by Robert Roper
The year before, Nabokov, clearing brush for his Onegin, had scorched a prior version by a scholar at the University of North Carolina. Now Wilson offered his stark opinion on the matter:
Mr. Nabokov … took up a good deal of space66 in these pages to denounce [that book]. [His] article—which sounded like nothing so much as one of Marx’s niggling and nagging attacks on someone who had had the temerity to write about economics and to hold different views from Marx’s—dwelt especially on what he regarded as Professor Arndt’s Germanisms and other infelicities… . Arndt had attempted the tour de force of translating the whole of Onegin into the original iambic tetrameter… . Nabokov decided that this could not be done with any real fidelity… . The results [of Nabokov’s approach] have been more disastrous than those of Arndt’s heroic effort. It has produced a bald and awkward language which has nothing in common with Pushkin.
Likening Nabokov to Marx: surely he goes too far. Nabokov’s response and Wilson’s response to the response and contributions by third parties played out over the next three years. Nabokov’s main riposte has him rubbing his hands over how a “number of earnest simpletons67 consider Mr. Wilson to be an authority in my field… . I am not sure that the necessity to defend my work … would have been a sufficient incentive for me to discuss [his] article,” but Wilson’s mistakes are so awful as to be “a polemicist’s dream come true, and one must be a poor sportsman to disdain what it offers.”
Skewering those mistakes, Nabokov puts Wilson in his place: “a mixture of pompous aplomb and peevish ignorance” distinguishes his style, his use of English being “singularly imprecise and misleading.” And then there’s his Russian:
A patient confidant68 of his long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language and literature, I have invariably done my best to explain to him his monstrous mistakes of pronunciation, grammar, and interpretation. As late as 1957 … we both realised with amused dismay that, despite my frequent comments on Russian prosody, he still could not scan Russian verse. Upon being challenged to read Evgeniy Onegin aloud, he started to perform with great gusto, garbling every second word … with a lot of jaw-twisting haws and rather endearing little barks that … soon had us both in stitches.
Nabokov vents his “utter disgust69” with “amoral” and “philistine” critics of his Onegin. Wilson is the representative enemy (he also discusses, with poisonous disdain, other offenders). Wilson fails on every score. Maybe most serious is his indulgence in “the old-fashioned, naïve, and musty method of human-interest70 criticism … that consists of removing the characters from an author’s imaginary world” and examining “these displaced characters as if they were ‘real people.’ ”
There is some glee, some good fun. Gouty, short Wilson comes into focus when Nabokov speaks of his “stubby pencil71,” but the overall tone is strained and bullying. He fails in the primary task of an essayist—even one defending his own work—which is to spark and sustain interest, and the litany of offenses goes on for eight thousand picky words, leaving an impression of Pushkin’s poem as food for pedants. Nabokov’s supple and vibrant translation, by miles the most faithful in English and more than sufficiently beautiful, despite his relaxation of rhyme and meter, is left out. He seems half-cowed by the comments of some reviewers and speaks of his “rather dry, rather dull72 work” on the poem, calling it “not ugly enough” and promising that “in future editions I plan to defowlerise it still more drastically … turn it entirely into utilitarian prose, with a still bumpier brand of English … in order to eliminate the last vestiges of bourgeois poesy.” Even if he is only pretending humility, he is unlike himself in turning his pen against his own work. The essay is sorrowful73, despite its high spirits; it is an act of destruction, of friendship murder—unavoidable, perhaps, given Wilson’s attack, but woeful, ruinous, and strange.
In Europe the Nabokovs often went afield in the warm months, collecting more alpine butterflies. They were comfortable in Switzerland, a land of mountains and tidiness, although sometimes they missed “our native West74,” as Nabokov put it in a letter. Dmitri lived nearby, and in the course of pursuing his operatic training in Italy, he became fluent in Italian and translated some of his father’s works into that language. He owned fabulously valuable and rare sports cars75 that he raced. His fields of accomplishment were many and offer an alternate version, in a different key, of his prodigious father’s: not poet/novelist/lepidopterist/scholar/translator but translator/musician/climber/driver/sailor/lothario/essayist, with an easy mastery of skiing and Ping-Pong76, among other pastimes.
In 1980, three years after his father’s death, Dmitri crashed a Ferrari 308 GTB on the road between Montreux and Lausanne, fracturing his spine at the second cervical vertebra and sustaining third-degree burns over much of his body. He was convinced his car had been sabotaged. As he revealed in an interview twenty years later, he had been working all along for the CIA77: “I had two military ranks… . I was asked to be [an agent] and it was quite understandable from the ideological viewpoint. Everything was organized at a very high diplomatic level.” In the sixties, Italy was “dangerously shifting to the left78,” and “I was to find support for the right-wing parties and understand their goals. It was as difficult as a game of chess.” An American friend79 of more than forty years, intimate with his living situations and preoccupations, agrees that Dmitri worked “for the CIA or some security agency. He was part of the apparat that welcomed escapees and immigrants from Eastern Europe,” debriefing them when they arrived in Italy. In the eighties, she met Dmitri’s intelligence handler. She also met the Italians who ran a safe house where Dmitri dealt with escapees.
Dmitri never told his father80 of these activities. After his accident, following treatment in a burn center and rehab lasting more than a year, he emerged “with new priorities81,” determined to focus on “writing, both my father’s and my own.” He did not give up racing. He acquired “a faster Ferrari82 of a slightly darker blue.” He was fond of speedboats, too, and competed in multiday races in the Mediterranean83 and the Caribbean, as part of a subculture of well-heeled enthusiasts, a cosmopolitan milieu in which he was welcomed because of his charismatic confidence, his languages, his name, his charm.
His father quickened to many things—to America, its norms and codes—by way of his young son. Humbert also reads America through the medium of a child. Both fathers are besotted; they love without limit. At the end of his last U.S. visit, in ’64, having spoken at Harvard as well as at the 92nd Street Y, Nabokov wrote that the professor who introduced him in Cambridge “mentioned that the writer’s son had climbed the walls within which his father was [now] lecturing”—referring to a stunt well known among members of the Harvard Mountaineering Club. “Your father embraces you, my dearest,” Nabokov concludes this note to Dmitri. “I am writing standing up; that is why the handwriting is so nabokiy [lopsided]… . I love you. My dearest!84 Keep well!”
Something has gone out of American writing with Nabokov’s passing. Other novelists have come along, some of them identifiable as his heirs, borrowers of his approach, modernists and postmodernists and dark humorists (although the belief in the towering work of novelistic art that carries all before it has gone undercover, too overweening to be easily admitted). Readers of Nabokov-style books are not increasing in number the way video-game players are, and they may even be decreasing. At the same time, computer tools make it possible to search for literary borrowings in texts with remarkable ease. The traditional method, Nabokov’s, relied on scholarship and intuition and many hours in libraries. His method of composing his artworks, which relied, to a great degree, on elaborating or parodying earlier work, may have a rebirth assisted by the new tools or others soon to be developed; more will no doubt follow of this masquerade.
Nabokov was an intimate writer. His reticences, his formal estrangements, his denial of interest in any reality beyond the text all need to be measured against that. Maximum closeness: not the closeness of ostentat
ious empathy but the closeness of one mind addressing another in the most thrilling terms. He speaks into the ear, sometimes dripping a little poison. He contrives to have a reader identify intimately with a protagonist or narrator, but even that is not enough; the reader receives secret handshakes from the author85 himself, behind a narrator’s back. Kinbote, in Pale Fire, is the high-water mark of this development. The poet Shade’s confessions in verse yield to the infinitely more self-revealing confessional of the mad, ever-burgeoning commentary, and meanwhile Nabokov and the reader exchange looks over Kinbote’s shoulder: so sad, he is, but so much fun! Such a shameless liar!
The voice of Kinbote takes on the ease, the hauteur, the unmistakable self-pleasure of Nabokov writing in his “own” voice, the voice of, for instance, the commentary to Eugene Onegin:
Pushkin’s critical acumen86 is curiously absent in the extravagant praise he bestows … on Sainte-Beuve’s derivative and mediocre Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme (1829). He found therein unusual talent and considered that “never, in any language, has naked spleen expressed itself with such dry precision”—an epithet that is singularly inappropriate in regard to Sainte-Beuve’s florid platitudes.
In a more typical note, focusing on a single word, he writes,
languorous87/ … This characteristic favorite [term] of Pushkin’s and his school … is basically equivalent to all the varieties of “languish” typical of the French and English sentimental writers; but because of its resemblance to tyomniy, “dark,” and owing to its Italianate fullness of sound, the Russian epithet surpasses in somber sonority its English counterpart and lacks the slight ridicule attached to the latter.
As if he has been reading the Bollingen Onegin, Kinbote writes,
Good old Sylvia!88 She had in common with [Fleur, a fragile beauty sent to seduce the king] a vagueness of manner, a languor of demeanor which was partly natural and partly cultivated as a convenient alibi for when she was drunk, and in some wonderful way she managed to combine that indolence with volubility reminding one of a slow-speaking ventriloquist who is interrupted by his garrulous doll.
Kinbote is like Nabokov, finally, in pursuing intimacy so fiercely that the nature of truth is transformed. Scientific truth—positivist, evidentiary, truth like a pinned insect on your research bench—yields to the truth of the passionate divo, the truth of an intimate plaint so prodigal and diverting as to carry all before it. He must exist, this crazy king; he does exist, because his words make his madness real.
Nabokov’s animadversions on reality—which does not concern him at all, and need not concern you, his reader—are incoherent. In the books of his American period89, reality reigns: a verifiable American reality. It is a boldly truer reality that he communicates, so intimately and freely rendered as to be a little frightening; the reader of Lolita feels “its heat [applied] to the entire sensibility, including the sense of humor,” giving rise to “horrid laughter.” The book works because the America it shows convinces. First comes shock, a little distaste; then “the supreme laugh may be on [those who fail] to see how much of everyone’s reality lurks in its fantastic shadow play.” It has a sense of “the gag that life is,” as F. W. Dupee memorably put it, writing in the startled first moment of the novel’s American birth. Its images “are ghastly but recognizable,” and Humbert’s “horrid scrapes become our scrapes.” The Haze-Humbert household is, undeniably, abnormal, yet it reflects “the painful comedy of family relations in general90.” Without this convincingness, Lolita would have been less effective—might by now have been forgotten.
In the mid-sixties, from his Swiss aerie, Nabokov undertook an experiment91 with time, an experiment that he borrowed from the writer J. W. Dunne, who in 1927 published a treatise on dreams. Dunne’s basic idea was that human minds make time seem to go in one direction: forward. In fact, time is not a river that flows but an ocean—the past, present, and future all mingled and all available, if we but learn how to separate them out. He had had dreams that occurred on “the wrong night,” Dunne said, before and not after some sensational story in the papers. The most unnerving instance92 was a dream about an island exploding, with the loss of four thousand lives; a few days later came news reports of the eruption of Mount Pelée, on Martinique, on May 8, 1902, an event in which, according to first estimates, forty thousand people had died.
Dragooning Véra into his project, Nabokov recorded their dreams for three months, beginning in October ’64. The first thing to note about his dream reports is that they belie his complaints of insomnia. He sleeps every night without fail; he may be sleeping less than he wants, or less deeply, but sleep he does. He dreams, too, and the reports pile up; he has so many dreams that he can make general observations, including that the “common features of my dreams93” are
1) v. exact clock time awareness but hazy passing-of-time feeling
2) many perfect strangers—some in almost every dream
3) verbal details
4) fairly sustained, fairly clear, fairly logical (w/in special limits) cogitation
5) great difficulty in recalling a complete dream even in outline
6) recurrent topics & themes
He was working on the novel Ada meanwhile, one part of which expands on these observations and others. (The character Van Veen is a psychiatrist who has an interest in dreams.) Another part is a treatise that Van works on, called “The Texture of Time.” Nabokov recorded an eerie dream about Edmund Wilson, whom he saw for the last time in the flesh in January ’64, during Edmund’s brief stay in Montreux:
Am coming down steps94 of Lausanne-like railway station and meet Edmund… . He is about to catch a train. I tell him I’ll go “upstairs” to see him off. He says: only Russians use “upstairs” in that sense. He walks briskly along the platform and I notice how fit he looks in a dark-grey suit. We lose each other in the crowd and the train glides away.
In another dream, Nabokov bursts into tears95, crying the way he used to as a child of five. He does not explain the cause of his distress.
The dream reports are companionable. Like most adults Nabokov dreams of needing to accomplish an urgent task, being hurried and under pressure. Unlike most dreamers of such dreams, he usually succeeds at his task. He edits his reports, not wanting to burden the reader with details of his nightmares. (He reports only one at length: finding himself in a terrain full of wonderful butterflies but having no net.) Who is “the reader” for whom he organizes and selects what to report of his many dreams? He was writing, first, for himself, or for scholars who might one day look at his dream notes in an archive; for their benefit, he admits that he has certain recurring baleful dreams, “fatidic” dreams, dreams that tell of a terrible ultimate catastrophe, but in general he downplays the importance of bad dreams. He is a highly conscious, rational man, in his telling, someone who by dint of will remains levelheaded96 even in the funnyland of dreams.
The accounts are enjoyable. They are full of strangeness and movement, with a savoring of incongruities. Sometimes while asleep he thinks that he should be writing this down, and then he quickly awakens to do so. For those readers who will always miss him, who find the literary landscape wan and the voices thin without him, whose experience of the literature of the twentieth century is rich and unforgettable because of him, he seems to live again, the voice at the ear, the sense of the joke:
8 AM Oct. 16, 1964, Friday
Was dancing with Ve. Her open dress, oddly speckled and summery. A man kissed her in passing. I clutch him by the head and bang his face with such vicious force against the wall that he almost gets meat-hooked on some fixtures… . Detaches himself with face all bloody and stumbles away.
17 Oct… . 8:30 AM
Sitting at round table in the office of the director of a small provincial museum. He (… colorless administrator, neutral features, crewcut) is explaining something about the collections. I suddenly realize that all the while he was speaking I was absentmindedly eating exhibits on the table�
��bricks of crumbling stuff which I had apparently taken for some kind of dusty insipid pastry but which were actually samples of rare soils… . I am now wondering not so much about the effects upon me of those samples … but about the method of restoring them and what exactly they were—perhaps very precious… . The director is called to the telephone [and] I am now talking to his assistant.
One dream achieves, with a flourish worthy of the awake writer, something like J. W. Dunne’s vision of past, future, and present all overlaid in one event:
Woke up early, decided to get this down though very sleepy… . I am lying on a couch and dictating to Ve. Apparently I have been dictating from written cards in my hand, but then I dictate in the act of composing… . It refers to a new, expanded The Gift. My young man F[yodor] is speaking of his destiny, already accomplished, and of his having vaguely but constantly realized that it was to be a great one. I am saying this slowly in [Russian]… . I am declaiming this … weighing every word, hesitating whether to use [one Russian word], wondering if [it] did not make the inward extending shadow too long and large… . Simultaneously, I am thinking rather smugly that nobody had ever rendered the name of nostalgia better than I and that I had subtly introduced … a certain secret strain: before actually anybody had left forever those avenues and fields, a sense of never-returning was … inscribed into them.
There are many more dreams. They are a last trove, written not for publication but—because it was his inconquerable instinct—to be savored by whoever might come along, who might be drawn to him thereby, who might find delight.
* In a letter to Sylvia Berkman in early February ’59, Véra said, “I meant to write you this much sooner but I am simply losing track of things because of the impossible pressure of work. Vladimir refuses to take the least interest in his own business matters, and I do not feel equipped to handle them properly. Besides, I am by no means a Sévigné, and writing ten to fifteen letters in one day leaves me limp.”