Nabokov in America (60 page)

114
  
such a friend:
Another friendship in the poem is between Shade and local farmer Paul Hentzner, who “knows the names of things.” Ibid., 185.

115
  
mountain-minded:
Ibid., 62. “I love great mountains,” says Shade on p. 52.

116
  
“How serene … first full cowbell … lacy resistance … Mr. Campbell … mountain mead … strip naked”:
Ibid., 119, 140, 139, 139, 140, 142. The puzzling exhaustiveness of this account expresses, perhaps, N.’s Shade-like love of great mountains and Dmitri’s ardent attraction to them also. Mountaineers often tell long and exhaustive stories.

117
  
“pinhead light”:
Ibid., 140.

118
  
“dark Vanessa”:
Kinbote refers to the insect,
Vanessa atalanta
, as a “memento mori,” and one that has been fluttering throughout the book settles on Shade’s sleeve just before he is shot to death. Ibid., 290. Most likely the famous photo of Walt Whitman with butterfly—fake butterfly—on finger had nothing to do with this.

119
  
“I came among these hills”:
Norton Anthology
, 156.

120
  
a beautiful passage:
PF
, 57, lines 662–64.

121
  
repetition of similar lines:
Ibid., 143, 239.

122
  
a fantastic gloss that takes off:
Boyd argues that Shade wrote all of
Pale Fire
, including the commentary presented as the work of Kinbote. Boyd 2, 443–56. The present author rejects Boyd’s reasonable thesis as reductive.

123
  
“I am capable”:
Ibid., 289. The drive to arrive at an inarguable solution to a book like
Pale Fire
is understandable, but unresolved mysteries, messy half solutions, also attract. There is an argument to be made from laziness. N. told an interviewer that “reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence … unattainable. You can know more and more … but you can never know everything … it’s hopeless.” In another context, he recommended that “we have the humility and the hard sense to recognize that the real world always escapes us.” Bloom, 99. Kinbote, despite his claim to be incapable of writing verse, may be the author of persuasively Shadeian lines. “We all are, in a sense, poets,” he tells Eberthella Hurley, a local faculty wife.
PF
, 238. He also adduces many variant lines to Shade’s poem, and in the novel’s tendentious index he seems to admit to having written several: “the Zemblan King’s escape (
K
’s contribution, 8 lines),
70
;
the Edda (
K
’s contribution, 1 line),
79
; Luna’s dead cocoon,
90–93
; children finding a secret passage (
K
’s contribution, 4 lines),
130
.”
PF
, 314.

124
  
transcendental verses:
Kernan, 104–5. Shade is “in that surprising American way of Emerson and Thoreau … a mystic and a visionary, irreligious but persuaded that beyond this seen world there is another unseen, that life here is but a step on the way to a transcendental beyond.” Ibid.

125
  
“Gradually I regained”:
PF
, 297.

126
  
“large, sluggish man”:
Ibid., 286. N. might have felt sluggish following ten years of archival work on
Eugene Onegin
. The description is actually of Conmal, Duke of Aros, the first, crude translator of Shakespeare into Zemblan. Ibid., 306.

127
  
disagrees with Shade’s skepticism:
Ibid., 224–27.

128
  
“in an elevated state”:
Ibid., 258.

129
  
“all at once”:
Ibid., 259.

Chapter Sixteen

1
  
“thick batch of U.S. roadmaps”:
Laura
, introduction.

2
  
“violins but trombones”:
Field,
Life in Part
, 32. N. speaks of a throb in “Inspiration.”
SO
, 310.

3
  
ex-San Francisco bohemian:
Hagerty,
Life of Maynard Dixon
, passim.

4
  
Dixon’s widow:
Edith Dale to Véra, February 9, 1956, in Boyd 2, 698n30. Dixon’s previous wife was the photographer Dorothea Lange.

5
  
drive to the southeast:
SL
, 186. Nabokov was very fond of his “beautiful little cottage.” Ibid. To Wilson he described the “Pink, terra-cotta and lilac” crags nearby that formed a “sympathetic background to the Caucasus of Lermontov”—he was finishing Dmitri’s translation of
A Hero of Our Time
, with Véra’s help.
DBDV
, 333.

6
  
famously empty:
U.S. Census, 1950.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950_United_States_Census#State_rankings
.

7
  
poet’s death in a duel:
EO
, vol. 3, 43–51. N.’s explanation of the Lenski-Onegin duel in the poem and of the famous duel on January 27, 1837, in which Pushkin was shot by Georges d’Anthès has a tone of grave simplicity hardly to be found anywhere else in the Nabokov canon.

8
  
splendid mind and literary sense:
Leving, 3. Nikki Smith, literary agent and representative, with Peter Skolnik, of the Nabokov estate from 1987 to 2008, says that Véra operated as N.’s “agent-of-origin” from the early days, from about 1930 on. An agent of origin parcels out an author’s work to publishers and to subagents, Altagracia de Jannelli being one of the subagents. Leving, 4.

9
  
“The air was keen”:
Pnin
, 190, 191.

10
  
eight thousand miles:
Boyd 2, 363.

11
  
quick sketch of everything:
Berg, page-a-day.

12
  
they denominate periods:
Berg.

13
  
“Ford-Keyser” … ’38 Buick:
D.N., “Close Calls,” 307, 310. Dmitri called the Buick “stately.”

14
  
Dmitri the madcap:
Berg. Dmitri’s job was as a translator at International House, Columbia University, according to Dmitri’s friend Sandy Levine. Dmitri “met a lot of girls that way.” Interview with Sandy Levine, June 3, 2012. According to Boyd,
the job was at the
Current Digest of the Soviet Press
, presumably as a translator. Boyd 2, 362. Dmitri’s apartment was at 636 West End Avenue, no. 8; phone, Lyceum 5–0516.

15
  
reserve unit that met:
Interviews with Sandy Levine and with Brett Schlesinger, November 27, 2012. The reserve meetings in New York City were at 529 West Forty-seventh Street.

16
  
Song of Igor’s:
Diment,
Pniniad
, 40. In Sept. ’58 N. was polishing his translation, in May ’59 Véra was typing it, and in ’60 it was published.

17
  
“he’s going to be famous”:
Interview with Schlesinger.

18
  
preservation of some old:
Berg.

19
  
sun emerging:
Berg, page-a-day.

20
  
advance copy:
Ibid. The diary indicates that the copy caught up with them in Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta. Boyd 2, 363, says it was delivered in Babb, Montana. Schiff, 228, guesses Glacier National Park.

21
  
“true greatness”:
Berg. The
New Republic
editorial was in an issue that also included a vicious pan of
Lolita
.

22
  
“begun to melt”:
Berg, page-a-day.

23
  
“engrossed in a big rodeo”:
Ibid. Véra’s account seems to inform (of course it does not) the rodeo in a small Nevada town in John Huston’s
The Misfits
(1961).

24
  
“excellent publisher”:
Ibid. Earlier the Nabokovs thought Minton a bumbler. Boyd 2, 364; Schiff, 229.

25
  
“EVERYBODY TALKING”:
SL
, 257.
Times
reviewer Orville Prescott was shocked: “To describe such a perversion with the pervert’s enthusiasm without being disgusting is impossible. If Mr. Nabokov tried to do so he failed.” “Books of the Times,”
New York Times
, October 18, 1958.

26
  
6,777 reorders:
SL
, 258.

27
  Times
bestseller list:
Schiff, 230.
Lolita
was number 1 from September 28 till November 9, 1958. From November 16 till March 8, 1959, it was number 2 behind
Doctor Zhivago
. It fell to number 3, behind
Zhivago
and Leon Uris’s
Exodus
, on March 8. Hawes Publications,
http://www.hawes.com/1958/1958.htm
and
http://www.hawes.com/1959/1959.htm
.

28
  
black moiré:
Schiff, 255.

29
  
under restriction:
There were no such restrictions in the United States. N. was proud of his country of citizenship for never banning it. “America is the most mature country in the world now in this respect,” he told the
New Haven Register
. Boyd 2, 367. In France, following publication of the Olympia Press edition in 1955, the state imposed a ban, only to lift it in January 1958. Boyd 2, 364. The ban was in response to a request by the British government; copies of
Lolita
had been making their way across the Channel. de Grazia, 260. In May 1958, a new ban was instituted in France, under which sales to those under eighteen were forbidden, as were bookshop displays. Boyd 2, 364. A British edition of
Lolita
became possible only with passage of the liberalizing Obscene Publications Act of 1959. de Grazia, 266.

30
  
“magnificently outrageous”:
Dupee, “ ‘Lolita’ in America,” 30.

31
  
“prodigy”:
Ibid.

32
  
“all the brows”:
Ibid., 35.

33
  
“the luck”:
Ibid.

34
  
a
postwar turn:
Ibid., 31.

35
  
“Into this situation”:
Ibid., 30, 31.

36
  
mordant person:
McCarthy, “F.W. Dupee”; McCarthy, “On F. W. Dupee.”

37
  
“the fading smile”:
Dupee, 35.

38
  
“Humbert can be heard”:
Ibid.

39
  
“too shocking”:
Ibid., 31. Dupee welcomed
Lolita
as the first sign of what would become the 1960s turn. He enjoyed seeing American normalcy subjected to humorously disrespectful analysis. In his introduction to a long, expurgated selection from
Lolita
in
The Anchor Review
, he wrote, “The book’s general effect is profoundly mischievous… . The images of life that
Lolita
gives back are ghastly but recognizable.” Dupee quoted poet John Hollander as saying that the novel “flames with a tremendous perversity of an unexpected kind,” yet had “no clinical, sociological or mythic seriousness.” Dupee disagreed about the lack of seriousness. He tried to show how Humbert’s situations were “our” situations in fifties America. “The supreme laugh may be on the reviewers for failing to see how much of everyone’s reality lurks in its fantastic shadow play.” In an article in
Encounter
, Dupee said that Nabokov sounded “most like a know-nothing native writer” when, in his afterword to
Lolita
, he denied the reality of his American portrait.

40
  
just read in the
Times
:
Schiff, 232.

41
  
phenomenal sum:
$150,000 in ’58 equaled about $1.2 million dollars in 2014.
DaveManuel.com
,
http://www.davemanuel.com/inflation-calculator.php
.

42
  
Véra’s account was “important”:
Berg. The word
important
appears in N.’s hand on a graph-paper-lined three-by-five card inside the page-a-day diary. The note reads, “My diary notes, summer 1951, while writing ‘Lo’ and, more important, Véra’s diary kept during the first months following the publication of ‘Lo’ in America.”

43
  
Inquiries:
Berg, page-a-day.

44
  
“ought to have happened”:
SL
, 259.

45
  
team from
Life
:
Boyd 2, 366.

46
  
The book’s having first gone to France:
In the prolonged process,
Lolita
had time to gather encomiums from Greene and other respected figures.
Lolita
’s unprosecuted publication in the United States cleared the way not only for a reissue of
Memoirs of Hecate County
but also for the successful defense and first legal publication of
Lady Chatterley
in the UK. Schiff, 236.

47
  
“could not believe”:
Berg.

48
  
Dean Martin’s show:
Ibid.

49
  “
Milton Berle … Groucho Marx”:
Boyd 2, 374.

50
  
first TV appearance:
Berg.

51
  
obvious Soviet ploy:
Boyd 2, 372. Published just days after
Lolita, Doctor Zhivago
supplanted it at the head of the
Times
bestseller list, and the books would be 1 and 2 into the new year. What N. had against Dr. Schweitzer was his work with Bertrand Russell on SANE, his do-gooding, his windy theology.