Nabokov in America (40 page)

Those who now embraced
Lolita
included “
all the brows
³²
—high, middle, and low,” categories of reader not used to “celebrating together,” Dupee wrote. The book had had “
the luck
³³
to make its American appearance at just the right moment. The state of literary feeling … has been undergoing … a change here during the past year,” and
Lolita
had “both profited by the change and helped to crystallise it.”

Dupee was trying—more successfully than any other early commentator—to locate what was large in the little masterpiece. The author was an
unlikely source for a change in national temper, Dupee thought: he was a foreigner, to begin with, serenely out of step with
a postwar turn
³⁴
that Dupee half-deplored, a “gone native” movement that believed in local traditions and hoped to place morality at the center of American literary discourse. “
Into this situation
³⁵
Nabokov failed to fit at all.” Nor was his pre-
Lolita
reputation promising—“admirable but rather scattered” work that “seemed to belong to the … obsolescent category of avant-garde writing.”

Dupee, a
mordant person
³⁶
who knew how to enjoy himself, found a rich new taste in the book. “It has helped to make
the fading smile
³⁷
of the Eisenhower Age give way to a terrible grin,” he wrote, and this death’s-head imagery might have been the best way he could find to suggest the wrenchingly disparate moods of the book, moods of “disgust and horror” but also of a weird, writhing mirth, darkly knowing, scathingly sophisticated. (“The book, they tend to say, is not pornography, having no four-letter words in it. And again Humbert
Humbert can be heard
³⁸
to laugh.”) Dupee had been waiting a long time to catch this new tone.
Lolita
was a book “
too shocking
³⁹
for any great tradition to want to own,” but
he
owned it; it answered something needful in him.

On September 13, a friend phoned the Nabokovs to congratulate them on what he had
just read in the
⁴⁰
Times
: that movie rights had been sold to Stanley Kubrick for $150,000. That was a
phenomenal sum
⁴¹
in ’58. Along with royalties soon to begin flooding in, it was far more than Nabokov had earned from all his previous work as a professional writer. In the diary Véra noted, “V. supremely indifferent—occupied with a new story, and with the spreading of some 2000 butterflies.” Probably he was not indifferent. The page-a-day preserves the mood of those weeks; Vladimir thought
Véra’s account was “important
⁴²
” to have, a kind of scientific field note, but it was
his
splashy success (and hers), hard-won after a long struggle, and it mattered to them.
Inquiries
⁴³
from “movie companies and agents, letters from fans etc.” kept coming, along with requests for interviews. All this “
ought to have happened
⁴⁴
thirty years ago,” Nabokov wrote his sister, adding, “I don’t think I shall need to teach any more.”

A
team from
⁴⁵
Life
came to Ithaca, led by staff writer Paul O’Neil and photographer Carl Mydans. Véra’s account is amused but quietly thrilled—both Nabokovs knew the meaning of being portrayed in
Life
’s pages. “To think that three years ago,” she wrote, “people like Covici, Laughlin, and … the Bishops strongly advised V. never to publish Lolita, because … ‘all the churches, the women’s clubs [would] crack
down on you.’ ” Now a Mrs. Hagen from the local Presbyterian church had called to ask if Vladimir would address their women’s group. Delicious irony! Yet the others had not been wrong: to have published four years before would have been to serve up another victim, probably,
Lolita
and its author sharing the fate of Wilson with
Memoirs of Hecate County
.
The book’s having gone first to France
⁴⁶
, where its louche publisher fought early censorship battles, had contributed to the cultural shift that F. W. Dupee praised.
Lolita
had birthed its own birthing.

They “
could not believe
⁴⁷
our ears,” Véra wrote when, on Sunday, December 7, they saw on
The Steve Allen Show
a skit about “new ‘scientific’ toys. Last item: doll-girl who can do ‘everything, oh but everything.’ … ‘We shall send this doll to Mr. Nabokov.’ We both heard it distinctly.”

And on
Dean Martin’s show
⁴⁸
, the singer explained that he had gone to Vegas but had had nothing to do because “he did not gamble. So he sat in the lobby and read … children’s books—
Polyanna
,
The Bobsie Twin
s,
Lolita
.”

Furthermore, “In his first show of the new year … 
Milton Berle
⁴⁹
opened with … ‘First of all let me congratulate Lolita: she is 13 now.’ ” And Groucho Marx was heard to say, “I’ve put off reading
Lolita
for six years, till she’s eighteen.”

For his own
first TV appearance
⁵⁰
, Nabokov went to Manhattan to be filmed for a Canadian show, hosted by CBC personality Pierre Berton and featuring scholar-critic Lionel Trilling, a fan of
Lolita
. Véra and Dmitri were in the studio. Dmitri felt proud of his father, and Véra thought that her husband “spoke beautifully.” “Then the warning came: Stand by! … three minutes left … two … one …” The stage set suggests a writer’s study, or a Vincent Price movie version of one, with a candelabra on a table, a sofa, statuary, books on shelves. The celebrity novelist has a rumpled look. At fifty-nine he has a thick, powerful neck and is mostly bald, but unwrinkled. Trilling, a slighter, younger man, looks older, troubled, brooding. He smokes throughout.

“On they were,” Véra recorded, and her hero proves an “ideal guest” (so the producers said), magnanimous toward those willing to try his book while dismissive of “bigots and philistines.” He retails stock Nabokovian ideas. He is not interested in producing emotions in his readers, nor in filling their heads with ideas. “I leave the field of ideas to Doctor Schweitzer and Doctor Zhivago,” he says,
Doctor Zhivago
, recently published, being an irritant to Nabokov, who considered it trash and its publication in the West an
obvious Soviet ploy
⁵¹
. (Supposedly anti-Communist, it did not go far
enough, the Nabokovs felt.) Instead of emotions, Vladimir says he wants readers to get “that little sob in the spine,” the flash of aesthetic bliss, when reading his work, and the chat-show host cannot let this statement pass:
he asks Trilling
⁵²
if he felt no emotions when he read the book, and Trilling says, “I found it a deeply moving book… . Mister Nabokov may not have meant to move hearts, but he moved mine.”

Nabokov denies any satirical intent. He is not criticizing America, “holding up the public abuses to ridicule.” Trilling replies, “But
there
is
an underlying tone
⁵³
of satire through the book,” and, “we can’t trust a creative writer to say what he has done; he can say what he meant to do, and even then we don’t have to believe him.”

Both men are a bit sententious. This was the only filmed interview, as well as the last interview of any kind, for which Nabokov did not insist on the submission of all questions in advance, thus it provides as unscripted and
in vivo
an impression of the author as exists. Even so, he has a bunch of cards in his lap on which he has written phrases; when he can,
he quotes himself
⁵⁴
.

Nabokov grins behind Trilling’s back. He grins when the critic says that we can’t trust writers to do what they say; there is at least the possibility that he is grinning also because he knows that much of the ower of his novel
is
due to a social critique, a deep and excoriating one, a critique that has caused “terrible grins” to appear on many American faces. A darkly dissident cultural skepticism comes into play with
Lolita
. The extent of it will become clear over the next decade and a half, and tonal similarities abound—in the movies, in productions like Hitchcock’s
Psycho
(1961) and Kubrick’s
Dr. Strangelove
(1964), and in literature and other cultural domains touched by the roiling intensity now associated with the term “the sixties.” Alert readers pick something up. The suburban world of Ramsdale and Beardsley, Charlotte Haze’s taste-free house, the forties roadside reality of motor courts and mindless miles racked up: Nabokov had done his homework, and for him to insist on an imaginary America, an America “just as fantastic as any inventor’s,” conjured in his workshop and not based on the observable world (“It was fun to breed her in my own laboratory,” he says), came across as fussy and false.

He had looked around him and recognized a curious, half-asleep people—a perky populace with gloomy secrets, inhabiting a magnificent landscape that it tended to crap up, prone to stifling social norms best depicted via caustic comedy. Gunplay would arrive in the last act, as it did in so many of the nation’s stories. Sex would be the springboard for all else—nonstandard, indeed perverted, sex, because the country
in its youthful aspect was fresh and sexy but also strapped in with prohibitions. The author swore he had no reforming purpose, did not wish to cause any sort of “awakening,” and in this he can be trusted: America for a writer of his kind was perfect as found.

Trilling maintains a dignified stillness. Nabokov twists, lunges, and
half-reclines on the sofa
⁵⁵
, his ovoid head angling and swiveling. He grins again when Trilling, trying to explain what is “shocking” about the book (“
a young girl, someone
⁵⁶
 … usually preserved from the sexual attentions of men; a
very
young girl, of twelve as I recall”), seems to be fighting a grin of his own, and Nabokov casts a look at the moderator: “Is he not licking his lips, sir? Oh, I fear your distinguished critic has read my book in the wrong way, just a little!”

Peter Sellers’s scrutiny of this documentary footage, as he prepared to play Clare Quilty in Kubrick’s film—and his liberal quoting from it, in the three roles he played later in
Dr. Strangelove
—is
hard to gainsay
⁵⁷
. Dr. Zempf, a school psychologist (Quilty in disguise), borrows Trilling’s biting way with certain loaded words (“sex,” “sexual”), and Trilling’s way with a cigarette, reminiscent of Edward R. Murrow’s, includes both the usual forefinger/middle-finger wedge and a much more peculiar (in the American context) thumb/forefinger grip, the smoking tip pointing upward. Sellers works brilliant changes on this
when Dr. Strangelove
⁵⁸
, in the later movie, explains the Doomsday Machine. The pomposity of the whole encounter seems to have galvanized Sellers and his director: the two clubby men of letters talking about sex with a comely child, almost giggling despite themselves; Nabokov modestly admitting that, yes, he is an expert on clinical pedophilia and on butterflies, in addition to being a great writer; Trilling with his hollow-eyed stare, looking like a man who has just gotten bad news from his gastroenterologist.

Both men are also appealing. Trilling loses his lugubriousness when he talks about the novel, which has truly excited him: he
has
been touched by the girl’s plight, by the tragic trajectory, by passages of sad tenderness. We suspect he even laughed at the wicked parts. And Nabokov connects, despite all his squirming. Even on this comical stage set, typecast as a condescending aesthete, he peers repeatedly from behind the mask, wanting to make contact with whoever may be out there. Shamelessly he plays the great man, but every now and then a
beautiful, boyish smile
⁵⁹
breaks out on his big face—vulnerable, wholehearted, it is the smile of someone never far from helpless laughter.

*
And soon to fall behind Nevada as the population of Las Vegas boomed. Wyoming was also the American mountain heartland, another reason that it thrilled the Nabokovs: the Tetons include the most totemic and challenging mountaineering peaks to be found in the American Rockies.

†
From Gogol, who was badly thrown off by the success of
The Government Inspector
and of
Dead Souls
—disturbed by the critics who misunderstood his work—Nabokov learned to be willing to disappoint, willing to confound readers who had loved him perhaps too much, or for the wrong reasons—always to push on and not to apologize.

17.

A
truly shocking incident (Véra seems to have been shocked, possibly because her own son was involved):

In New York on Tuesday, November 25, the day before the TV shoot, the Nabokovs had dinner with publisher Walter Minton at a restaurant on Third Avenue,
Café Chambord
¹
, a well-known theatrical hangout.
Minton’s wife
²
, Polly, came too. The Mintons were in a bad way. A “slithery-blithery onetime
Latin Quarter showgirl
³
” had become a “fast friend” of the publisher, and Mrs. Minton had learned of the affair only the previous week—via an article in
Time
. Polly was distraught, in pain. “She is a pretty girl,” Véra wrote in the page-a-day diary, “frightened, bewildered,” a wholesome mother of three. The couple had been happy till
Lolita
came along, Polly said, “
for that was when Walter
⁴
began to see a lot of people and get mixed up” in the tornado around the novel. It was
even more baroque
⁵
than that: Minton’s lover was the person who had first brought
Lolita
to his attention (he had been unaware of its existence till June ’57, despite the Paris edition) and was therefore owed a finder’s fee, per Putnam’s acquisitions policy.