Nabokov in America (13 page)

Wilson had lost a close friend, John Peale Bishop, the year before and would soon lose another, Paul Rosenfeld. In the year he met Nabokov, Scott Fitzgerald died, and Nabokov may have received some of the older-brotherly solicitude that Wilson—who had been
close to Fitzgerald since
¹⁶
college—might have tendered the needful Scott.

Nabokov’s signs of affection are everywhere. That he wrote to Wilson personally, rather than having Véra write on his behalf (his later practice even with close friends), is notable, as is the quality of what he wrote: brilliant, fluent passages of radiant prose. In March ’43, when Wilson was married to Mary McCarthy, Nabokov wrote, “In the middle of April I shall spend a day in New York … and I simply must see you both. I miss you a lot.” In another letter, “
You are one of
¹⁷
the very few people in the world whom I keenly miss when I do not see them.”

Nabokov
had
other male friends
¹⁸
. His letters to them, mostly in Russian, are warm and engaging but nothing like the letters to Wilson. Just as in his love letters to Véra, he felt free to report his every literary gambit, his every career win, big or small:

I hope you
¹⁹
will enjoy reading my new paper on Lepidoptera, which I am appending. Try reading it
between
the descriptions—though there are some fine bits in them too. I have just finished writing a story for the
Atlantic
(Weeks rang me up 4 times to get another one after “Mlle O” [fifth chapter of the future
Speak, Memory
]—and I got a letter from an Institution called “Better Speech” something, asking me the permission to use a paragraph from “Mlle O” in their manual …).

The recitation of triumphs verges on the insufferable. Nabokov blamed Wilson for this: “
if I keep talking
²⁰
about my affairs in such detail it is because I feel it is you who have given me the great Push.”

Mary McCarthy, trying to account for their devotion, said, “they had
an absolute ball
²¹
together. Edmund was always in a state of
joy
when Vladimir appeared; he
loved
him.” There were raucous, bibulous visits back and forth, to Wilson’s houses on the Cape and to the residences the Nabokovs rented. Vladimir told biographer Andrew Field that Wilson was “in certain ways
my closest
²²
” friend; nor did he say, “my closest
American
friend.” Their companionability, even in a political sense, needs to be noted, considering their intense disagreements over the Soviet state. Both were extreme individualists and free-speech near fundamentalists. Both were philo-Semitic at a time when prominent English-language authors—Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, many others—signaled a sham gentility by disdaining Jews. Nabokov’s review of
The Guillotine at Work
, which failed to appear in the
New Republic
despite a preface by Wilson—the magazine wished to take a less hostile stance toward Stalin in the winter of 1942—acknowledged that history needs idealists, which was Wilson’s position, too: “
without the impetus of such dreams the world would soon cease to turn.” Moreover, there were people “to whom the notion of human misery is so utterly revolting that they will plunge into any adventure that holds the faintest chance of improving the world,” and this “discloses the kind of unconscious optimism which man, perhaps fortunately, will never forsake
²³
.”

*   *   *

Nabokov’s
duties at Wellesley were nominal: three classroom appearances in October and three in January, with six community-wide talks given over the course of the year. “
I am expected to participate in ‘social life,’ ” he told Wilson, but that was it—light duty and lots of time to write. He continued his report of projects undertaken, of wins: “I have sold another story to Weeks … it will appear in the Christmas number… . I have been working a good deal lately in my special branch of entomology, two papers of mine have appeared in a scientific journal.” He would produce “a rather ambitious work on mimetic phenomena
²⁴
,” he promised Wilson, as if Wilson had been waiting to hear this.

Wellesley sustained him for seven years. His employment status was always irregular, following the bumpy course of the war.
Shortly after Pearl
²⁵
Harbor, with budget cuts pending and the Soviet Union still in bad repute, college administrators were lukewarm toward Slavic studies, and the stock of Slavic experts declined. With tales of Soviet suffering gaining currency, and news of the Soviets’ brilliant, hard-to-be-believed victory over the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, whereby Hitler’s forecast of world conquest became incorrect, a vogue for things Russian set in. Nabokov was not offered employment for fall of ’42, after his artist-in-residence year, but
by spring of ’43
²⁶
he was at Wellesley teaching on a noncredit basis, and by academic year 1944–45 he was a near professor: the extracurricular instructor in Russian.

His anti-Soviet line, insisting on an equivalence between Com-munist and fascist tyrannies, made Mildred Helen McAfee, Wellesley’s president, uncomfortable. Headed for Washington to become the first director of the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), McAfee did not see his pox-on-both-your-houses stance as quite correct. She resisted pressure from a wealthy alumna to hire him in spring of ’42. It was
only after she had left
²⁷
for Washington, and after a year in the vocational wilderness for Nabokov, that conditions favored a return.

His teaching was expert, if eccentric. He was not a wrong-footed foreign lecturer who, straining in a language not his own, professes into a cultural void, into a human unknown; he carefully configured his pedagogy to his audience, and he had a gift for imagining that audience—for imagining any group of other minds. He might have mused upon his own creativity for a year, as a cosseted writer-in-residence, but instead he devised specific talks for specific situations—for students taking Spanish courses, he spoke about Don Quixote’s appeal to Russian dissenters, for Italian students he dilated upon Leonardo, and
for students taking zoology he spoke on lepidopterological mimicry, a special interest of his. In his
community-wide addresses
²⁸
, he chose writers the campus population could be expected to be familiar with: Chekhov, Turgenev, Tyutchev (a mistake there), and Tolstoy; of course Tolstoy.

He esteemed Tolstoy greatly. His father had been acquainted with the author, as a fellow fighter for social reform; as a ten-year-old, Vladimir waited while his father spoke with a “
little white-bearded
²⁹
old man” on a street in St. Petersburg, after which his father commented, “That was Tolstoy.” Tolstoy was so large, so indisputably the monument of the Russian novel, that Vladimir’s relations with him could not but be complex. Sometimes he found the master ludicrous as well as great. “
Have you noticed
³⁰
,” he wrote Wilson, “when reading
War and Peace
the difficulties Tolstoy experienced in forcing mortally wounded Bolkonsky to come into geographical … contact with Natasha? It is painful to watch the way the poor fellow is dragged and pushed and shoved.” In one way Tolstoy was unimpeachable, however: it was his ability to
match the passage of time
³¹
within a story to readers’ natural feel for time, so that, carried along on the great Volga of narrative, readers felt that everything happened more or less when it ought to, at the pace, seemingly, of “real life.” Nabokov’s own way with time is also often splendidly right-feeling, if complicated by modernist structural disjuncts—underneath all there is a deft modeling of others’ consciousness, others’ capacities, generous sympathy with an audience.

James Laughlin, his publisher, visited Boston in May ’42. Their first book together had sold little—America had entered a world war just as an obscure Russian was publishing a novel of epistemological doubt—but Laughlin did not turn away from him; he remained eager to publish him, and in defiance of the commercial fate of
Sebastian Knight
and of the tumult of the war, they agreed on two more books to do together, a study of the Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol and a volume of translations from Pushkin and Tyutchev.

Laughlin was in his twenties. He had graduated from Harvard only three years before. He was the great-grandson of an Irish immigrant who had founded a steel fortune. His upbringing was privileged; his great-uncle Henry Clay Frick was a coal magnate and chairman of Carnegie Steel, and Laughlins were industrialists of weight and
influence. James decided early that “I would
not go into the mill
³²
,” yet his turn away from the family business did not include a turn away from the family; as he wrote when given an award many years later, “
none of this
³³
[the publishing house he founded and its literary successes] would have been possible without the industry of my ancestors, the canny Irishmen who immigrated in 1824 from County Down [and] built up what became the fourth largest steel company in the country. I bless them with every breath.”

He wrote poetry himself. But Ezra Pound, to whom Laughlin made pilgrimage in the mid-thirties, advised him to become a publisher instead, and Pound’s recommendations of worthy writers to pursue helped make him
the
independent
³⁴
publisher in the English language in the twentieth century. In May ’42, with no academic job in the offing, Nabokov was greatly buoyed to have books to write for him. Gogol could be personally useful, too: to write of Gogol would be another way to introduce himself, to further the planned Russification of the American reader.

Though he worked hard he soon bogged down. The problem was that quotations from Gogol needed for his book had been
poorly translated
³⁵
by others. Constance Garnett’s translation of Gogol’s
The Government Inspector
was “
dry shit
³⁶
,” he told Laughlin, and his days were taken up with retranslating passages from it and others from
Dead Souls
.
‡
Garnett’s version of the novel had appeared in ’23 and was the standard English translation. But Gogol was too important a writer to be botched; he had brought a bizarre, fantastical mind and a bright new eye to Russian letters, and Nabokov needed to evidence that, to write about it. “Before his and Pushkin’s advent,”

Russian literature was purblind
³⁷
… . It did not see color for itself but merely used the hackneyed combinations of blind noun and dog-like adjective that Europe had inherited from the ancients… . The sky was blue, the dawn red, the foliage green… . It was Gogol (and after him Lermontov and Tolstoy) who first saw yellow and violet at all.

A
famous passage from
Dead Souls
—made famous by Nabokov, in two books and countless lectures—reads, in the serviceable, certainly not illiterate, Garnett version,

The big overgrown
³⁸
and neglected old garden which stretched at the back of the house, and coming out behind the village, disappeared into the open country, seemed the one refreshing feature in the great rambling village, and in its picturesque wildness was the only beautiful thing in the place. The interlacing tops of the unpruned trees lay in clouds of greenery and irregular canopies of trembling foliage against the horizon. The colossal white trunk of a birch-tree, of which the crest had been snapped off by a gale or a tempest, rose out of this green maze and stood up like a round shining marble column; the sharp slanting angle, in which it ended instead of in a capital, looked dark against the snowy whiteness of the trunk, like a cap or a blackbird.

Nabokov makes this,

An extensive old garden which stretched behind the house and beyond the estate to lose itself in the fields, alone seemed, rank and rugged as it was, to lend a certain freshness to these extensive grounds and alone was completely picturesque in its vivid wildness. The united tops of trees that had grown wide in liberty spread above the skyline in masses of green clouds and irregular domes of tremulous leafage. The colossal white trunk of a birchtree deprived of its top, which had been broken off by some gale or thunderbolt, rose out of these dense green masses and disclosed its rotund smoothness in midair, like a well proportioned column of sparkling marble; the oblique, sharply pointed fracture in which, instead of a capital, it terminated above, showed black against its snowy whiteness like some kind of headpiece or a dark bird
³⁹
.

Both versions seem a bit wordy after seventy years. Nabokov cares about that not at all; his standard is not concision but fidelity to Gogol’s words and pace (“
udar molnii
,” for example, is rendered as “gale or thunderbolt,” not as “a gale or a tempest,” which flirts with redundancy, aside from being incorrect). He manages a certain streaming quality in the prose, a subtle onrushingness absent from the Garnett. His first sentence comes to rest on the exciting “vivid wildness”; Garnett
concludes instead with the benign, doughy “the only beautiful thing in the place.”

This passage of lyric description—somewhat unusual in
Dead Souls
—may have excited Nabokov for reason of its thoroughness, its air of going the whole hog, taking all the time it needs to make its subject live. That subject is a bit of greenery, no more—nature and man’s diggings and plantings all run together, higgledy-piggledy, somewhere in Russia. One can walk on, pay it not a moment’s thought, or—wait a second—look again.
See
it thoroughly and try afterward to put it in words, using metaphors if necessary, being fanciful and funny and even ominous: “showed black against its snowy whiteness,” Nabokov writes, “like some kind of headpiece or a dark bird.” (Garnett mistranslates and trivializes, makes cuddly, with “a cap or a blackbird.”)