Nabokov in America

by Robert Roper

  Two years later, when his first book appeared, Nicolas made sure an advance copy got to Wilson:

  I hope39 (so much) that you will review it for The New Yorker… . It would give me such a pleasure. The fact [is] I not only hope that you will review it, but think that you “must” review it (as a teacher “must” review the papers of his students) because you are the godfather of the book insofar as it was you who started me on the “pay the way by writing” career. Will you? Will you please?

  Whether or not this experience made Wilson cautious about helping other writers named Nabokov, the meeting with Vladimir took place in October 1940, and it proved a success. The men had a Mutt and Jeff radical difference physically, but in other respects they were reflections: literary out to their fingertips; contentious know-it-alls; sons of upper-class families, their fathers distinguished jurists involved in politics; lovers of Proust, Joyce, Pushkin. Both had struggled and would continue struggling to make a living by their pen. Wilson, then at the New Republic, offered Nabokov books to review, and the explosive material of dangerous future arguments was immediately before them: reviewing a book called The Guillotine at Work, by G. P. Maximoff, about the Soviet Union, Nabokov wrote,

  The seven years40 of Lenin’s regime cost Russia from 8 to 10 million lives; it took Stalin ten years to add another 10 million, thus, according to Mr. Maximoff’s “very conservative estimate,” between 1917 and 1934 there perished about 20 million people, some being tortured and shot, others dying in prisons, others again falling in the Civil War… . The appearance of this tragic and terse book is especially welcome because it may help to dispose of the wistful myth that Lenin was any better than his successor.

  Wilson, in To the Finland Station, argued that Lenin was indeed better, was an indispensable man, in fact, bearer of the torch of history’s oppressed. At a dinner at Roman Grynberg’s,‡ Nabokov expressed a lesser estimation of the dictator, which prompted Wilson to send him a copy of his new book “in the hope41 that this may make [you] think better of Lenin.” The attractions of authentic friendship must already have been strong between them, not to mention Nabokov’s awareness of the impolitique of offending the foremost literary critic in America. Vladimir did not explode, or go off on a contemptuous rant, as at other times he did when encountering American beliefs about Lenin; on the subject of Soviet rulers, he was an absolutist, disinclined to see anything attractive or inspiring in the extermination of millions and the smothering of a liberal alternative in the catastrophe of 1917. Loyalty to his father’s memory was part of his anti-Bolshevism (which over the years came to resemble garden-variety American anti-Communism, with, in the fifties, a bemused fondness for Joe McCarthy, and in the sixties outright disgust with long-haired American students protesting the war in Vietnam). Loyalty to his own hopes in America, too, was a factor. Already he was aware that Russians of the emigration—the million-plus people who had been driven out or had fled after the Revolution— were illegitimate as a class, in the eyes of many educated Westerners. If they were anti-Soviet, they must be reactionary, the thinking went; if they condemned the events of 1917, they were standing in the way of history.

  Wilson was not a propagandist for Stalin or even Lenin. By the time he finished Finland Station, he was in horror of the purge trials and the frenzy of political murders, and he noted in a letter42 that his writing of Finland Station was ending just as Russia was trying to end Finland (in the Russo-Finnish War). Wilson had been shaped by the Depression, which he reported for the New Republic. After a professional beginning on the cultural side, he became more interested in social issues, responding to the Crash with a feeling of deep anxiety for his beleaguered country:

  There are today43 [January 1931] in the United States … something like nine million men out of work; our cities are scenes of privation and misery on a scale which sickens the imagination … our agricultural life is bankrupt … our industry, in shifting to the South, has reverted almost to the horrible conditions … of the England of a hundred years ago.

  A “darkness” had descended, Wilson felt, bringing a sense of “a rending44 of the earth in preparation for the Day of Judgment.” He paid particular attention to the epidemic of American suicides. This bespoke an enfeeblement of will, although his feeling toward suicides was entirely compassionate. He gave up his literary portfolio at the New Republic to travel the country for many months, writing about factory politics and Henry Ford as an incoherent prophet of capitalism; about starvation in plain sight; about the trial of the Scottsboro Boys in Chattanooga. In ’32, he assembled his reportage45 in a book called The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump, a largely nondoctrinaire, upsetting, meticulously reported account of the deep wound to American prospects. In a chapter called “The Case of the Author,” he offered a bluff self-profile: petit-bourgeois, conventional, pleasure-seeking, selfish. He reported his earnings46 during the twenties, noting that family money had afforded him leisure time for “reading, liquor, and general irresponsibility.”

  Part of Wilson’s attraction to Soviet Communism came from a feeling that the American people were being poorly served. With a businessman’s president in the White House, there had been a shocking failure to recognize the near abyss; this same president “kept telling us47,” Wilson wrote, “that the system was perfectly sound,” and meanwhile he sent General Douglas MacArthur “to burn the camp of the unemployed war veterans who had come to appeal … [and] we wondered about the survival of republican American institutions.” The Soviets did not blink at such profound problems, Wilson felt—they grabbed them by the throat. “We became more and more impressed48 by the achievements of the Soviet Union, which could boast that its industrial and financial problems were carefully studied by the government, and that it was able to avert such crises.”

  By the time of his first meeting with Nabokov, Wilson had wised up considerably about the Soviets, especially about Stalin. In 1935 he traveled to Russia on a Guggenheim, and his prolific energy and capacity for meeting people and getting their story gave him material for three books. In Russia he was aware of the police state, of the active fear among intellectuals, many soon to be executed; the crowds on the streets seemed “dingy49” and “monotonous,” and socialism had not cured an overriding Russian sadness, he felt—quite the contrary. Still, Wilson did not forefront the fear in the books he wrote; instead he looked for elements of the Soviet story that might translate into an American idiom, that signaled competence, a grip on the future. The two lands were comparable, after all: both were vast, both still untamed, all “prairies and wild rivers50 and forests,” and “we never know what we have got in the … wastes of these countries; we never know what is going to come out of them.”

  Edmund Wilson, early 1940s

  * Nabokov’s father was himself an enthusiastic chaser of moths and butterflies. In Nabokov’s novel The Gift, his hero, Fyodor, considers writing a biography of his late father, an eminent field scientist, and his account of his father’s adventures in western China has a grand, heartfelt style—the contemplation of a lost father, a daring naturalist, relieves him of his customary irony, is an opening to deep feeling. At the time of Nabokov’s arrival, the American Museum was headed by Dr. Roy Chapman Andrews, a naturalist-explorer much in the mold of Fyodor’s adventurous father. Andrews as a young man had so desired to work at the AMNH that, upon being denied a scientific job, he went to work as a janitor in the taxidermy department.

  † Wilson was not a sportsman. As a boy he gave away the baseball outfit his mother had bought him in hopes that it would encourage him to be athletic, and by the time Nabokov got to know him he was notably short, stout, and gouty. Nevertheless, Nabokov hoped to recruit him for collecting. “Try, Bunny,” he wrote, addressing Wilson by his nickname. Chasing butterflies “is the noblest sport in the world.”

  ‡ Wilson knew Grynberg independently of Nabokov, who had been his English tutor in France. Grynberg was a book-loving businessman deeply saturated in literature, a publ
isher of Russian-language journals after his move to the United States. His sister Irina had become a friend of Wilson’s while serving as his guide in Moscow in 1935, when Wilson was reporting his book Travels in Two Democracies (’36).

  4.

  With Wilson getting him review assignments and making many contacts for him, Nabokov was able to survive his first winter in America without a steady job. There was the Stanford position to look forward to, and cousin Nicolas arranged a lecture for him at upstate Wells College in February. Nabokov had arrived in the United States with “one hundred lectures1—about 2,000 pages—on Russian literature” already prepared and ready to be rolled out should opportun- ities arise. He saw himself as a professor-to-be as well as an artist—saw himself delivering cultural goods, knowledge of an exotic foreign literature, to a deprived audience willing to pay for it. His hopefulness was not misplaced, and his immigrant’s adaptive strategy was a good one.

  Karpovich of Harvard recommended him to a booking service, and Wellesley College invited him for two weeks of talks in March ’41, partly because a copy of his 1922 translation2 of Alice in Wonderland was among the library’s Lewis Carroll editions. He proved a seductive, roaringly funny, erudite, and becomingly accented lecturer in English. “My lectures are a purring success3,” he wrote Wilson. “Incidentally I have slaughtered Maxim Gorky, Mr. Hemingway—and a few others.” He liked the Wellesley girls and also the “very charming” women professors, and while in Boston he had lunch with Edward Weeks, who, like Nabokov, had attended Trinity College, Cambridge. Weeks “received my story and me with very touching warmth,” he reported—the story, “Cloud, Castle, Lake,” was one that Wilson had recommended— and Weeks followed up with such praise (“this is genius”) and so unconditional an invitation to further submissions to the Atlantic (“this is what we have been looking for”) that Nabokov was shocked.

  Véra was ill for much of the year, underweight and suffering “from all the migrations4 and anxieties,” as she later described it. She looked for work, found it in January ’41—translating for a Free French newspaper—and lost it when laid up for weeks with sciatica5. Her troubled back threatened the planned trip to Palo Alto: it seemed unlikely she would be able to travel, but on May 26, a Monday and also the day of a new moon, the family set out for the West, in the car belonging to Dorothy Leuthold, one of Vladimir’s language students.

  To drive to California in ’41 was to go adventuring, in a small way. The system of numbered6 roads (U.S. 1, Md. Hwy 97) was only about ten years old, and many roads, including major routes, were still poorly surfaced. The world context, meanwhile, was unstable in the extreme. Two weeks before they left, in the heavy American car containing manuscripts and a seven-year-old, 3,600 Jews7 had been rounded up in Paris by the Gestapo, many of them children.

  The Germans had just captured Crete, and their warships were decimating British shipping in the North Atlantic. German intentions vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, its Non-Aggression Pact partner, were showing a new character. To what extent Nabokov or his wife monitored events by newspaper or radio is hard to know, but Vladimir observed in a letter to Wilson after the German attack in the east,

  For almost 258 years Russians in exile have craved for something—anything—to happen that would destroy the Bolsheviks,—for instance a good bloody war. Now comes this tragic farce. My ardent desire that Russia, in spite of everything, may defeat or rather utterly abolish Germany—so that not a German be left in the world, is putting the cart before the horse, but the horse is so disgusting that I prefer doing so.

  The Pontiac was a different kind of horse. The travelers called it Pon’ka9, Russian for “pony.” This Lewis and Clark expedition undertaken by the family, with a native guide (Miss Leuthold, who was intent on practicing her Russian), established the template for the summer explorations to come. Each day they drove until evening approached or they felt they had been on the move long enough. A motel or other accommodation hove into view, a vacancy sign displayed. A list that Nabokov compiled10 of the places where they stayed shows a fondness for motor courts (“Motor Court Lee-Meade,” “Wonderland Motor Courts,” “El Rey Courts,” etc.) and an avoidance of standard hotels, which in 1940 still had dress codes and where employees had to be tipped. The Nabokovs stayed11 at a single hotel and a single self-described motel: the General Shelby, in Bristol, Tennessee. (Shelby was a Confederate cavalry hero.) They avoided tourist homes; these were boardinghouse-style arrangements with a communal table and bathrooms, and Nabokov wanted his own bath.

  At this moment in history, the fate of millions in the balance, American recreational consumerism was following its blithe course, confidently reconfiguring the landscape. The hotel was on the way out; it had been on a downward trend for a while in small cities as Americans traveled less by train. In the past, the railroad had delivered captive passengers to hotels, often located near rail stations12. Since about 1910, though, Americans had traveled more and more by car, and at the end of a day’s drive, a harried tourist did not wish to have to negotiate the downtown streets of a strange city, looking for an overpriced hotel. The Nabokovs in ’41 were joining the parade of change at an advanced point. They were the beneficiaries of a thirty-year evolution whereby American car gypsies at first had carried their own tents and stopped at any pretty spot along the road, or at a public car campground maintained by a municipality; then had begun to favor private campgrounds offering showers, a communal kitchen, and primitive cabins or tent-cabins, basic protection against the weather; then at progressively nicer cabin camps, where freestanding wooden structures with serviceable beds and other furniture could be rented for a small fee; then at cottage camps, a.k.a. cottage courts, the cottage being an evolution of the cabin in the direction of fresher paint, curtains in the window, nicer furniture, a private shower, and a parking space alongside. The motor courts common13 by the forties, as suggested by Nabokov’s list, differed from cottage courts in that the separate units were attached under one roof; often the establishment had a rectangular or oblong plan, creating a central space that might be landscaped, and by the forties the development in the direction of architectural tomfoolery was well under way, with log-cabin, Olde Tudor, Indian-tepee, Colonial-frame-with-flower-box, and even miniature-Alamo-style court units popular.

  It took the Nabokovs, with the middle-aged Miss Leuthold driving every mile, three weeks to cross the country. A train would have taken four days. Nabokov collected madly; he later donated his specimens to the AMNH, where they ended up in a stuffy storeroom at the end of a hall, locked up for seventy years with curatorial miscellany. In 2011, two staff scientists14, David Grimaldi and Suzanne Rab Green, noticed the name Nabokov on a label. The specimens were still unpinned, still inside the glassine envelopes on which Nabokov had jotted the place and date of collection. Every day of the trip had produced at least one capture. On May 28, two days out, Vladimir caught specimens he considered worth saving at Luray and Shenandoah, Virginia, locations eighteen miles apart, as Miss Leuthold drove them from Gettysburg, where they stayed their first night, to Luray, where they stayed their second. They made a side trip to Great Cacapon, West Virginia, seventy-five miles west of Gettysburg. Nabokov had three nets in the Pon’ka; this was to be an entomological version of a summer vacation under the regime of someone—a conceivable American dad—who, crazy for golf, say, intended to play every course they passed.

  El Rey Court (now El Rey Inn), Santa Fe, New Mexico

  He collected in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, on the Tennessee–North Carolina state line, which had been dedicated only a few months before by President Roosevelt. In Tennessee he also took specimens at Bristol, Crossville, Nashville, and Jackson. His itinerary might have been suggested by road maps handed out at gas stations; also car clubs, such as the American Automobile Association, published guides, and Nabokov became a close reader15 of these. His penciled comments about establishments frequented (“Motel Shelby—all right,” “Maple Shade Cottages—no,”
“Cumberland Motor Court—very nice”) recall the ratings of businesses in the guides. The names of places with their connotations of grandeur or leafy ease suggest an embryonic form of the parody of motel names to appear one day in Lolita.

  They drove southwest along the Blue Ridge, following U.S. Route 11, today’s Interstate 81. The traveling was mostly on two-lane blacktop. In Knoxville, they connected with U.S. 40; their stops show Nabokov taking specimens where he also took rooms, which suggests that he found lodgings and then went out the next morning, armed with net. In Little Rock, they left 40 for U.S. 67, which heads southwest. Just outside Little Rock, Miss Leuthold agreed to another detour: it may be she was as eager as the foreigners to see as much of the country as possible, in June’s green days, and they traveled to Hot Springs National Park, where Americans had been taking the waters since the early nineteenth century.

  How Nabokov responded to the landscape can be inferred, in part, from a letter written after the arrival in Palo Alto: “During our16 motor-car trip across several states (all of them beauties) I frantically collected.” Ten years later, he wrote in a now famous passage in Lolita of “the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country” that Humbert Humbert and Lolita see by car. Humbert, whom it is surely perilous to take for Nabokov, nonetheless seems to see with Nabokov’s eyes when he records, “Beyond the tilled17 plain … there would be a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm, peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dove-gray cloud.” Humbert has a “fancy prose style,” he tells us, but in his reports on the landscape he comes as close as he ever does to addressing the reader plainspokenly. His account of the “average lowland North-American countryside” is fond; as always with him, there is a struggle to go beyond what he brings to an encounter—to escape his own previsions and arch, learned analogies—and have it fresh.