokov’s life than his love for the natural history and taxonomy of butterflies. He began in early childhood, encouraged by a traditional interest in natural history among the upper-class intelligentsia of Russia (not to mention the attendant economic advantages of time, resources, and opportunity). Nabokov stated in a 1962 interview (Zimmer, page 216): “One of the first things I ever wrote in English was a paper on Lepidoptera I pr
epared at age twelve. It wasn’t published because a butterfly I described had been described by someone else.” Invoking a lovely entomological metaphor in a 1966 interview, Nabokov spoke of childhood fascination, continuous enthusiasm throughout life, and regret that political realities had precluded even more work on butterflies (Zimmer, page 216):
But I also intend to collect butterflies in Peru or Iran before I pupate. . . . Had the Revolution not happened the way it happened, I would have enjoyed a landed gentleman’s leisure, no doubt, but I also think that my entomological occupations would have been more engrossing and energetic and that I would have gone on long collecting trips to Asia. I would have had a private museum.
Nabokov published more than a dozen technical papers on the taxonomy and natural history of butterflies, mostly during his six years of full employment as Research Fellow (and unofficial curator) in Lepidoptery at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, where he occupied an office three floors above the laboratory that has been my principal scientific home for thirty years. (I arrived twenty years after Nabokov’s departure and never had the pleasure of meeting him, although my knowledge of his former presence has always made this venerable institution, built by Louis Agassiz in 1859 and later tenanted by several of the foremost natural historians in America, seem even more special.)
Nabokov worked for Harvard, at a modest yearly salary of about one thousand dollars, between 1942 and 1948, when he accepted a teaching post in literature at Cornell University. He was a respected and recognized professional in his chosen field of entomological systematics. The reasons often given for attributing to Nabokov either an amateur, or even only a dilettante’s, status arise from simple ignorance of accepted definitions for professionalism in this field.
First, many leading experts in various groups of organisms have always been “amateurs” in the admirable and literal (as opposed to the opposite and pejorative) sense that their love for the subject has inspired their unparalleled knowledge, and that they do not receive adequate (or any) pay for their work. (Taxonomy is not as expensive, or as laboratory-driven, as many scientific fields. Careful and dedicated local observation from childhood, combined with diligence in reading and study, can supply all the needed tools for full expertise.)
Second, poorly remunerated and inadequately titled (but full-time) employment has, unfortunately, always been de rigueur in this field. The fact that Nabokov worked for little pay, and with the vague title Research Fellow, rather than a professorial (or even a curatorial) appointment, does not imply nonprofessional status. When I took my position at the same museum in 1968, several heads of collections, recognized as world’s experts with copious publications, worked as “volunteers” for the symbolic “dollar a year” that gave them official status on the Harvard payroll.
Third, and most important, I do not argue that all duly employed taxonomists can claim enduring expertise and righteous status. Every field includes some clunkers and nitwits, even in high positions! I am not, myself, a professional entomologist (I work on snails among the Mollusca), and therefore cannot judge Nabokov’s credentials on this crucial and final point. But leading taxonomic experts in the large and complex group of “blues” among the butterflies testify to the excellence of his work, and grant him the ultimate accolade of honor within the profession by praising his “good eye” for recognizing the (often subtle) distinctions that mark species and other natural groups of organisms (see the bibliography to this essay for two articles by leading butterfly taxonomists: Remington; and Johnson, Whitaker, and Balint). In fact, as many scholars have stated, before Nabokov achieved a conventional form of literary success with the publication of Lolita, he could have been identified (by conventional criteria of money earned and time spent) as a professional lepidopterist and amateur author!
In conjunction with this collegial testimony, we must also note Nabokov’s own continual (and beautifully stated) affirmation of his love and devotion to all aspects of a professional lepidopterist’s life. On the joys of fieldwork and collecting, he effuses in a letter to Edmund Wilson in 1942 (quoted in Zimmer, page 30): “Try, Bunny, it is the noblest sport in the world.” Of the tasks traditionally deemed more dull and trying—the daily grind of the laboratory and microscope—he waxed with equal ardor in a letter to his sister in 1945, in the midst of his Harvard employment (in Zimmer, page 29):
My laboratory occupies half of the fourth floor. Most of it is taken up by rows of cabinets, containing sliding cases of butterflies. I am custodian of these absolutely fabulous collections. We have butterflies from all over the world. . . . Along the windows extend tables holding my microscopes, test tubes, acids, papers, pins, etc. I have an assistant, whose main task is spreading specimens sent by collectors. I work on my personal research . . . a study of the classification of American “blues” based on the structure of their genitalia (minuscule sculpturesque hooks, teeth, spurs, etc., visible only under the microscope), which I sketch in with the aid of various marvelous devices, variants of the magic lantern. . . . My work enraptures but utterly exhausts me. . . . To know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena—all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it.
Nabokov worked so long and so intensely in grueling and detailed observation of tiny bits of insect anatomy that his eyesight became permanently compromised—thus placing him in the company of several of history’s most famous entomologists, especially Charles Bonnet in the eighteenth century and August Weismann in the nineteenth, who sacrificed their sight to years of eye-straining work. In a television interview in 1971, Nabokov stated (Zimmer, page 29):
Most of my work was devoted to the classification of certain small blue butterflies on the basis of their male genitalic structure. These studies required the constant use of a microscope, and since I devoted up to six hours daily to this kind of research my eyesight was impaired forever; but on the other hand, the years at the Harvard Museum remain the most delightful and thrilling in all my adult life.
Nonetheless, and as a touching, final testimony to his love and dedication to entomology, Nabokov stated in a 1975 interview (Zimmer, page 218) that his enthusiasm would still pull him inexorably in (“like a moth to light” one is tempted to intone) if he ever allowed impulse to vanquish bodily reality:
Since my years at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Harvard, I have not touched a microscope, knowing that if I did, I would drown again in its bright well. Thus I have not, and probably never shall, accomplish the greater part of the entrancing research work I had imagined in my young mirages.
Thus, in conclusion to this section, we cannot adopt the first solution to “the paradox of intellectual promiscuity” by arguing that Nabokov’s lepidoptery represents only the harmless diversion of an amateur hobbyist, ultimately stealing no time that he might realistically have spent writing more novels. Nabokov loved his butterflies as much as his literature. He worked for years as a fully professional taxonomist, publishing more than a dozen papers that have stood the test of substantial time.
Can we therefore invoke the second solution by arguing that time lost to literature for the sake of lepidoptery nonetheless enhanced his novels, or at least distinguished his writing with a brand of uniqueness? I will eventually suggest a positive answer, but by an unconventional argument that exposes the entire inquiry as falsely parsed. I must first, however, show that the two most popular versions of this “second solution” cannot be defended, and that the paradox of intellectual promiscuity must itself be rejected and identified as an impediment to proper understanding of the relationships between art and science.
Two False Solutions to a Nonproblem
In surveying commentaries written by literary scholars and critics about Nabokov’s work on butterflies, I have been struck by their n
early universal adherence to either of two solutions for the following supposed conundrum: Why did one of the greatest writers of our century spend so much time working and publishing in a markedly different domain of such limited interest to most of the literate public?
The Argument for Equal Impact
In this first solution, Nabokov’s literary fans may bemoan their losses (just as any lover of music must lament the early deaths of Mozart and Schubert). Still, in seeking some explanation for legitimate grief, we may find solace in claiming that Nabokov’s transcendent genius permitted him to make as uniquely innovative and distinctive a contribution to lepidoptery as to literature. However much we may wish that he had chosen a different distribution for his time, we can at least, with appropriate generosity, grant his equal impact and benefit upon natural history. Adherents to this solution have therefore tried to develop arguments for regarding Nabokov’s lepidoptery as specially informed by his general genius, and as possessing great transforming power for natural history.
But none of these claims can be granted even a whisper of plausibility by biologists who know the history of taxonomic practice and evolutionary theory. Nabokov, as documented above, was a fully professional and highly competent taxonomic specialist on an important group of butterflies—and for this fine work he gains nothing but honor in my world. However, no natural historian has ever viewed Nabokov as an innovator, or as an inhabitant of what humanists call the “vanguard” (not to mention the avant-garde) and scientists the “cutting edge.” Nabokov may have been a major general of literature, but he can only be ranked as a trustworthy, highly trained career infantryman in natural history.
I Have Landed Page 4