Nabokov in America

by Robert Roper

  Humbert Humbert, who marries a widow to get at her daughter, realizes all his dreams (and nightmares) when the mother dies. An even more stark prototype23 exists in the form of The Enchanter, a novella that Nabokov wrote in fall ’39, about a man who marries an ailing woman who soon dies, leaving him in control of her desirable child. That Nabokov was mulling the Lolita plexus for a long while before taking up the subject in America is clear, and he would return to the theme of—possibly to his own private fascination with—the bodies of young girls in other texts, so that, from one perspective, at any rate, his entire body of work can be said to be centrally about this matter24.†

  What Lanz might have contributed—seems to have—was his Old World charmer persona, his handsome, insinuating way. He was an amiable man who got what he wanted sexually. He commanded his young wife to dress as a child in their home, and on weekends, according to what he told Vladimir, he drove out “into the country” to “participate in orgies25,” presumably with children. Where Lanz was most like Humbert was in his convenient helplessness, his passivity before his obsession. He “suffered from … nympholepsy,” Nabokov said, according to Field; he was a case study out of “Havelock Ellis,” beyond cure. When Lanz died suddenly at fifty-nine—Humbert also dies young—Nabokov was persuaded that he had killed himself, rather than that he had been carried away by “a long infection26 and peritonitis,” as the Stanford alumni magazine reported.

  The issue of real-life models for Nabokov’s characters—Lanz as Humbert, or possibly Gaston Godin, another character in Lolita who combines foreignness with libertinism—soon grows complicated. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, published three months after his return from California, the half brother of a deceased novelist sets out to learn what he can of his brother’s existence. Sebastian and V., as the half brother is called, were six years apart in age; they grew up in the same house in St. Petersburg, but Sebastian, in the manner of many older brothers, was aloof and disappearing. V., watching Sebastian paint with watercolors one day, clambers up beside him on a chair, but

  with a shrug27 of his shoulder he pushes me away, still not turning, still as silent and distant, as always in regard to me. I remember peering over the banisters and seeing him come up the stairs, after school… . My lips pursed, I squeeze out a white spittal which falls down and down … and this I do, not because I want to annoy him, but merely as a wistful and vain attempt to make him notice my existence.

  Sebastian leaves for Cambridge at nineteen. V. and his mother move to France, and contact between the brothers mostly ends. The elements of Nabokov’s own biography are everywhere present in the novel, but intriguingly altered; a reader is tempted to say that the novel is a demonstration, with a mild parodic flavor, of the changes that any clever novelist might ring in a story based on his personal material.

  Nabokov had two younger brothers. The one nearest him in age, Sergei, died in the Neuengamme28 concentration camp on January 10, 1945, having been imprisoned by the Nazis for “subversive statements.” (He had been imprisoned before for homosexuality and released.) The brothers were not close. Many things about Sergei irritated Vladimir: his jejune aestheticism, his religiosity, his homosexual beau monde friends in Paris, but mostly it was the homosexuality, the homosexuality above all else. To speculate freely—but then, the whole of Sebastian Knight invites a reader to speculate about a writer’s life and art—Nabokov found his brother to be an embarrassment and a pain but was also aware that he was his brother, and that Sergei would have had his own perspective on things. (Kirill Nabokov, the other brother, was twelve years younger than Vladimir; he, too, at times experienced the high hat and the high hand, but their relations were usually sweeter.)

  There seems to be something like an attempt to make things right via-à-vis his brothers in Sebastian Knight. It is as if, aware of his lack of empathy, Vladimir were granting the possibility that his brothers had all along been honorable, loyal, deeply intelligent men in the mold of V. in the novel, deserving of much better treatment. (So sympathetic is younger brother V. that the novel implies that he himself might have been the writer Sebastian.) In light of Sergei’s fate it seems possible, if we grant Nabokov prophetic powers—and why not, since he arrogates all other powers to the artist—that he foresaw the likelihood of Neuengamme or some other horror as an end for him, that already he was mourning him.

  Sebastian Knight encourages speculation of this sort, but it disciplines it, too. V. pursues his brother’s traces not neglecting to seek clues in his published novels, from which he often quotes, but the detective chase is long and twisty. A bad-biographer figure appears; he is misnamed Goodman, and his ambition is to cash in on Sebastian’s fame. Goodman gets everything wrong, is a cad when it comes to the truth. (More prophecy here: Nabokov seems to be addressing Andrew Field, his erroneous first biographer, thirty years before ever meeting him.) V. is not like Goodman, though. He is sensitive and imaginative; he can enter into his brother’s secret life, enter but not go too far, because as Nabokov’s second, highly scrupulous, biographer, Boyd, puts it, “the mortal quest for another’s29 self” is impossible, that is, we are all unknowable to each other.

  The book is equally wonderful and tiresome. Nabokov was the exponent of a zealous modernist approach by the time he wrote it, an approach that owed everything to Proust except what it owed James Joyce. He had emerged as a writer at the hour of the major modernist triumphs, nor did he arrive at his encounters with À la Recherche du Temps Perdu and Ulysses as a blank slate: already he had swallowed Russian literature whole, along with French and English literatures of several centuries, and as a precocious teen he had thrilled to the poetry of what is sometimes called the Russian Silver Age, which encompasses avant-garde movements like Symbolism and Acmeism. All had washed through him, much staying with him. As he made his way as a young writer, modernism was triumphing among taste-making critics, and his work of a most severe modernist30 cast dates from just shortly before Sebastian Knight.

  The novel, about a novel-writing writer, is full of discussions about the writing of novels. There is a breathtaking confidence in the inherent fascination of the creative personality as subject. That this should be the focus of literate art is unquestioned, in a novel that submits much else to de-sentimentalized scrutiny. Proust had licensed this sort of thing in his beautiful, exhausting portraits of characters who are stand-ins for an artist-author. Joyce did also. Sebastian Knight reads at times like A Portrait of a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The question has become how to address the sovereign author-subject, whether, through even the most devoted efforts, he can ever be comprehended in his full magnificence.

  Nabokov embeds personal material throughout the book. The near catastrophe of the Guadanini affair belonged to the year just before he began writing Sebastian, and it colors everything. Instead of a novelist who nearly wrecks his life by abandoning a loving wife, the novel presents a novelist who does wreck his life, who abandons a devoted soul mate for a ravishing mistress, which leads to his ruin. The love letters that Nabokov wrote Guadanini appear in the form of letters that the dying Sebastian bequeaths his half brother, marked “to be destroyed.” Brother V., acting unlike any previous biographer known to God or man, burns all of them unread. This consigns the truth about Sebastian Knight to the realm of the undiscoverable. From the point of view of the ordinary reader, the gesture is perverse and unsatisfying, if intellectually rigorous: the author seems to be rapping us on the knuckles, sending us home unfed for our own good.

  The Stanford summer now nearly over, the Nabokovs took a standard California vacation31, heading for Yosemite Valley with a couple they knew from Berlin. They had last seen Bertrand and Lisbet Thompson in ’37, in the South of France, at the height of the marital crisis. Lisbet, one of Véra’s closest friends, might have sensed something amiss at that time, but four years later the family seemed fine32, son Dmitri healthy and lively, Vladimir with many new butterfly captures, Véra having much enjoyed33 her l
ong drive across the continent, her first encounter with America’s “beauty spots34.”

  Bertrand, almost old enough35 to be Vladimir’s father, fascinated him. He was a character out of an American novel36—something by Saul Bellow from the coming decade, a cross between The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King, perhaps. He was African American. Born in Denver, he had grown up in Los Angeles with a divorced mother and earned a law degree at eighteen. Unable to find work because of his race, he became a Unitarian minister. He went for more study to Harvard, where he wrote The Churches and the Wage Earners while earning an advanced degree in economics. His ministry took him to storied sites familiar to Hawthorne, among them Salem and Peabody. More transformations were coming. He became secretary of Boston’s Chamber of Commerce, encountering there the management theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, now widely credited with having invented scientific business management. In 1914, he wrote Scientific Management, a Taylorist treatise that dissented carefully from the master’s orthodoxy.

  Yosemite Valley, Yosemite National Park, 1939

  In 1917, Thompson published37 The Theory and Practice of Scientific Management, still in print and “perhaps the most definitive work ever published on scientific management,” according to Public Administration: Balancing Power and Accountability, the classic reference on public administration. Wait: even more changes were on the way. Offered a full professorship at Harvard, Thompson instead became a freelance business consultant and introduced Taylorist ideas in France, Germany, and Italy. The French Ministry of Armament hired him to rationalize shell-loading procedures. In the 1920s he became wealthy. He spent a year in the Philippines consulting for the Calami Sugar Cane Plantation and Processing Plant. In ’29 he lost much of his wealth. By ’37 he was driving an aged Studebaker38, suggestive of a slow recovery from the collapse of his finances. By the time of the Yosemite trip, however, he was driving a brand-new ’41 Studebaker Commander and pursuing yet another career, studying biochemistry39 at Berkeley. He researched cell biology throughout his sixties, and by his ninth decade40 he had become a cancer researcher in Uruguay, where he died, following a trip to Chicago to be honored by a business group, at eighty-seven.

  Yosemite was not the oldest or largest American park. It was iconic, though, talismanic: John Muir had labored for decades to secure its preservation, Muir being in some ways41 the instrument of the original American protector, Abraham Lincoln, who, at the height of the Civil War, had troubled himself to sign a bill giving Yosemite Valley to the state of California for purposes of public recreation, thus establishing the precedent of federal set-asides. By the early forties the park looked much as it does today. Several buildings in the National Park Service rustic style had been built; Herbert Maier, who designed the Yosemite Museum42, had been named a regional director of the Civilian Conservation Corps, and his guidebooks on design were followed in construction projects around the country, making the rustic style the default for public park buildings.

  Nabokov had an affinity for American parks. Already on his first trip he had visited Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Hot Springs National Park, the Grand Canyon, and possibly Petrified Forest National Monument (close to Holbrook, Arizona, where he recorded having captured a specimen). He also visited several state parks—in Tennessee alone he collected in or near Mount Roosevelt State Forest, Frozen Head State Park, and Cumberland Mountain State Park. While in Yosemite he again used the “accredited member” credential granted him by the AMNH. So intent was he on chasing insects that he stepped on a sleeping bear43.‡ The Nabokov-Thompsons were typical of their era in that they arrived in Yosemite by car.§ They might have stayed at the housekeeping tents in the park ($11.50 per week for a family of three; slightly more with linen). Campgrounds where visitors paid no fees at all were also plentiful. They were like the motor camps44 of the twenties, with water hydrants, picnic tables, and communal restrooms, but on none of their western trips did the Nabokovs live in a tent they themselves carried—sleeping on the ground did not appeal.

  When a party arrived from the San Francisco direction, as did the Nabokovs and Thompsons, Sentinel Rock, Cathedral Rocks, El Capitan, and Half Dome came suddenly, wantonly into view—it was one of the most remarked-upon tourist views in North America, an astonishment of granite. Car visitors, who, like the Thompsons and Nabokovs, often stayed for a week, frequently made day trips45 to Glacier Point, to the Mariposa Grove of sequoias, to Crane Flat, to Hetch Hetchy Valley before its flooding, and to the famous waterfalls.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson had come to Yosemite. Presidents including Kennedy, Eisenhower, Roosevelt, Taft, and Grant had come to look and to acknowledge the grandeur. As with all of his western travels, Nabokov began with the desire to capture insects, and though his stepping on a bear suggests the usual obsessive focus, he had other purposes, too. To set Dmitri free in an outdoor setting was one, and to consort with Americans in an American place in an American way was, if not the first item on his agenda, agreeable. In coming years there would be many other trips to parks. In his correspondence with Altagracia de Jannelli, Vladimir had spoken of being charmed by “that old-fashioned something” that clings to America despite the “hard glitter,” and the parks, whatever else they do, serve up a benign milieu with a democratic flavor, rustic in style (thus “old-fashioned”), inexpensive, healthful as long as you don’t fall off a cliff, and a comfortable distance from what is daring and amoral and ultramodernistic (to cite cultural tendencies that Nabokov said he deplored).‖

  By September of ’41, when the Nabokovs came46, the park had made most of its accommodations to the automobile, including paving the roads. The weather in early September is blissful47; rain is rare, and days in the valley are warm and cloudless. Nights are good for sleeping at four thousand feet. The Nabokovs were off the peak of the tourist season, although the cars that September before the war were still numerous. On September 9 or 10, the Thompsons drove them back48 to Palo Alto.

  Nabokov might have made a whole life in the West. The lepping was fantastic, and he responded joyfully to the landscapes. Writing to the artist Dobuzhinsky, he remarked on the palette of the Grand Canyon, which he mistakenly located in New Mexico: the uncanny “cleaves and cleavages” of orange earth and blue sky were captivating, he reported. In Russian there are different words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy), and Russian speakers have been shown49 to be faster at discriminating among blue tones than are English speakers. “How wonderful was50 the journeying!” he enthused. “I, of course, in the main caught butterflies along the road, but nonetheless by habit investigated the excellent landmarks.”

  Americans were a restless people51. They liked to travel long distances, often for fun, which made them different from many Europeans. The greatest distances in the United States are in the West; westerners are therefore the biggest travelers. Nabokov soon became the kind of traveler52 who makes a daily record of miles driven and gallons of gas purchased, along with sights seen and motels or other lodgings patronized (including the occasional dude ranch). When away from his vacation haunts, he spoke of plans to return soon to his beloved West, and he mused that it would be ideal to own a cabin53 out there as well as a New York apartment, a cabin close to “a certain little bit of desert54 in Arizona which I shall never forget.”

  * Nabokov did not go to California ignorant of its writers and its literature. A letter to Wilson from Palo Alto acknowledges receipt of Wilson’s “delightful book” The Boys in the Back Room: Notes on California Novelists, recently published, and Nabokov added that he had read most of the essays when they appeared earlier in the New Republic, on such writers as John Steinbeck, Nathanael West, James M. Cain, John O’Hara, and William Saroyan.

  † The English novelist Martin Amis takes the opportunity, in a December 2011 Times Literary Supplement review, to express his high regard for Nabokov. Discussing a new essay collection from Brian Boyd, he observes that the biographer “attempts something fairly ambitious: h
e takes the titanic Nabokov and seeks to revise him upwards.” But Boyd, he says, is “something of an apologist for the only significant embarrassment in the Nabokov corpus. Of the nineteen fictions, no fewer than six wholly or partly concern themselves with the sexuality of prepubescent girls… . To be as clear as one can be: the unignorable infestation of nymphets … is not a matter of morality; it is a matter of aesthetics. There are just too many of them.”

  The pedophilia theme is not only about aesthetics. The repetition suggests a compulsion—a literary equivalent of the persistent impulse of a pedophile. A self-conscious writer in the best sense, Nabokov is unlikely not to have noticed the tendency of his own body of work. In the absence of evidence of actual relations with children—evidence that his biographers, no matter how worshipful, have tried to find—the suspicion arises that he sensed something that he could do, something some writer ought to do, with the theme of a child taken sexually. Mostly ignored or treated covertly before, the subject attracted him for reasons probably not fully clear to him until he rendered it in Lolita. The child there is brought to full, suffering life, the bleakness of her captivity shown, along with its suggestive absurdity. There were many children like Lolita at the time, many housed in protective institutions. Nabokov never aimed to “reform,” but his affinity for stories of the forbidden, of humiliation and compulsion, played half for laughs, brought him and his readers to a great uncovering.

  ‡ Black bears were plentiful in the valley in the 1940s. Promotional films of the time show tourists feeding them by hand, and cubs were quick to learn how to stand on their hind legs to take food.