Nabokov in America (2 page)

What we see here is the formidable, the often remote and condescending, Nabokov
making a new friend
. Downey was not the first of his
many butterfly friends; one of his first stops off the boat from France was at the American Museum of Natural History, on Central Park West at Seventy-ninth Street, where he introduced himself to the staff and immediately charmed them. Nabokov’s life for the previous twenty years had been fellow-collector-starved; he had been busy eking out a living, unable to arrange many trips in the field or even to museums. Meanwhile he had read widely in the scientific literature and was eager to visit legendary American sites of collection. People like William P. Comstock, a museum research assistant, were doing work he respected, and just as important, the AMNH staff was a cohort of devotees as eager as he was to get out into the field. They spoke his native language—not Russian, taxonomic Latin—and his boyish pleasure when on the hunt or when looking at butterflies under a microscope made perfect sense to them.

Here we see Nabokov fulfilling another prophecy out of original American writ. It holds that upon these shores will be founded a new relation among men, democratic, frank, noneffete. Though not much of a
reader of Whitman
¹⁰
, he fulfilled Walt’s injunction to befriend ordinary folk, to take rough comrades to one’s bosom. Academic entomologists are not New York workmen circa 1855, nor are they the Civil War soldiers whom Whitman nursed, but they
are
real Americans, people imbued with a praxis. They do things in the world, they travel and get dirty. For Nabokov they became devoted friends.

I came to Nabokov young, and I have remained a reader for fifty years. The excellence of some of his books moves me—I like especially the ones written while he lived in the United States, in what the biographers call his “American period,” 1940 to 1960. During a visit to an archive of historical documents some years ago I found myself seated across the table from an older gentleman who kept chuckling as he read a batch of old letters; when he left for lunch, I peeked and, wouldn’t you know it, they were letters of Nabokov.
But that’s what
I
want to be reading
, I realized, suddenly disenchanted with my Civil War manuscripts.
Those letters should be on
my
side of the table
.

I traveled several thousand miles in the East and West, looking for his traces, trying to nail down details of where he’d stayed, what he’d seen, who he’d befriended, which mountains he’d climbed. In Afton, Wyoming, I found his favorite motel from the summer of ’52, pretty much unchanged, and on the border of Rocky Mountain National Park
in Colorado, I found the rustic lodge where Véra and he had rented a cabin—the structure still stands, though now disused. I don’t claim to be the first fan to have put hand to forehead and face to dusty window pane and peered inside. There he is, his figment, his ghost—still it walks these cracked floorboards, still it lies down at night on one of those broken cots.

Going where Nabokov had been and seeing what he’d seen did not, in the end, add much to my research. More profitable was to sit in a chair for a couple of years and reread his books, making forays meanwhile into the critical literature that has toadstooled up around the magnificent two-trunked Russian birch that the writer once was. About this literature I have a couple of things to say. One: it is very well written by the standards of the academy, graced with clarity and humor and intellectual honesty—this is the more miraculous considering that the first studies of Nabokov came into being just as critical theory was subduing one university English department after another. Those men and women who chose to write about Nabokov were, in the style of their subject, practitioners of elegant expression, instinctual haters of jargon, and their work, lacking many of the markers of the 1970s
au courant
, remains readable today.

Two: the scholars of Nabokov, being scholars, rejoice in discovering what is recherché, and they bring as much stamina and rigor to their efforts as they can summon. Nabokov sets an affectionate trap for such readers, being of a pedantic turn of mind himself and having left behind a body of work as if designed for picking over. Nuggets of hidden reference are everywhere, if one looks a certain way. There is an ever-narrowing quality to the hunt sometimes, and a common reader such as me feels a quiet dismay: When will the fossicking be finished? Can we not get back to saying simpler, possibly more urgent, things about the great author?

In a small way this book is an attempt to borrow Nabokov back from the scholars. The novelist himself put much effort into teaching ordinary Americans how to catch his devious sense.
*
Though often
condescending, he was not the kind of literary artist to shy away from contact with the common herd, as long as the herd came to him on his own terms. In America he hoped to find a large readership, and unlike many innovative writers of the past century he was willing to think practically about how to go about getting it.

I am deeply indebted, as a reader of this book will soon discover, to the Nabokovs’ excellent foundational biographers: Brian Boyd, author of
Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years
(1990) and
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years
(1991), and Stacy Schiff, author of the enchanting
Véra
(1999). Because these writers did such good jobs of re-creating the Nabokovs’ lives day to day I did not have to reinvent that wheel—did not, at some points, dare to.

On a number of other matters I came to differ with both of them, however. (“Predictably enough,” a reader of second-generation biographies will wryly add.) The sheer flabbergasting
Americanness
of Nabokov’s transformation, the way he opened himself to local influences once here—and long before, when he was only dreaming of one day escaping to the United States—impressed itself upon me again and again. In the standard account, Nabokov makes the profound change of writing in English after decades of writing and publishing in Russian, and that’s enough—that’s intellectual upheaval, profound transformation, enough for anyone. In America, the standard account goes on, he looked around and with his impossibly sharp eye began to render what he saw,
I Am a Camera
fashion. I agree, but there was much more. His wide-ranging and semi-surreptitious immersion in American cultural materials, his assimilating of our literary traditions and bringing them to bear on his own modernist literary enterprise, struck me powerfully. No surprise, if you think of it: he was the kind of classical writer who moves forward by thinking of similarities, ingenious connections, to earlier authors and their works. He had done that when he wrote in Russian, generating his own stories out of a fabulously fertile grasp of older Slavic writers he loved (and some he loved only to make fun of), and he would do the same when he wrote in American English.

Boyd and others are ready to admit that America represented an opening, a refreshing change, but the basic account holds that America was but one phase of an ongoing pageant of greatness. There were twenty years in Berlin and France, where he wrote marvelous books in Russian; then came twenty years in America, where he wrote books in English that were also marvelous; followed by nearly twenty in Switzerland, living in a five-star hotel, writing the incomparable
late-career masterworks. To this I say: not quite. There is beauty and magic all over Nabokov’s body of work, but the claim to greatness rests most solidly on the American books. This is not just a function of his midcareer fame, of the fact that
Lolita
secured for him the vast readership he had long coveted.
Lolita
may be why millions of people still remember his name (although they tend to mispronounce it
†
), but his immersion in American life provoked changes far more significant than did, say, his encounters with German life in Berlin or his Swiss encounters in his last decades.

He did not come to love Germany (Russians rarely do), and Switzerland was mostly a place of dignified refuge, a place to work and gather tribute. But he
did
love America—many things about vulgar, far-flung America. His embrace of it and his comfort with the changes it forced on him had something to do with all that joyous butterfly collecting, something also to do with being able to raise a healthy, promising child in America at midcentury. After the murderous nights of Europe, after Russia and Germany in their seizures of totalitarian madness, America was a place in which to breathe more easily, but—and here is the slight twist—he did not become complacent artistically. Instead he began to write with a new audacity, with, I would argue, an American-style effrontery.

Nabokov’s American Period, that neat twenty-year interval, has become mythic. Penniless and without a secure language to write in at first, he became the most famous literary writer in English in the world, author of a sexy smash bestseller and of other works of great distinction. His early Russian novels began to be republished, in translations that he himself controlled, and soon he was declared an immortal, a giant on the order of Proust, Joyce, Kafka. Struggling writers everywhere took note. Even those without much taste for him admired the force of will, the sheer scintillating panache of him. If Nabokov could do it, then maybe they could, too.

Maybe his style, so exacting and sesquipedalian, so larded with puns and learned references, was never really to the taste of the mainstream.
To put it another way: maybe not all of his books are the deathless classics he announces them to be in the arrogant introductions he wrote to those English republications. Maybe
Lolita
continues to work like an Oklahoma tornado—to scandalize and amuse and horrify, while putting a creepy, horny claw on an American obsession with child rape that only he seems to have noticed. But maybe some of us can make it through life without having to reread
Ada
. Maybe
Look at the Harlequins!
,
Transparent Things
,
Bend Sinister
,
Invitation to a Beheading
,
Despair
—even long sections of
The Gift
, the Russian novel of which he was most proud—are less than compelling. He was always a forceful promoter of his own brand, and maybe we have been in some sense sold a bill of goods.

No matter. The myth remains, and the books do, too, ever ready for rediscovery. The story of what he made of adversity is authentically inspiring, and parents of kids who love books should tell it at the hearth and the bedside, pointing out where a refusal to compromise high standards won through in the end (while an ability to politick, to find mentors, to take on new coloring, to borrow shamelessly and exhort tirelessly in one’s own behalf came in handy, too).

The flight to America, with the nightmare of war closing upon his wake, was the great stroke of luck—but, as with everything else, it had long been prepared for. The
real
mystery is how he contrived to be
taught to read English at age four, before he read Russian
¹¹
; how he managed to have an American-style liberal constitutionalist for a father, who imbued him with Anglophilia and set him to dreaming about Anglophone lands. Wandering the parks of his family’s estate he was already imagining himself in a cowboys-and-Indians story, and from early on he was a hunter of wild game (mere butterflies, but wild game nonetheless), just like Hemingway up in Michigan or Faulkner in north-central Mississippi. Is it only in retrospect that he looks fully, if ironically, American? Or did he call a new America into being—a Lolitaesque, Nabokovian new land, layered with perplexities, rippling with edgy laughter—to ratify what he had known he would become?

*
The first book he wrote upon arriving, the exhaustingly insightful, eccentric literary biography
Nikolai Gogol
, is, as many have noticed, at least as much about how to read Nabokov as how to read the nineteenth-century Ukrainian author of
Dead Souls
and
The Government Inspector
. His savage attacks on fellow writers—Hemingway a joke, Faulkner a pompous fraud, etc.—were a related attempt to draw attention to himself and suggest a man in an overgrown field slashing this way and that, willing even to burn it down to clear his path.

†
Na-BO-kuf
is the right way, although most English speakers, especially those exposed in their impressionable youth to the 1980 hit song “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” by the Police (which features the line “Just like the old man in that book by
NAB-a-kof
”), happily persist in
NAB-a-kof
, which somehow comes easier to the English-speaking tongue.

1.

The
American escape began way, way back for Nabokov, but that does not mean it was inevitable; and at a dangerous moment the writer who was also a husband and a father nearly threw it all away. In 1936, while they were living in Berlin, Véra insisted that Vladimir get out of the city, away from the Nazis; the couple had been
trying to put together
¹
an exit since at least 1930, failing mostly for financial reasons, but now she wanted him out and in the relative safety of France. She would remain behind with their two-year-old son, tying up loose ends.

Véra, if not the family’s principal breadwinner, then always essential to their survival, could no longer work. A job as translator for a Jewish-owned company making machinery had ended in spring ’35 when the German authorities expropriated the company and fired all its Jewish employees. Nabokov, writing at a great clip at the time—
Glory
,
Camera Obscura
,
Despair
,
Invitation to a Beheading
, and parts of
The Gift
were just some of his 1930s productions—was looking for a job of almost any kind in France or England. Nor was he “
afraid of living
²
in the American boondocks,” as he wrote to a professor acquaintance at Harvard. Not his Jewish wife but Vladimir himself was the one most under threat, the family believed: a man who meant the blackest of black evil to Nabokov, a Russian exile named Sergei Taboritsky—a fanatical Romanov partisan, Nazi stooge, and one of the two men who had attacked his father, V.D. Nabokov, fatally shooting him at a public meeting in 1922—had been appointed to the agency that monitored Russian exiles in Berlin. Nabokov was not a politician-journalist like his father, but the family name and its liberal associations were enough to put him on a fatal list—so Véra believed.