Nabokov in America (35 page)

Had Wilson read
The Gift
, he might have been persuaded that the reformers had given birth to the murderous, ingenious Bolsheviks, and that literature written to advance a social agenda, even worthy-seeming literature, can be dangerous. But equally, he might have felt that Nabokov
still
did not understand. Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the bad novelist who is subjected to an amusing biographizing in
The Gift
, foisted materialist utilitarianism on literature, judging Pushkin to be a
writer of aesthetic trifles
⁸
. But Chernyshevsky, who spent twenty years in prison and exile, was like Nabokov’s poet hero, Fyodor, and like Nabokov himself, decisively on the mind side of things, the ideational side, his strict materialism to the contrary notwithstanding. (All is matter, and there is only material reality, but this idea is itself the lever of the future: the man who possesses it will move the world.) Wilson was less idealist. The questions he asked about situations of social conflict were on the order of
Who is suffering here? Who possesses real power? Whose lives are being crushed?
Had he read
The Gift
he might have agreed with Nabokov, who believed it to be his best work in Russian. But also he might have dismissed it. The young hero, Fyodor, is fascinated by his own creative process—ravished by the beauty of his mind. His own inspirations thrill him; they constitute the drama of his life in shabby thirties Berlin:

When in the mornings
⁹
I entered this world of the forest, whose image I had raised as it were by my own efforts above the level of those artless Sunday impressions (paper trash, a crowd of picnickers) out of which the Berliners’ conception of “Grunewald” was composed; when on these hot, summer weekdays I walked
over to its southern side, into its depths, to wild secret spots, I felt as much delight as if this was a primeval paradise.

Fyodor climbed aboard
¹⁰
[a bus], and the conductor, on the open top deck, smote its plated side with his palm to tell the driver he could move on. Along this side and along the toothpaste advertisement upon it swished the tips of soft maple twigs—and it would have been pleasant to look down from above on the gliding street ennobled by perspective, if it were not for the everlasting, chilly thought: there he is, a special, rare and as yet undescribed and unnamed variant of man, and he is occupied with God knows what, rushing from [poorly paid language] lesson to lesson, wasting his youth on a boring and empty task.

In sometimes exciting passages—flaneur reportage of a high order—Fyodor creates a Berlin, and though these are dire times, portentous for the entire world, German fascism hardly figures in the portrait. Only near the end do we read, “
A truck went by
¹¹
with a load of young people returning from some civic orgy, waving something or other and shouting something or other.” Wilson, to presume to speak for him, would have noticed more amply. The author is making a familiar point about realms of the imagination being open to the artist, who lives and suffers in historical time but can sometimes transcend it, but
why
is Nabokov’s Berlin novel so contentedly, so entertainingly unempathic? Did social reform ideas of the Russian 1860s really create Bolshevism? What about serfdom and its imperfect eradication, continuing the beggaring of the peasantry? What about outbreaks of violence against landowners going back hundreds of years, or the dislocations of primitive Russian industrialization, or the rate of infant mortality? Nabokov’s most autobiographical novel has no responsibility to address those matters, nor to acknowledge historical forces as commonly understood, but
it does present itself
¹²
as saying something pertinent about Bolshevism, and what it says, at unusual length, is not persuasive.

In his response to
Bend Sinister
, Wilson had written, “
You have no idea
¹³
why or how the [dictator] Toad was able to put himself over,” and here is the crux of their disagreement. For Nabokov, dictators are beneath notice, even when they murder you. For Wilson, the suffering of classes of people is a commanding truth, and the means by which they connive in their own enslavement needs to be understood. The
novel was not the best place to seek that understanding, but for Wilson, a rejection of the whole topic by an author was telling. Too often he found in his friend’s work a giggling pleasure in suffering. Maybe more important, the novels, with their clever schematic premises, held to with impressive rigor, did not relax and breathe and give him a feeling of life profoundly opened to and understood, a feeling he got from novelists Nabokov disdained—Malraux, Faulkner, Pasternak—as well as some he respected—Gogol, Tolstoy.
An art of narcissism
¹⁴
, of exultant, trumpeted ego: this was a possible description of Nabokov’s art, and for Wilson that was a disappointment.

In December ’55 a break: novelist Graham Greene named
Lolita
, still available only in the Olympia Press edition,
one of the three best
¹⁵
books of the year. This mention in the London
Sunday Times
led a columnist, John Gordon of the London
Sunday Express
, to declare the novel “
the filthiest book
¹⁶
I have ever read. Sheer unrestrained pornography… . The entire book is … utterly disgusting… . It is published in France.” An item in Harvey Breit’s book-chat column in the
New York Times
noted the London controversy; till then,
Lolita
had not been mentioned anywhere in the U.S. press.

Pnin
had just been rejected by its publisher. It took Nabokov time to realize his good fortune: “I am extremely irritated by the turn my nymphet’s destiny is taking,” he wrote Wilson, and, “although I foreglimpsed the situation, I have no inkling how to act” in regard to the British controversy. He did not need to act. A perfect Rube Goldberg machine of promotion had been jiggered into action, with Greene forming a John Gordon Society to identify “
all offensive books
¹⁷
, plays, paintings, sculptures and ceramics.” The
society actually met
¹⁸
, leading to amusing press coverage. Nabokov’s reputation for magical English prose, a reputation won through hard work over fifteen years, made what he feared for
Lolita
unlikely. His American professional cohort—book editors, magazine editors, reviewers, literary scholars, and writers who read him with joy and amazement—made it difficult to dismiss him as a hack (or a pornographer). A second column by Breit quoted reactions from that cohort:

“[
Lolita
]
shocks because it is great art
¹⁹
, because it tells a terrible story in a wholly original way.” … “The actual theme of the book—which has long held a powerful appeal for our most
important writers—is the corruption of innocence, as now envisioned through the imagination of a European intellectual in quest of his private America.” … “Readers may find something of Nathanael West in it. Its closest analogues are
Notes from the Underground
and
The Possessed
.” … “Something of its bedazzlement might be suggested by a composite impression of
Daisy Miller
and
The Possessed—
or perhaps, again, of
The Captive
and
Tender Is the Night
.”

What Nabokov called a “
foul little flurry
²⁰
” in London secured
Lolita
’s future.
Gallimard, the esteemed French house, acquired rights for a French-language edition, and the
Nouvelle Revue
²¹
Française
arranged to run an excerpt. Some American
publishers now contacted
²²
Nabokov—none was able to bring the book out in the end, but that there would be an American
Lolita
edition was looking more likely.

Spring of ’56, Nabokov took leave from Cornell and spent three months at Harvard, further researching
Eugene Onegin
. Dmitri was in Cambridge, too, studying music at the
Longy School
²³
, a Harvard-connected conservatory. In his memoir Dmitri says,

My first MG
²⁴
has been wrecked, and I drive my second. It was bought used, has been modified to go fast, and possesses no top or windshield wipers. It is often parked near Harvard Square, and usually contains, amid sports paraphernalia and snow, an open copy of the first book I shall translate: Lermontov’s
Hero of Our Time
. Father … comes upon the car [and] carefully notes the page number to see how far I have progressed, and reproachfully reports it to me in the evening.

His parents,
nervously supporting his hopes
²⁵
for an operatic career, had hatched a backup plan. Vladimir had proposed to Viking a retranslation of the Lermontov novel, offering “a
very wonderful
²⁶
young translator” to do the work. The wonderful translator’s father
would supervise
²⁷
him. That Dmitri knew of this only vaguely in advance is suggested by a note from Véra:

I have a piece
²⁸
of very good news for you: it appears almost certain that you will be entrusted with the translation of THE HERO OF OUR TIME… . One of the Doubleday editors flew over last
Monday for lunch and after a long conference with father became interested in this idea. To-day he has written and offered to go ahead with the contract.

By then a Harvard graduate, accepted at Harvard Law (but without interest in attending), Dmitri still seemed dangerously unmoored, if we can read between the lines of Véra’s letter:

The contract (if passed)
²⁹
will be between you and Doubleday. The book has about 200 pages… . This means good, thorough, conscientious work, up to an hour and a half to a page, and at least 3–4 pages a day… . You should have about one half of the book done before [you start at Longy]. After that you will progress at a slower rate, but you will still have to work
every
day (no holidays) for as many hours as you can squeeze in… . It is very enjoyable work but it is also quite exacting and above all it has to be followed up with the utmost perseverance.

Something in her American son frightens her—maybe several things. “
Your father
³⁰
, who never can say no,” as Véra described Vladimir, “
expects
³¹
of you” a good job, and declining the opportunity seems not to have been an option. When Dmitri failed to carry through on the work as expected, his parents did most of it themselves. “Dismiss all thought of things such as car racing,” Véra warned him a year later, summer of ’56.

Also, please review
³²
your financial life of the past year: You received (and sent down the drain) a very important sum ($1.000) from Doubleday, only one third of which you have more or less earned; you “borrowed” from your father an additional substantial sum which still has to be repaid; you borrowed from the bank; you spent every cent you earned; you were all the time short of money… . Instead of taking a good rest, your father and I have been working all [summer] on the “Hero,” and shall be saddled with this job to the end of our vacation. Is this fair? Ponder it, son, ponder it, it’s time to grow up!

Dmitri had come to resemble Toad—not the dictator in
Bend Sinister
but the madcap in
Wind in the Willows
. He had always had a “passionate
love for moving things
³³
,” but “so much more intense” than other children, Véra wrote. His habits began to look like a death wish. Nabokov’s
stories written in America have a persistent theme of the death of a child—not only
Lolita
and
Bend Sinister
but also the short stories “Signs and Symbols” and “Lance,” and the poem “Pale Fire,” in the novel of that name, is centrally about the death of a daughter.

Sylvia Berkman, a friend from the Wellesley years, saw them during their spring at Harvard.
*
She was one of Véra’s intimate correspondents and author of a critical study of Katherine Mansfield. At Wellesley Berkman had sometimes found Vladimir
hard to bear
³⁴
, his playfulness exhausting, but by the mid-fifties she was a wholesale admirer and something of a protégé. “
She is one of our
³⁵
most subtle and sensitive women writers,” Vladimir (or maybe Véra) wrote to the University of Iowa when Berkman applied to the Writers’ Workshop in ’55. “I see a radiant future… . Her method of writing, with its artistic care for wording and vivid detail, demands some leisure,” i.e., paid time off from Wellesley.

Nabokov
put her name forward
³⁶
for the Guggenheim. When a book of Berkman’s stories came out, he urged the publisher, who was also one of his publishers, to
get behind it
³⁷
. Berkman read everything by Nabokov that saw print, and though she was in a position where a tone of worship could be said to have been in her interest, she
was
worshipful
³⁸
, authentically in awe of him.

Writing about
Pnin
she said, “I think the … 
installments are superlative
³⁹
—all permeated with a wise mellow humor and astringent wit, the sharpest kind of exact presentation, and the constant melancholy sense of … things … never again to be reached.”
Pnin
as a campus novel especially engaged her. “This is the absolute location in the college world I think (it makes ‘The Groves of Academe’ shrivel to a waspish hum), because while it is unsparing in its utter accuracy it is yet genial, and allows … that bores may at the same time be well meaning.”

Berkman walked in the master’s steps when possible. She spent a summer at Stanford, socializing with
some of the same friends
⁴⁰
the Nabokovs had made there in the forties. Traveling Nabokov style, but by Greyhound bus rather than by car, she made an adventurous exploration out of her trip west, “
all the way South
⁴¹
and into the Southwest on my way [out] then up into the Pacific Northwest and down through the States to Colorado,” staying at cheap lodgings.
Lolita
had just come out in its
American edition. Long, open-road
explorations by writers
⁴²
made up a distinct genre in the late forties and fifties: Berkman, whether or not she read them, was traveling and experiencing the country in the style of Henry Miller’s
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
(1947), Simone de Beauvoir’s
America Day by Day
(1948), and Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road
(1957) and
The Dharma Bums
(1958), as well as Humbert Humbert’s saga. Her ability to take from the master was limited, however. “
What I … learn
⁴³
from [him] most,” she wrote Véra, “is the clear, condensed particularity, residing always in the sharp word chosen rather than the indifferent ordinary one.” She could write with bracing accuracy herself, rendering equivocal perceptions well, but, like other gifted psychological realists, she found Nabokov
problematic as a model
⁴⁴
. His example led to despair: