Nabokov in America

by Robert Roper

  61 “pale porpoise”: DBDV, 308.

  62 conversant with: Sweeney, “Sinistral,” 65.

  63 “Keep it Kold”: N., “The Refrigerator Awakes,” New Yorker, June 6, 1942, 20.

  64 “sharp-sightedness”: N., Poems and Problems, 145.

  65 represent his American surroundings: Flanner, “Goethe,” part I, 34, and part II, 28, 30, 35. Mann did ponder a Hollywood novel but finally did not write it. “Whether the German exiles liked Los Angeles depended on whether they liked nature.” Bahr, quoted in Laskin. Mann often walked his poodle, Niko, in Palisades Park, Santa Monica, before lunch.

  66 Ayn Rand: Johnson, “Bedfellows.”

  67 “I am also old”: N., Stories, 584.

  68 “marvelous picnics”: Kopper, “Correspondence,” 60–61.

  Chapter Nine

  1 Wilson sent him: DBDV, 229n1.

  2 Of a wealthy family … beyond control: Ibid. Simon Karlinsky, editor of DBDV, in his thorough account of this episode, displays the careful and suggestive scholarship that everywhere distinguishes his volume.

  3 “Many thanks”: Ibid., 230.

  4 his entomology friends: Berg, letters of Harry Clench.

  5 Remington wrote him: Berg. N. hoped to answer “critical unsolved problems in butterfly classification.” Remington, “Lepidoptera Studies,” 278.

  6 Schmoll: “Hazel Schmoll,” Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame, http://www.cogreatwomen.org/index.php/item/162-hazel-schmoll.

  7 advance of $2,000: DBDV, 200.

  8 book-talk fee: Boyd 2, 116.

  9 had been reading entomological: N. read and wrote French, English, Russian, German, and Latin.

  10 “Taken by Haberhauer”: Berg.

  11 “jam of logs”: Ibid. The account originally appeared in National Geographic, June 1944: 672.

  “the summer of 1834”: Berg.

  12 “N. Colo.”: Ibid. “Ecology” appears in a letter to Wilson of November 21, 1948. DBDV, 241. “Ecological” appears in that letter and also in lepidopteral notes from ’44. NB, 307.

  13 “On a hot August”: NB, 403.

  14 “is forced open oysterwise”: Ibid., 322.

  15 “It may well be”: Ibid., 422.

  16 “I had done no collecting”: Ibid., 126.

  17 “can be defined as a Polyommatus”: Berg.

  18 center of a coterie: N.’s entomological friends read him carefully. Cyril dos Passos, of the AMNH, said about N.’s “Notes on the Morphology of the Genus Lycaeides,” “It is a most interesting paper and I certainly enjoyed reading it… . The article cannot be mastered at one reading and I have promised myself the pleasure of giving it further study.” Berg. Dos Passos also wrote N., on May 31, 1949, “You have doubtless read Munroe’s paper in The Lepidopterists’ News … on the genus concept in RHOPALOCERA, in which he holds up Warren, Grey, yourself, and myself as horrible examples of splitters and returns to the old outworn ideas… . Warren and I have been having some correspondence on the subject and feel that Munroe should be taken down a peg or two. It is our opinion that you are the person to do this”: NB, 447.

  19 boarded at Columbine Lodge: AAA Guide, 38.

  20 during his stay: “As many as four lepidopterists have visited me here to pay their respects and take me to distant collecting grounds.” DBDV, 219.

  21 Tolland Bog: Remington was conducting research at the University of Colorado’s Science Lodge, near Schmoll’s ranch. NB, 49–50.

  22 feet-on-the-boggy-ground: Garland Companion, 277–78.

  23 “We have a most comfortable”: DBDV, 218.

  24 lodge was within a half-mile: Pickering, 15. The Longs Peak Inn was built by the nature writer Enos Mills. Pyle, 50.

  25 “to the Tahosa Valley”: Pickering, 7. The Nabokovs ate in the communal dining hall and might have had electricity and indoor plumbing in their cabin. Author’s visit, September 15, 2012.

  26 with beaver dams: Pickering, 18.

  27 kinnikinnick gave way: Ibid; author’s visit.

  28 Véra enjoyed: Schiff, 143. Novelist Edmund White, working for The Saturday Review in the early seventies, oversaw a cover story on the occasion of the publication of N.’s Transparent Things. White, “How Did One Edit Nabokov?” City Boy (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2009).

  29 Don Stallings: Berg.

  30 “Some new”: Psyche 49 (September–December 1942).

  31 “There will not be any fee”: Berg.

  32 “a flock of unnamed races”: Berg, letter of May 13, 1943.

  33 tutored by Nabokov: Berg, letter of February 12, 1947.

  34 ran the idea by: Berg, letter of May 26, 1943.

  35 “This giant race”: Stallings and Turner, “New American.” Stallings was still relying on genitalic identification ten years later. Stallings and Turner, “Four New Species,” 4. N. coined several terms of genitalic morphology, among them humerulus, alula, bullula, mentum, rostellum, sagum, and surculus. NB, 498.

  36 “You will find”: Berg, letter of March 21, 1944.

  37 “my ideas run along”: Berg, letter of November 12, 1943.

  38 “Also received”: Berg, letter of February 13, 1946.

  39 teach him the names: Berg, letter of March 21, 1944.

  40 “Did some dissecting”: Berg, letter of April 14, 1944.

  41 “Uncle Sam”: Berg, letter of November 12, 1943.

  42 “D-Day”: Berg, letter of July 8, 1944. N. registered for the draft on February 16, 1942, soon after Pearl Harbor. In the Registrar’s Report on Vladimir Nabokoff (Serial Number 726, Order Number 10207) he is described as five feet eleven and a half inches tall, one hundred seventy pounds, of ruddy complexion, with an appendix scar. National Archives, National Personnel Records Center.

  43 dated from this time: N. claimed to have done some writing of Lolita in ’47, but he also wrote Wilson on January 16, 1952, that at Harvard for the semester “I shall have some timespace for certain pleasurable labors that I contemplate—a novel (in English) that I have been palpating in my mind for a couple of years.” DBDV, 298.

  44 Humbert drives immediately: Lolita, 283.

  45 a promising site: DBDV, 294. N. told Wilson that Telluride had “awful roads, but then—endless charm, an old-fashioned, absolutely touristless mining town full of most helpful, charming people—and when you hike from there, which is 9000’, to 10000’, with the town and its tin roofs and self-conscious poplars lying toylike at the flat bottom of a cul-de-sac valley … all you hear are the voices of children playing.” Ibid.

  46 “absence of her voice”: Lolita, 326. N. might have seen the name Telluride at the MCZ when reading of the capture of a type specimen in 1902 by a man named Weeks at “Telluride, San Miguel Mts., S.W. Colorado, alt. 10,000 to 12,000 ft.” NB, 425. But N. never mentions Weeks or Telluride in his first two main papers about the genus Lycaeides, “The Nearctic Forms of Lycaeides Hüb[ner]” and “Notes on the Morphology of the Genus Lycaeides.” Stallings’s talk of interesting captures he made there during summer of ’47 might have ignited N.’s desire to go.

  47 “most delightful”: Berg.

  48 “collect my way”: Boyd 2, 121; “Erebia Magdalena,” Butterflies and Moths of North America, http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/species/Erebia-magdalena.

  49 “forget your face”: Berg, letter of January 8, 1948.

  50 “sending you”: Berg, letter of February 23, 1948.

  51 years: Boyd 2, 116. N. remained an active collector for the rest of his life, but not a lab worker or theorist.

  52 still the boy: N. to sister Elena, August 30, 1950, NB, 465.

  53 eventually to appear: DBDV, 219. The Nabokovs’ long stay at Columbine Lodge was possible only because of the sale of “Portrait of My Uncle” and another story to The New Yorker. On July 24, 1947, he had written Wilson, “I am rather in a fix at the moment (as always in summer).” Ibid., 217.

  54 blue of summer: SM, 119.

  55 of Longs Peak: Ibid., 138–39. N.’s butterflies are biologically true but also totemic, l
ike Hemingway’s trout of “Big Two-Hearted River” and the Irati River in The Sun Also Rises.

  56 superimpose one part: Ibid., 139.

  57 a lost country: NB, 323.

  58 vivid memories: SO, 22.

  59 way with slang: Schiff, 140.

  60 Brecht, for instance: Bentley, 17. Brecht was famously derisive of Americans. But “there was an ‘on the other hand’ … to his anti-Americanism. If the Americans … were hopeless, they were also not so hopeless… . They were human, and he liked some of their habits so much he affected them: not shaking hands upon being introduced, for example, or saying ‘so what?,’ an expression that did not exist in German until Brecht first said, ‘so was?”’ Ibid.

  61 Henry Koster: “Henry Koster,” IMDb.com, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0467396/bio.

  62 “how well he had known me”: NB, 46.

  63 “uninhibited”: Ibid., 45.

  64 Moby-Dick: Ibid. There are appropriations from Melville in BS, which N. was working on at this time.

  65 native habitats: Boyd 2, 82.

  66 about the trouble: Ibid.

  67 “a strange wave”: DBDV, 146.

  68 “complete collapse”: Ibid., 148.

  69 “hot music”: Ibid., 149.

  Chapter Ten

  1 “rather startling”: Bishop, “Nabokov at Cornell,” 234.

  2 talked up: DBDV, 225.

  3 leery of hiring: Boyd 2, 123.

  4 grant was tapped: Diment, Pniniad, 30–1.

  5 Widening Stain: Tom and Edith Schantz, “Morris Bishop,” August 2007, Rue Morgan Press, http://www.ruemorguepress.com/authors/bishop.html.

  6 “pretty worthless”: SL, 83; Schiff, 153.

  7 “a strong appeal”: Ibid., 82.

  8 Harvard failed: Boyd 2, 303. N. had vexed relations with the Harvard structuralist Roman Jakobson, who blackballed his appointment to a position at the university in ’57. Ibid., 698n50. Their cooperation on a three-man translation (plus annotations) of The Song of Igor’s Campaign (the third man was Cornell historian Marc Szeftel) came to naught, and N. wrote Jakobson a letter in ’57 that said, in part, “I have come to the conclusion that I cannot collaborate with you… . Frankly, I am unable to stomach your little trips to totalitarian countries.” (Jakobson had traveled to the USSR.) Berg. Before the contretemps surrounding the Harvard appointment, N. had said of his collaborator’s work, “Jakobson’s studies [are] especially brilliant.” DBDV, 241.

  9 struggle was over: Boyd 2, 129. Wilson frankly admired what N. had done: to have arrived as a penniless immigrant and within a decade to have become a professor at a distinguished university, with an exciting literary career in a new language. Wilson might have found a place for himself in the academy, but he demurred; the “whole thing … is unnatural, embarrassing, disgusting” for a writer, he felt, and at a time of financial difficulty he still “decided to try to hang on with journalism and publishers’ advances.” Letters, 401. He was playing in a different league financially from N., on a salary from the New Yorker that, at the time of the writing of Hecate County, was $10,000 plus $3,000 for expenses. (N. was paid $5,000 a year by Cornell.) Ibid., 404; de Grazia, 211–12; Schiff, 152n. N. began angling for better-paying jobs as soon as he arrived at Cornell, and he constantly asked for advances against his salary. Schiff, 153.

  10 Never shall I forget: PF, 19–20.

  11 Windows, as well known: Ibid., 87–88.

  12 Most faculty: Appel and Newman, 236.

  13 a professor’s trim house: Boyd 2, 219.

  14 services to her husband: Véra was more and more called upon to handle N.’s swelling business, personal, and literary correspondence, including the authorship of thousands of letters under his signature: Schiff and Boyd, passim.

  15 attention-getting part: Schiff, 151.

  16 “cocoon of love”: Shapiro, 282.

  17 home for a winter vacation: Gibian and Parker, 159.

  18 Each of the houses: Shapiro, 281–82.

  19 Evenings passed: Shapiro, 282.

  20 same age: Dmitri was born May 10, 1934; Lolita’s birthday was January 1, 1935. Lolita, 69.

  21 “very very grateful”: Berg; Boyd 2, 129.

  22 “I was not always”: Shapiro, 282.

  23 “vulgar cad”: Berg.

  24 about a third: Schiff, 152n.

  25 lived on the perilous border: D.N., “Close Calls,” 305–6.

  26 “phoney”: Lolita, 202.

  27 “adjustment”: Ibid.,187.

  28 “is obsessed”: Ibid., 207.

  29 “low-Mexican”: Ibid., 209. Urinals had special foul meaning for N. In his notes for “Speak On, Memory,” he wrote, “In an age when literature is supposed to come from one’s favorite public urinal … my formal prose [can please] only the mature reader of yesterday.” Berg.

  30 sexual hijinks: D.N., “Close Calls,” 306 and passim.

  31 “regime”: Lolita, 197.

  32 “rapist”: Ibid., 198.

  33 on the right track: At his parents’ urging, Dmitri applied to Harvard Law School and was accepted, but he never matriculated.

  34 “little limp Lo!”: Lolita, 168.

  35 “Ladies and gentlemen”: Ibid., 93.

  Chapter Eleven

  1 “the four D’s”: Lolita, 187.

  2 “gleeful pleasure”: SO, 47.

  3 his best novel: Ibid. N. insisted that Lolita was intensely pleasurable for him to contemplate in retrospect. “On a Book Entitled,” 333–34; SO, 47.

  4 Sex in Nabokov: There were many more-graphic writers, Henry Miller and D. H. Lawrence being the most noted.

  5 violet-clad girl: Enchanter, 27.

  6 “scrap”: Ibid., 16.

  7 “not pleased”: Ibid., 12.

  8 “a beautiful piece”: Ibid., 16.

  9 off-putting: The beginning recalls the difficult Invitation to a Beheading and looks forward to Bend Sinister, rather than to the reader-inviting Speak, Memory, Lolita, and Pnin.

  10 “thin, dry-lipped”: Enchanter, 25.

  11 its simplicity: Enchanter plays changes on “Little Red Riding Hood,” while Lolita plays with/refers to some sixty other works.

  12 “But what struck”: Hecate County, 250–1.

  13 “I remember”: Hecate County, quoted in de Grazia, 214.

  14 forbidden terms: Dabney, 326. Wilson mentions Miller occasionally in his correspondence: Letters, 537, 663. That N. also read Miller, or hastily sampled him, can be deduced from his comment to his sister that “Miller is talentless obscenity.” NB, 464.

  15 an American take: de Grazia, 239. Edel edited Wilson’s journals of four decades (twenties through fifties).

  16 “avalanche of erotic”: Edel, The Twenties, quoted in de Grazia, 239. John Updike was a percipient admirer of Wilson’s erotic writing and named “The Princess with the Golden Hair,” the central story in Hecate County, “my first and to this day most vivid glimpse of sex through the window of fiction.” Updike, Hugging, 196.

  17 “subordinate clause”: Enchanter, 29.

  18 “Already his gaze”: Ibid., 88–89.

  19 “All my previous books”: SL, 96.

  20 “Now let’s sit down”: Enchanter, 45.

  21 “Please, try”: Ibid., 52–53.

  22 “immobilized fraction”: Lolita, 46.

  23 “soot-black lashes”: Ibid.

  24 “plaid shirt”: Ibid., 43.

  25 “knew I could kiss”: Ibid., 51.

  26 “first cloth coat”: Ibid., 198–99.

  27 “perversions”: Ibid., 3.

  28 “ ‘aphrodisiac’ ”: Ibid., 4.

  29 “great work of art”: Ibid., 5. In a private journal, in ’58, Véra wrote, “I wish, though, somebody would notice the tender description of the child’s helplessness, her pathetic dependence on monstrous HH, and her heartrending courage all along… . They all miss the fact that … Lolita, is essentially good … or she would not have straightened out after being crushed so terribly and found a decent life with poor D
ick.” Berg. N. wrote a similar self-review of Speak, Memory that in the end he decided not to place in the published book, but which appeared twenty years after his death in the New Yorker. NB, 456–58. Though in “On a Book Entitled” N. says, “I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction and, despite John Ray’s assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow,” in ’56 he wrote Wilson, “When you do read LOLITA, please mark that it is a highly moral affair.” DBDV, 331.

  30 “some interesting”: Lolita, 11.

  31 indites one: N. mentions John Cleland’s Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure in “On a Book Entitled,” and from Wilson he received a copy of Histoire d’O, which the two men chuckled over like naughty schoolboys, according to Véra.

  32 “the one of perfect liberty”: Harris, vi.

  33 “Next moment”: Lolita, 61.

  34 “state of excitement”: Ibid., 61.

  35 “Talking fast”: Ibid., 62.

  36 “plane of being”: Ibid., 63.

  37 “in the pungent”: Ibid., 63.

  38 “I was a radiant”: Ibid., 63–64.

  39 “it’s nothing”: Ibid., 64.

  40 “a euphoria”: Ibid.

  41 composition: Berg, notes for “Speak On, Memory”; Boyd 2, 226.

  42 “Once or twice”: Lolita, 330.

  43 real attempts: Schiff, 166–67, for 1948; Boyd 2, 170, for 1950.

  44 “are keeping”: Schiff, 167.

  45 cards he composed on: Boyd 2, 169. The method of composing on index cards was borrowed from his lepidopteral work, where he routinely made notations on four-by-six-inch cards. Normally he destroyed early manuscript versions of his works, but in ’58 the Library of Congress began offering tax concessions in return for donations of his papers, and thereafter he saved his manuscripts. Boyd 2, 367.

  46 “interruptions”: Lolita, 330.

  47 “some forty years”: Ibid.

  48 “optimistic”: “The Female of Lycaeides argyrognomon sublivens,” NB, 481.“Sky island” is a term that originated in the early forties and was brought into currency over the next twenty-five years. “Sky Island,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_island.