Nabokov in America
Page 35
12 influenced the direction: Boyd, “Nabokov, Literature, Lepidoptera,” in NB, 24–25.
13 Comstock was: Zimmer, http://www.d-e-zimmer.de/eGuide/Biographies.htm.
14 this was a method: NB, 41.
15 Andrey Avinoff: Hellman, New Yorker, August 21, 1948, 32–47; Boyd 2, 16. Avinoff’s New Yorker profile notes that “He became an American citizen a few years after settling down here [in 1917]; he had begun to feel at home in this country rather quickly, partly because many American butterflies, such as the red admiral, the mourning cloak, the painted lady, and certain varieties of cabbages, skippers, yellow swallowtails, and fritillaries, have identical counterparts in Russia.”
16 Avinoff was another devotee: Hellman, 36; “Andrey Avinoff,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Avinoff.
17 “I have hunted”: SM, 125–26.
18 “Frankly”: SO, 46–47.
19 “untrammeled, rich”: Lolita, 335.
20 “should not ignore”: SO, 40.
21 “extensive and elaborate”: SM, 135.
22 drawn to the newer ones: SM, 122.
23 “Spring was in full tilt”: Hamsun, Pan, 19–20.
24 “Sphinx moths”: Ibid., 32–33.
25 “it was many years”: SM, 127.
26 “On the other side”: Ibid., 138.
27 “soaking, ice-cold”: Ibid., 121.
28 “wound he cannot”: Boyd 1, 8.
29 “Already it was warmer”: Faulkner, “The Bear,” 57.
30 “gained absolute control”: SM, 123.
31 “landscape lives twice”: SO, 40.
32 scene out of: Schiff, 109. N. said of Turgenev that he wrote a “weak blond prose.” DBDV, 59.
33 put him in touch: Nicolas Nabokov to Edmund Wilson, August 1941, Beinecke.
34 “My cousin Nicholas”: DBDV, 33.
35 those for whom he acted: Meyers, 248–50.
36 his favorite: Ibid., 166.
37 “That was awfully sweet”: Nicolas Nabokov to Edmund Wilson, February 8, 1944, Beinecke.
38 “It occurred to me”: Nicolas Nabokov to Edmund Wilson, December 7, 1947.
39 “I hope (so much)”: Nicolas Nabokov to Edmund Wilson, December 1950.
40 “The seven years”: LOC. The review never appeared in the New Republic. DBDV, 46.
41 “in the hope”: Pitzer, 169.
42 noted in a letter: Meyers, 223.
43 “There are today”: Wilson, “An Appeal to Progressives,” New Republic, January 14, 1931.
44 “a rending”: Wilson, Shores of Light, 496, 498.
45 his reportage: Packer, New Yorker, April 29, 1913, 70.
46 reported his earnings: Dabney, 173–74.
47 “kept telling us”: Wilson, Shores, 499.
48 “more and more impressed”: Ibid.
49 “dingy”: Wilson, Red, Black, Blond, and Olive, 167.
50 “prairies and wild rivers”: Dabney, 206.
Chapter Four
1 “one hundred lectures”: SO, 5.
2 his 1922 translation: Boyd 2, 25; SO, 286–87.
3 “a purring success”: DBDV, 47; Boyd 2, 26.
4 from all the migrations: Véra, 115.
5 sciatica: Ibid., 113.
6 system of numbered: Skidmore, Restless Americans, 9.
7 3,600 Jews:
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/nazioccupation/frenchjews.html.
8 “For almost 25”: DBDV, 53.
9 called it Pon’ka: Zimmer, http://www.d-e-zimmer.de/HTML/whereabouts.htm.
The Nabokovs called Dorothy “Dasha.” Véra’s Diary 1958–59, Berg.
10 Nabokov compiled: LOC.
11 Nabokovs stayed: Boyd 2, 140; interview with Richard Buxbaum, August 14, 2013.
12 located near rail stations: Belasco, 46.
13 motor courts common: Jakle, 45; Belasco, 138.
14 two staff scientists: Interview with David Grimaldi, January 5, 2013; Suzanne Rab Green, e-mail to author, May 22, 2013.
15 close reader: Lolita describes two periods of extended travel by car, and for his travels in fictional 1947–48 Humbert Humbert relies extensively on the three-volume AAA Travel Guide, in particular the “Western” volume. Humbert calls it “the Tour Book of the Automobile Association” and uses it to find accommodations and as a source of roadside diversions to amuse a young girl. Lolita, 153, 162, 163, 164, 166. Through continuous use the Travel Guide becomes “an atrociously crippled tour book” without a cover, “almost a symbol of my torn and tattered past,” Humbert says. See also Zimmer, http://www.d-e-zimmer.de/LolitaUSA/Trip1.htm.
16 “During our”: DBDV, 52.
17 “Beyond the tilled”: Lolita, 161.
18 too much staring blue: Dirig, p. 6 of 7.
19 paint Dmitri’s face: Schiff, 120.
20 “No, I am … houses by the road”: Berg.
21 “odd attachment”: Ibid.
22 “am driving off”: DBDV, 51.
23 “celebrated American dentist”: Boyd 1, 84.
24 wettest year: “Texas Annual Rainfall,” Texas Weather, http://web2.airmail.net/danb1/annualrainfall.htm.
25 took specimens: Green, e-mail to author.
26 “lovely”: Berg.
27 huddled in the car: Boyd 1, 29.
28 slushy mule track: N. to Comstock, February 20, 1942, Berg.
29 working for the Atchison: Colter’s direct employer was the Fred Harvey Company.
30 Colter’s mix: Gerke, “Bright Angel Cabins”; “Bright Angel Lodge,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_Angel_Lodge.
31 rustic style: “National Park Service Rustic,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Park_Service_rustic.
32 Hopi House: “Hopi House,”Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_House. N.’s travels in the West and Southwest did not provoke in him a marked interest in Native Americans. Unlike D. H. Lawrence, to take an example of another foreign writer who also traveled west, N. did not sense a “crisis of consciousness” in civilized modern man, a severing from primordial “blood knowledge.” For N., nothing was wrong with modern man in the aggregate—nothing that had not always been wrong—and besides, little of use could be said about man in the aggregate. Specific individuals might be cruel, evil, sociopathic—it had ever been thus. There is no historical irony in Nabokov.
33 among his captures: N. to Comstock, February 20, 1942, Berg; Boyd 2, 28–29.
34 consummation long wished: SM, 136. The specimen was not of a new species but of a subspecies of an insect that had not formerly been known to range north of Mexico. The subspecies is now called Cyllopsis pertepida dorothea: NB, 9.
35 “I found it”: N., “On Discovering a Butterfly,” New Yorker, May 15, 1943, 26.
36 further stops: Green, e-mail to author, January 7, 2013.
Chapter Five
1 pseudo-pueblos: Adkins. Southwest Indian dwellings graced the St. Louis World’s Fair (1904), the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915), the Chicago World’s Fair (1933–34), and the Golden Gate International Exposition (1939–40).
2 “Ivestigate and you will”: Agee, “Roadside,” 174.
3 “A good cave”: Ibid.
4 Humbert, seeking distractions: Lolita, 160.
5 “slow suffusion”: Lolita, 161.
6 butterflies at his feet: N. to Dobuzhinski, July 25, 1941, Bakh.
7 comfortable deck chair: DBDV, 52.
8 swimsuit: Boyd 2, 33.
9 cactus-green Buick: Perret, 87.
10 “girls are quite attractive”: O’Brien, 114. JFK’s book developed out of his undergraduate thesis at Harvard. Two professional writers, both associates of his father, helped turn the thesis into a marketable book, but the student paper already presents a sophisticated argument about the disadvantages of democracies at times of impending war, and as the son of a notoriously isolationist father, who made impolitic and defeatist statements to reporters (“If you can find out why the British are stan
ding up against the Nazis you’re a better man than I am”), young Kennedy wished to assert a different position while remaining a loyal son. O’Brien, 103–9. The debate over intervention dominated the season of N.’s arrival in the States; it intensified with Dunkirk and the defeat of France (Paris taken June 14, 1940) and persisted until nearly the end of ’41.
11 fury of effort: Boyd 2, 29.
12 a froth: Ibid.; Field, Life and Art, 209.
13 “I assign myself”: Bakh. Pushkin had called translations “the post-horses of civilization.” Boyd 2, 32.
14 Laughlin offered: Boyd 2, 33. The advance paid was $150. Laughlin acquired Sebastian Knight on the recommendation of hired reader Delmore Schwartz. Schwartz was also an astute appreciator of Wilson’s prose; see “The Writing of Edmund Wilson,” Accent 2 (Spring 1942): 177–86.
15 limpid and a bit cool: Boyd 2, 33, paraphrasing a letter from N. to Aldanov, July 20, 1941.
16 “I have a fear”: DBDV, 49.
17 sitting in: Schiff, 116n. He also gave a few lectures to the campus at large.
18 “prime object of a playwright”: Boyd 2, 30.
19 as a speaker, charismatic: Ibid., 32. One student recalled, “He shared with us his creative activity and experience. Never was there richer fare in any course taught on a college campus, but it was as impossible to reduce to notes as to convert a Rolls-Royce into tin cans with a tack hammer.”
20 became friends: Schiff, 117. The Nabokovs especially enjoyed socializing with Yvor Winters and his wife, Janet Lewis, Yvor being the well-known poet and critic and Janet the extraordinary poet and novelist. Boyd 1, 33. Janet Lewis was N.’s exact contemporary (1899–1998) and author of The Indians in the Woods and The Wife of Martin Guerre, among other titles. Martin Guerre was published the year of N.’s residence at Stanford. Its radiant lucidity and casually worn moral weight, qualities intrinsic to its clever working of a mysterious plot, make it one of the distinguished twentieth-century novels and one of the few fine American novels of the day to have escaped Wilson’s ken, Nabokov’s also. (Another, of the same order, was Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep.) See Dick Davis, “Obituary: Janet Lewis,” Independent, December 15, 1998, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-janet-lewis-1191516.html.
21 “tall, narrow man”: Haven, “Lolita Question,” Stanford magazine.
22 “Ah, if only”: Gift, 186.
23 stark prototype: The American movie comedy Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), directed by Frank Oz and starring Michael Caine and Steve Martin, is another example, perhaps on a lesser level of attainment, of a creative project coming into sharper focus, finding its definitive style, in a second attempt, the first being Ralph Levy’s adequate but unsurprising Bedtime Story (1964), with David Niven and Marlon Brando playing the Caine and Martin parts. Two of the three writers of Scoundrels were also writers of Bedtime. The female lead in the remake, played by Glenne Headly, has been given a richer part, but the real discovery is in the confident, excited, absurdist performances of Caine and Martin, who act rather than impersonate themselves as celebrities.
24 centrally about this matter: Amis, “Levity,” 5.
25 “participate in orgies”: Field, Life and Art, 210–11. California natives may scratch their heads at the suggestion of the rural San Francisco Peninsula of the Depression years, a place of struggling truck farms and nut orchards, as a site for Sadeian outrages on a weekly basis.
26 “a long infection”: Haven.
27 “with a shrug”: TRLSK, 14.
28 died in the Neuengamme: Pitzer, 306, 310.
29 “mortal quest for another’s”: Boyd 1, 499.
30 most severe modernist: Foster, ix–xii. Modernism shows first, clearly, with Invitation to a Beheading, published two years before the writing of Sebastian Knight. Foster demonstrates—in the most thoughtful and comprehensive study of N.’s literary inheritances—that N. was decisively on the Gallic side of things, temperamentally attuned to Proust and Bergson (his ideas on time, on memory, on art) and allergic to the Anglo-American modernism of Pound and Eliot, with its devaluation of specific character and promotion of a “mythical method.” N. was opposed to depth psychologies, to all one-size theories of sexuality and the unconscious. His foundational gift was for the quiddity of things. From Proust he borrowed, excitedly elaborated, the mixing of fictional and autobiographical elements, and also the approach that begins in involuntary memory and proceeds to a purposeful unearthing of the past. The characteristic flow of Proust’s prose, with currents of narrative suddenly onrushing to a conclusion that stuns, finds correspondences in Nabokov. N. continually rewrote himself (through translations and new editions), and his recapture via memory of the homeland he lost resembles Joyce’s recall of Dublin. He was shaped as a writer also by the “modernism of underdevelopment,” the Russian responses to contact with the destabilizing West; the Petersburg tradition of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Bely, and Mandelstam was his lifeblood. The intertextual gestures in his works are an honoring of, an endless playing with, these myriad literary inheritances.
31 a California vacation: Boyd 2, 33.
32 family seemed fine: Schiff, 118. Many of the Nabokovs’ friends and relations were trapped in Europe, destined to die there or escape only with great difficulty. From the $150 advance for Sebastian Knight, they sent $50 to Anna Feigin, Véra’s cousin, who was marooned in southern France. Schiff, 117.
33 much enjoyed: Schiff, 115.
34 “beauty spots”: Berg.
35 Bertrand, almost old enough: Schiff, 313.
36 character out of an American novel: John Buehrens, “Famous Consultant and Forgotten Minister,” UUWorld, January 2001, www.uuworld.org/2004/01/lookingback.html; McKinney, 149–51. Thompson in some ways followed a path pioneered by W. E. B. Du Bois, who earned a Harvard B.A. (as Thompson did) before undertaking graduate studies that took him to Berlin. Thompson lived and worked in Berlin for a time, like Du Bois. Thompson’s turn to business might have been influenced by Booker T. Washington’s gospel of black entrepreneurship. Thompson apprenticed himself to Frederick Winslow Taylor and became a lecturer at the Harvard Business School. He is frequently credited with having invented the occupation of international business consultant.
37 In 1917, Thompson published: McKinney, 149.
38 driving an aged Studebaker: Schiff, 313.
39 studying biochemistry: He had earlier studied it at Harvard.
65 new ’41 Studebaker: Schiff, photograph following 210; the photo shows a 1941 Studebaker Commander. See John’s Old Car and Truck Pictures, http://oldcarandtruckpictures.com/Studebaker/1941_Studebaker_Commader_4_
DoorSedan-jan20.jpg. The Studebaker Co. sold a model between 1927 and ’37 that was called the Dictator, ostensibly because Studebaker models “dictated the standard” that all other automobiles followed; there might have been a nod intended to the contemporary political meaning of dictator, too—other Studebaker models had the names President, Commander, and Champion.
40 by his ninth decade: Buehrens, “Famous Consultant”; “Obituary,” Academy of Management Journal, 66.
41 Muir being in some ways: Roper, “High Country,” 9.
42 designed the Yosemite Museum: “Yosemite Museum,” Yosemite National Park, National Park Service, http://www.nps.gov/yose/historyculture/yosemite-museum.htm.
43 stepped on a sleeping bear: Boyd 2, 33.
44 like the motor camps: Yosemite National Park Guidebook, National Park Service, 1940. The guidebook for ’41 has many more photos but has stopped quoting exact prices for lodging.
45 made day trips: Yosemite National Park Guidebook, National Park Service, 1941.
46 when the Nabokovs came: Pavlik, 187.
47 September is blissful: “Temperatures & Precipitation,” Yosemite National Park, National Park Service, http://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/climate.htm.
48 drove them back: Boyd 2, 33–34.
49 Russian speakers have been shown: Winawer.
50 �
�how wonderful was”: Bakh.
51 a restless people: Skidmore.
52 the kind of traveler: Berg.
53 to own a cabin: SO, 28.
54 “little bit of desert”: DBDV, 52.
Chapter Six
1 arrived by train: Schiff, 118.
2 established in an apartment: Ibid., 119.
3 “just rolled back”: DBDV, 53. The house was built in 1934. “19 Appleby Rd, Wellesley, MA 02482,” Zillow, http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/19-Appleby-Rd-Wellesley-MA-02482/56617394_zpid.
4 “I got that Guggenheim”: DBDV, 106–7.
5 to say that Nabokov: Boyd 2, 61; Meyers, 159.
6 “a big spaseebo”: DBDV, 44–45.
7 “I am leaving”: Ibid., 42.
8 “In doing future”: Ibid., 34.
9 “All Americans are”: Boyd 2, 21.
10 Wilson’s stewardship: A writer of N.’s energy and ambition was unlikely to remain unpublished in America. But Wilson’s mentorship made a difference—a difference in the potential size and scope of the career. Publication in obscure journals, no Guggenheims at dire moments, no real earnings from writing, no introductions to the likes of Katharine White, J. Laughlin, Edward Weeks, William Shawn: this conceivable alternate career history might have affected not only which books N. was able to publish but the audacity of those he was able to conceive.
11 “Nabokov was introduced”: Boyd 2, 21.
12 “My English novel”: DBDV, 52.
13 “I don’t want to mention”: Ibid., 50.
14 “Could you god-father”: Ibid., 51.
15 “I get aboard my boat”: Ibid., 166.
16 close to Fitzgerald since: Meyer, 259. Wilson deeply grieved his lost friends. He served Fitzgerald superbly as posthumous editor and wrote a profound elegy of Rosenfeld. Wilson, Classics and Commercials, 503–519.
17 “You are one of”: DBDV, 237.
18 other male friends: N. to Dobuzhinsky, Grynberg, and Karpovich, in Bakh.
19 “I hope you”: DBDV, 105.
20 “if I keep talking”: Ibid., 50.
21 “an absolute ball”: Boyd 2, 26.
22 “my closest”: Field, VN, 57.
23 “without the impetus … forsake”: LOC.
24 “I am expected to participate … mimetic phenomena”: DBDV, 54.