Nabokov in America

by Robert Roper

  Disappointment Peak, Teton Range, Wyoming

  Buxbaum sensed Nabokov’s anger when they emerged from the woods several hours late. Nabokov seethed but did not voice his anger. Both parents had been out of their minds with worry.

  Nabokov wrote Wilson on August 18, “We have had some wonderful adventures … and are driving back next week. I have lost many pounds77 and found many butterflies.” They crossed into Canada on the way back, traveling just north of the Great Lakes. The previous spring, after a car trip with Véra, he had described to Wilson the “lovely soft-bosomed78 scenery” they saw between Ithaca and Manhattan; his wife had driven him “beautifully,” he said. They were Americans now, able to go where they wanted79 in their own car, when they wanted. Their automobiles—a 1940 Plymouth, never in very good shape; the Oldsmobile; a new green Buick Special bought in ’54; an “amazing white [Chevrolet] Impala80” rented while they lived briefly in Los Angeles—became markers of periods in their lives and of their modest financial ascent. The Olds was the Lolita car, the one Véra parked in the shade of roadside trees when Vladimir wanted a quiet, upholstered place to write. The famous photo of him writing in a car, taken by Carl Mydans of Life, dates from ’58 and is a staging81; the car is the two-door Buick, not the legendary Olds, and the location is a roadside near Ithaca.

  12.

  During their next trip west, in 1951, Nabokov was still constantly taking notes. His American researches were extensive1. They bespeak a desire to get things right and also an anxiety about his subject; he recorded information on the habits and physiques of pubescent American girls, on the average age of menstruation onset, on attitudinal changes, on the proper method of inserting an enema tip2 into a rectum. He collected girlish slang3 from teen magazines, his Russianness, notwithstanding his long acquaintance with formal English, helping such phrases as “It’s a sketch” or “She was loads of fun” to emerge from colloquial invisibility.

  As a writer he took off, felt liberated to create, when he knew hard facts. No author of his century was so punctilious about demonstrable, testable reality and simultaneously so agnostic toward it, if we take his warnings about its provisionality seriously. He rode on buses to hear teenagers speak, and for the scene with Miss Pratt4, head of the Beardsley School, he interviewed a real school principal and pretended to have a daughter who sought admission.

  Late in March 1950, he read newspaper reports of a sensational crime. An unemployed auto mechanic, Frank La Salle, had abducted an eleven-year-old girl named Sally Horner and kept her for two years as his sex slave, traveling from New Jersey to California by way of Texas, before being apprehended in a San Jose auto court. La Salle was described as a “hawk-faced5 … sex criminal” with “a long record of morals offenses,” and Sally as a “plump little girl” and “a nice looking youngster, with light brown hair and blue-green eyes.” The second part of Lolita, the schema for it, had been handed him. Sally’s captivity lasted for twenty-one months, included attendance at school, and concluded when she confided her secret to a classmate, who told her that what was happening was wrong. Lolita, similarly, travels for twenty-one months before being placed in the Beardsley School, where Humbert fears that she has spilled the beans to a classmate, who has advised her on how to run away. La Salle controlled Sally by claiming to be an FBI agent who would send her to “a place for girls like you” unless she did his bidding. Humbert, taking pointers, reminds Lolita that, as a child whose birth parents are both dead, she would end up in a “detention home6, or one of those admirable … protectories where you knit things” if her stepfather were to go to jail.

  La Salle abducted Sally after watching her commit a crime (shoplifting), hence the threat about sending her to “a place for girls.” This may be Nabokov’s crucial borrowing; Humbert also persuades Lolita that she has broken the law, has “impaired the morals7 of an adult in a respectable inn” by inviting him “to know her carnally” when they spent the night at the Enchanted Hunters hotel. Precocious and in many ways bright, Lolita is finally just a child. She can be gulled. Nabokov’s other borrowings from the Horner case include the girls’ resemblance (“nice-looking … light brown hair and blue-green eyes”) and Lolita’s fate, which is prefigured in the short life of Sally, who two years after being rescued from her captivity died in a highway accident, as Lolita will die in childbirth. For both of them, an extinguished childhood and early sex are doomful; no matter their hopes and apparent second chances, they have been marked.

  Nabokov’s journal for ’518, the notes he kept as he traveled, show him wide awake and questing. “Sunday, June 24 … started 7:30 p.m. Mileage 50.675 clover in bloom, low sun in platinum haze, warm, peach upper contour of one dimension pale grey cloud fusing with distant mist.” The landscape of upstate New York reminded him of “oilskins … with pictures, hung on wall above washstand [with] these kind of curly trees, this kind of green, these farms and cows,” from his Russian boyhood. With pleasure he realized that his first images of America had been “imported from here!”—from rural upstate New York or somewhere similar.

  This recognition made its way into Lolita. “Not only had Lo no eye for scenery,” Humbert writes about their first, yearlong ramble cross-country, “but she furiously resented my calling her attention to this or that enchanting detail of landscape.” He continues,

  By a paradox of pictorial9 thought, the average lowland North-American countryside [was] something I accepted with a shock of amused recognition because of those painted oilcloths which were imported from America in the old days to be hung above washstands in Central-European nurseries … opaque curly trees, a barn, cattle, a brook … and perhaps a stone fence or hills of greenish gouache.

  The “pale grey cloud” gets into the famous description of a “two- dimensional, dove-gray cloud” turning peach as the sun sets. In real-life Missouri, outside a restaurant, where “the bill was delicately placed by waitress under the rolls,” Nabokov noted another sky, this one containing “Lorrain’s clouds … fading into misty azur … parts of them … projected out of neutral background.” In Lolita we read of

  a line of spaced trees10 silhouetted against the horizon, and hot still noons above a wilderness of clover, and Claude Lorrain clouds inscribed remotely into misty azure with only their cumulus part conspicuous against the neutral swoon of the background. Or again, it might be a stern El Greco horizon, pregnant with inky rain.

  Over and over his journal jottings find their way into the text. Quite possibly it was not a case of him being inspired by something seen, which then prompted him to write a passage now to be found in Lolita, but rather of him actively seeking some detail to solve a problem in his writing. He looks at the sky in coming days or on the very day of arriving at a problem, discovering something that he can use; to say that the landscape has inspired him is to romanticize the process.

  He provides what he needs, shaping what he finds; he is “inventing America,” as he claimed, by looking at it creatively and with many words ready to be summoned—indeed, with words inseparable from the looking. The sky on a particular day, like the philosopher’s tree that falls or maybe does not fall in the forest, suddenly arrives at existence11. In biographical terms, he may be recording a process of learning to read America. He imputes this process, or an approximation of it, to Humbert. There is at first a tendency to see scenes as stereotypes (the oilcloth images), along with an attitude of uninterest or condescension, but the “inutile loveliness” begins to work on Humbert, and though Lolita remains resistant, “I myself learned12 to discern [the landscape] … after being exposed for quite a time” to it, to “the delicate beauty ever present in the margin of our undeserving journey.”

  What Nabokov saw, other than instances of the picturesque, is not the immediate concern of his novel. Still, his protagonist registers moods and reaches conclusions. The year of madcap moteling (August ’47 to August ’48) began with

  a series of wiggles13 and whorls in New England, then meandered south, up
and down, east and west; dipped deep into ce qu’on appelle Dixieland, avoided Florida … veered west, zigzagged through corn belts and cotton belts … crossed and recrossed the Rockies, straggled through southern deserts where we wintered; reached the Pacific, turned north through the pale lilac fluff of flowering shrubs along forest roads; almost reached the Canadian border; and proceeded east, across good lands and bad lands.

  They had been almost “everywhere.” Yet, “We had really seen nothing,” Humbert decides. He means that the greed and dishonor of what he’s done to a child cancel other values. Their “long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime” the dreamy American vastness; what remained were “dog-eared maps, ruined tour books,” and the child’s “sobs in the night14—every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep.”

  Humbert and Lolita lose reality themselves as they travel. Even at “our very best moments,” he writes,

  when we sat reading15 on a rainy day … or had a quiet hearty meal in a crowded diner, or played a childish game of cards, or went shopping, or silently stared, with other motorists and their children, at some smashed, blood-bespattered car with a young woman’s shoe in the ditch … I seemed to myself as implausible a father as she seemed to be a daughter.

  They are not father and daughter—they are pedophile and captive. They pretend; each has reasons to do so, and doing so awakens in one of them a sensitivity to a cognate quality in the passing scene, an undertone of enigma. “And sometimes trains would cry16 in the monstrously hot and humid night,” Humbert records, sounding Allen Ginsbergian. The train whistles have a “heartrending and ominous plangency, mingling power and hysteria in one desperate scream.” He takes Lolita to a “dusk-mellowed, mysterious side-road” for some fondling; a little later,

  tall trucks studded with colored lights, like dreadful giant Christmas trees17, loomed in the darkness and thundered by [our] little sedan. And again next day a thinly populated sky, losing its blue to the heat, would melt overhead, and Lo would clamor for a drink … and the car inside would be a furnace when we got in again, and the road shimmered ahead, with a remote car changing its shape mirage-like in the surface glare.

  The mirage car predicts the one that Humbert will see following them later on; his pedophile shadow self, Clare Quilty, may be at the wheel. Mirages grow from this landscape. Humbert notes “the mysterious outlines18 of table-like hills” as they get farther west, and then “red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue, and blue into dream.”

  An impostor, he roams a land of equivocal sights. The freedom to move at will, to cover hundreds of miles in a day, to stay under assumed names (as Quilty does) in interchangeable motels: this is the man-made anonymous world, laid upon a landscape already given to mystery. The more Humbert peers at America, the stranger it appears. Illusions hatch there, as do vision seekers and con artists. Humbert’s paranoia grows rather than diminishes as he becomes an experienced traveler on American roads. At first these promise fun: “I have never seen such smooth amiable roads19 as those that now radiated before us,” he writes, “across the crazy quilt of forty-eight states. Voraciously we consumed those long highways, in rapt silence we glided over their glossy black dance floors.” A day’s travel often ends in disorientation, though:

  And the desert20 would meet us with a steady gale, dust, gray thorn bushes, and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking pale flowers among the … wind-tortured withered stalks all along the highway; in the middle of which there sometimes stood simple cows, immobilized in a position … cutting across all human rules of traffic.

  Quilty, who does pursue them and who is a fiendishly clever tormentor, belongs among the withered stalks and snagged toilet paper. He resembles Humbert in his degeneracy and his witty wordplay but differs as regards the moral sense. Humbert lacerates himself as he debauches his captive; he anguishes over the state of what might be his soul, while Quilty is more hipster-lecher, rotten with boredom yet everywhere active, a con man21 on the order of the central character of Melville’s The Confidence-Man (1857), an arch manipulator, a deep devil of deceit. Quilty also recalls Chichikov, in Gogol’s Dead Souls, but Chichikov was a lower order of devil, less conscious, more buffoon. Quilty is, in some reprehensible way, an artist, a magician of style.

  Nabokov liked to mock commentary that found larger meanings in Lolita. “Although everybody should know22 that I detest symbols and allegories” by now, “an otherwise intelligent reader who flipped through the first part described Lolita as ‘Old Europe debauching young America,’ while another flipper saw in it ‘Young America debauching old Europe.’ ” Readers can take from a text whatever meanings they wish; novels have mythic dimensions because readers perceive them. Lolita invites interpretation coquettishly. It describes a journey across the whole “crazy quilt,” Whitmanesquely embracing all America, meanwhile focusing its attention on the growth edge of the enterprise, as represented in the magazines and television of the time: the suburbs. Wittily it engages in the sort of pseudo-analysis that Nabokov liked to mock, shuffling everything into categories:

  We came to know2723—nous connûmes, to use a Flaubertian intonation—the stone cottages under enormous Chateaubriandesque24 trees, the brick unit, the adobe unit, the stucco court… . The log kind, finished in knotty pine… . We held in contempt the plain whitewashed clapboard Kabins, with their faint sewerish smell25… . Nous connûmes (this is royal fun) … all those Sunset Motels, U-Beam Cottages, Hillcrest Courts, Pine View Courts, Mountain View Courts… . The baths were mostly tiled showers, with an endless variety of spouting mechanisms.

  He categorizes people, too:

  the various types of motor court operators, the reformed criminal, the retired teacher and the business flop, among the males; and the motherly, pseudo-ladylike and madamic variants among the females26… . We came to know the curious roadside species, Hitchhiking Man … with all its many subspecies and forms: the modest soldier, spic and span, quietly waiting, quietly conscious of khaki’s viatic appeal; the schoolboy wishing to go two blocks; the killer wishing to go two thousand miles; the mysterious, nervous, elderly gent, with brand-new suitcase and clipped mustache; a trio of optimistic Mexicans; the college student displaying the grime of vocational outdoor work … the clean-cut, glossy-haired, shifty-eyed … young beasts in loud shirts and coats … priapically thrusting out tense thumbs to tempt lone women or sadsack salesmen.

  If he is not writing a novel of midcentury America, what is he writing? A massive body of critical scholarship, beginning with Page Stegner’s Escape into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov (1966) and amounting now to hundreds of books and thousands of scholarly articles, largely seeks to answer that question. Readers continue to take him at face value, even so. They encounter his lists of American types and think they recognize someone or something they know. His period slang is engagingly accurate (in the passage above, “business flop,” “spic and span,” “brand-new,” “sadsack”), and the details he forefronts recall a time that Americans feel as if they have lived through, no matter when they were born:

  [Lolita] it was to whom ads were dedicated28: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster. And she attempted … to patronize only those restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads.

  I was not really29 quite prepared for her fits of disorganized boredom, intense and vehement griping, her sprawling, droopy, dopey-eyed style, and what is called goofing off—a kind of diffused clowning which she thought was tough in a boyish hoodlum way.

  Independent of the novel’s allusions30—references to, or parodies of, Poe, Dante, Dostoevsky, Lewis Carroll, Freud, Baudelaire, Flaubert, T. S. Eliot, Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, Tristram Shandy, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Don Quixote, and John Keats; Hans Christian Andersen, Proust, the Brothers Grimm, Shakespeare, Mérimée, Melville, Bacon, Pierre de Ronsard, lepidoptery, and the literatur
e of the double; Aubrey Beardsley, Sherlock Holmes, Catullus, Lord Byron, Goethe, Rimbaud, Browning, Nabokov himself—the basic story of abduction and flight, and the sexual exploitation of a child, moves logically forward, in a detailed American context. The book itself is a parody. It is Humbert’s parody of the Romantic confessional novel31 of an earlier century, telling of a hopeless and obsessive love. According to the able scholar Alfred Appel Jr., Nabokov found ways to make parody play for pathos as well as for laughs; Lolita is “a parody … with real suffering32 in it,” he says. The novel has it “both ways,”

  involving the reader33 … in a deeply moving yet outrageously comic story, rich in verisimilitude, [while] engaging him in a game made possible by the interlacings of verbal figurations which undermine the novel’s realistic base and distance the reader from its dappled surface.

  Many readers do not feel distanced. American or not, they recognize something like the America they know or believe they know. Half-aware of hints being dropped, skimming the many uncommon French terms (frétillement, grues, poser un lapin, arrière-pensée, etc.), sensing an author a bit on the solipsistic side, one whose tale of a self-absorbed but sympathetic pervert is a working out, on some level or in some sense, of personal issues, they read on. Humbert is just amusing enough34 to not be unbearable. What he does to the girl child is hateful but—if we can be frank here—lasciviously compelling, at least in the early chapters. And the book is suspenseful. Readers of mysteries and fans of film thrillers of the kind made by Alfred Hitchcock35 in the same years—Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1941), Notorious (1946)—undergo the same compulsion to find out, to follow through to the end, when they embark on Lolita. The “undermining of the novel’s realistic base” may mean one thing to a scholar of an ontological bent; to a reader who begins to sense, along with Humbert, that something’s not quite right, that someone is playing tricks on a poor foreign-born pedophile, it means another.