Read Nabokov in America Online
Authors: Robert Roper
Nabokov in America
For
Bill Pearson of Mississippi:
in whom the literature
enduringly dwells
CONTENTS
The
slender Russian man is on vacation. He has an arrogantly beautiful face and an oddly tall little boy accompanying him as he stalks up and down a trout stream in the Wasatch Range, a few miles east of Salt Lake City, Utah. They deploy butterfly nets. “I walk
from 12 to 18 miles
1
per day,” he writes in a letter mailed around July 15, 1943, “wearing only shorts and tennis shoes …
always
a cold wind blowing in this particular cañon. Dmitri has a great time catching butterflies and gophers and building dams.”
The Allies have landed in Sicily. Himmler has ordered the liquidation of the Polish ghettos. The writer Vladimir Nabokov, meanwhile, concerns himself with
Lycaeides melissa annetta
, a pretty little shimmery butterfly. He finds
specimens “on both sides
2
of the Little Cottonwood River, between 8,500–9,000 ft. alt… . its habitat … characterized by clumps of Douglas fir, ant-heaps … and an abundant growth of
Lupinus parviflorus
Nuttall,” a pale local lupine.
The novelist out chasing insects—the signature image of Nabokov in America—came to beguile millions. “A
man without pants
3
and shirt” was how a local teenager, John Downey, saw him that summer when he encountered Nabokov on the Cottonwood Canyon road. He was “dang near nude,” and when Downey asked the stranger what he was up to, Nabokov refused to explain at first.
He was forty-four. That November he would have his two front teeth removed, the rest soon following. (“
My tongue is like
4
someone who comes home and finds all his furniture gone.”) He was balding and narrow-chested, a heavy smoker. For twenty years before his arrival, he had been living on an edge—he was an
artist
, after all, and deprivation
went with the territory. His wife, Véra Evseevna, worked odd jobs to help support them, and neither of them had ever been much for cooking or packing on the pounds.
The Nabokovs had been through the historical wringer. They were Zelig-like figures of twentieth-century catastrophe, dispossessed of their native Russia by the Bolsheviks, hair’s-breadth escapees of the Nazis in Berlin and Paris, “little” people with a monstrous evil breathing down their necks. Had they been in Russia that summer of ’43, they might have been among the thousands starving to death during the Siege of Leningrad, the most murderous blockade in world history;
had they been in France
5
, which they’d escaped at
the
last moment, on the last French ship for New York, Véra, who was Jewish, and their young son would likely have been destined for Drancy, the French internment camp that fed Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Instead,
melissa annetta
. Days of hiking in the sun. In Utah there was no cholera, nor was there mass starvation. Although a first impression is of a delicious absurdity—the supercilious Nabokov among the marmots and Mormons—the outdoors had always thrilled him, and America had beckoned to him all his life. He was unlike other desperate European immigrants of the war years, who tended to huddle in anxious enclaves in New York (unless they were artists with connections, in which case they headed straight for Hollywood). Saul Steinberg’s 1976 map of the United States, showing the three thousand miles between the Hudson and the Pacific as a tan patch with rocks, surely resembles the mental maps of many émigrés. Out west were the uncultured, the isolationist, the anti-Semitic, the proto-fascist. The stories of American boorishness and proud ignorance, which fed enduring suspicions of American society, were the common inheritance of many educated Europeans. Nabokov knew all that, and he yielded to no man in his savoring of American foolishness. That he, the beneficiary of a superb Old World education, fluent on the most rarefied levels in three languages, the creation, culturally and intellectually, of doting, brilliant parents with advanced ideas and money, should have found himself among the cowboys and religious lunatics was surely a joke of fate.
Invited to teach for a summer at Stanford, he did not hurry cross-country by train but instead took nineteen leisurely days, chauffeured across by an American friend with a Pontiac. The journey was “
wondrous
6
,” Véra wrote in a letter, and Vladimir told Edmund Wilson, another new American friend, “
During our motor-car
7
trip across several states (all of them beauties) I frantically collected butterflies.”
In
his forties Nabokov was still stubbornly youthful. Despite the dentures and the tubercular look, he was physically vigorous, youthful also in the sense of being deeply enamored of himself, like an eight-year-old who scribbles his name over and over on a schoolbook page. This egoistic vitality, which others often found hard to take, helps explain a strange fact in his résumé. During his twenty years in America, he traveled upward of 200,000 miles by car, much of it in the high-mountain West, on vacations organized around insect collecting. Véra and Dmitri were swept along in this outdoor enthusiasm; they were good sports about it, although Dmitri, as he got older, took care never to be seen in public waving a net. (No photos of him so equipped survive beyond age seven.)
Two hundred thousand miles by car. Divide this total by thirteen, the number of years in which the family took wide-ranging trips, adjust for Véra doing all the driving (until Dmitri was old enough to spell her), factor in Vladimir in the passenger seat checking maps or making the odd note on a four-by-six card, and you arrive at something like a coefficient of deep happiness. The Nabokovs got along, and their days were blessed with a simple purpose: they got
here
from
there
, staying at motor courts that cost a dollar or two a night, in towns so patly, Americanly themselves that a visitor had to smile. Nabokov’s descriptions of these trips, in letters to Wilson and others, are glowing but reticent. He talks about getting a tan, about the specimens he’s finding, and leaves it at that. Deep happiness does not conduce to writing about itself. Meanwhile, he pursued other matters: the composition of parts of several books, among them the biography
Nikolai Gogol
, the memoir
Conclusive Evidence
(later called
Speak, Memory
), the novels
Lolita
,
Pnin
, and
Pale Fire
, and his multivolume annotated translation of Pushkin’s novel-in-verse
Eugene Onegin
. He was a professional, always with projects in the works, and why
not
write while on the road? Writing was another pleasure.
In these postwar years, the nation as a whole was enamored of the West, seeking reflections of itself in tales of cowpokes and pioneers. Western movies had long been popular, but now they were over the moon. The car vacation achieved a sort of consummation in the same period, and the motor court (or, to use the racy new parlance, the
motel
) was becoming ubiquitous. New roads were being built and old ones resurfaced; the Interstate Highway System, begun in ’56, at its completion the largest public works project in the history of the world, was but the capstone of a phenomenal outburst of American grading and paving. The cars of the fifties were better, people had money in their
pockets, the United States had just won the big war: what better time to drive to Yellowstone?
American Literature—a second-rate affair in Nabokov’s eyes, although not without interest—reflected all this vagabonding. There is a countercurrent in our homegrown literature, one that runs athwart the mainstream of worthy novels of social complexity—works by Hawthorne, Howells, James, Cather, Dreiser, et al.—and in the period of Nabokov’s emergence this countercurrent became reinvigorated. The tradition went back to Walt Whitman, Walt being the Mother Poet of us all, the first American writer to put on slouch hat and sturdy boots and set forth on the open road, in self-conscious impersonation of a vagabond. Henry Miller, a connoisseur not of American locales but of seedy European ones, set forth in the 1930s. The Beats also were wandering and feverishly writing just as Nabokov, fresh off the boat, with his high-modernist bona fides proudly on display, slipped quietly into the American stream.
Yet another part of our home tradition—our rough collection of amusing tall tales, with a few works of unaccountable brilliance glittering among the dross—also gathers in Nabokov. This is that part that begins with Captain John Smith and continues through William Bartram and Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur to Audubon, Emerson, Thoreau, John Muir, John Burroughs, and many modern practitioners, the tradition of itinerant semi-scientific naturalists. Possibly the most revealing resemblance to which Nabokov, who hated to be compared to
anyone
, can be recruited is to Muir, the father of American conservation, whose breakthrough reimagining of how glaciers shape landscapes predicts Nabokov’s splendid scientific reordering of the Polyommatini, the tribe of Blue butterflies.
Nabokov’s prolific tramping
8
of forests and meadows in what he came to call his “native West” finds an answer in Muir’s thousands of miles walked hither and thither. Both loved the high-mountain zones best. Both were Darwinists who dissented from orthodoxy, sounding like mystical intelligent-designers at times. Muir was probably the last orthodox Transcendentalist, believing, as Emerson had taught him, that “every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact”; Nabokov, too, was spiritualistic, in part a believer in ghostly forces that infiltrate our fallen mundane world.
But to return to that summer day on the Cottonwood Canyon road. John Downey, the boy who asked him what he was up to, already knew:
Downey was a collector himself, and later he would become a distinguished entomologist. In an audio recording he made late in life, he said,
Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah
I continued the
one-sided conversation
9
. “I’m a collector too!” This got a millisecond glance, and one raised eyebrow … but still no sound from him, nor slowing of his pace as he continued down-canyon. Finally, a nymphalid, as I recall, flitted across the road. “What’s that?” he asked. I gave him the scientific name as best I could remember, not having used the terms before with obvious professionals, and fresh out of Holland’s
Butterfly Book
. His pace didn’t slacken, but an eyebrow stayed higher a little longer this time. Yet another butterfly crossed the road. “What’s that?” says he. I gave him a name, a little less sure of myself now… . “Hm!” was his only response. A third test specimen crossed his vision… . I gave him my best idea and to my surprise he stopped, put out his arm, and said, “Hello! I’m Vladimir Nabokov.” And thus we met.
