Nabokov in America (56 page)

18
  
“mysterious outlines”:
Lolita
, 162.

19
  
“smooth amiable roads”:
Ibid., 160.

20
  
“and the desert”:
Ibid., 162.

21
  
a con man:
N.’s use of
Who’s Who in the Limelight
(p. 33) to announce early in his book the avatars and connections of Clare Quilty closely echoes Black Guinea’s early list (chapter 3) of the disguises of the con man in Melville’s
The Confidence Man
. Appel,
Annotated
, 351n5.

22
  
“Although everybody should know”:
Lolita
, 332.

23
  
“We came to know”:
Ibid., 153–54.

24
  
“Chateaubriandesque”:
N. considered Chateaubriand the first European writer to describe the American natural scene well; the Frenchman came to America in 1791 and wrote novels such as
Les Natchez, Atala
, and
René
.

25
  
“sewerish smell”:
This derives from a page-a-day diary entry, Berg.

26
  
“various
types … the females”:
Ibid., 154.

27
  
“We came to know … tense thumbs”:
Ibid., 168.

28
  
“to whom ads were dedicated”:
Ibid., 156.

29
  
“I was not really”:
Ibid.

30
  
the novel’s allusions:
this list is only partial. N. parodies himself in the sense that Humbert’s self-serving autobiography is a travesty of N.’s scrupulous
Speak, Memory
. Humbert’s confessions also evoke those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “There is the same sense of childhood lost and the same paranoid suspicions emerging as the work progresses. Nabokov simply gives another turn to the screw of Rousseau’s attempt to justify himself and disarm his tormentors by means of absolute and sensational sincerity.” Bruss, 29.

31
  
the Romantic confessional novel:
Appel, liii.

32
  
“a parody … with real suffering”:
Ibid., liv.

33
  
“involving the reader”:
Ibid., lx.

34
  
just amusing enough:
For many readers, he is amusing enough, but for others an absolute rejection of child sexual abuse as a legitimate theme makes
Lolita
objectionable. It will probably always be so.

35
  
made by Alfred Hitchcock:
The affinities between some of Hitchcock’s works and some of N.’s are many, if superficial: motels (the ones in
Lolita
and the one in
Psycho
); doppelgängers (Hermann and Felix in
Despair
, Guy and Bruno in
Strangers on a Train
); national parks (
Lolita
and
North by Northwest
); mental health workers who explain all (John Ray in
Lolita
’s foreword and the psychiatrist who limns Norman Bates’s character at the end of
Psycho
); author cameos (virtually every Nabokov novel, beginning with
King, Queen, Knave
, and all the American-made Hitchcock films, beginning with
Rebecca
). The two auteurs had an appreciation for each other, and they exchanged phone calls and letters in ’64, in hopes of finding a film project to work on together. After seeing
The Trouble with Harry
, N. commented, “His humor noir is akin to my humor noir, if that’s what it should be called.” Davidson, 4. Both were born in 1899, both emigrated to the United States as war broke out, each arriving after career attainments abroad. Hitchcock asked N. to work on the screenplay for
Frenzy
, but he was unavailable. “The primary affinity is in the similar relationship that Hitchcock and Nabokov established with their audience … a relationship of playfulness, obtuseness, self-allusiveness and parody”: Ibid., 10.

36
  
so concerned for order:
Other authors of the postwar moment mocked a sanitized America, prominent among them Miller and Kerouac. Kerouac’s work of the forties and fifties would seem definingly un-Nabokovian, but
The Dharma Bums
—even more than
On the Road
, with its Humbertian wanderings all over the map— stubbornly lays hold of Nabokovian materials and approaches. Kerouac began bumming west, looking for America, looking for something, in July ’47; N. was in Colorado that summer, and Humbert and Lolita begin their travels at the same time, mid-August ’47. Both
Dharma
and
Lolita
are works of deep subjectivity, but both batten on precise reports of locales, specific American locales, and Ray, the scruffy Buddhism-intoxicated hero of
Dharma
, has ecstatic reponses to high- mountain areas (Matterhorn Peak, the Skagit Country) he traverses on foot, just as did the lepidopterophile Nabokov.
Lolita
and
Dharma
end in illuminations of love.
Their respective protagonists are importers of alien ideologies—Buddhism in Ray’s case and Euro hyper-aestheticism in Humbert’s. Nabokov’s delightful conflation of Longs Peak, Colorado, with locales he remembers from his Russian boyhood has an eerily exact echo in
Dharma
, mountain-climbing Ray being “happiest when he has a sense that he already knows this wilderness, when he feels ‘something inexpressibly broken in my heart as though I’d lived before and walked this trail.” ’ Douglas, xxiii. Ray and Humbert are terrified of cops, and society at large unnerves them. But both love, even adore, certain people, and Ray coming off the mountain is thrilled to “begin to smell people again.” Ibid., xxii. “The true story of postwar America in all its speed, tomfoolery, and sorrowfulness,” according to Kerouac, “could only be told as interior monologue and confession.” Ibid., x. N., who wrote his first-person masterworks in America, might have said amen to that.

Chapter Thirteen

1
  
“mania”:
Lolita
, 253.

2
  
“After all, gentlemen”:
Ibid.

3
  
“around 1950 I”:
Ibid., 184.

4
  
“abominable nausea”:
Ibid., 325.

5
  
“I went to Telluride”:
DBDV
, 294. The mountains are not mainly granitic; the geology of the mountains around Telluride is complex, and though there is some granite, volcanic breccia is more common. The “self-conscious poplars” are probably balsam poplars, a.k.a. black cottonwood, deciduous broadleafed trees that grow on wet ground from six thousand feet in elevation to the tree line.

6
  
“heroic wife”:
Ibid. This capture was probably the most significant of N.’s years in North America. He had described the butterfly,
Lycaeides argyrognomon sublivens
, on the basis of nine male specimens found at the MCZ; the males had been taken near Telluride in 1902.
NB
, 425, 480–81. On a steep, brushy slope above his Telluride motel in ’51, N. “had the pleasure of discovering the unusual-looking female.” Ibid., 481. The insect is now known as
Lycaeides idas sublivens
Nabokov. Ibid., 754.

7
  
“Small grasshoppers spurted”:
Lolita
, 325–26.

8
  
“A very light cloud was opening its arms”:
One of the reasons N. is beloved of some readers is that he finds words for perceptions many people have had or, when they read him, suddenly feel they have. The fact that he has had the same perceptions—noticing two cloud patches moving at different rates of speed, one catching up with the other—draws him close.

9
  
“divinely enigmatic”:
Lolita
, 326.

10
  
“Every natural fact”:
Emerson, 34.

11
  
signs of unusual talent:
Dmitri became Massachusetts and all–New England high school debating champion at the Holderness School, Plymouth, New Hampshire. D.N., “Close Calls,” 306.

12
  
compromised innocence:
In this regard,
Lolita
has affinities with
The Scarlet Letter
,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
,
The Turn of the Screw
, “Bartleby the Scrivener,”
Billy Budd
,
Moby-Dick
, and
The Sea Wolf
, among others.

13
  
“Dmitri has set his heart”:
Houghton, letter of May 3, 1950.

14
  
“always a pleasure”:
Houghton, letter of May 8, 1950. Ivan is Nicolas’s eldest son.

15
  
“in
complete honesty”:
Bakh, letter of November 2, 1951. In spring ’51, N. borrowed $1,000 from Grynberg. Boyd 2, 199.

16
  
last short story:
Boyd 2, 206.

17
  
could not understand it:
Boyd 2, 208. Ross died December 6, 1951, aged fifty-nine. The story appeared in the magazine on February 2, 1952.

18
  
impoverished:
Schiff, 152n.

19
  
feeling especially broke:
In September ’51, he wrote Wilson, “at present I am in quite awful circumstances, despite a thousand dollars I borrowed from Roman in spring.”
DBDV
, 295.

20
  
other positions:
Schiff, 153.

21
  
“long since”:
Bakh. He wrote Wilson, “
The New Yorker
has bought in all 12 of the 15 [chapters] submitted to them. One piece was in the
Partisan
.”
DBDV
, 262.

22
  
“mumble back”:
DBDV
, 273. N.’s teeth were extracted by “Dr Favre, a Boston dentist.” Berg, note for “Speak On, Memory.”

23
  
“doctor says”:
DBDV
, 294.

24
  
poor sleep:
N. complained of lifelong insomnia, but to judge by the accounts of his dreams he began keeping in his sixties, he slept every night for at least a few hours. Berg.

25
  
“letters from private individuals”:
DBDV
, 292.

26
  
Salinger:
Boyd 2, 608.

27
  
men entranced by younger girls:
The situation occurs in “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” (December 1946), “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (January 1948), “A Girl I Knew” (February 1948), “I’m Crazy” (December 1948), “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” (April 1950), and
The Catcher in the Rye
(1951).

28
  
slang:
Salinger, passim; e.g., “phony,” “crumby,” “that killed me,” “I got a bang out of that.” “The Catcher in the Rye,”
Wikipedia
,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Catcher_in_the_Rye
.

29
  
Both authors venture:
N. ventures but scrupulously avoids profanity; Salinger employs profanity on occasion.

30
  
first refusal deal:
Boyd 2, 73, for N.; Slawenski, 166, for Salinger.

31
  
off and on for years:
Salinger worked for more than ten years on his novel, considering that Holden Caulfield appeared in “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” sold to
The New Yorker
in Nov. ’41 (though not published till after the war). “Catcher,”
Wikipedia
. N. worked for five years on
Lolita
, although he could be said to have developed the theme beginning in the late thirties, for a total of fifteen years.

32
  
“pretty little ears”:
Salinger, 88. “Roller-skate skinny” might have been borrowed from
The Enchanter
.

33
  
“very emotional, for a child”:
Ibid., 89.

34
  
“She was laying there”:
Ibid., 206–7.

35
  
“one of her old nightgowns”:
Lolita, 135–36.

36
  
“had for object”:
Ibid., 136.

37
  
write about St. Mark’s:
Berg, note of February 18, 1951; Boyd 2, 122, 685n40.

38
  
This work, with scholarly:
SL
, 130.

39
  
they sublet a house:
Schiff, 172. N. wrote Wilson, “We have a very charming, ramshackle house, with lots of bibelots and a good bibliotheque, rented unto us by a charming lesbian lady, May Sarton.”
DBDV
, 303.

40
  
she
was upset:
Schiff, 173.

41
  
at nine or ten:
EO
, vol. 2, 328.

42
  
a supreme work of art:
Pushkin was second only to Shakespeare in N.’s poetic pantheon.

43
  
“at heart a pedant”:
DBDV
, 262.

44
  
“two months in Cambridge”:
Ibid., 311.

45
  
“weary negligence”:
Shakesepeare,
King Lear
, act 1, scene 3. Goneril is speaking of the attitude her minions should show her father. Pushkin was reading Byron as he composed
Eugene Onegin
and other concurrent poems. Mitchell, xxvii–xxxi. In his exile to Kishinev (of the infamous pogrom eighty years later), Pushkin befriended a family that introduced him to Byron’s verse. Ibid., xxvii.

46
  
“’Tis now, I know, within your will”:
EO
, vol. 1, 165. The tone is not unlike that of Charlotte Haze in her landlady’s letter to Humbert. This quotation and all others are from N.’s translation of the poem.