Nabokov in America (12 page)

Ralph Waldo Emerson had come to Yosemite. Presidents including Kennedy, Eisenhower, Roosevelt, Taft, and Grant had come to look and to acknowledge the grandeur. As with all of his western travels, Nabokov began with the desire to capture insects, and though his stepping on a bear suggests the usual obsessive focus, he had other purposes, too. To set Dmitri free in an outdoor setting was one, and to consort with Americans in an American place in an American way was, if not the first item on his agenda, agreeable. In coming years there would be many other trips to parks. In his correspondence with Altagracia de Jannelli, Vladimir had spoken of being charmed by “that old-fashioned something” that clings to America despite the “hard glitter,” and the parks,
whatever else they do, serve up a benign milieu with a democratic flavor, rustic in style (thus “old-fashioned”), inexpensive, healthful as long as you don’t fall off a cliff, and a comfortable distance from what is daring and amoral and ultramodernistic (to cite cultural tendencies that Nabokov said he deplored).
‖

By September of ’41,
when the Nabokovs came
⁴⁶
, the park had made most of its accommodations to the automobile, including paving the roads. The weather in early
September is blissful
⁴⁷
; rain is rare, and days in the valley are warm and cloudless. Nights are good for sleeping at four thousand feet. The Nabokovs were off the peak of the tourist season, although the cars that September before the war were still numerous. On September 9 or 10, the Thompsons
drove them back
⁴⁸
to Palo Alto.

Nabokov might have made a whole life in the West. The lepping was fantastic, and he responded joyfully to the landscapes. Writing to the artist Dobuzhinsky, he remarked on the palette of the Grand Canyon, which he mistakenly located in New Mexico: the uncanny “cleaves and cleavages” of orange earth and blue sky were captivating, he reported. In Russian there are different words for light blue (
goluboy
) and dark blue (
siniy
), and
Russian speakers have been shown
⁴⁹
to be faster at discriminating among blue tones than are English speakers. “
How wonderful was
⁵⁰
the journeying!” he enthused. “I, of course, in the main caught butterflies along the road, but nonetheless by habit investigated the excellent landmarks.”

Americans were
a restless people
⁵¹
. They liked to travel long distances, often for fun, which made them different from many Europeans. The greatest distances in the United States are in the West; westerners are therefore the biggest travelers. Nabokov soon became
the kind of traveler
⁵²
who makes a daily record of miles driven and gallons of gas purchased, along with sights seen and motels or other lodgings
patronized (including the occasional dude ranch). When away from his vacation haunts, he spoke of plans to return soon to his beloved West, and he mused that it would be ideal
to own a cabin
⁵³
out there as well as a New York apartment, a cabin close to “a certain
little bit of desert
⁵⁴
in Arizona which I shall never forget.”

*
Nabokov did not go to California ignorant of its writers and its literature. A letter to Wilson from Palo Alto acknowledges receipt of Wilson’s “delightful book”
The Boys in the Back Room: Notes on California Novelists
, recently published, and Nabokov added that he had read most of the essays when they appeared earlier in the
New Republic
, on such writers as John Steinbeck, Nathanael West, James M. Cain, John O’Hara, and William Saroyan.

†
The English novelist Martin Amis takes the opportunity, in a December 2011
Times Literary Supplement
review, to express his high regard for Nabokov. Discussing a new essay collection from Brian Boyd, he observes that the biographer “attempts something fairly ambitious: he takes the titanic Nabokov and seeks to revise him
upwards
.” But Boyd, he says, is “something of an apologist for the only significant embarrassment in the Nabokov corpus. Of the nineteen fictions, no fewer than six wholly or partly concern themselves with the sexuality of prepubescent girls… . To be as clear as one can be: the unignorable infestation of nymphets … is not a matter of morality; it is a matter of aesthetics. There are just too many of them.”

The pedophilia theme is not only about aesthetics. The repetition suggests a compulsion—a literary equivalent of the persistent impulse of a pedophile. A self-conscious writer in the best sense, Nabokov is unlikely not to have noticed the tendency of his own body of work. In the absence of evidence of actual relations with children—evidence that his biographers, no matter how worshipful, have tried to find—the suspicion arises that he sensed something that he could do, something some writer ought to do, with the theme of a child taken sexually. Mostly ignored or treated covertly before, the subject attracted him for reasons probably not fully clear to him until he rendered it in
Lolita
. The child there is brought to full, suffering life, the bleakness of her captivity shown, along with its suggestive absurdity. There were many children like Lolita at the time, many housed in protective institutions. Nabokov never aimed to “reform,” but his affinity for stories of the forbidden, of humiliation and compulsion, played half for laughs, brought him and his readers to a great uncovering.

‡
Black bears were plentiful in the valley in the 1940s. Promotional films of the time show tourists feeding them by hand, and cubs were quick to learn how to stand on their hind legs to take food.

§
Yosemite epitomized western tourism. Since the 1870s it had drawn travelers coming west by rail; railroads described its enchantments in the promotional guides they published, which, along with journalism about travel and travelers’ memoirs, argued that Yosemite and sites like it justified tourism as much as did the castles and cathedrals of Europe. Travel to Europe had always been out of reach for many Americans; when World War I made Europe temporarily unavailable even to the wealthy, western tourism boomed. Henry Ford introduced the Model T in ’08, and roads began to improve in many regions, although slowly. In 1913, a ban on cars in the valley was relaxed. The world’s fairs at San Francisco and San Diego in ’15 brought thousands of car travelers to California, and many included a Yosemite side trip.

‖
It was a milieu that also made a good foil for what
was
daring and amoral and modernistic—for things that went on behind the facade. Thus, in his sexual delirium in fictional 1947–48, when he drives around America with a child captive, Humbert Humbert takes in many national parks and monuments. They visit Rocky Mountain, Mesa Verde, Crater Lake, Yellowstone, and Wind Cave National Parks, and the Bandolier, Gila Cliff Dwellings, Canyon de Chelly, and Death Valley National Monuments. They also stop at the National Elk Refuge, in Wyoming, the Lincoln Home National Historic Site, in Springfield, Illinois, and Mount Rushmore National Memorial.

6.

From
New York, where they
arrived by train
¹
with colds, the family traveled on to Boston. Vladimir’s two-week stint at Wellesley College the previous March had been so successful—so charming, so winning had he proved as a literary visitor—that the college had offered him a writer’s residency at a yearly salary of three thousand dollars (an associate professor’s pay). By September 18 they were
established in an apartment
²
in a house on a dead-end street in Wellesley, twenty miles west of Boston. “We have
just rolled back
³
to the East,” he immediately wrote Edmund Wilson. “I shall be teaching Comparative Literature here for a year. I want very much to see you.”

Anyone who reads of the falling-out that came, two decades later, for the two writers—a savage, ultra-public bloodletting, maybe the last such battle of the pedants ever to be staged in America, although who knows—must marvel at the emotional distance traveled, the tenor of friendship thus sacrificed. “Dear Bunny,” Nabokov had written him in the early forties,

I got that Guggenheim
⁴
Fellowship. Thanks, dear friend. “You bring good luck” [Russian saying to this effect]. I have noticed that whenever you are involved in any of my affairs they are always successful… . I shall pass through N.Y. on Wednesday and Thursday, 14th and 15th of April. I shall ring you up if you tell me your ’phone number.

Wilson
had urged Nabokov to apply for the Guggenheim. Then he had written an irresistible letter on his behalf.
*
In due course the fellowship came through.
To say that Nabokov
⁵
would have been awarded a Guggenheim at age forty-three without Wilson’s help is fanciful—no previous grantee had been older than forty.

“Dear Wilson,” Nabokov wrote him in ’41,

a big
spaseebo
⁶
for “contacting” me with
Decision
and “New Direction.” I had a very pleasant talk with Klaus Mann [son of Thomas Mann and editor of
Decision
] who suggested my writing for them an article of 2000 words. I got a letter from James Laughlin and am sending him my English novel.

The English novel was
Sebastian Knight
, and Wilson, besides helping it see print, was at that time “contacting” Nabokov with many influential people, many publishing outlets. In December ’40 Wilson had written,

I am leaving
⁷
The New Republic
at the end of this week, but I have arranged with Bruce Bliven [president of the magazine’s editorial board] to have you do a periodical article … about contemporary Russian literature. I suppose each one ought to be limited to perhaps 1,500 words, unless there is a good deal that is very important.

Earlier he had advised,

In doing future
⁸
reviews, please follow exactly
The New Republic
usage giving the title, author, etc., at the top. You will note that the number of pages and the [book] price are included. I am enclosing an example. Another thing: please do refrain from puns,
to which I see you have a slight propensity. They are pretty much excluded from serious journalism here.

Famously supportive—there is no writer in our literature who so loyally helped so many—Wilson is here pulling out all the stops. Connections to editors ready to pay (“I should think Klaus Mann would … pay you more than the [
Partisan Review
]”); advice on submitting clean copy; editorial advice (Nabokov sends him stories, poems, translations, and complete books, and Wilson reads all); strategizing over live editor management (“send it to Nigel Dennis, who is now in charge … reminding him that I had arranged … with Bliven”): here is the full gamut run. Wilson’s helpfulness has been attributed by some Nabokov scholars to self-interest, to his intoxication with all things Russian, to his eagerness to practice the language. While there were benefits to associating with a Russian writer, such explanations fail to account for Wilson’s remarkable energy and steadfastness. In ’44, he brokered Nabokov’s entrée into the
New Yorker
as a prose writer, a crucial maneuver of inestimable value to his career; chapters from what would be
Speak, Memory
soon began to appear, along with short stories, and Katharine White, fiction editor at the magazine, became another important Nabokov rabbi. Alexandra Tolstoy, of the Tolstoy Foundation, had warned him, “
All Americans are
⁹
completely uncultured, credulous fools,” and while the verdict is still out on that, Nabokov’s experience in his first years in America was that cultured, powerful people were magically available to him.

Without
Wilson’s stewardship
¹⁰
, the road would have been different—there might not have been a road. Boyd, who derogates Wilson, allows that “
Nabokov was introduced
¹¹
from the start to the best that American intellectual life had to offer,” but the magus of this introduction was surely Wilson.
Sebastian Knight
had had no luck with publishers despite the best efforts of two agents, until Wilson interceded with Laughlin; thereafter, as Nabokov wrote, “
My English novel
¹²
has been accepted by New Directions, and Laughlin came to see me here from Los Angeles… . It will appear in Octobre.”

Nabokov’s prose could attract the attention of the
New Yorker
editors because Wilson had arranged for it to appear earlier in the
Atlantic
; his intimacy with Weeks of the
Atlantic
was such that when Nabokov asked for help getting payment from him, Wilson wrote, “
I don’t want to mention
¹³
it to him, because I do a good deal of recommending as to what he ought to print … and he might resent it if I tried to tell him when he ought to pay his contributors as well.”

Nabokov
referred to Wilson as a “magician,” intending praise of Wilson’s cleverness, but he was speaking also of Wilson’s effective sponsorship. Having translated a Pushkin monologue, he turned to Wilson with it: “
Could you god-father
¹⁴
it—if you find the translation all right?” he asked, meaning find a magazine for it. “And I would be immensely grateful to you for any corrections.”
†

Though there are arguments from self-interest, if we take Wilson at his word, and Nabokov at his, the grounds for their intense involvement for years were simple: they were good friends. They fell for each other, hard. “Dear Volodya,” Wilson wrote him in March ’45,

I get aboard my boat
¹⁵
[to Europe] Wednesday… . I’ll be away four to six months. Good luck in the meantime. By the way, if you really want an academic job, you might write to Lewis Jones, president of Bennington and say that you are the person I mentioned to him… . Our conversations have been among the few consolations of my literary life through these last years—when my old friends have been dying, petering out or getting more and more neurotic, and the general state of the world has been so discouraging.