Nabokov in America

by Robert Roper

  So I am still looking12 for somebody who might make a translation of that 500 page book… . I know of one man who could do it if I helped him with his Russian. This is a roundabout way of putting it but I am afraid you have other dogs to beat whereas I have no illusions about the sums Laughlin can pay.

  Indeed, Wilson had other projects; he wrote back, “If I had the leisure13, I’d be glad to translate your book. I’d like to see you translated… . But I’ve got so many things … that I couldn’t possibly.”

  Nabokov now sent nearly everything Wilson’s way. Lepidopteral papers, old poems, parts of novels, a play. He sent Nikolai Gogol and “the whole book14” of what was later Three Russian Poets. (It was published by Laughlin: the scheme to co-author a work with Wilson finally came to nothing.) Nabokov resembles an overeager younger brother, perhaps, confident that his every word will find favor. He senses that he goes too far sometimes; in January ’44, he wrote, “An obscure paper15 on some obscure butterflies in an obscure scientific journal is another sample of Nabokoviana which will soon be in your hands,” and in March, “I would have sent [the Gogol proofs] for a critical examination had I not known how busy you [are] reading books.”

  The friendship was exciting and inspiring. Uniquely in Nabokov’s oeuvre, he acknowledges direct inspiration, the taking of his lead from another:

  Are you writing16 a lot? I liked your school recollections.‡ I think I shall write about my Tenishevskoe Oochilishche [his St. Petersburg high school] soon—you have declenché that particular sequence [unleashed that store of memories, such as] the Russian teacher … at whom I threw a chair once; the terrific fistfights which I thoroughly enjoyed because, though weaker than the two or three main bullies, I had had private lessons of boxing and savate … and the soccer in the yard, and the nightmare exams, and the Polish boy who paraded his first clap.

  The question of how much to send Wilson, how deeply to presume on his attention, proved important. Nabokov’s novel in progress, Bend Sinister, went in January ’44, then went on to an editor at Doubleday. Wilson, now a regular reviewer for the New Yorker, read Nabokov’s early pages and liked them “very much,” he wrote back; “am eager to see the rest of it.” The New Yorker was keeping him busy—he produced lengthy reviews on almost a weekly basis. He might have read Nabokov’s pages a little hastily. He penciled in some comments, on Nabokov’s use of some English verbs, but encouragingly pronounced the thing “excellent17.”

  It did not find favor at Doubleday. That hardly mattered: Nabokov had so powerful a conception of the novel that he confidently told Wilson, “it will contain 315 pages” and that “Towards the end … there will be the looming and development of an idea which has never been treated before.” Most of the book was written two years later18, in the winter-spring of 1945–46. A dystopian novel, a political novel, despite Nabokov’s disavowal of political novels and message writing, it has affinities with his Kafkaesque novel of the thirties, Invitation to a Beheading, but betrays an evolution in the direction of modernist difficulty, of challenging reading. Altagracia de Jannelli, had she still been his career coach, might have declared him headed in exactly the wrong direction. Brian Boyd, whose biography contains readings of all the novels, most of which Boyd judges works of supreme art, speaks of “a programmatic refusal19 to satisfy the ordinary interests of readers” with Bend Sinister. It is “self-conscious” and without the “obvious charms” of some of Nabokov’s other works, Boyd says.

  The novel’s off-putting elements include a modernist mixing of styles: straight narration along with parodies of narration; a witty, tiresome chapter of exegesis of Hamlet and other Shakespeare commentary; direct addresses to the reader, to signal that the author is aware of writing a text, as the reader needs to know; fancy words in fussy passages interruptive of the story’s flow. Krug, the hero, is a world-famous philosopher and “man of genius” who, early in the book, is easy to take for a stand-in for a self-regarding author. His misfortune consists in being a prominent citizen of a police state, whose dictator, a former schoolmate, wants him to make statements supporting the regime. Nabokov’s disgust with Nazism and Stalinism might have influenced his decision to treat the fictional regime with disdain: to show the murderers and torturers to be cretins and clowns. A kind of antic comedy breaks out at intervals, with the punch line darkened by beastliness.

  At the beginning, Krug’s wife has died. Krug keeps the news from their child:

  There at the [nursery] door20 he stopped and the thumping of his heart was suddenly interrupted by his little son’s special bedroom voice, detached and courteous, employed by David with graceful precision to notify his parents (when they returned, say, from a dinner in town) that he was still awake and ready to receive anybody who would like to wish him a second goodnight.

  David will be taken hostage by the state and murdered. The novel, which includes disparagements of some bestselling American novels, proceeds in a conventional way, with deep devotion to family the wellspring of all its action. “The main theme21 of Bend Sinister,” Nabokov wrote twenty years later, in a dyspeptic introduction to a new edition, “is the beating of Krug’s loving heart, the torture an intense tenderness is subjected to—and it is for the sake of the pages about David and his father that the book was written and should be read.” If this is so, then the theme is handled clumsily. The references to David are treacly, and Krug’s devotion to his late wife is paraded but remains abstract—a reader hears of it but does not feel it.

  A secondary character22, Ember, resembles Edmund Wilson in many ways and enjoys an intimate friendship with Krug based on literary affinity. They are deeply simpatico. Some Nabokov scholars argue that Wilson’s failure23 to recognize the elaborate and loving tribute to him was a shock to Nabokov and a disappointment; the Shakespearean exegesis is just the sort of thing that they liked to engage in, and the book is fruitcaked with bits designed for Wilson’s taste, including an elaborate play on the title of one of Mary McCarthy’s novels. Wilson, when the book24 appeared, said nothing about the character Ember or about any in-jokes. He disliked the novel. “I was rather disappointed in Bend Sinister,” begins his letter of January 30, 1947:

  I had had some doubts25 when I was reading the parts you showed me… . Other people may very well think otherwise: I know, for example, that Allen Tate [the editor who acquired the book for Holt] is tremendously excited about it—he told me that he considered it “a great book.” But I feel that, though it is crammed with good things … it is not one of your greatest successes. First of all, it seems to me that it suffers from the same weakness as that play [The Waltz Invention, also about a dictator]. You aren’t good at this kind of subject, which involves questions of politics and social change, because you are totally uninterested in these matters and have never taken the trouble to understand them.

  This is Wilson’s frankest, most detailed critique of a Nabokov novel of which there is written record. There is every reason to think that Nabokov, while irritated or saddened, read it carefully:

  For you, a dictator26 … is simply a vulgar and odious person who bullies serious and superior people like Krug. You have no idea why or how the [dictator in your book] was able to put himself over, or what his revolution implies. And this makes your picture of such happenings rather unsatisfactory. Now don’t tell me that the real artist has nothing to do with the issues of politics. An artist may not take politics seriously, but, if he deals with such matters at all, he ought to know what it is all about. Nobody could be more … intent on pure art than Walter Pater, whose Gaston de Latour I have just been reading; but I declare that he has a great deal more insight into [the religious politics] raging in the sixteenth century than you have into the conflicts of the twentieth.

  The book drew few good reviews. As Nabokov would note twenty years later, it made a “dull thud27.” Wilson went on:

  I think, too28, that your invented country has not served you particularly well. Your strength lies so much in precise obser
vation that, in combining Germanic and Slavic [elements in your setting], you have produced something that does not seem real… . Beside the actual Nazi Germany and the actual Stalinist Russia, the adventures of your unfortunate professor have the air of an unpleasant burlesque. I never believed in him much from the beginning… . As it is, what you are left with … is a satire on events so terrible that they really can’t be satirized.

  Wilson was bored by the novel. It had “longueurs” unlike anything else he had read by Nabokov. He understood that his friend was aiming at a “denser texture of prose” full of learned allusions, but the fatty writing reminded him of Thomas29 Mann—one of Nabokov’s hated “second-raters.”

  The sting of this scolding lasted a long time. In the dyspeptic introduction already referred to, Nabokov struck back not at Wilson personally (“A kind friend, Edmund Wilson, read the typescript …”) but at obtuse readers who require of an author explanations of his allusions and imagery. The Nabokov of ’63 was among the most successful writers in the world. People could not still doubt his genius, could they? But still he rode the hobbyhorse of antipolitics, and still he thundered against the “literature of social comment,” like a stern schoolmaster shaking an errant pupil by the shoulders. The world’s conviction that politics matter offended him—how stupid of the world.

  The novel was not entirely unsuccessful. In some of the late chapters, Nabokov stops scoring points and writes with radiant immediacy, in a blackly humorous tone that recalls one of his fiercest, most readable earlier novels, Laughter in the Dark, and looks forward to his next—to the densely allusive, morally complex, joyously readable Lolita. In ways both large and small, Lolita looms in the sad action:

  She was standing30 in the tub, sinuously soaping her back or at least such parts of her narrow, variously dimpled, glistening back which she could reach by throwing her arm across her shoulder. Her hair was up, with a kerchief or something twisted around it. The mirror reflected a brown armpit and a poppling pale nipple. “Ready in a sec,” she sang out.

  This is Mariette, a diminutive, cruel police spy who comes to work as a governess for Krug. Krug “slammed the door31 [to the bath] with a great show of disgust,” but moments later he imagines Mariette’s “adolescent buttocks,” and a few days later “he dreamt that he was surreptitiously enjoying Mariette while she sat, wincing a little, in his lap during the rehearsal of a play in which she was supposed to be his daughter.”

  Humbert-like, Krug attaches to Mariette a sullying categorical term: she is not a nymphet but a puella.§ Though still a child, she is sexually hungry and sophisticated:

  “Good night32,” he said. “Don’t sit up too late.”

  “May I sit in your room while you are writing?”

  “Certainly not.”

  He turned to go but she called him back… . “When I’m alone,” she said, “I sit and do like this, like a cricket. Listen, please.”

  “Listen to what?”

  “Don’t you hear?”

  She sat with parted lips, slightly moving her tightly crossed thighs, producing a tiny sound, soft, labiate, with an alternate crepitation as if she were rubbing the palms of her hands.

  Krug forgives himself in advance. He had “lost his wife33 in November,” and it was “quite natural” for a man to want to rid himself of “tension and discomfort.” (Humbert, notoriously, forgives himself in a thousand ways for what he does to the child Lolita.) At the last instant, Krug does not fall, does not take advantage; then there comes a tap at his door:

  He opened34… . She was standing there in her nightgown. A slow blink concealed and revealed again the queer stare of her dark opaque eyes. She had a pillow under her arm and an alarm clock in her hand. She sighed deeply.

  “Please, let me come in,” she said, the somewhat lemurian features of her small white face puckering up entreatingly. “I am terrified, I simply can’t be alone. I feel something dreadful is about to happen. May I sleep here? Please!”

  She crossed the room on tiptoe and with infinite care put the round-faced clock down on the night table. Penetrating her flimsy garment, the light of the lamp brought out her body in peachblow silhouette.

  Krug sounds a little like Charlotte Haze, Lolita’s mother, in a famous passage from Lolita, when he declares,

  “You know too little35 or too much… . If too little, then run along, lock yourself up, never come near me because this is going to be a bestial explosion, and you might get badly hurt. I warn you. I am nearly three times your age and a great big sad hog of a man. And I don’t love you.”

  She looked down at the agony of his senses. Tittered.

  “Oh, you don’t?”

  Mea puella, puella mea. My hot, vulgar, heavenly delicate little puella.

  Among other foretastes of Lolita are scenes in which Mariette and others, including Krug’s eight-year-old son, speak in American slang36. David says, “Uh-uh,” and “Gee whizz,” and Krug imagines emigrating to a country where “his child could be brought up in security … a long long beach dotted with bodies, a sunny honey and her satin Latin—advertisement for some American stuff somewhere seen, somehow remembered.” Eventually, a squad of police agents breaks in, beats up Krug, and takes David away to his death, and these thugs sound as if they have been watching too many movies or are intent on restaging parts of “The Killers”:

  “Sure,” said Mac37.

  “And you won’t catch cold because there is a mink coat in the car.”

  Owing to the door of the nursery suddenly opening … David’s voice was heard for a moment: oddly enough, the child, instead of whimpering and crying for help, seemed to be trying to reason with his impossible visitors… .

  Krug moved his fingers—the numbness was gradually passing away. As calmly as possible. As calmly as possible, he again appealed to Mariette.

  “Does anybody know what he wants of me?” asked Mariette.

  “Look,” said Mac to [Krug], “either you do what you’re told or you don’t. And if you don’t, it’s going to hurt like hell, see? Get up!”

  Mac has a great jaw and a hand “the size of a steak for five38.” He is a figure out of the funnies, as well as the movies; Bluto in Popeye might almost say, as he does, “Aw, for Christ’s sake,” and “Hold it straight, kiddo,” when Mariette fondles his flashlight. These passages offer a brief fantasia on lowbrow American themes. America is where gangsterism found its style, but it is also where, if Krug had pulled off a planned escape, things might have turned out differently for his child:

  He saw David39 a year or two older, sitting on a vividly labelled trunk at the customs house on the pier.

  He saw him riding a bicycle in between brilliant forsythia shrubs and thin naked birch trees down a path with a “no bicycles” sign. He saw him on the edge of a swimming pool, lying on his stomach, in wet black shorts, one shoulder blade sharply raised … saw him in one of those fabulous corner stores that have face creams on one side and ice creams on the other, perched … at the bar and craning towards the syrup pumps. He saw him throwing a ball with a special flip of the wrist, unknown in the old country. He saw him as a youth crossing a technicoloured campus.

  It will be Lolita, a year or two hence, who will sample fountain drinks in American drugstores as Humbert drives her back and forth across the country. But Lolita, too, will never escape into wider life—will not survive to cross a groomed college campus, will not get beyond the looming doom that Nabokov, in these war and just-postwar years, found implied in the vulnerability of childhood.

  * * *

  Many of the events of Lolita (1955) are set in a fictionalized 1947–48. Among the qualities of the novel that charmed hundreds of thousands of readers, especially American ones, was the comical truth of its settings, which are evoked in a realistic mode. The critic Elizabeth Hardwick observed about the novel, “It is rather40 in the mood of Marco Polo in China that he meets the (to us) exhausted artifacts of the American scene. Motels, advertisements, chewing-gum … for Nabo
kov it is all a dawn, alpine freshness.” Mark Twain’s rustic settlements in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn came to American readers with a similar charge in the 1880s: stereotypical settings—Southern river towns, famously sleepy—came into focus as backdrops to events such as the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud, or the Duke and the Dauphin’s balderdash connivings. That other American novel of aimless travel was also rich, as Lolita is, with the flavors of American speech and the savories of place.

  Only in ’46 did Nabokov fully take command41 of English. Early in ’47 he wrote Wilson,

  I have not had42 a word from you for ages. How are you? Did you get my new Russian poem? … [Bend Sinister] is due to appear in the beginning of June… . They sent me a most absurd blurb… . I have little hope that [it] brings me any money. I am writing two things now 1. a short novel about a man who liked little girls—and it’s going to be called The Kingdom by the Sea—and 2. a new type of autobiography—a scientific attempt to unravel and trace back all the tangled threads of one’s personality—and the provisional title is The Person in Question.