Nabokov in America

by Robert Roper

  Nabokov might have been thinking as they drove along of William Jacob Holland’s The Butterfly Book, a popular illustrated guide for the United States and Canada, which was unscientific but full of information. William Comstock or Andrey Avinoff might have told him where to hunt, or he might have gotten hints from articles in the Journal of the New York Entomological Society, which he had been reading closely. As the Pontiac crossed into Texas, vistas out of Mayne Reid presented themselves. Still traveling on U.S. 67, the voyagers covered three hundred miles on June 2, from Hot Springs to Dallas, and the signature western landscape change, toward a flat immensity, began to manifest. The sudden openness, with ridges or peaks at the horizons, seems to enlarge the sky, bringing it paradoxically closer; travelers sometimes have a feeling of too much emptiness, too much staring blue18.

  For Dmitri’s sake, the party might have begun to look around for cowboys and Indians. A few months after their return, a babysitter in Wellesley, Massachusetts, on the night of October 31, 1941, would paint Dmitri’s face19 and take him around the neighborhood, on his head an Indian headdress bought in New Mexico. Dmitri was chattering in fluent American by then. His mother and father had not been quick to kit him out à l’Américain; during the summer at Stanford he was seen in lederhosen-like shorts, and before the trip he wore a fur coat in cold weather; his mother, in a portrait of him she wrote, recalled that other children would approach and ask if he was a boy or a girl. “No, I am a boy,” he would reply calmly, “and this kind of coat is worn by boys where I come from.” He was gentle and friendly and brave, she wrote. From an early age he exhibited a “reserve regarding the deeper emotions”; a loss “hit him the harder the less he spoke of it.” About their cross-country drive she said that “he found himself on a motor car trip through many beauty spots … and [we] stopped for the nights at motor courts, I remember taking him … to a barber’s for a hair cut. ‘And where is your home, son?’ the barber asked… . ‘I don’t have a home,’ was the answer… . ‘Where do you live then?’ ‘In little houses by the road20.’ ”

  The Nabokovs were primed for living in such little houses. Since the year of Dmitri’s birth, they had had more than twenty-five addresses, in three countries; Dmitri did not outwardly mourn the places they left, such as the Berlin apartment where he lived his first three years, but in his mother’s view he developed an “odd attachment21 for more passengery dwelling places,” and “his passionate clinging to every bit of his childish possessions and propensity towards accumulating ‘complete’ sets of … five and ten cent store motor cars and trains [had] its root in that initial loss of home and toys.” It represented “a pathetic attempt of a very small and bewildered individual to throw an anchor of his own amidst the incomprehensible.”

  A series of photos taken in a national park, to judge by the WPA-style stonework, shows Vladimir so intent on his hobby as to seem under a compulsion. His back is turned, or his gaze is on the ground, where the insects are, or his back is turned and his gaze is on the ground. His neck is scrawny and bent like a heron’s. In a letter he wrote Wilson just before the family left New York, he announced, “I am driving off22 … to-morrow with butterfly-nets, manuscripts, and a new set of teeth.” His teeth had been a torment most of his life; at age eleven, he had needed the attentions of “a celebrated American dentist23” in Germany, and by the time he got to America he was fighting rearguard actions, having these ones taken out but not those, and then, inevitably, those, too.

  Nineteen forty-one was the wettest year24 in Texas history. The travelers experienced thunderstorms, but the weather was most often baking dry; sun and heat after rain bring out butterflies, and Nabokov took specimens25 in Mineral Wells and Lubbock as well as Dallas. West of Dallas, they followed Texas 108 and U.S. 84, crossing into New Mexico near Clovis, the town where, in 1929, spearpoints used by Paleolithic hunters had been unearthed. Nabokov caught another desirable insect in Fort Sumner, en route for Santa Fe; Fort Sumner is where Billy the Kid was shot, and his name is in many guidebooks. West of the Pecos and east of the Rio Grande, the party left U.S. 84 for U.S. 66, in ’41 already a fabled American route, the romantic favored highway from Chicago to L.A., and in Santa Fe they spent two nights at another motor court (“lovely26”) and Dmitri was given his Halloweenish headdress.

  The Centerpiece of the trip, collecting-wise, was the Grand Canyon. Here the party stayed at Bright Angel Lodge, on the South Rim, where some of the semi-detached cabins are only yards from the precipice. From U.S. 66 (today’s I-40) probably they took U.S. 180 north, continuing as it turned into the park’s South Entrance Road. They stayed two days. It rained and snowed; it was so cold on June 9 that Véra and Dmitri huddled in the car27 while Vladimir and Miss Leuthold walked down the Bright Angel Trail, on that morning but a “slushy mule track28.” The lodge had recently been renovated, under the supervision of Mary E. J. Colter, an architect working for the Atchison29, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway, which owned the South Rim concessions. Parts of the original lodge, preserved in Colter’s renovation, date from 1896. Its progression from primitive inn serving stagecoaches to tent camp for rail tourists to cabin camp to hostelry with whimsical outlying units linked by pergolas (rooms also rented in the lodge itself) replicates much of the history of the motor court, although Colter’s mix30 of local stone and peeled logs and adobe and her care in fitting all the structures to the site lift the lodge far above the level of any motel that the Nabokovs had seen so far.

  Now an historic landmark, Bright Angel Lodge typifies the National Park Service rustic style31 (sometimes known as “parkitecture”), grander examples of it being the Ahwahnee Hotel, in Yosemite, and Paradise Inn, on Washington’s Mount Rainier. Colter was one of the inventors. The style’s mercurial way with authenticity can be seen in Hopi House32, a gift-shop-cum-workshop she designed in 1905. She borrowed freely—obsessively—from the actual Hopi pueblo at Oraibi, Arizona, where, just at the time of her appropriation, traditionalist inhabitants of the pueblo were being forced out by other tribal members more friendly to whites. Hopi House, which is next door to the stately El Tovar hotel, allowed South Rim tourists to sample contemporary Hopi and Navajo craftwork; they could watch real Indians making that work, then buy some.

  Nabokov, before setting out on this first journey, asked a friend at the American Museum to write him a note saying that he was an “accredited member” of the institution. That brought him permission to hunt insects in Grand Canyon National Park, and among his captures33 were males and females of what he joyously took for a new species—he named it Neonympha dorothea, in honor of Miss Leuthold, who had chauffeured them safely and had kicked up the specimens he caught on that cold morning on the mule trail. It was a consummation long wished34 for. Since early boyhood, he had dreamed of finding a new species that would bear his name (“Neonympha dorothea Nabokov”). A year or so after the trip he wrote a poem, not about this insect, but about another one that, alas, also turned out not to be of an entirely new species:

  I found it35 and I named it, being versed

  in taxonomic Latin; thus became

  godfather to an insect and its first

  describer—and I want no other fame.

  Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep),

  and safe from creeping relatives and rust,

  in the secluded stronghold where we keep

  type specimens it will transcend its dust.

  The western trip had paid off wonderfully. The group in the Pontiac drove on, Vladimir making further stops36 and collecting further interesting insects at Las Vegas, San Bernardino, Santa Monica, and Ojai.

  5.

  Architect Mary Colter’s appropriation of the design and materials of a nine-hundred-year-old Hopi pueblo to make a gift shop was, for its time, already a familiar gesture. Railroad and hotel promoters of tourism in the Southwest had been stimulating interest in the region for decades, going so far as to build pseudo-pueblos1 at world’s fairs. Colter, whose Hopi House was built by actu
al Hopi, out of sandstone and juniper, with thatched ceilings and chimneys made from pottery shards, only went further than most.

  What Nabokov took from the architectural mélange is hard to say. The built environment he experienced on his first western trip was “not quite fish and not quite fowl,” as James Agee, in an article in Fortune magazine, said about roadside America in the thirties. For Agee the typical roadside attraction was the cave, a cave that was being exploited as a tourist trap. (The cabin camp ran a close second to the cave.) “The finding of such [an attraction] is, for commercial purposes, merely the first step,” Agee wrote:

  Investigate and you will2 find shafts sunk to reach them (some have elevators). You will find $100,000 “lodges” built over the entrances—to house rest rooms, lunch counters, and, above all, souvenir stands. Uniformed attendants will lead you along … concrete paths… . All good caves are electrically lighted, often with ingenious indirect effects. Each point of … interest is named, the bent being for whimsy and romance.

  Such places combine “the art of nature and the art of the entrepreneur,” Agee said. “A good cave3 may gross $150,000 a year… . This money-making contraption … is more valuable if it twists and turns mysteriously, if it boasts a still pool (always called an ‘underground lake’) or a running stream (forever the ‘River Styx’).”

  The Nabokovs saw ads for caves on their drive. In Luray, Virginia, they passed a famous cave system, and their route across New Mexico took them north of Carlsbad Caverns, which had been turned into a park under President Hoover. There is mention of caves in Lolita; Humbert, seeking distractions4 for his young sex captive, considers stopping at “a natural cave in Arkansas [or at] a replica of the Grotto of Lourdes in Louisiana.” Tacky, hucksterish reconfigurations of the landscape, developed for the purpose of making a buck: America had not invented this game, but it had gone far, far beyond the Old World in the direction of playful shamelessness. Nabokov did not rear back in horror. His letters to friends mostly neglect the man-made sights; he keeps his eye instead on the “slow suffusion5 of inutile loveliness” in the distance, or on the butterflies at his feet6. That he was noticing, and bemused by, Mother Goose–themed motor courts and “tea rooms built like teapots, papier-mâché owls lettered ‘I-SCREAM,’ [and] laughing swine with Neon teeth,” to quote from Agee’s litany of marvels, can be assumed from the classic account he later wrote of the roadside.

  In Palo Alto, The Nabokovs lived at 230 Sequoia Avenue, about a block from the Stanford campus. A redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) grew out front of the “nice little house,” as Vladimir described it, and the backyard had a comfortable deck chair7 where he sunbathed in a swimsuit8. Stanford before the war was not an especially distinguished American university; some noted scholars were on the faculty, several in the sciences, but it was the beauty of the setting and the paradisiacal climate—especially over the course of a summer of predictably perfect days, hot but cooling by night, with ever cloudless cornflower skies and smogless views of the Coast Ranges—that made the strongest impression on many visitors. The fall before the Nabokovs arrived, Jack Kennedy, recently of Harvard, audited classes for a few months, living in a one-bedroom cottage behind a house at 624 Mayfield Avenue, whose owner, Gertrude Gardiner, remembered him as “head and shoulders” above the normal run of student. Kennedy used the lovely valley campus, with its native live oaks and imported palms and eucalyptus, mainly as a place of resort. He drove a cactus-green Buick9 convertible with red seats bought with earnings from Why England Slept, the recent book he had written with the help of two men close to his father, Ambassador to Britain Joseph P. Kennedy. After some relaxing weeks, he wrote a prep-school friend that “the girls are quite attractive10—and it’s a very good life” on “The Farm,” as Stanford called itself.

  Dorothy Leuthold returned east. Nabokov was not dozing uselessly in that deck chair: the classes he taught that summer, Modern Russian Literature and The Art of Writing, provoked in him a fury of effort11 out of all proportion to their enrollment (two in Russian Literature, four in Art of Writing). One of his students remembered that Nabokov lost himself so deeply in his lectures that a froth12 of spittle would form on his lips, nor would he pause to wipe it away.

  The spittle was atypical. Students of his at Wellesley and Cornell in the future never saw such signs of stress—his presentation later would be urbane, singularly self-possessed. In the twenty years of his European exile, he had written distinctive, original work, almost all of which had been published and praised; by this hard labor he had put himself in the forefront of twentieth-century literature, whether or not the Anglophone world knew about it. He had created meanwhile an audience attuned to his sensibility. They were Russian speakers, émigrés like him who had learned not to be put off by his mocking cruelty toward his own characters, or by his wincing way with strong emotion, or by his disdain for shapely stories full of standard meanings. Here in America there would have to be a fresh audience-building effort, though an arduous and uncertain one.

  Reclining in his chair, Nabokov applied himself to what would seem a minor task: improving the translations to be read by the students in his Russian Lit class. Translating had always been the nub for him—it mattered more than anything. It mattered because if he could open readers to the full range of music in Pushkin’s “A Feast During the Plague,” say, or Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” then much else good would happen. The English-language reader, given something like the flavor of great Russian work, would be on the way to possessing the literature as a whole. He wrote to his former art tutor, Dobuzhinsky, that he had no time for his own writing because “I assign myself13 a lot of extra work … in the sense of translations to English, but what else to do, when existing translations … are not chaise-horses of enlightenment but rather wild asses of ignorance. What carelessness, what shamelessness,” he lamented.

  And if they could be opened to the literature as a whole, to those parts of it that he most valued—Pushkin, Tyutchev, Gogol, Lermontov, Tolstoy, some others—then the real treasure, works by V. Nabokov, would also come within reach.

  James Laughlin, the founder-publisher of New Directions, visited Palo Alto early in July. Laughlin had been tipped to Nabokov by Wilson, among others. Laughlin offered14 him a minuscule advance for the theretofore-much-rejected novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and Nabokov accepted: at least it was an advance, a guarantee of publication.

  He went butterfly hunting in Los Altos, south of Stanford.* To Dobuzhinsky he extolled the “charming, yellowish country” of tawny coastal foothills bordered by dark forest. The California summer—hot in the sun but cold out of it, because the air holds little moisture—reminded him of Pushkin’s Parnassian prose, also limpid and a bit cool15. Wilson had warned him not to become intoxicated with the Golden State. “I have a fear16 … that you may become bewitched out there and never come back… . The weather is fine … and the rest of the world [comes to seem] unreal.”

  Nabokov’s lectures developed cachet on campus. Interested faculty and others started sitting in17. He was indulgent toward his students, accepting of the flawed work they produced, but ferocious toward famous authors not up to the high standards he propounded. “The prime object of a playwright18 ought to be not to write a successful play but an immortal one,” he declared, as if continuing his heartfelt contention with Altagracia de Jannelli. Despite his missing teeth and sunken chest, despite the hand-me-downs he wore (an ultramarine suit courtesy of Mikhail Karpovich, a tweed jacket from Harry Levin, another Harvard professor), despite shoes without socks, despite the froth at his mouth and an alarming excess of aesthetic intensity—despite or because of all this, he was attractive as a speaker, charismatic19, the “real thing.”

  Henry Lanz had brought him to Stanford, and they became friends20. Lanz was a “tall, narrow man21 with rounded shoulders [and] gently penetrating black eyes,” according to a profile of him in the campus newspaper. He was of Finnish descent, son of a naturalized American fat
her, born in Moscow and educated there and in Germany. During World War I, Lanz had found his way to London, where at age thirty he married a fourteen-year-old. In California he taught English to American soldiers of Slavic descent. By the end of the war he was on his way to a professorship at Stanford, in a language department that he created. He was a wonderment of culture on the Farm: fluent in several languages, musical, mystical, amusingly forgetful—an Old World type, rich in charm. He loved chess and played hundreds of games with Nabokov that summer, most of which Nabokov won. Vladimir described Lanz to biographer Andrew Field as un triste individuel, a shorthand term for “pedophile” commonly employed in Swiss newspapers. Over the chessboard they exchanged confidences, and Lanz revealed that he was a “fountainist,” as well as a seducer of little girls: someone who derives pleasure from watching them urinate.

  Lanz must have had something to do with the genesis of Lolita. This seemed clear to Field, who, when he suggested as much to Nabokov, elicited an outraged denial. The theme of sexual predation of young girls had been present in Nabokov’s work much earlier; it went back to a poem of the late 1920s, and the whole of the novel Lolita seems to impend in a passage in The Gift (1938) in which the hero of that book puts up with his girlfriend’s “cocky and corny” stepfather, who one night confesses to him,

  “Ah, if only22 I had a tick or two, what a novel I’d whip off! … Imagine this kind of thing: an old dog—but still in his prime, fiery, thirsting for happiness—gets to know a widow, and she has a daughter, still quite a little girl—you know what I mean—when nothing is formed yet but already she has a way of walking that drives you out of your mind—A slip of a girl, very fair, pale, with blue under the eyes—and of course she doesn’t even look at the old goat. What to do? Well, not long thinking, he ups and marries the widow… . They settle down the three of them. Here you can go on indefinitely—the temptation, the eternal torment, the itch.”