Nabokov in America

by Robert Roper

  He did not come to love Germany (Russians rarely do), and Switzerland was mostly a place of dignified refuge, a place to work and gather tribute. But he did love America—many things about vulgar, far-flung America. His embrace of it and his comfort with the changes it forced on him had something to do with all that joyous butterfly collecting, something also to do with being able to raise a healthy, promising child in America at midcentury. After the murderous nights of Europe, after Russia and Germany in their seizures of totalitarian madness, America was a place in which to breathe more easily, but—and here is the slight twist—he did not become complacent artistically. Instead he began to write with a new audacity, with, I would argue, an American-style effrontery.

  Nabokov’s American Period, that neat twenty-year interval, has become mythic. Penniless and without a secure language to write in at first, he became the most famous literary writer in English in the world, author of a sexy smash bestseller and of other works of great distinction. His early Russian novels began to be republished, in translations that he himself controlled, and soon he was declared an immortal, a giant on the order of Proust, Joyce, Kafka. Struggling writers everywhere took note. Even those without much taste for him admired the force of will, the sheer scintillating panache of him. If Nabokov could do it, then maybe they could, too.

  Maybe his style, so exacting and sesquipedalian, so larded with puns and learned references, was never really to the taste of the mainstream. To put it another way: maybe not all of his books are the deathless classics he announces them to be in the arrogant introductions he wrote to those English republications. Maybe Lolita continues to work like an Oklahoma tornado—to scandalize and amuse and horrify, while putting a creepy, horny claw on an American obsession with child rape that only he seems to have noticed. But maybe some of us can make it through life without having to reread Ada. Maybe Look at the Harlequins!, Transparent Things, Bend Sinister, Invitation to a Beheading, Despair—even long sections of The Gift, the Russian novel of which he was most proud—are less than compelling. He was always a forceful promoter of his own brand, and maybe we have been in some sense sold a bill of goods.

  No matter. The myth remains, and the books do, too, ever ready for rediscovery. The story of what he made of adversity is authentically inspiring, and parents of kids who love books should tell it at the hearth and the bedside, pointing out where a refusal to compromise high standards won through in the end (while an ability to politick, to find mentors, to take on new coloring, to borrow shamelessly and exhort tirelessly in one’s own behalf came in handy, too).

  The flight to America, with the nightmare of war closing upon his wake, was the great stroke of luck—but, as with everything else, it had long been prepared for. The real mystery is how he contrived to be taught to read English at age four, before he read Russian11; how he managed to have an American-style liberal constitutionalist for a father, who imbued him with Anglophilia and set him to dreaming about Anglophone lands. Wandering the parks of his family’s estate he was already imagining himself in a cowboys-and-Indians story, and from early on he was a hunter of wild game (mere butterflies, but wild game nonetheless), just like Hemingway up in Michigan or Faulkner in north-central Mississippi. Is it only in retrospect that he looks fully, if ironically, American? Or did he call a new America into being—a Lolitaesque, Nabokovian new land, layered with perplexities, rippling with edgy laughter—to ratify what he had known he would become?

  * The first book he wrote upon arriving, the exhaustingly insightful, eccentric literary biography Nikolai Gogol, is, as many have noticed, at least as much about how to read Nabokov as how to read the nineteenth-century Ukrainian author of Dead Souls and The Government Inspector. His savage attacks on fellow writers—Hemingway a joke, Faulkner a pompous fraud, etc.—were a related attempt to draw attention to himself and suggest a man in an overgrown field slashing this way and that, willing even to burn it down to clear his path.

  † Na-BO-kuf is the right way, although most English speakers, especially those exposed in their impressionable youth to the 1980 hit song “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” by the Police (which features the line “Just like the old man in that book by NAB-a-kof ”), happily persist in NAB-a-kof, which somehow comes easier to the English-speaking tongue.

  1.

  The American escape began way, way back for Nabokov, but that does not mean it was inevitable; and at a dangerous moment the writer who was also a husband and a father nearly threw it all away. In 1936, while they were living in Berlin, Véra insisted that Vladimir get out of the city, away from the Nazis; the couple had been trying to put together1 an exit since at least 1930, failing mostly for financial reasons, but now she wanted him out and in the relative safety of France. She would remain behind with their two-year-old son, tying up loose ends.

  Véra, if not the family’s principal breadwinner, then always essential to their survival, could no longer work. A job as translator for a Jewish-owned company making machinery had ended in spring ’35 when the German authorities expropriated the company and fired all its Jewish employees. Nabokov, writing at a great clip at the time—Glory, Camera Obscura, Despair, Invitation to a Beheading, and parts of The Gift were just some of his 1930s productions—was looking for a job of almost any kind in France or England. Nor was he “afraid of living2 in the American boondocks,” as he wrote to a professor acquaintance at Harvard. Not his Jewish wife but Vladimir himself was the one most under threat, the family believed: a man who meant the blackest of black evil to Nabokov, a Russian exile named Sergei Taboritsky—a fanatical Romanov partisan, Nazi stooge, and one of the two men who had attacked his father, V.D. Nabokov, fatally shooting him at a public meeting in 1922—had been appointed to the agency that monitored Russian exiles in Berlin. Nabokov was not a politician-journalist like his father, but the family name and its liberal associations were enough to put him on a fatal list—so Véra believed.

  As he had done the year before, Nabokov arranged to give readings in Brussels and Antwerp. Another event would follow in Paris, in early February, on the rue Las Cases; it would be a smash success, a joyous celebration—he had passionate fans in Paris, many of them women, some of whom delighted in quoting his poetry back to him. Though there were dissenting voices, V. Sirin—his nom de plume in the emigration (he was also known by his own name)—was acknowledged as a brilliant writer and possible heir to the tradition of Pushkin and Lermontov and Tolstoy and Chekhov. Those who dissented from this view included fellow writers, some of them his contemporaries, some his envious elders—for instance, Ivan Bunin, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in ’33, whose relations with the flash youngster were bantering but brittle, but in any case—to return to Paris early in ’37 was to be treated as a kind of hero, as the coming idol.

  Between mid-January, when he left his wife, and the third week of May, when he reunited with her, Nabokov wrote her once a day3, sometimes twice, without fail. His letters are immensely tender. “My darling, my joy,” he addresses her in February, after the Paris reading; and then in April,

  My life, my love4, it is twelve years today [since our wedding]. And on this very day Despair has been published, and The Gift appears in Annales Contemporaines… . The lunch at the villa of Henry Church (… an American millionaire with a splendid boil on his nape … with a literature-addicted wife of German extraction) turned out remarkably well… . I was much “feted” and was in great form… . I got on swimmingly with Joyce’s publisher Sylvia Beach, who might help considerably with the publication of Despair in case Gallimard and Albin Michel ne marcheront pas… . My darling, I love you. The story about my little one … is enchanting. [Dmitri had been trained to recite lines from Pushkin.] My love, my love, how long it’s been since you’ve stood before me… . I embrace you, my joy, my tired little thing.

  The mix of endearments, of droll descriptors (“boil on his nape”), of crowing over literary advances, is very Nabokov. Perhaps needless to say, he was having an affa
ir. Véra could sense it; then some busybody sent her a letter revealing the identity of the home wrecker, one Irina Guadanini, a Russian divorcée who worked as a dog groomer. Guadanini was one of those women who could recite Sirin by the foot or the yard. Nabokov denied all—as the envied new writer, he was the subject of malicious gossip on all sides, he maintained. His daily letters to his wife did not cease, nor did they become any less tender; they were a pack of lies5.

  A Jewish woman with a two-year-old, near-penniless in Hitler’s Berlin: surely Véra’s situation was desperate, in the year when the Buchenwald concentration camp opened near Weimar, in the year of the Entartete Kunst, the “Degenerate Art” show that featured many Jews, yet Véra did not hasten to join her husband in the South of France, as he urged her to. Instead she concocted a journey in the wrong direction, eastward to Prague, where Nabokov’s mother lived on a small pension. Madame Nabokov had never seen her grandson, and this might be her last chance.

  In fulfilling this pressing duty to her mother-in-law, Véra tormented her errant husband, who was already half-mad with guilt. He was unwilling to give up the affair, though, to abandon La Guadanini, a witty woman who, to judge by a story6 she published twenty-five years later, was in the grip of the most transporting love of her life. Vladimir developed psoriasis—it had troubled him before at times of intolerable stress. In the end he took the train to Prague. He saw his mother for the last time; she saw her grandson for the first and last time. The crisis7 in the marriage did not abate for months. Only in mid-July, when they were in Cannes, temporarily beyond the reach of the Nazis, did Nabokov fully confess his infidelity, thus allowing the catastrophe to proceed toward a climax. (He continued to write to Guadanini, who showed up one day at the beach, begging him to come away with her; he painfully, reluctantly spurned her.)

  He had been a lothario before his marriage—this Véra knew. There had been twenty-eight youthful seductions, and in the early years of the marriage he continued to prowl, almost certainly without telling his wife. (“Berlin is very fine8 right now,” he wrote a friend in ’34, “thanks to the spring, which is particularly juicy … and I, like a dog, am driven wild by all sorts of … scents.”) Here the rampant philandering stopped, however. The Guadanini affair was too punishing, too savage. His proud and fascinating wife, she whose depths of cleverness and devotion are but suggested by the way she fought back, drawing the frazzled fool of a husband away from liberty in Western Europe, in a geographical direction that flirted with disaster: this was not a wife to abandon, though she might appear wan and worn after ten years on small allowance, after having given birth and having lost a second child9 (probably) the year before the crisis. Though Véra’s biographer, Schiff, says that “the last dalliance was not that with Irina Guadanini in 1937 any more than the last cigarette was that of 1945,” when Nabokov gave up smoking four or five packs per day, this was categorically not a marriage10 that would ever again be about infidelity.

  France was not Germany, luckily. But France in the late thirties was less than hospitable to someone like Nabokov. Despite being treated like an idol and despite his literary connections, he was unable to work legally, nor did he possess a French carte d’identité until August ’38. They avoided Paris, where people gossiped and where Guadanini resided. He gave a reading in the city in late ’38, but for the most part the couple lived in semi-isolation on the Côte d’Azur, in those days a warm alternative to Paris and a place where artists and writers could live on a shoestring. Nabokov wrote and wrote. To say that he escaped the crisis of his marriage and the anguish of putting it back together by diving into work is to overlook his prodigious habit before the crisis; nor did Véra, in the worst passage of her life, fail to complete a translation of Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov’s dreamlike novel of oppression and imprisonment, to show an agent in New York.

  In ’34, a different literary agent, in London, had sold British rights to two other novels11, Camera Obscura and Despair.* The English translation of Camera appalled Nabokov; it was “loose, shapeless12, sloppy,” “full of hackneyed expressions meant to tone down … the tricky passages,” he wrote the publisher, Hutchinson, but, eager to have a book in the bookstores, he let it stand. Three years later, when American rights to Camera were sold by the New York agent Altagracia de Jannelli, Nabokov undertook to retranslate it himself, in the process rewriting much of it and giving it a title he thought would appeal to Americans: Laughter in the Dark. He was less than fully confident13 of his English at this point—his arrangement with Hutchinson required them to examine his work, remove any howlers.

  French, Swedish, Czech, and German translations also were in the works. Translations for sale in English-speaking countries were most important, considering the size of the market. Sirin’s books had no existence inside the Soviet Union; the home of his natural readership of millions, where he might have written in his native idiom and had fewer headaches about translation, while dwelling in splendor as the crown prince of the tradition that meant everything to him, the Pushkinian tradition in Russian verse and prose—that homeland of his literary heart was tragically lost to him. It was lost to everybody else, too, of course. There was no “Russia” anymore in which he might have dwelt in safety and joy, and the boldest writers of his generation who had stayed behind were on their way to hurried procedures conducted in the basements of prisons—writers such as Isaac Babel, author of Red Cavalry, arrested in ’39 and shot in ’40, and Osip Mandelstam, arrested in ’38 and dead by that December. Mandelstam’s famous14 poem “Epigram Against Stalin,” which compares Stalin’s fingers to worms and his mustache to a cockroach, begins with the phrase “We live without feeling the country beneath our feet,” and surely one thing the poet meant by that line was the lostness of Russia to a generation.

  To be busy translating one’s own novels for sale in America was not the worst fate to befall a Russian writer in the thirties. Largely ignorant of American literature, perhaps disdainful of the very concept, Nabokov had a considerable acquaintance with British and Irish literature, Shakespeare and R. L. Stevenson and Joyce being especial favorites. His mother had read him English fairy tales when he was small, and his grip on the language was precocious. As an older boy he was carried away by the books of Mayne Reid, an Irishman who fought in the Mexican-American War and later wrote American Westerns such as The Scalp Hunters, The Rifle Rangers, The Death Shot, and The Headless Horseman: A Strange Tale of Texas. Nabokov claimed that Reid, prolific potboiler maker, had given him a vision15 of the great open range and the vaulting western sky. Here is Reid describing a burned-over prairie in The Headless Horseman (1866):

  Far as the eye16 can reach the country is of one uniform colour—black as Erebus. There is nothing green—not a blade of grass—not a reed nor weed!

  It is after the summer solstice. The ripened culms of the gramineae, and the stalks of the prairie flowers, have alike crumbled into dust under the devastating breath of fire.

  In front—on the right and left—to the utmost verge of vision extends the scene of desolation. Over it the cerulean sky is changed to a darker blue; the sun, though clear of clouds, seems to scowl rather than shine—as if reciprocating the frown of the earth.

  Ignoring the antique poetic touches, we can, indeed, see this—and the rollicking Reid is one of those writers who tell us just what their leveled eyes tell them. On the next page,

  The landscape17 … has assumed a change; though not for the better. It is still sable as ever, to the verge of the horizon. But the surface is no longer a plain: it rolls … not entirely treeless—though nothing that may be termed a tree is in sight. There have been [trees], before the fire—algarobias, mesquites, and other of the acacia family—standing solitary, or in copses. Their light pinnate foliage has disappeared like flax before the flame.

  In the 1966 edition of Speak, Memory, his autobiography, Nabokov says of The Headless Horseman, “It has its points.” The mix of realistic evidence plain to the eye with scientific-sound
ing precision—terms such as culm and pinnate and algarobia, all used correctly—gives satisfaction to a certain sort of boy reader, or to any sort of reader, for that matter. A few pages on, a figure appears out of the burned plain:

  Poised … upon the crest of the ridge, horse and man presented a picture… .

  A steed, such as might have been ridden by an Arab sheik—blood-bay in colour … with limbs clean as culms [those culms again!] of cane, and hips of elliptical outline, continued into a magnificent tail sweeping rearward … on his back a rider … of noble form and features; habited in the picturesque costume of a Mexican ranchero—spencer jacket of velveteen—calzoneros laced along the seams—calzoncillos of snow-white lawn … around the waist a scarf of scarlet crape; and on his head a hat of black glaze, banded with gold bullion.

  This is the novel’s dashing hero, Maurice Gerald (“Sir Maurice Gerald,” Nabokov adds in Speak, Memory, “as his thrilled bride was to discover at the end of the book”). Reid’s work—seventy-five novels, plus reportage—reveals an enduring concern for matters of costumery. His heroes are rough and ready, yet in their way also comme il faut, and dangerously attractive to women:

  Through the curtains18 of the travelling carriage he was regarded with glances that spoke of a singular sentiment. For the first time in her life, Louise Poindexter looked upon … a man of heroic mould. Proud might he have been, could he have guessed the interest which his presence was exciting in the breast of the young Creole.