Nabokov in America (18 page)

Cousin Vladimir, buried beneath insect work, began to stir fictionally. He credited Véra with pulling him back from the brink, from the lepidopteral fascination that was swallowing all of his time:

Véra
has had a serious
⁶
conversation with me… . Having sulkily pulled [the beginning pages of
Bend Sinister
] out from under my butterfly manuscripts I discovered … that it was good, and … that the [first] twenty pages at least could be typed and submitted… . I have [also] lain with my Russian muse after a long period of adultery and am sending you the big poem she bore… . I have also almost finished a story in English.

Nikolai Gogol
now complete, Nabokov began scheming over how to escape the deal he had with Laughlin, the second part of which required
him to write other books for little pay. Wilson proposed that they use the translations that Nabokov had been making and
collaborate on “a book
⁷
on Russian literature—I contributing [the] essays … you contributing translations.” Wilson had been writing about Russian authors for
The Atlantic
, and he foresaw a book that “with the mounting interest in Russian, would have a certain sale. There would be nothing like it in English.”

This period of their correspondence shows them fully entwined, intimates of the heart and of the page. Wilson sent his
Atlantic
pieces to Nabokov for comment: “
You may find them
⁸
annoying, but they pretend to be nothing more than the first impressions of a foreigner,” he wrote. Nabokov replied, “
I am returning
⁹
your proofs. Véra and I liked this and the other article
enormously
.” Wilson was trespassing on Nabokov’s terrain, the Russian literary mother lode, but Vladimir welcomed it; even Wilson’s take on Pushkin, the most revered progenitor, found favor. Wilson needs to not be underestimated. His essay on Pushkin is
superb journalism
¹⁰
, and its authority and insight may reflect debts he owed Nabokov, which Nabokov was flattered to detect.
†
But Nabokov knew what a special colleague he had in Wilson. To no other contemporary writer, with the exception of the émigré poet Khodasevich (1886–1939), did he make similar
gestures of respect
¹¹
. Hoping to bring
The Gift
, the novel he considered his masterwork, before American readers, he asked Wilson to translate it:

So I am still looking
¹²
for somebody who might make a translation of that 500 page book… . I know of one man who could do it if I helped him with his Russian. This is a roundabout way of putting it but I am afraid you have other dogs to beat whereas I have no illusions about the sums Laughlin can pay.

Indeed, Wilson had other projects; he wrote back, “
If I had the leisure
¹³
, I’d be glad to translate your book. I’d like to see you translated… . But I’ve got so many things … that I couldn’t possibly.”

Nabokov
now sent nearly everything Wilson’s way. Lepidopteral papers, old poems, parts of novels, a play. He sent
Nikolai Gogol
and “
the whole book
¹⁴
” of what was later
Three Russian Poets
. (It was published by Laughlin: the scheme to co-author a work with Wilson finally came to nothing.) Nabokov resembles an overeager younger brother, perhaps, confident that his every word will find favor. He senses that he goes too far sometimes; in January ’44, he wrote, “
An obscure paper
¹⁵
on some obscure butterflies in an obscure scientific journal is another sample of Nabokoviana which will soon be in your hands,” and in March, “I would have sent [the
Gogol
proofs] for a critical examination had I not known how busy you [are] reading books.”

The friendship was exciting and inspiring. Uniquely in Nabokov’s oeuvre, he acknowledges direct inspiration, the taking of his lead from another:

Are you writing
¹⁶
a lot? I liked your school recollections.
‡
I think I shall write about my
Tenishevskoe Oochilishche
[his St. Petersburg high school] soon—you have
declenché
that particular sequence [unleashed that store of memories, such as] the Russian teacher … at whom I threw a chair once; the terrific fistfights which I thoroughly enjoyed because, though weaker than the two or three main bullies, I had had private lessons of boxing and
savate
 … and the soccer in the yard, and the nightmare exams, and the Polish boy who paraded his first clap.

The question of how much to send Wilson, how deeply to presume on his attention, proved important. Nabokov’s novel in progress,
Bend Sinister
, went in January ’44, then went on to an editor at Doubleday. Wilson, now a regular reviewer for the
New Yorker
, read Nabokov’s early pages and liked them “very much,” he wrote back; “am
eager to see the rest of it.” The
New Yorker
was keeping him busy—he produced lengthy reviews on almost a weekly basis. He might have read Nabokov’s pages a little hastily. He penciled in some comments, on Nabokov’s use of some English verbs, but encouragingly pronounced the thing “excellent
¹⁷
.”

It did not find favor at Doubleday. That hardly mattered: Nabokov had so powerful a conception of the novel that he confidently told
Wilson, “it will contain 315 pages” and that “Towards the end … there will be the looming and development of an idea which has
never
been treated before.” Most of the book was
written two years later
¹⁸
, in the winter-spring of 1945–46. A dystopian novel, a political novel, despite Nabokov’s disavowal of political novels and message writing, it has affinities with his Kafkaesque novel of the thirties,
Invitation to a Beheading
, but betrays an evolution in the direction of modernist difficulty, of challenging reading. Altagracia de Jannelli, had she still been his career coach, might have declared him headed in exactly the wrong direction. Brian Boyd, whose biography contains readings of all the novels, most of which Boyd judges works of supreme art, speaks of “a
programmatic refusal
¹⁹
to satisfy the ordinary interests of readers” with
Bend Sinister
. It is “self-conscious” and without the “obvious charms” of some of Nabokov’s other works, Boyd says.

The novel’s off-putting elements include a modernist mixing of styles: straight narration along with parodies of narration; a witty, tiresome chapter of exegesis of
Hamlet
and other Shakespeare commentary; direct addresses to the reader, to signal that the author is aware of writing a text, as the reader needs to know; fancy words in fussy passages interruptive of the story’s flow. Krug, the hero, is a world-famous philosopher and “man of genius” who, early in the book, is easy to take for a stand-in for a self-regarding author. His misfortune consists in being a prominent citizen of a police state, whose dictator, a former schoolmate, wants him to make statements supporting the regime. Nabokov’s disgust with Nazism and Stalinism might have influenced his decision to treat the fictional regime with disdain: to show the murderers and torturers to be cretins and clowns. A kind of antic comedy breaks out at intervals, with the punch line darkened by beastliness.

At the beginning, Krug’s wife has died. Krug keeps the news from their child:

There at the [nursery]
door
²⁰
he stopped and the thumping of his heart was suddenly interrupted by his little son’s special bedroom voice, detached and courteous, employed by David with graceful precision to notify his parents (when they returned, say, from a dinner in town) that he was still awake and ready to receive anybody who would like to wish him a second goodnight.

David will be taken hostage by the state and murdered. The novel, which includes disparagements of some bestselling American novels,
proceeds in a conventional way, with deep devotion to family the wellspring of all its action. “
The main theme
²¹
of
Bend Sinister
,” Nabokov wrote twenty years later, in a dyspeptic introduction to a new edition, “is the beating of Krug’s loving heart, the torture an intense tenderness is subjected to—and it is for the sake of the pages about David and his father that the book was written and should be read.” If this is so, then the theme is handled clumsily. The references to David are treacly, and Krug’s devotion to his late wife is paraded but remains abstract—a reader hears of it but does not feel it.

A secondary character
²²
, Ember, resembles Edmund Wilson in many ways and enjoys an intimate friendship with Krug based on literary affinity. They are deeply simpatico. Some Nabokov scholars argue that
Wilson’s failure
²³
to recognize the elaborate and loving tribute to him was a shock to Nabokov and a disappointment; the Shakespearean exegesis is just the sort of thing that they liked to engage in, and the book is fruitcaked with bits designed for Wilson’s taste, including an elaborate play on the title of one of Mary McCarthy’s novels.
Wilson, when the book
²⁴
appeared, said nothing about the character Ember or about any in-jokes. He disliked the novel. “I was rather disappointed in
Bend Sinister
,” begins his letter of January 30, 1947:

I had had some doubts
²⁵
when I was reading the parts you showed me… . Other people may very well think otherwise: I know, for example, that Allen Tate [the editor who acquired the book for Holt] is tremendously excited about it—he told me that he considered it “a great book.” But I feel that, though it is crammed with good things … it is not one of your greatest successes. First of all, it seems to me that it suffers from the same weakness as that play [
The Waltz Invention
, also about a dictator]. You aren’t good at this kind of subject, which involves questions of politics and social change, because you are totally uninterested in these matters and have never taken the trouble to understand them.

This is Wilson’s frankest, most detailed critique of a Nabokov novel of which there is written record. There is every reason to think that Nabokov, while irritated or saddened, read it carefully:

For you, a dictator
²⁶
 … is simply a vulgar and odious person who bullies serious and superior people like Krug. You have no idea why or how the [dictator in your book] was able to put himself
over, or what his revolution implies. And this makes your picture of such happenings rather unsatisfactory. Now don’t tell me that the real artist has nothing to do with the issues of politics. An artist may not take politics seriously, but, if he deals with such matters at all, he ought to know what it is all about. Nobody could be more … intent on pure art than Walter Pater, whose
Gaston de Latour
I have just been reading; but I declare that he has a great deal more insight into [the religious politics] raging in the sixteenth century than you have into the conflicts of the twentieth.

The book drew few good reviews. As Nabokov would note twenty years later, it made a “
dull thud
²⁷
.” Wilson went on:

I think, too
²⁸
, that your invented country has not served you particularly well. Your strength lies so much in precise observation that, in combining Germanic and Slavic [elements in your setting], you have produced something that does not seem real… . Beside the actual Nazi Germany and the actual Stalinist Russia, the adventures of your unfortunate professor have the air of an unpleasant burlesque. I never believed in him much from the beginning… . As it is, what you are left with … is a satire on events so terrible that they really can’t be satirized.

Wilson was bored by the novel. It had “longueurs” unlike anything else he had read by Nabokov. He understood that his friend was aiming at a “denser texture of prose” full of learned allusions, but the fatty writing
reminded him of Thomas
²⁹
Mann—one of Nabokov’s hated “second-raters.”

The sting of this scolding lasted a long time. In the dyspeptic introduction already referred to, Nabokov struck back not at Wilson personally (“A kind friend, Edmund Wilson, read the typescript …”) but at obtuse readers who require of an author explanations of his allusions and imagery. The Nabokov of ’63 was among the most successful writers in the world. People could not still doubt his genius, could they? But still he rode the hobbyhorse of antipolitics, and still he thundered against the “literature of social comment,” like a stern schoolmaster shaking an errant pupil by the shoulders. The world’s conviction that politics matter offended him—how stupid of the world.

The novel was not entirely unsuccessful. In some of the late chapters, Nabokov stops scoring points and writes with radiant immediacy, in a
blackly humorous tone that recalls one of his fiercest, most readable earlier novels,
Laughter in the Dark
, and looks forward to his next—to the densely allusive, morally complex, joyously readable
Lolita
. In ways both large and small,
Lolita
looms in the sad action:

She was standing
³⁰
in the tub, sinuously soaping her back or at least such parts of her narrow, variously dimpled, glistening back which she could reach by throwing her arm across her shoulder. Her hair was up, with a kerchief or something twisted around it. The mirror reflected a brown armpit and a poppling pale nipple. “Ready in a sec,” she sang out.

This is Mariette, a diminutive, cruel police spy who comes to work as a governess for Krug. Krug “
slammed the door
³¹
[to the bath] with a great show of disgust,” but moments later he imagines Mariette’s “adolescent buttocks,” and a few days later “he dreamt that he was surreptitiously enjoying Mariette while she sat, wincing a little, in his lap during the rehearsal of a play in which she was supposed to be his daughter.”