Nabokov in America

by Robert Roper

  47 “him does the snake”: EO, vol. 1, 115.

  48 “without avail”: Ibid., 114.

  49 shade of red: Ibid., vol. 3, 181–83.

  50 less than one hundred: Ibid., vol. 2, 209. N. is counting backward from the time of the completion of Onegin, 1831. The Russian language had been standardized for the first time only in the eighteenth century. Mitchell, xi. The borrowing from other literatures came via French translations.

  51 “Pétri”: Ibid., vol. 2, 5–10.

  52 “tipping a flippant tale”: EO, vol. 2, 5–6. On the first page of his commentaries (vol. 2, 5), N. in effect footnotes a footnote; about the epigraph, he asserts that it is almost certainly fictitious, but “for those who like to look for the [living] models of fictional characters,” take a look at some lines (vol. 1, p. 115, stanza 46), which, to be understood, must be read along with his comments in vol. 2, pp. 173–74. We are already in the sort of mad chase, involving fingers holding places in multiple locations, that begins the novel Pale Fire, which he conceived in the same years dedicated to his long labors on Onegin.

  53 “Why did you visit us”: EO, vol. 1, 165. In his comments on these lines, N. says his italicizing of the word Why was “influenced by a wonderful record (played for me one day in Talcottville by Edmund Wilson) of Tarasova’s recitation of Tatiana’s letter.” Ibid., vol. 2, 391.

  54 “No, to nobody”: Ibid., vol. 1, 166.

  55 She is replicating: Ibid., vol. 2, 391–92.

  56 “the dashes”: Ibid., vol. 1, 261.

  57 “And by degrees”: Ibid., vol. 1, 262.

  58 “At this point”: Ibid., vol. 3, 85. When discussing Pushkin, N. believes in a straightforward way in evidence and reality. Cf. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, where a reader/investigator can never quite know an author/brother.

  59 “with soft-melting gaze”: Ibid., vol. 1, 259.

  60 inspired by: This painting was displayed at the British ambassador’s residence in Athens. “Lord Byron,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Byron. The statuette could also be of Napoleon. Other translations of Onegin, e.g. those by Charles Johnson and Walter Arndt, say definitively that it is Napoleon. N. is silent on the matter; he might have noticed that Napoleon is almost universally shown not “with arms crosswise compressed,” as Pushkin has it, but with one arm bent at the elbow and the hand disappearing in a tunic. The Phillips painting shows Byron with arms crosswise.

  61 like émigré scholars of the day: In an interview in ’51, N. confessed that he did not read young American novelists very often but that he was “a great reader … of the critics.” Harvey Breit, “Talk with Mr. Nabokov,” New York Times, February 18, 1951, http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/02/lifetimes/nab-v-talk.html.

  62 “This is a confession”: Lolita, 71. Charlotte’s “but what would it matter” resembles Tatiana’s “who knows” (both appearing in parentheses).

  63 Nabokov the scholar traces: EO, vol. 3, 98–100. Eugene when he travels carries with him copies of René, Adolphe, and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (the name Melmoth is borrowed for an automobile in Lolita).

  64 “His is a checkered nature”: Ibid., 100–1.

  65 something in the novel to ripen … refreshed himself: Boyd 2, 225, 310.

  66 wrote nothing: DBDV, 308.

  67 “By the age of 14”: SO, 46.

  68 a kind of trial run: Brodhead, 13.

  69 “compel a man”: Parker, 768.

  70 “looking for”: N., letter to the editor, New York Review of Books, October 7, 1971.

  71 “sardine”: Boyd 2, 502.

  72 “Pierre Point”: Lolita, 34.

  73 syllabus: Boyd 2, 200.

  74 he had already worked up: Harvard made him add Don Quixote.

  75 precursors: Appel, lviii; Borges, 201.

  76 anxiety about the world: Brodhead, 5.

  77 “I wonder”: Moby-Dick, 511.

  78 “Sir, I mistrust it”: Ibid., 521; author’s versing.

  79 parodies: For example, the Quilty-Humbert duality in Lolita, a kind of extended parody of the double theme à la Dostoevsky.

  80 Boyd shows: Boyd 2, 246–47.

  81 “Greek-like simplicity”: Gilmore, 109.

  82 there is a child: Pip is not, strictly speaking, a cabin boy, though he lives with Ahab in his cabin and might have served him as one. He was a ship’s hand who normally performed as a shipkeeper—one who stayed aboard when the harpoonists ventured out in whaleboats.

  83 “Thou touchest”: Moby-Dick, 522.

  84 three blacks: The other two are Daggoo, an African harpooner, and Fleece the cook.

  85 “velvet shark-skin”: Ibid.

  86 “Unless it can be proven”: Lolita, 300.

  Chapter Fourteen

  1 “Wyoming, 1952”: NB, 489–94.

  2 Gathered around a central space: author’s visit, September 2012. The establishment was still in business as the Corral Motel but about to undergo a renovation. The log cabins of the American West closely resemble log dwellings common in western Russia at the time of N.’s boyhood.

  3 “In early August”: NB, 493.

  4 “palpating”: DBDV, 298.

  5 begun writing: Ibid.

  6 wrote little: Ibid., 308.

  7 “spent almost two weeks”: Ibid., 262.

  8 annoying duties: DBDV, 300. N. wrote Wilson, “I am sick of teaching,” but he also reported on the fun of working up Mansfield Park and Bleak House for lectures, saying, “I think I had more fun than my class.” Ibid., 282.

  9 “tempestuously”: Ibid., 298.

  10 “focus briefly”: D.N., “Close Calls,” 306.

  11 “the following order”: SL, 122. N. also said of his son that he had “a magnificent brain.” Ibid., 138.

  12 “partner for tennis”: “Close Calls,” 307.

  13 associated with ascents: Roberts, “Hearse Traverse,” “Harvard Five.”

  14 climbers went to: Harvard Mountaineering Archive.

  15 did not climb on a rope with: Interview with Peter McCarthy, HMC president, May 14, 2012.

  16 published an article: American Alpine Journal no. 28 (1954): 196–200.

  17 first ascent of Gibraltar: Alden, 30, 33. The year of Dmitri’s first ascents, ’53, was the year of Art Gilkey’s death on K2 and of the British first ascent of Mount Everest.

  18 “an elderly Packard”: “Close Calls,” 309.

  19 “doubt if we shall ever”: Ibid.; SL, 139.

  20 climbers died: Harvard Mountaineering no. 12, May 1955; “Close Calls,” 311.

  21 “his third car”: SL, 138.

  22 often worried: Dmitri’s climbing passion slackened in ’55, when he took two falls in the Canadian Rockies. He decided to quit before killing himself. Boyd 2, 268.

  23 Ashland: The well-known Shakespeare Festival dates from modest beginings in 1935.

  24 “no greater pleasure”: DBDV, 308.

  25 modest wooden houses: Theirs, at 163 Mead Street, belonged to a professor at Southern Oregon College of Education. It was perched on a steep street, and it burned down in September ’99: Johnson, Nabokv-L.

  26 “more or less … coily thing”: SL, 140.

  27 Véra hand-carried: Schiff, 199. The Nabokovs feared sending it through the mails because the Comstock Act made it a crime to distribute obscenity that way. Ibid., 204. Schiff also shows that White held off reading Lolita for another three years, until March ’57; one reason was that she disliked having to conceal the manuscript from her colleague William Shawn. A detailed account of the shenanigans, showing White to have been ardent about getting an early look (before she then became reluctant), is to be found in Diment, “Two Lolitas.”

  28 more shockable: Schiff, 199.

  29 to friend Wilson: DBDV, 314.

  30 on the sixth: Berg, notes for “Speak On, Memory.”

  31 “sensuous … this fiasco”: DBDV, 317.

  32 tormenting: Was N. suffering and unhappy while writing Lolita? According to what he told
his New Yorker editor, possibly. But a contemporaneous letter to his sister says, “I am fairly fat … everything is going wonderfully well.” SL, 139. He was joyful when he had the time to work on what he wanted.

  33 as his own agent: Véra did all secretary work and much strategizing.

  34 Epstein esteemed: Schiff, 205–6.

  35 a better chance: For Laughlin, see SL, 152; for Covici, see Schiff, 201. Joyce had had to publish Ulysses first in France.

  36 willing to part: Schiff, 201; SL, 147.

  37 brought convictions: de Grazia, 7–9. The Little Review daringly published episode 13, “Nausicaa.”

  38 rose garden: Rose imagery abounds in the novel, perhaps appropriately for a novel written partly in Ashland. This includes reference to Lolita’s intimate “brown rose.”

  39 paperback from Grove: de Grazia, 338, 370. The legal publication of Lolita in America in ’58 led to the republication of Hecate County the next year. Schiff, 236.

  40 theme of sex with children: Incest was a theme in Mary Shelley’s long-suppressed Mathilda and in The Heptameron, by Marguerite de Navarre. Dostoevsky treated pedophila in Crime and Punishment and in a chapter of The Devils, “At Tikhon’s,” not published until 1922.

  41 a novel for readers: Schiff, 236.

  42 sold extremely well: The novel sold 100,000 copies in its first three weeks of release; it was the first novel since Gone with the Wind (1936) to do so. Schiff, 232.

  43 best work: DBDV, 317.

  44 “character entirely new”: SL, 178.

  45 “one of the few words”: Lolita, 330.

  46 “exhilarating”: Ibid., 333.

  47 high spirits: All of N.’s books, written wherever and whenever, evince a measure of gleeful verve.

  48 “Indian paupers”: SL, 150. Dmitri had better memories, recalling “an adobe house in Taos … rented from a pair of opera-loving gentlemen. Its painful quaintness was … compensated by … a WWII Jeep in which I chauffered Father on lepidopterological hunts, and the first recording I had ever heard of Verdi’s Requiem,” which became his favorite piece of music. “Close Calls,” 315.

  49 notorious widow: Schiff, 203.

  50 on his own: Ibid.

  51 “what agony it was”: SL, 149.

  52 “poor Pnin”: SL, 143.

  53 market wisdom: Boyd 2, 256–57.

  54 unusual focus on things Russian: Diment, Pniniad, 45, says The New Yorker had an “unusual amount of Russian material” in ’53. It was the year of Stalin’s death and of Beria’s arrest.

  55 thought bubble: Pnin, 60–61.

  56 “no other work”: Maar, 80.

  57 “very amusing and quite brilliant”: DBDV, 304.

  58 campus novel: Before McCarthy’s, there were C. P. Snow’s The Masters, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, and Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night.

  59 “sheer sympathy”: Pnin, 35. The “Egg and We” nods, perhaps, to the popular memoir The Egg and I (1945), by Betty MacDonald, the basis of a film under the same name (1947).

  60 “Although forbidden”: Ibid., 40.

  61 “Whereas the degree”: Ibid., 11.

  62 “Well, to make”: Ibid., 33–34.

  63 Based partly on: Diment, Pniniad. Szeftel came to Cornell in ’45, and he was on the hiring committee that brought N. to the university. He was delighted to have another Russian aboard, and one, like him, with a Jewish wife. Ibid., 31. Despite these commonalities, Szeftel never could establish an intimacy. Another Cornell professor, Robert M. Adams, said, “Many had a sense that Nabokov did not have any desire for real friendships, that Véra was … all that he needed, and that even the Bishops, who were the Nabokovs’ most frequent companions … were in no way their intimate friends.” Ibid., 35. Szeftel’s comical English and professorial oddities inform the portrait of Timofey Pnin in the novel. Szeftel was more successful than his representation and was hired by the University of Washington in ’61. Ibid., 56.

  64 “I must warn”: Pnin, 34.

  65 “mourning for an intimate part”: Ibid., 39.

  66 boarding school: Ibid., 93–96.

  67 “now a secret”: Ibid., 8.

  68 loves his hero: To a potential publisher N. described Pnin as a figure of “great moral courage, a pure man … a staunch friend, serenely wise, faithful to a single love [who] never descends from a high plane of life characterized by authenticity and integrity.” Boyd 2, 292–93.

  69 VN knew Pnin: VN’s account of their past is fluent but not to be trusted; Pnin disagrees with it at several points. Pnin, 179–80.

  70 telling him: Ibid., 84.

  71 “I intended”: SL, 150.

  72 “All of a sudden”: Pnin, 146; “Pnin Gives a Party,” New Yorker, November 12, 1955, 47.

  73 “The good doctor”: Pnin, 155; “Pnin Gives a Party,” 50.

  74 fight over everything: Boyd 2, 270. In March ’55, he wrote White, “I have cheerfully agreed to accept some thirty minor alterations” in a segment of the novel that was being called “Pnin’s Day,” but other changes he found insupportable: they “would affect the inner core of the piece which is built on a whole series of inner organic transitions; it would be agony even to contemplate replacing” them. SL, 156–57.

  75 “well-padded”: Pnin, 155–56.

  76 “singularly delightful”: Ibid., 144.

  77 spruce trees and old elms: Ibid.

  78 “suburban”: Ibid.

  79 “dark rock wall”: Ibid., 164.

  80 “At last”: Ibid. N. never acquired property in America. This might have been his ideal: a secluded modest house (not too hard to heat), among fields and forest, with a cliff nearby and lepping possible. “Pheasants visited the weedy ground between the garage and the cliff,” we are told; those iconic American shrubs, lilacs, “crowded in sapless ranks along one wall of the house,” and a great tree cast “Indian-summer shadows” on the porch steps. Ibid., 145.

  81 “old brown loafers”: Pnin, 156.

  82 “a detailed diary”: Ibid., 157.

  83 “blundered from chair to chair”: Ibid., 163.

  84 “During the eight”: Ibid., 62. The scene looks toward the Ray Carver story “Why Don’t You Dance?”

  85 designed to charm: Boyd 2, 271–87. Boyd’s discussion of Pnin is superb, supplying an ample gloss, a great service to readers of this oft-perplexing author. His biography provides a gloss for every book.

  86 “large bowl”: Pnin, 153.

  87 “perfectly divine”: Ibid., 157.

  88 living words: With an entire scene, N. here achieves an effect usually obtained only with single phrases of brilliance and intense seeingness.

  89 “beautiful bowl was intact”: Ibid., 172–73.

  90 “is inviting”: Ibid., 169.

  91 he was offended: SL, 179. “I do not write sketches,” he told Pascal Covici.

  92 “central axis”: Maar, 77.

  93 Mira Belochkin: Boyd 2, 282.

  94 remarkable sales: Ibid., 307.

  95 “highly satisfying”: Pnin, 69.

  96 “walked down the gloomy stairs”: Ibid., 70.

  97 “started to lose his sight”: Ibid., 70–71.

  98 “We can’t know more”: SL, 178.

  99 good at schematics: N. was a first-rate composer of chess problems, though not a first-rate chess player. Gezari, 44–54.

  100 Nabokov knew this: In his letter to Oskar Pollak of November 8, 1903, Kafka wrote, “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? … We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves… . A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” Karl, 98.

  101 “Elena loved”: DBDV, 316.

  102 “you may at last have made contact”: Ibid., 343.

  103 “I like it less”: Ibid., 320. Wilson implies that he has read an earlier treatment of the pedophilia th
eme; this may mean that he had been shown The Enchanter or part of it. See note “brought from Europe,” p. 308.

  104 “Bunny, I liked very much”: DBDV, 322. N. refers to Wilson’s article “Eretz Yisrael,” in The New Yorker, December 4, 1954. “The Scrolls from the Dead Sea,” a different article, appeared six months later.

  105 came to feel, erroneously: Wilson did read the whole manuscript, as he was careful to assert in his original draft of the letter. Beinecke.

  106 “sold my LOLITA”: DBDV, 325.

  107 “depresses me”: Ibid., 330.

  108 “read his complete works”: Ibid., 306.

  109 promising an étude: Ibid., 318.

  110 “The heroes”: Wilson, Window, 232.

  111 “Nabokov has gone on record”: Ibid.

  112 “sado-masochism”: Ibid., 237.

  113 “aggrieved and indignant”: Ibid., 230–31.

  114 “humiliate”: Ibid., 237. There is surely, as Wilson felt, something like schadenfreude in N.’s reports of the sufferings of some of his characters. Those reports are wickedly funny. But there is also a quality of authorial nonseparation from such sufferings. N. wrote about his own pratfalls, too. His writings do not evince what is usually thought of as authorial compassion, but there is often an “in it with you” quality to his presentation of his characters at their most shamed and helpless.

  115 “The sadist, here”: Ibid.

  116 invades his text: As Pushkin does in Eugene Onegin, asserting a friendship with his fictional protagonist.

  117 “the warm rose-red silk”: Pnin, 134. The cardiac event has even more the character of an anxiety attack. Interview with Professor Tristan Davies, Johns Hopkins University, November 13, 2013. The cardiac aspect of the fit, whatever it is, may be a remnant of N.’s first plan for the book, in which Pnin did indeed die.

  118 the foulness: See Pitzer, passim.

  119 “gentle heart”: Pnin, 135.

  120 “a great number of deaths”: Ibid.

  121 Anne Frank figure: The Diary of a Young Girl, published in English in ’52, became a smash bestseller the year before N. began Pnin. Readers encountering Mira in the novel might well have been reminded of Anne. But Anne in her diary has many shadings of temperament; the world is what makes her emblematic of Jewish female victimhood—that was not her own intention. The squirrels in Pnin are emissaries of Mira in heaven, sent to help Pnin. Ibid., 136. N., who often devised plots via parody and the construction of intertextualities, was relatively without such models when he set about creating Pnin’s story. Thrown on his own resources, he encountered difficulties. He was unable to enlarge the narrative. Finally, he “discarded many vistas … eliminating everything that was not strictly justified in the light of art.” SL, 178.