Nabokov in America

by Robert Roper

  The tone is tongue-in-cheek, with overtones of self-regard. Nabokov’s standard table talk—mockery of psychoanalysis, of inferior writers, of au courant scholars; praise of authentic geniuses like himself; savage scorn for the Soviets—forms the book’s substrate. The anti-Bolshevik writing is of a high order, tuned to fit with anti-Communist sentiments of the day. Senator McCarthy comes in for mention but is neither endorsed nor condemned, and Nabokov mourns the Russian intelligentsia oppressed under the tsar and obliterated by the Soviets. What is missing is plot. When Victor, who loves Pnin instinctively, enters the story and his need for a father begins to touch us, it seems that the story has found its point, but, as Covici lamented, Nabokov disdains to develop that feeling. He seems to have wanted to but to have been unable. “We can’t know more98 about Victor,” he replied, answering an editorial letter full of doubts as well as praise. “Throughout the years I worked at this book, I discarded many vistas that opened before me, abandoned many alluring but unnecessary sub-plots … eliminating everything that was not strictly justified in the light of art.” In general he derogated plot—plottedness was a characteristic of lesser work, he thought. He was not good at plots, although he was good at schematics99, at working within a set of arbitrary preconditions, making things come out neatly. A plot of the kind that Covici seems to have wanted takes a story in unexpected but convincing directions, while expressing emotions to a degree uncommon in life outside of books. Many readers, not the readers Nabokov was most comfortable catering to, read to feel the breaking of “the frozen sea inside us” that Kafka wrote about in his famous letter to a school friend. Nabokov knew this100, might even have wished to please such readers—witness his “many discarded vistas”—but could not.

  Edmund Wilson enjoyed Pnin moderately. About the first excerpt to appear he wrote, “Elena [his new, fourth and final, wife] loved101 your … short story… . I liked it, too, but expected more of a wow at the end.” He was more positive when the full book came out, saying, “I think it is very good, and also that you may at last have made contact102 with the great American public… . The reviews I have so far seen all say exactly the same thing: this shows that no one is puzzled, they know how they are meant to react.” He offered corrections, some picayune. It was important for him to praise Pnin. Lolita had left him cold, repulsed. “Now, about your novel,” he had written three years before, after reading a copy of the Lolita manuscript:

  I like it less103 than anything else of yours I have read. The short story that it grew out of was interesting, but I don’t think the subject can stand this very extended treatment. Nasty subjects may make fine books; but I don’t feel you have got away with this. It isn’t merely that the characters and the situation are repulsive … but that … they seem quite unreal. The various goings-on and the climax … become too absurd to be horrible or tragic, yet remain too unpleasant to be funny… . I agree with Mary that the cleverness sometimes becomes tiresome.”

  It is remarkable that the friendship survived this response. Nabokov, who was undoubtedly wounded, nevertheless replied, only a few months later, with unequivocal praise for a Wilson article in the New Yorker: “Bunny, I liked104 very much your Palestine essay. It is one of your best pieces.” Wilson was too needed a friend—too close, too simpatico—to lose over this. When he came to feel, erroneously105, that Wilson had not read the full manuscript (he had wished to hand it on to publishers as soon as possible; also he was sharing pages with Elena and with Mary McCarthy, therefore he read it quickly), Nabokov was hurt anew. He wrote, “I have sold my106 LOLITA [in France]… . I would like you to read it some day,” and when publishers in America still shunned the book,

  It depresses me107 to think that this pure and austere work may be treated by some flippant critic as a pornographic stunt. This danger is the more real to me since I realize that even you neither understand nor wish to understand the texture of this intricate and unusual production.

  Wilson tried to express what had disappointed him. “I think that the time is approaching,” he wrote Véra in ’52, “when I am going to read his complete works108 and write an essay on them that will somewhat annoy him.” Two years later, he was still promising an109 étude approfondie, a view of the whole oeuvre to date, but it never came together. Friendship might have prevented a frank assessment. Nabokov in ’52 or even into ’57 was still a little-known immigrant author subsisting on a professor’s salary, and Wilson might have feared damaging him. When he did speak at last in a full-throated way it was ten years later, and it was only about the translation of Eugene Onegin, which he disliked for stylistic and scholarly reasons. By then, 1965, Nabokov was a titan, very nearly a literary immortal, and to challenge him risked damage to Wilson’s reputation more than Nabokov’s.

  Only at the end of his life—succumbing to strokes and beset by other health problems—would Wilson write something like a general assessment. In a volume called A Window on Russia, published the year he died (1972), he presents a summing up only seven pages long. He has gone back and read the early novels, he says. On the whole he has not been carried away. “The heroes110 of these stories,” he writes, “were almost always … surrounded by rather absurd inferiors; they, however, possess an inalienable distinction and at moments a kind of communication with a higher world.”

  Mr. Nabokov has gone on record111 … as explaining that he regards a novel as a kind of game with the reader. By deceiving the latter’s expectation, the novelist wins the game. But the device exploited in these novels is simply not to have anything exciting take place, to have the action peter out… . In King, Queen, Knave, the lover and his mistress are discouraged from murdering her husband. In Invitation to a Beheading, [the hero] is not executed but, dissociating himself from his accusers, simply gets up and walks away. (It is curious to contrast this ending with one of Solzhenitsyn’s prison camps from which there can be no escape.)

  Perhaps forgetting his own subtle early readings, his appreciation for stand-alone worlds of art, Wilson loses patience with the undeveloped plots, with actions that dissipate. He finds “sado-masochism112” present and associates Nabokov with people “who enjoy malicious teasing and embarrassing practical jokes” but get “aggrieved and indignant113” when someone turns the tables.

  Pnin, he says, in his summing up, shows Nabokov importing himself into a story, for reasons mainly related to this sado-masochism. He can more directly “humiliate114 … his humble little Russian professor, who dreads Nabokov’s brilliance and insolence,” i.e., the character VN’s insolence. Pnin is “somewhat sentimentalized,” Wilson continues. “The sadist, here115 as often, turns out to have an underside of sentimentality.” Wilson misses badly on this matter of VN entering the story. Not to humiliate more, but to display refinements of soul in Pnin—to distinguish between him and VN in ways readers can put together but that VN, largely, cannot—is why the narrator invades his text116.

  On the question of sentimentality, Wilson was more useful. The moral center of the book is underdeveloped. It is Mira, the young woman who died at Buchenwald, the girl Pnin had been in love with long ago; he remembers her in a reverie brought on by a cardiac event (possibly a heart attack), and he thinks of her in terms familiar from other Nabokovian evocations of fetching young girls (“the warm rose-red117 silk lining of her karakul muff,” “the slenderness of arm and ankle”). Here, almost uniquely in his writings, Nabokov makes explicit mention of the Holocaust and a known site of extermination. His approach, usually, is to broadly fictionalize, as if to name the horrors of his own century would be to endorse them. Better to write of them in code, in contexts insistently unreal, thus to keep the foulness118 at a remove.

  This approach is understandable. The danger is that characters such as Krug in Bend Sinister, Kinbote in Pale Fire, and even Humbert may be allowed to dress themselves in the robes of unmentionable suffering, entering special pleas on account of the darkness of their times. Even noble Pnin seems to do this, since Nabokov does not fu
lly dramatize the connection with Mira. She is a fey angel, that’s all; Pnin remembers her “gentle heart119,” her “graceful, fragile, tender” young womanhood, but, as with stepson Victor, the author’s plan for his book rules out an exploration via plot. Pnin hurries from lovelorn thoughts to visions of Mira dying “a great number of deaths120,” being “inoculated with filth, tetanus bacilli, broken glass, gassed in a sham shower bath with prussic acid, burned alive in a pit,” etc. Nabokov himself seems to hurry, pushing her offstage. She is made into a paragon, an Anne Frank figure121; without benefit of enriching, complicating scenes that have a flavor of tricksome life, she is sacralized, sent straight to the higher realms.

  15.

  Wilson’s criticisms of Pnin and other works have been seen by some Nabokov scholars as proof, on a deep level, of envy. An upstart crow arrives, not even speaking the language well, and carries off all the loot; a man who needs to be top dog—not Nabokov, Wilson—turns against a former protégé, now blown up far too high1. Envy probably played some part. But Wilson’s words expressed critical reservations of the kind that was his métier, with which normally he took great care. He might have been blind or philistine or so weakened near the end as to be incapable of judging well, but probably he was not corrupted by envy in a simple way. Something did not persuade him in Nabokov’s work. He had voiced objections for years. Even books he liked2, such as Nikolai Gogol, annoyed him, and the one novel he enthused about, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, also had important flaws, in his view.

  Wilson made a fetish of his independence and incorruptibility. This might have fooled him—led him not to recognize the tribute to their friendship written into Bend Sinister, for instance. For all his devoted reading of whatever Nabokov sent his way, Edmund did not read him professionally. He did not take extensive notes3 on—possibly did not remember—important aspects of the work. In ’53 he wrote, “Is there any chance4 of your publishing a book any time before the fall after next? I hope so, for it would give me a pretext to do a long New Yorker article about you and include it in a book that is supposed to come out.” He wanted to read him, sought grounds for a professional appraisal. He added, “I have been aiming5 to make you my next Russian subject after Turgenev.”

  An enduring difference was political. Scholars friendly to Nabokov cast the Russian as immensely more knowledgeable about history, as someone who had not only experienced it but had thought hard about it. In The Gift, according to Simon Karlinsky, a careful and persuasive Nabokov scholar who was also an émigré, the writer “dealt with the roots6 of totalitarianism in the ostensibly libertarian but actually dogmatic and fanatical ideologies” of the Russian reformers who predated the Bolsheviks. Wilson, to his misfortune, never read The Gift—his Russian wasn’t up to it, and an English translation appeared only in ’63. Thus he could write ignorantly, indeed insultingly, to Nabokov when Bend Sinister came out, advising him to avoid all “questions of politics and social change,” since “you aren’t good at this7.”

  Had Wilson read The Gift, he might have been persuaded that the reformers had given birth to the murderous, ingenious Bolsheviks, and that literature written to advance a social agenda, even worthy-seeming literature, can be dangerous. But equally, he might have felt that Nabokov still did not understand. Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the bad novelist who is subjected to an amusing biographizing in The Gift, foisted materialist utilitarianism on literature, judging Pushkin to be a writer of aesthetic trifles8. But Chernyshevsky, who spent twenty years in prison and exile, was like Nabokov’s poet hero, Fyodor, and like Nabokov himself, decisively on the mind side of things, the ideational side, his strict materialism to the contrary notwithstanding. (All is matter, and there is only material reality, but this idea is itself the lever of the future: the man who possesses it will move the world.) Wilson was less idealist. The questions he asked about situations of social conflict were on the order of Who is suffering here? Who possesses real power? Whose lives are being crushed? Had he read The Gift he might have agreed with Nabokov, who believed it to be his best work in Russian. But also he might have dismissed it. The young hero, Fyodor, is fascinated by his own creative process—ravished by the beauty of his mind. His own inspirations thrill him; they constitute the drama of his life in shabby thirties Berlin:

  When in the mornings9 I entered this world of the forest, whose image I had raised as it were by my own efforts above the level of those artless Sunday impressions (paper trash, a crowd of picnickers) out of which the Berliners’ conception of “Grunewald” was composed; when on these hot, summer weekdays I walked over to its southern side, into its depths, to wild secret spots, I felt as much delight as if this was a primeval paradise.

  Fyodor climbed aboard10 [a bus], and the conductor, on the open top deck, smote its plated side with his palm to tell the driver he could move on. Along this side and along the toothpaste advertisement upon it swished the tips of soft maple twigs—and it would have been pleasant to look down from above on the gliding street ennobled by perspective, if it were not for the everlasting, chilly thought: there he is, a special, rare and as yet undescribed and unnamed variant of man, and he is occupied with God knows what, rushing from [poorly paid language] lesson to lesson, wasting his youth on a boring and empty task.

  In sometimes exciting passages—flaneur reportage of a high order—Fyodor creates a Berlin, and though these are dire times, portentous for the entire world, German fascism hardly figures in the portrait. Only near the end do we read, “A truck went by11 with a load of young people returning from some civic orgy, waving something or other and shouting something or other.” Wilson, to presume to speak for him, would have noticed more amply. The author is making a familiar point about realms of the imagination being open to the artist, who lives and suffers in historical time but can sometimes transcend it, but why is Nabokov’s Berlin novel so contentedly, so entertainingly unempathic? Did social reform ideas of the Russian 1860s really create Bolshevism? What about serfdom and its imperfect eradication, continuing the beggaring of the peasantry? What about outbreaks of violence against landowners going back hundreds of years, or the dislocations of primitive Russian industrialization, or the rate of infant mortality? Nabokov’s most autobiographical novel has no responsibility to address those matters, nor to acknowledge historical forces as commonly understood, but it does present itself12 as saying something pertinent about Bolshevism, and what it says, at unusual length, is not persuasive.

  In his response to Bend Sinister, Wilson had written, “You have no idea13 why or how the [dictator] Toad was able to put himself over,” and here is the crux of their disagreement. For Nabokov, dictators are beneath notice, even when they murder you. For Wilson, the suffering of classes of people is a commanding truth, and the means by which they connive in their own enslavement needs to be understood. The novel was not the best place to seek that understanding, but for Wilson, a rejection of the whole topic by an author was telling. Too often he found in his friend’s work a giggling pleasure in suffering. Maybe more important, the novels, with their clever schematic premises, held to with impressive rigor, did not relax and breathe and give him a feeling of life profoundly opened to and understood, a feeling he got from novelists Nabokov disdained—Malraux, Faulkner, Pasternak—as well as some he respected—Gogol, Tolstoy. An art of narcissism14, of exultant, trumpeted ego: this was a possible description of Nabokov’s art, and for Wilson that was a disappointment.

  In December ’55 a break: novelist Graham Greene named Lolita, still available only in the Olympia Press edition, one of the three best15 books of the year. This mention in the London Sunday Times led a columnist, John Gordon of the London Sunday Express, to declare the novel “the filthiest book16 I have ever read. Sheer unrestrained pornography… . The entire book is … utterly disgusting… . It is published in France.” An item in Harvey Breit’s book-chat column in the New York Times noted the London controversy; till then, Lolita had not been mentioned anywhere in the U.S. press.<
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  Pnin had just been rejected by its publisher. It took Nabokov time to realize his good fortune: “I am extremely irritated by the turn my nymphet’s destiny is taking,” he wrote Wilson, and, “although I foreglimpsed the situation, I have no inkling how to act” in regard to the British controversy. He did not need to act. A perfect Rube Goldberg machine of promotion had been jiggered into action, with Greene forming a John Gordon Society to identify “all offensive books17, plays, paintings, sculptures and ceramics.” The society actually met18, leading to amusing press coverage. Nabokov’s reputation for magical English prose, a reputation won through hard work over fifteen years, made what he feared for Lolita unlikely. His American professional cohort—book editors, magazine editors, reviewers, literary scholars, and writers who read him with joy and amazement—made it difficult to dismiss him as a hack (or a pornographer). A second column by Breit quoted reactions from that cohort:

  “[Lolita] shocks because it is great art19, because it tells a terrible story in a wholly original way.” … “The actual theme of the book—which has long held a powerful appeal for our most important writers—is the corruption of innocence, as now envisioned through the imagination of a European intellectual in quest of his private America.” … “Readers may find something of Nathanael West in it. Its closest analogues are Notes from the Underground and The Possessed.” … “Something of its bedazzlement might be suggested by a composite impression of Daisy Miller and The Possessed—or perhaps, again, of The Captive and Tender Is the Night.”

  What Nabokov called a “foul little flurry20” in London secured Lolita’s future. Gallimard, the esteemed French house, acquired rights for a French-language edition, and the Nouvelle Revue21 Française arranged to run an excerpt. Some American publishers now contacted22 Nabokov—none was able to bring the book out in the end, but that there would be an American Lolita edition was looking more likely.