Nabokov in America

by Robert Roper

  49 brought from Europe: Berg. It was brought unwittingly. N. thought his sole copy had been destroyed, but in ’59, according to a letter he wrote to publisher Walter Minton, he found it again, and in ’86 it appeared in a translation by Dmitri. Berg. This account is thrown into doubt, however, by a letter Wilson wrote on November 30, 1954, giving his response to Lolita, which he had just read in manuscript: “Now about your novel: I like it less than anything else of yours I have read. The short story that it grew out of was interesting, but I don’t think the subject can stand this very extended treatment.” DBDV, 320. Unless there is a story by N. that scholars have somehow overlooked, the short one Wilson refers to is likely to be The Enchanter or part of it.

  50 Wilson was a new recruit: Wilson was already explicit in what he wrote in his journals but not yet in his fiction.

  51 “trying to be an American”: Lolita, 333.

  52 “little money”: SL, 122.

  53 To reach: “I am sick of having my books muffled up in silence,” he wrote Wilson in June ’51. DBDV, 292.

  54 “in the matter of”: DBDV, 289. Twain, like N., resisted those who sought morals or ideas in his novels; see his “NOTICE” after the title page of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. N. knew well who Twain was and where he had come from; in Hannibal, Missouri, he observed “the brown and the blue struggling for ascendancy in the Mississippi.” Berg, journal for ’51.

  55 first American bestseller: Castiglia, Bound and Determined, 1.

  56 thirty editions: Sturma, “Aliens and Indians,” 318.

  57 seven hundred: Ibid.

  58 “enthusiastic review”: Sayre, “Abridging,” 488.

  59 “artlessness”: Wolff, 411.

  60 “moose”: Ibid., 422.

  61 reached its height: DBDV, 311. N. rejoiced in his work at the Widener Library at Harvard, tracking down every literary allusion in Eugene Onegin.

  62 Pushkin had done: Wolff, 410–11. Pushkin considered Chateaubriand’s and James Fenimore Cooper’s novels about America “brilliant works.” Ibid., 411. Mayne Reid counted among his entranced readers Frank Harris and Theodore Roosevelt.

  63 what tale to tell: N.’s model for the theme of an intensely jealous man and a sweet cheat who is a deceptive captive is most likely Proust. Field, VN, 328–29.

  64 found him smart: Boyd 2, 141. N. spent time particularly with Ransom, and they made several live radio broadcasts together while in Salt Lake. Field, Life in Part, 272.

  65 Buxbaum: Interview with Richard Buxbaum, August 14, 2013. At the time of the interview, Buxbaum was the Jackson H. Ralston Professor of International Law (emeritus) at the University of California, Berkeley.

  66 resembling the route: Zimmer, http://dezimmer.net/LolitaUSA/Trip2.htm.

  67 “ah, that first whiff”: Lolita, 222.

  68 nonfictional travelers: Interview with Buxbaum. Buxbaum noticed the separate beds because his own parents slept in one.

  69 “We wish you”: Lolita, 223.

  70 “a woman’s hair”: Ibid.

  71 “commercial fashion”: Ibid. Such big motels were appearing—a few, though they were not yet the fashion.

  72 “beautiful bones”: Interview with Buxbaum.

  73 conferred with Klots: NB, 447.

  74 “meet ten bears”: Boyd 2, 142. Klots was the future author of Field Guide to the Butterflies of North America, East of the Great Plains.

  75 South of the Tetons: Berg, “Notes for a second volume (twenty years in America) of Speak, Memory.”

  76 an adventure: Boyd 2, 142. The author, aged sixty-six, in a perhaps ill-advised attempt to understand that adventure, undertook the trek to the base of Disappointment Peak, which gains three thousand feet in five miles. The weather became stormy. His solo climb of the rocks ended with the arrival of purple clouds and lightning. Half an hour later, after an undignified retreat, he found himself bathed in warm sunlight, the sky beautifully clear; he did not return to the rocks, but enjoyed a day of cautious hiking in the heart of the Tetons, legendary summits all around.

  77 “lost many pounds”: DBDV, 254.

  78 “soft-bosomed”: Ibid.

  79 go where they wanted: the Nabokovs became American citizens in ’45.

  80 “amazing white Impala”: Schiff, 268. A ’54 Buick Special bought new cost between $2,200 and $3,163. Theirs was a two-door sedan, the smallest model. The Special was Buick’s bestselling car. “1954 Buick Special—Classic Car Price Guide,” Hagerty, http://www.hagerty.com/price-guide/1954-Buick-Special.

  81 is a staging: Steve Coates, “His Father’s Siren, Still Singing,” New York Times, May 4, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/weekinreview/04nabokov.html.

  Chapter Twelve

  1 researches were extensive: Humbert Humbert on occasion reports what must have been N.’s own research experience—for example, that he never figured out Humbert’s legal status vis-à-vis his stepdaughter, although he consulted “many books on marriage, rape, adoption and so on.” Lolita, 181–82. In the Library of Congress are ninety-four four-by-six cards with research notes for Lolita. N. reminds himself to look up certain words in a dictionary or thesaurus—not all his immense vocabulary, as some have feared, was immediately available to him.

  2 enema tip: LOC.

  3 girlish slang: LOC; Boyd 2, 211. N.’s slang collection informs Lolita’s “furious harangues” when she uses such expressions as “swell chance,” “I’d be a sap,” “Stinker,” and “I despise you.” Lolita, 181.

  4 scene with Miss Pratt: Boyd 2, 211.

  5 “hawk-faced” to “blue-green eyes”: Dolinin, 11.

  6 “detention home”: Lolita, 159.

  7 “impaired the morals”: Ibid.

  8 journal for ’51: Berg. Also known as the page-a-day diary.

  9 “paradox of pictorial”: Lolita, 160–61.

  10 “line of spaced trees”: Ibid., 161. The passage continues, “and a passing glimpse of some mummy-necked farmer.” A diary note for June 30 reads, “farmer with a mumy’s [sic] neck, furrowed and tanned … grim El Greco horizon.” Berg.

  11 arrives at existence: N. was in this sense antipositivist or Kantian.

  12 “I myself learned”: Lolita, 160. This process parallels one of learning to see Lolita with loving eyes, not only via a sexually devouring gaze.

  13 “a series of wiggles”: Ibid., 162. See, regarding Humbert’s travels and for many other matters Nabokov-related, Dieter Zimmer’s indispensable website, at http://dezimmer.net/index.htm.

  14 “sobs in the night”: Ibid., 186.

  15 “when we sat reading”: Ibid., 184.

  16 “trains would cry”: Ibid., 154.

  17 “dreadful giant Christmas trees”: Ibid., 162. The trees echo a diary entry for June 28, 1951, “yesternight highbrow trucks like dreadful huge Christmas trees in the darkness.” Berg. These notes from the ’51 western trip went directly into Lolita so often that it raises the question: Did N. save this notebook so that scholars of the future could learn from it something of his compositional process; or was it saved because it happened to have many unwritten-upon pages, on which Véra, in ’58, could jot an account of the events surrounding the American publication of Lolita? See chapters 15 and 16 of this book.

  18 “mysterious outlines”: Lolita, 162.

  19 “smooth amiable roads”: Ibid., 160.

  20 “and the desert”: Ibid., 162.

  21 a con man: N.’s use of Who’s Who in the Limelight (p. 33) to announce early in his book the avatars and connections of Clare Quilty closely echoes Black Guinea’s early list (chapter 3) of the disguises of the con man in Melville’s The Confidence Man. Appel, Annotated, 351n5.

  22 “Although everybody should know”: Lolita, 332.

  23 “We came to know”: Ibid., 153–54.

  24 “Chateaubriandesque”: N. considered Chateaubriand the first European writer to describe the American natural scene well; the Frenchman came to America in 1791 and wrote novels such as Les Natchez, Atala, and René.


  25 “sewerish smell”: This derives from a page-a-day diary entry, Berg.

  26 “various types … the females”: Ibid., 154.

  27 “We came to know … tense thumbs”: Ibid., 168.

  28 “to whom ads were dedicated”: Ibid., 156.

  29 “I was not really”: Ibid.

  30 the novel’s allusions: this list is only partial. N. parodies himself in the sense that Humbert’s self-serving autobiography is a travesty of N.’s scrupulous Speak, Memory. Humbert’s confessions also evoke those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “There is the same sense of childhood lost and the same paranoid suspicions emerging as the work progresses. Nabokov simply gives another turn to the screw of Rousseau’s attempt to justify himself and disarm his tormentors by means of absolute and sensational sincerity.” Bruss, 29.

  31 the Romantic confessional novel: Appel, liii.

  32 “a parody … with real suffering”: Ibid., liv.

  33 “involving the reader”: Ibid., lx.

  34 just amusing enough: For many readers, he is amusing enough, but for others an absolute rejection of child sexual abuse as a legitimate theme makes Lolita objectionable. It will probably always be so.

  35 made by Alfred Hitchcock: The affinities between some of Hitchcock’s works and some of N.’s are many, if superficial: motels (the ones in Lolita and the one in Psycho); doppelgängers (Hermann and Felix in Despair, Guy and Bruno in Strangers on a Train); national parks (Lolita and North by Northwest); mental health workers who explain all (John Ray in Lolita’s foreword and the psychiatrist who limns Norman Bates’s character at the end of Psycho); author cameos (virtually every Nabokov novel, beginning with King, Queen, Knave, and all the American-made Hitchcock films, beginning with Rebecca). The two auteurs had an appreciation for each other, and they exchanged phone calls and letters in ’64, in hopes of finding a film project to work on together. After seeing The Trouble with Harry, N. commented, “His humor noir is akin to my humor noir, if that’s what it should be called.” Davidson, 4. Both were born in 1899, both emigrated to the United States as war broke out, each arriving after career attainments abroad. Hitchcock asked N. to work on the screenplay for Frenzy, but he was unavailable. “The primary affinity is in the similar relationship that Hitchcock and Nabokov established with their audience … a relationship of playfulness, obtuseness, self-allusiveness and parody”: Ibid., 10.

  36 so concerned for order: Other authors of the postwar moment mocked a sanitized America, prominent among them Miller and Kerouac. Kerouac’s work of the forties and fifties would seem definingly un-Nabokovian, but The Dharma Bums—even more than On the Road, with its Humbertian wanderings all over the map— stubbornly lays hold of Nabokovian materials and approaches. Kerouac began bumming west, looking for America, looking for something, in July ’47; N. was in Colorado that summer, and Humbert and Lolita begin their travels at the same time, mid-August ’47. Both Dharma and Lolita are works of deep subjectivity, but both batten on precise reports of locales, specific American locales, and Ray, the scruffy Buddhism-intoxicated hero of Dharma, has ecstatic reponses to high- mountain areas (Matterhorn Peak, the Skagit Country) he traverses on foot, just as did the lepidopterophile Nabokov. Lolita and Dharma end in illuminations of love. Their respective protagonists are importers of alien ideologies—Buddhism in Ray’s case and Euro hyper-aestheticism in Humbert’s. Nabokov’s delightful conflation of Longs Peak, Colorado, with locales he remembers from his Russian boyhood has an eerily exact echo in Dharma, mountain-climbing Ray being “happiest when he has a sense that he already knows this wilderness, when he feels ‘something inexpressibly broken in my heart as though I’d lived before and walked this trail.” ’ Douglas, xxiii. Ray and Humbert are terrified of cops, and society at large unnerves them. But both love, even adore, certain people, and Ray coming off the mountain is thrilled to “begin to smell people again.” Ibid., xxii. “The true story of postwar America in all its speed, tomfoolery, and sorrowfulness,” according to Kerouac, “could only be told as interior monologue and confession.” Ibid., x. N., who wrote his first-person masterworks in America, might have said amen to that.

  Chapter Thirteen

  1 “mania”: Lolita, 253.

  2 “After all, gentlemen”: Ibid.

  3 “around 1950 I”: Ibid., 184.

  4 “abominable nausea”: Ibid., 325.

  5 “I went to Telluride”: DBDV, 294. The mountains are not mainly granitic; the geology of the mountains around Telluride is complex, and though there is some granite, volcanic breccia is more common. The “self-conscious poplars” are probably balsam poplars, a.k.a. black cottonwood, deciduous broadleafed trees that grow on wet ground from six thousand feet in elevation to the tree line.

  6 “heroic wife”: Ibid. This capture was probably the most significant of N.’s years in North America. He had described the butterfly, Lycaeides argyrognomon sublivens, on the basis of nine male specimens found at the MCZ; the males had been taken near Telluride in 1902. NB, 425, 480–81. On a steep, brushy slope above his Telluride motel in ’51, N. “had the pleasure of discovering the unusual-looking female.” Ibid., 481. The insect is now known as Lycaeides idas sublivens Nabokov. Ibid., 754.

  7 “Small grasshoppers spurted”: Lolita, 325–26.

  8 “A very light cloud was opening its arms”: One of the reasons N. is beloved of some readers is that he finds words for perceptions many people have had or, when they read him, suddenly feel they have. The fact that he has had the same perceptions—noticing two cloud patches moving at different rates of speed, one catching up with the other—draws him close.

  9 “divinely enigmatic”: Lolita, 326.

  10 “Every natural fact”: Emerson, 34.

  11 signs of unusual talent: Dmitri became Massachusetts and all–New England high school debating champion at the Holderness School, Plymouth, New Hampshire. D.N., “Close Calls,” 306.

  12 compromised innocence: In this regard, Lolita has affinities with The Scarlet Letter, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Turn of the Screw, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Billy Budd, Moby-Dick, and The Sea Wolf, among others.

  13 “Dmitri has set his heart”: Houghton, letter of May 3, 1950.

  14 “always a pleasure”: Houghton, letter of May 8, 1950. Ivan is Nicolas’s eldest son.

  15 “in complete honesty”: Bakh, letter of November 2, 1951. In spring ’51, N. borrowed $1,000 from Grynberg. Boyd 2, 199.

  16 last short story: Boyd 2, 206.

  17 could not understand it: Boyd 2, 208. Ross died December 6, 1951, aged fifty-nine. The story appeared in the magazine on February 2, 1952.

  18 impoverished: Schiff, 152n.

  19 feeling especially broke: In September ’51, he wrote Wilson, “at present I am in quite awful circumstances, despite a thousand dollars I borrowed from Roman in spring.” DBDV, 295.

  20 other positions: Schiff, 153.

  21 “long since”: Bakh. He wrote Wilson, “The New Yorker has bought in all 12 of the 15 [chapters] submitted to them. One piece was in the Partisan.” DBDV, 262.

  22 “mumble back”: DBDV, 273. N.’s teeth were extracted by “Dr Favre, a Boston dentist.” Berg, note for “Speak On, Memory.”

  23 “doctor says”: DBDV, 294.

  24 poor sleep: N. complained of lifelong insomnia, but to judge by the accounts of his dreams he began keeping in his sixties, he slept every night for at least a few hours. Berg.

  25 “letters from private individuals”: DBDV, 292.

  26 Salinger: Boyd 2, 608.

  27 men entranced by younger girls: The situation occurs in “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” (December 1946), “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (January 1948), “A Girl I Knew” (February 1948), “I’m Crazy” (December 1948), “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” (April 1950), and The Catcher in the Rye (1951).

  28 slang: Salinger, passim; e.g., “phony,” “crumby,” “that killed me,” “I got a bang out of that.” “The Catcher in
the Rye,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Catcher_in_the_Rye.

  29 Both authors venture: N. ventures but scrupulously avoids profanity; Salinger employs profanity on occasion.

  30 first refusal deal: Boyd 2, 73, for N.; Slawenski, 166, for Salinger.

  31 off and on for years: Salinger worked for more than ten years on his novel, considering that Holden Caulfield appeared in “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” sold to The New Yorker in Nov. ’41 (though not published till after the war). “Catcher,” Wikipedia. N. worked for five years on Lolita, although he could be said to have developed the theme beginning in the late thirties, for a total of fifteen years.

  32 “pretty little ears”: Salinger, 88. “Roller-skate skinny” might have been borrowed from The Enchanter.

  33 “very emotional, for a child”: Ibid., 89.

  34 “She was laying there”: Ibid., 206–7.

  35 “one of her old nightgowns”: Lolita, 135–36.

  36 “had for object”: Ibid., 136.

  37 write about St. Mark’s: Berg, note of February 18, 1951; Boyd 2, 122, 685n40.

  38 This work, with scholarly: SL, 130.

  39 they sublet a house: Schiff, 172. N. wrote Wilson, “We have a very charming, ramshackle house, with lots of bibelots and a good bibliotheque, rented unto us by a charming lesbian lady, May Sarton.” DBDV, 303.

  40 she was upset: Schiff, 173.

  41 at nine or ten: EO, vol. 2, 328.

  42 a supreme work of art: Pushkin was second only to Shakespeare in N.’s poetic pantheon.

  43 “at heart a pedant”: DBDV, 262.

  44 “two months in Cambridge”: Ibid., 311.

  45 “weary negligence”: Shakesepeare, King Lear, act 1, scene 3. Goneril is speaking of the attitude her minions should show her father. Pushkin was reading Byron as he composed Eugene Onegin and other concurrent poems. Mitchell, xxvii–xxxi. In his exile to Kishinev (of the infamous pogrom eighty years later), Pushkin befriended a family that introduced him to Byron’s verse. Ibid., xxvii.

  46 “’Tis now, I know, within your will”: EO, vol. 1, 165. The tone is not unlike that of Charlotte Haze in her landlady’s letter to Humbert. This quotation and all others are from N.’s translation of the poem.