Nabokov in America (33 page)

Although forbidden
⁶⁰
to come near it, he would be caught trespassing again and again. Casting aside all decorum and caution, he would feed it anything that happened to be at hand, his handkerchief, kitchen towels, a heap of shorts and shirts smuggled down from his room, just for the joy of watching through that porthole what looked like an endless tumble of dolphins with the staggers.

Like his author, he hails from St. Petersburg, but unlike him he is odd-looking and hopeless with English:

Whereas the degree
⁶¹
in sociology and political economy that Pnin had obtained … at the University of Prague around 1925 had become … a doctorate in desuetude, he was not altogether miscast as a teacher of Russian. He was beloved not for any essential ability but for those unforgettable digressions of his, when he would remove his glasses to beam at the past while massaging the lenses of the present.

Nabokov shapes his story as professional writers do, ending segments with cliffhangers (chapter 2, part 4; chapter 6, part 4). Pnin’s speech is a source of fun. Not masterful as a writer of dialogue, Nabokov works hard to present Pnin-speak as comical; when Pnin inspects a room for rent, the room, and the fragment of winter afternoon, are what are memorable:

“
Well, to make
⁶²
a long story very short: habitated in Paris from 1925, abandoned France at beginning of Hitler war. Is now here.
Is American citizen. Is teaching Russian and such like subjects at Vandal [Waindell] College. From Hagen, Head of German Department, obtainable all references.” …

Pnin peered into Isabel’s pink-walled, white-flounced room. It had suddenly begun to snow, though the sky was pure platinum, and the slow scintillant downcome got reflected in the silent looking glass… . He held his hand at a little distance from the window.

Based partly on
⁶³
another Cornell professor, émigré historian Marc Szeftel, the character Pnin draws on elements of Nabokov’s own biography, parts not fitted into other American books. There is the matter of bad teeth. Before his room inspection, Pnin tells his prospective landlady, “
I must warn
⁶⁴
: will have all my teeth pulled out. It is a repulsive operation.” But like Nabokov, Pnin experiences liberation, uncanny joy, following dental surgery:

During a few days he was in
mourning for an intimate part
⁶⁵
of himself… . And when the plates were thrust in, it was like a poor fossil skull being fitted with the grinning jaws of a perfect stranger… . Ten days passed—and suddenly he began to enjoy the new gadget… . At night he kept his treasure in a special glass of special fluid where it smiled to itself, pink and pearly… . The great work on Old Russia … which for the last ten years or so he had been fondly planning, now seemed accessible.

Speak On, Memory
, Nabokov’s intended second memoir, became less likely now. Into
Pnin
went an account of a St. Mark’s-like
boarding school
⁶⁶
, which Victor Wind, the teenaged son of Pnin’s ex-wife, attends. Likewise Vladimir’s plan to write, in a memoir, about his tour of southern colleges yielded to the comic possibilities of putting Pnin on a similar tour. As the book begins he is headed for a distant town to speak to a women’s club, but “
now a secret
⁶⁷
must be imparted,” Nabokov tells us. “Professor Pnin was on the wrong train.” Like several of his other novels, this one employs dramatic irony of the most extreme kind, the protagonist absurdly unaware of what a reader sees thumpingly to be the case. Nabokov’s reputation for cruelty—for creating situations in which his characters mistake reality to an elephantine extent—would have been validated but for his affection for his hero, nor is it an exaggeration to say that he
loves
his hero
⁶⁸
, in the way of a friend realizing, as
he tries to describe them, the deep goodness and mysterious idiosyncrasy of another.

The book’s narrator, whom Nabokov calls “VN,” is not quite V. Nabokov.
VN knew Pnin
⁶⁹
in St. Petersburg, and he offers an account of their boyhood. Nabokov, who by his own confession was a bully when young, who needed to triumph in all encounters and who disdained weakness, lends this shading of his personality to VN, whose roguish way with women includes a casual conquest of Pnin’s future wife, who, Tatiana-like, throws herself at VN’s feet. On the rebound she marries Pnin,
telling him
⁷⁰
“everything” about the affair.

The novel’s set piece—a housewarming—appeared as a
New Yorker
story on November 12, 1955. Nabokov was by then the veteran of ten years of close editing by the magazine. He had fought strenuous attempts to improve him, and as recently as the year before he had made himself count to ten before replying to Katharine White’s rejection of
Pnin
’s chapter 2 (“
I intended
⁷¹
to answer—and refute—your criticism point by point; but … the five-month delay has dulled that urge”). White’s changes to “Pnin Gives a Party” imposed
New Yorker
house style, inserting commas that seemed intended to correct, as a teacher corrects a wiggling student, a fondness for unfettered movement. Thus, “
All of a sudden
⁷²
he experienced an odd feeling of dissatisfaction as he checked the little list of his guests” became “All of a sudden, he experienced an odd feeling of dissatisfaction as he checked, mentally, the little list of his guests.” “
The good doctor
⁷³
had perceptibly aged since last year but was as sturdy and square-shaped as ever” became “The good Doctor, a square-shouldered, aging man …” Nabokov had learned not to
fight over everything
⁷⁴
. Exposure in the magazine’s pages was valuable, and he was being well paid. Still, “Pnin Gives a Party” is incomparably less as short story than as chapter in a book. The description of the doctor—a German professor who is fond of Pnin, who protects him when others try to fire him, but who is himself about to leave Waindell for a better job—continues in the novel, “with his
well-padded
⁷⁵
shoulders, square chin, square nostrils, leonine glabella, and rectangular brush of grizzled hair that had something topiary about it.” White edited the chapter to article length, cutting out of necessity. A quality of uncanny heartbreak went out of the prose, and it became a sophisticated amusement, whereas before it had been that but also a mortal plaint, a cry.

Unaware of his impending firing, Pnin hopes to buy the house he rents. “The sense of living in a discrete building all by himself,” VN explains,

was
to Pnin something
singularly delightful
⁷⁶
and amazingly satisfying to a … want of his innermost self… . One of the sweetest things about the place was the silence—angelic, rural, and perfectly secure, thus in blissful contrast to the persistent cacophonies that had surrounded him from six sides in the rented rooms of his former habitations.

The house is “cherry-red brick, with white shutters and a shingle roof.” It is definingly a house of the era. Nearby is a cornfield; across Todd Road, where the house sits, are
spruce trees and old elms
⁷⁷
, and the nearest neighbor is half a mile away, which accounts for the silence. Pnin thinks of it as “
suburban
⁷⁸
,” possibly because outlier houses invaded farmland in advance of suburbs in America. In back is some remnant raw nature: a cliff surmounted by brush. Late in his party, Pnin takes two friends upstairs, and from his bedroom windows they see “a
dark rock wall
⁷⁹
rising” only fifty feet away from the house. One friend is moved to say, as if understanding author Nabokov’s own love of cliffs, “
At last
⁸⁰
you are really comfortable.”

We know he will lose the house before he can possess it. We know that the friends of his Waindell years—some of them more than casual, some who love him—will be lost to him. The comedy of being on a wrong train is missing here—again a Nabokovian hero labors under absurd misconceptions, but there is little humor in it. The party is nevertheless lovely, a success. Academics and their wives, existing as broad types but also as cherishable individuals, hold forth in ways that make a reader want to say,
Yes, they
would
sound like that
, but also,
Wait a minute, I know that man (or woman)
. All come under a shadow, their vividness instinct with impermanence. One of the guests, an English lit professor, channels the mood. He is “an obvious figure,” Nabokov explains:

If you drew a pair of
old brown loafers
⁸¹
, two beige elbow patches, a black pipe, and two baggy eyes under heavy eyebrows, the rest was easy to fill out. Somewhere in the middle distance hung an obscure liver ailment, and somewhere in the background there was Eighteenth-Century Poetry, Roy’s particular field, an overgrazed pasture, with the trickle of a brook and a clump of initialed trees.

The professor has a secret. He is a Pepys-style chronicler who keeps “
a detailed diary
⁸²
, in cryptogrammed verse, which he hoped posterity
would someday decipher and, in sober backcast, proclaim the greatest literary achievement of our time.” Sent to fetch his wife’s purse, he

blundered from chair to chair
⁸³
, and found himself with a white bag, not knowing really where he picked it up, his mind being occupied by the adumbrations of lines he was to write down later in the night:

We sat and drank, each with a separate past locked up in him, and fate’s alarm clocks set at unrelated futures
.

An earlier chapter, number 3, begins,

During the eight
⁸⁴
years Pnin had taught at Waindell College he had changed his lodgings … about every semester. The accumulation of consecutive rooms in his memory now resembled those displays of grouped elbow chairs on show, and beds, and lamps, and inglenooks which, ignoring all space-time distinctions, commingle in the soft light of a furniture store beyond which it snows, and the dusk deepens, and nobody really loves anybody.

The writing is plain, less worked than
Lolita
’s prose of high allusion. To a degree the book is an un-
Lolita
,
designed to charm
⁸⁵
not scare away publishers, and Pnin is a non-Humbert, a radiant soul rather than a destroyer of childhood.

Pnin is also almost a stepfather. He warms to his ex-wife’s fourteen-year-old son, Victor, who visits him in Waindell. This remarkable boy, tall and magnetically self-possessed, like Dmitri, can perceive the Pninian radiance, and one of the disappointments of the novel is that Nabokov does not arrange for them to linger longer together onstage, packing the boy off to California and Pnin to a Karpovich-like summer camp with Russians. Humbert gave his stepdaughter presents to win sex from her. Pnin also gives Victor gifts, but gifts that misfire: a soccer ball when Victor has no interest in sports, a book of Jack London stories when he reads at a higher level. The most remarkable gifting happens the other way, when Victor sends Pnin a “
large bowl
⁸⁶
of brilliant aquamarine glass with a decorative design of swirled ribbing and lily pads.” The bowl arrives the day Pnin begins planning a party. One
of his guests will exclaim, “Gracious, Timofey, where on earth did you get that
perfectly divine
⁸⁷
bowl!” He fills it with wine punch.

The bowl cannot help but symbolize: it suggests the fragile world of friendship and amusement, caught in time; Victor’s affection for Pnin; many things possibly not necessary to spell out—while being also exceptional, eye-catching, eerie. Around the blue bowl, which is a kind of cocktail-party version of James’s burdensomely meaningful golden bowl, the gathering of well-lubricated friends, each with a separate past and living to the ticking of an unknown alarm, ascends into a realm of heightened here-and-nowness—the novel itself seems to exist within quotation marks for a page or two, not the quotes of ironic distance but quote marks in their original sense, simple signs setting off true speech, the
living words
⁸⁸
for things.

Later the bowl appears to crack, like James’s crystal bowl with its flaw. Pnin has received the bad news, from his academic protector, that his sanctuary is built of wind, and in his distress he mishandles the bowl in a sinkful of sudsy water. But no, better not go that way, Nabokov seems to decide: recalling his editor’s strictures on bleak endings, possibly, he makes it an unimportant wineglass that breaks. (“The
beautiful bowl was intact
⁸⁹
. He took a fresh dish towel and went on with his household work.”)

Pnin’s tale briskly concludes thereafter. Not only is he to be fired, but the English department “
is inviting
⁹⁰
one of your most brilliant compatriots” to Waindell, and this man is none other than VN, the novel’s narrator, the man who seduced Pnin’s beloved years ago. Pnin can stay on but at this rival’s sufferance. He declines to stay.

Viking had second thoughts when Nabokov sent them the full manuscript on August 29, 1955. The book was too short, they thought. It had other problems, the main one being that it failed to cohere, was mere sketches. Nabokov had worked hard to make it come together, and
he was offended
⁹¹
. The story begins with a trip to a women’s club, and it ends with a faculty wag about to retell that story. Michael Maar argues that the book is built as a perfect mirror construction, seven chapters arranged along a “
central axis
⁹²
of symmetry,” the axis being chapter 4, about Victor and Pnin. A homely rodent, the American tree squirrel, appears in every chapter. Squirrels are so plainly stitched into the American scene that only a foreigner might be expected to notice them. They remind Pnin of a kind, incandescent girl he loved in St. Petersburg, a Jewish girl who fled Russia and died in Buchenwald. She was called
Mira Belochkin
⁹³
—Belochkin echoing
belochka
, a diminutive of
belka
, Russian for “squirrel.”