Nabokov in America (9 page)

For almost 25
⁸
years Russians in exile have craved for something—anything—to happen that would destroy the Bolsheviks,—for instance a good bloody war. Now comes this tragic farce. My ardent desire that Russia, in spite of everything, may defeat or rather utterly abolish Germany—so that not a German be left in the world, is putting the cart before the horse, but the horse is so disgusting that I prefer doing so.

The Pontiac was a different kind of horse. The travelers
called it
Pon’ka
⁹
, Russian for “pony.” This Lewis and Clark expedition undertaken by the family, with a native guide (Miss Leuthold, who was intent on practicing her Russian), established the template for the summer explorations to come. Each day they drove until evening approached or they felt they had been on the move long enough. A motel or other accommodation hove into view, a vacancy sign displayed. A list that
Nabokov compiled
¹⁰
of the places where they stayed shows a fondness for motor courts (“Motor Court Lee-Meade,” “Wonderland Motor Courts,” “El Rey Courts,” etc.) and an avoidance of standard hotels,
which in 1940 still had dress codes and where employees had to be tipped. The
Nabokovs stayed
¹¹
at a single hotel and a single self-described motel: the General Shelby, in Bristol, Tennessee. (Shelby was a Confederate cavalry hero.) They avoided tourist homes; these were boardinghouse-style arrangements with a communal table and bathrooms, and Nabokov wanted his own bath.

At this moment in history, the fate of millions in the balance, American recreational consumerism was following its blithe course, confidently reconfiguring the landscape. The hotel was on the way out; it had been on a downward trend for a while in small cities as Americans traveled less by train. In the past, the railroad had delivered captive passengers to hotels, often
located near rail stations
¹²
. Since about 1910, though, Americans had traveled more and more by car, and at the end of a day’s drive, a harried tourist did not wish to have to negotiate the downtown streets of a strange city, looking for an overpriced hotel. The Nabokovs in ’41 were joining the parade of change at an advanced point. They were the beneficiaries of a thirty-year evolution whereby American car gypsies at first had carried their own tents and stopped at any pretty spot along the road, or at a public car campground maintained by a municipality; then had begun to favor private campgrounds offering showers, a communal kitchen, and primitive cabins or tent-cabins, basic protection against the weather; then at progressively nicer cabin camps, where freestanding wooden structures with serviceable beds and other furniture could be rented for a small fee; then at cottage camps, a.k.a. cottage courts, the cottage being an evolution of the cabin in the direction of fresher paint, curtains in the window, nicer furniture, a private shower, and a parking space alongside. The
motor courts common
¹³
by the forties, as suggested by Nabokov’s list, differed from cottage courts in that the separate units were attached under one roof; often the establishment had a rectangular or oblong plan, creating a central space that might be landscaped, and by the forties the development in the direction of architectural tomfoolery was well under way, with log-cabin, Olde Tudor, Indian-tepee, Colonial-frame-with-flower-box, and even miniature-Alamo-style court units popular.

It took the Nabokovs, with the middle-aged Miss Leuthold driving every mile, three weeks to cross the country. A train would have taken four days. Nabokov collected madly; he later donated his specimens to the AMNH, where they ended up in a stuffy storeroom at the end of a hall, locked up for seventy years with curatorial miscellany. In 2011,
two staff scientists
¹⁴
, David Grimaldi and Suzanne Rab Green, noticed the
name Nabokov on a label. The specimens were still unpinned, still inside the glassine envelopes on which Nabokov had jotted the place and date of collection. Every day of the trip had produced at least one capture. On May 28, two days out, Vladimir caught specimens he considered worth saving at Luray and Shenandoah, Virginia, locations eighteen miles apart, as Miss Leuthold drove them from Gettysburg, where they stayed their first night, to Luray, where they stayed their second. They made a side trip to Great Cacapon, West Virginia, seventy-five miles west of Gettysburg. Nabokov had three nets in the Pon’ka; this was to be an entomological version of a summer vacation under the regime of someone—a conceivable American dad—who, crazy for golf, say, intended to play every course they passed.

El Rey Court (now El Rey Inn), Santa Fe, New Mexico

He collected in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, on the Tennessee–North Carolina state line, which had been dedicated only a few months before by President Roosevelt. In Tennessee he also took specimens at Bristol, Crossville, Nashville, and Jackson. His itinerary might have been suggested by road maps handed out at gas stations; also car clubs, such as the American Automobile Association, published guides, and Nabokov became a
close reader
¹⁵
of these. His penciled comments about establishments frequented (“Motel Shelby—all right,”
“Maple Shade Cottages—no,” “Cumberland Motor Court—very nice”) recall the ratings of businesses in the guides. The names of places with their connotations of grandeur or leafy ease suggest an embryonic form of the parody of motel names to appear one day in
Lolita
.

They drove southwest along the Blue Ridge, following U.S. Route 11, today’s Interstate 81. The traveling was mostly on two-lane blacktop. In Knoxville, they connected with U.S. 40; their stops show Nabokov taking specimens where he also took rooms, which suggests that he found lodgings and then went out the next morning, armed with net. In Little Rock, they left 40 for U.S. 67, which heads southwest. Just outside Little Rock, Miss Leuthold agreed to another detour: it may be she was as eager as the foreigners to see as much of the country as possible, in June’s green days, and they traveled to Hot Springs National Park, where Americans had been taking the waters since the early nineteenth century.

How Nabokov responded to the landscape can be inferred, in part, from a letter written after the arrival in Palo Alto: “
During our
¹⁶
motor-car trip across several states (all of them beauties) I frantically collected.” Ten years later, he wrote in a now famous passage in
Lolita
of “the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country” that Humbert Humbert and Lolita see by car. Humbert, whom it is surely perilous to take for Nabokov, nonetheless seems to see with Nabokov’s eyes when he records, “
Beyond the tilled
¹⁷
plain … there would be a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm, peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dove-gray cloud.” Humbert has a “fancy prose style,” he tells us, but in his reports on the landscape he comes as close as he ever does to addressing the reader plainspokenly. His account of the “average lowland North-American countryside” is fond; as always with him, there is a struggle to go beyond what he brings to an encounter—to escape his own previsions and arch, learned analogies—and have it fresh.

Nabokov might have been thinking as they drove along of William Jacob Holland’s
The Butterfly Book
, a popular illustrated guide for the United States and Canada, which was unscientific but full of information. William Comstock or Andrey Avinoff might have told him where to hunt, or he might have gotten hints from articles in the
Journal of the New York Entomological Society
, which he had been reading closely. As the Pontiac crossed into Texas, vistas out of Mayne Reid presented themselves. Still traveling on U.S. 67, the voyagers covered three hundred miles on June 2, from Hot Springs to Dallas, and the signature western
landscape change, toward a flat immensity, began to manifest. The sudden openness, with ridges or peaks at the horizons, seems to enlarge the sky, bringing it paradoxically closer; travelers sometimes have a feeling of too much emptiness,
too much staring blue
¹⁸
.

For Dmitri’s sake, the party might have begun to look around for cowboys and Indians. A few months after their return, a babysitter in Wellesley, Massachusetts, on the night of October 31, 1941, would
paint Dmitri’s face
¹⁹
and take him around the neighborhood, on his head an Indian headdress bought in New Mexico. Dmitri was chattering in fluent American by then. His mother and father had not been quick to kit him out
à l’Américain
; during the summer at Stanford he was seen in lederhosen-like shorts, and before the trip he wore a fur coat in cold weather; his mother, in a portrait of him she wrote, recalled that other children would approach and ask if he was a boy or a girl. “
No, I am a boy,” he would reply calmly, “and this kind of coat is worn by boys where I come from.” He was gentle and friendly and brave, she wrote. From an early age he exhibited a “reserve regarding the deeper emotions”; a loss “hit him the harder the less he spoke of it.” About their cross-country drive she said that “he found himself on a motor car trip through many beauty spots … and [we] stopped for the nights at motor courts, I remember taking him … to a barber’s for a hair cut. ‘And where is your home, son?’ the barber asked… . ‘I don’t have a home,’ was the answer… . ‘Where do you live then?’ ‘In little houses by the road
²⁰
.’ ”

The Nabokovs were primed for living in such little houses. Since the year of Dmitri’s birth, they had had more than twenty-five addresses, in three countries; Dmitri did not outwardly mourn the places they left, such as the Berlin apartment where he lived his first three years, but in his mother’s view he developed an “
odd attachment
²¹
for more passengery dwelling places,” and “his passionate clinging to every bit of his childish possessions and propensity towards accumulating ‘complete’ sets of … five and ten cent store motor cars and trains [had] its root in that initial loss of home and toys.” It represented “a pathetic attempt of a very small and bewildered individual to throw an anchor of his own amidst the incomprehensible.”

A series of photos taken in a national park, to judge by the WPA-style stonework, shows Vladimir so intent on his hobby as to seem under a compulsion. His back is turned, or his gaze is on the ground, where the insects are, or his back is turned
and
his gaze is on the ground. His neck is scrawny and bent like a heron’s. In a letter he wrote Wilson just before
the family left New York, he announced, “I
am driving off
²²
 … to-morrow with butterfly-nets, manuscripts, and a new set of teeth.” His teeth had been a torment most of his life; at age eleven, he had needed the attentions of “a
celebrated American dentist
²³
” in Germany, and by the time he got to America he was fighting rearguard actions, having these ones taken out but not those, and then, inevitably, those, too.

Nineteen forty-one was the
wettest year
²⁴
in Texas history. The travelers experienced thunderstorms, but the weather was most often baking dry; sun and heat after rain bring out butterflies, and Nabokov
took specimens
²⁵
in Mineral Wells and Lubbock as well as Dallas. West of Dallas, they followed Texas 108 and U.S. 84, crossing into New Mexico near Clovis, the town where, in 1929, spearpoints used by Paleolithic hunters had been unearthed. Nabokov caught another desirable insect in Fort Sumner, en route for Santa Fe; Fort Sumner is where Billy the Kid was shot, and his name is in many guidebooks. West of the Pecos and east of the Rio Grande, the party left U.S. 84 for U.S. 66, in ’41 already a fabled American route, the romantic favored highway from Chicago to L.A., and in Santa Fe they spent two nights at another motor court (“
lovely
²⁶
”) and Dmitri was given his Halloweenish headdress.

The Centerpiece of the trip, collecting-wise, was the Grand Canyon. Here the party stayed at Bright Angel Lodge, on the South Rim, where some of the semi-detached cabins are only yards from the precipice. From U.S. 66 (today’s I-40) probably they took U.S. 180 north, continuing as it turned into the park’s South Entrance Road. They stayed two days. It rained and snowed; it was so cold on June 9 that Véra and Dmitri
huddled in the car
²⁷
while Vladimir and Miss Leuthold walked down the Bright Angel Trail, on that morning but a “
slushy mule track
²⁸
.” The lodge had recently been renovated, under the supervision of Mary E. J. Colter, an architect
working for the Atchison
²⁹
, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway, which owned the South Rim concessions. Parts of the original lodge, preserved in Colter’s renovation, date from 1896. Its progression from primitive inn serving stagecoaches to tent camp for rail tourists to cabin camp to hostelry with whimsical outlying units linked by pergolas (rooms also rented in the lodge itself) replicates much of the history of the motor court, although
Colter’s mix
³⁰
of local stone and peeled logs and adobe and her care in fitting all the structures to the site lift the lodge far above the level of any motel that the Nabokovs had seen so far.