Nabokov in America (34 page)

In
one of the era’s regrettable editorial misjudgments, Viking declined to publish
Pnin
. Literary values aside, they thus failed to nail down a relationship with an author who was soon to become world famous.
Pnin
was not the book that made Nabokov, but it was a title that a publisher would long feel fortunate to have on its list. Appearing from Doubleday in March ’57, it had
remarkable sales
⁹⁴
, sales that a book by Nabokov had never enjoyed before.
Lolita
was a cause célèbre by then, available only in the raffish Olympia edition, which was hard to find.

Much of the writing is splendid. When Pnin first attaches a pencil sharpener to his desk, it is “that
highly satisfying
⁹⁵
, highly philosophical implement that goes ticonderoga-ticonderoga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a … soundlessly spinning ethereal void.” About the college’s self-satisfied nowhereness, VN says,

Pnin
walked down the gloomy stairs
⁹⁶
and through the Museum of Sculpture. Humanities Hall, where … Ornithology and Anthropology also lurked, was connected with another brick building, Frieze Hall, which housed the dining rooms and the Faculty Club, by means of a rather rococo openwork gallery: it went up a slope, then turned sharply and wandered down toward a routine smell of potato chips and the sadness of balanced meals.

The college president

had
started to lose his sight
⁹⁷
a couple of years before and was now almost totally blind. With solar regularity … he would be led every day by his niece and secretary to Frieze Hall; he came, a figure of antique dignity, moving in his private darkness to an invisible luncheon … and it was strange to see, directly behind him on a [large mural], his stylized likeness in a mauve double-breasted suit and mahogany shoes, gazing with radiant magenta eyes at the scrolls handed him by Richard Wagner, Dostoevski, and Confucius.

The tone is tongue-in-cheek, with overtones of self-regard. Nabokov’s standard table talk—mockery of psychoanalysis, of inferior writers, of au courant scholars; praise of authentic geniuses like himself; savage scorn for the Soviets—forms the book’s substrate. The anti-Bolshevik writing is of a high order, tuned to fit with anti-Communist sentiments
of the day. Senator McCarthy comes in for mention but is neither endorsed nor condemned, and Nabokov mourns the Russian intelligentsia oppressed under the tsar and obliterated by the Soviets. What is missing is plot. When Victor, who loves Pnin instinctively, enters the story and his need for a father begins to touch us, it seems that the story has found its point, but, as Covici lamented, Nabokov disdains to develop that feeling. He seems to have wanted to but to have been unable. “
We can’t know more
⁹⁸
about Victor,” he replied, answering an editorial letter full of doubts as well as praise. “Throughout the years I worked at this book, I discarded many vistas that opened before me, abandoned many alluring but unnecessary sub-plots … eliminating everything that was not strictly justified in the light of art.” In general he derogated plot—plottedness was a characteristic of lesser work, he thought. He was not good at plots, although he was
good at schematics
⁹⁹
, at working within a set of arbitrary preconditions, making things come out neatly. A plot of the kind that Covici seems to have wanted takes a story in unexpected but convincing directions, while expressing emotions to a degree uncommon in life outside of books. Many readers, not the readers Nabokov was most comfortable catering to, read to feel the breaking of “the frozen sea inside us” that Kafka wrote about in his famous letter to a school friend.
Nabokov knew this
¹⁰⁰
, might even have wished to please such readers—witness his “many discarded vistas”—but could not.

Edmund Wilson enjoyed
Pnin
moderately. About the first excerpt to appear he wrote, “Elena [his new, fourth and final, wife]
loved
¹⁰¹
your … short story… . I liked it, too, but expected more of a wow at the end.” He was more positive when the full book came out, saying, “I think it is very good, and also that
you may at last have made contact
¹⁰²
with the great American public… . The reviews I have so far seen all say exactly the same thing: this shows that no one is puzzled, they know how they are meant to react.” He offered corrections, some picayune. It was important for him to praise
Pnin. Lolita
had left him cold, repulsed. “Now, about your novel,” he had written three years before, after reading a copy of the
Lolita
manuscript:

I like it less
¹⁰³
than anything else of yours I have read. The short story that it grew out of was interesting, but I don’t think the subject can stand this very extended treatment. Nasty subjects may make fine books; but I don’t feel you have got away with this. It isn’t merely that the characters and the situation are repulsive … but
that … they seem quite unreal. The various goings-on and the climax … become too absurd to be horrible or tragic, yet remain too unpleasant to be funny… . I agree with Mary that the cleverness sometimes becomes tiresome.”

It is remarkable that the friendship survived this response. Nabokov, who was undoubtedly wounded, nevertheless replied, only a few months later, with unequivocal praise for a Wilson article in the
New Yorker
: “
Bunny, I liked
¹⁰⁴
very much
your Palestine essay. It is one of your best pieces.” Wilson was too needed a friend—too close, too simpatico—to lose over this. When he
came to feel, erroneously
¹⁰⁵
, that Wilson had not read the full manuscript (he had wished to hand it on to publishers as soon as possible; also he was sharing pages with Elena and with Mary McCarthy, therefore he read it quickly), Nabokov was hurt anew. He wrote, “I have
sold my
¹⁰⁶
LOLITA [in France]… . I would like you to read it some day,” and when publishers in America still shunned the book,

It
depresses me
¹⁰⁷
to think that this pure and austere work may be treated by some flippant critic as a pornographic stunt. This danger is the more real to me since I realize that
even
you neither understand nor wish to understand the texture of this intricate and unusual production.

Wilson tried to express what had disappointed him. “I think that the time is approaching,” he wrote Véra in ’52, “when I am going to
read his complete works
¹⁰⁸
and write an essay on them that will somewhat annoy him.” Two years later, he was still
promising an
¹⁰⁹
étude approfondie
, a view of the whole oeuvre to date, but it never came together. Friendship might have prevented a frank assessment. Nabokov in ’52 or even into ’57 was still a little-known immigrant author subsisting on a professor’s salary, and Wilson might have feared damaging him. When he did speak at last in a full-throated way it was ten years later, and it was only about the translation of
Eugene Onegin
, which he disliked for stylistic and scholarly reasons. By then, 1965, Nabokov was a titan, very nearly a literary immortal, and to challenge him risked damage to Wilson’s reputation more than Nabokov’s.

Only at the end of his life—succumbing to strokes and beset by other health problems—would Wilson write something like a general assessment. In a volume called
A Window on Russia
, published the year
he died (1972), he presents a summing up only seven pages long. He has gone back and read the early novels, he says. On the whole he has not been carried away. “
The heroes
¹¹⁰
of these stories,” he writes, “were almost always … surrounded by rather absurd inferiors; they, however, possess an inalienable distinction and at moments a kind of communication with a higher world.”

Mr.
Nabokov has gone on record
¹¹¹
 … as explaining that he regards a novel as a kind of game with the reader. By deceiving the latter’s expectation, the novelist wins the game. But the device exploited in these novels is simply not to have anything exciting take place, to have the action peter out… . In
King, Queen, Knave
, the lover and his mistress are discouraged from murdering her husband. In
Invitation to a Beheading
, [the hero] is not executed but, dissociating himself from his accusers, simply gets up and walks away. (It is curious to contrast this ending with one of Solzhenitsyn’s prison camps from which there can be no escape.)

Perhaps forgetting his own subtle early readings, his appreciation for stand-alone worlds of art, Wilson loses patience with the undeveloped plots, with actions that dissipate. He finds “
sado-masochism
¹¹²
” present and associates Nabokov with people “who enjoy malicious teasing and embarrassing practical jokes” but get “
aggrieved and indignant
¹¹³
” when someone turns the tables.

Pnin
, he says, in his summing up, shows Nabokov importing himself into a story, for reasons mainly related to this sado-masochism. He can more directly “
humiliate
¹¹⁴
 … his humble little Russian professor, who dreads Nabokov’s brilliance and insolence,” i.e., the character VN’s insolence. Pnin is “somewhat sentimentalized,” Wilson continues. “
The sadist, here
¹¹⁵
as often, turns out to have an underside of sentimentality.” Wilson misses badly on this matter of VN entering the story. Not to humiliate more, but to display refinements of soul in Pnin—to distinguish between him and VN in ways readers can put together but that VN, largely, cannot—is why the narrator
invades his text
¹¹⁶
.

On the question of sentimentality, Wilson was more useful. The moral center of the book is underdeveloped. It is Mira, the young woman who died at Buchenwald, the girl Pnin had been in love with long ago; he remembers her in a reverie brought on by a cardiac event (possibly a heart attack), and he thinks of her in terms familiar from other Nabokovian evocations of fetching young girls (“
the warm rose-red
¹¹⁷
silk lining of her karakul muff,” “the slenderness of arm and ankle”). Here, almost uniquely in his writings, Nabokov makes explicit mention of the Holocaust and a known site of extermination. His approach, usually, is to broadly fictionalize, as if to name the horrors of his own century would be to endorse them. Better to write of them in code, in contexts insistently unreal, thus to keep
the foulness
¹¹⁸
at a remove.

This approach is understandable. The danger is that characters such as Krug in
Bend Sinister
, Kinbote in
Pale Fire
, and even Humbert may be allowed to dress themselves in the robes of unmentionable suffering, entering special pleas on account of the darkness of their times. Even noble Pnin seems to do this, since Nabokov does not fully dramatize the connection with Mira. She is a fey angel, that’s all; Pnin remembers her “
gentle heart
¹¹⁹
,” her “graceful, fragile, tender” young womanhood, but, as with stepson Victor, the author’s plan for his book rules out an exploration via plot. Pnin hurries from lovelorn thoughts to visions of Mira dying “
a great number of deaths
¹²⁰
,” being “inoculated with filth, tetanus bacilli, broken glass, gassed in a sham shower bath with prussic acid, burned alive in a pit,” etc. Nabokov himself seems to hurry, pushing her offstage. She is made into a paragon, an
Anne Frank figure
¹²¹
; without benefit of enriching, complicating scenes that have a flavor of tricksome life, she is sacralized, sent straight to the higher realms.

15.

Wilson’s
criticisms of
Pnin
and other works have been seen by some Nabokov scholars as proof, on a deep level, of envy. An upstart crow arrives, not even speaking the language well, and carries off all the loot; a man who needs to be top dog—not Nabokov, Wilson—turns against a former protégé, now
blown up far too high
¹
. Envy probably played some part. But Wilson’s words expressed critical reservations of the kind that was his métier, with which normally he took great care. He might have been blind or philistine or so weakened near the end as to be incapable of judging well, but probably he was not corrupted by envy in a simple way. Something did not persuade him in Nabokov’s work. He had voiced objections for years. Even
books he liked
²
, such as
Nikolai Gogol
, annoyed him, and the one novel he enthused about,
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
, also had important flaws, in his view.

Wilson made a fetish of his independence and incorruptibility. This might have fooled him—led him not to recognize the tribute to their friendship written into
Bend Sinister
, for instance. For all his devoted reading of whatever Nabokov sent his way, Edmund did not read him professionally. He
did not take extensive notes
³
on—possibly did not remember—important aspects of the work. In ’53 he wrote, “
Is there any chance
⁴
of your publishing a book any time before the fall after next? I hope so, for it would give me a pretext to do a long
New Yorker
article about you and include it in a book that is supposed to come out.” He
wanted
to read him, sought grounds for a professional appraisal. He added, “
I have been aiming
⁵
to make you my next Russian subject after Turgenev.”

An
enduring difference was political. Scholars friendly to Nabokov cast the Russian as immensely more knowledgeable about history, as someone who had not only experienced it but had thought hard about it. In
The Gift
, according to Simon Karlinsky, a careful and persuasive Nabokov scholar who was also an émigré, the writer “
dealt with the roots
⁶
of totalitarianism in the ostensibly libertarian but actually dogmatic and fanatical ideologies” of the Russian reformers who predated the Bolsheviks. Wilson, to his misfortune, never read
The Gift
—his Russian wasn’t up to it, and an English translation appeared only in ’63. Thus he could write ignorantly, indeed insultingly, to Nabokov when
Bend Sinister
came out, advising him to avoid all “questions of politics and social change,” since “
you aren’t good at this
⁷
.”