Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977
Page 43
Vladimir Nabokov
Montreux, Switzerland
TO: PROF. LAUREN G. LEIGHTON
TL (XEROX), 1 p.
Montreux, July 12, 1971
Dear Mr. Leighton,
My husband asks me to convey to you his warmest thanks for your letter of 17th June, with the fascinating information and enclosures, and his particular gratitude for the transparencies1 and all the trouble you took.
He read with the greatest attention and interest your letter, and also the essay with the many quotations from a well identifiable unnamed author. Once again, he is full of admiration for the essay's daring authors but worries about their security. He would be happy if you could let them know his sympathy and appreciation, provided you had an opportunity to do so without any risks for you or for them.
With cordial greetings from VN and me.
(Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
TO: BARBARA EPSTEIN
TL (XEROX), 1 p.
Switzerland
August 29th, 1971
Dear Barbara,
Your constant kindness in regard to my little grievances in the past encourages me to ask you to publish the short review which I enclose.1
A Mr. Rowe, Assistant Professor of Russian at New York University, who recently visited us at Montreux (and seemed to be a responsible and civilized person) has now exuded a book about me: I have nothing much to say about its first two parts, but its third part and appendix suggest that in the course of writing his book he lost his mind.
If you agree to print my review, perhaps you could let me know by cable. And I would also like then to see the proof which I would keep only for a few minutes before cabling you my corrections or my OK. Ann Murphy of McGraw, who just called me up from New York about another matter, had not seen the book and the review, but thought immediately that The New York Review would be the proper place to send my piece.
I hope all is well with you. Véra joins me in sending you and Jason our love. We shall return to the Montreux Palace from this mountain retreat on August 31.
Yours ever,
Vladimir Nabokov
TO: JOHN LEONARD1
TL (XEROX), 1 p.
Montreux-Palace Hotel
Montreux, Switzerland
Septembre 29, 1971
Dear Mr. Leonard,
I wrote to you on September 13 enclosing a kind of Letter to the Editor which concerned my reaction to Edmund Wilson's Upstate. In that piece I was not airing a grievance but firmly stopping a flow of vulgar and fatuous invention on Wilson's part. I still do not know whether or not you agree to print my protest.2
Meanwhile, less than two days after airmailing my letter, I received from you in result of some telepathic process a long and amiable telegram dealing with three other matters. I am very grateful to you for promising to keep misprintless my chat with Israel Shenker3 (who incidentally sent me a few days ago several absolutely first-rate pictures he took of me here). Thanks, too, for suggesting I write about J.D. Salinger : I do admire him very much but am struggling in a whirlpool of work which does not allow me to produce either that article or the third thing you mention—observations on the new OED edition.
Please do let me know at your earliest convenience your reaction to my protest. I would very much want to have your review publish it but if that is impossible then do return the stuff at your earliest convenience so that I might send it elsewhere.
Cordially yours,
Vladimir Nabokov
TO: NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
PRINTED LETTER1
To the Editor:
I seek the shelter of your columns to help me establish the truth in the following case:
A kind correspondent Xeroxed and mailed me pages 154–162 referring to my person as imagined by Edmund Wilson in his recent work "Upstate." Since a number of statements therein wobble on the brink of libel, I must clear up some matters that might mislead trustful readers.
First of all, the "miseries, horrors and handicaps" that he assumes I was subjected to during 40 years, before we first met in New York are mostly figments of his warped fancy. He has no direct knowledge of my past. He has not even bothered to read my "Speak, Memory," the records and recollections of a happy expatriation that began practically on the day of my birth. The method he favors is gleaning from my fiction what he supposes to be actual, "real-life," impressions and then popping them back into my novels and considering my characters in that inept light—rather like the Shakespearean scholar who deduced Shakespeare's mother from the plays and then discovered allusions to her in the very passages he had twisted to manufacture the lady. What surprises me, however, is not so much Wilson's aplomb as the fact that in the diary he kept while he was my guest in Ithaca he pictures himself as nursing feelings and ideas so vindictive and fatuous that, if expressed, should have made me demand immediate departure.
A few of the ineptitudes I notice in these pages of "Upstate" are worth considering here. His conviction that my insistence on basic similarities between Russian and English verse is "a part of [my] inheritance of [my] father..., champion of a constitutional monarchy for Russia after the British model" is too silly to refute; and his muddleheaded and ill-informed description of Russian prosody only proves that he remains organically incapable of reading, let alone understanding, my work on the subject. Equally inconsistent with facts—and typical of his Philistine imagination—is his impression that at parties in our Ithaca house my wife "concentrated" on me and grudged "special attention to anyone else."
A particularly repulsive blend of vulgarity and naivete is reflected in his notion that I must have suffered "a good deal of humiliation," because as the son of a liberal noble I was not "accepted [!] by strictly illiberal nobility"—where? when, good God?—and by whom exactly, by my uncles and aunts? Or by the great grim boyars haunting a plebian's fancy?
I am aware that my former friend is in poor health but in the struggle between the dictates of compassion and those of personal honor the latter wins. Indeed, the publication of those "old diaries" (doctored, I hope, to fit the present requirements of what was then the future), in which living persons are but the performing poodles of the diarist's act, should be subject to a rule or law that would require some kind of formal consent from the victims of conjecture, ignorance and invention.
Vladimir Nabokov
Montreux, Switzerland
TO: MRS. PETER SEMLER1
TL (XEROX), 1 p.
Montreux-Palace Hotel
Montreux, Switzerland
October 1, 1971
Dear Mrs. Semler,
My husband asks me to say to you that he appreciated your good letter of September 26 very much. He regrets that it is not possible for him to make room for yet another interview in his already overcrowded schedule.
Incidentally, he very much regrets that "America" has such a neutral a-political character. What is needed, he thinks, is vigorous political propaganda.
Sincerely yours,
(Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
TO: OLIVER CALDECOTT1
CC, 1 p.
1820 Montreux, Palace Hotel
October 18, 1971
Dear Mr. Caldecott,
My husband asks me to write to you about your new editions of PNIN and NABOKOV'S DOZEN. His first request is that I thank you on his behalf for sending him three copies of each of the books and tell you how much he liked their appearance.
I wish I could stop here. But he also asks me to call your attention to the absence in PNIN of all mention of copyright. As you know, this is a very serious matter in the United States. Such omission can result in loss of copyright. This omission is the more surprising as the copyright matter is properly taken care of in the other book (NABOKOV'S DOZEN). I hope you can see your way to remedy the situation without delay. If not the entire printing has already been manufactured please have the copyright notice inserted where it belongs. Moreover, please try to have a slip with the copyright notice tipped in in all the c
opies you still have on hand. It should read "Copyright © 1953, 1955, 1957 by Vladimir Nabokov. All rights reserved."
Another matter that my husband finds extremely annoying. Who and why has written in the blurb to PNIN (back cover) "...such Nabokovian enemies as McCarthyism"? In point of fact VN has never criticized or attacked McCarthy for the simple reason that he found anti-McCarthyists much more repulsive than McCarthy himself. Since, moreover, it does not reflect any statement occuring in PNIN, this sentence on the jacket, says VN, is absurd and must be removed.
When both above-mentioned matters have been taken care of please send us a sample copy. May we please hear from you by return mail?
Yours truly,
(Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
TO: BENJAMIN P. LAMBERTON1
TL (XEROX), 1 p.
1820 Montreux, Switzerland
November 5, 1971
Dear Mr. Lamberton,
I don't know if I would have ever got around to acknowledge your kind and interesting letter in ordinary circumstances. However, my husband is so angry and disgusted with the Levy article in the N.Y. Times Magazine2 that he asks me to make it quite clear to anyone who might ask that, among many other things, the bits about his sister, our life in Montreux, are false and vulgar.
Although he does not consider Solzhenitsyn a great writer, he would never have "cackled" over the misfortunes of that heroic man, as Mr. Levy insinuates. VN will probably take up the matter in a Letter to the Editor.3
Yours truly,
(Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
TO: G. H. BELL1
TL (XEROX), 1 p.
Montreux, Switzerland
January 24, 1972
Dear Sir,
My husband asks me to acknowledge your letter of January 17.
He does not believe that America, or the world, would have been better off if Germany had won the war. The great mistake was made in the peace-making period when so much power was allowed the Communists, when the Allies surrendered half of Europe to Russian control. Bad though things look to-day my husband is convinced that a Nazi control of the world would have been worse, and not only because of Hitler's mad-dog policy toward the Jews.
He asks you not to use his statements out of context which would produce a wrong impression.
Yours truly,
(Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
TO: STEWART H. SMITH1
TL (XEROX), 1 p.
Montreux-Palace Hotel
1820 Montreux, Switzerland
February 25, 1972
Dear Mr. Smith,
The Real Life of Sebastian Kinght was written during the winter 1938–1939, in a little flat we rented in Paris in a street curiously named Rue de Saïgon, connecting the Avenue du Bois (alias Foch) with the Avenue de la Grande Armée.
The Russ, novel, which was to be titled Ultima Thule, was begun in 1939 and interrupted in May 1940, when we left for the United States. The two chapters—Solus Rex and Ultima Thule—is all that has been preserved by my husband who destroyed the rest of the material. Ultima Thule will soon appear in The New Yorker in an English translation. Both pieces will be included in the collection of short stories to be published by McGraw-Hill in the coming fall.2
The publication dates of the original Russian versions were 1942 (Novïy Zhurnal, I, New York) for Ultima Thule (Ch. One of the unfinished novel), and early 1940 (Sovremennïya Zapiski, LXX, Paris) for Solus Rex (Ch. Two).
It was very thoughtful of you not to bother my husband with idle queries. He quite appreciates that the ones you are asking are important.
Greetings from both of us.
(Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
TO: KATE RAND LLOYD1
TL (XEROX), 1 p.
Montreux-Palace Hotel
1830 Montreux, Switzerland
April 13, 1972
Dear Miss Lloyd,
I thank you for sending me a copy of the April 15 issue of Vogue which arrived to-day, on the eve of our departure for the South of France.
Simona Morini's questions are admirable and my replies to them are reproduced with a rare fidelity—to which I am not accustomed in most published interviews.2 The pictures, alas, are not as good as the text. The little one at the top corner of p. 78 is, I think, terrible, and the one of Mr. and Mrs. Nabokov relaxing in the "green salon" not only disfigures my wife and me but hypertrophies our lower limbs in a grotesque and incomprehensible manner. The façade of the hotel on p. 74 is, on the other hand, charming and somehow in elegant correspondence with my Givenchy tie on the opposite page!
With best regards,
Vladimir Nabokov
Dictated by Mr. Nabokov
but signed in his absence
TO: NEW STATESMAN
PRINTED LETTER1
Montreux, Switzerland
Sir, When the American edition of Edmund Wilson's Upstate appeared, I saw myself obliged to publish a detailed letter to the editor in The New York Times Book Review (7 November 1971) refuting the vulgar nonsense Mr. Wilson saw fit to spin around the bogus image of my person. Since your reviewer, Anthony Bailey (NS 7 April) has evidently not seen my letter (while casually quoting a portion of a particularly offensive passage in Upstate) may I point out for the benefit of English readers that the 'humiliation' ascribed to me therein is nothing but the product of conjecture, ignorance and invention on Mr. Wilson's part.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
TO: WILLIAM D. FIELD1
TL (XEROX), 1 p.
Montreux-Palace Hotel
1820 Montreux, Switzerland
May 25, 1972
Dear Mr. Field,
Many thanks for your kind letter and the five splendid papers. I hasten to respond to your query about those Vienna examples of V. atalanta.
If it is only, or mainly, a reduction of the subapical white bar that gives those specimens an American look, and if the series is fairly short (say, three or four individuals), the narrowing of that bar might be regarded as a chance variation not uncommon in Europe (it is represented, for instance, in photographic figures of V. atalanta : South's Brit. Butts, pl. 47, female, and Verity's Farf. d'ltalia, pl. 52, fig. 8, "italica"—which you have correctly sunk), for it is quite impossible to believe that such a wanderer as our Red Admirable could have evolved a stable race right in the center of its European dispersal (incidentally, all attempts to split it into several European races is doomed from the start, the Swedish type itself being but the summer offspring of May newcomers from the south). Anyway, I shall be collecting soon in a corner of Switzerland not too far from Austria and will try to take specimens of the thing here and there in chalet gardens.
I have been hunting butterflies in the Alps and the Mediterranean area every season since 1961 but everything is still papered and stored, and awaiting a favorable pause in my literary labors to get nicely set for study. I would certainly be delighted to give some of the rarer stuff to the National Museum and shall send a list for approval.2
I am looking forward to your Catalogue of New World Lycaenidae. It will, I trust, straighten out the unfortunate nomenclatorial confusion which has resulted from American lepidopterists' ignoring the change of two specific names in Lycaeides (Int. Comm. Zool. Nom, 1954). Since the time I wrote about that subgenus (see Bull. NCZ vol. 101, Feb. 1949) the name of the short-falx Holarctic species, which I and others used to call "L. argyrognomon (Bergstr., Tutt)", has been changed to "L. idas (L)", whilst the name "L. argyrognomon (Bergstr.)" has been shifted to the long-falx Palaearctic species, which I and others used to call "L. ismenias (Meigen)".
I have also arrived at the conclusion that my "L. melissa samuelis" should be treated as a distinct species—but that is another story.
Sincerely yours,
Vladimir Nabokov
TO: PROF. CARL R. P ROFFER
TL (XEROX), 2 pp.
Montreux-Palace Hotel
1820 Montreux, Switzerland
July 21, 1972
Dear Mr. Proffer,
I have been reading
the Russian Literature Triquarterly1 with great interest and attention, and here is a short list of some little adjustments that might be used in reprints of any of these articles :
p. 344: About Buying a Horse is a once famous book by Burnand, editor of Punch; and The Author of Trixie is by Caine (the lesser known Caine) and is about an archbishop (which would have provided Mr Olcott with yet another piece for his mythical chess set) who secretly writes a frivolous novel.
p. 361, p. 368 : Several points have been missed by the author of this excellent article, p. 361: Judging by their aspect and habitat the little butterflies on the sand could only belong to one species namely Lycaeides samuelis Nabokov (also known as L. melissa samuelis Nab.), a fact utterly beyond Pnin's and Chateau's ken. And p. 368: the double dream Pnin and Victor dream takes us to Zembla; and we actually meet Pnin again at the end of PALE FIRE (a much more secure Pnin).
p. 402: Zemski. The name existed long before 1861 (look up, for example, the Zemskie sobory of the sixteenth century). To a Russian ear it suggests rather an association with "Vyazemski" than with "an occasional sewer".
p. 405: Kurva is yet another dig at Lowell who understood Mandelshtam's phrase Kurva Moskva (Moscow the Whore) as "Moscow's curving avenues".