Nabokov in America

by Robert Roper

  Almost before he unpacked his bags, he went looking for butterflies: not in Central Park or some other urban green spot, but at the American Museum of Natural History, whose collections were world-famous. In his Berlin days, he had on occasion approached the heads of state museums: of one, chief of the Entomological Institute at Dahlem, he wrote, “I simply loved11 that old, fat, red-cheeked scientist … with a dead cigar in his teeth as he casually and dexterously picked through the … glass boxes… . I will go back in a few days for a little more bliss.”*

  At the American Museum he found William P. Comstock, a research associate and expert in the Blue butterflies. They hit it off. Comstock secured him access to the collections, and Comstock’s expertise and excitement—he was working on a paper, Lycaenidae of the Antilles, the Lycaenidae being the family of the Blues—influenced the direction12 of all of Nabokov’s subsequent research. Comstock was13 a former construction engineer who, with little employment during the Depression, began spending more and more time on his hobby, lepidopterology. He was about as old as Nabokov’s father would have been. From him Vladimir learned the fine points of examining the genitalia of different species—this was a method14 capable of giving definitive answers to questions of speciation, and though professional entomologists knew of it, they often failed to practice it.

  Also soon after arrival, Nabokov wrote to Andrey Avinoff15, director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, in Pittsburgh. Avinoff was an associate of Comstock’s and one of the greatest private collectors in modern times. He was an English-speaking Russian, of a semi-noble family connected to the tsar’s court, much like V. D. Nabokov; like Rachmaninoff, he had come to America soon after the Revolution, and in 1924 he affiliated with the Carnegie Museum, where he organized the insect holdings. He was also a gifted painter and illustrator. His career closely predicts Nabokov’s own shadow career, the years of affiliation with Comstock and other New York scientists, the low-paid but joyous work at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, where Nabokov labored in the forties, cleaning up Harvard’s chaotic collections. Avinoff was another devotee16 of collecting in high-mountain zones, where groups of butterflies often become separated by geography and where allopatric speciation—whereby populations undergo mutations and evolve into new subspecies—can be dramatically at play.

  The writer might have been entirely lost to world literature—might have, if we believe him, gone down the rabbit hole of American entomology—so rich was the fun of collecting on the new continent, and so pressing were his insights into evolutionary biology. With a straight face Nabokov tells us that collecting was his greatest joy ever: “My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting,” he said in an interview, and, even more pointedly:

  I have hunted17 butterflies in various climes and disguises: as a pretty boy in knickerbockers and sailor cap; as a lanky cosmopolitan expatriate in flannel bags and beret; as a fat hatless old man in shorts… . Incredibly happy memories, quite comparable, in fact, to those of my Russian boyhood, are associated with my research work at the MCZ… . No less happy have been the many collecting trips taken almost every summer, during twenty years, through most of the states of my adopted country.

  His collecting and his museum work made the 1940s “the most delightful and thrilling [years] in all my adult life,” and this first decade in America also saw a falling off, almost to zero, of his writing of novels. “Frankly18, I never thought of letters as a career,” he told an interviewer. “Writing has always been for me a blend of dejection and high spirits… . On the other hand, I have often dreamt of a long and exciting career as an obscure curator of Lepidoptera in a great museum.”

  He did return to the novel, of course. We can assume he spoke tongue in cheek. But in the forties he was putting to rest his “natural idiom,” his “untrammeled, rich19, and infinitely docile Russian tongue,” completing the switch to English that had begun with the translations he wrote in the thirties. That transition was painful and saddening. Altagracia de Jannelli forbade his writing anything in Russian, since it could not be sold, and though he sometimes disobeyed her, in the end he submitted to this “private tragedy,” to the suppression of his inmost language, his heart’s parlance. Lepidoptery was almost as ingrained in him as was Russian, though—that they couldn’t take away, and he practiced it with relief.

  The reasons he loved collecting were many. First, the insects themselves: radiant, deceptive, tender beings. Then, “one should not ignore20 the element of sport … of brisk motion and robust achievement … an ardent and arduous quest ending in the silky triangle of a folded butterfly … on the palm of one’s hand.” His fascination with the play and adventure of collecting began when he was very young. It was connected with Vyra, the family estate, since the Nabokovs went there in the warmer months, the seasons of good collecting. “The ‘English’ park that separated our house from the hayfields,” he writes in Speak, Memory,

  was an extensive and elaborate21 affair with labyrinthine paths, Turgenevian benches, and imported oaks among the endemic firs and birches. The struggle that had gone on since my grandfather’s time to keep the park from reverting to the wild state always fell short of complete success. No gardener could cope with the hillocks of frizzly black earth that the pink hands of moles kept heaping on the tidy sand of the main walk. Weeds and fungi, and ridgelike tree roots crossed and recrossed the sun-flecked trails. Bears had been eliminated in the eighties, but an occasional moose still visited the grounds.

  There was a touch of true wildness—especially in the eyes of a seven- or eight-year-old. He had been introduced to collecting by his parents, Victorian and Anglophile in this as in much else. Elena Ivanovna, his mother, brought to the marriage a great dowry but also a collection of books of entomology, some from the seventeenth century. At age eight, Nabokov began to read these texts. He was especially drawn to the newer ones22, such as Edward Newman’s An Illustrated Natural History of British Butterflies and Moths (1871), compendious and authoritative; Ernst Hofmann’s Die Gross-Schmetterlinge Europas (1894), the German vade mecum; and Samuel Hubbard Scudder’s systematic and wonderfully illustrated The Butterflies of the Eastern United States and Canada (1889).

  Other pastimes—botanizing, for example—also come with a rich literature, and young practitioners can read their way into a lifetime hobby. But the physical side of butterfly collecting needs to be emphasized. It took him outdoors, in good if changeable weather—around Vyra, into an intense, short-lived season of up to nineteen hours of sunlight per day, with sudden births and metamorphoses followed by rapid dyings-off. Vyra was less than two hundred miles from the Finnish border. Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian novelist (1859–1952)—he joins Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Leskov, and dozens of other writers of authentic power on Nabokov’s list of little or no respect—gave the northland summer one of its classic representations in his novel Pan (1894):

  Spring was in full tilt23; I found starflowers and yarrow in the fields, and both the chaffinches and the bramblings had arrived. I knew all the birds. Sometimes I would take two quarters from my pocket and chink them together to break the solitude… . It was beginning to be no night, the sun barely dipped its disk into the sea before it rose again, red, renewed, as if it had been down to drink… . There was a rustling all over the forest. Animals snuffled, birds called one another, their signals filled the air. It was a year when the cockchafers [May bugs] were particularly numerous; their buzzing mingled with that of the moths, it sounded like whisperings through the forest.

  Hamsun’s hero, Lieutenant Glahn, is a hunter of game; in the course of his ill-considered Rousseauvian return to nature, he experiences intensities of joy and despair that the short Arctic summer exaggerates:

  Sphinx moths24 … come flying soundlessly in through my window, lured by the light of the fireplace and by the smell of my roasted bird. They bump against the ceiling with a dull sound, buzz past my ears sending cold shivers through me… . They sit there … sil
k moths, goat moths… . Some of them look to me like flying pansies… . I step outside the hut and listen… . The air sparkles with flying insects, myriads of buzzing wings. Over by the edge of the forest there are ferns and wolfsbane; the bearberry is in bloom and I love its tiny flowers. I thank you, God, for every ling flower I’ve ever seen… . Large white flowers have … unfolded in the forest, their stigmas are open, they are breathing. And furry twilight moths dip down into their petals, setting the whole plant trembling.

  The boy Vladimir—roaming at will day after day, in a forest six hundred miles more southerly than Glahn’s but equally rich with sudden life—comes to treasure his solitude and also, possibly, to regret it. (“It was many years25 before I met a fellow sufferer.”) Both hunters are profoundly awakened. The living land speaks to them, their contact with it almost too intimate, at the borders of decorum—for Glahn the forest is sexualized and full of ardent women, some of whom set upon him like Maenads, and for nine- or ten-year-old Vladimir, there are sexual overtones if not quite yet sexual feelings. To say that this constitutes a sensual awakening is not to say quite enough:

  On the other side26 of the river, a dense crowd of small, bright blue male butterflies that had been tippling on the rich, trampled mud and cow dung through which I trudged rose all together into the spangled air and settled again as soon as I had passed… . I came to the bog. No sooner had my ear caught the hum of diptera around me, the guttural cry of a snipe overhead, the gulping sound of the morass under my foot, than I knew I would find here quite special arctic butterflies… . The next moment I was among them. Over the small shrubs of bog bilberry with fruit of a dim, dreamy blue … a dusky little Fritillary bearing the name of a Norse goddess passed in low, skimming flight… . I pursued rose-margined Sulphurs, gray-margined Satyrs… . Through the smells of the bog, I caught the subtle perfume of butterfly wings on my fingers, a perfume which varies with the species—vanilla, or lemon, or musk, or a musty, sweetish odor difficult to define. Still unsated, I pressed forward.

  Eleven years old, the boy is undergoing a forest initiation. To invoke the name of another writer Nabokov did not much honor, Faulkner, in “The Bear” (1931), initiates his protagonist in hunting and the woods beginning at about the same age; that initiation takes place over a few years. The American process is more involved with bloodletting and bonding with doomed father figures, although not much more; young Vladimir is at least as comfortable with killing as is Ike McCaslin (“the soaking, ice-cold27 absorbent cotton pressed to the insect’s lemurian head; the subsiding spasms of its body; the satisfying crackle produced by the pin penetrating the hard crust of its thorax”), and the loss of his father is, as Boyd writes, “a wound he cannot28 leave alone but can hardly bear to touch.”

  Nabokov does not hunt “the occasional moose” at Vyra, but he learns absolute competence with the tools of his kind of hunt (net, spreading board, field guide) just as does Ike, and the doomed patches of wilderness that they roam—Faulkner’s spread of primeval Mississippi bottom-forest, and Vyra’s subarctic bogs and boreal stands—are enough of paradise for a boy or girl never to forget, or a grown man or woman. As Faulkner writes in “The Bear,” “Already it was warmer29; they could run tomorrow. He felt the old lift of the heart … as on the first day; he would never lose it, no matter how old in hunting or pursuit: the best, the best of all breathing.”

  For Nabokov, butterfly hunting was an intellectual effort, too. His biographers trace the passion over his life’s length, showing how he puzzled out the heavy German texts—by age nine, after work with a dictionary, “I had gained absolute control30 over the European lepidoptera as known to Hofmann,” he tells us proudly. From this came more explorations and deeper ones; he was especially fond of English-language studies, which took an evolutionarily more sophisticated approach to butterfly taxonomy. When reading about the captures on which species designations were based, he learned where type specimens (holotypes) had been caught—in what mountain range, at what altitude, near which geographical marker, on what exact date.

  The locales of capture—a talus field in the Tian Shan, for instance, the mountain range that divides China from Kyrgyzstan, or a moist Colorado meadow at eleven thousand feet—undergo a transfiguration. As the site of an historic encounter, “a given landscape lives twice31,” Nabokov explained in an interview, “as a delightful wilderness in its own right and as the haunt of a certain butterfly or moth.” When you visit such sites, “things you have gloated over in books, in obscure scientific reviews, on the splendid plates of famous works … you now see on the wing … among plants and minerals that acquire a mysterious magic through the intimate association.”

  There was the other kind of intellectual effort in the years to come: thematizing butterflies in literary works of a complicated modernist cast. None of this is the less if we also remember that he was once a boy with suggestive smells on his fingers, tramping through dung, intent on gathering loot—a full game bag, glorious trophies, instances of the marrow of things.

  Six weeks after arriving in New York, the Nabokovs left for southern Vermont, where Mikhail Karpovich, the Harvard professor, had a 250-acre property with an old farmhouse on it. In a scene out of32 a Turgenev novel—maybe Home of the Gentry—friends of Karpovich and his wife, Tatiana, lived for months among Russian-inflected berry picking and tea drinking, with kids running around, lots of sunbathing, dips in cool lakes, and comfort taken from the nearness of other Slavs. Here Nabokov first fulfilled his dream of hunting butterflies on a continent not that of his birth. He had consulted Avinoff, at the Pittsburgh museum, and probably he had read American entomological journals for detailed information about species and sites. He found Vermont’s skunks and porcupines impressive, and he caught “a number of good moths,” as he wrote Edmund Wilson later.†

  Cousin Nicolas, now living with his second wife, spent part of 1940 on Cape Cod. Across the sandy road from his house was Edmund Wilson, and they chatted each other up—Wilson, after six years of work, was about to publish To the Finland Station, his study of revolutionary ideologies and the Bolshevik Revolution, and things Russian engaged him intensely. Nicolas was drawn to Wilson by the same flawless instinct for cultural importance he displayed elsewhere, and Wilson, as their correspondence shows, took him for a plausible example of a soulful Russian in need of support. Within months Wilson was helping him place magazine articles—he put him in touch33, as he would Vladimir, with Edward A. Weeks, the Atlantic Monthly’s new editor, who readily published both of them. It was Nicolas who made the generous handoff of Vladimir to Wilson; he wrote his cousin at the Karpoviches’, and on August 30, 1940, Vladimir wrote Wilson, thus inaugurating one of the great American correspondences:

  My cousin Nicholas34 has suggested my writing to you. I would be very happy to meet you. I am staying with friends in Vermont (goldenrod and wind, mostly), but I shall be back in New York in the second week of September. My address there will be: 1326, Madison Ave. Tel. At. 97186.

  Wilson knew absolutely everyone, and he was tutelary toward other writers. The list of those for whom he acted35 as de facto agent, editor, employment counselor, life adviser, or parti pris reviewer includes F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Anaïs Nin, Dawn Powell, Arthur Mizener, Maxwell Geismar, Helen Muchnic, John Dos Passos, Louise Bogan, Mary McCarthy, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, in addition to the two Nabokovs. He got along with Russians; they were his favorite36 non-Americans. Russian language and literature would be something of a stock in trade for him, the subjects of essays he published in magazines and then republished in books. Nicolas made claims on their new friendship that are hard to credit. After Wilson became The New Yorker’s books editor in ’43, Nicolas wrote asking for entrée at the magazine. Wilson could not manage it, but he made connections for him at other publications, and Nicolas noted:

  That was awfully sweet37 of you! Thank you so much. I received a letter from [Paul] Rosenfeld [a music editor] informing
me that the piece will be published in the next issue… . I also have a little question to ask you then, about the possibility of an essay on the “lives of Conductors” for the New Yorker (which I would have to write under a highly assumed name, to protect my future musical output from being banished from the programs by the -itzki’s, -owski’s and Co.).

  Three years later, Nicolas declined an invitation to visit with Wilson, saying that he was about to leave for California, where he would spend ten days with Stravinsky:

  It occurred to me38 that I might try to write something on Stravinsky of a kind Niccolo Tucci wrote on Einstein. Do you think, if well done, it could suit the New Yorker for the “Reporter at Large” column?—It is my first trip to California. I am going with Balanchine.

  Wilson replied, “I have taken your suggestion up with them here … and they say they would like to see [a Stravinsky article]. They can’t promise anything … but I think it would be worthwhile to submit it.”