by Robert Roper
A more typical, substantive notation, showing his precision and alertness to the naturalistic big picture:*
N. Colo12., Spring Cn. [Canyon] W. of Fort Collins, alt. 52–5500 ft., arid grassy foothills, Upper Sonoran Zone with Transition elements, and 23 miles up Little S. Powder R[iver] Cn. from “The Forks” (alt. 6500 ft), Transition Zone, with Can[yon] Z[one] elements; Bellevue, Larimer Co[unty] alt. 5200 ft. Dry meadows and flats. Three Life Zones … noted within a horizontal distance of 6 mi.
In his scientific papers he sounded Nabokovian: artful, expressive, prickly-charming. He wrote,
On a hot August13 day, from a bridge in Estes Park, Colo., my wife and I watched for almost a minute a striped Hawk Moth (Celerio) poised above the water, facing upstream against a swift current, in the act of drinking. The delicate wake produced by the immersion of the proboscis was a special feature of the performance.
In a paper published in Psyche:
When the whole [male organ of a Blue] is forced open oysterwise14 so that its symmetrically extended valves continue to point down … the most conspicuous thing … is the presence of a pair of formidable semi-translucent hooks … facing each other in the manner of the stolidly raised fists of two pugilists … with [a hood-shaped feature] lending a Ku-Klux Klan touch to the picture.
He was gracious but argumentative. Fools had made a mess of Lycaenid nomenclature, he said, identifying species falsely, and he campaigned against their influence the way he’d campaigned against “issue” novels and reading for “meaning”:
It may well be15 … that a well-marked Washington form near ssp. scudderi is disguised as “Plebeius Melissa var lotis” in Leighton’s incredibly naïve paper … where utter confusion is achieved by references … to Holland’s hopelessly unreliable book. In this connection, it is worthwhile repeating that Holland … figured … the “type” of Lycaena scudderi Edwards [as] a male of melissa samuelis Nabokov … which is one of the reasons I do not attach any importance to Chernock’s vague statement … that … he found “two males … that may be part of the series given to Edwards by Scudder.” The confusion … runs through the whole literature.
Longs Peak, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado
Earlier, in his first papers, he had been warmly charming. He wrote in the tones of the gentleman naturalist of the European nineteenth century, less concerned with scientific rigor than with style:
I had done no collecting16 at all for more than ten years, and then quite suddenly a stroke of luck enabled me to visit … the Pyrénées Orientales and the Ariège. The night journey from Paris to Perpignan was marked by a pleasant though silly dream in which I was offered what looked uncommonly like a sardine, but was really a tropical moth.
America made him more scientist, less flaneur. It gave him intellectual tools—sex-organ dissection and reliance on the microscope; focus on the Blues—while putting at his disposal the marvelous MCZ. The distance traveled from dreams of sardines to the lab notations of the forties is large:
[Icaricia icarioides, Boisduval’s Blue] can be defined as a Polyommatus17 with an Aricia-like organ. There is however one peculiar “American” character which it shares with shasta neurona: this is the remarkable glass like thinness … of the falx [part of the male organ] which is very wide … but tapers almost at once as it goes up producing an impression of atrophy … and recalling a piece of pointed candy that has been very thoroughly sucked.
By ’47 he had written astute, far-seeing papers, sent copies to close comrades, and become the center of a coterie18. Instead of Hazel Schmoll’s ranch, with its prohibition on strong drink, he boarded at Columbine Lodge19, a forty-year-old hotel-with-cabins mentioned in the 1947 Western Travel Guide of the AAA. A number of entomologists from his circle came to see him during his stay20 there. Charles Remington drove him south to Tolland Bog21, a brushy, moist bottomland along South Boulder Creek, at an elevation of nine thousand feet. “I was under the vague impression that he was a writer of novels,” Remington would recall forty-five years later; “we never talked about that side of his productivity.” Instead they chatted about “recent specimen collecting and research” that each had done, reveling in their shared obsession. Nabokov was “quite equally passionate” about it—and the real pleasure of the day was the sport of it, the physical effort, feet-on-the-boggy-ground22 in the Rockies, in the summertime.
Columbine Lodge, the “Grizzly” cabin, a separate unit reputedly occupied by the Nabokovs, summer 1947
Columbine Lodge, four miles from 14,259-foot Longs Peak, offered rooms with bath or without and was deemed “Attractive” by the AAA. Nabokov wrote Wilson, “We have a most comfortable23 cabin all to ourselves.” The lodge was within a half-mile24 of the better-known Longs Peak Inn and a mile from the popular Hewes-Kirkwood Inn, a storied resort built by Charles Edwin Hewes, author of Songs of the Rockies and other works of poetry.† James Pickering, another local author, described the locality at the time of Nabokov’s visit:
It was to the Tahosa Valley25 that I came as a boy in 1946, following the footsteps of my father… . The “cabin,” as we called it, was a magical place … for a boy from suburban New York. There were two large bear rugs (whose heads and paws still had their teeth and claws) on the floor of the living room in front of the massive two-story moss rock fireplace; a dramatic view of the East Face of Longs Peak … and, in the corner, an old wind-up victrola with its collection of raspy dance records… . There was no electricity or in-door plumbing, and food was kept in a “cave” just off the back porch, which “Uncle Fred and Aunt Jessie” told us had once been scavenged by a bear, later captured and sent “over the mountain.” There were kerosene lamps … and a whole stack of paperback novels by Zane Grey and Luke Short.
To Pickering, “this was, surely, the West!” Columbine Lodge looked east to the Twin Sisters, eleven-thousand-foot pyramidal peaks of the Colorado Front Range, and west to Longs and other mountains of the Continental Divide. The valley between these two ranges was high meadow, crisscrossed by streams fed by springs and snowmelt, with beaver dams26. Nabokov reported to Wilson that the “flora is simply magnificent,” and his family’s long stay—late June to early September—allowed them to witness successive wildflower outbreaks. On rising ground, the kinnikinnick gave way27 to lodgepole pine mixed with ponderosa and juniper, with many aspen stands.
Véra enjoyed28 the summer, although annoyed that nowhere in Estes Park, the nearest sizable town, could she find a copy of the Saturday Review of Literature, which she and her husband liked to read. Dmitri climbed Longs Peak. Late in July, a collector from Caldwell, Kansas, Don Stallings29, made pilgrimage to meet Nabokov in person—they had been corresponding since ’43, when a friend at the MCZ had sent Stallings a paper that Nabokov had written (probably “Some new30 or little known Nearctic Neonympha,” which recorded his Grand Canyon captures). Stallings, a lawyer, asked Nabokov to help him determine some specimens, offering to pay for the service. Nabokov replied, “I shall certainly be very glad to determine your specimens. There will not be any fee31.”
In a thank-you letter, Stallings wrote, “I was pleased to note that the wife and I had as a general rule correctly identified these specimens… . In the future in your research if we have any specimens that you wish to borrow, please feel free to do so.” He added, “Of course I realize that our collection is not as large as some, still it does represent some 10,000 North American Butterflies covering a little over 1100 species—plus a flock of unnamed races32 which … we do not have sufficient material at the present time [to determine].”
This was an enormous personal collection. Within a few years, Stallings, tutored by Nabokov33, went into business as “Stallings & Turner, Lepidopterists,” furnishing materials to collectors and museums. The correspondence from the beginning had a comradely tone, with tongue-in-cheek sallies. Stallings, from his home on the Oklahoma state line, had ranged throughout the Southwest and into Mexico, and Nabokov relied on him for information on sites;
when thinking of going to Alta in ’43, he first ran the idea by34 Stallings.
Vladimir’s reliance on the microscope had a galvanizing effect. In a paper he co-wrote for the Canadian Entomologist, Stallings said, with the certitude of a new convert,
This giant race35 of the species freija Thun. was collected along the Alaska Military Highway in British Columbia. In size and wing shape this would appear to be a race of frigga Thun. rather than of freija, and we have no doubt but that those who depend on external characters only will insist that we are in error; nevertheless gentalic study leaves no doubt as to its true relationship with freija.
Stallings prepared for his Alaska trip by studying specimens Nabokov had loaned him from the MCZ. “Yes we’d like to borrow the Alaska Highway specimens,” he wrote in April ’45, after first declaring,
You will find36 … that in some ways I’m rather lazy—and if another fellow has done something I usually ask him for his results before I dig in myself—hence I’d like to see a rough sketch of yours of the genitalia of pardalis indicating where it differs from icarioides and you didn’t send me any sketches of the innards of the Melissa-scudderi-anna group.
He confessed that “my ideas run along37 similar to yours—but I always find you about ten good full strides ahead of me.” Then, in ’46, Stallings wrote, “Also received38 your latest paper which is more nearly a book. Thanks. I like your genitalic work. Have hopes of … doing some of that myself.”
Stallings asked Nabokov to teach him the names39 of genital parts. Soon he was replicating, as far as he could, Nabokov at work at his bench in the MCZ:
Did some dissecting40 the other evening. A couple of icarioides and one specimen of what I thought was a pardalis, but didn’t see any … differences, though I haven’t made sketches yet of the valves and falax and uncas lobe. I can’t get a scope—so am using a borrowed one with 90 power … hence I can’t do any 300 times looking.
With Stallings, Nabokov engaged in advanced shoptalk. From him he heard of, or heard more about, the concerns of an American man of that time; Stallings wrote that he dreamed of going collecting the following summer “if Uncle Sam41 doesn’t want to send me traveling first,” and he also wrote, “Had a letter from my brother-in-law Dr. Turner, he parachuted into France on D-Day42 and is still going strong. As soon as the war is over … we have hopes [of collecting in southern Alaska].”
Near the end of Lolita, whose composition Nabokov dated from this time43, the heroine, married at seventeen, contacts Humbert Humbert three years after having escaped his captivity. Humbert drives immediately44 to the city she writes from, a town he calls Coalmont, “some eight hundred miles from New York City” (“not ‘Va.,’ not ‘Pa.,’ not ‘Tenn.’—and not Coalmont, anyway—I have camouflaged everything,” he says). Lolita is pregnant. She asks for a few hundred dollars so that she and her husband, an ex-GI, can move to Alaska to begin a new life. Humbert intends to kill the husband but relents upon seeing how young he is. He implores Lolita to return to him; she refuses. So absolute is the sentence of catastrophe upon everyone in this supposedly comic novel that Lolita, although miraculously intact after her cruel youth, wonderfully seasoned, in fact, and movingly decent in her young womanhood, will soon die in childbirth, and the faint wash of hope in the dark sky of the story comes to bleak nothing.
Stallings also discussed with Nabokov, may have been the first to guide him to, Telluride, Colorado, in the forties a small mining town whose remote location made it a promising site45 for collecting. Four years later Nabokov made one of the most exciting captures of his life there. According to the afterword he wrote to Lolita, Telluride was where he found the female of Lycaeides argyrognomon sublivens, on a mountain slope far above the mining village. The “tinkling sounds” of life from below undergo a sea change as they find representation in the novel, becoming, to Humbert’s way of hearing, the voices of children at play:
One could hear now and then … an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope … and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice46 from that concord.
Stallings invited Nabokov to visit Kansas. Vladimir suggested Estes Park, and there they met at last, with their spouses, late in July. “My family joins me in sending Mrs Stallings and you our kindest regards,” Nabokov wrote afterward. “Those two days … we had together were most delightful47.” The first day was hard on Stallings; he was fresh from lowland Kansas, and Nabokov led him high up Longs, making a show of his own ability to caper and bound at a great altitude. The next day Stallings announced, “Today we’re going to collect my way48,” and they had better luck hunting Erebia magdalena, a Satyr butterfly, at lower elevations on the rocky slopes near timberline that the species favors.
Nabokov’s friendship with Don Stallings continued into the next decade. “I shall never forget your face49 when I suggested a certain short cut on our way to the magdalena ground,” Nabokov wrote him—the shortcut was probably a steep one—and Stallings kept their exchange of samples going, responding to Nabokov’s interest in argyrognomon sublivens by writing, “I am sending you50 a few of the ‘melissa’ things that we caught in southern Colorado around Independence Pass and then further south near Lake City and Slumgullion Pass—I don’t believe these are your sublivens but rather the ‘hum drum’ race [of melissa that resembles sublivens].”
Nabokov’s years51 of lepidopteral work were ending. He had wrestled the MCZ collection into shape, meanwhile accomplishing research of a high order that fulfilled dreams of entomological achievement. To his sister he wrote that he was unchanged as an adult—still the boy52 who had had those dreams. The unity of his world, the persistence of personal themes, was itself a deep subject of Speak, Memory, begun in the thirties in France and eventually to appear53 in American magazines, chapter by chapter. “Some part of me must have been born in Colorado,” he wrote Wilson, “for I am constantly recognizing things with a delicious pang.” Colorado reminded him of the family estate on the river Oredezh, of mountain slopes in the Crimea where he had collected—the Colorado sky recalled for him the blue of summer54 mornings at Vyra, on days when he went out hunting.
Two famous passages from Speak, Memory, from the butterfly chapter (chapter 6), work a pleasing trick with insects and time, the seven-year-old losing a magnificent swallowtail given him by a servant, only to recapture it “after a forty-year race, on an immigrant dandelion under an endemic aspen near Boulder.” At age eleven, exploring across the Oredezh,
At last I saw I had come to the end of the marsh. The rising ground beyond was a paradise of lupines, columbines, and penstemons. Mariposa lilies bloomed under Ponderosa pines. In the distance, fleeting cloud shadows dappled the dull green of slopes above timber line, and the gray and white of Longs Peak55.
The point is that “I do not believe in time,” the author tells us. “I like to fold my magic carpet … in such a way as to superimpose one part56 of the pattern upon another.” Despite the dislocations of his century—revolution, his father’s murder, world war, exterminations—butterflies persist, and, more important, the author by an act of art binds up his realms, unites them, overrules chaos.
He does believe in time, though. His protagonists struggle against it, seek to evade or triumph over it, and they must be struggling against something. He also believes in—savors and records—irreducible specificities, and the magic by which the bog bilberry and other marsh flora turn into the flowers of the high Rockies is charming but inexact. “Let visitors trip,” he says, and indeed we do trip on the uncharacteristic imprecision of mariposa lilies, which love full sun and rocky ground, growing in piney shade.
In Bend Sinister he had blended countries. Then he backed off, in the luminous books of his American prime, downplayin
g geographical confusions until Pale Fire, written in Europe. Some of his iconoclasm regarding geography is strictly lepidopteral; not only are there butterflies, like the swallowtail, that disregard borders, but the Lycaeides, the genus of Blues that he most liked to hunt, inhabits
a lost country57 of plenty [above and below] the Arctic circle of today; its nurseries are the mountains of central Asia, the Alps, and the Rockies. Seldom more than two and never more than three species are known to occur in a given geographical region, and so far as records go, not more than two species have ever been seen frequenting the same puddle or the same flowery bank.
To his way of thinking, there existed a butterfly supercontinent—the northern half of what is called Pangaea, a supercontinent of three hundred million years ago. Here the small, unshowy Blues fluttered over a domain that subsumed Russia and America and other lands, too.
The books of his American prime disciplined this fancy. He did not lose his interest in geofoolery, but for a period of years the world remained stable in his work, remarkably like the real world; the common reader of the forties and fifties, encountering new books by Nabokov, dealt with many types of ambiguity, but not with wholesale rechartings of the globe.
The flood of American impressions contributed to this (temporary) stability. Needing to earn a living, he taught American undergraduates for twenty years, developing an acute sense of how much disorientation they could take; his acquaintance with students describes a vast opening out, from language classes for three or four to performances in front of three or four hundred, his progress from obscurity to celebrity on campus predicting his writing career. From teaching he took countless impressions: