Nabokov in America (32 page)

Corral Log Motel (interior)

He had sent White something else instead, a story about Pnin, a Russian-born professor, which
was
suitable. Writing that and writing the installments of
Speak, Memory
had been “brief sunny escapes” from the other book, the one that had tortured him. Nabokov both wanted and did not want to show White
Lolita
. He was obliged to, under their contract, and he hoped that she would declare it a work of genius despite its treatment of depravity, of such incomparable merit that all worries about public revulsion or possible prosecution could be forgotten. White was not charmed, however, by the unsigned manuscript that
Véra hand-carried
²⁷
to New York a few months later, at the end of ’53. The
New Yorker
’s head editor, William Shawn, was not to be shown it by any means, Véra insisted to White—Shawn was
more shockable
²⁸
than she was.

The writing of a classic novel thus passed, was accomplished, marked by a few comments to an editor (“heartbreaking,” “enormous”) and by
a hint or two
to friend Wilson
²⁹
(“quite soon I may show you a monster”). White had no doubt heard this sort of thing before: writers often think their latest work their greatest. He continued dictating that fall, recording only
on the sixth
³⁰
of December that he was truly finished. “The theme and situation are decidedly
sensuous,” he told Wilson, but “its art is pure and its fun riotous.” It was his “best thing in English.” One of the first editors to see the manuscript warned him, however, that “we would all go to jail if the thing were published. I feel rather depressed about this fiasco
³¹
.”

The publication of
Lolita
, like its composition, was long and
tormenting
³²
. At times it seemed unlikely to be accomplished. Nabokov acted
as his own agent
³³
, as Wilson had taught him to. Viking rejected it first, an editor warning that publication under a pseudonym, Nabokov’s initial plan for the book, would invite prosecution, reluctance to affix an author’s real name suggesting awareness of pornographic content. Simon & Schuster rejected it next, editor Wallace Brockway blaming the decision on prudish colleagues. In October ’54, J. (James) Laughlin, bold avant-gardist not afraid to challenge obscenity statutes, said no for New Directions. Farrar, Straus & Young declined out of fear of a court battle they could not win. Jason Epstein, of Doubleday, had been tipped to the book by Wilson, who was given a manuscript in late ’54; like Pascal Covici, the Viking editor, and like Brockway, and like Roger Straus of Farrar, Straus,
Epstein esteemed
³⁴
Nabokov’s writing but was unable to persuade his colleagues to publish the new book, and in a memo he expressed some literary reservations but also a feeling that
Lolita
was somehow and not in a trivial way, brilliant.

Laughlin and Covici thought it might have
a better chance
³⁵
overseas. Nabokov therefore sent it to Doussia Ergaz, his agent in Paris, and started looking around for an American agent to do what he had been unable to—he was
willing to part
³⁶
with 25 percent of earnings, he told Brockway.

This complicated process, which did lead eventually to a foreign first publisher (Olympia Press) and finally to an American one (Putnam’s), seems in retrospect fated to have worked out. The book was sexual but demure: free of forbidden words. It was highly readable. It appeared at a good moment, when the enforcers of public morality were coming to seem completely absurd. Joyce’s
Ulysses
, widely acknowledged as an iconic work, possibly the greatest of the century, had been under attack by moral guardians since before it was even a book. (A first excerpt, published in 1918,
brought convictions
³⁷
for obscenity for the two editors
of the
Little Review
.) A long line of other works, condemned, confiscated, and burned, including Lawrence’s
Women in Love
,
The Well of Loneliness
, by Radclyffe Hall,
Tropic of Cancer
,
Tropic of Capricorn
,
Naked Lunch
, Ginsberg’s “Howl,” Dreiser’s
An American Tragedy
, Erskine Caldwell’s
God’s Little Acre
, Lillian Smith’s
Strange Fruit
, and
Memoirs of Hecate County
, had pre-dug Nabokov’s
rose garden
³⁸
. Just in the years between his book’s first rejections (’54) and its acceptance by an American house (’58), the censorship effort in America went from weak to moribund, and by ’59
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, the most suppressed novel of the century, had appeared in
paperback from Grove
³⁹
Press, and in ’61
Tropic of Cancer
also appeared, also from Grove.

It was fated to work out for other reasons, too. Though Nabokov told Katharine White that
Lolita
was “a great and coily thing” without precedent, it was not a formal breakthrough on the order of
Ulysses
or
The Sound and the Fury
, or
As I Lay Dying
(or
Moby-Dick
, for that matter). It did not present difficulties for readers like those to be found in Djuna Barnes’s
Nightwood
or Andrei Bely’s
Petersburg
or, to name works only of
Lolita
’s own decade, Beckett’s
Molloy, The Voyeur
, by Robbe-Grillet,
The Recognitions
, by William Gaddis, or Michel Butor’s
Second Thoughts
. Within Nabokov’s own canon it was easier to enter than
The Gift
or
Bend Sinister
. If by “without precedent” he had meant the
theme of sex with children
⁴⁰
treated openly, on that score he would have been exaggerating his book’s originality; disturbing accounts had appeared before, in works by the Marquis de Sade (
The 120 Days of Sodom
,
Incest
) and others. Nabokov meant something else by “without precedent.” Probably he meant the coily, intricate skein of correspondences half-buried in the text, hints whereby Humbert becomes aware of Quilty, whose string pulling mirrors his own but on a level suggestive of devilish intriguing, of a universe of mocking gods, with a Master Pratfall Designer up there somewhere, ensnaring everyone in a stupendous gag.

Whatever he meant, he had written
a novel for readers
⁴¹
: ordinary readers. It was decked with gaudy allures, wickedly funny, sure to offend, but with its doors wide open. Altagracia de Jannelli would have approved. She had wanted him to write something right over the American plate. In all his magpie gleaning of period objects and attitudes he had managed not to overlook simplicity and emotion as American preferences. The book sold well for Olympia, despite legal challenges in Britain and France, and for Putnam’s and later American publishers it
sold extremely well
⁴²
—phenomenally well, in the hundreds
of thousands in just its first year, and in ensuing decades in the many, many millions.

Some of Nabokov’s struggle as he wrote came from fear that his new book would be stillborn—would be suppressed, kept from all those readers. Writers are a varied bunch, some concerned about readership, some indifferent, but even the indifferent ones write with at least one reader in mind, working to entice and seduce and impress themselves. To give up five years of professional prime and his
best work
⁴³
in English, as he decreed
Lolita
to be—to carry the child full-term, knowing that it might already be dead—that was indeed anguishing.

His superciliousness, his scorn for all that was popular and midmarket, was an authentic attitude with him but also a deception. His novel
Pnin
was valuable and justified as a work of art because “what I am offering you,” he told one publisher who became interested in it, “is a
character entirely new
⁴⁴
to literature … and new characters in literature are not born every day.” Novelty was what justified
Lolita
, too, he felt—being without “precedent in literature.” Luckily, to have the sense of originality he needed in order to write did not require an
As I Lay Dying
type text, structurally strange and forbidding to mainstream readers. He had written such books, plentifully forbidding ones—
Bend Sinister
was his modernist American swan song, unfriendly to many reader expectations, and some of his Russian novels, such as
Invitation to a Beheading
, rejoice in narrative discontinuities and redressings of reality.

Reality, identified by Nabokov as “
one of the few words
⁴⁵
which mean nothing” without quote marks around them, signified something new in the New World. Reality was vital and vulgar here. It provided Nabokov with “
exhilarating
⁴⁶
” opportunities for burlesque, for extended high-flying parodies, and the books of his American prime are excited even when dark. Readers puzzled or disgusted by the
high spirits
⁴⁷
of
Lolita
, which he himself deemed a tragedy, were not misperceiving it; the energy of discovery—the pleasure in claiming new writerly territory—skews the representation. But that reality is also fairly stable. In
Pnin
the quote marks around it have been all but erased, and a reader of
Lolita
, especially of the road-trip parts, might almost have used it as a Baedeker. In
Ada
, written after his self-exile to Switzerland, the reality of countries and continents is an idea again under interrogation. Use
Ada
as Baedeker at your peril.

Summer
of ’54, the Nabokovs had a rare bad western trip: a cabin they rented turned out to be a mess—it was ten miles north of Taos, New Mexico, “an ugly and dreary town,” Nabokov wrote White, with “
Indian paupers
⁴⁸
placed at strategic points by the Chamber of Commerce to lure tourists from Oklahoma and Texas.” Then Véra found a lump in her breast. A local doctor said it was cancerous, and she rushed east by train, to a doctor in New York who removed the lump and found it to be benign. Before this, which put an end to the New Mexico trip, Vladimir had asked a local man to introduce him to Frieda Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence’s
notorious widow
⁴⁹
, who lived on a ranch nearby. Véra refused to go with him; she had no interest in meeting such a woman, and she discouraged him from going
on his own
⁵⁰
. The Lawrence ranch, where the writer’s ashes had been brought after his death in southern France, had been given to Frieda by the arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan, and it had become a place of pilgrimage for devotees, who ventured to it as to a shrine. Nabokov’s attentions to graves and writers’ widows are little known—in America, this appears to have been his only attempt to pay such respects.

He worked hard the year
Lolita
was being rejected. Among his projects was a translation into Russian of
Speak, Memory
, a “most harrowing” task, he informed White. “I think I have told you more than once
what agony it was
⁵¹
 … to switch from Russian to English… . I swore I would never go back, but there I was, after fifteen years … wallowing in the bitter luxury of my Russian.” He continued working on
Eugene Onegin
, translating the other direction. He wrote a second chapter of
Pnin
, deemed “unpleasant” by the
New Yorker
and rejected; Viking had acquired book rights, but his editor there felt unsure after reading the early chapters and disagreed with Nabokov’s overall plan, which ended in death for “
poor Pnin
⁵²
 … with everything unsettled and uncompleted, including the book Pnin had been writing all his life.” Speaking Jannellian
market wisdom
⁵³
, the editor, Pascal Covici, urged an outcome a little less hopeless, and Nabokov took this advice: he changed his plan.

Pnin
shows him performing as an alert professional, writing about a Russian in America after the death of Stalin and during Joseph McCarthy’s hunt for Soviet moles—a time of
unusual focus on things Russian
⁵⁴
. The book is of the early fifties as
Lolita
is of the late forties and a bit later. Michael Maar, a German scholar, notes that “the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima” makes its way into the text, Professor Pnin reminded of it when he sees a
thought bubble
⁵⁵
in a cartoon, and in general, “
no other work
⁵⁶
by Nabokov lets so much contemporary history
pass through its membranes.” The writing is social comedy of an exalted sort. Mary McCarthy had published
The Groves of Academe
in ’52, and Nabokov read it and pronounced it “
very amusing and quite brilliant
⁵⁷
in parts.”
Pnin
is, like hers, a
campus novel
⁵⁸
, but Nabokov, although he holds some characters up to ridicule, and though he takes aim at a discrete social world, writes a few degrees off true north of social satire, not much concerned to shape a thoroughgoing critique of anything. Pnin is a good soul and an honorable man. He patronizes a local restaurant, the Egg and We, out of “
sheer sympathy
⁵⁹
with failure,” and his byword is kindness. He has been through the century’s wringer. Now he finds himself in a land of excellent washing machines: