Nabokov in America

by Robert Roper

  These became wonderful, enchanting books43, for many readers Nabokov’s best. They were realist in the sense of seeming to be reports of an intelligible world, albeit a world rendered to a degree of detail far from ordinary. Wilson, when he eventually read the manuscript, did not like Lolita, but he joined the chorus of praise44 for the essays that Nabokov began to publish in The New Yorker, later to become Speak, Memory. Neither the memoir nor the novel is a political fantasy à la Bend Sinister, and neither imagines a country that is sort of this way and sort of that.

  Neither avoids complicated, allusive writing, but Nabokov’s learnedness is semi-masked in Lolita. In Bend Sinister, the Shakespearean discourse claims most of a chapter and, though intrinsic to the text, interrupts; readers wishing the story to forge ahead have to wait. Lolita, by contrast, reads easily, without interpolations; Humbert Humbert’s first-person narration goes down very smoothly:

  “Look, make Mother take you and me45 to Our Glass Lake tomorrow.” These were the … words said to me by my twelve-year-old flame in a voluptuous whisper, as we happened to bump into one another on the front porch, I out, she in. The reflection of the afternoon sun, a dazzling white diamond with innumerable iridescent spikes quivered on the round back of a parked car.

  As I lay46 in bed, erotically musing before trying to go to sleep, I thought of a final scheme how to profit by the picnic to come. I was aware that mother Haze hated my darling for her being sweet on me. So I planned my lake day with a view to satisfying the mother. To her alone would I talk; but at some appropriate moment I would say I had left my wrist watch or my sunglasses in that glade yonder—and plunge with my nymphet into the wood.

  The plot is simple: scholarly pedophile makes off with young girl, who escapes. Bend Sinister, two-thirds as long, is a labyrinth of plot compared with Lolita’s fablelike, mostly chronological unspooling, although the events of the latter are mysterious in a way unknown to the former. The ease of reading is another seduction. Humbert wins us with artful palaver to a position of suspended distaste for his actions (“Oh, my Lolita47, I have only words to play with!”), our ease of entry into his view of things complicitous. We should be sufficiently abhorrent of child sexual enslavement to be reading something more improving, but aren’t.

  Speak, Memory, mandarin in style, is less welcoming to some readers:

  School was taught48 from the fifteenth of September to the twenty-fifth of May, with a couple of interruptions: a two-week intersemestral gap—to make place, as it were, for the huge Christmas tree that touched with its star the pale-green ceiling of our prettiest drawing room—and a one-week Easter vacation, during which painted eggs enlivened the breakfast table. Since snow and frost lasted from October well into April, no wonder the mean of my school memories is definitely hiemal.

  * * *

  I see very clearly49 the women of the Korff line, beautiful, lily-and-rose girls, their high, flushed pommettes, pale blue eyes and that small beauty spot on one cheek … which my grandmother, my father, three or four of his siblings, some of my twenty-five cousins, my younger sister and my son Dmitri inherited in various stages of intensity.

  The book is Proustian—from start to end an excavation of personal memory—but not especially modernist, written in refined, deep- breathing sentences that require attention but do not perplex. Terms like hiemal and pommette may have sent some New Yorker readers to a dictionary, but Speak, Memory is the report of a mind awash in clarity, Apollonian, resplendently poised.

  Nabokov needed money. Financially “I am rather dejected50,” he wrote Wilson upon learning that his Guggenheim would not be renewed for a second year. A plan to return west51 had to be put off for a year, then two, then three. Dmitri had “absolutely nowhere to play out of doors and lives in a neighborhood full of impossible little hooligans52,” and the family made short trips in summer, one to Newfound Lake, New Hampshire, said to be the cleanest lake53 in the state today but “filthy54” back when Nabokov took his family there. The Nabokovs later told a story about anti-Semitism55 in New Hampshire, in the wake of the war and reportage of the death camps. In a restaurant with a “Gentiles Only” notice on its menu, Nabokov asked the waitress if she would refuse service to a man and woman and infant son who arrived on a donkey. She had no answer, and they stalked out.

  In other versions of the story56—which evoke the forthcoming novel and film Gentleman’s Agreement (both released in 1947)—the New Testament triad arrives in “an old Ford,” and in one, Véra is absent but Dmitri brings along a friend, and the boys are deeply impressed by Nabokov’s outspokenness. He was psychologically fragile at the time. He had gone to New Hampshire on doctor’s orders; exhausted by work on Bend Sinister and on a lepidopteral research paper, he’d visited a hospital57 complaining of heart trouble, ulcers, kidney stones, and cancer. The doctor pronounced him sound but played out. In letters of early 1946, Nabokov described himself as “impotent,” most amusingly in a note to Wilson about Memoirs of Hecate County, recently published and selling briskly, in part because of daring sexual passages:

  There are lots of wonderful58 things in it… . You have given your [character’s] copulation-mates such formidable defences … that the reader (or at least one reader, for I would have been absolutely impotent in your singular little harem) derives no kick from the hero’s love-making. I should have as soon tried to open a sardine can with my penis.

  He missed the West, and his feeling of unwellness might have been related to his gaining sixty pounds when he stopped smoking. Beginning in ’47, and with hardly an interruption for the next decade and a half, he did go west, mostly to high mountains, where he tramped himself fit. Newfound Lake seemed to him tame, polluted; at the lodge where they stayed, he was sickened by the smell of fried clams59 drifting in from a Howard Johnson’s.

  Something miraculous happened. In the late forties, the émigré who was finally in command of wise, precise, plastic English took a further step. He undertook the American subject as he saw it. As he later explained to Playboy, “I had to invent America60… . It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced by a similar task, with a lesser amount of time at my disposal.” America in his version is marked by fanciful touches—curious, resonant place-names in Lolita, for instance, such as “Ramsdale,” “Elphinstone,” “Beardsley”—but is not fanciful in a metafictional sense, the sense of an arch author signaling the made-up-ness of his text. (Humbert, narrator not author, allows that he has fictionalized here and there but insists on the desperate reality of events.) For scholarly readers who enjoy fossicking in a text, Lolita, like the next two American novels, Pnin (1957) and Pale Fire (1962), offers a rich field of excavation, concocted out of countless literary sources, but Nabokov carefully preserves an illusion of “this world” for readers who wish to enter his story and be carried away.

  He had studied America casually, beginning long before he arrived.‖ At Wilson’s urging, he read authors who had escaped his notice, such as Henry James (finding him to be a “pale porpoise61” who needed debunking). He was conversant with62 Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Frost, Eliot, Pound, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, and many others, despite being a professor largely of Russian literature and language. Nonliterary evidence also started piling up. In a poem he wrote after an overnight stay at Wilson’s, he showed an instinct for the American surreal:

  Keep it Kold63, says a poster in passing, and lo,

  loads,

  of bright fruit, and a ham, and some chocolate cream,

  and three bottles of milk, all contained in the gleam

  of that wide-open white

  god, the pride and delight

  of starry-eyed couples in dream kitchenettes.

  His literary path—until Lolita—looked promising without being especially American. Wilson had fashioned an arrangement for him at the New Yorker, which guaranteed him a yearly advance in exchange for first look at whatever he wrote, and what he wrote was mainly Russia
n-inflected. He might have made a small, smart career in ancien régime nostalgia, and to a degree the career he did make looks back, revives, lovingly reworks Pushkin, Gogol, and the other Russian forefathers.

  He had “a vagabond’s sharp-sightedness64,” however. Thomas Mann, another writer who fled Europe and became American, and who wrote prolifically while in the United States, gave scarcely a hint of his residence in Pacific Palisades, California, and before that in Princeton, New Jersey. Mann wrote about German fascism, about a fictional German composer, about the Ten Commandments and Pope Gregory of the sixth century while in America, but he did not find a way or did not seek a way to represent his American surroundings65. Probably the émigré novelist who most closely resembles Nabokov in going American is Ayn Rand66, his near contemporary (1905–1982), of a Jewish family similar to Véra Slonim’s, a writer of different attainments but, like Nabokov, determined to write for the movies and in the fifties the author of a giant bestseller (Atlas Shrugged). Rand was also from St. Petersburg, had also fled the Revolution, and her arrival in the United States began a period of intense self-education and a wholesale embrace of what she took for Americanism.

  Nabokov’s first short story set in America, “Time and Ebb,” looks at the decade of the forties from eighty years later. An old man recalls the quaint artifacts of 1944—skyscrapers, soda jerks, airplanes—and speaks to the reader in stiff, fudgy sentences:

  I am also old67 enough to remember the coach trains: as a babe I worshipped them; as a boy I turned away to improved editions of speed… . Their hue might have passed for the ripeness of distance, for a blending succession of conquered miles, had it not surrendered its plum-bloom to the action of coal dust so as to match the walls of workshops and slums which preceded a city as inevitably as a rule of grammar and a blot precede the acquisition of conventional knowledge. Dwarf dunce caps were stored at one end of the car and could flabbily cup (with the transmission of a diaphanous chill to the fingers) the grottolike water of an obedient little fountain which reared its head at one’s touch.

  The nostalgia has a labored, self-pleased quality. Nabokov’s model might have been H. G. Wells, one of his favorite writers as a boy, or Frederick Lewis Allen, author of the bestselling Only Yesterday (1931), a spry history of the twenties. “Oh—he means those conical little paper cups they have,” a reader thinks after decoding the sprung last sentence, and the living detail of “diaphanous chill to the fingers” and “flabbily cup” goes half-astray, being too much worked for.

  The story communicates a fondness for American things. In America, “my most sacred dreams have been realized,” he wrote his sister in ’45. “My family life is completely cloudless. I love this country and dearly want to bring you over. Alongside lapses into wild vulgarity there are heights here where one can have marvelous picnics68 with friends who ‘understand.’ ” The American turn was for him a turn of the heart. He wanted his sister and her son to be here, too, despite the vulgarity. Like Mann walking his poodle in Palisades Park, Santa Monica, beguiled by the California light, Nabokov felt safe, he felt hopeful, and in the period of this gladness he conceived Lolita.

  * Nicolas Nabokov’s ardent search for the American musical real resembles cousin Vladimir’s bewitchment by unique sites and specimens of lepidoptera, but the most systematic and profound seeker of meaning in American materials whose surname happens to be Nabokov is probably Nicolas’s second son, Peter, now an emeritus professor of anthropology at UCLA. Peter is the co-author of Native American Architecture, an indispensable photographic compendium and scholarly commentary, and author of A Forest of Time: American Indian Ways of History and Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places, among other titles. A relentless close noticer, P. Nabokov traveled the continent for decades in a style not so different from Vladimir’s—both were gripped by lifelong intellectual obsessions that brought them constantly into the outdoors, that made them expert field researchers and led them to significant discoveries. Peter Nabokov’s most approachable work is probably Restoring a Presence: American Indians and Yellowstone National Park (2004), co-written with Lawrence Loendorf, which briskly overturns the idea that Yellowstone was a natural preserve full of buffalo, bear, and other iconic fauna but devoid of humans. Native peoples were said to have feared the area and to have avoided it; in fact, tribal groups swept through and dwelt within what are now park lands in nonstop migrations over at least eight thousand years.

  † Wilson wrote well about Pushkin before he knew Nabokov. Clive James, the Australian-born critic, calls Wilson’s 1937 essay “In Honor of Pushkin” the best short introduction to the poet, echoing the judgment of John Bayley, author of the authoritative Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary. To round out the back-patting, James calls Bayley’s praise of Wilson’s short study “a generous tribute, considering that Bayley has written the best long one.”

  ‡ Wilson had sent Nabokov his new book Note-books of Night (1942), which contained “At Laurelwood,” about his New Jersey childhood. DBDV, 237n5.

  § From the Latin meaning “little girl,” after puellus, a contraction of puerulus, meaning “young boy, slave.”

  ‖ Nabokov was not yet married to Véra Slonim when he first proposed that they move to America (letter of December 3, 1923). In his late sixties, when an interviewer asked him why he had started writing in English, since he could not possibly have known that he would one day be allowed to emigrate, he said, “Oh, I did know I would eventually land in America.”

  9.

  As Nabokov began work, Wilson sent him1 the sixth volume of Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex in its French edition, drawing his attention to an appendix, the sexual confession of a Ukrainian man born around 1870. Of a wealthy family and educated abroad, the man had been initiated into sex at age twelve. He’d become obsessively sexual and failed at his studies, and only by becoming celibate did he manage to qualify as an engineer. On the eve of his marriage to an Italian woman, he encountered some child prostitutes and succumbed to his former obsession. Thereafter he squandered all his money, the marriage fell through, and he became an addict of sex with young girls, exposing himself to them in public. The confession ends with a feeling of hopelessness, of a life ruined by a hunger beyond control2.

  Nabokov wrote back, “Many thanks3 for the books. I enjoyed the Russian’s love-life hugely. It is wonderfully funny. As a boy, he seems to have been quite extraordinarily lucky in coming across [willing] girls… . The end is rather bathetic.”

  He might have been in that state where everything comes as grist to the mill, the novel in his head finding reflections everywhere. His commitment to writing a sex narrative—a sex narrative likely to invite prosecution for obscenity, as Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County had done for him—seems already quite strong. The tone of his response to Wilson is also notable: his play-it-for-wisecracks approach is already in place, and the critique of his novel that would dominate public discussion—that such compassion as it displays is thin or misplaced, is afforded the degenerate Humbert as much as the ruined little girl—seems implicit.

  Nabokov’s life in Cambridge was socially rich. He had literary friends, people from Harvard and Wellesley, as well as fellow “sufferers” from the need to chase and study insects. One of his entomology friends4 was the son of the Harvard museum curator of mollusks; Nabokov had been corresponding with the young man, who was interested in the Blues, since ’43. Another young scientist, Charles L. Remington, began haunting the MCZ as soon as he got out of the Army, and he would soon cofound the Lepidopterists’ Society, of which Nabokov became a member. Midsummer ’46, Remington wrote him5 suggesting a collecting trip to Colorado. He also wrote to Hazel Schmoll6, who owned a nature preserve near Rocky Mountain National Park, inquiring about accommodations. Schmoll, the former Colorado state botanist, usually advertised for guests to her ranch in the Christian Science Monitor; Nabokov declined to stay with her when he learned that she favored guests who did no
t drink.

  He did go to Colorado the following summer. The trip became possible with the receipt of an advance of $2,0007 for Bend Sinister, and in general things were looking up for him financially: his salary from Wellesley was now $3,250, and his MCZ stipend and yearly advance from The New Yorker contributed to a respectable total, enlarged by the occasional book-talk fee8. The family went west by train. Dmitri was now thirteen and six feet tall; to go west for him meant to go to high mountains again, where he could hike and climb. Nabokov’s collecting needs dictated the itinerary. Tips from entomology friends, such as Comstock of the AMNH and Charles Remington, were useful, but by now Nabokov had examined many thousands of specimens, cataloging many of them de novo, and his own sense of where to look was astute. The names of North American sites of collection, some of them famous, some not, were sharply present in his mind. Chivington, Independence Pass, and La Plata Peak in Colorado; in Arizona, Ramsay Canyon and Ruby; West Yellowstone; the Tolland bogs; Polaris, Montana; Harlan, Saskatchewan. He had been reading entomological9 literature for forty years. His MCZ notecards display an astonishing appetite for detail, morphological detail above all—wing-scale counts, sex-organ descriptions, portraits of polytypes—and secondarily the details of discrete moments of capture. “Taken by Haberhauer10 near Astrabad, Persia,” he wrote about one insect collected seventy-five years before, “probably in the Lendakur Mts … . where in summer 1869 he spent 2½ months, from the 24th of June, ‘in a village where shepherds lived only in summer,’ Hadschyabad, 8000 ft.”

  Another notation preserved some suggestive phrasing: “jam of logs11 [in the Priest River, Idaho] stranded on its sandbars and a scurry of clouds mirrored in the dark water between its high banks.” He liked poetic touches—they were part of the specificity that he honored. About Lycaena aster Edwards, a copper butterfly, he recorded, “In the summer of 1834 it was nearly as abundant as Coenonympha tullia [of] Carbonear Island … where every step aroused numbers of these bright little creatures from the grass.”