Nabokov in America (30 page)

without avail
⁴⁸
:

here there was dullness; there, deceit and raving;

this lacked conscience, that lacked sense;

on all of them were different fetters;

and the old had become old-fashioned,

and the new raved about the old.

As he’d left women, he left books.

Pushkin was likewise made of books, of words. Nabokov’s scholarly apparatus—more than a thousand closely printed pages, notes on everything from the first word of the poem’s French epigraph (
Pétri
⁵¹
, meaning “steeped in,” “consisting of”) to several pages on the precise
shade of red
⁴⁹
of a woman’s fashionable beret—shows him drunk on words, drunk on research, joyously drunk on the task of tracking down antecedents to Pushkin’s every thought or phrase. Russian verse was
less than one hundred
⁵⁰
years old at the time, Nabokov tells us, and the new literature had been born through shameless borrowing—mostly from French but also from English, German, Italian, and classical Latin literatures.

“Pétri” appears in an epigraph that Pushkin made up, after the manner of other fictionalizing epigraphers. Nabokov tells us,

The idea of
tipping a flippant
⁵²
tale with a philosophical [quote] is obviously borrowed from Byron. For the first two cantos of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
 … Byron sent [his publisher] … a motto beginning: “L’univers est une espèce de livre, dont on n’a lu que la première page,” [taken] from Louis Charles Fougeret de Monbron’s
Le Cosmopolite
(London, 1750), p. 1.

The oblique epigraph was a great favorite with English writers; it aimed at suggesting introspective associations; and, of course, Walter Scott is remembered as a most gifted fabricator of mottoes.

Pushkin’s
⁵³
Russian—like the Russian of other poets he salutes, parodies, or otherwise makes use of—was bursting with Gallicisms. The brains of Russians had been so colonized by French that even Tatiana, a semi-educated landowner’s daughter stuck off in the provinces, composes her love letter in that language. The plain speech of the heart had been learned not from life but from books. When Tatiana writes,

Why
did you visit us?

In the backwoods of a forgotten village,

I would have never known you

nor have known bitter torment.

The tumult of an inexperienced soul

having subdued with time (who knows?),

I would have found a friend after my heart,

have been a faithful wife

and a virtuous mother

she is borrowing, unconsciously, from the literature of the day, where the phrase “an inexperienced soul” is a commonplace. She might have married another, but never would she have
loved
another. “Another!” she exclaims:

No, to nobody
⁵⁴
[else] on earth

would I have given my heart away!

That has been destined in a higher council,

that is the will of heaven: I am thine;

my entire life has been the gage of a sure tryst with you;

I know, you’re sent to me by God.

She is replicating
⁵⁵
, or Pushkin is, a formula common in the romances of the time, as for example in French poet André Chénier’s
Les Amours (“Un autre! Ah! je ne puis”
) or in Byron’s
The Bride of Abydos
(“To bid thee with another dwell: Another!”).

A year after Tatiana’s letter—after Onegin has killed Lenski in the duel—Tatiana one day sets out for his manor house, now deserted. In his empty rooms she finds some books he left behind, with notes (“
the dashes
⁵⁶
of his pencil”):

And by degrees
⁵⁷
begins

my Tatiana to understand

more
clearly now—thank God—

the one for whom to sigh

she’s sentenced by imperious fate.

A sad and dangerous eccentric,

creature of hell or heaven,

this angel, this arrogant fiend,

who’s he then? Can it be—an imitation,

an insignificant phantasm, or else

a Muscovite in Harold’s mantle,

a glossary of other people’s megrims,

a complete lexicon of words in vogue? …

Might he not be, in fact, a parody?

In his charming, loquacious commentary, Nabokov explains,

At this point
⁵⁸
the reader should be reminded of the fascination that Byron exercised on Continental minds in the 1820s. His image was the romantic counterpart of that of Napoleon, “the man of fate,” whom a mysterious force kept driving on, toward an ever-receding horizon of world domination. Byron’s image was seen as that of a tortured soul wandering in constant quest of a haven beyond the haze.

The man who so captivated her was but a copy. Not that this makes Tatiana love him any less; as Pushkin writes,

Tatiana
with soft-melting gaze
⁵⁹

around her looks at all,

and all to her seems priceless,

all vivifies her dolent soul

with a half-painful joyance.

There is a painting of Byron in the room, and even a little “puppet”—a statuette showing a man “under a hat, with clouded brow / with arms crosswise compressed” (possibly
inspired by
⁶⁰
the 1813 oil, by Thomas Phillips, of Byron in ethnic Albanian dress).

The
Onegin
took Nabokov not one year to complete, but seven. He poured into it the literary equivalent of his lepidopteral passion, summoning the skills of a philologist and entering into debate with generations of Pushkin scholars, just as he had addressed, befriended, denounced,
and embraced the butterfly men in his museum work. His commentary is itself parodic. Sounding like himself, but also
like émigré scholars of the day
⁶¹
, such as Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach, he is exhaustless in his hunt for influence; his approach is to read everything Pushkin and his characters have read or might have, in the original language or in contemporary translation.

The commentary, like the poem, hails
Lolita
at many points.
Onegin
is a story of an obsessive love complicated by fate, as is the novel. Tatiana’s letter, cliché-ridden but from the heart, is treated more kindly by Onegin than is Charlotte Haze’s to her boarder in Ramsdale, USA, but Charlotte’s has the same tone of abject vulnerability:

This is a confession
⁶²
. I love you… . Last Sunday in church … when I asked the Lord what to do about it, I was told to act as I am acting now. You see, there is no alternative. I have loved you from the minute I saw you. I am a passionate and lonely woman and you are the love of my life.

Now, my dearest, dearest,
mon cher, cher monsieur
, you have read this; now you know. So will you please,
at once
, pack and leave… . Go! Scram!
Departez
! I shall be back by dinnertime, if I do eighty both ways and don’t have an accident (but what would it matter?).

Lolita
’s plot grows from this letter as
Onegin
’s does from Tatiana’s. And Humbert closely resembles Onegin. There are important points of difference—pedophilia, for one—but a strong genotypic similarity, and
Nabokov the scholar traces
⁶³
the Byronic lineage both pre– and post–
Childe Harold
, discerning its outline in Romantic novels such as Chateaubriand’s
René
(1802), which he deems “a work of genius,” and Benjamin Constant’s
Adolphe
(1816), “a contrived, dry, evenly gray, but very attractive work.” Constant’s hero, like Humbert, blends “egotism and sensibility”:

His is a checkered nature
⁶⁴
, now knight, now cad. From sobs of devotion he passes to fits of infantile cruelty, and then again dissolves in saltless tears. Whatever gifts he is supposed to possess, these are betrayed and abolished in the course of his pursuing this or that whim and of letting himself be driven by … vibrations of his own irritable temper.

Midway
in the dark wood of his novel, Nabokov drinks deeply from exotic sources. He needs to be reminded of his idol Pushkin, needs to think of Chateaubriand, “the greatest French writer of his time,” the first foreign novelist to travel in America and to write suggestively of its wild landscape. Nabokov is, as always, putting out product for the market, writing because he needs to publish, to make his way, but his deep immersion in Pushkin is a necessary detour, allowing
something in the novel to ripen. In the period 1951–53, he refreshed himself
⁶⁵
by going often to a great library, by preparing to write scholarly articles, and by sometimes writing on subjects that were neither
Onegin
- nor
Lolita
-related. Some months he even
wrote nothing
⁶⁶
. In the way of a professional managing his energies and hopes, he found ways to continue to work on a novel that he also kept wanting to burn.

“In my boyhood I was an extraordinarily avid reader,” Nabokov told an interviewer in the mid-sixties.

By the age of 14
⁶⁷
or 15 I had read or re-read all Tolstoy in Russian, all Shakespeare in English, and all Flaubert in French—besides hundreds of other books. Today I can always tell when a sentence I compose happens to resemble in cut and intonation that of any of the writers I loved or detested half a century ago.

He is not like us—us Americans. Not because he reads a lot, and not because he reads in three languages, but because he hears his sources as he writes.
*
He makes that recognition part of the story. Resemblance made conscious becomes homage—or parody. He might have said, “I write by borrowing, by pretending to be someone else in many lines that I compose—and I catch myself in the act of pretending.”

Novels
that proceed in this way are rare in America. Often they fail to attract many readers. Eliot and Pound, not favorites of Nabokov’s, and not novelists, founded their modernism on a similar approach, but Melville is probably the American writer of whom Nabokov was aware whose literary sources likewise seem to give birth to his prose—not only add meaning or pedigree to it but seem often to generate the lines themselves.

Moby-Dick
(1851), which Nabokov might have never read to the end, evinces a wide literary culture—“all Shakespeare in English,” plus the King James Bible, Greek and Roman mythology, Seneca and other Stoics, Byron, Burke, Spinoza, Plato, Kant, Dante, Pascal, Rousseau, Coleridge, many others. Much of this wide culture Melville came to late, when, having written adventure books based on his youthful years at sea, he awakened to a philosophical potential in the novel, its ability to sound deep chords. About
Mardi
(1849),
a kind of trial run
⁶⁸
at
Moby-Dick
, Melville’s beloved friend Hawthorne wrote that it had depths that “here and there … 
compel a man
⁶⁹
to swim for his life,” and there is already some of the stylistic mashing up in
Mardi
that made
Moby-Dick
, when it had been nearly forgotten in America, a sensational rediscovery for modernist critics.

Nabokov nods, slyly, toward Melville. In a letter to the editor in 1971, he compared hunting for the sexy parts in
Lolita
to “
looking for
⁷⁰
allusions to aquatic animals in
Moby Dick
,” and in an interview he joked about “Melville at breakfast feeding a
sardine
⁷¹
to his cat.” Humbert, early in
Lolita
, joins an expedition to the Canadian Arctic that builds a weather station at “
Pierre Point
⁷²
, Melville Sound,”
Pierre
being Melville’s last published novel.

At Harvard, Nabokov might well have lectured on
Moby-Dick
, which was usually on the
syllabus
⁷³
for Karpovich’s survey course, but he decided not to. His preference was to teach books
he had already worked up
⁷⁴
at Cornell.
Moby-Dick
, like other works of the American Renaissance—
The Scarlet Letter
, by Hawthorne; Poe’s last published poem, “Annabel Lee”; and Poe’s
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
, which broods behind that trip to the Arctic (although Pym voyaged toward the South Pole, not the North)—is a ghostly source, a distant touchstone, and maybe to find its influence is only to exemplify a dictum of Borges, that “great writers create their
precursors
⁷⁵
.” Borges meant that a work of sufficient power casts light backward as well as ahead, so that a novel about a young girl used for sex along the American road of 1947 can seem to be prefigured in a story of the Puritan seventeenth century
where another lustrous, capricious child is the Pearl at the very heart of things.
Moby-Dick
, whether or not Nabokov read every page (and if he did not, he would only be following Melville’s method, which was to read enough of a book to catch its “idea”), shares with
Lolita
an immense
anxiety about the world
⁷⁶
. Ahab tries to fix the world in place with a harpoon. Likewise Stubb, the second mate on the
Pequod
, muses, during a rainy night watch, “
I wonder
⁷⁷
, Flask, whether the world is anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable, though.”