Nabokov in America (59 page)

15
  
one of the three best:
Boyd 2, 293.

16
  
“the filthiest book”:
John Gordon, “Current Events,”
Sunday Express
(London), January 29, 1956, 6; Schiff, 212–13.

not been mentioned:
Boyd 2, 293.

“I am extremely irritated”:
DBDV
, 331.

17
  
“all offensive books”:
Graham Greene, “The John Gordon Society,”
The Spectator
(London), February 10, 1956, 182.

18
  
society actually met:
Boyd 2, 295.

19
  
“shocks because it is great art”:
Harvey Breit, “In and Out of Books,”
New York Times Book Review
, March 11, 1956, 8. The source of some of the sentiments quoted by Breit was Harry Levin, and N. thanked him for his kind words in a letter that November: “I shall always remember your kindness to her [
Lolita
] on the Harvey Breit episode.” Houghton.

20
  
“foul little flurry”:
DBDV
, 331.

21
  
Gallimard … Nouvelle Revue:
Boyd 2, 295.

22
  
publishers now contacted:
Schiff, 213.

23
  
Longy School:
Nadia Boulanger was at the school from 1938 to 1945; she taught composition to Aaron Copland, Quincy Jones, and John Cage, among others.

24
  
“My first
MG”:
D.M., “Close Calls,” 311. Dmitri’s father, when a student at Cambridge in 1920, similarly failed to produce in a timely fashion a translation that his father had arranged for him to do. Boyd 1, 178.

25
  
nervously supporting his hopes:
Véra to Berkman, June–July 1955, Berg. “The Longy School gave Dmitri all sorts of tests,” Véra wrote. “They find him very good and full of excellent promise and strongly recommend that he study voice and music. I am quite reconciled to the idea that this will be an experimental year.”

26
  
“very wonderful”:
SL
, 155.

27
  
would supervise:
Ibid., 156.

28
  
“I have a piece”:
Berg, July 1, 1955.

29
  
“The contract (if passed)”:
Ibid.

30
  
“Your father”:
Berg, December 5, 1962.

31
  
“expects”:
Berg, July 1, 1955.

32
  
“Also, please review”:
Berg, June 8, 1956.

33
  
“love for moving things”:
Berg, Véra’s notes on Dmitri, 1950.

34
  
hard to bear:
Boyd 2, 83.

35
  
“She is one of our”:
Berg, March 10, 1955.

36
  
put her name forward:
Berg, October 10, 1956. In his letter to Henry Allen Moe of the Guggenheim Foundation, recommending her, N. also puts himself forward, asking for a third grant, this one to complete studies of “lepidopterous fauna of the Rocky Mts.”
SL
, 189. The Foundation turned him down.

37
  
get behind it:
Berg, February 2, 1959.

38
  
worshipful:
Berg, November 14, 1955.

39
  
“installments are superlative”:
Ibid.

40
  
some of the same friends:
Berg, Véra letter of February 2, 1959.

41
  
“all the way South”:
Berg, August 10, 1959. She stayed at hotels, not motels, because cheap hotels were clustered around bus stations. The “filthiest” she found was in Butte, Montana.

42
  
explorations by writers:
Heany, 127–93. Other notable books in this vein are
Travels with Charley
(1962), by John Steinbeck, and
Going Away: A Report, a Memoir
(1962), by Clancy Sigal.

43
  
“What I … learn”:
Berg, November 14, 1955.

44
  
problematic as a model:
Berkman’s story “Blackberry Wilderness,” in the book of the same name (1959), is nominally Nabokovian in being about an artist. In tone it suggests a fable by Hawthorne. N. himself seems to appear on pp. 149–50.
Blackberry Wilderness
(Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1959).

45
  
“I’ve been delighted”:
Berg, January 16, 1958. Berkman reviewed N.’s story collection
Nabokov’s Dozen
for the
New York Times
, September 21, 1958. She notes that the author often focuses on small people crushed by history and that he gets many, many tonal “hues” in each story. “One may observe of Mr. Nabokov’s mind that he perceives experience not in the tone of a single shade (black or white) but as a spectrum.” N. asked her to take over his classes at Cornell in spring ’59, but she could not, as she was on her way to Stanford on a writing fellowship.

46
  
“specific detail”:
DBDV
, 331.

47
  
“characters
had a kite of meaning”:
Ibid., 321. McCarthy seems unironic in her use of the term “haziness.” In ’62, she reviewed
Pale Fire
in discerning and awestruck terms in the
New Republic
.

48
  
“somehow Mind is involved”:
PF
, 227. The speaker is Kinbote.

49
  
metaphysical speculation:
Henry James’s ghost stories posit the existence of lowly spirits but seem agnostic about a higher spiritual realm. Twain deals with ghosts humorously and stays out of churches. Emersonians no longer, they are not in search of “spiritual facts”—indeed, the concept has become oxymoronic.

50
  
not unknowable:
Fluck, 24.

51
  
two chapters of a never-to-be-completed novel:
N.,
Russian Beauty
, introduction to “Ultima Thule,” 147.

52
  
something more:
Berg.

53
  
“Hurricane Lolita”:
The term appears in Véra and Vladimir’s page-a-day notebook, Berg, but is also to be found in the poem “Pale Fire,” line 680, commentary on p. 243.

54
  
“sophisticated spiritualism”:
Boyd 2, 306.

55
  
“insular kingdom”:
Ibid. N. predicts, in ’57, that in a few years a “President Kennedy” will be involved with the king’s search for sanctuary.

56
  
“to Colorado”:
Ibid., 306–7. Kinbote, after the events of the novel, goes to a western state and holes up in a motor court, à la the Nabokovs; it’s in a town called Cedarn, “in Utana, on the Idoming border.”
PF
, 182.

57
  
novel’s central conceit:
Kinbote may be someone else, but for purposes of narrative simplicity he will here be called Kinbote. N. later wrote, “I wonder if any readers will notice the following details: 1) that the nasty commentator is not an ex-King and not even Dr. Kinbote, but Prof. Vseslav Botkin, a Russian and a madman 2) that he really knows almost nothing about ornithology, entomology and botany 3) that he commits suicide before completing his Index.” Berg, notebook for 1962. This raises the issue of a book escaping its author’s intent. N. held in high regard the poem (“Pale Fire”) he composed for the book. Schiff, 277–78. But Kinbote at times seems not so impressed.
PF
, 263, 286, 296–97.

58
  
“the most perfect novel”:
Boyd 2, 425.

59
  
“Two pages into”
: Ibid., 425–26.

60
  
novels of which Nabokov was aware:
Boyd 2, 398.

61
  
The humbling:
Considering where his books always sold the most, and where he said he found wonderful readers, N. was addressing an American readership. Therefore, it is the American reader who is being humbled.

62
  
“Although these notes”:
PF
, 28.

63
  
“wise in such cases”:
Ibid., 28.

64
  
“brilliant achievement”:
Boyd 2, 439.

65
  
“few better things to offer”:
Ibid., 440.

66
  
other writers:
Kernan, 102–4.

67
  
“my name / Was”:
PF
, 48.

68
  
“Maud Shade was eighty”:
Ibid., 40. Light verse is a case of “the form happily driving the expression.” Chiasson, 63.

69
  
“When I’d just turned eleven”:
PF
, 38.

70
  
like Wordsworth’s:
The poet referred to “The Prelude” as “the poem on the growth of my own mind.”
Norton Anthology
, 230.

71
  
he
told an interviewer:
SO
, 18.

72
  
“abstract bric-a-brac”:
PF
, 67.
Pale Fire
also includes sincere-sounding comments from Kinbote on prejudice, on how blacks and Jews ought to be referred to. Ibid., 216–18.

73
  
“democracy of ghosts”:
Pnin
, 136.

74
  
“cradle rocks”:
SM
, 19.

75
  
“colossal efforts”:
Ibid., 20; Alexandrov, 23–24.

76
  
“everything that happens”:
SM
, 218.

77
  
“taps his knee”:
Ibid.

78
  
seems present in:
Alexandrov, 187.

79
  
“plexed artistry”:
PF
, 63.

80
  
“Existence, or”:
Ibid., 69.

81
  
“There was a time”:
Ibid., 39.

82
  
“may not be a beauty”:
Ibid., 44.

83
  
“no use, no use”:
Ibid.

84
  
“still the demons”:
Ibid., 44–45.

85
  
“Are we quite sure”:
Ibid., 49.

86
  
“ruby ring”:
Ibid., 49–50.

87
  
contrapuntal movement:
Kinbote, in his commentary to lines about the parents watching TV as the daughter drowns, observes that “the synchronization device has been already worked to death by Flaubert and Joyce.” Ibid., 196.

88
  
Charles Xavier Vseslav:
Ibid., 306.

89
  
“distant northern land”:
Ibid., 315.

90
  
“Oh, I did not expect”:
Ibid., 296–97.

91
  
“I was the shadow of the waxwing”:
Ibid., 33. Probably this is a cedar waxwing; the more colorful Bohemian waxwing is a bird more of the American Northwest and western Canada.
Birds of North America
, 240–41. Waxwings are eerily perfect, as if made not of feathers but of some seamless stuff.

92
  
“All colors made me”:
Ibid., 34.

93
  
“How fully I felt nature”:
Ibid., 36.

94
  
“And from the inside, too”:
Ibid., 33.

95
  
“no desire to twist”:
Ibid., 86.

96
  
“I turned to go”:
Ibid., 23.

97
  
“We shall now go back”:
Ibid., 123, 125. N.’s use of kingship in
Pale Fire
miscalculates American readers slightly—kings are for us only to be deposed, are conclusively anachronistic—but he might have been writing already for a world readership, not an American one.

98
  
“Well did I know”:
Ibid., 97–98.

99
  
“One day I happened”:
Ibid., 24.

100
  
“His laconic”:
Ibid., 20–21.

101
  
“Dear Jesus”:
Ibid., 93.

102
  
“a very loud amusement park”:
Ibid., 13, 15.

103
  
he chooses Popian prosody:
This is not really odd, since Shade is a Pope scholar. He may be, like other writers, so captured by his own learning as to be unable to choose otherwise. Boyd 2, 443–44.

104
  
wisdom in its own failure:
Kernan, 124–25.

105
  
“desponder”:
Ibid., 173.

106
  
“frozen mud”:
Ibid., 258.

107
  
“moments of volatility”:
Ibid., 173.

108
  
“admiration for him”:
Ibid., 27.

109
  
“an organic miracle”:
Ibid.

110
  
“Clink-clank, came the horseshoe”:
Ibid., 289.

111
  
“Solemnly I weighed”:
Ibid. Kinbote is awed but perfectly willing to twist the meaning of the manuscript and invent his own lines.

112
  
“enchantment and”:
Ibid., 246. N. describes the landing zone as a “hay-feverish” field with “rank-flowering weeds.” They are probably ragweed. “Up to half of all cases of pollen-related allergic rhinitis in North America are caused by ragweeds,” and the yellow flowers are indeed rank. “Ragweed,”
Wikipedia
,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragweed
.

113
  
“phantom companion”:
Ibid., 233. The author experienced this delusion descending from Mount Humphreys, Sierra Nevada, 1987.