Nabokov in America

by Robert Roper

  For Bill Pearson of Mississippi:

  in whom the literature

  enduringly dwells

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Credits

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  The slender Russian man is on vacation. He has an arrogantly beautiful face and an oddly tall little boy accompanying him as he stalks up and down a trout stream in the Wasatch Range, a few miles east of Salt Lake City, Utah. They deploy butterfly nets. “I walk from 12 to 18 miles1 per day,” he writes in a letter mailed around July 15, 1943, “wearing only shorts and tennis shoes … always a cold wind blowing in this particular cañon. Dmitri has a great time catching butterflies and gophers and building dams.”

  The Allies have landed in Sicily. Himmler has ordered the liquidation of the Polish ghettos. The writer Vladimir Nabokov, meanwhile, concerns himself with Lycaeides melissa annetta, a pretty little shimmery butterfly. He finds specimens “on both sides2 of the Little Cottonwood River, between 8,500–9,000 ft. alt… . its habitat … characterized by clumps of Douglas fir, ant-heaps … and an abundant growth of Lupinus parviflorus Nuttall,” a pale local lupine.

  The novelist out chasing insects—the signature image of Nabokov in America—came to beguile millions. “A man without pants3 and shirt” was how a local teenager, John Downey, saw him that summer when he encountered Nabokov on the Cottonwood Canyon road. He was “dang near nude,” and when Downey asked the stranger what he was up to, Nabokov refused to explain at first.

  He was forty-four. That November he would have his two front teeth removed, the rest soon following. (“My tongue is like4 someone who comes home and finds all his furniture gone.”) He was balding and narrow-chested, a heavy smoker. For twenty years before his arrival, he had been living on an edge—he was an artist, after all, and deprivation went with the territory. His wife, Véra Evseevna, worked odd jobs to help support them, and neither of them had ever been much for cooking or packing on the pounds.

  The Nabokovs had been through the historical wringer. They were Zelig-like figures of twentieth-century catastrophe, dispossessed of their native Russia by the Bolsheviks, hair’s-breadth escapees of the Nazis in Berlin and Paris, “little” people with a monstrous evil breathing down their necks. Had they been in Russia that summer of ’43, they might have been among the thousands starving to death during the Siege of Leningrad, the most murderous blockade in world history; had they been in France5, which they’d escaped at the last moment, on the last French ship for New York, Véra, who was Jewish, and their young son would likely have been destined for Drancy, the French internment camp that fed Auschwitz-Birkenau.

  Instead, melissa annetta. Days of hiking in the sun. In Utah there was no cholera, nor was there mass starvation. Although a first impression is of a delicious absurdity—the supercilious Nabokov among the marmots and Mormons—the outdoors had always thrilled him, and America had beckoned to him all his life. He was unlike other desperate European immigrants of the war years, who tended to huddle in anxious enclaves in New York (unless they were artists with connections, in which case they headed straight for Hollywood). Saul Steinberg’s 1976 map of the United States, showing the three thousand miles between the Hudson and the Pacific as a tan patch with rocks, surely resembles the mental maps of many émigrés. Out west were the uncultured, the isolationist, the anti-Semitic, the proto-fascist. The stories of American boorishness and proud ignorance, which fed enduring suspicions of American society, were the common inheritance of many educated Europeans. Nabokov knew all that, and he yielded to no man in his savoring of American foolishness. That he, the beneficiary of a superb Old World education, fluent on the most rarefied levels in three languages, the creation, culturally and intellectually, of doting, brilliant parents with advanced ideas and money, should have found himself among the cowboys and religious lunatics was surely a joke of fate.

  Invited to teach for a summer at Stanford, he did not hurry cross-country by train but instead took nineteen leisurely days, chauffeured across by an American friend with a Pontiac. The journey was “wondrous6,” Véra wrote in a letter, and Vladimir told Edmund Wilson, another new American friend, “During our motor-car7 trip across several states (all of them beauties) I frantically collected butterflies.”

  In his forties Nabokov was still stubbornly youthful. Despite the dentures and the tubercular look, he was physically vigorous, youthful also in the sense of being deeply enamored of himself, like an eight-year-old who scribbles his name over and over on a schoolbook page. This egoistic vitality, which others often found hard to take, helps explain a strange fact in his résumé. During his twenty years in America, he traveled upward of 200,000 miles by car, much of it in the high-mountain West, on vacations organized around insect collecting. Véra and Dmitri were swept along in this outdoor enthusiasm; they were good sports about it, although Dmitri, as he got older, took care never to be seen in public waving a net. (No photos of him so equipped survive beyond age seven.)

  Two hundred thousand miles by car. Divide this total by thirteen, the number of years in which the family took wide-ranging trips, adjust for Véra doing all the driving (until Dmitri was old enough to spell her), factor in Vladimir in the passenger seat checking maps or making the odd note on a four-by-six card, and you arrive at something like a coefficient of deep happiness. The Nabokovs got along, and their days were blessed with a simple purpose: they got here from there, staying at motor courts that cost a dollar or two a night, in towns so patly, Americanly themselves that a visitor had to smile. Nabokov’s descriptions of these trips, in letters to Wilson and others, are glowing but reticent. He talks about getting a tan, about the specimens he’s finding, and leaves it at that. Deep happiness does not conduce to writing about itself. Meanwhile, he pursued other matters: the composition of parts of several books, among them the biography Nikolai Gogol, the memoir Conclusive Evidence (later called Speak, Memory), the novels Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire, and his multivolume annotated translation of Pushkin’s novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin. He was a professional, always with projects in the works, and why not write while on the road? Writing was another pleasure.

  In these postwar years, the nation as a whole was enamored of the West, seeking reflections of itself in tales of cowpokes and pioneers. Western movies had long been popular, but now they were over the moon. The car vacation achieved a sort of consummation in the same period, and the motor court (or, to use the racy new parlance, the motel) was becoming ubiquitous. New roads were being built and old ones resurfaced; the Interstate Highway System, begun in ’56, at its completion the largest public works project in the history of the world, was but the capstone of a phenomenal outburst of American grading and paving. The cars of the fifties were better, people had money in their pockets, the United States had just won the big war: what better time to drive to Yellowstone?

  American Literature—a second-rate affair in Nabokov’s eyes, although not without interest—reflected all this vagabonding. There is a countercurrent in our homegrown literature, one that runs athwart the mainstream of worthy novels of social complexity—works by Hawthorne, Howells, James, Cather, Dreiser, et al.—and in the period of Nabokov’s emergence
this countercurrent became reinvigorated. The tradition went back to Walt Whitman, Walt being the Mother Poet of us all, the first American writer to put on slouch hat and sturdy boots and set forth on the open road, in self-conscious impersonation of a vagabond. Henry Miller, a connoisseur not of American locales but of seedy European ones, set forth in the 1930s. The Beats also were wandering and feverishly writing just as Nabokov, fresh off the boat, with his high-modernist bona fides proudly on display, slipped quietly into the American stream.

  Yet another part of our home tradition—our rough collection of amusing tall tales, with a few works of unaccountable brilliance glittering among the dross—also gathers in Nabokov. This is that part that begins with Captain John Smith and continues through William Bartram and Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur to Audubon, Emerson, Thoreau, John Muir, John Burroughs, and many modern practitioners, the tradition of itinerant semi-scientific naturalists. Possibly the most revealing resemblance to which Nabokov, who hated to be compared to anyone, can be recruited is to Muir, the father of American conservation, whose breakthrough reimagining of how glaciers shape landscapes predicts Nabokov’s splendid scientific reordering of the Polyommatini, the tribe of Blue butterflies. Nabokov’s prolific tramping8 of forests and meadows in what he came to call his “native West” finds an answer in Muir’s thousands of miles walked hither and thither. Both loved the high-mountain zones best. Both were Darwinists who dissented from orthodoxy, sounding like mystical intelligent-designers at times. Muir was probably the last orthodox Transcendentalist, believing, as Emerson had taught him, that “every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact”; Nabokov, too, was spiritualistic, in part a believer in ghostly forces that infiltrate our fallen mundane world.

  But to return to that summer day on the Cottonwood Canyon road. John Downey, the boy who asked him what he was up to, already knew: Downey was a collector himself, and later he would become a distinguished entomologist. In an audio recording he made late in life, he said,

  Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah

  I continued the one-sided conversation9. “I’m a collector too!” This got a millisecond glance, and one raised eyebrow … but still no sound from him, nor slowing of his pace as he continued down-canyon. Finally, a nymphalid, as I recall, flitted across the road. “What’s that?” he asked. I gave him the scientific name as best I could remember, not having used the terms before with obvious professionals, and fresh out of Holland’s Butterfly Book. His pace didn’t slacken, but an eyebrow stayed higher a little longer this time. Yet another butterfly crossed the road. “What’s that?” says he. I gave him a name, a little less sure of myself now… . “Hm!” was his only response. A third test specimen crossed his vision… . I gave him my best idea and to my surprise he stopped, put out his arm, and said, “Hello! I’m Vladimir Nabokov.” And thus we met.

  What we see here is the formidable, the often remote and condescending, Nabokov making a new friend. Downey was not the first of his many butterfly friends; one of his first stops off the boat from France was at the American Museum of Natural History, on Central Park West at Seventy-ninth Street, where he introduced himself to the staff and immediately charmed them. Nabokov’s life for the previous twenty years had been fellow-collector-starved; he had been busy eking out a living, unable to arrange many trips in the field or even to museums. Meanwhile he had read widely in the scientific literature and was eager to visit legendary American sites of collection. People like William P. Comstock, a museum research assistant, were doing work he respected, and just as important, the AMNH staff was a cohort of devotees as eager as he was to get out into the field. They spoke his native language—not Russian, taxonomic Latin—and his boyish pleasure when on the hunt or when looking at butterflies under a microscope made perfect sense to them.

  Here we see Nabokov fulfilling another prophecy out of original American writ. It holds that upon these shores will be founded a new relation among men, democratic, frank, noneffete. Though not much of a reader of Whitman10, he fulfilled Walt’s injunction to befriend ordinary folk, to take rough comrades to one’s bosom. Academic entomologists are not New York workmen circa 1855, nor are they the Civil War soldiers whom Whitman nursed, but they are real Americans, people imbued with a praxis. They do things in the world, they travel and get dirty. For Nabokov they became devoted friends.

  I came to Nabokov young, and I have remained a reader for fifty years. The excellence of some of his books moves me—I like especially the ones written while he lived in the United States, in what the biographers call his “American period,” 1940 to 1960. During a visit to an archive of historical documents some years ago I found myself seated across the table from an older gentleman who kept chuckling as he read a batch of old letters; when he left for lunch, I peeked and, wouldn’t you know it, they were letters of Nabokov. But that’s what I want to be reading, I realized, suddenly disenchanted with my Civil War manuscripts. Those letters should be on my side of the table.

  I traveled several thousand miles in the East and West, looking for his traces, trying to nail down details of where he’d stayed, what he’d seen, who he’d befriended, which mountains he’d climbed. In Afton, Wyoming, I found his favorite motel from the summer of ’52, pretty much unchanged, and on the border of Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, I found the rustic lodge where Véra and he had rented a cabin—the structure still stands, though now disused. I don’t claim to be the first fan to have put hand to forehead and face to dusty window pane and peered inside. There he is, his figment, his ghost—still it walks these cracked floorboards, still it lies down at night on one of those broken cots.

  Going where Nabokov had been and seeing what he’d seen did not, in the end, add much to my research. More profitable was to sit in a chair for a couple of years and reread his books, making forays meanwhile into the critical literature that has toadstooled up around the magnificent two-trunked Russian birch that the writer once was. About this literature I have a couple of things to say. One: it is very well written by the standards of the academy, graced with clarity and humor and intellectual honesty—this is the more miraculous considering that the first studies of Nabokov came into being just as critical theory was subduing one university English department after another. Those men and women who chose to write about Nabokov were, in the style of their subject, practitioners of elegant expression, instinctual haters of jargon, and their work, lacking many of the markers of the 1970s au courant, remains readable today.

  Two: the scholars of Nabokov, being scholars, rejoice in discovering what is recherché, and they bring as much stamina and rigor to their efforts as they can summon. Nabokov sets an affectionate trap for such readers, being of a pedantic turn of mind himself and having left behind a body of work as if designed for picking over. Nuggets of hidden reference are everywhere, if one looks a certain way. There is an ever-narrowing quality to the hunt sometimes, and a common reader such as me feels a quiet dismay: When will the fossicking be finished? Can we not get back to saying simpler, possibly more urgent, things about the great author?

  In a small way this book is an attempt to borrow Nabokov back from the scholars. The novelist himself put much effort into teaching ordinary Americans how to catch his devious sense.* Though often condescending, he was not the kind of literary artist to shy away from contact with the common herd, as long as the herd came to him on his own terms. In America he hoped to find a large readership, and unlike many innovative writers of the past century he was willing to think practically about how to go about getting it.

  I am deeply indebted, as a reader of this book will soon discover, to the Nabokovs’ excellent foundational biographers: Brian Boyd, author of Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990) and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991), and Stacy Schiff, author of the enchanting Véra (1999). Because these writers did such good jobs of re-creating the Nabokovs’ lives day to day I did not have to reinvent that wheel—did not, at some points, dare to.

 
; On a number of other matters I came to differ with both of them, however. (“Predictably enough,” a reader of second-generation biographies will wryly add.) The sheer flabbergasting Americanness of Nabokov’s transformation, the way he opened himself to local influences once here—and long before, when he was only dreaming of one day escaping to the United States—impressed itself upon me again and again. In the standard account, Nabokov makes the profound change of writing in English after decades of writing and publishing in Russian, and that’s enough—that’s intellectual upheaval, profound transformation, enough for anyone. In America, the standard account goes on, he looked around and with his impossibly sharp eye began to render what he saw, I Am a Camera fashion. I agree, but there was much more. His wide-ranging and semi-surreptitious immersion in American cultural materials, his assimilating of our literary traditions and bringing them to bear on his own modernist literary enterprise, struck me powerfully. No surprise, if you think of it: he was the kind of classical writer who moves forward by thinking of similarities, ingenious connections, to earlier authors and their works. He had done that when he wrote in Russian, generating his own stories out of a fabulously fertile grasp of older Slavic writers he loved (and some he loved only to make fun of), and he would do the same when he wrote in American English.

  Boyd and others are ready to admit that America represented an opening, a refreshing change, but the basic account holds that America was but one phase of an ongoing pageant of greatness. There were twenty years in Berlin and France, where he wrote marvelous books in Russian; then came twenty years in America, where he wrote books in English that were also marvelous; followed by nearly twenty in Switzerland, living in a five-star hotel, writing the incomparable late-career masterworks. To this I say: not quite. There is beauty and magic all over Nabokov’s body of work, but the claim to greatness rests most solidly on the American books. This is not just a function of his midcareer fame, of the fact that Lolita secured for him the vast readership he had long coveted. Lolita may be why millions of people still remember his name (although they tend to mispronounce it†), but his immersion in American life provoked changes far more significant than did, say, his encounters with German life in Berlin or his Swiss encounters in his last decades.