Nabokov in America (23 page)

A cabin in northern Wisconsin

Is what I would be for the nonce in,

To
be rid of the pain

Of
The
Widening Stain
⁵

And W. Bolingbroke Johnson

Nabokov made clear from the outset what could be expected of him as a professor. Though “sorry to disappoint you,” he wrote the dean of arts and sciences, “I am entirely lacking in administrative talents. I am a hopelessly poor organizer, and my participation in any committee would be, I am afraid,
pretty worthless
⁶
.” At the same time,

I entirely agree with you that courses in Russian Literature should not be limited to those given in Russian… . I know from experience that a course in this subject given in English has
a strong appeal
⁷
for students who have a general interest in literature,—the enrollment in such a course which I am giving currently at Wellesley College … is one of the largest in the College.

He was annoyed that
Harvard had failed
⁸
to recruit him. But his Cornell appointment was excellent news—a deep relief. Just on the level of an immigrant’s story, his had now become much sunnier. His small boat was being lifted by a postwar tide that produced an enormous expansion in American higher education. Leaving aside his gifts as educator and entertainer, and the undeniable luster he brought to an institution, he had been seeking employment during a long depression that merged with a war, and now that
struggle was over
⁹
.

He worked prodigiously at Cornell. While there, he wrote parts or all of
Lolita
,
Pnin
, and
Speak, Memory
, short stories, poetry, and translations of his own work and others’. He also composed his 1,895-page annotated translation of
Eugene Onegin
, as well as an annotated translation of the Old Slavonic epic
The Song of Igor’s Campaign
. In addition, he conceived and began work on
Pale Fire
and
Ada
, his ambitious novels of the sixties.
Pale Fire
is, among other things, an ingenious animation of Ithaca. Almost offhandedly he registers his habitat with a vividness that surpasses in affectionate fidelity the accounts of all other chroniclers. New Wye, the novel’s college town, is a place of steep up-and-down topography like Ithaca’s, of hardwood forests and drafty old houses above a lake. The winters are snowy and bitter, as Charles Kinbote, the half-cracked, deluded, but not entirely unreliable narrator discovers:

Never shall I forget
¹⁰
how elated I was upon learning, as mentioned in a note my reader shall find, that the suburban house (rented for my use from Judge Goldsworth who had gone on his Sabbatical to England) … stood next to that of the celebrated American poet whose verses I had tried to put into Zemblan two decades earlier! Apart from this glamorous neighborhood, the Goldsworthian chateau, as I was soon to discover, had little to recommend it. The heating system was a farce, depending as it did on registers in the floor wherefrom the tepid exhalations of a throbbing and groaning basement furnace were transmitted to the rooms… . It is true that, as usually happens to newcomers, I was told I had chosen the worst winter in years… . On one of my first mornings there, as I was preparing to leave for college in the powerful red car I had just acquired, I noticed that Mr. and Mrs. Shade, neither of whom I had yet met socially … were having trouble with their old Packard in the slippery driveway where it emitted whines of agony but could not extricate one tortured rear wheel out of a concave inferno of ice.

Kinbote spies on Shade, the Robert Frost–like poet, and Ithaca/New Wye’s prospects assist him:

Windows, as well known
¹¹
, have been the solace of first-person literature throughout the ages. But this observer never could emulate in sheer luck the eavesdropping
Hero of Our Time
or the omnipresent one of
Time Lost
. Yet I was granted now and then scraps of happy hunting. When my casement window ceased to function because of an elm’s gross growth, I found, at the end of the veranda, an ivied corner from which I could view rather amply the front of the poet’s house. If I wanted to see its south side I could go down to the back of my garage and look from behind a tulip tree across the curving downhill road at several precious bright windows… . If I yearned for the opposite side, all I had to do was walk uphill to the top of my garden where my bodyguard of black junipers watched the stars, and the omens, and the patch of pale light under the lone streetlamp on the road below. By the onset of the season here conjured up, I had surmounted … private fears … and rather enjoyed following in the dark a weedy and rocky easterly projection of my grounds ending in a locust grove on a slightly higher level than the north side of the poet’s house.

In
a book of tributes to Nabokov published later, Morris Bishop recalled the early sabbatical-house days:

Most faculty
¹²
members come from bourgeois, even petty- bourgeois, backgrounds. We have the habit of small economies; we cut our own grass, replace our own washers, paint our own floors. The Nabokovs had known two extremes: first opulence, then privation in mean Berlin furnished rooms. They had had little training in the complacent middle.

Furnished houses, with few duties for upkeep, suited them. Some of the houses were dreary, some splendid, as for example
a professor’s trim house
¹³
on Hampton Road in Cayuga Heights, perched atop a hill with a picture-window view of Cayuga Lake. Véra “carried the burdens of everyday life on a small budget in a provincial town,” Bishop recalled, and Stacy Schiff exhaustively documents Vera’s
services to her husband
¹⁴
as chauffeur, classroom attendant, housekeeper, house hunter, and amanuensis. She was regal of mien and admired from afar by many, but also pitied, worried over, also from afar:

The
attention-getting part
¹⁵
was the distribution of labor. More than a few heads turned when, in the supermarket parking lot, Véra set her bagged groceries down in the snow while she shuffled for her keys, then loaded the trunk. In the car her husband sat immobile, oblivious. A similar routine was observed during a move, when Nabokov made his way into a new home carrying a chess set and a small lamp. Véra followed with two bulky suitcases.

Dmitri’s memories of Cornell glow, effuse. He was there off and on; Ithaca became another site of his successful American adjustment, an attachment point for the “
cocoon of love
¹⁶
and well-being and encouragement in which both my parents always enveloped me,” he later wrote. Thinking of Ithaca, he recalled how,

home for a winter vacation
¹⁷
, I would trudge on skis for groceries over Ithaca roads made impassable by a giant snowstorm, or, in spring, drive in our beloved Olds or its successor, the froglike green Buick … to the Cascadilla tennis courts for a game with Father.

Each of the houses
¹⁸
had “its personal charms, from horseshoes to basement workshops to a splendid cannonball of unknown origin that I dug up in the Hansteens’ garden, somehow related in my memory to the expression ‘Go over like a lead balloon.’ ”
Evenings passed
¹⁹
watching “
The Honeymooners
 … on one of the sabbatical TVs … or Alfred Hitchcock episodes that presaged a collaboration with Hitchcock that was almost to happen [for Vladimir] some years later.”

Dmitri was the
same age
²⁰
as fictional Dolores Haze. The wash of cozy Americanness was her donnée, too, but made painful and grotesque in her case; the house with Mexican knickknacks where she lived with her mother was where she lost that mother, after having first lost her father, and then the
real
nightmare started. The success of Nabokov’s real child—the object of his and Véra’s every effort, in a sense—was an accomplishment about which Vladimir, with charming apologies, liked to boast to friends. They had brought their son out of fascist Germany and through many threatful twists had delivered him, un-Englished and wrongly dressed, undernourished-looking, to a bourn of hope. Days after moving to Ithaca, Nabokov wrote his
New Yorker
editor, White, “We are absolutely enchanted with Cornell and
very very grateful
²¹
to the kind fate that has guided us here.”

Dmitri was a difficult creation. He was headstrong (“
I was not always
²²
an easy son”), and his private school tuition, at the Dexter School (attended earlier by John F. Kennedy), St. Mark’s (the head there was a “
vulgar cad
²³
,” Véra thought), and the hardy Holderness School, where he learned to ski and went on hikes, cost Nabokov
about a third
²⁴
of his Cornell income. “My boarding school career … survived some bad skids,” Dmitri admitted.

I … 
lived on the perilous border
²⁵
between success … and minor clandestine delinquency: beer in the woods, nighttime excursions, even a first-year episode of petty thievery… . A superb teacher named Charles Abbey … taught me the rudiments of Shakespeare and guided me to state and New England debating championships… . I had already been accepted at [college, when there came] an indignant protest from a group of village mothers… . I had volunteered to chauffeur a spastic fellow student on regular visits to the local osteopath [and] discovered that the [doctor had] a flirtatious daughter, and [engaged in] a few groping trysts. Thanks to [the school headmaster] I have been allowed to leave with dignity, [taking] my final examinations on the honor system at home.

The
trick was to help him Americanize in positive ways. That the Nabokovs were in a position to reject a school like St. Mark’s—elite and renowned, if riddled with favoritism, Nabokov felt—and find a more congenial one, Holderness, testified to their American good fortune.

Lolita also goes to private school. Her predatory stepfather places her in the “Beardsley School,” somewhere in New England, after a year of sexual usage on the road. Beardsley has “
phoney
²⁶
British aspirations,” Humbert says, but is proudly progressive, concerned with “ ‘the
adjustment
²⁷
of the child to group life,’ ” according to the headmistress. Lolita, cheeky though wounded, her youth profoundly sullied, performs adequately as a student, but Miss Pratt observes certain anomalies: that she “ ‘
is obsessed
²⁸
by sexual thoughts for which she finds no outlet,’ ” while at the same time she “ ‘remains morbidly uninterested in sexual matters … represses her curiosity in order to save her ignorance and self-dignity.’ ” She writes an “ ‘obscene four-letter word which our Dr. Cutler tells me is
low-Mexican
²⁹
for urinal with her lipstick on some health pamphlets,’ ” yet seems not to know about the birds and the bees.

Some of Dmitri’s
sexual hijinks
³⁰
as a youth, as described in his memoirs, might have colored Nabokov’s sketches of hormonal American boys. Humbert jealously guards his captive stepdaughter against such boys, determined that, “as long as my
regime
³¹
lasted she would never, never be permitted to go with a youngster in rut to a movie, or neck in a car,” and auto-mad Dmitri seems to lurk behind Humbert’s thoughts about “the self-sufficient
rapist
³²
with pustules and a souped-up car” who comes a-courting. Whatever his qualities, Dmitri had the freedom to explore, to experiment. His intelligent, concerned parents, laboring to put him
on the right track
³³
, to secure, if possible, an American acculturation in a single generation, leading eventually to happiness and a secure income, both protected and liberated him. Humbert’s fathering of Lolita is the dark negation of this.

Bereft of good parents, Dmitri’s unlucky sister floats free. Her girlish allure is immense, radioactive:

Lo,
little limp Lo!
³⁴
Owing perhaps to constant amorous exercise, she radiated, despite her very childish appearance, some special languorous glow which threw garage fellows, hotel pages, vacationists, goons in luxurious cars, maroon morons near blued pools, into fits of concupiscence… . Little Lo was aware of that glow of hers, and I would often catch her
coulant un regard
in the
direction of some … grease monkey, with a sinewy golden-brown forearm and watch-braceleted wrist, and hardly had I turned my back to go and buy this very Lo a lollipop, than I would hear her and the fair mechanic burst into a perfect love song of wisecracks.

Sexually precocious, she travels a dangerous road. To be male would be safer; in one of his few factual misrepresentations, Nabokov, who researched pedophilia carefully, opines,

Ladies and gentlemen
³⁵
of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen… . Poets never kill.

They do kill, though. Humbert kills; Clare Quilty, his nemesis, dies by his hand, and Charlotte Haze, his wife, dies in an accident brought on by his acts. Lolita dies, too. After years of his misprotection, she liberates herself by means of a different, stranger captivity, with Quilty. But the mark is upon her: the doomful sex mark. She is American, and for us these things are never simple. Hawthorne seems to attend her as she lights out, Huck Finn style, for the Alaska territory, pregnant with a child who will never be born: hoping to outrun her bad luck, she only manifests the curse more clearly, finds swift destruction.