by Robert Roper
Kinbote resembles his author, who also is prone to wonderment. Upon first coming to America—parachuting into a field near Baltimore—Kinbote looks around him with “enchantment and112 physical wellbeing.” The commentary is seeded with Nabokov’s enduring love of mountains. Zembla is a high kingdom, a peninsula with a mountain range forming its spine, and the king escapes only by climbing into that range and then down the other side. At an “eerie altitude, in the heady blue,” he enters the mental zone “where the mountaineer becomes aware of a phantom companion113”—a friend, an imaginary ally, who can lead him to safety.†
Shade is such a friend114 to Kinbote. Shade’s poem, incorporating Zemblan material, is casually mountain-minded115, making reference to famous peaks (Mont Blanc, the Matterhorn) and making much of a confusion between a mountain and a fountain. “How serene were the mountains, how tenderly painted on the western vault of the sky,” Kinbote enthuses, and the commentary, as it relates the king’s escape, paints in all manner of alpine life, from “the first full cowbell of dawn” to the “lacy resilience” of bracken underfoot, to dangerous boulderfields (“Mr. Campbell had once twisted an ankle and had to be carried down, smoking his pipe, by two husky attendants”) to mountain huts where exhausted climbers are saved by friendly rustics who provide them with nourishing food, a “bowl of mountain mead” thrown in, and whose unwashed daughters lead them on tricky parts of the route and then strip naked116, offering themselves.
Motifs of the poem, many, appear again up high, transformed, as believable parts of the mountain world. The “pinhead light117” of the TV becomes a “pinhead light” from a distant hut. A butterfly that skelters through the poem, called “dark Vanessa118” by Shade and associated with his wife, Sybil, greets the king as sunlight reaches him on a dawn mountainside. His journey to freedom evokes Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” about ecstasies had in nature (“I came among these hills119; when like a roe / I bounded o’er the mountains”); and a beautiful passage120 from “Pale Fire,” a borrowing from Goethe’s “The Erlking,” expressing Shade’s grief over his daughter’s death, is echoed by Charles’s repetition of similar lines121 as he tries to escape.
Maybe Shade was writing about Zembla, after all. Or maybe Kinbote, the sole possessor of the manuscript following the poet’s death (at the hands of a misfiring assassin, à la Nabokov’s father), is inspired to write a fantastic gloss that takes off122 from Shade’s poem and that begins with the useful fiction that the inspiration went the other way, critic to poet. Kinbote says of himself,
I am capable123, after long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world (but singularly enough not verse—I am a miserable rhymester)… . I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do—pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web.
Nabokov might have said this about himself. To see things fresh, to combine freely: this was his artistic way. The result is a body of work full of metaphor and comparison. Pale Fire, deriving Zembla from staid transcendental verses124, is itself a metaphor, one thing for another, a conjunction absurd on its face but enchanting, if read a certain way. Kinbote spells that out:
Gradually I regained125 my usual composure [after a first look through the manuscript]. I reread Pale Fire more carefully. I liked it better when expecting less. And what was … that dim music, those vestiges of color in the air? Here and there I discovered … echoes and spangles of my mind, a long ripplewake of my glory. I now felt a new, pitiful tenderness toward the poem.
The book shows other aspects, intimate aspects, of Nabokov. Whether in Shade’s costumery or in another’s, the author seems helpless not to portray himself:
A large, sluggish man126 with no passions save poetry, he seldom moved from his warm castle and its fifty thousand crested books, and had been known to spend two years in bed reading and writing after which, much refreshed, he went for the first and only time to London, but the weather was foggy … and so went back to bed for another year.
As the commentary literally overcomes the poem—seventy-five thousand words to a mere seventy-five hundred—the romantic impulse overwhelms the transcendental. The grounds for metaphysical belief that Shade had advanced, developing a cosmology based on the artist—who alone senses the workings of creation, who alone resembles the Creator—come to seem paltry. Many mortals who believe fervently do so with a sense of inadequacy, not with exultant superiority. Often terrified or disheartened, they seek mercy, not recognition; are moved not by their own genius so much as by acts of compassion, tales of martyrs’ sufferings. Kinbote seems to be of this humble, numerically vast human category at times. He disagrees with Shade’s skepticism127 about sin and God. He is a churchgoer, a serious churchgoer, and one Sunday he strolls home “in an elevated state128 of mind” after having prayed in not one but two congregations (feeling “in my bones that there is a chance yet of my not being excluded from Heaven”). He hears a disembodied voice in the summer air, Shade’s voice seemingly, speaking to him, saying something that moves him very much: “Come tonight, Charlie,” meaning, Come over for a walk and some friendly talk. Later, speaking to Shade on the phone, Kinbote “all at once129, with no reason at all, burst into tears”—he is an emotional man; he needs this friend and his simple kindness. They are, after all, connected.
* They also saw Harry Levin and his Russian-born wife, Elena, who introduced them to the novelist John Dos Passos; the Mikhail Karpoviches; Arthur and Marian Schlesinger; and the painter Billy James, son of the philosopher William and nephew of novelist Henry.
† This well-documented delusion among climbers is usually associated with extreme exhaustion. Dmitri may have told his father about it. The son writes in his memoir that he “read of the ghostly ‘third man’ that accompanied early Himalayan climbers at high altitudes.”
16.
In their last years in America, the Nabokovs traveled west faithfully, as if trying to visit every corner of the country, to tick off all the attractive areas (all those promising for collecting, that is). Vladimir amassed a library of maps and guides, with his notes scribbled in. He could tell that there would come a time when he would want to read them again and remember.
After they moved to Switzerland in late 1960, a “well-meaning maid would empty forever a butterfly-adorned gift wastebasket of its contents,” Dmitri later recorded. The wastebasket’s treasures included “a thick batch of U.S. roadmaps1 on which my father had meticulously marked the roads and towns that he and my mother had traversed. Chance comments of his were [noted] there, as well as names of butterflies and their habitats.”
Nabokov’s Speak On, Memory, the continuation volume to Speak, Memory, thus had an unlucky fate. There are other reasons to think that he would never have written it, though. He told first biographer Andrew Field that he had had a plan in mind for twenty years but that when he sat down to write it, the book turned into a mere collection of anecdotes, something that promised “not … violins but trombones2.” The only parts still attended by throbs of inspiration for him were the MCZ period and his butterfly adventures in the Rockies.
Maynard Dixon cabin, Mt. Carmel, Utah
Dixon cabin (interior)
In ’56, the Nabokovs had a long, pleasant trip, starting in late spring and extending into August. Véra had rented a cabin in Utah, a log-and-stone summer house built by the Western artist Maynard Dixon outside the village of Mount Carmel, along a fork of the Virgin River. Zion National Park was twenty miles west. Bryce Canyon National Park was thirty miles northeast, and an alpine zone of conifers and canyons called the Cedar Breaks was about the same distance northwest. The immense variety and rugged separations of landforms promised good collecting. Neither Nabokov seems to have known who Maynard Dixon was. He was an ex-San Francisco bohemian3, the illustrator of Clarence E. Mulford’s Hopalong Cassidy novels, who became an easel
painter and muralist, a light-struck, self-taught master of desert atmospherics, of big vistas and dry hazes, a perpetrator of nostalgic cowboy art à la Frederic Remington but also of landscape abstractions through which Cézanne and Braque seem to roam, wearing cowboy hats. It was Dixon’s widow4, Edith Hamlin Dale, a former WPA muralist herself, who rented them the cottage. Like other lodgings of theirs, this one was close to a town but not too close. The floodplain of the Virgin is a miles-long meadow, adjacent to sandy sagebrush country. Two hours’ drive to the southeast5 is the Grand Canyon’s North Rim, and they collected there, too.
From Utah they migrated north as summer progressed, arriving in Afton in time for the hatches they had found there four years before. They had been traveling the West now for fifteen years. They did not stop to see people they knew or had collected with; if they stayed at the Corral Log Motel again, it was for the same reasons as before: convenience and low rates. Their lives during the rest of the year, bringing them in contact with hundreds of people they needed to deal with but did not necessarily want to know, made the emptiness of the West tonic. In 1950, the middle year of their American period, Colorado was the only Rocky Mountain state with a population greater than one million. Wyoming, their favorite state, was famously empty6, the least populous per square mile next to Nevada.*
The European semi-isolation of their last years, lived in a suite of rooms in a grand hotel on Lake Geneva, was a sedentary version of their American vacationing. Vladimir needed protected time alone, to write, to read, to think, to recuperate. Véra was not markedly more social than he, nor was either of them really reclusive; they treasured visits from good friends, as long as they could control the timing and length of those visits. They were well matched in this regard, unlike Pushkin and his alluring wife, whose warm response to the attentions of a rakish Chevalier Guard of Tsar Nicholas I led to the poet’s death in a duel7. Nabokov had married well—he also married for love. Just as his careful study of Gogol had taught him how not to act should one of his books ever achieve immense success, Pushkin’s fate might have telegraphed the utility of marrying someone devoted who was also equipped to help him in his career.† That Véra Evseevna had a splendid mind and literary sense8 was the best of his many lucky breaks.
The loneliness of the West, full of waste places emblematic, for many, of a cosmic emptiness, is a feature missing from Nabokov’s writing. Humbert and Pnin feel lonely and beset, but not because the New World horizon is too far. At the end of his book, Pnin rides off into that unknown, in a car stuffed with belongings and a little white dog, his American life in tatters, but he is unintimidated and not without hope:
The air was keen9, the sky clear and burnished… . Then the little sedan boldly swung past [a truck in front of it] and, free at last, spurted up the shining road, which one could make out narrowing to a thread of gold in the soft mist where hill after hill made beauty of distance, and where there was simply no saying what miracle might happen.
Humbert, too, though he endures torments in Western settings, meanders through. Social traps are what he fears more: neighborhood snoops, progressive schools with nosy heads, the police.
In ’57 the Nabokovs did not travel. But in ’58 they put eight thousand miles10 on their car in seven weeks, and the next year, their last of American voyaging, they probably drove even farther, across the country and back by meandering routes. Véra made a document of the last years’ trips; for this purpose she took over a page-a-day diary that dated from 1951, in which Vladimir had jotted early notes, and on the unwritten-upon pages she interposed entries that belong to 1958–59. The notebook begins with a quick sketch of everything11 that happened to them: all that had come to them in America, from the start. “We arrived … on the Champlain,” and Dmitri’s schools, Vladimir’s first writing jobs, summer camps, Wellesley, Stanford, parties at which Véra found it “difficult to follow many-pronged conversations in English,” the Alta summer with Laughlin, friends Vladimir made among the entomologists: everything gets a mention. The rental addresses, eleven in Ithaca alone. That the trip to Colorado had been “by train both ways, caught in floods, re-routed.” The books her husband wrote while living at Craigie Circle, Cambridge. Where Dmitri roomed as a Harvard freshman.
Like real Americans, they denominate periods12 by the cars owned: first the Oldsmobile and then the ’54 Buick, and meanwhile Dmitri has been living his own car-inflected history, driving what Véra called a “Ford-Keyser” (actually a ’31 Model A Ford, dark blue) and later a ’38 Buick13, which took him to the Tetons. Dmitri the madcap14 has by August 21, 1958, when Véra wrote many of these notes, become Harvard graduate Dmitri, aspiring performer Dmitri, a young man with “a wonderful job, excellent singing teacher,” and a “charming apartment of his own, which he keeps meticulously clean.” In ’57 he was drafted into the Army. After six months of training he joined a reserve unit that met15 weekly in Manhattan and for two weeks each summer out of town. “Dmitri went today to Camp Drum,” Véra wrote on August 7, 1958, noting that he sounded “cheerful, reasonable, tenderly interested in everything” on the phone.
An event was approaching that, like a celestial happening—a gigantic comet, say, swooping close to the earth, causing explosions and a wobble in the planetary orbit itself—would alter whatever it could. The Nabokovs were as solid and well prepared for big change as can be imagined; they were deeply in love, partners in an enterprise—the advancement of the husband’s writings—that seems never to have awakened envy in the wife; neither had a drinking problem or at this point was prone to stray; and the husband’s oft-expressed belief in his own genius, which once might have hinted at underlying uncertainty, the recognition that the best creators are often plowed under regardless, graced only with the world’s forgetting, had, like Vladimir himself, only grown stouter.
Near Ithaca, New York, September 1958 (Photo by Carl Mydans, Life magazine)
He was not played out as Hurricane Lolita, the American publication of his novel, hit. He was in the conceiving stage of his last great book (Pale Fire), had nearly finished annotating Eugene Onegin, and, as final inoculation against any warping effects, was just completing another translation, his Englishing of the twelfth-century The Song of Igor’s16 Campaign. When he suddenly became famous on a scale that he had long hoped for, lifelong habits that included their yearly travels, the low-rent, free-range recuperations out west, put a barrier between them and what might have turned other people’s heads.
Still, the Lolita event was a bomb, and it was the force of it that Véra tried to record. “Dinner at the Bishops,” she writes for May 20, 1958, and then her husband, as if looking over her shoulder, calmly pencils in, “Spread Wyoming butterflies, batch taken in 1952 … West Wyoming.” They trade off entries for a while; the Putnam American edition is scheduled for August, they can feel it coming. “Dmitri telephoned. In raptures… . Sang (audition) for Opera group, got enthusiastic praises. Loves his apartment.” Maybe Dmitri is what they are both most worried about. Whatever is coming, it will mean something also for a reckless, uncertainly artistic child who is subject to raptures. Dmitri told his barracks mate, a New Yorker who became a friend, that “this year he’s going to be famous17,” meaning that his father would be ascending in ’58. There may be no good time to become the offspring of a very famous father or mother, but this time, which Véra is trying hard to see as a corner-turning, with the mountain climbing and sportscar driving falling away, is especially delicate.
“Quiet day,” Vladimir records for May 22, a Thursday. He spent it sorting more insects. They were his treasured snapshots: place and time and weather fixed. Before Véra became the sole keeper of the diary, before Hurricane Lolita hit in earnest, a beautiful interpolation: not the introduction of field notes or new fictional material, but the preservation of some old18, a week’s worth of his notes from ’51 (June 24–July 1), made while he was intensely at work on Lolita. They are flavorful, these notes from that unique time: cost-of-gas figures, Russi
an words, pencil sketches, and phrases in English now to be found nearly unchanged in the novel. From this came that. The tone is amiable, sardonic, concerned with a “stinky river” behind a motor court and with an old farmer’s “mummy’s neck,” and with a little boy seen “ ‘frogging’ on a bike.” It may be an accident that the empty page-a-day diary was not quite empty, that it contained these earlier jottings; they might have been torn out, but since they have not been they give a savor of days that must already have seemed legendary. Turn another page and you might find yourself on the road to Telluride with them, Véra at the wheel of the Olds, Vladimir beside her writing the note you’re living. The floods and storms of Kansas are behind, they’re in the real West now, the scenery on a gigantic scale, with the sun emerging19 with that special force it has after a rain.
On about July 15, 1958, an advance copy20 of Lolita caught up with them in Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta. They had seen a piece in the New Republic that had spoken of Nabokov in terms that they welcomed, terms of “true greatness21.” Lolita publication day was now only weeks off. Not in much of a hurry, but excited, they turned east. They stopped at Devils Tower National Monument, in northeastern Wyoming. Their cabin was across the road from the tower, which looked to Véra like a giant conical ice cream treat (in France called plombières) that “has just begun to melt22 at the base … purplish-chocolate-colored.” When the weather was warm Vladimir collected leps.
“Sheridan [Wyoming] was engrossed in a big rodeo23,” Véra wrote. She hated seeing “poor cattle mistreated,” but the local event was causing a stir: “We were almost driven off the road repeatedly and had to stop for cars passing other cars to get back in their lane—all of them … with horses in trailers.” They saw “two trucks in collision—no one hurt but the vehicles; and, on the shoulder of the road, a cowboy, all decked out … dismally changing … a tire.”