by Robert Roper
His science writing was confident—proto-Nabokovian. The first notes he ever made about butterflies, when he was a boy in Russia, had been in English; he admired the British journal The Entomologist and learned scientific terms from it, and English was thereafter67 his language of science. What gave him joy in chasing and writing about bugs is a large question, tantamount to the question of what gave him joy in life, but part of it was surely to have the chance to write to an extreme degree of detail in a style developed over centuries by cognoscenti who, by their command of a style, signaled fellowship with one another. One representative sample of his own science prose, from “Some new or little-known Nearctic Neonympha (Lepidoptera: Satyridae),” published in ’43 in the Harvard-connected journal Psyche:
A broad cinereous68 border heavily stippled with purplish black transverse striae, merged with the cinereous underside of the fringe and limited inwardly by the arches of the second discal and subterminal lines, occupies the whole outer third (excepting a vineleaf-shaped, as viewed from base, fulvous brown spot between second discal and subterminal lines …), thus completely enclosing the ocelli and other markings to be mentioned.
He is here describing a butterfly’s secondary wings. Eventually he developed a system69 for the complete mapping of an insect’s wing markings, scale by colored scale. He had been working on his butterfly prose70 since boyhood, and now he was a near adept, on his way to becoming a master. Imitation or parody had provided him, as with his literary prose, with a basis for launching into matters full of significance for him, in this case, into knotty problems in lepidopteral systematics and evolutionary theory.
* Wilson had himself been the beneficiary of Guggenheim largesse, in 1935, when he visited the Soviet Union. From 1930–31, he served on the foundation’s literary committee, where he became friends with Henry Allen Moe, Guggenheim head for forty years and, in Wilson’s opinion, “the only man connected with a foundation I’ve ever known who didn’t get fat and go to sleep on the job.” After serving on the literary committee, Wilson was of the opinion that “the whole thing would be better run if—in the literary department, at any rate—Moe were able to make all the decisions himself.” Moe and Wilson remained friends, and Wilson’s occasional letters in support of fellow writers carried weight.
† We see here an innocent early stage in the two writers’ involvement with translating Pushkin. Nabokov freely acknowledges Wilson’s competence and is happy to offer him a stake in the enterprise. The bloody fight of twenty-five years hence would be premised, from Nabokov’s point of view, on Wilson’s utter incompetence as a reader and translator of Pushkin.
‡ Nabokov does not ridicule Garnett directly in his book, although his chapter on Dead Souls begins with this unequivocal assertion: “The old translations of ‘Dead Souls’ into English are absolutely worthless and should be expelled from all public and university libraries.”
§ He continued to write poetry in Russian well into his seventh decade. Notable examples, collected in his compilation Poems and Problems (1970), are “To Prince S.M. Kachurin” and “From the Gray North.”
‖ From among this group of writers Nabokov recognized only Proust and Joyce as authentic masters.
7.
Because of Vladimir’s hard work as a volunteer, Nathan Banks approved an appointment for him as a research fellow at the MCZ for 1942–43, at the slim salary of one thousand dollars. Véra contributed to the family finances, giving language lessons and working off and on as a Harvard secretary, but she had “married a genius1,” a friend of hers remembered her thinking, and she saw herself as his support, seeing to it “that he had every opportunity” to write. Their insecure position prompted her to take several wise managerial steps. She made sure he wrote charmingly to two professors at Wellesley who had liked him, to say that he hoped to be invited back again, and she typed up his CV with a list of topics he could speak on, sending that to an organization that put together lecture tours. The agency booked him at a number of colleges in the South and the Midwest, and he set off in October2 ’42 by train, interrupting his work on the Gogol book to do so.
Chichikov’s travels in Dead Souls found an echo, although without infernal overtones. In Springfield, Illinois, where he was taken on a tour of Lincoln’s home and grave, he met a character straight out of the Gogol story “Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt,” a man whose passion in life was flagpoles. (The character Shponka dreams of flagpoles.) The Illinois man was “a creepily silent melancholic3 of somewhat clerical cast,” Vladimir wrote Véra, “with a small stock of automatic questions… . He livened up and flashed his eyes one single time … having noticed that the flagpole by the Lincoln mausoleum had been replaced by a new, taller one.” The letters from this second American exploration are intimate but also large. Something about America invites alert vagabonding, along with attempts to embrace the country entire: Audubon’s letters and journals, Whitman’s reports from the open road (mostly fictional), the five thousand journal pages of Lewis and Clark, Tocqueville’s reports on 1830s frontier settlements—these are but a few of the antecedents to the chatty, imaginative letters that Nabokov sent Véra. From Valdosta, Georgia, he wrote on October 14,
Arrived here, on4 the Florida border, yesterday around 7 P.M. and leave for Tennessee on Monday… . The college has booked a beautiful room for me as well as paid for all my meals, so that … I won’t be spending anything before I go. They gave me a car as well, but I only look at it, not daring to drive it. The college [Georgia State College for Women], with a charming campus among pines and palms, is a mile out of town. It is very Southern here. I took a walk down the only big street, in the velvet of the twilight and the azure of the neon lamps, and came back, overcome by a big Southern yawn.
Wherever possible he hunted insects. From Hartsville, South Carolina, he wrote,
After lunch5 the college biologist drove me in her car to … the coppices by the lake, where I took some remarkable hesperids and various kinds of pierids. It is hard to convey the bliss of roaming through this strange bluish grass, between blossoming bushes (one bush here is full of bright berries, as if colored in a cheap Easter purple—an utterly shocking chemical hue …) [A]fter “The Tragedy of Tragedy” [one of his talks], I went collecting again… . A Presbyterian minister, Smyth, turned up, a passionate butterfly collector and son of the famous lepidopterologist Smyth, about whom I know a lot.
Not only an enormous country: one full of butterfly men. Though anxious about how his talks would be received and recognizing the futility of the venture—profiting little because he was forced to pay for his own travel—and wishing he was home so he could write or go to the MCZ, Vladimir, a still young man with a good digestion, strikes a tone reminiscent of Mark Twain’s in Roughing It, or Whitman’s when6 he wrote about the fascinations of Manhattan’s Broadway. “Couldn’t sleep at all,” Nabokov tells us early on,
since at the numerous stations7 the wild jolts and thunderings of the train cars’ copulations … allowed no rest. By day, lovely landscapes skimmed past—huge trees in a profusion of forms—with their somehow oil-painted shade and iridescent greenery reminding me … of Caucasian valleys… . When I got off in Florence [South Carolina], I was immediately surprised by the heat and the sun, and the gaiety of the shadows—like what one feels upon reaching the Riviera from Paris.
He realized—probably not while he wrote, but again, who knows—that he had the makings of another book8. Comical interludes (waiting for a ride to a college, he overhears someone in a hotel lobby wondering why the Russian professor hasn’t shown up. “But I am the Russian professor!” Nabokov exclaims); revelatory encounters with Southern racialism (“In the evenings, those who have children rarely go out because … they have no one to leave the kids with; Negro servants never sleep over in the whites’ homes—it is not allowed—and they cannot have white servants because they cannot work with blacks”); further romps in the sun-shot, weirdly foliaged9 Southern wilds, chasing insects: the t
rip aroused and provoked him, led him to think and understand, made him want to write.
The tone resembles that of the letters he wrote in ’37. But he is conducting no clandestine affair this time, and the self-pleased tone of the glamorous young writer toasted by le tout Paris has been dialed back. He still admires himself a lot and reports evoking extravagant regard in others, but he shows himself as a bumbler, too10, as someone who chats up the professors at a college and then reaches into his pocket for his lecture notes and finds nothing. (“It came out very smoothly” anyway.) He meets iconic African Americans11, among them W. E. B. Du Bois, and writes from Spelman College that he is at “a black Wellesley” presided over by a formidable woman with a wart beside her nose, someone who requires him to attend chapel with four hundred students in the morning. As he later told interviewers, who hoped to pin down exactly what kind of reactionary or paleo-liberal or reactionary paleo-liberal he was, racial segregation12 disgusted him. “To the west, cotton plantations,” he wrote from South Carolina,
and the prosperity13 of the numerous Cokers [founders of Coker College], who seem to own half of Hartsville, is founded on this very cotton industry. It is picking time now, and the “darkies” (an expression that jars me, reminding me … of the “Zhidok” [“Yid”] of western Russian landowners) pick in the fields, getting a dollar for a hundred “bushels”—I am reporting these interesting facts because they stuck mechanically in my ears.
He is not a Northern liberal shocked to see that things are different in South Carolina, but he goes far, for him, in the direction of recognizing a social evil and showing concern. “My lecture about Pushkin … was greeted with almost comical enthusiasm,” he tells Véra, after informing his Spelman audience that Pushkin had had an African grandfather. He is pandering, a little, but pandering with a wholesome truth.
These letters later figured in plans for a sequel to Speak, Memory, a book he hoped to write someday about his American experience. He would call that book Speak On, Memory (or maybe More Evidence, or maybe Speak, America)—it was to have been about his friendship with Bunny Wilson and his years of exploring the West, with his college lecture tour from the first year of the war as foundation. The bundled letters followed him to Switzerland when he resettled there in the sixties, but the book never quite took form. Rereading his letters was for the older Nabokov intensely moving. “I need not tell you14 what agony it was,” he wrote Edmund Wilson’s widow in 1974, two years after Wilson’s death, “rereading the exchanges belonging to the early radiant era of our correspondence.” He had waited too long to harvest the book, as sometimes happens, even with writers of “genius.”
In May ’43, Nabokov told Laughlin that he had finally finished Nikolai Gogol, a book that “has cost me more trouble15 than any other I have composed… . I never would have accepted your suggestion to do it had I known how many gallons of brain-blood it would absorb.” It had been hard to write because “I had first to create” the writer (that is, translate him) “and then discuss him… . The recurrent jerk of switching from one rhythm of work to the other has quite exhausted me… . I am very weak, smiling a weak smile, as I lie in my private maternity ward, and expect roses.”
Laughlin was puzzled by the manuscript. He had wanted a sturdy introduction, to bring Gogol to the attention of readers who might have barely heard of him, and Nabokov had written an eccentric gloss in the manner of William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain or D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature. Those works had first appeared in the twenties. Lawrence was another European exile, someone who had struggled to find himself in America, and his study, like Nabokov’s, is furiously concerned with the flavor of authorial voice. Hoping to salvage some “classic” American writers—Franklin, Cooper, Crèvecoeur, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Dana, Whitman—from their reputation as authors of “children’s books,” Lawrence argues for their irreducible “art-speech16.” The “old American art-speech contains an alien quality,” he says,
which belongs17 to the American continent and to nowhere else… . There is a new voice in the old American classics. The world has declined to hear it, and has babbled about children’s stories… . The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything… . The world is a great dodger, and the Americans the greatest.
Lawrence’s book cost him18 much trouble, as did Nabokov’s. It grew out of a similar hope: to find in America an audience to replace an audience in Europe with which he felt increasingly out of step. He roughs up his classic Americans in much the way Nabokov does Gogol.* Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that Nabokov had read Lawrence’s book. Lawrence was one of the authors he never mentioned without an ostentatious sneer; he had read some Lawrence, he admitted (the novels probably), and Lawrence’s daring way with sex and the immense notoriety of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the most banned book of the twentieth century, were Lawrentian developments so relevant to Nabokov’s future career that his sneer, when he affected it, might have signaled a debt of an uncomfortable size.
In the first chapter of Studies Lawrence says,
There is a new feeling19 in the old American books, far more than there is in the modern American books, which are pretty empty of any feeling… . Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a … liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day… . The old American artists were hopeless liars. But they were artists… . And you can please yourself, when you read The Scarlet Letter, whether you accept what that sugary, blue-eyed little darling of a Hawthorne has to say for himself, false as all darlings are, or whether you read the impeccable truth of his art-speech… . Like Dostoevsky posing as a sort of Jesus, but most truthfully revealing himself all the while as a little horror.
Lawrence seems to be winking at the future Nabokov here, Dostoevsky being the Russian writer whom Nabokov most scorned. Style is what makes meaning20 for Lawrence; primitive America makes itself known, becomes real, only in the voices of homegrown artists, whom, however, Lawrence does not exalt as geniuses, whom he regards with a mixture of love and condescension.
March of ’43, Nabokov learned he had gotten his Guggenheim21: $2,500. Wellesley invited him back to teach again, and the MCZ renewed his research position at $1,200 a year. Immediately he began planning another trip west. On the California trip, he had had fun in New Mexico, collecting “near a place which22 had some connection with Lawrence,” he told Wilson (probably somewhere in Taos County). “You were going to tell me23 about a place you knew, when something interrupted us… . What we want is a modest, but good boarding-house, in hilly surroundings.”
Mountains were important, because mountain terrain favored the evolution of new species. Laughlin, who had not yet read the Gogol book, invited the Nabokovs to stay at a ski lodge he co-owned near the village of Sandy, Utah, southeast of Salt Lake City. The place was at an elevation of 8,600 feet, in a long, tumbling canyon24 full of aspens and granite, under high peaks that reach to 11,000 feet. Utah had been only lightly harvested by lepidopterists. The family traveled west by train.
This was the summer during which Dmitri helped his father bag specimens of Lycaeides melissa annetta. In a letter at the end of the war to his sister Elena, who was riding out the war in Prague, Nabokov sketched Dmitri’s character. He noted “a propensity for pensiveness and dawdling… . He does extremely well at school, but that is thanks to Véra who goes over every bit of homework with him.” Dmitri had “an exceptionally gifted nature” but, again, “a dose of indolence,” and he could “forget everything in the world” to submerge himself in an “aviation magazine—airplanes, to him, are what butterflies are to me25.”† His son was “vain, quick-tempered26, pugnacious, and flaunts American expressions” that were “pretty crude,” although, by the standard of American schoolboys, he was “infinitely gentle and generally very lovable.”
Aged eleven, Dmitri was still being sent to school in that “gray suit with a red jockey cap.” The waywardness27 that Nabokov emphasized would b
e a theme years later, in scolding, loving, anxious letters that Véra wrote her son when he was a student at Harvard and then in Italy, where he was starting an operatic career. While granting Dmitri great freedom, which he used to cultivate excitements of many kinds, the Nabokovs were also shaping him for a kind of work that in the long run would confer honor on him and sustain him morally and financially, in part. They made him a worker in the family cottage industry, whose product was books signed “Nabokov.” His Russian, which was his because his parents had made sure to speak it with him, was expressive but “appalling” as a written language; in his first year in college, Vladimir wrote Roman Jakobson, the renowned Harvard structuralist linguist, saying that the boy was “very anxious to take a course28 with you” and badly needed work on his grammar. This was a step, though by no means the first step, in a long campaign to equip him to translate his father’s work.