by Robert Roper
Spring of ’56, Nabokov took leave from Cornell and spent three months at Harvard, further researching Eugene Onegin. Dmitri was in Cambridge, too, studying music at the Longy School23, a Harvard-connected conservatory. In his memoir Dmitri says,
My first MG24 has been wrecked, and I drive my second. It was bought used, has been modified to go fast, and possesses no top or windshield wipers. It is often parked near Harvard Square, and usually contains, amid sports paraphernalia and snow, an open copy of the first book I shall translate: Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time. Father … comes upon the car [and] carefully notes the page number to see how far I have progressed, and reproachfully reports it to me in the evening.
His parents, nervously supporting his hopes25 for an operatic career, had hatched a backup plan. Vladimir had proposed to Viking a retranslation of the Lermontov novel, offering “a very wonderful26 young translator” to do the work. The wonderful translator’s father would supervise27 him. That Dmitri knew of this only vaguely in advance is suggested by a note from Véra:
I have a piece28 of very good news for you: it appears almost certain that you will be entrusted with the translation of THE HERO OF OUR TIME… . One of the Doubleday editors flew over last Monday for lunch and after a long conference with father became interested in this idea. To-day he has written and offered to go ahead with the contract.
By then a Harvard graduate, accepted at Harvard Law (but without interest in attending), Dmitri still seemed dangerously unmoored, if we can read between the lines of Véra’s letter:
The contract (if passed)29 will be between you and Doubleday. The book has about 200 pages… . This means good, thorough, conscientious work, up to an hour and a half to a page, and at least 3–4 pages a day… . You should have about one half of the book done before [you start at Longy]. After that you will progress at a slower rate, but you will still have to work every day (no holidays) for as many hours as you can squeeze in… . It is very enjoyable work but it is also quite exacting and above all it has to be followed up with the utmost perseverance.
Something in her American son frightens her—maybe several things. “Your father30, who never can say no,” as Véra described Vladimir, “expects31 of you” a good job, and declining the opportunity seems not to have been an option. When Dmitri failed to carry through on the work as expected, his parents did most of it themselves. “Dismiss all thought of things such as car racing,” Véra warned him a year later, summer of ’56.
Also, please review32 your financial life of the past year: You received (and sent down the drain) a very important sum ($1.000) from Doubleday, only one third of which you have more or less earned; you “borrowed” from your father an additional substantial sum which still has to be repaid; you borrowed from the bank; you spent every cent you earned; you were all the time short of money… . Instead of taking a good rest, your father and I have been working all [summer] on the “Hero,” and shall be saddled with this job to the end of our vacation. Is this fair? Ponder it, son, ponder it, it’s time to grow up!
Dmitri had come to resemble Toad—not the dictator in Bend Sinister but the madcap in Wind in the Willows. He had always had a “passionate love for moving things33,” but “so much more intense” than other children, Véra wrote. His habits began to look like a death wish. Nabokov’s stories written in America have a persistent theme of the death of a child—not only Lolita and Bend Sinister but also the short stories “Signs and Symbols” and “Lance,” and the poem “Pale Fire,” in the novel of that name, is centrally about the death of a daughter.
Sylvia Berkman, a friend from the Wellesley years, saw them during their spring at Harvard.* She was one of Véra’s intimate correspondents and author of a critical study of Katherine Mansfield. At Wellesley Berkman had sometimes found Vladimir hard to bear34, his playfulness exhausting, but by the mid-fifties she was a wholesale admirer and something of a protégé. “She is one of our35 most subtle and sensitive women writers,” Vladimir (or maybe Véra) wrote to the University of Iowa when Berkman applied to the Writers’ Workshop in ’55. “I see a radiant future… . Her method of writing, with its artistic care for wording and vivid detail, demands some leisure,” i.e., paid time off from Wellesley.
Nabokov put her name forward36 for the Guggenheim. When a book of Berkman’s stories came out, he urged the publisher, who was also one of his publishers, to get behind it37. Berkman read everything by Nabokov that saw print, and though she was in a position where a tone of worship could be said to have been in her interest, she was worshipful38, authentically in awe of him.
Writing about Pnin she said, “I think the … installments are superlative39—all permeated with a wise mellow humor and astringent wit, the sharpest kind of exact presentation, and the constant melancholy sense of … things … never again to be reached.” Pnin as a campus novel especially engaged her. “This is the absolute location in the college world I think (it makes ‘The Groves of Academe’ shrivel to a waspish hum), because while it is unsparing in its utter accuracy it is yet genial, and allows … that bores may at the same time be well meaning.”
Berkman walked in the master’s steps when possible. She spent a summer at Stanford, socializing with some of the same friends40 the Nabokovs had made there in the forties. Traveling Nabokov style, but by Greyhound bus rather than by car, she made an adventurous exploration out of her trip west, “all the way South41 and into the Southwest on my way [out] then up into the Pacific Northwest and down through the States to Colorado,” staying at cheap lodgings. Lolita had just come out in its American edition. Long, open-road explorations by writers42 made up a distinct genre in the late forties and fifties: Berkman, whether or not she read them, was traveling and experiencing the country in the style of Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1947), Simone de Beauvoir’s America Day by Day (1948), and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and The Dharma Bums (1958), as well as Humbert Humbert’s saga. Her ability to take from the master was limited, however. “What I … learn43 from [him] most,” she wrote Véra, “is the clear, condensed particularity, residing always in the sharp word chosen rather than the indifferent ordinary one.” She could write with bracing accuracy herself, rendering equivocal perceptions well, but, like other gifted psychological realists, she found Nabokov problematic as a model44. His example led to despair:
I’ve been delighted45 to see all the fine notice of Pnin in the English newspapers and reviews… . Lolita I think is the most brilliant and extraordinary novel of this century. It has been very much commented upon I know in the reviews and quarterlies, and I add my bedazzled admiration and enormous pleasure to all that has been said. Why does anyone else even attempt to write in the face of work like this? It meets what I consider a primary test in that one wants to read it again and again.
Nabokov was supreme, and his courage to write as an exercise of arrogant self-awareness, in defiance of Bolsheviks and Nazis and any others who would subsume art to their purposes, made his example stirring. But particularity and le mot juste were just the beginning for him. In a letter to Wilson that has become famous, in which he speaks of “the specific detail46 … the unique image, without which … there can be no art,” he has not explained his aesthetic but only a sine qua non of good work. What follows from precision is large—is larger. Reality vibrates like an icicle tapped with a cane in passages of his characteristic descriptive prose. From Laughter in the Dark:
It really was blue: purple-blue in the distance, peacock-blue coming nearer, diamond-blue where the wave caught the light. The foam toppled over, ran, slowed down, then receded, leaving a smooth mirror on the wet sand, which the next wave flooded again. A hairy man in orange-red pants stood at the edge of the water wiping his glasses.
* * *
A large bright ball was flung from somewhere and bounced on the sand with a ringing thud.
“The water is wet!” she cried, and ran into the surf. There she advanced swinging her hips and her outspread arms, pushing
forward in knee-deep water.
From Lolita:
Under the flimsiest of pretexts … we escaped from the café to the beach, and found a desolate stretch of sand, and there, in the violet shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave, had a brief session of avid caresses, with somebody’s lost pair of sun-glasses for only witness. I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.
The vibration, to readers responsive to such things, occurs seemingly within the reader’s own mind. The author comes intimately close, saying just those words that cause an apprehension. The phrases please and may be comic but are not necessarily “aesthetic”—often they are very simple. They evoke a specific thought, and the whole process is attended by a feeling of I knew that—I’ve seen such things before, I just never put them into words.
A writer like Berkman—or like John Updike, Dmitri’s near classmate at Harvard and a great champion of Nabokov in the coming generation—practices precision, refines and furthers it, but does not necessarily take a step beyond, the step whereby the hyperreal begins to dissolve. Mary McCarthy, another realist writer, objected to that next step; writing to Wilson, when both were reading the Lolita manuscript, she praised “all the description of motels and other U.S. phenomenology” but felt the novel “escaped into some elaborate allegory or series of symbols… . You felt all the characters had a kite of meaning47 tugging at them from above.” The writing was “terribly sloppy” as a result, “full of what teachers call haziness, and all Vladimir’s hollowest jokes and puns. I almost wondered whether this wasn’t … part of the idea.”
It was part. Reality showed itself to be ambiguous, self-undermining around the edges; it donned quotation marks and at that point became more interesting for Nabokov, opened upon something magical, an encounter with the primam causam, with the author himself. In Pale Fire (1962), the reader learns that “somehow Mind is involved48 as a main factor in the making of the universe,” and this capitalized Mind, possibly the mind of God, is, on the evidence of Pale Fire itself, a trickster consciousness besotted with puns, doublings, misperceptions, and literary texts that acknowledge one another. Pale Fire, like Pnin but unlike Lolita, is esoteric and spiritualistic; it does many things, but notably it makes a case for a higher realm. The existence of such a dimension is implied by anomalies of this world we inhabit; the Great Mind that decrees a world of doubles, riddling coincidences, and secret correspondences is, by a curious coincidence, the very model of the mind that can understand it.
This spiritual project is an old one in American letters. Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Dickinson, along with many lesser-known authors, make up one cohort of spirit seekers; others had come before them and others would come later, but by the end of the nineteenth century metaphysical speculation49 had fallen somewhat out of favor, authors such as Twain, James, and Howells positing a world more or less without godly overtones. Some of Nabokov’s distaste for James may represent unease with the older writer’s ordinary epistemology. The world around us, especially in its social aspects, is complex and devious but not unknowable50 for James, and knowledge consists in perceptions tested against those of other people. Nabokov, although he writes of the comedy of getting things horribly wrong—thinking yourself a king of a foreign land, for instance, while being in fact an obscure refugee academic, like the main narrator of Pale Fire—claims for himself such powers of clairvoyance as to remove any need to consult with other minds. That they are his metaphysical insights and riddles is supreme validation: the mind that can make worlds is the final fascination.
Like other of Nabokov’s best works, Pale Fire is a second attempt, a reboot. Important parts were already present in Pnin (and the character Pnin himself reappears in Pale Fire: readers troubled by his loss of a job find him securely placed in the later story). In the winter of 1939–40, after writing The Enchanter, Lolita’s precursor, Nabokov had written two chapters of a never-to-be-completed novel51 that prefigure Pale Fire. There is a fantasia on the theme of a lost kingdom; there is an artist grieving over a loss, hoping for personal contact beyond the grave. Now he began to feel the stirrings of a new book, new but old, in those same miraculous few years when he completed Lolita but could not yet get it published as he wanted, when he wrote Pnin, when he dove ever deeper into the scholarship of Eugene Onegin and translated it several times, only by the painful process of rejecting his own work arriving at last at a version he felt did Pushkin honor. And now something more52: in October of ’56, Véra wrote Sylvia Berkman that Vladimir’s teaching was interfering “with his literary work, for apart from going ahead with the Pushkin book, he is trying to write a new novel.”
Pale Fire brewed for a long while. Between the first stirrings and the actual writing (early sixties, when he was back in Europe) occurred what the Nabokovs referred to as “Hurricane Lolita53,” an enormous upheaval on all fronts. In March ’57 Vladimir sent Doubleday editor Jason Epstein a preview of a projected, post-Lolita novel: it would involve “some very sophisticated spiritualism54,” he wrote, adding, “My creature’s quest is centered in the problem of heretofore and hereafter, and it is I may say beautifully solved.”
Pale Fire would be metaphysical although “completely divorced from so-called faith or religion.” There would be “an insular kingdom55” where “a dull and savage revolution” ousts a king, who escapes to America. Nabokov signals an intention to play with geography in a way hinted at in earlier books. The Hudson River will flow “to Colorado56,” and the border between upstate New York and “Montario” will be “a little blurry and unstable,” but overall, “the locus and life-color are what a real-estate mind would call ‘realistic.’ ”
The novel’s central conceit57—that a man called Charles Kinbote is annotating a poem by a man called John Shade—is not described in the Epstein letter. Brian Boyd, for whom Pale Fire may be “the most perfect novel58 ever written,” wonderfully describes a reader first trying to enter the book:
Two pages into59 the foreword, Kinbote tells us that his poor friend Shade proclaimed to him on the last day of his life that he had reached the end of his labors [on the long poem]. Kinbote adds: “See my note to line 991.” At this point we can either continue with the foreword, and catch the note when we come to it, or trust the author enough to suppose there is some reason … and turn to the note. If we take the second course, we can witness at once Kinbote’s curious attachment to Shade. As he returns home, Kinbote … finds Shade on “the arborlike porch or veranda I have mentioned in my note to lines 47–48.” Do we continue the note to line 991 … or do we divert to the earlier note? If we do, we are referred forward almost at once to the note to line 691, and though we are running out of fingers to insert as bookmarks … we may agree to one last try.
Nabokov works hard to entertain his reader. There is also a subtle humbling. Between 1956, when the book first stirred in him, and the early sixties, novels of which Nabokov was aware60, some of which he praised—for instance, works by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Raymond Queneau, stalwarts of, respectively, the nouveau roman and the French literary movement Oulipo—appeared and acknowledged, in some ways superseded, Nabokov’s formally most innovative work. He might have felt inspired to move further in an experimental direction. The humbling61 was of the common reader. As his follow-up to a smash bestseller, Nabokov was offering a novel with no certain way to be read. Kinbote tries, in his way, to be helpful:
Although these notes62, in conformity with custom, come after the poem, the reader is advised to consult them first and then study the poem with their help, rereading them of course as he goes through its text, and perhaps, after having done with the poem, consulting them a third time so as to complete the picture.
No question which part the commentator hopes will not be missed! Possibly in a bid to double book sales—akin to the astute
copywriter who first printed on a bottle of shampoo, “Rinse and Repeat”—he confesses that he finds it
wise in such cases63 as this to eliminate the bother of back-and-forth leafings by either cutting out and clipping together the pages with the text of the thing, or, even more simply, purchasing two copies of the same work which can then be placed in adjacent positions on a comfortable table.
The book’s focal text, Shade’s long poem “Pale Fire,” is old-fashioned: rhymed and metered. Boyd calls it “a brilliant achievement64 in its own right,” adding that “English poetry has few things better to offer65 than ‘Pale Fire.’ ” It derives its form from the verse of Alexander Pope, although other writers66 are also echoed, among them Milton, Goethe, Wordsworth, Housman, and Yeats. John Shade, a college-dwelling author of the fireside sort, is a medium-famous northeastern poet, or as he puts it in “Pale Fire,” “my name / Was67 mentioned twice, as usual just behind / (one oozy footstep) Frost.” Nine hundred ninety-nine lines long, his poem is not frank doggerel, but it does have a wearying singsong quality, and the self-satisfied mastery of eighteenth-century heroic couplets—rhyming pairs of lines of iambic pentameter—produces an effect of contented neatness:
Maud Shade was eighty68 when a sudden hush
Fell on her life. We saw the angry flush
And torsion of paralysis assail
Her noble cheek. We moved her to Pinedale,