Nabokov in America

by Robert Roper

  § Yosemite epitomized western tourism. Since the 1870s it had drawn travelers coming west by rail; railroads described its enchantments in the promotional guides they published, which, along with journalism about travel and travelers’ memoirs, argued that Yosemite and sites like it justified tourism as much as did the castles and cathedrals of Europe. Travel to Europe had always been out of reach for many Americans; when World War I made Europe temporarily unavailable even to the wealthy, western tourism boomed. Henry Ford introduced the Model T in ’08, and roads began to improve in many regions, although slowly. In 1913, a ban on cars in the valley was relaxed. The world’s fairs at San Francisco and San Diego in ’15 brought thousands of car travelers to California, and many included a Yosemite side trip.

  ‖ It was a milieu that also made a good foil for what was daring and amoral and modernistic—for things that went on behind the facade. Thus, in his sexual delirium in fictional 1947–48, when he drives around America with a child captive, Humbert Humbert takes in many national parks and monuments. They visit Rocky Mountain, Mesa Verde, Crater Lake, Yellowstone, and Wind Cave National Parks, and the Bandolier, Gila Cliff Dwellings, Canyon de Chelly, and Death Valley National Monuments. They also stop at the National Elk Refuge, in Wyoming, the Lincoln Home National Historic Site, in Springfield, Illinois, and Mount Rushmore National Memorial.

  6.

  From New York, where they arrived by train1 with colds, the family traveled on to Boston. Vladimir’s two-week stint at Wellesley College the previous March had been so successful—so charming, so winning had he proved as a literary visitor—that the college had offered him a writer’s residency at a yearly salary of three thousand dollars (an associate professor’s pay). By September 18 they were established in an apartment2 in a house on a dead-end street in Wellesley, twenty miles west of Boston. “We have just rolled back3 to the East,” he immediately wrote Edmund Wilson. “I shall be teaching Comparative Literature here for a year. I want very much to see you.”

  Anyone who reads of the falling-out that came, two decades later, for the two writers—a savage, ultra-public bloodletting, maybe the last such battle of the pedants ever to be staged in America, although who knows—must marvel at the emotional distance traveled, the tenor of friendship thus sacrificed. “Dear Bunny,” Nabokov had written him in the early forties,

  I got that Guggenheim4 Fellowship. Thanks, dear friend. “You bring good luck” [Russian saying to this effect]. I have noticed that whenever you are involved in any of my affairs they are always successful… . I shall pass through N.Y. on Wednesday and Thursday, 14th and 15th of April. I shall ring you up if you tell me your ’phone number.

  Wilson had urged Nabokov to apply for the Guggenheim. Then he had written an irresistible letter on his behalf.* In due course the fellowship came through. To say that Nabokov5 would have been awarded a Guggenheim at age forty-three without Wilson’s help is fanciful—no previous grantee had been older than forty.

  “Dear Wilson,” Nabokov wrote him in ’41,

  a big spaseebo6 for “contacting” me with Decision and “New Direction.” I had a very pleasant talk with Klaus Mann [son of Thomas Mann and editor of Decision] who suggested my writing for them an article of 2000 words. I got a letter from James Laughlin and am sending him my English novel.

  The English novel was Sebastian Knight, and Wilson, besides helping it see print, was at that time “contacting” Nabokov with many influential people, many publishing outlets. In December ’40 Wilson had written,

  I am leaving7 The New Republic at the end of this week, but I have arranged with Bruce Bliven [president of the magazine’s editorial board] to have you do a periodical article … about contemporary Russian literature. I suppose each one ought to be limited to perhaps 1,500 words, unless there is a good deal that is very important.

  Earlier he had advised,

  In doing future8 reviews, please follow exactly The New Republic usage giving the title, author, etc., at the top. You will note that the number of pages and the [book] price are included. I am enclosing an example. Another thing: please do refrain from puns, to which I see you have a slight propensity. They are pretty much excluded from serious journalism here.

  Famously supportive—there is no writer in our literature who so loyally helped so many—Wilson is here pulling out all the stops. Connections to editors ready to pay (“I should think Klaus Mann would … pay you more than the [Partisan Review]”); advice on submitting clean copy; editorial advice (Nabokov sends him stories, poems, translations, and complete books, and Wilson reads all); strategizing over live editor management (“send it to Nigel Dennis, who is now in charge … reminding him that I had arranged … with Bliven”): here is the full gamut run. Wilson’s helpfulness has been attributed by some Nabokov scholars to self-interest, to his intoxication with all things Russian, to his eagerness to practice the language. While there were benefits to associating with a Russian writer, such explanations fail to account for Wilson’s remarkable energy and steadfastness. In ’44, he brokered Nabokov’s entrée into the New Yorker as a prose writer, a crucial maneuver of inestimable value to his career; chapters from what would be Speak, Memory soon began to appear, along with short stories, and Katharine White, fiction editor at the magazine, became another important Nabokov rabbi. Alexandra Tolstoy, of the Tolstoy Foundation, had warned him, “All Americans are9 completely uncultured, credulous fools,” and while the verdict is still out on that, Nabokov’s experience in his first years in America was that cultured, powerful people were magically available to him.

  Without Wilson’s stewardship10, the road would have been different—there might not have been a road. Boyd, who derogates Wilson, allows that “Nabokov was introduced11 from the start to the best that American intellectual life had to offer,” but the magus of this introduction was surely Wilson. Sebastian Knight had had no luck with publishers despite the best efforts of two agents, until Wilson interceded with Laughlin; thereafter, as Nabokov wrote, “My English novel12 has been accepted by New Directions, and Laughlin came to see me here from Los Angeles… . It will appear in Octobre.”

  Nabokov’s prose could attract the attention of the New Yorker editors because Wilson had arranged for it to appear earlier in the Atlantic; his intimacy with Weeks of the Atlantic was such that when Nabokov asked for help getting payment from him, Wilson wrote, “I don’t want to mention13 it to him, because I do a good deal of recommending as to what he ought to print … and he might resent it if I tried to tell him when he ought to pay his contributors as well.”

  Nabokov referred to Wilson as a “magician,” intending praise of Wilson’s cleverness, but he was speaking also of Wilson’s effective sponsorship. Having translated a Pushkin monologue, he turned to Wilson with it: “Could you god-father14 it—if you find the translation all right?” he asked, meaning find a magazine for it. “And I would be immensely grateful to you for any corrections.”†

  Though there are arguments from self-interest, if we take Wilson at his word, and Nabokov at his, the grounds for their intense involvement for years were simple: they were good friends. They fell for each other, hard. “Dear Volodya,” Wilson wrote him in March ’45,

  I get aboard my boat15 [to Europe] Wednesday… . I’ll be away four to six months. Good luck in the meantime. By the way, if you really want an academic job, you might write to Lewis Jones, president of Bennington and say that you are the person I mentioned to him… . Our conversations have been among the few consolations of my literary life through these last years—when my old friends have been dying, petering out or getting more and more neurotic, and the general state of the world has been so discouraging.

  Wilson had lost a close friend, John Peale Bishop, the year before and would soon lose another, Paul Rosenfeld. In the year he met Nabokov, Scott Fitzgerald died, and Nabokov may have received some of the older-brotherly solicitude that Wilson—who had been close to Fitzgerald since16 college—might have tendered the needful Scott.<
br />
  Nabokov’s signs of affection are everywhere. That he wrote to Wilson personally, rather than having Véra write on his behalf (his later practice even with close friends), is notable, as is the quality of what he wrote: brilliant, fluent passages of radiant prose. In March ’43, when Wilson was married to Mary McCarthy, Nabokov wrote, “In the middle of April I shall spend a day in New York … and I simply must see you both. I miss you a lot.” In another letter, “You are one of17 the very few people in the world whom I keenly miss when I do not see them.”

  Nabokov had other male friends18. His letters to them, mostly in Russian, are warm and engaging but nothing like the letters to Wilson. Just as in his love letters to Véra, he felt free to report his every literary gambit, his every career win, big or small:

  I hope you19 will enjoy reading my new paper on Lepidoptera, which I am appending. Try reading it between the descriptions—though there are some fine bits in them too. I have just finished writing a story for the Atlantic (Weeks rang me up 4 times to get another one after “Mlle O” [fifth chapter of the future Speak, Memory]—and I got a letter from an Institution called “Better Speech” something, asking me the permission to use a paragraph from “Mlle O” in their manual …).

  The recitation of triumphs verges on the insufferable. Nabokov blamed Wilson for this: “if I keep talking20 about my affairs in such detail it is because I feel it is you who have given me the great Push.”

  Mary McCarthy, trying to account for their devotion, said, “they had an absolute ball21 together. Edmund was always in a state of joy when Vladimir appeared; he loved him.” There were raucous, bibulous visits back and forth, to Wilson’s houses on the Cape and to the residences the Nabokovs rented. Vladimir told biographer Andrew Field that Wilson was “in certain ways my closest22” friend; nor did he say, “my closest American friend.” Their companionability, even in a political sense, needs to be noted, considering their intense disagreements over the Soviet state. Both were extreme individualists and free-speech near fundamentalists. Both were philo-Semitic at a time when prominent English-language authors—Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, many others—signaled a sham gentility by disdaining Jews. Nabokov’s review of The Guillotine at Work, which failed to appear in the New Republic despite a preface by Wilson—the magazine wished to take a less hostile stance toward Stalin in the winter of 1942—acknowledged that history needs idealists, which was Wilson’s position, too: “without the impetus of such dreams the world would soon cease to turn.” Moreover, there were people “to whom the notion of human misery is so utterly revolting that they will plunge into any adventure that holds the faintest chance of improving the world,” and this “discloses the kind of unconscious optimism which man, perhaps fortunately, will never forsake23.”

  * * *

  Nabokov’s duties at Wellesley were nominal: three classroom appearances in October and three in January, with six community-wide talks given over the course of the year. “I am expected to participate in ‘social life,’ ” he told Wilson, but that was it—light duty and lots of time to write. He continued his report of projects undertaken, of wins: “I have sold another story to Weeks … it will appear in the Christmas number… . I have been working a good deal lately in my special branch of entomology, two papers of mine have appeared in a scientific journal.” He would produce “a rather ambitious work on mimetic phenomena24,” he promised Wilson, as if Wilson had been waiting to hear this.

  Wellesley sustained him for seven years. His employment status was always irregular, following the bumpy course of the war. Shortly after Pearl25 Harbor, with budget cuts pending and the Soviet Union still in bad repute, college administrators were lukewarm toward Slavic studies, and the stock of Slavic experts declined. With tales of Soviet suffering gaining currency, and news of the Soviets’ brilliant, hard-to-be-believed victory over the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, whereby Hitler’s forecast of world conquest became incorrect, a vogue for things Russian set in. Nabokov was not offered employment for fall of ’42, after his artist-in-residence year, but by spring of ’4326 he was at Wellesley teaching on a noncredit basis, and by academic year 1944–45 he was a near professor: the extracurricular instructor in Russian.

  His anti-Soviet line, insisting on an equivalence between Com-munist and fascist tyrannies, made Mildred Helen McAfee, Wellesley’s president, uncomfortable. Headed for Washington to become the first director of the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), McAfee did not see his pox-on-both-your-houses stance as quite correct. She resisted pressure from a wealthy alumna to hire him in spring of ’42. It was only after she had left27 for Washington, and after a year in the vocational wilderness for Nabokov, that conditions favored a return.

  His teaching was expert, if eccentric. He was not a wrong-footed foreign lecturer who, straining in a language not his own, professes into a cultural void, into a human unknown; he carefully configured his pedagogy to his audience, and he had a gift for imagining that audience—for imagining any group of other minds. He might have mused upon his own creativity for a year, as a cosseted writer-in-residence, but instead he devised specific talks for specific situations—for students taking Spanish courses, he spoke about Don Quixote’s appeal to Russian dissenters, for Italian students he dilated upon Leonardo, and for students taking zoology he spoke on lepidopterological mimicry, a special interest of his. In his community-wide addresses28, he chose writers the campus population could be expected to be familiar with: Chekhov, Turgenev, Tyutchev (a mistake there), and Tolstoy; of course Tolstoy.

  He esteemed Tolstoy greatly. His father had been acquainted with the author, as a fellow fighter for social reform; as a ten-year-old, Vladimir waited while his father spoke with a “little white-bearded29 old man” on a street in St. Petersburg, after which his father commented, “That was Tolstoy.” Tolstoy was so large, so indisputably the monument of the Russian novel, that Vladimir’s relations with him could not but be complex. Sometimes he found the master ludicrous as well as great. “Have you noticed30,” he wrote Wilson, “when reading War and Peace the difficulties Tolstoy experienced in forcing mortally wounded Bolkonsky to come into geographical … contact with Natasha? It is painful to watch the way the poor fellow is dragged and pushed and shoved.” In one way Tolstoy was unimpeachable, however: it was his ability to match the passage of time31 within a story to readers’ natural feel for time, so that, carried along on the great Volga of narrative, readers felt that everything happened more or less when it ought to, at the pace, seemingly, of “real life.” Nabokov’s own way with time is also often splendidly right-feeling, if complicated by modernist structural disjuncts—underneath all there is a deft modeling of others’ consciousness, others’ capacities, generous sympathy with an audience.

  James Laughlin, his publisher, visited Boston in May ’42. Their first book together had sold little—America had entered a world war just as an obscure Russian was publishing a novel of epistemological doubt—but Laughlin did not turn away from him; he remained eager to publish him, and in defiance of the commercial fate of Sebastian Knight and of the tumult of the war, they agreed on two more books to do together, a study of the Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol and a volume of translations from Pushkin and Tyutchev.

  Laughlin was in his twenties. He had graduated from Harvard only three years before. He was the great-grandson of an Irish immigrant who had founded a steel fortune. His upbringing was privileged; his great-uncle Henry Clay Frick was a coal magnate and chairman of Carnegie Steel, and Laughlins were industrialists of weight and influence. James decided early that “I would not go into the mill32,” yet his turn away from the family business did not include a turn away from the family; as he wrote when given an award many years later, “none of this33 [the publishing house he founded and its literary successes] would have been possible without the industry of my ancestors, the canny Irishmen who immigrated in 1824 from County Down [and] built up what became the fourth largest steel company in th
e country. I bless them with every breath.”

  He wrote poetry himself. But Ezra Pound, to whom Laughlin made pilgrimage in the mid-thirties, advised him to become a publisher instead, and Pound’s recommendations of worthy writers to pursue helped make him the independent34 publisher in the English language in the twentieth century. In May ’42, with no academic job in the offing, Nabokov was greatly buoyed to have books to write for him. Gogol could be personally useful, too: to write of Gogol would be another way to introduce himself, to further the planned Russification of the American reader.

  Though he worked hard he soon bogged down. The problem was that quotations from Gogol needed for his book had been poorly translated35 by others. Constance Garnett’s translation of Gogol’s The Government Inspector was “dry shit36,” he told Laughlin, and his days were taken up with retranslating passages from it and others from Dead Souls.‡ Garnett’s version of the novel had appeared in ’23 and was the standard English translation. But Gogol was too important a writer to be botched; he had brought a bizarre, fantastical mind and a bright new eye to Russian letters, and Nabokov needed to evidence that, to write about it. “Before his and Pushkin’s advent,”

  Russian literature was purblind37… . It did not see color for itself but merely used the hackneyed combinations of blind noun and dog-like adjective that Europe had inherited from the ancients… . The sky was blue, the dawn red, the foliage green… . It was Gogol (and after him Lermontov and Tolstoy) who first saw yellow and violet at all.

  A famous passage from Dead Souls—made famous by Nabokov, in two books and countless lectures—reads, in the serviceable, certainly not illiterate, Garnett version,