Nabokov in America

by Robert Roper

  From inside the tornado they thought of Dmitri. The job of translating A Hero of Our Time had not worked out as hoped; even so, when Nabokov had the ear of his publisher, in the fizzy days just before Lolita exploded, he brought up the idea of a translation of Invitation to a Beheading, stipulating that “the translator must be19: 1) male, 2) American-born or English. He must also have a sound and scholarly knowledge of Russian. I do not know anyone who would meet these requirements except my son—but he is unfortunately much too busy.”

  By January ’59 Dmitri had become available, and his father signed20 an agreement whereby Dmitri collected an immediate advance. “I cannot tell you how delighted21 I am by this,” Véra wrote her friend Elena Levin in Cambridge. Dmitri had not been well. He had had “permanent little ailments,” Véra wrote in her diary; “he is so big and strong, and his health has been excellent before he entered the military service. Then he caught that cold22, or flu, or virus or whatever it was and could not get rid of it.” In fact, he had been ailing for a year. In ’62 he was diagnosed with Reiter’s syndrome, an inflammatory polyarthritis often seen in young men following a venereal infection23. Véra thought he was overworked and approved when he gave up his office job—the only office job24 he would ever hold.

  January 19, 1959, Nabokov taught his last class at Cornell25, “to which some glamour was added,” he told Minton, by “a reporter-photographer” who snapped pictures throughout. The attention from the world press26 was nonstop. In Manhattan in late February, the Nabokovs fielded calls from Time, Life, the New York Times, the London Daily Mail and Daily Express, and other journals, and Nabokov declined three TV appearances. Véra was writing up to fifteen letters27 per day for business.* Meetings and bouts with minor illnesses kept them in New York until April 18, and they were being lionized the whole time—Véra recalled this period as “wonderful” and recorded that hundreds of people showed up28 to honor them.

  Before they took off for the West again, Nabokov settled some business that meant a great deal to him, placing Eugene Onegin, the central work of scholarship of his life, with the Bollingen Press of Princeton. Other elements of a writer’s apotheosis rarely seen outside of writers’ dreams now also attended him. The publisher of the upcoming British edition of Lolita, George Weidenfeld, met with the Nabokovs during their New York stay and made promises29—almost all of which were eventually kept—to publish new or first English editions of Bend Sinister, Invitation to a Beheading, Nikolai Gogol, Speak, Memory, Laughter in the Dark, and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, along with either The Gift or The Defense. Weidenfeld faced a still uncertain censorship environment in England, and publishing worthy, nonpedophilic titles by Nabokov might burnish Lolita’s case, but it was his canny sense that his author would now carry all before him—that he was now, on the strength of his groundbreaking novel, one of those writers whose every word would attract readers for many years—that led him to be bold.

  The excellent French translation of Lolita, from Gallimard, had been completed; Nabokov checked proofs30 while in New York. Dmitri’s work on Beheading was also looking good. The annoyance of having to do their son’s work for him would not be repeated, at least never on the scale of A Hero of Our Time; the fond hope of bringing him aboard the family ark, every Nabokov volume going back to Mary (1926) sharing a berth with its approved translation, seemed now likely of fulfillment31. All this plus a long western vacation. They took a southerly route out of New York, wanting to get to warm weather as directly as possible. An early stop was Gatlinburg, Tennessee, gateway to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which they had first seen in ’41, on the epochal first trip west. “We drove slowly,” Véra noted of this part of their journey, and the Tennessee highlands were “full of flowering32 dogwood and numberous … bushes and trees which colored the whole mountainsides.”

  The Nabokovs said a long farewell to America. They did not know it was farewell, or admit that it was; they were aware of a certain indelicacy in having scored big, only to turn their backs on the country that had refuged them, that, one might argue, had made Nabokov a world writer.† In the encounter between his cut-glass sensibility and the strange and multicolored American material had been shaped great books. Pale Fire was the last, half-American (conceived in the United States but mostly written abroad; American in settings before taking off for Kinbote’s fantasyland); after that came Ada, the magnum opus, clever and relentless and high-handed, full of mechanistic mating in a Hugh Hefnerian dreamscape, full also of antic wordplay, reminiscent of Finnegans Wake, which Nabokov had once pronounced “a cold pudding33 of a book, a persistent snore in the next room.”

  Véra’s “Amazing Americans!” suggests fondness, and that was a big part of her response to America, also of Vladimir’s. But they were also appalled. The Dmitri project did not relent for years. In America it had always been challenging, with their son’s large appetite for risky experience working against their reasonable desire to see him well placed, to see him make something of a good mind and advantages. Then with Vladimir’s immense success, their arguments against buying this car or that, against running through money that wasn’t his, were undermined—why not live a large, playful life?

  Véra was also an early alarm-sounder about American turmoil. In May ’58 she recorded, “Last night a howling mob34 of Cornell students converged on President Malott’s house. When he came out to speak to them, they pelted him with eggs and rocks.” The reason for the protest was “the projected prohibition of so-called ‘apartment parties,’ which may be unfair but cannot be refuted by mob violence,” Véra warned sternly. “Professor Sale’s youngest son, Kirk”—Kirkpatrick Sale, editor of the student paper and future author on the left—“who was to be graduated in June, [was] suspended as recognized ‘whipper up’ of the student crowds.”

  Véra’s reaction can be ascribed to her long memory for Bolshevik street actions. Or she might have found youthful destruction repellent in its own right. Windows were broken35 in the Cornell president’s house. Her strict anti-Communism led sometimes to odd ideas, for instance the conviction, shared with her husband, that Boris Pasternak was willingly serving Soviet masters; that the manuscript of Zhivago had been cleverly delivered into the hands of (no surprise here) a Communist36 publisher in Italy, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli; that Soviet denunciations of the novel were false, having “the object of increasing foreign sales,” generating foreign exchange that “they would eventually pocket and spend on propaganda abroad,” as Vladimir explained to an interviewer. “Any intelligent Russian would see … that the book is pro-Bolshevist and historically false, if only because it ignores the Liberal Revolution37 of spring, 1917,” the takeover attempt by Nabokov’s father’s party.

  By the late sixties, from Montreux, Véra’s dislike of noisy students had hardened. She considered them fanatics, and by ’72 she was proud to say, “We are all for Nixon38, emphatically against McGovern whom we find an irresponsible demagogue who deliberately misleads his followers and is doing damage to America… . We are completely disgusted by The NY Rev. of Books (the ‘radical chic’ medium)” because of its stance against the Vietnam War, which both Nabokovs supported.

  Gone from America, they found America frightening. They took at face value young radicals’ estimates of their power—the idea that they could make a revolution, for instance. In the seventies they became friendly with William F. Buckley, who gave them a subscription to his conservative39 National Review, which they read. Other sources led Véra to understand that America was on the verge40 of a race war, that you took your life in your hands to venture out on the streets of New York, that the wheels had come off the society. At the same time, they detested America bashing and defended U.S. foreign policy. In ’66, when de Gaulle led France41 out of NATO, defying the United States, they canceled a French vacation near Mont Blanc. Insults to the American flag42, by burning it or misquoting its image, enraged them.

  Often they promised to return to see American friends, but t
hose friends made pilgrimage to Montreux instead, obeying the rules about how to behave, how not to inconvenience. The Nabokovs returned in ’62, to attend the premiere of Kubrick’s film, and in ’64 to support the release of the Bollingen Onegin. Those trips were fun but also hard work. At the 92nd Street Y in New York, on April 5, 1964, Nabokov recited poetry and prose in a stentorian voice, his playfully reproving tone and occasional King’s Englishism—a-gane for again, re-wawd for reward—furthering a resemblance to the Romanian-born actor-producer John Houseman43, especially his performance in Smith Barney ads. Nabokov’s spoken English is subtle—capable of lampooning while also asserting superiority—and always intelligible. Some remnants of Russian pronunciation44, and possibly his dentures, impose a slight impediment, but he turns this to advantage, affecting a sonorous, hortatory style that a native English speaker on such a stage could only have intended ironically.

  Eight years later, he considered another return. McGraw-Hill was soon to release his collection of ex cathedra pieces, Strong Opinions (1973), and Nabokov, mulling a new multibook contract, dusted off the idea of Speak On, Memory once more. “I have already accumulated45 a number of notes, diaries, letters, etc.,” he told McGraw-Hill, “but in order to describe my American years adequately I should need money to revisit several spots,” among them the Grand Canyon and “other Western localities.” One last gambol over the landscape, on a publisher’s dime. His notes include part of a foreword, and he declares at the outset his annoyance at having been misidentified as a satirist of America: what he has written, he says, is in no way satire, although, one has to admit, the ways of Americans are peculiar. “An average émigré46 Russian … will not borrow your comb, walk barefoot on a hotel carpet, or plug up a public washbasin before use, as his American counterpart thinks nothing of doing.” This tendency to misread him on America makes him “prodigiously anxious,” he says—in the end, too anxious to write the book.

  His insistence on not being labeled a satirist hangs on a technicality. He knew he wrote in a ridiculing way, but this was not true satire, because satire implies moral judgment and corrective measures, he felt. The Russian reformers of the nineteenth century had indeed had change in mind; in fact, they had devalued literature that did not serve reform. But Nabokov and the European modernists—and even some primitive Americans47, going back at least to Poe—preferred not to look beyond the text, pointedly severing writing from its social reality. Edmund Wilson, who visited him in Montreux, would have recognized the stance; he might even have agreed with it. The text was sufficient, Wilson had often acknowledged, was incommensurable, if it chose to be, with the world. On the question of what mattered in literature, though, the two men remained in deep disagreement. Wilson campaigned for the “trashy” and politically dubious Doctor Zhivago48. He published two long articles49, one in The New Yorker and one in Encounter, representing it as “one of the great events in man’s literary and moral history.” Pasternak had “the courage of genius,” Wilson thought. A poet whom even Nabokov had once respected, who had fallen into silence during the years of Soviet horror, had produced an epic novel that said no50 to the regime, that stood defiantly against the horror.

  Moreover, it was a modern novel. “Certain critics … have completely missed the spirit and the shape of the book,” Wilson argued. They had been misled by

  the English and American translations51, which … have eliminated so much of the poetry and ignored the significant emphases. Doctor Zhivago is not at all old-fashioned: in spite of some echoes of the Tolstoyan tone in certain of the military scenes, there is no point in comparing it with War and Peace. It is a modern poetic novel by a writer who has read Proust, Joyce, and Faulkner, and who, like Virginia Woolf … has gone on from his predecessors to invent in this genre a variation of his own.

  The book was a complicated, profound weave of symbols and parallels, Wilson maintained. It allegorized cleverly and in parts was “very much in the manner52 of Joyce… . Pasternak has been influenced by Finnegans Wake,” Wilson found.

  He knew how it annoyed his friend. As he was finishing his New Yorker piece, Wilson told a correspondent that he had been talking to Vladimir on the phone and that he was “behaving rather badly53 about Pasternak. I have talked to him … three times lately about other matters and he did nothing but rave about how awful Zhivago was. He wants to be the only Russian novelist in existence.” Some impish urge—a desire to tweak Vladimir’s nose—seems to have entered the process. Nabokov’s habit was to run down other writers, and Wilson had long detested it. He “has just discovered that Stendhal is a complete fraud54,” he wrote to another friend, “and is about to break the news to his class. He has also read Don Quixote for the first time, and declares it is completely worthless.”

  Nabokov perverted the meanings of stories. He turned The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Tolstoy, into something full of “cruel little ironies55”—something by Nabokov, perhaps. There was a divergence in sensibility and also in views of the novel’s likely future. Wilson wanted to recruit “this genre,” what he took for modernism, to a tradition that on occasion had produced works of moral genius, acts of momentous truth-telling that also satisfied aesthetically. Nabokov wanted nothing like that, and in fact he had bet his career on the impossibility of it. Desperate to escape the smothering Russian Problem, he had enunciated over and over a non serviam that rejected the path56 of personal suffering, the bearing of witness from within the beast. He would not be a Pasternak or Mandelstam or, in the next generation, a Solzhenitsyn. As much as he revered and served the Russian heritage, he would never write the kind of book that Pasternak had, a religio-historical saga about, again, the Problem—humanist, generic, “inspiring.”

  He responded with fury to “Edmund’s symbolico-social57 criticism and phoney erudition” about Zhivago. Never again must a blurb from Mr. Wilson be used to promote one of his books: so he instructed Walter Minton regarding the translated Invitation to a Beheading. He had Véra write Wilson,

  As you know by now58, New Directions are bringing out a new edition of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. You have been kind to this book in 1941, when it was first published, and for this reason New Directions have taken it upon themselves to ask your endorsement… . Vladimir deplores the publishers’ practice of pestering famous people… . He begs you to refuse. He has written New Directions that he is against such solicitations.

  In case Edmund did not feel the chill, she added, “The reason I am writing this letter (and not V. himself) is that he wants it mailed immediately, but, after having been writing for the last four days, he feels absolutely exhausted.”

  The letter found Wilson in his upstate New York home. It was July of ’59, and he was indeed famous, enjoying a late prime. The Scrolls from the Dead Sea (1955) had been a triumph, a New York Times bestseller for thirty-three weeks59, product of a typical Wilsonian effort, first the learning of a new language (Hebrew), then deep reporting for the New Yorker, then the writing of two immensely popular articles60 and finally of the book, a shapely, politically alert, elegantly expressed, scholarly unraveling of a complicated topic. The topic becomes fascinating by virtue of Wilson’s telling. William Shawn, the New Yorker chief editor, considered Wilson’s expository style61 one of the half-dozen best in the history of English. Soon he would produce another work of complicated contemporary history, Apologies62 to the Iroquois (1960), based on painstaking reportage à la The American Jitters, and two years later he brought out the classic study of Civil War literature Patriotic Gore (1962), his great work of American remembrance. In Nabokov’s parlance, Wilson, too, created worlds. He was not notably unfulfilled as a writer, torn with envy. Roger Straus, a publisher who became a close friend, said that Wilson was “not only the man I admired most but the man who gave me the most pleasure63 to be with,” and the core of that pleasure was “the excitement of his enthusiasm for other writers present and past.” If envy explains Wilson’s disrespect of Lolita, it was not a quality others found in h
im.

  The correspondence that had lasted twenty years, the source and sign of their splendid friendship, now abated. They never wrote at length64 thereafter, and though there are affectionate phrases in their brief notes, Wilson’s appreciation of Doctor Zhivago had finished something. The great feud that erupted six years later, in the summer of ’65, when Wilson published an intemperate, funny, slapdash pan of Eugene Onegin in the New York Review of Books, was prefigured in the Zhivago affair. Nabokov’s cruelty to other writers seems to have unhinged Wilson, and his attack on his friend’s translation is unapologetically an attack on its author:

  This production though in certain ways valuable65, is something of a disappointment; and the reviewer, though a personal friend of Mr. Nabokov—for whom he feels a warm affection sometimes chilled by exasperation—and an admirer of much of his work, does not propose to mask his disappointment. Since Mr. Nabokov is in the habit of introducing any job of this kind … by an announcement that he is unique and incomparable and that everybody else … is an oaf and an ignoramus … usually with the implication that he is also … a ridiculous personality, Nabokov ought not to complain if the reviewer … does not hesitate to underline his weaknesses.