Nabokov in America (14 page)

The passage continues,

Strands of hop
⁴⁰
[a sinuous, twining vine], after strangling the bushes of elder, mountain ash and hazel below, had meandered all over the ridge of the fence whence they ran up at last to twist around that truncate birchtree halfway up its length. Having reached its middle, they hung down from there and were already beginning to catch at the tops of other trees, or had suspended in the air their intertwined loops and thin clinging hooks which were gently oscillated by the air.

This is Nabokov. Garnett does not cut the passage, as other translators had done, but she loses detail, turning the vine’s grasping hooks into the vaguer “
tendrils faintly stirring
⁴¹
in the breeze.” Maybe she has begun to tire, to run out of words. (Nabokov
never
runs out of words.) His “truncate birchtree,” which reenacts the shattering of a trunk, is for her a simple “broken birch-tree,” and his “oblique, sharply slanting fracture,” suggesting the violence of the tree-topping but also the shattering of bone—stark white like a birch—is in her milder version a “sharp slanting angle.”

A bit of green background, no more. There are millions—billions—of such views to be had in Mother Russia. Someone hoping to write his own books may feel inspired, seeing how much can be done with even the waste places.
Dead Souls
is in a large sense a study of waste places, a bringing to scandalous, teeming life of Russian backwaters and Nowheresvilles, and Nabokov, who first read the novel as a youth, might have felt a sort of invitation from the future. By happy accident this garden, which belonged to the fictional landowner Plyushkin, came
to be
the focus of a question
⁴²
on Nabokov’s honors exams at Cambridge, in 1922; asked to describe the neglected garden, he deliriously ran away with the question, recalling detail after detail.

Summer of ’42, near-penniless, the Nabokovs returned to the Karpovich place in Vermont, where they spent an impecunious but sunny July and August. Dmitri, eight years old, had been sick most of the winter and had just had his tonsils out. He was a good-looking, stork-shaped boy whose long limbs and neck were striking—by age ten he had nearly caught up with his tall mother in height, and a few years later he would top out at a full six foot five, a species of young American giant, confident, athletic, car crazy.

In the coming years, the Nabokovs scrimped on everything but his education. Véra sometimes lamented that his natural sweetness had been worn away by contact with rougher American boys. Both parents were anxious that he get the best education affordable, and though Véra feared that American coarsening, both recognized that a process of acculturation was in order. Dmitri would recall his Wellesley days in a memoir published in the 1980s:

I ride my balloon-tired
⁴³
bicycle to a neighborhood school on my own … along a tree-shaded lane. We live in a shingled house on Appleby Road, whose name will remain mnemonically entwined with the green apples that grow in the leafy depths at its dead end, and that serve as missiles for elaborately staged battles. In the spring I shall be initiated into the rites of marbles by the girl next door. Her mysterious femininity at twelve … will appear unattainably mature to me at eight, and my crush will remain undeclared.

Often dissatisfied with the schools they find for him—quick to pull him out and put him in others—the Nabokovs are gratified when Americanizing is on the program:

One
wonderful thing will happen
⁴⁴
here [at a school in Cambridge, Massachusetts]. Mrs. Ruedebush, the music teacher … will notice that I, a European child with no grounding in traditional American singing, have trouble carrying the tune of hymns sung during the school assemblies. She will take me under her musical
wing, give me lessons in solfege and piano, and begin training my high soprano… . Enthusiasm will replace frustration. I shall go on to sing in choirs and student performances, and eventually reward her early efforts by becoming a professional operatic basso.

True conversion, though, happens on the athletic field:

I sit on the lawny grounds
⁴⁵
of Dexter School. It is the day of spring sports awards. I entered Dexter three years ago [1944], still quite unequipped for life as an American boy. The school’s headmaster, Francis Caswell, has been the second superb pedagogue of my life. He has taught me not only Cicero and Caesar, but also how to bat a ball and throw a block, how to give a firm handshake while looking the other squarely in the eye, how to be a “citizen.” … I have managed to win maroon Dexter Ds in various sports, but still think of myself as a skinny, imperfectly coordinated outsider… . I am in mid-reverie when I hear my name announced as overall winner of the spring sports contest, a cumulative competition comprised of track and field events plus such things as baseball throwing. I look around, thinking I have misheard.

Dmitri and Vladimir in Vermont, Véra traveled to Boston to find them an apartment. The one they could afford, at 8 Craigie Circle, Cambridge, has become a site of pilgrimage for Nabokov fans: here they stayed longer than anywhere else in America, in a third-floor flat (No. 35) in a building of six stories. The redbrick structure, with vertically coursed, bright-white ashlar blocks, has an elegant wood-paneled lobby and a secure feel, with a small courtyard leading to an oaken front door. The flat itself was cramped, and Nabokov once called it “
dingy
⁴⁶
.” He had to write “
under an old lady
⁴⁷
with feet of stone and above a young woman with hypersensitive hearing,” but during the war he was proud enough of the place to draw his sister Elena a floor plan and to describe watching from an upstairs window as Dmitri, “
looking very trim
⁴⁸
, wearing a gray suit and a reddish jockey cap,” set out for school in the morning.

Nabokov would set out an hour later. His daily walk to the Museum of Comparative Zoology, at Harvard, where he had begun to volunteer, took him along level streets beneath mature eastern hardwoods—he seems proud as
he informs Elena
⁴⁹
that Véra and he live “in a suburb … in the Harvard area.” His walk of fifteen minutes took him past tennis courts
gone to weeds
⁵⁰
during the war. The
transformation of Harvard
⁵¹
—its
depopulation by ordinary students and its repopulation as a military training facility, with thousands of soldiers, ROTC candidates, and lab workers taking over the grounds—is nowhere reflected in his letters or other writings of the time. As a recent immigrant he can be expected to have been less comprehending of changes than a local; still, his not noticing, or not recording, what he saw suggests his absorption in private matters.

8 Craigie Circle, Cambridge, where the Nabokovs lived from 1942 to 1948

Those
were lepidopteral, mainly. Nathan Banks, head of the Department of Entomology at Harvard, welcomed him when Vladimir wandered into the MCZ one day, bearing specimens from the Grand Canyon. Banks knew some of the same people Nabokov knew in New York, and Vladimir’s energy and specialist knowledge made him good to have around. Positions at the MCZ would soon go unfilled as men were called away to war. Banks, though a professional entomologist, was somewhat at sea among the lepidoptera—his areas of expertise included wasps, lacewings, fish flies, and mites (he was probably best known for his
Treatise on the Acarina, or Mites
, 1905). To sister Elena Vladimir described his good luck in landing where he had:

My museum
⁵²
—famous throughout America (and throughout what used to be Europe)—is … part of Harvard University… . My laboratory occupies half of the fourth floor. Most of it is taken up by rows of cabinets, containing sliding glass cases of butterflies. I am custodian of these absolutely fabulous collections. We have butterflies from all over the world; many are type specimens (i.e., the very same specimens used for the original descriptions, from the 1840s until today). Along the windows extend tables holding my microscopes, test tubes, acids, papers, pins, etc. I have an assistant, whose main task is spreading specimens… . My work enraptures but utterly exhausts me.

The collections were in disarray—surprising at such an institution. Sometimes he put in
fourteen-hour days
⁵³
at his worktable, which caused Véra to fear that he would be lost to literature. “To know that no one before you has seen” what you are seeing among the specimens, he wrote, “to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon … all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it.” After a long day of complete fascination, he would stumble home, “
already in the blue darkness
⁵⁴
of winter, the hour of evening newspapers … and radio phonographs [that] burst into song in the illumined apartments of large ivy-colored buildings.”

Lepidopterology was solace, sanctuary: he needed to be moving on, proceeding with American-style alacrity to make a future as a writer, yet he also needed to absorb, to adjust, to become. He expressed his perplexed state of mind to Wilson, whose own career provided a daunting example of self-furthering: “
Funny—to know Russian
⁵⁵
better than
any living person—in America at least—and more English than any Russian in America,—and to experience such difficulty in getting a university job.” He was in possession of authentic goods, literary riches, that he knew one day could secure his future. By virtue of the same playful fate that had arranged for him to be born in the last year of the nineteenth century, exactly one hundred years after the birth of his idol, Pushkin, then had arranged for him a ringside seat at the Revolution and the arrival of the Nazis, he found himself in a country badly in need of basic education in matters Russian at that rare moment when America was asking to be taught. Some of his obsessing over issues of translation betrays an anxiety of near possession, a kind of greed. He knew things others did not, had read more deeply and passionately—
he
should be the one delivering the Russian treasure, to claim the new audience.

Meanwhile, he was half out of the living sea of his Russian, half into the dimensionless American air. After complaining that he had bogged down with Gogol because he had to retranslate so much, he stated the problem more honestly: “The
book is progressing slowly
⁵⁶
because I get more and more dissatisfied with my English. When I have finished, I shall take three months’ vacation with my ruddy robust Russian muse.”
The truth was that his muse was being left behind.
§
“
I envy so bitterly
⁵⁷
your intimacy with English words,” he wrote Wilson. Whether or not he truly envied Wilson’s English, he was effectively tongue-tied: the “
urge to write
⁵⁸
is sometimes terrific, but as I cannot do it in Russian I do not do it at all.” He wrote little fiction, only a bit of what would become the dystopian novel
Bend Sinister
(1947). His later descriptions of the ordeal of changing his language have a weary tone, but that does not mean he was not suffering.
Isaiah Berlin
⁵⁹
, who had made the same switch at a younger age, felt loss and regret for the rest of his life, as he expressed to a friend:

Blue butterflies, collected by Nabokov and others, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard

It is our Russian conversations which I adore & look forward to & think about and remember the longest… . I can never talk so … to anybody in England … Russian to me is more imaginative, intimate and poetical than any other [language]—& I feel a curious transformation of personality when I speak it—as if everything becomes easier to express, & the world brighter and more charming.

Tormented by his loss—feeling unreal in English and, incidentally, barely able to pay the rent at Craigie Circle (
sixty dollars a month
⁶⁰
)—he completed a wonderful book, the first manifestly brilliant work of his American years.
Nikolai Gogol
is a work of urgent, amusing directness, the ten-dollar words of his usual style mostly absent. He plunges the reader—his hoped-for American reader—into the bizarre
Slav profonde
material right off: Gogol is dying in Rome. He is forty-two years old and has come under the care of “diabolically energetic” foreign doctors who apply leeches to his long, pointed nose, a nose that he used to touch to his lower lip to impress people. The leeches have been placed inside it, the better to feed from the tender membranes, and a Frenchman, himself a perfect leech, orders that Gogol’s hands be restrained when he tries to brush them away.