Nabokov in America (29 page)

It’s
always a pleasure
¹⁴
to get your annual letter. It’s also a pleasure to think that Dmitri—to whom we took a great liking, when we glimpsed him last fall in his new and semi-adult phase—is likely to be at Harvard fairly soon. I have his cousin Ivan, also a nice and bright boy, in one of my freshman classes… . The person to address about Mitya’s application is Dr. Richard M. Gummere, Director of Admissions… . If any references are required, I should be honored to stand as an enthusiastic godparent.

That
was how things were done in America! Dmitri was duly admitted to Harvard, although without a scholarship. Nabokov wrote Roman Grynberg, who often loaned him large sums, that he was worried:

I’ll tell you
in complete honesty
¹⁵
, the thought that I would not be able to afford his Harvard education takes a lot out of me. I just sent a story to the
New Yorker
and if they take it … then it’ll be just enough to pay in December around five hundred for his education, and for ourselves to scrape out of the sludge we’ve become trapped in. But if it doesn’t sell then for at least some of the sum I will turn to you.

The
New Yorker
did take the story, “Lance,” Nabokov’s
last short story
¹⁶
, which is about, among other things, the fear felt by the parents of an
adventurous young man who climbs mountains and travels to other planets. Harold Ross, the
New Yorker
editor in chief, complained that he
could not understand it
¹⁷
, but Katharine White argued for it, and the magazine published it after Ross’s sudden death.

Restored by his vacations, Nabokov was also
impoverished
¹⁸
by them. His western trips represented the re-embrace of an avocation that had never earned him much, and over the years he noticed that summer was often a time of
feeling especially broke
¹⁹
. Though appreciating Cornell, he soon complained of being underpaid. He asked for advances against his salary, and he began looking for
other positions
²⁰
—at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford.
Speak, Memory
, not selling well, had “already brought me 13–14 thousand” from magazine excerpts, he told Grynberg, but his new novel could not be published that way—too scandalous. In any case, the magazine money was “
long since
²¹
spent.”

At midcentury, Nabokov was half a century old. He had dentures top and bottom. In May ’50 he wrote, “I have to go to Boston to have six lower teeth extracted. My plan is to go thither … Sunday the 28th, grunt at the dentist’s … Monday and Tuesday and perhaps Thursday … then
mumble back
²²
, toothless, to Ithaca.” When returning from his summers, he glowed with good health, but there were collapses. “I am ill,” he wrote Wilson upon his return in September ’51.

The
doctor says
²³
it is a kind of sunstroke. Silly situation: after two months of climbing, shirtless, in shorts, in the Rockies, to be smitten by the insipid N.Y. sun on a dapper lawn. High temperature, pain in the temples, insomnia and an incessant, brilliant but sterile turmoil of thoughts and fancies.

He often complained of
poor sleep
²⁴
, and the separate bedrooms he and his wife kept were at least in part so he could pace or write in the middle of the night. He was under great pressure. It was mostly self-generated: to write wonderful things, to do so now. He had the beginnings of a devoted audience, mostly via
The New Yorker
; as he told Wilson, “The
letters from private individuals
²⁵
I get are, in their wild enthusiasm, ridiculously incommensurable” with the treatment he got from publishers, who failed to push his books. Great things, and great success, were possible. In ’51, he witnessed the extraordinary breakout of another
New Yorker
writer, J. D.
Salinger
²⁶
, who in ’46 had published “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” a story introducing a character called Holden Caulfield. Salinger was the rare author of
his time of whom Nabokov did not speak with disrespect. Stories published by Salinger, in various magazines, introduced his signature concern for adolescence and for young
men entranced by younger girls
²⁷
; among aspects of his style that might have appealed to Nabokov are his shaggy-dog plots and his quirky, imaginative accounts of the flow of thought. His use of
slang
²⁸
, like Nabokov’s, is choice.
Both authors venture
²⁹
into sex talk, and both find a fertile subject in postwar teenagerhood.

Nabokov’s emergence, its crucial stage, coincided exactly with Salinger’s. Eleven chapters of the future
Speak, Memory
appeared in the
New Yorker
just in the years (1948–50) when Salinger was publishing “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” and “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” the run of stories that made him a coming star. In ’48, the magazine offered Salinger a
first-refusal deal
³⁰
of the kind Nabokov had gotten in ’44. Salinger worked on
The Catcher in the Rye
(1951), as Nabokov did
Lolita
,
off and on for years
³¹
. Each book seems vaguely aware of the other. Both invoke an America in which to write about magical young girls is somehow a necessary thing—a key to what is.

Holden’s sister, Phoebe, is the object of her brother’s immense, protective devotion:

She has nice,
pretty little ears
³²
. In the wintertime, her [red hair is] pretty long… . Sometimes my mother braids it and sometimes she doesn’t. It’s really nice, though. She’s only ten. She’s quite skinny, like me, but nice skinny. Roller-skate skinny. I watched her once from the window when she was crossing over Fifth Avenue to go to the park, and that’s what she is, roller-skate skinny. You’d like her. I mean if you tell old Phoebe something, she knows exactly what the hell you’re talking about.

Holden’s voice is the marrow of his novel. Just so Humbert’s. Among the attractions of Humbert’s is that he describes people without common decency or restraint; Holden, too, is funny when most harsh, usually about adults. Scholars have so far failed to detect parodies of
The Catcher in the Rye
in
Lolita
, but Holden’s ambling, self-reflexive, morally troubled voice, an instrument for negotiating a way out of sexual fear, among other things, suggests Humbert’s gleeful sexual ravenousness turned on its outrageous head:

The
only trouble is, she’s a little too affectionate sometimes. She’s
very emotional, for a child
³³
… . Something else she does, she writes books all the time. Only, she doesn’t finish them. They’re all about some kid named Hazel Weatherfield—only old Phoebe spells it “Hazle.” Old Hazle Weatherfield is a girl detective. She’s supposed to be an orphan, but her old man keeps showing up. Her old man’s always a “tall attractive gentleman about 20 years of age.” That kills me. Old Phoebe. I swear to God you’d like her.

Late in the story, Holden returns from boarding school and sneaks into his sister’s room. The mention of Phoebe having a part in a school play, as does Lolita Haze—like the name “Hazle” for Phoebe’s alter ego, an “orphan” whose “old man keeps showing up”—and the length of the bedroom scene, a morally glowing inversion of the morally appalling bedroom scene in
Lolita
at the Enchanted Hunters, suggest that Nabokov read Salinger or in some way imbibed his novel’s vapors. Holden watches his sister asleep:

She was laying there
³⁴
 … with her face sort of on the side of the pillow. She had her mouth way open. It’s funny. You take adults, they look lousy when they’re asleep and they have their mouths way open, but kids don’t. Kids look all right. They can even have spit all over the pillow and they still look all right.

Humbert gazes upon
his
little girl:

Clothed in
one of her old nightgowns
³⁵
, my Lolita lay on her side with her back to me, in the middle of the bed. Her lightly veiled body and bare limbs formed a Z. She had put both pillows under her dark tousled head; a band of pale light crossed her top vertebrae.

He has given her a sleeping potion. But it isn’t strong enough:

The whole [drug-giving] had
had for object
³⁶
a fastness of sleep that a whole regiment would not have disturbed, and here she was staring at me, and thickly calling me “Barbara.” Barbara, wearing my pajamas which were much too tight for her, remained poised motionless over the little sleep-talker. Softly, with a hopeless sigh, Dolly turned away, resuming her initial position.

Humbert
soon does to Dolly something that Holden, in his fragile emotional state, might have found unbearable to hear or even think about. For both, a certain period of childhood—nymphethood for Humbert, and for Holden those years when a child comes out with things that “just kill” you—is a window upon radiance. If it makes sense to speak of an American zeitgeist, then these two seem to have partaken of something within it, maybe of the same thing—each, of course, in his own way.

Salinger offers a tart account of Holden’s boarding school, called Pencey Prep. Nabokov, generating new book ideas even as he labored at
Lolita
, made a mental note to
write about St. Mark’s
³⁷
, Dmitri’s un-favoritest school, in the second volume of autobiography he was contemplating. While
Lolita
was under way, he also applied for a Guggenheim to finance the translation of
Eugene Onegin
.
This work, with scholarly
³⁸
notes, would take him a little over a year to complete, he confidently told Henry Moe, of the foundation.

His friend Mikhail Karpovich, of the skunk-and-moth-rich Vermont farm, was going on sabbatical, and he asked Nabokov to take over his classes at Harvard for the spring of ’52. In Cambridge
they sublet a house
³⁹
from the memoirist May Sarton, who remembered them afterward for their kindness to her old cat, which had health problems, and for breaking a number of dishes. Véra audited a course in which Dmitri was also enrolled, and
she was upset
⁴⁰
to see how often he was late to class or simply didn’t show up.

Nabokov had first read
Eugene Onegin
at nine or ten
⁴¹
. Modern Russian literature comes “out from Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,’ ” Dostoevsky is supposed to have said, but others thought it came from Pushkin’s dueling pistol; Nabokov had no doubt that in writing a readable translation of Pushkin’s intoxicating novel in verse he would be introducing
a supreme work of art
⁴²
, also furthering his project of Russifying the Anglophones. While at Harvard he learned that he had been awarded the Guggenheim. Thus he could take a second semester away from Cornell (spring of ’53), and his researches, as he investigated the social and literary context of Pushkin’s work, expanded.

“Being
at heart a pedant
⁴³
,” as he said of himself, he battened on the deep research. “For
two months in Cambridge
⁴⁴
,” he wrote Wilson, “I did nothing (from 9
A.M.
to 2
A.M.
) but work on my commentaries to
E.O
. The Harvard libraries are wonderful.” The story of Onegin,
jaded Russian nobleman of the 1820s who retreats to the country, where he befriends a mediocre young poet, Lenski, whom he later kills in a duel, for Nabokov as for other Russians was a giant leap forward in sophistication, wit, and self-awareness in a work of art. Onegin does not invent the attitude of “
weary negligence
⁴⁵
”—a pose first named, perhaps first identified, by Shakespeare, in
King Lear
—but he bodies it forth ably, and for Nabokov the way that attitude and Onegin’s whole character are constructions out of the books he has read—lots of Byron, for example—was a fruitful idea.

Tatiana, the novel’s heroine, falls in love with Onegin. She writes him a rash letter, impassioned, frank, self-compromising:

’Tis now, I know, within your will
⁴⁶

to punish me with scorn.

But you, for my unhappy lot

keeping at least one drop of pity,

you’ll not abandon me.

At first, I wanted to be silent;

believe me: of my shame

you never would have known

if I had had the hope,

even seldom, even once a week,

to see you at our country place,

only to hear your speeches,

to say a word to you, and then

to think and think about one thing,

both day and night, till a new meeting.

A retired rake, Onegin refuses her—not unkindly, but he does refuse. He is a man of “sharp, chilled mind.” Pushkin, who portrays himself as Onegin’s close friend in the poem, explains that there were “no more enchantments” for Onegin, that he had burned out early:

him does the snake
⁴⁷
of memories,

him does repentance bite.

All this often imparts

great charm to conversation.

At first, Onegin’s language

would trouble me; but I grew used

to his sarcastic argument

and
banter blent halfwise with bile

and virulence of gloomy epigrams.

So disenchanted is Onegin that, while still young, he gives up reading. Formerly he had been, like the poem’s translator, a quotating pedant, with scraps of Juvenal, Virgil,
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
, and Rousseau salting his table talk. Now in his rustic retreat he buys books, but