Nabokov in America

by Robert Roper

  My most vivid memories58 concern examinations. Big amphitheater [at Cornell]. Exam from 8 a.m. to 10:30. About 150 students—unwashed, unshaven young males and reasonably well-groomed young females. A general sense of tedium and disaster. Half-past eight. Little coughs, the clearing of nervous throats, coming in clusters… . Some of the martyrs plunged in meditation, their arms locked behind their heads. I meet a dull gaze directed at me… . Girl in glasses comes up to my desk to ask: “Professor Kafka, do you want us to say that …? Or do you want us to answer only the first part of the question?” … The shaking of a cramped wrist, the failing ink, the deodorant that breaks down. When I catch eyes directed at me, they are forthwith raised to the ceiling in pious meditation. Windowpanes getting misty. Boys peeling off sweaters. Girls chewing gum in rapid cadence. Ten minutes, five, three, time’s up.

  Students at Stanford and Wellesley recalled his quick way with slang59, his ethnological curiosity. If he had been more like other writers of the emigration—like Bertolt Brecht, for instance60, who arrived at about the same time and who had long fantasized a skyscraper America, brutalist and unsentimental—his friendships with Americans would have been few and unimportant. Nabokov immersed himself in the demos. His resemblance as émigré artist is less to Mann or Brecht or other luminaries living in enclaves than to hardworking filmmakers with carryover reputations: quick studies like Billy Wilder, who had made films in French as well as German before he switched to American, and Henry Koster61 (Das Hässliche Mädchen followed by One Hundred Men and a Girl, The Bishop’s Wife, Harvey, The Robe, and The Singing Nun, among others).

  He became fond of a lab volunteer at the MCZ, Phyllis Smith, who prepared specimens for him. They worked together beginning when Smith was seventeen. When she was in her fifties, she recalled “how well he had known me62.” Nabokov liked to chat at the workbench; he was “sometimes quiet, sometimes loud,” always “uninhibited63 and unselfconscious,” she remembered. Sometime in the early forties, he read Moby-Dick64; they then discussed it. He asked her “questions, questions. How-to questions, why questions,” savoring the bizarrerie of Americans in their native habitats65. Smith’s parents divorced, and Nabokov consoled her at the time; he asked her many questions about the trouble66.

  June of ’44, he ate “some Virginia ham in a little Wursthaus near Harvard Square and was happily … examining the genitalia of a specimen from [California] at the museum, when suddenly I felt a strange wave67 of nausea.” The ensuing bout of hemorrhagic colitis provoked a two-thousand-word account sent to Wilson and McCarthy, graphic and comic and notable for the curiosity he summoned despite projectile vomiting and rectal bleeding:

  By then, I was in a state of complete collapse68 and when the doctor … turned up he could find neither my pulse, nor my blood pressure. He started telephoning and I heard him saying “extremely grave” and “not a minute to be lost.” Five minutes later … he had arranged the matter and … I was at the Mt. Aubrey hospital in a semi-private ward—the “semi” being represented by an old man dying from acute cardiac trouble (I could not sleep all night owing to his groans and ahannement [panting]—he died towards dawn after telling some unknown “Henry” such things as “My little boy, you can’t do that to me. Use me right” etc.,—all very interesting …).

  After a night and a day on an IV, Nabokov was transferred

  to the general ward, where the radio kept emitting hot music69, cigarette ads (in a juicy voice from the heart) and gags without interruption until (at 10 p.m.) I bellowed to the nurse to have the bloody thing stopped (much to the annoyance and surprise of the staff and of the patients. This is a curious detail of American life—they did not actually listen to the radio, in fact everybody was talking, retching, guffawing, wisecracking, flirting with the (very charming) nurses … but apparently the impossible sounds coming from the apparatus … acted as a “life-background” for the … ward, for as soon as it was stopped complete quiet ensued and I soon fell asleep).

  He noticed that the dying man panted; also the “juicy voice from the heart.” He operated as a writer does, noticing all he can, and this might have helped him negotiate a terrifying and humiliating ordeal. In any event, he was always noticing.

  * The word ecology appears only a few times in his notes. It had been coined only eighty years before, by Ernst Haeckel, the German scientist who also improvised phylum, phylogeny, and stem cell.

  † Included in his oeuvre is a 690-page epic in blank verse, The America (1941).

  10.

  Soon after returning from Colorado, Nabokov heard from a professor at Cornell, Morris Bishop, informing him of an open position in Russian literature. Bishop knew of him from stories published in magazines and because Vladimir’s cousin Nicolas had been “the rather startling1 Professor of Music” at Wells College, just north of Ithaca. Bishop published occasional verse in the New Yorker, and Katharine White, hearing of an opening at Cornell, had talked up2 Nabokov.

  He had visited the campus once before. Now he came on a charm tour, under Bishop’s sponsorship; the search committee was leery of hiring3 someone without advanced degrees, but Cornell had recently created a Division of Literature, distinct from other academic departments, and a Rockefeller grant was tapped4 to cover his salary (five thousand dollars).

  Ithaca became the American base. Here he lived with Véra and Dmitri (on vacations from school) for eleven years, beginning in the summer of ’48, in houses rented from leave-taking professors. Bishop and his wife, Alison, became good friends. Bishop’s scholarly temperament, leavened with the kind of wit to be encountered in the New Yorker of the Thurber-Perelman era, made him good company, and he was a faithful institutional protector of Nabokov, in the mold of Wilson and Comstock. In addition to his poetry and academic writing, Bishop wrote popular books, including a mystery novel under the name W. Bolingbroke Johnson. He denied authorship, but a copy found in the Cornell library bore this inscription in his hand:

  A cabin in northern Wisconsin

  Is what I would be for the nonce in,

  To be rid of the pain

  Of The Widening Stain5

  And W. Bolingbroke Johnson

  Nabokov made clear from the outset what could be expected of him as a professor. Though “sorry to disappoint you,” he wrote the dean of arts and sciences, “I am entirely lacking in administrative talents. I am a hopelessly poor organizer, and my participation in any committee would be, I am afraid, pretty worthless6.” At the same time,

  I entirely agree with you that courses in Russian Literature should not be limited to those given in Russian… . I know from experience that a course in this subject given in English has a strong appeal7 for students who have a general interest in literature,—the enrollment in such a course which I am giving currently at Wellesley College … is one of the largest in the College.

  He was annoyed that Harvard had failed8 to recruit him. But his Cornell appointment was excellent news—a deep relief. Just on the level of an immigrant’s story, his had now become much sunnier. His small boat was being lifted by a postwar tide that produced an enormous expansion in American higher education. Leaving aside his gifts as educator and entertainer, and the undeniable luster he brought to an institution, he had been seeking employment during a long depression that merged with a war, and now that struggle was over9.

  He worked prodigiously at Cornell. While there, he wrote parts or all of Lolita, Pnin, and Speak, Memory, short stories, poetry, and translations of his own work and others’. He also composed his 1,895-page annotated translation of Eugene Onegin, as well as an annotated translation of the Old Slavonic epic The Song of Igor’s Campaign. In addition, he conceived and began work on Pale Fire and Ada, his ambitious novels of the sixties. Pale Fire is, among other things, an ingenious animation of Ithaca. Almost offhandedly he registers his habitat with a vividness that surpasses in affectionate fidelity the accounts of all other chroniclers. New Wye, the novel’s college town, is a place of steep up-and-down topog
raphy like Ithaca’s, of hardwood forests and drafty old houses above a lake. The winters are snowy and bitter, as Charles Kinbote, the half-cracked, deluded, but not entirely unreliable narrator discovers:

  Never shall I forget10 how elated I was upon learning, as mentioned in a note my reader shall find, that the suburban house (rented for my use from Judge Goldsworth who had gone on his Sabbatical to England) … stood next to that of the celebrated American poet whose verses I had tried to put into Zemblan two decades earlier! Apart from this glamorous neighborhood, the Goldsworthian chateau, as I was soon to discover, had little to recommend it. The heating system was a farce, depending as it did on registers in the floor wherefrom the tepid exhalations of a throbbing and groaning basement furnace were transmitted to the rooms… . It is true that, as usually happens to newcomers, I was told I had chosen the worst winter in years… . On one of my first mornings there, as I was preparing to leave for college in the powerful red car I had just acquired, I noticed that Mr. and Mrs. Shade, neither of whom I had yet met socially … were having trouble with their old Packard in the slippery driveway where it emitted whines of agony but could not extricate one tortured rear wheel out of a concave inferno of ice.

  Kinbote spies on Shade, the Robert Frost–like poet, and Ithaca/New Wye’s prospects assist him:

  Windows, as well known11, have been the solace of first-person literature throughout the ages. But this observer never could emulate in sheer luck the eavesdropping Hero of Our Time or the omnipresent one of Time Lost. Yet I was granted now and then scraps of happy hunting. When my casement window ceased to function because of an elm’s gross growth, I found, at the end of the veranda, an ivied corner from which I could view rather amply the front of the poet’s house. If I wanted to see its south side I could go down to the back of my garage and look from behind a tulip tree across the curving downhill road at several precious bright windows… . If I yearned for the opposite side, all I had to do was walk uphill to the top of my garden where my bodyguard of black junipers watched the stars, and the omens, and the patch of pale light under the lone streetlamp on the road below. By the onset of the season here conjured up, I had surmounted … private fears … and rather enjoyed following in the dark a weedy and rocky easterly projection of my grounds ending in a locust grove on a slightly higher level than the north side of the poet’s house.

  In a book of tributes to Nabokov published later, Morris Bishop recalled the early sabbatical-house days:

  Most faculty12 members come from bourgeois, even petty- bourgeois, backgrounds. We have the habit of small economies; we cut our own grass, replace our own washers, paint our own floors. The Nabokovs had known two extremes: first opulence, then privation in mean Berlin furnished rooms. They had had little training in the complacent middle.

  Furnished houses, with few duties for upkeep, suited them. Some of the houses were dreary, some splendid, as for example a professor’s trim house13 on Hampton Road in Cayuga Heights, perched atop a hill with a picture-window view of Cayuga Lake. Véra “carried the burdens of everyday life on a small budget in a provincial town,” Bishop recalled, and Stacy Schiff exhaustively documents Vera’s services to her husband14 as chauffeur, classroom attendant, housekeeper, house hunter, and amanuensis. She was regal of mien and admired from afar by many, but also pitied, worried over, also from afar:

  The attention-getting part15 was the distribution of labor. More than a few heads turned when, in the supermarket parking lot, Véra set her bagged groceries down in the snow while she shuffled for her keys, then loaded the trunk. In the car her husband sat immobile, oblivious. A similar routine was observed during a move, when Nabokov made his way into a new home carrying a chess set and a small lamp. Véra followed with two bulky suitcases.

  Dmitri’s memories of Cornell glow, effuse. He was there off and on; Ithaca became another site of his successful American adjustment, an attachment point for the “cocoon of love16 and well-being and encouragement in which both my parents always enveloped me,” he later wrote. Thinking of Ithaca, he recalled how,

  home for a winter vacation17, I would trudge on skis for groceries over Ithaca roads made impassable by a giant snowstorm, or, in spring, drive in our beloved Olds or its successor, the froglike green Buick … to the Cascadilla tennis courts for a game with Father.

  Each of the houses18 had “its personal charms, from horseshoes to basement workshops to a splendid cannonball of unknown origin that I dug up in the Hansteens’ garden, somehow related in my memory to the expression ‘Go over like a lead balloon.’ ” Evenings passed19 watching “The Honeymooners … on one of the sabbatical TVs … or Alfred Hitchcock episodes that presaged a collaboration with Hitchcock that was almost to happen [for Vladimir] some years later.”

  Dmitri was the same age20 as fictional Dolores Haze. The wash of cozy Americanness was her donnée, too, but made painful and grotesque in her case; the house with Mexican knickknacks where she lived with her mother was where she lost that mother, after having first lost her father, and then the real nightmare started. The success of Nabokov’s real child—the object of his and Véra’s every effort, in a sense—was an accomplishment about which Vladimir, with charming apologies, liked to boast to friends. They had brought their son out of fascist Germany and through many threatful twists had delivered him, un-Englished and wrongly dressed, undernourished-looking, to a bourn of hope. Days after moving to Ithaca, Nabokov wrote his New Yorker editor, White, “We are absolutely enchanted with Cornell and very very grateful21 to the kind fate that has guided us here.”

  Dmitri was a difficult creation. He was headstrong (“I was not always22 an easy son”), and his private school tuition, at the Dexter School (attended earlier by John F. Kennedy), St. Mark’s (the head there was a “vulgar cad23,” Véra thought), and the hardy Holderness School, where he learned to ski and went on hikes, cost Nabokov about a third24 of his Cornell income. “My boarding school career … survived some bad skids,” Dmitri admitted.

  I … lived on the perilous border25 between success … and minor clandestine delinquency: beer in the woods, nighttime excursions, even a first-year episode of petty thievery… . A superb teacher named Charles Abbey … taught me the rudiments of Shakespeare and guided me to state and New England debating championships… . I had already been accepted at [college, when there came] an indignant protest from a group of village mothers… . I had volunteered to chauffeur a spastic fellow student on regular visits to the local osteopath [and] discovered that the [doctor had] a flirtatious daughter, and [engaged in] a few groping trysts. Thanks to [the school headmaster] I have been allowed to leave with dignity, [taking] my final examinations on the honor system at home.

  The trick was to help him Americanize in positive ways. That the Nabokovs were in a position to reject a school like St. Mark’s—elite and renowned, if riddled with favoritism, Nabokov felt—and find a more congenial one, Holderness, testified to their American good fortune.

  Lolita also goes to private school. Her predatory stepfather places her in the “Beardsley School,” somewhere in New England, after a year of sexual usage on the road. Beardsley has “phoney26 British aspirations,” Humbert says, but is proudly progressive, concerned with “ ‘the adjustment27 of the child to group life,’ ” according to the headmistress. Lolita, cheeky though wounded, her youth profoundly sullied, performs adequately as a student, but Miss Pratt observes certain anomalies: that she “ ‘is obsessed28 by sexual thoughts for which she finds no outlet,’ ” while at the same time she “ ‘remains morbidly uninterested in sexual matters … represses her curiosity in order to save her ignorance and self-dignity.’ ” She writes an “ ‘obscene four-letter word which our Dr. Cutler tells me is low-Mexican29 for urinal with her lipstick on some health pamphlets,’ ” yet seems not to know about the birds and the bees.

  Some of Dmitri’s sexual hijinks30 as a youth, as described in his memoirs, might have colored Nabokov’s sketches of hormonal American boys. Humbert jealousl
y guards his captive stepdaughter against such boys, determined that, “as long as my regime31 lasted she would never, never be permitted to go with a youngster in rut to a movie, or neck in a car,” and auto-mad Dmitri seems to lurk behind Humbert’s thoughts about “the self-sufficient rapist32 with pustules and a souped-up car” who comes a-courting. Whatever his qualities, Dmitri had the freedom to explore, to experiment. His intelligent, concerned parents, laboring to put him on the right track33, to secure, if possible, an American acculturation in a single generation, leading eventually to happiness and a secure income, both protected and liberated him. Humbert’s fathering of Lolita is the dark negation of this.

  Bereft of good parents, Dmitri’s unlucky sister floats free. Her girlish allure is immense, radioactive:

  Lo, little limp Lo!34 Owing perhaps to constant amorous exercise, she radiated, despite her very childish appearance, some special languorous glow which threw garage fellows, hotel pages, vacationists, goons in luxurious cars, maroon morons near blued pools, into fits of concupiscence… . Little Lo was aware of that glow of hers, and I would often catch her coulant un regard in the direction of some … grease monkey, with a sinewy golden-brown forearm and watch-braceleted wrist, and hardly had I turned my back to go and buy this very Lo a lollipop, than I would hear her and the fair mechanic burst into a perfect love song of wisecracks.