Nabokov in America

by Robert Roper

  The Greek-like simplicity81 of it: a man of forceful character driven by his sombre nature and his bleak heritage, bent on his own destruction and dragging his immediate world down with him with a despotic and utter disregard of them as individuals … a sort of Golgotha of the heart become immutable as bronze in the sonority of its plunging ruin; all against the grave and tragic rhythm of the earth in its most timeless phase: the sea.

  What’s missing from Moby-Dick is an enchanting child. But there82 is a child, and he is enchanting. Ahab’s grimness is tempered by his love for the ship’s boy Pip, who loses his mind from fear after being left awhile afloat in the open ocean. Like Lear’s fool, Pip speaks cracked wisdom, and Ahab adopts him, explaining, “Thou touchest83 my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings.”

  One of three blacks84 (one African, two African American) aboard the ship of all men, Pip wonderingly strokes the captain’s hand, musing,

  What’s this? here’s velvet shark-skin85… . Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this, perhaps he had ne’er been lost! This seems to me, sir, as a man-rope; something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, sir, let old Perth [ship’s blacksmith] now come and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the white, for I will not let this go.

  Ahab, along with everyone but Ishmael, will not escape his fate by this turn to fatherly love. But the novel escapes some of its grimness thereby. Ahab has set his course and will follow it, but his diabolical arrogance partly drops away. The grimness of a story of mechanical, three-times-a-day rape of a child was the great challenge to Nabokov, and he wrapped it in brilliant wordplay and other diversions, but finally there it was, unbearably, unmistakably. Like Melville, whose Greek-like tragedy was all too plainly built and dark, Nabokov added colors of the heart, facetiously or not, to his story, especially to its final act. We see the monster coming to love, treasuring the worn seventeen-year-old girl with her “adult, rope-veined narrow hands” when Humbert visits her in Coalmont, and his untrustworthy words need to be trusted, so that we, his readers, can feel the deepest pity stir in us:

  Unless it can be proven86 to me … that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy … palliative of articulate art.

  * Americans have historically spoken, thought, and written out of any number of texts, but especially religious ones, and most especially the Bible. A masterful piece of American rhetoric like the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is continually allusive but unpedantic. The density of its culture may be hidden to American ears yet is a prime source of its power. Among the sources melded and worn plainly but veiled by familiarity in that speech are the American Negro spiritual (“Free at last”), the Gettysburg Address, the Declaration of Independence, “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” Langston Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again,” Exodus, Galatians, Isaiah, Amos, Richard III, “This Land Is Your Land,” and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Autobiography (“this is a wonderful America, which the founding fathers dreamed”).

  14.

  One of Nabokov’s favorite spots to stay, with an inexpensive roof over his head, was Afton, Wyoming, a small Mormon town along the meandering Salt River. Here Vladimir and Véra spent some weeks in ’52 and ’56, in a motor court on the edge of town called the Corral Log Motel. East of town rises the Salt River Range, part of a national forest. In a chatty entomological paper called “Butterfly Collecting in Wyoming, 19521,” Nabokov remembered “spending most of August in collecting around the altogether enchanting little town of Afton,” which was reached by a paved road close to the Idaho state line.

  The Nabokovs had their own unit with bath. Gathered around a central space2, like encircling Conestoga wagons, the cabins were built in Broadaxe Hewn Log style, with compound dovetail corners (each log end extending beyond the meeting of walls). The logs were debarked and varnished, the chinks filled with mortar and covered with battens. Several creeks flow west from the mountains near Afton. Nabokov’s method was to follow the creeks upstream, taking specimens in the riparian brush. “In early August3,” he wrote in his paper, “the trails in Bridger National Forest were covered at every damp spot with millions of N. californica Boisd. in tippling groups of four hundred and more, and countless individuals were drifting in a steady stream along every canyon.”

  He had been working on Lolita at that point for three years. Most of that work had been preparatory, what he called “palpating4 in my mind,” with much note-taking. During his semester at Harvard in spring ’52 he might have begun writing5 a draft, but during that summer he in fact wrote little6 or nothing.

  Corral Log Motel, Afton, Wyoming

  He enjoyed his usual vacation bloom of health. The years of work on the book were, on the whole, a time of health crises: dental dramas, and in ’50 a recurrence of intercostal neuralgia, a painful inflammation of the nerves of the ribs, which can make breathing torturous. He told Wilson,

  I spent almost two weeks7 in a hospital and have been howling and writhing since the end of March when the influenza I caught at that somewhat dingy [New Yorker] party tapered to the atrocious point of intercostal neuralgia, the symptoms of which, the wracking, unceasing pain and panic, mimic diseases of the heart and kidney, so that for days on end I was experimented upon by doctors… . I am not quite well yet, had a little relapse to-day and am still in bed, at home.

  When at home he was able to write undisturbed. Véra delivered his lectures in his stead, and other annoying duties8 temporarily dropped away.

  Dmitri, who had faltered at Harvard—his freshman year “began tempestuously9,” Nabokov told Wilson—soon righted himself. He was distractable but able “to focus briefly10 on a page [and have] it register photographically,” he later wrote of himself, and in the end he graduated with honors, to his parents’ delight. Nabokov told his sister that Dmitri was “interested, in the following order11, in: mountain climbing, girls, music, track, tennis, and his studies.” Vladimir’s semesters at Harvard were for purposes of close monitoring as well as research; Véra and he imposed a regime whereby Dmitri had to earn his own pocket money, and he worked as a dog walker, a mailman in Harvard Yard, and a “partner for tennis12 and French conversation to an odd, ruddy-faced Bostonian bachelor” who picked him up in a Jaguar.

  He joined the Harvard Mountaineering Club. This organization has been associated with ascents13 of imposing mountains since its founding, in 1924, and Dmitri came to the club during a postwar golden age. Harvard climbers went to14 Alaska, Peru, Antarctica, the Himalaya, the Canadian Rockies, and western China. (A peak in the Amne Machin Range was rumored to be taller than Everest.) The most influential American climbers of the fifties were Harvard men. They included Charles Houston, leader of the 1953 K2 expedition, on which Art Gilkey died; Ad Carter, editor of the American Alpine Journal, the world’s leading mountaineering journal; and Brad Washburn, whose aerial photos of Mount McKinley and other peaks made accurate mapping possible. Dmitri did not climb on a rope with15 them, but he rubbed shoulders with these men, and he hungrily assimilated the club ethos, moving from beginner to leader on first ascents. In ’54 he published an article16 in the Alpine Journal, “Mt. Robson from the East,” describing a climb of the East Face of the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies, a two-day ascent that included sleeping out in a crevasse. On this same trip he led the first ascent of Gibraltar17 Mountain, in the Canadian Selkirk Range. His team drove into Canada in “an elderly Packard18 hearse whose motor we lovingly rebuilt … and which we equipped with bunks” and war-surplus B-25 tires.

  “I doubt if we shall ever19 get used to it,” Nabokov wrote his sister Elena, referring to his son’s risk taking. Several Harvard climbers died20. Dmitri was mad for speed as well as summits, and by September ’53 he had run “his third
car21 into the ground,” his father reported, “and is getting ready to buy a used plane.” He “worked building highways in Oregon [in the summer of ’53] and handling a gigantic truck,” while his father and mother, traveling here and there to rendezvous with him, often worried22.

  For a while they lodged in the town of Ashland23, Oregon. Like Afton, and like Estes Park and Telluride, Ashland sits in the lee of mountains, in this case the Siskiyous, with nearby streams, lakes, and marshy meadows. (“There is no greater pleasure24 in life than exploring … some alpine bog,” Vladimir told Wilson.) The town had a commercial district and modest wooden houses25 for rent. Ashland in the summer is full of blooming roses. Here Nabokov dictated much of Lolita in its final form. Upon returning to Ithaca that September he told Katharine White that he had “more or less completed” his “enormous, mysterious, heartbreaking novel,” a novel requiring “five years of monstrous misgivings and diabolical labors.” It had cast on him an “intolerable spell” and was “a great and coily thing26 [with] no precedent in literature. In none of its parts will it be suitable” for her magazine.

  Corral Log Motel (interior)

  He had sent White something else instead, a story about Pnin, a Russian-born professor, which was suitable. Writing that and writing the installments of Speak, Memory had been “brief sunny escapes” from the other book, the one that had tortured him. Nabokov both wanted and did not want to show White Lolita. He was obliged to, under their contract, and he hoped that she would declare it a work of genius despite its treatment of depravity, of such incomparable merit that all worries about public revulsion or possible prosecution could be forgotten. White was not charmed, however, by the unsigned manuscript that Véra hand-carried27 to New York a few months later, at the end of ’53. The New Yorker’s head editor, William Shawn, was not to be shown it by any means, Véra insisted to White—Shawn was more shockable28 than she was.

  The writing of a classic novel thus passed, was accomplished, marked by a few comments to an editor (“heartbreaking,” “enormous”) and by a hint or two to friend Wilson29 (“quite soon I may show you a monster”). White had no doubt heard this sort of thing before: writers often think their latest work their greatest. He continued dictating that fall, recording only on the sixth30 of December that he was truly finished. “The theme and situation are decidedly sensuous,” he told Wilson, but “its art is pure and its fun riotous.” It was his “best thing in English.” One of the first editors to see the manuscript warned him, however, that “we would all go to jail if the thing were published. I feel rather depressed about this fiasco31.”

  The publication of Lolita, like its composition, was long and tormenting32. At times it seemed unlikely to be accomplished. Nabokov acted as his own agent33, as Wilson had taught him to. Viking rejected it first, an editor warning that publication under a pseudonym, Nabokov’s initial plan for the book, would invite prosecution, reluctance to affix an author’s real name suggesting awareness of pornographic content. Simon & Schuster rejected it next, editor Wallace Brockway blaming the decision on prudish colleagues. In October ’54, J. (James) Laughlin, bold avant-gardist not afraid to challenge obscenity statutes, said no for New Directions. Farrar, Straus & Young declined out of fear of a court battle they could not win. Jason Epstein, of Doubleday, had been tipped to the book by Wilson, who was given a manuscript in late ’54; like Pascal Covici, the Viking editor, and like Brockway, and like Roger Straus of Farrar, Straus, Epstein esteemed34 Nabokov’s writing but was unable to persuade his colleagues to publish the new book, and in a memo he expressed some literary reservations but also a feeling that Lolita was somehow and not in a trivial way, brilliant.

  Laughlin and Covici thought it might have a better chance35 overseas. Nabokov therefore sent it to Doussia Ergaz, his agent in Paris, and started looking around for an American agent to do what he had been unable to—he was willing to part36 with 25 percent of earnings, he told Brockway.

  This complicated process, which did lead eventually to a foreign first publisher (Olympia Press) and finally to an American one (Putnam’s), seems in retrospect fated to have worked out. The book was sexual but demure: free of forbidden words. It was highly readable. It appeared at a good moment, when the enforcers of public morality were coming to seem completely absurd. Joyce’s Ulysses, widely acknowledged as an iconic work, possibly the greatest of the century, had been under attack by moral guardians since before it was even a book. (A first excerpt, published in 1918, brought convictions37 for obscenity for the two editors of the Little Review.) A long line of other works, condemned, confiscated, and burned, including Lawrence’s Women in Love, The Well of Loneliness, by Radclyffe Hall, Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Naked Lunch, Ginsberg’s “Howl,” Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre, Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit, and Memoirs of Hecate County, had pre-dug Nabokov’s rose garden38. Just in the years between his book’s first rejections (’54) and its acceptance by an American house (’58), the censorship effort in America went from weak to moribund, and by ’59 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the most suppressed novel of the century, had appeared in paperback from Grove39 Press, and in ’61 Tropic of Cancer also appeared, also from Grove.

  It was fated to work out for other reasons, too. Though Nabokov told Katharine White that Lolita was “a great and coily thing” without precedent, it was not a formal breakthrough on the order of Ulysses or The Sound and the Fury, or As I Lay Dying (or Moby-Dick, for that matter). It did not present difficulties for readers like those to be found in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood or Andrei Bely’s Petersburg or, to name works only of Lolita’s own decade, Beckett’s Molloy, The Voyeur, by Robbe-Grillet, The Recognitions, by William Gaddis, or Michel Butor’s Second Thoughts. Within Nabokov’s own canon it was easier to enter than The Gift or Bend Sinister. If by “without precedent” he had meant the theme of sex with children40 treated openly, on that score he would have been exaggerating his book’s originality; disturbing accounts had appeared before, in works by the Marquis de Sade (The 120 Days of Sodom, Incest) and others. Nabokov meant something else by “without precedent.” Probably he meant the coily, intricate skein of correspondences half-buried in the text, hints whereby Humbert becomes aware of Quilty, whose string pulling mirrors his own but on a level suggestive of devilish intriguing, of a universe of mocking gods, with a Master Pratfall Designer up there somewhere, ensnaring everyone in a stupendous gag.

  Whatever he meant, he had written a novel for readers41: ordinary readers. It was decked with gaudy allures, wickedly funny, sure to offend, but with its doors wide open. Altagracia de Jannelli would have approved. She had wanted him to write something right over the American plate. In all his magpie gleaning of period objects and attitudes he had managed not to overlook simplicity and emotion as American preferences. The book sold well for Olympia, despite legal challenges in Britain and France, and for Putnam’s and later American publishers it sold extremely well42—phenomenally well, in the hundreds of thousands in just its first year, and in ensuing decades in the many, many millions.

  Some of Nabokov’s struggle as he wrote came from fear that his new book would be stillborn—would be suppressed, kept from all those readers. Writers are a varied bunch, some concerned about readership, some indifferent, but even the indifferent ones write with at least one reader in mind, working to entice and seduce and impress themselves. To give up five years of professional prime and his best work43 in English, as he decreed Lolita to be—to carry the child full-term, knowing that it might already be dead—that was indeed anguishing.

  His superciliousness, his scorn for all that was popular and midmarket, was an authentic attitude with him but also a deception. His novel Pnin was valuable and justified as a work of art because “what I am offering you,” he told one publisher who became interested in it, “is a character entirely new44 to literature … and new characters in literature are not born every day.” Novelty was what justified Lolita, too, he fe
lt—being without “precedent in literature.” Luckily, to have the sense of originality he needed in order to write did not require an As I Lay Dying type text, structurally strange and forbidding to mainstream readers. He had written such books, plentifully forbidding ones—Bend Sinister was his modernist American swan song, unfriendly to many reader expectations, and some of his Russian novels, such as Invitation to a Beheading, rejoice in narrative discontinuities and redressings of reality.

  Reality, identified by Nabokov as “one of the few words45 which mean nothing” without quote marks around them, signified something new in the New World. Reality was vital and vulgar here. It provided Nabokov with “exhilarating46” opportunities for burlesque, for extended high-flying parodies, and the books of his American prime are excited even when dark. Readers puzzled or disgusted by the high spirits47 of Lolita, which he himself deemed a tragedy, were not misperceiving it; the energy of discovery—the pleasure in claiming new writerly territory—skews the representation. But that reality is also fairly stable. In Pnin the quote marks around it have been all but erased, and a reader of Lolita, especially of the road-trip parts, might almost have used it as a Baedeker. In Ada, written after his self-exile to Switzerland, the reality of countries and continents is an idea again under interrogation. Use Ada as Baedeker at your peril.