Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977

by Vladimir Nabokov

  TO: KATHARINE A. WHITE

  CC, 1 p.

  Ithaca, N.Y.

  December 30, 1950

  Dear Katharine,

  First of all I want to thank you for the generous cheque,—or have I done so already when I returned the signed double of the agreement?

  Barghoorn's book ("The Soviet Image of the United States") does not barge into anything I might say on the subject. His information stops at 1947 while I was thinking in terms of 1949 and 1950. It is a very poor book written by a man who, judging by a terrible mistranslation on p. 46 for instance, hardly knows any Russian. The whole thing sounds as if it had been written by a graduate student with an average of 77 in his undergraduate days. Finally, he is mainly interested (and lugubriously unspecific at that) in political Soviet articles whereas I had in mind a racy and artistic piece on the way America and Americans look in Soviet stories, novels, plays and "literature-culture" articles in Soviet magazines.

  A collection of excerpts in the Times Book Review by Schwarz1 is somewhat nearer in general trend to the color of the water in which I see my subject floating while it still has gills.

  If Mr. Ross and Mr. Shawn would like me to tackle the matter, would they be willing to give me some guarantee that my time would not be a complete loss in case some unexpected circumstance were to prevent the publication of the piece?

  And what about the length? Say, three instalments?

  Wishing you a happy New Year, I remain, dear Katharine,

  Yours very cordially,

  TO: HAROLD ROSS

  CC, 1 p.

  802 East Seneca Street

  Ithaca, New York

  December 6, 1950

  [for 6 January 1951]

  Dear Mr. Ross,

  Thanks for your nice letter—it covers all the points. Yes, a single piece of 5000–6000 words would be just the thing. The extraneous circumstance I had in mind was the possible though improbable appearance of an article on the same subject and lines in some other periodical before I had quite finished mine.1

  I did have the pleasure of meeting you. In fact I came all the way, across some hilly country, to the anniversary reception at the Carlton last March and said to you (in allusion to our indirect meetings through Katharine White in all kinds of verbal jungles): "Dr. Ross, I presume?" You said you were not a doctor.

  I hope to have an opportunity to see you again.

  Sincerely yours,

  Vladimir Nabokov

  TO: JOHN SELBY1

  CC, 1 p.

  802 East Seneca Street

  Ithaca, N.Y

  January 17, 1951

  Dear Mr. Selby,

  Two years ago you wrote to me about my book but to my regret at that time we did not arrive at an understanding. To-day I am writing you on an entirely different matter which, I hope, will interest you.

  I am teaching a course in European Fiction at Cornell University and have selected as a permanent item Flaubert's "Madame Bovary". In September I ordered, for a class of 133 students, copies of your edition of that novel, through the university book shops. I devoted seven class meetings to the discussion of the novel, and at least 10 minutes of every such period had to be spent in correcting the incredible mistranslations (more exactly, only the worst of them). In point of fact every page of the book contains at least three or four blunders—either obvious mistakes, or slovenly translations giving a wrong slant to Flaubert's intention. His lovely descriptions of visual things, clothes, landscapes, Emma's hairdo etc. are completely botched by the translator. I had to revise all this, going through each word of the book with a copy of the French first edition before me and have found, in addition to the various blunders due to the translator's insufficient French, a number of misprints due, in most cases, to faulty proofreading ("beads" for "meads", "came" for "cane"—that sort of thing) and, in other cases, to the translator's faithfully copying the misprints in the French first edition (which were corrected in the later French editions).

  My intention was to use the book next year and in later years. As my classroom analysis of Flaubert's style is a close one, and as my students are not expected to have enough French to turn to the French original, the situation is an alarming one. I thought you might be interested to know all this. My suggestion is that before you make a new printing of your edition (the one "based on the Eleanor Marx Aveling translation with corrections and modernization by the editor", 1946), you accept from me a list of more than 1000 corrections. If this suggestion interests you, please let me know what terms you could offer me.2

  I have also come to the conclusion that a number of notes elucidating local, literary and historical allusions, which are absolutely incomprehensible to the American student, ought to be added to the English translation of the book (provided that all mistranslations are corrected); and this I would also be willing to do.

  With one thing and another I have almost completed a small book on the structure of "Madame Bovary" for students. Would you be interested in publishing it?

  Sincerely yours,

  V. Nabokov

  TO: PATRICIA HUNT1

  CC. 2 pp.

  802 East Seneca Street

  Ithaca, New York.

  February 6th, 1951

  Dear Miss Hunt,

  Your suggestion interests me hugely. All my collecting life (45 years—I started at 6) I had been dreaming of somebody's taking photographs of the marvels I saw, and the skill of a Nature Reporter and a photographer from LIFE combined with my knowledge of butterflies and their ways would make a simply ideal team. It is really a wonderful idea and I am absolutely at your service in this matter, if we agree on terms.

  There are the following considerations to be taken into account. The environs of Ithaca are hopeless; and so is New England. Indeed, the whole east (except Florida which, however, represents a totally different, tropical, fauna related to the Antilles) is extremely poor in butterflies. There are a few interesting things far up in the north of Maine but none of them are showy. The few showy ones that occur throughout the eastern states (the Monarch, two or three Swallowtails, Admirals) have been pictured ad nauseam. The few rare species, dingy or dazzling, are extremely local and cannot be counted upon to show up at a fixed time and place. There is one little thing, a perfect jewel (and one of the rarest butterflies in the world) of which only some thirty or forty specimens have been taken since it was turned up by Edwards' Negro gardener almost a hundred years ago; at the present time two or three collectors know of a locality for it in Vermont, in early May—but the exact place is a secret. A very local blue butterfly which I have named myself can be found in a pine barren between Albany and Schenectady but nothing else of popular or scientific interest is to be found in that neighborhood. The only eastern butterfly that combines marvelous beauty with comparative rarity (a good female costs two or three dollars) is a large Fritillary which is found here and there in June in the hills of the south-eastern states. To try and get pictures of these things would mean traveling from one place to another and being subject to the whims of weather and collector's luck.

  Not so in the west (where I have extensively collected during several summers). I am thinking especially of S. Colorado and Arizona—but some gorgeous things can be easily found in fair numbers anywhere in the Rockies. I would dearly want to have photographs taken of a charming middle-size butterfly that I discovered and named ten years ago in the Grand Canyon, a few minutes walk down the Bright Angel Trail. The Tetons where I collected for two months in 1949 are also splendid. Then, of course, there is Alaska, where I have not been, but which I know to be full of nice things easy to photograph.

  I have had in mind for years a list of positions and perching places in regard to various not too shy and very photogenic butterflies. Flowerheads, leaves, twigs, rocks, treetrunks. In certain spots, a number of interesting and gaudy things have, on hot days, a habit of congregating on damp sand and are not easily disturbed in their tippling. Many other species settle with outspread
wings on short alpine flowers or bask in the sun on stones. (I take it for granted that your photographer is prepared to do some crawling and wriggling and to ignore completely the possible presence of snakes). Others with closed wings revealing in profile beautiful undersides can be photographed very nicely since dozens of them can be seen at a time on the blossoms of thistles along quite accessible roads in canyons. All these western butterflies can make wonderful pictures and such pictures have never been taken before.

  Some fascinating photos might be also taken of me, a burly but agile man, stalking a rarity or sweeping it into my net from a flowerhead, or capturing it in midair. There is a special professional twist of the wrist immediately after the butterfly has been netted which is quite fetching. Then you could show my finger and thumb delicately pinching the thorax of a netted butterfly through the gauze of the netbag. And of course the successive stages of preparing the insect on a setting board have never yet been shown the way I would like them to be shown. All this might create a sensation in scientific and nature-lover circles besides being pleasing to the eye of a layman. I must stress the fact that the whole project as you see it has never been attempted before.

  When collecting, my general system is to go by car to this or that locality which may be a bog or a mountain pass or the shore of a lake or the beginning of a trail leading to alpine meadows. I do not care to camp out but usually stay at one of the good motels which abound in the west. The best time to collect is from the end of June to the beginning of August though of course this varies with altitude, latitude etc. I have not quite made up my mind where I shall collect this summer. It will depend to some extent on the money my book—(CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE to be brought out by Harper on the 14th of this month—you may have seen parts of it in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine or the Partisan) will bring me. It may also depend on what LIFE would decide to spend on this project.

  Sincerely yours,

  Vladimir Nabokov

  TO: KATHARINE A. WHITE

  CC, 4 pp.

  Ithaca, N.Y.

  March 17, 1951

  Dear Katharine,

  I am sorry the New Yorker rejected my story.1 It has already been sent elsewhere, so that I feel free to discuss certain points without being suspected of trying to persuade the New Yorker to reconsider their decision.

  First of all, I do not understand what you mean by "overwhelming style", "light story" and "elaboration". All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. Several pieces of "Conclusive Evidence", for instance, which you were kind to admire were merely a series of impressions held together by means of "style". For me "style" is matter.

  I feel that the New Yorker has not understood "The Vane Sisters" at all. Let me explain a few things: the whole point of the story is that my French professor, a somewhat obtuse scholar and a rather callous observer of the superficial planes of life, unwittingly passes (in the first pages) through the enchanting and touching "aura" of dead Cynthia, whom he continues to see (when talking about her) in terms of skin, hair, manners etc. The only nice thing he deigns to see about her is his condescending reference to a favorite picture of his that she painted—frost, sun, glass—and from this stems the icicle-bright aura through which he rather ridiculously passes in the beginning of the story when a sunny ghost leads him, as it were, to the place where he meets D. and learns of Cynthia's death. At the end of the story he seeks her spirit in vulgar table-rapping phenomena, in acrostics and then he sees a vague dream (permeated by the broken sun of their last meeting), and now comes the last paragraph which, if read straight, should convey that vague and sunny rebuke, but which for a more attentive reader contains the additional delight of a solved acrostic; I C-ould I-solate, C-onsciously, L-ittle. E-very-thing S-eemed B-lurred, Y-ellow-C-louded, Y-ielding N-othing T-angible. H-er I-nept A-crostics, M-audlin E-vasions, T-heopath-ies—E-very R-ecollection F-ormed R-ipples O-f M-ysterious M-ean-ing. E-very thing S-eemed Y-ellowly B-lurred, I-llusive, L-ost. The "icicles by Cynthia" refers of course to the setting at the beginning of the story and is a message, as it were, from her forgiving, gentle, doe-soul that had made him this gift of an iridescent day (giving him something akin to the picture he had liked, to the only small thing he had liked about her); and to this, in eager, pathetic haste, Sybil—a little ghost close to the larger one—adds "meter from me, Sybil", alluding of course to the red shadow of the parking meter near which the French professor meets D.

  You may argue that reading downwards, or upwards, or diagonally is not what an editor can be expected to do; but by means of various allusions to trick-reading I have arranged matters so that the reader almost automatically slips into this discovery, especially because of the abrupt change in style.

  Most of the stories I am contemplating (and some I have written in the past—you actually published one with such an "inside"—the one about the old Jewish couple and their sick boy)2 will be composed on these lines, according to this system wherein a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one. I am really very disappointed that you, such a subtle and loving reader, should not have seen the inner scheme of my story. I do not mean the acrostic—but the coincidence of Cynthia's spirit with the atmosphere of the beginning of the story. When some day you re-read it, I want you to notice—I hope with regret—how everything in the tale leads to one recurving end, or rather forms a delicate circle, a system of mute responses, not realized by the Frenchman but directed by some unknown spirit at readers through the prism of his priggish praises.3

  I have yet something else to say. I do not think that the remarks jotted down in pencil came from you. They are not in your style. On page 15, I start preparing the reader for the last paragraph by describing the kind of thing millions of cranks have done with Shakespeare's sonnets—reading the initial letters of the lines to see if they made some esoteric sense. What on earth has this to do with the remark in the margin that Shakespeare's sonnets have the rhyme scheme ABBA or ABAB?

  On page 4 the annotater finds it unusual that a college girl wears a hat at an exam. They all do it when they want to catch a bus or a train immediately afterwards. I skip some other queries, such as the one on page 6 "how he knows"—anent the lovers of the lady. But I cannot understand how any reader can be stumped by "ultimate island" on page 7, clearly a reference to Ultima Thule. There are other things, but let them ride.

  I am really quite depressed by the whole business. The financial side is an entirely separate trouble. But what matters most is the fact that people whom I so much like and admire have completely failed me as readers in the present case.

  I expect to be in New York end of May, and I hope that Véra and I will have an opportunity to see both of you then. Before then I hope to send you another story which will come back to me in a "Rush" envelope, on yellow paper.

  Sincerely yours,

  TO: SHEILA HODGES1

  CC, 1 p.

  802 East Seneca Street

  Ithaca, New York

  March 22, 1951

  Dear Miss Hodges,

  I am delighted to learn that your firm wants my book. I shall hear of it, no doubt, from Harpers within a day or two.

  I had several titles in mind for the book and selected the most abstract one as I hate to have a drop of a book's life blood exuded upon its cover. But of course I understand your point of view, especially as none of my friends liked "Conclusive Evidence". So here are a few other titles from which you can choose: "Clues", "The Rainbow Edge", "Speak, Mnemosyne!" (this one is my favorite), "The Prismatic Edge", "The Moulted Feather" (from Browning's poem), "Nabokov's Opening" (a chess term), "Emblemata".2

  Very truly yours,

  Vladimir Nabokov

  TO: FRANCIS BROWN1

  CC, 1 p.

  Res.: 802 East Seneca Street

  Ithaca, N.Y.

  April 19, 1951

  Dear Mr. Brown,

  I remembered the Chehov and Tolstoy portr
aits included in the Bunin memoir2 you kindly sent me and hoped that the other portraits would be on the same high level. Unfortunately they are not.

  If I undertook to write an article on this book, I would certainly do so in a destructive vein. However, the author, whom I used to know well, is now a very old man, and I do not feel that I should demolish his book. As I cannot praise it, I would rather not review it at all.

  I am sorry to have caused you this slight delay and am returning the book to-day, under separate cover.

  Yesterday I wrote you asking you to let me review Klots' book on butterflies, which I know is an important and interesting work. I hope that this idea will appeal to you.3

  Sincerely yours,

  Vladimir Nabokov

  TO: PROF. JOHN H. FINLEY, JR.1

  CC, 1 p.

  Ilease reoly 802-East Seneca Street

  It aca, N.Y.

  June 12, 1951

  Dear Irofessor Finley,

  Many t anks for your delig tful letter. Yes, I think I would be able to arrange a course of t e general tyoe you suggest, orovided you allow me some individual latitude. In my lectures I emo asize t e artistic side of literature. I visualize a course t at would not clas wit your conceot of te connections between narrative genres. It would deal wit questions of structure, develooment of tec nique, t emes (in't e sense of "t ematic lines"), and imagery and magic and style. I certainly could link uo my study of nineteent century fiction wit t ematic lines running t rough such initial masteroieces as t e Iliad—or te Slovo; but my main ouroose would be to analyze sue artistic structures as Mansfield lark (and its fairy-tale oattern), Bleak ouse (and its c ild-and-bird t eme), Anna Karenin (and its dream-and-deat symbols), ten te "transformation" teme, as old as te oldest myt's, in one lumo consisting of t ree stories (Gogol's Overcoat, Stevenson's Jekyll and yde and Kafka's Metamoro osis), and finally the jardins suoerooses of Iroust's style in is first volume Swann's Way. If t is is too muc , eit er Bleak or Mansfield may be sacrificed. It seems to me t at t is orogram does not really deviate from yours since in't e long run it deals with t e istorical evolution of symbols, of images, of ways of seeing t ings and conveying one's vision. After all, Homer, and Flaubert, and Gogol, and Dickens, and Iroust are all members of my family. I only hooe t at t e "added stiooend" will be adequate—if, of course, my course outline meets with your aooroval.