by Robert Roper
Nabokov notes that he and an older cousin, Yuri Rausch von Traubenberg, acted out whole scenes from Reid, perfecting the insouciant gestures, and while an effort to find the Nabokovian high style prefigured in this boy’s own adventure prose may be going too far—is certainly going too far—there are points in common. Fascination with North American geography, with the wide-openness, an invitation to adventure; scientific nomenclature; exotic sensuality; the kind of writerly precision that notes that a cerulean sky looks darker directly overhead. “The edition I had19,” Nabokov writes, “remains in the stacks of my memory as a puffy book bound in red cloth.” It was a British or an American edition; the important thing was that it was the “unabridged original,” not the “translated and simplified” Russian version that Yuri and other Russian children had to read because their English wasn’t up to the original. The frontispiece of a prairie “has been so long exposed to the blaze of my imagination that it is now completely bleached,” Nabokov adds, then observes, “but miraculously replaced by the real thing … by the view from a ranch you [Véra] and I rented [in 1953] … a cactus-and-yucca waste whence came … the plaintive call of a quail—Gambel’s Quail, I believe.”
Nabokov’s American agent worked hard for him—admirably hard. Altagracia de Jannelli’s letters show her leaving no door unknocked-upon with Sirin’s unconventional early novels, shaped in the smithy-soul of an author then much under the influence of Joyce and Proust. In August ’36, she writes,
Please find enclosed20 a couple of letters concerning your books. This, of course, always means nothing, because there is the right person somewhere and sometime that will take it:
August 4, 1936
“Houghton Mifflin Company regret to report their decision not to make a publishing offer for the accompanying manuscript.”
August 12, 1936
“Thank you for sending us the novel LA COURSE DU FOU [The Defense], which is very interesting, but not for us. We would appreciate your calling for it at your earliest convenience.”
She forwards another note that December:
We feel that21 the enormous effort of establishing the name of Nabokoff-Sirin in America would be so great as to militate against the commercial chances of his novel, KONIG DAME BUBE [King, Queen, Knave]. It is for this reason that we cannot undertake publication of a book that has many obvious qualities.
The novels, several, existed only in Russian; this complicated the approach to American publishers, who resented the cost of hiring foreign-language readers, but even without that, V. Sirin—or, as he saw no reason not to call himself now, Nabokoff, and soon Nabokov—was a tough sell, someone who wrote purposely against the market trend, it often seemed, offering demented or deluded protagonists who gave a reader scant opportunity for a warm glow of identification. Nabokov, like Joyce before him, was engaged in the high-modernist counterattack against the middlebrow novel, the work of cozy expectations, orderly progression of plot, and moral insight. All his life he would rail against readers who looked for a representation of “social problems” in his books; he was in a real lather about it, as can be seen in this note to Vladislav Khodasevich, a fellow poet:
[Writers should] occupy themselves22 only with their own meaningless, innocent, intoxicating business and justify only in passing all that in reality does not even need justification: the strangeness of such an existence, the discomfort, the solitude … and a certain quiet inner gaiety. For that reason I find unbearable any talk—intelligent or not, it’s all the same to me—about “the modern era,” “inquietude,” “religious renaissance,” or any sentence at all with the word “postwar.”
Jannelli, who recognized23 his talent and also a certain commercial promise—but who would be gone, dead at an early age, before the changes of sensibility that allowed him to write books she might have made real money with—submitted one of his novels to more than sixty publishing houses and periodicals. A partial list of outlets contacted, from the collection of rejection notes at the Library of Congress: Houghton Mifflin, Henry Holt, Liveright, Robert M. McBride, Lippincott, Longmans, Green & Co., Chas. Scribner’s Sons, Knopf, Random House, Macmillan, Simon and Schuster, MGM, the New York Times, the John Day Co., Little, Brown, the Phoenix Press, Frederick A. Stokes Co., Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Reynal and Hitchcock, Dodd, Mead & Co., Harcourt, Brace & Co., H. C. Kinsey & Co., the Atlantic Monthly, D. Appleton-Century Co., Blue Ribbon Books, Liberty magazine, Doubleday, Doran & Co., and Life.
The sale of Laughter in the Dark (1941) to Bobbs-Merrill, the schoolbook publisher, was anomalous. But Laughter had benefited from two translations by that point, the second Nabokov’s careful own, in which he intuited as best he could American readers’ desires, changing German names (Magda to Margot, Anneliese to Elisabeth, etc.) and sharpening the novel’s theme of cinematic clichés that are colonizing people’s brains. A wealthy businessman becomes obsessed with an usherette in a movie house; the usherette is young and beautiful and cruel. She wants to become a movie star. Cinematic tropes abound, and the businessman loses all—more than all—as he becomes the poodle of the young beauty and her cynical, diabolical boyfriend. German expressionist lighting effects—film noir avant la lettre—give the story a black-and-white mood, and the cruelty is played mostly for wincing laughs, always at the expense of the poor besotted businessman:
As a child [the boyfriend] had poured oil over live mice, set fire to them and watched them dart about for a few seconds like flaming meteors. And it is best not to inquire into the things he did to cats. Then, in riper years … he tried in more subtle ways to satiate his curiosity, for it was not anything morbid with a medical name—oh, not at all—just cold, wide-eyed curiosity, just the marginal notes supplied by life to his art. It amused him immensely to see life made to look silly, as it slid helplessly into caricature.
When at last it appeared, Laughter sank; Bobbs-Merrill recorded anemic sales, and the house declined to exercise options on other Sirin works. Even so, the book is a triumph, if a minor novel: suspenseful, strange in a fresh way, briskly dismaying. The style of its humor of cruelty was possibly a little ahead of its time; it resembles the black-comedic mode announced to the world in the third section—the Jason section—of The Sound and the Fury (“April Sixth, 1928”), a novel that we can be fairly sure Nabokov had not read by the thirties and would possibly never read, Faulkner being24 one of the American writers he most relentlessly ridiculed. He had hoped to catch the eye of movie producers with Laughter, and though no film was made in the thirties, in ’69 Tony Richardson’s adaptation, starring Nicol Williamson and Anna Karina, appeared, to small acclaim.
Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s biographer, presents Altagracia de Jannelli as a figure largely of fun, quoting a letter of Nabokov’s in which he describes her as his “literary (or rather, anti-literary) agent—a short, fearsome, bandy-legged woman, her hair dyed an indecent red.” The line on Jannelli is that she was a philistine who plied the refined artist with absurd requests for readable books “with attractive25 heroes and moral landscapes.” Yet their exchanges touched on matters of real concern to Nabokov, in his European impoverishment. Just what was the tenor of literary life in the United States? What could he realistically expect over there? Jannelli lectured him on matters with a special meaning for her; in ’38, before they met and after he had been calling her Mr. de Jannelli for years, she wrote,
No, the “Mr.”26 didn’t bother me at all, for the good reason that all people who haven’t seen me address me in this way … Europeans, not knowing the capacity of our American women, think that any big job must be done by a man. The women here do big things… . They are the pal and equal, and they often stand together in a front against men, whom they feel (perhaps like Strindberg) is the enemy.
She boosted America as a place where serious business was to be done; somewhat defensively, she presented herself as immensely well connected, scoffing at the suggestion of Nicolas Nabokov, Vladimir’s younger cousin, w
ho had been living in New York since ’33, that there was something wrong in the way she had gone about a submission:
To make you happy27, I got in touch with Viking, and found out that your cousin is again wrong in dates, since they tell me that Harold Ginsburg will only be back by middle of September… . The editor to whom I spoke is going on his vacation, hence I do not think that I shall send a copy … until I can get in touch with Ginsburg himself. Meantime … “Despair” will go to a firm where the heads are very good friends of mine, although, to be sure, they do not buy books for my personality but because they think they can make money on them.
Nabokov had no mentor in matters Americo-literary at this point. He was the refined artist, yes, but why not listen as the amusing Jannelli ran down her version of things? He must have been unnerved by the figure of sixty rejections: rejection is the plight of the writer, but Nabokov wasn’t used to it. In his Berlin days, his stories and poems had found immediate publication in Rul’ (“The Rudder”), a newspaper cum literary review cofounded by his father, and other publishers and editors had also hastened to bring out whatever he wrote. Sixty rejections. The fear, even for someone as sublimely confident as Nabokov, must have been that the most original things about him as an artist would damn him in America: his formal audacity, his psychological hard edge, his determination “never, never, never28 [to] write novels solving ‘modern problems’ or picturing ‘the world unrest.’ ”
Before he began to call her Mrs. de Jannelli, Nabokov wrote her in a mode that he almost never employed with mere agents. “Many thanks for your nice long letter of October 12th,” he begins.
I quite understand29 what you have to say about “old-fashioned themes.” … I am afraid that the “ultra-modernistic” fad is in its turn a little passé in Europe! That sort of thing was much discussed in Russia just before the revolution … depicting the kind of “amoral” life on which you comment in such a delightful way. It may be curious, but what charms me personally about American civilisation is exactly that old-world touch, that old-fashioned something which clings to it despite the hard glitter, and hectic night-life, and up-to-date bathrooms… . When I come across “daring” articles in your reviews—there was one about condoms in the last Mercury—I seem to hear your brilliant moderns applauding themselves for being such brave naughty boys.
America would not be avant-garde—anyway, he hoped it would not. He himself was not an avant-garde writer; he was an innovative writer, something different, with stylistic tricks and formal novelties up his sleeve, and he needed a stolid backdrop sometimes for his tricks to come off. We see him in this note imagining America as an air-conditioned phantasmagoria only thinly built atop an “old-fashioned something,” an Amérique profonde of conservative or even reactionary temper. Yet America would not be just the lowbrow purlieu depicted in H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan’s American Mercury30, especially in the magazine’s satirical “Americana” section. “Buster Brown has grown up,” Nabokov says to Jannelli, a little hopefully, and though “beautifully young and naïf,” it “has a magnificent intellectual future, far beyond its wildest dreams, perhaps.”
* Camera Obscura (1933) is a brisk, noir story that plays with cinematic tropes, and Despair (1934) is a concoction of other cinematic and Dostoevskian elements, about a double and a lunatic “perfect crime.” For a full list of Nabokov’s novels and novellas, see here.
2.
The Nabokov who was casually researching America—reading American journals, writing friends established over there, exchanging impressions with his agent—was half inclined to move to England instead. There he had gone to university (Cambridge) and had some connections. A nice secure lectureship1 at his alma mater or at a redbrick university, teaching Slavic literature or something along that line: this had its appeal for him, Nabokov being one of those artists who always found an academic setting congenial. But despite a number of trips to England and stubborn attempts to exploit his contacts, nothing turned up. The years 1937 to ’40, which began with the anxious exit from Berlin and the drama of the Guadanini affair, were a time of desperate recourses and temporizing as the Nabokovs worked hard to pay the rent and meanwhile held their tattered banner out in the winds of change, hoping for a response from somewhere.
They lived in Menton, east of Cannes, for almost a year, then in the tiny upland village of Le Moulinet, where he chased butterflies beneath rocky outcrops and, at an elevation of four thousand feet, captured a Blue2 he had never seen before, one he named, in a paper he later published in America, Plebejus (Lysandra) cormion Nabokov. They were poor—as poor as they had ever3 been. In 1916 Vladimir had inherited4, from his maternal uncle Ruka, an estate of two thousand acres plus the equivalent of $6.25 million (worth more than $140 million in 2014); for a year he had been a very wealthy young man, but then came the October Revolution, and, like most of the people he knew, he became an émigré of decidedly modest means. By the late thirties, “modest” probably overstated the case.
From Le Moulinet he moved with his family to Cap d’Antibes, and in October ’38 they relocated to Paris, hoping for a change in fortune. In his needful turning this way and that—cadging sums from friends, giving English lessons, and, in one happy instance, receiving twenty-five hundred francs from Sergei Rachmaninoff, who was moved by the plight of the bootless young writer—Nabokov wrote to the Russian Literary Fund5, a scholarly organization founded in 1859 and now with an outpost in America. They wired him twenty dollars.
Rachmaninoff, world-bestriding composer-pianist-conductor, was a figure to contemplate. Having lost all in the Revolution, forced to flee to Finland with his wife and daughters in an open sled, Rachmaninoff had overleapt Europe and fled to sleepy but generous-hearted America, where he reckoned a large career might be built. He acquired an excellent booking agent, Charles Ellis, and by 1919 he was touring and on his way to becoming one of the most honored and best-remunerated classical musicians of the twentieth century. Nabokov cared little for music, classical or any other kind, but he knew this story (as did everyone in the emigration) and may be said to have traced a writerly version of Rachmaninoff’s trajectory, although his own progress was more halting. Like Nabokov, Rachmaninoff had always had a special feeling for America, which he first visited in 1909, and also like him Rachmaninoff was of a contemplative but adventurous temperament—a gleeful speeder6 in powerful cars, for instance.
Véra said years later that the move to America became their definite plan7 at a certain point in time: just before September 3, 1939, when France and England went to war with Germany. Her biographer questions this, arguing that “the family’s hold8 on the planet was so tenuous that a gust could have pushed them in any direction.” France was less than promising: work permits were hard to get, and soon it would be overrun with armed Germans. Nabokov’s French was rich and flexible, but his English was deeper, more resourceful, and he might have felt that his sensibility belonged naturally among the ranks of English-language authors. England herself could still find no place for him, though—all doors remained closed.
His first cousin, Nicolas, visited them in Menton. Nicolas was now a professor of music at distant Wells College, in exotic Aurora, New York. He was faring remarkably9 well in the New World: in 1934, the ballet Union Pacific, which he scored to a libretto by Archibald MacLeish, had opened in Philadelphia, in a production of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, and this “first American ballet” soon became an international hit, the most successful production of the Ballet Russe in the mid-thirties. Some things worked out in America! Nicolas had composed other works, too—his La Vie de Polichinelle also opened in ’34, in a Paris Opera production—and he was remarkably well connected for a storm-tossed immigrant, a friend not just of MacLeish and Léonide Massine (choreographer of Union Pacific) and Sol Hurok (producer-impresario) but of George Balanchine, Igor Stravinsky, Virgil Thomson, George Gershwin, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and many glittering others.
A charming and handsome tall man, sa
id to be conversant in twelve languages10, “emotionally extravagant, physically demonstrative, and always late11,” Nicolas had befriended Edmund Wilson, by the late thirties the most influential literary journalist in the United States. What the cousins discussed in Menton has gone unrecorded. But the fact of Nicolas’s ascent cannot have been uninteresting.*
Vladimir was not salon material, by way of contrast. It was not that he was less charming, and he had no problem accepting favors from influential individuals in his youth—from his well-known publisher father12, but also from others. Vladimir was thoroughly an artist, however: an artist through and through. He enjoyed rubbing elbows with famous people—with Joyce’s sponsor and the first publisher of Ulysses, for instance—and in his years in Berlin and Paris he had met everyone illustrious he cared to, including Joyce himself, who showed up at a reading Nabokov gave in February ’37, and with whom he attended a dinner party in Paris in February ’39. On that evening, the often scintillating, sometimes overwhelmingly mirthful Nabokov failed to shine, and the hostess wondered later if he had been in awe of the great man. When Nabokov read her account, he commented,
I find it refreshing13 to be accused of bashfulness (after finding so frequently in the gazettes complaints of my “arrogance”); but is her impression correct? She pictures me as a timid young artist; actually, I was forty, with a sufficiently lucid awareness of what I had already done for Russian letters preventing me from feeling awed in the presence of any living writer.