by Robert Roper
Alta Lodge, 1945
Alta, Laughlin’s lodge, now an iconic American powder-skiing destination, was a kind of mountain fastness. The family took the train to Salt Lake and then caught a ride into the mountains, but then they were more or less stranded, since no one among them drove, and they had no car anyway. Véra was uncomfortable in the weather. She would come to marvel at mountain thunderstorms and hailstorms, but Alta was windy and cold that summer. Relations with Laughlin and his wife were also edgy, verging on chilly. Laughlin had promised “moderate” terms for a room, but in Laughlin the “landlord and the poet29 are fiercely competing,” Nabokov wrote Wilson, “with the first winning by a neck.” Like other scions of great fortunes, the publisher was eager not to be taken for a mark, and he drove hard bargains with many of his writers. His argument with Nabokov about the Gogol book was real and inflected what happened over the summer. He wanted plot summaries of Gogol’s works, among other additions that Nabokov found laughable. Vladimir grudgingly supplied a chronology and a new final chapter, “Commentaries,” which holds the publisher up to ridicule, but which Laughlin had the good form to publish as Nabokov wrote it.
The tone of the chapter—recalling the famous sketch by Hemingway, “One Reader Writes”—reports Laughlin saying such things as “ ‘Well … I like it—but I do think the student ought … to be told more about Gogol’s books… . He would want to know what those books are about.’ ” Vladimir replies that he said what they are about, to which Laughlin answers, “ ‘No… . I have gone through it carefully and so has my wife, and we have not found the plots… . The student ought to be able to find his way, otherwise he would be puzzled and would not bother to read further30.’ ”
In Hemingway’s sketch, published in Winner Take Nothing (1933), a woman whose husband has contracted syphilis writes to an advice columnist asking for basic information about the disease. Her prudery invites ridicule and seems intended as an indictment of American women, or maybe just of American wives. Nabokov’s sketch is almost entirely dialogue: usually he disdained writing that was heavily dialogue-based, Hemingway’s most definitely included in the derogation, but here he uses naturalistic speech to clever effect, showing the thickness of the character identified as “the publisher” with every word out of his mouth. The “I” of the dialogue is patient and sane by contrast and justified in feeling exasperated; he is the victim of someone enamored of his own ideas who also, unfortunately, signs the checks. A technique often said to be an invention of Hemingway’s, leaving out passages for a reader to infer, has a near-parodic demonstration in the sixteenth paragraph, when, after the patient author is asked to recite the plot events of The Inspector General, and gives a laughably literal summary, the publisher says, “Yes, of course you may use it,” in reply to an unvoiced request to put it in the revised manuscript.
Nabokov had an especially keen disregard31 for Hemingway. Faulkner he dismissed32 with similarly appalled commentary, but Hemingway bestrode the era of Nabokov’s arrival in America as a colossus, his fame and sales evoking in many writers a troubled response. In the year of Nabokov’s arrival, 1940, Hemingway was dominatingly present, with the publication in October of For Whom the Bell Tolls, his long, sporadically excellent, crowd-pleasing novel of the Spanish Civil War. Nabokov admitted to having read Hemingway. In an interview in the sixties he said, “As to Hemingway33, I read him for the first time in the early forties, something about bells, balls, and bulls, and loathed it. Later I read his admirable ‘The Killers’ and the wonderful fish story.” “Bells, balls, and bulls” conflates For Whom the Bell Tolls with The Sun Also Rises, and “the wonderful fish story” is probably The Old Man and the Sea, another crowd-pleaser but definitely minor Hemingway. “The Killers” is an early dialogue-based story, virtually a screenplay. It has influenced American film34 but gives a decidedly narrow idea of Hemingway’s resources as a writer.
Nabokov’s attention to the literary goings-on of this period, especially his awareness of his fellow authors, is what can be expected of an ambitious newcomer aiming to play a hand. Just in a single letter of his Utah summer he gives a sense of wide, continuous reading among writers in the American grain. To Wilson on July 15, a month into the Alta stay, he wrote that he had “liked very much Mary35 [McCarthy]’s criticism of [Thornton] Wilder’s play in the Partisan.” (The play was The Skin of Our Teeth, and McCarthy’s acid review called it an “anachronistic joke, a joke both provincial and self-assertive.”) He had also read, and lustily hated36, Max Eastman’s long narrative poem Lot’s Wife, which had just come out as a book. Wilson had mentioned the émigré writer V. S. Yanovsky, and Nabokov, displaying no kindness toward a fellow Slav, one now also writing for the American market, denounced him as “a he-man37 … if you know what I mean.” Furthermore, “He cannot write.”
Returning to Western subjects, he said,
Twenty years ago38 this place was a Roaring Gulch with golddiggers plugging each other in saloons, but now the Lodge stands in absolute solitude. I happened to read the other day a remarkably silly but rather charming book about a dentist who murdered his wife—written in the nineties and uncannily like a translation from Maupassant in style. It all ends in the Mohave Desert.
That book was probably McTeague39, by Frank Norris.
Some of the scene at Alta can be imagined from Nabokov’s letters, from passages in the Gogol book, and from Laughlin’s accounts of having the Nabokovs as touchy guests. The solitude in the canyon came with marks of desolation40; the local silver mines having shut down, Nabokov could see “ancient mine dumps” and derelict equipment when he looked through the plateglass windows. Built four years before by a railroad company, with Laughlin coming on later as investor, the lodge was a modest wooden structure sited on a steep slope of the canyon, with a snow-shedding roof and a deck built on piers on the downhill side. Inside, stone fireplaces and guest rooms catered to skiers in winter. Nabokov relished the views. “A delicate sunset was framed41 in a golden gap between gaunt mountains,” he writes in Nikolai Gogol. “The remote rims of the gap were eyelashed with firs and … deep in the gap itself, one could distinguish the silhouettes of other, lesser and quite ethereal, mountains.”
He went out on the deck nights. According to Laughlin, he “affixed big lights [inside] the plate glass windows … and collected moths.” (Some of these moths, of the variety known as pugs42, he sent to J. H. McDunnough of the AMNH, who named one of the captures Eupithecia nabokovi.) Laughlin was astounded by his energy. He “wrote every day43 and hunted butterflies every good day,” Laughlin told Time magazine in the sixties. “I never knew what he was writing … he was secretive about that, but I could hear the typewriter going.” (The typewriter would have been operated by Véra; Vladimir wrote almost exclusively with a pen44, whose operation was impeded by the altitude.)
When the weather kept them indoors45, the Russians played Chinese checkers. Laughlin and his young wife had a pair of cocker spaniel puppies, and these were often underfoot—they were “a draggle-eared black46 one with an appealing slant in the bluish whites of his eyes and a little white bitch with a pink-dappled face and belly,” Nabokov wrote. They were supposed to stay out on the deck but sneaked in.
Despite the occasional rainstorm, “Never in my life … have I had such good collecting as here,” Nabokov wrote Wilson. “I climb easily47 to 12000 ft… . I walk from 12 to 18 miles a day, wearing only shorts and tennis shoes.” The canyon was a wildflower paradise. Feeling strong and animated, possibly, by a resentful urge, Nabokov challenged Laughlin, a fine athlete and tireless hiker, to climb with him to the summit of Lone Peak, a serious ascent that gains over six thousand feet from the valley floor in the space of six miles. Modern-day wilderness hikers consider Lone Peak the most arduous48 high ascent in the Wasatch Range. Two routes to the summit were known in the forties; neither offered water beyond the trailhead, and well-prepared climbers carried full canteens. There is reason to think the two were not well prepared. Nabokov wore “wh
ite shorts and sneakers49,” Laughlin told the Time correspondent, and it was “a very tough mountain and the round trip took … nine exhausting hours.” The climb requires careful route finding and movement over steep granite. A well-researched modern Web guide speaks of “incredibly steep,” “deeply eroded,” and “very exposed” passages, with a “sheer wall50” below the summit proper that “requires scrambling” to surmount.
An approach to Lone Peak
The top was all snow, due to heavy precipitation that year. In his report to Time, Laughlin recalled that Nabokov on the way down “lost his footing51 and slid five hundred to six hundred feet,” suffering bad friction burns on his buttocks. Slides on summit snowfields of that length are often fatal. Speaking to a different interviewer twenty years further on and recalling events differently, Laughlin emphasized that the outing had been for a scientific purpose—Nabokov had brought his butterfly net, and he collected near the snowy summit. Then, on the way down,
we [both] lost our footing and began to slide52. We were sliding faster and faster … toward a terrible bunch of rocks, but Nabokov had his butterfly net [which he] managed somehow to hook … onto a piece of rock that was sticking through the snow. I grabbed his foot and held onto him… . If it hadn’t been for that butterfly net …
The climbers were late returning. Véra phoned the county sheriff, who sent a squad car out53, and the deputies found the men as they were exiting the forest, exhausted but intact.‡
Nabokov’s Utah experience, despite some irritations, filled him with joy. He had made excellent captures and had “trudged and climbed some 60054 miles in the Wasatch,” he told Wilson. To Mark Aldanov, his novelist friend in New York, he wrote in an ecstatic mode, sounding like a nature mystic:
We are living in wild eagle country55, terribly far from everything, terribly high up… . The grey ripple of aspens amid black firs, bears crossing the roads, mint, Saffron crocus, lupin flowering, Uinta ground squirrels (a kind of suslik) [that] stand upright beside their burrows… . I know you’re no nature lover, but all the same I tell you it’s an incomparable pleasure to clamber up a virtual cliff at 12000 feet and there observe, “in the neighborhood” of Pushkin’s “God,” the life of some wild insect stuck on this summit since the ice ages.
“God” is in quote marks but warrants mention. Nabokov here joins a cavalcade of mountain ascenders who feel themselves in the presence of a “spirit” as they approach a high summit. Americans are not alone in this—the story goes back at least to Moses on Mount Sinai—but Americans have made a practice of it, and John Muir of the Sierra Nevada and Henry Thoreau of Mount Monadnock are only the most famous examples of American mountain pilgrims.
A few years later, when his son was mad for climbing, Nabokov placed him in a program in the Tetons. There Dmitri adventured with the best American mountaineers of his era, some of them charismatic mountain mystics. Nabokov tried to explain to Wilson:
In the meantime56 [Vladimir and Véra were staying in a rented cabin 100 miles away] Dmitri was camping on Jenny Lake … and climbing mountains along their most difficult and dangerous sides. The thing with him is an extraordinarily overwhelming passion. The professional alpinists there are really wonderful people, and the very physical kind of exertion supplied by the mountains somehow is transmuted into a spiritual experience.
Dmitri does not seem to have become mystical. But one of his instructors was probably Willi Unsoeld, the first man to climb the West Ridge of Mount Everest, the most significant ascent by an American in the twentieth century.§ Unsoeld was hired57 at the climbing school the same summer Dmitri attended. A religious intellectual who wrote a well-regarded doctoral thesis58 on Henri Bergson, Unsoeld was preternaturally calm in terrifying situations, a world-class athlete and a proponent of insight gained through physical risk. He died in an avalanche on Mount Rainier.
Another legendary climber with whom Dmitri probably trained that summer was Art Gilkey, a geologist who would die in an American attempt on K2 in 1954. Dmitri’s initiation into the sport thus was courtesy of spiritually minded outdoorsmen who, while advancing the sport technically, climbed with a dual purpose. Their instruction included the idea that mountaineering was a species of quest—getting to the summit brought on godly thoughts, brought intoxication.
* Nabokov’s final judgment was that Gogol was a trivializer of his monumental talent.
† An American child under influence of the war, Dmitri was able to “unerringly identify types of aircraft by a distant silhouette … or even by a buzz, and loves to assemble and glue together various models.”
‡ In his communications with Laughlin in future years, Nabokov often took an imperious tone, the tone of someone who has been disrespected. The year after Alta, he wrote, “I want you to do something for me… . I have somehow mislaid samples of plants which I brought from Utah … There are several species of lupine [and] I need the one growing in the haunts of annetta … I would also like to have a few [ant] specimens… . Kill the ants with alcohol or carbona … and put them into a small box with cotton wool. The plants can be mailed in a carton … but try to keep them flat.” Four years on, writing about a reprint deal involving another publisher, he wrote, “Quite independently of whether or not the deal is a profitable one … it is essential for me to keep my records straight, and this I cannot do unless I know the exact text of your contract with the New American Library… . [P]lease give it your attention… . I am at a loss to understand why you have not done it before.” Laughlin had sent along a copy of The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles, and Nabokov declared it “an utterly ridiculous performance, devoid of talent. You ought to have had the manuscript checked by a cultured Arab. Thanks all the same for sending me those books. I hope you don’t mind this frank expression of my opinion.”
§ In 1963. His climbing partner was Tom Hornbein. Unsoeld had been part of the expedition that put Jim Whittaker atop Everest by the South Col route, which in ’63 was already familiar to high-altitude mountaineers because of the British first ascent of the mountain ten years earlier. Unsoeld and Hornbein preferred to climb Everest by a new route, an immensely more challenging one, the outcome of their effort entirely in doubt. That they succeeded in good style enlarged the sport.
8.
Back in Cambridge, Nabokov underwent a sharp decompression1, trading the western sights that thrilled him for trim lawns, fall foliage, boring leps, and tame hills. He again dove into work at the MCZ. His labors were “immense,” he told Wilson:
Part of my scientific work on the Blues2 … in which I correlate the nearctic [New World] and palaearctic [Old World] representatives, is due to appear in a week or two… . The number of my index cards exceeds a thousand references … I have dissected and drawn the genitalia of 360 specimens and unraveled taxonomic adventures that read like a novel. This has been a wonderful bit of training in the use of our (if I may say so) wise, precise, plastic, beautiful English language.
Somewhat isolated at the MCZ—with no fellow researchers interested in his favorite insect tribe—he reveled in the huge holdings. Nicolas Nabokov had had a similar New World immersion experience ten years before. The composer had agreed to write a ballet, one on “an American subject,” for Léonide Massine, and he had gone in search of materials to aid in this assignment, excited to be creating an indigenous American dance. Up to that point he had known America largely from books and movies, he confessed in his memoirs; America was to Nicolas a land of “milk shakes and banana3 splits,” of cars that looked like “funereal monsters,” of “noisy, filthy, dilapidated elevated trains”: an uncultured, foreboding place. Archibald MacLeish took Nicolas to see Gerald Murphy, the Jazz Age celebrity who, besides being a friend of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, Cocteau, and other icons of the Lost Generation, was a collector of musical artifacts. These treasures included “cylinders with recordings made by Thomas Edison” from the turn of the century, some of them containing “poignantly authentic4” bits of American music, the music
for “ ‘bear steps,’ ‘wolf steps,’ ‘fox trots,’ and … pre–Civil War ‘cakewalks,’ ” Nicolas discovered. “Not only their tunes5 [but] their harmonies, their rhythms, seemed fresh and real, [and] the manner of playing or singing and the choice of instruments” did also.*
Cousin Vladimir, buried beneath insect work, began to stir fictionally. He credited Véra with pulling him back from the brink, from the lepidopteral fascination that was swallowing all of his time:
Véra has had a serious6 conversation with me… . Having sulkily pulled [the beginning pages of Bend Sinister] out from under my butterfly manuscripts I discovered … that it was good, and … that the [first] twenty pages at least could be typed and submitted… . I have [also] lain with my Russian muse after a long period of adultery and am sending you the big poem she bore… . I have also almost finished a story in English.
Nikolai Gogol now complete, Nabokov began scheming over how to escape the deal he had with Laughlin, the second part of which required him to write other books for little pay. Wilson proposed that they use the translations that Nabokov had been making and collaborate on “a book7 on Russian literature—I contributing [the] essays … you contributing translations.” Wilson had been writing about Russian authors for The Atlantic, and he foresaw a book that “with the mounting interest in Russian, would have a certain sale. There would be nothing like it in English.”
This period of their correspondence shows them fully entwined, intimates of the heart and of the page. Wilson sent his Atlantic pieces to Nabokov for comment: “You may find them8 annoying, but they pretend to be nothing more than the first impressions of a foreigner,” he wrote. Nabokov replied, “I am returning9 your proofs. Véra and I liked this and the other article enormously.” Wilson was trespassing on Nabokov’s terrain, the Russian literary mother lode, but Vladimir welcomed it; even Wilson’s take on Pushkin, the most revered progenitor, found favor. Wilson needs to not be underestimated. His essay on Pushkin is superb journalism10, and its authority and insight may reflect debts he owed Nabokov, which Nabokov was flattered to detect.† But Nabokov knew what a special colleague he had in Wilson. To no other contemporary writer, with the exception of the émigré poet Khodasevich (1886–1939), did he make similar gestures of respect11. Hoping to bring The Gift, the novel he considered his masterwork, before American readers, he asked Wilson to translate it: