Nabokov in America (39 page)

Dixon cabin (interior)

In ’56, the Nabokovs had a long, pleasant trip, starting in late spring and extending into August. Véra had rented a cabin in Utah, a log-and-stone summer house built by the Western artist Maynard Dixon outside the village of Mount Carmel, along a fork of the Virgin River. Zion National Park was twenty miles west. Bryce Canyon National Park was
thirty miles northeast, and an alpine zone of conifers and canyons called the Cedar Breaks was about the same distance northwest. The immense variety and rugged separations of landforms promised good collecting. Neither Nabokov seems to have known who Maynard Dixon was. He was an
ex-San Francisco bohemian
³
, the illustrator of Clarence E. Mulford’s Hopalong Cassidy novels, who became an easel painter and muralist, a light-struck, self-taught master of desert atmospherics, of big vistas and dry hazes, a perpetrator of nostalgic cowboy art à la Frederic Remington but also of landscape abstractions through which Cézanne and Braque seem to roam, wearing cowboy hats. It was
Dixon’s widow
⁴
, Edith Hamlin Dale, a former WPA muralist herself, who rented them the cottage. Like other lodgings of theirs, this one was close to a town but not too close. The floodplain of the Virgin is a miles-long meadow, adjacent to sandy sagebrush country. Two hours’
drive to the southeast
⁵
is the Grand Canyon’s North Rim, and they collected there, too.

From Utah they migrated north as summer progressed, arriving in Afton in time for the hatches they had found there four years before. They had been traveling the West now for fifteen years. They did not stop to see people they knew or had collected with; if they stayed at the Corral Log Motel again, it was for the same reasons as before: convenience and low rates. Their lives during the rest of the year, bringing them in contact with hundreds of people they needed to deal with but did not necessarily want to know, made the emptiness of the West tonic. In 1950, the middle year of their American period, Colorado was the only Rocky Mountain state with a population greater than one million. Wyoming, their favorite state, was
famously empty
⁶
, the least populous per square mile next to Nevada.
*

The European semi-isolation of their last years, lived in a suite of rooms in a grand hotel on Lake Geneva, was a sedentary version of their American vacationing. Vladimir needed protected time alone, to write, to read, to think, to recuperate. Véra was not markedly more social than he, nor was either of them really reclusive; they treasured visits from good friends, as long as they could control the timing and length of those visits. They were well matched in this regard, unlike Pushkin and his alluring wife, whose warm response to the attentions of a rakish
Chevalier Guard of Tsar Nicholas I led to the
poet’s death in a duel
⁷
. Nabokov had married well—he also married for love. Just as his careful study of Gogol had taught him how not to act should one of his books ever achieve immense success, Pushkin’s fate might have telegraphed the utility of marrying someone devoted who was also equipped to help him in his career.
†
That Véra Evseevna had a
splendid mind and literary sense
⁸
was the best of his many lucky breaks.

The loneliness of the West, full of waste places emblematic, for many, of a cosmic emptiness, is a feature missing from Nabokov’s writing. Humbert and Pnin feel lonely and beset, but not because the New World horizon is too far. At the end of his book, Pnin rides off into that unknown, in a car stuffed with belongings and a little white dog, his American life in tatters, but he is unintimidated and not without hope:

The air was keen
⁹
, the sky clear and burnished… . Then the little sedan boldly swung past [a truck in front of it] and, free at last, spurted up the shining road, which one could make out narrowing to a thread of gold in the soft mist where hill after hill made beauty of distance, and where there was simply no saying what miracle might happen.

Humbert, too, though he endures torments in Western settings, meanders through. Social traps are what he fears more: neighborhood snoops, progressive schools with nosy heads, the police.

In ’57 the Nabokovs did not travel. But in ’58 they put
eight thousand miles
¹⁰
on their car in seven weeks, and the next year, their last of American voyaging, they probably drove even farther, across the country and back by meandering routes. Véra made a document of the last years’ trips; for this purpose she took over a page-a-day diary that dated from 1951, in which Vladimir had jotted early notes, and on the unwritten-upon pages she interposed entries that belong to 1958–59. The notebook begins with a
quick sketch of everything
¹¹
that happened to them: all that had come to them in America, from the start. “We arrived … on the Champlain,” and Dmitri’s schools, Vladimir’s first writing jobs, summer camps, Wellesley, Stanford,
parties at which Véra found it “difficult to follow many-pronged conversations in English,” the Alta summer with Laughlin, friends Vladimir made among the entomologists: everything gets a mention. The rental addresses, eleven in Ithaca alone. That the trip to Colorado had been “by train both ways, caught in floods, re-routed.” The books her husband wrote while living at Craigie Circle, Cambridge. Where Dmitri roomed as a Harvard freshman.

Like real Americans,
they denominate periods
¹²
by the cars owned: first the Oldsmobile and then the ’54 Buick, and meanwhile Dmitri has been living his own car-inflected history, driving what Véra called a “
Ford-Keyser” (actually a ’31 Model A Ford, dark blue) and later a ’38 Buick
¹³
, which took him to the Tetons.
Dmitri the madcap
¹⁴
has by August 21, 1958, when Véra wrote many of these notes, become Harvard graduate Dmitri, aspiring performer Dmitri, a young man with “a wonderful job, excellent singing teacher,” and a “charming apartment of his own, which he keeps meticulously clean.” In ’57 he was drafted into the Army. After six months of training he joined a
reserve unit that met
¹⁵
weekly in Manhattan and for two weeks each summer out of town. “Dmitri went today to Camp Drum,” Véra wrote on August 7, 1958, noting that he sounded “cheerful, reasonable, tenderly interested in everything” on the phone.

An event was approaching that, like a celestial happening—a gigantic comet, say, swooping close to the earth, causing explosions and a wobble
in the planetary orbit itself—would alter whatever it could. The Nabokovs were as solid and well prepared for big change as can be imagined; they were deeply in love, partners in an enterprise—the advancement of the husband’s writings—that seems never to have awakened envy in the wife; neither had a drinking problem or at this point was prone to stray; and the husband’s oft-expressed belief in his own genius, which once might have hinted at underlying uncertainty, the recognition that the best creators are often plowed under regardless, graced only with the world’s forgetting, had, like Vladimir himself, only grown stouter.

Near Ithaca, New York, September 1958 (Photo by Carl Mydans,
Life
magazine)

He was not played out as Hurricane Lolita, the American publication of his novel, hit. He was in the conceiving stage of his last great book (
Pale Fire
), had nearly finished annotating
Eugene Onegin
, and, as final inoculation against any warping effects, was just completing another translation, his Englishing of the twelfth-century
The
Song of Igor’s
¹⁶
Campaign
. When he suddenly became famous on a scale that he had long hoped for, lifelong habits that included their yearly travels, the low-rent, free-range recuperations out west, put a barrier between them and what might have turned other people’s heads.

Still, the Lolita event was a bomb, and it was the force of it that Véra tried to record. “Dinner at the Bishops,” she writes for May 20, 1958, and then her husband, as if looking over her shoulder, calmly pencils in, “Spread Wyoming butterflies, batch taken in 1952 … West Wyoming.” They trade off entries for a while; the Putnam American edition is scheduled for August, they can feel it coming. “Dmitri telephoned. In raptures… . Sang (audition) for Opera group, got enthusiastic praises. Loves his apartment.” Maybe Dmitri is what they are both most worried about. Whatever is coming, it will mean something also for a reckless, uncertainly artistic child who is subject to raptures. Dmitri told his barracks mate, a New Yorker who became a friend, that “this year
he’s going to be famous
¹⁷
,” meaning that his father would be ascending in ’58. There may be no good time to become the offspring of a very famous father or mother, but
this
time, which Véra is trying hard to see as a corner-turning, with the mountain climbing and sportscar driving falling away, is especially delicate.

“Quiet day,” Vladimir records for May 22, a Thursday. He spent it sorting more insects. They were his treasured snapshots: place and time and weather fixed. Before Véra became the sole keeper of the diary, before Hurricane Lolita hit in earnest, a beautiful interpolation: not the introduction of field notes or new fictional material, but the
preservation of some old
¹⁸
, a week’s worth of his notes from ’51 (June 24–July 1), made while he was intensely at work on
Lolita
. They are flavorful, these notes from that unique time: cost-of-gas figures, Russian words, pencil sketches, and phrases in English now to be found nearly unchanged in the novel. From this came that. The tone is amiable, sardonic, concerned with a “stinky river” behind a motor court and with an old farmer’s “mummy’s neck,” and with a little boy seen “ ‘frogging’ on a bike.” It may be an accident that the empty page-a-day diary was not quite empty, that it contained these earlier jottings; they might have been torn out, but since they have not been they give a savor of days that must already have seemed legendary. Turn another page and you might find yourself on the road to Telluride with them, Véra at the wheel of the Olds, Vladimir beside her writing the note you’re living. The floods and storms of Kansas are behind, they’re in the real West now, the scenery on a gigantic scale, with the
sun emerging
¹⁹
with that special force it has after a rain.

On about July 15, 1958, an
advance copy
²⁰
of
Lolita
caught up with them in Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta. They had seen a piece in the
New Republic
that had spoken of Nabokov in terms that they welcomed, terms of “
true greatness
²¹
.”
Lolita
publication day was now only weeks off. Not in much of a hurry, but excited, they turned east. They stopped at Devils Tower National Monument, in northeastern Wyoming. Their cabin was across the road from the tower, which looked to Véra like a giant conical ice cream treat (in France called
plombières
) that “has just
begun to melt
²²
at the base … purplish-chocolate-colored.” When the weather was warm Vladimir collected leps.

“Sheridan [Wyoming] was
engrossed in a big rodeo
²³
,” Véra wrote. She hated seeing “poor cattle mistreated,” but the local event was causing a stir: “We were almost driven off the road repeatedly and had to stop for cars passing other cars to get back in their lane—all of them … with horses in trailers.” They saw “two trucks in collision—no one hurt but the vehicles; and, on the shoulder of the road, a cowboy, all decked out … dismally changing … a tire.”

In early August they were in New York. Walter Minton, president of G.P. Putnam’s Sons, the
Lolita
publisher, was throwing a press reception at the Harvard Club, and the author was the celebrity attraction. Minton was an “
excellent publisher
²⁴
,” Véra decided, someone who spent freely on “beautiful ads,” and the book his house produced was itself
beautiful, with a cover that the Nabokovs found tasteful (no image of the little girl). On August 18 Minton sent them a telegram:

EVERYBODY TALKING
²⁵
OF LOLITA ON PUBLICATION DAY YESTERDAYS REVIEWS MAGNIFICENT AND NEW YORK TIMES BLAST THIS MORNING PROVIDED NECESSARY FUEL TO FLAME 300 REORDERS THIS MORNING AND BOOK STORES REPORT EXCELLENT DEMAND CONGRATULATIONS.

Sales figures were immediately large. In the first four days, there were
6,777 reorders
²⁶
from retailers running out of copies, and by the end of September
Lolita
was number one on the
New York Times
²⁷
bestseller list, where it remained for seven weeks.

At Minton’s party Vladimir was “a tremendous success … amusing, brilliant and—thank God—did not say what he thinks of some famous contemporaries,” Véra recorded. This party was a foretaste of gala events in Paris, London, and Rome the following year at which the author and his demurely glamorous, long-necked wife, with her snowy hair and
comme il faut
outfits (a
black moiré
²⁸
dress and mink stole in Paris), graciously displayed themselves. The sales and
succès d’estime
of
Lolita
made Nabokov a new world celebrity. He had squared the circle, written a challenging work that was also an alluring sex book, still, at the time of its U.S. publication,
under restriction
²⁹
in Britain and France. F. W. Dupee, a professor at Columbia and a freelance critic, called
Lolita
a “
magnificently outrageous
³⁰
novel,” also a “little masterpiece,” also “a formidable addition to popular mythology.” By mythology he meant that other stories had attached to the novel’s story. The main one was the tale of the book’s path to publication: how respectable New York houses had fled from it, how the brilliant author had had to send his manuscript to Paris, where a semi-pornographer had taken it on, and how the shunned work was now a “
prodigy
³¹
of the … business,” “not only a novel but a phenomenon.”