Stalking Nabokov (4 page)

Because my scholarship had ended and I had no money saved after ten years as a student, I bought a monthly Greyhound bus pass. This allowed unlimited travel on Greyhound buses for a surprisingly low fee. To save on accommodation costs, I turned the buses into my hotel. I would work in, say, the Cornell Library all day, and if I didn’t need to travel to another library next day, I would still take an interstate bus southward and sit in the bus processing the day’s material until midnight, get off the bus at two a.m., and take another bus back north to arrive back at the library at opening time again, not very fresh or very clean but young enough to be still full of energy. I kept that up for two months.

Meanwhile, the Nabokov scholar and Russian-language publisher Carl Proffer, who had examined my Ph.D. thesis, had sent it on to Véra Nabokov. After reading it, she wrote, inviting me to visit her. I had been planning to return to New Zealand across the Pacific but instead flew via Europe and spent four days in Montreux, pumping her with questions until way past what I later learned was her usual bedtime. She discovered from my questions that I knew much about Nabokov’s bibliography and his life that no one else but she knew. Two months later she wrote to me asking if I would like to catalogue her husband’s archives. It took me a whole loud heartbeat to decide to accept the invitation. I spent two Southern Hemisphere summers or Northern Hemisphere winters sorting out the archives for her while also working on the materials for my bibliography project.

Véra Nabokov was a very private person and, as she was the first to admit, distrustful by nature. She and Nabokov had been badly hurt by their experience with Andrew Field, whose biography of Nabokov had been riddled with envious rivalry, wild guesses, and astonishing errors (he managed to date the Russian Revolution to 1916 and even defended the date when challenged). After Field, I thought Véra would simply not agree to another biography. But once, when she was trying to deflect my insistent requests to be allowed access to Nabokov’s letters to his mother, she said to me: “Why do you need to see those, if you’re writing only a bibliography? Of course, if you were writing a biography, I would show you everything.” I gulped but said nothing: I was a young academic with new courses to teach and no time to write a biography. But I applied for a fellowship and as soon as I was awarded it, I wrote to her reminding her of her words. She could not deny them, and she let me begin. I saw her every day for a year and a half as I worked through the papers in Montreux, but she did not relax her guard. She did not speak to me on first-name terms until after she read the draft of my first chapter, five years after we first met. Much later, in her last year of life when she found the very act of reading had become physically painful for her, I was touched to see that she still kept the biography by her bedside to reread just for pleasure.

For the biography of a living figure, or one not long dead, earning the trust of the subject or the heirs is crucial if you wish to have access to materials and contacts. Of course you also need to maintain intellectual independence at the same time as you sustain trust. That’s a delicate task, especially for someone as naturally critical and undiplomatic as I am. Although she had her own strong opinions, Véra respected my independence, partly because she knew how enthusiastic I was about Nabokov, although I could also be bluntly disapproving when I didn’t think his work reached his usual standards.

But there is perhaps a more insistent kind of control exerted by your dead subject. If you respect your subject, then you want to respect his or her sense of what matters, as well as your own. Nabokov had an astonishing memory and a no less extraordinary ability to evoke his memories in words. He was reluctant for anything about him to be expressed in ways that differed from his own recollections or formulations. He would ask for interviews to be submitted in writing, and he would answer them in writing and then check the interview in proofs. He could not check
my
material, but his sense of the importance of precise and evocative detail certainly exerted one kind of control over my work. Now, in writing about Popper, I have an opposite kind of pressure since Popper preferred argument to story, ideas to words, explanatory laws to descriptive details, and I will have to resist those preferences without, of course, ignoring the ideas, just as in writing about Nabokov I had to spell out the ideas that he only ever wanted to suggest with the utmost insouciance.

Many a modern biographer must face a problem Einhard never had to contend with. Anyone famous enough to merit a biography is likely nowadays not merely to know how to write, unlike Charlemagne, but to have already written an autobiography. As a biographer, you welcome an autobiography, but you do not want merely to repeat it. Fortunately, autobiographers rarely tell all. Nabokov, with his fierce sense of privacy, refrained from discussing any living person other than himself but movingly ends
Speak, Memory
by addressing its last chapters increasingly overtly to an unnamed “you” that we realize must be his wife. Popper, with his resolute focus on ideas, at one point in
his
autobiography mentions that he has a wife, quickly apologizes for becoming so personal, and moves on.

Just how do you situate your own effort in relation to your subject’s “official” life story, especially when it’s a performance as superlative as
Speak, Memory
? I adopted two different solutions to the problem: first, to interpret
Speak, Memory
as a work of art—and to show how the artistry, the transforming imagination of the writer, in fact can reveal
more
about Nabokov than a more direct transcription from life would do; and, second, to ferret out those direct transcriptions, the raw facts behind the art, the things that Nabokov would rather we didn’t know.

Although Nabokov was often hailed as the finest stylist of his time, many readers have found themselves perturbed by the deliberateness of his style. To them, his phrasing calls attention to itself too much to express genuine emotion or even to
say
anything. I try to show how wrong that is by opening the biography with a close look at one sentence, the end of the first chapter of
Speak, Memory
. There, Nabokov anticipates the day he would look down at his father lying in an open coffin. Again and again throughout his autobiography Nabokov returns obliquely to his father’s murder as if it were a wound he cannot leave alone but can hardly bear to touch. For Nabokov the love of those closest to the heart—a parent, a spouse, a child—distends the soul to dwarf all other feeling. The narrowly focused love that marked his life also shapes his fiction, whether positively or negatively, in the desolation of love’s absence or the horror of its sham surrogates. Because love matters so much to Nabokov, so, too, does loss. But he had learned from his parents to bear distress with dignity, and when he depicts his father high in the midday air he alludes to his private grief with the restraint taught him as a child. The formality and apparent distance in no way diminish the emotion: he simply feels that even a sense of loss sharp enough to last a lifetime must be met with courage and self-control.

I linger over that sentence to show qualities of mind and tendencies of thought that pervade Nabokov’s life and art. But it’s enough here to note that he thought that sentence was as much as he could bring himself to write about his father’s death. He would
never
have wanted to publish his intensely personal diary account of his and his mother’s reaction to the news his father had been shot. But that poignant, heartbreaking document was something I just had to quote in full in the biography (
chapter 19
in this volume, “
Speak, Memory
: The Life and the Art,” juxtaposes the sentence from
Speak, Memory
and the diary entry). Because I had earned Véra’s trust, I had access to that diary even without asking. But the problem of finding materials and of the unevenness of the materials for different phases of a life, are not usually so easily solved.

Each epoch of Nabokov’s life presented its own special problems. In 1917, when his family fled Petrograd for the Crimea, and again when they fled the Crimea for London in 1919, they had to leave almost everything of their Russian years behind. Data for the first twenty years of Nabokov’s life, other than what he provided in
Speak, Memory
, were extremely difficult to collect, especially as I was researching in the Soviet Union in the days before
glasnost’
, when Nabokov was still persona non grata. I had to travel out to Vyra, the Nabokov family estate, which was further from Leningrad than I was legally entitled to go. On my second excursion to Vyra, I spent the whole day taking photographs. A local came up to me about four o’clock, by which time everybody in the Soviet countryside seemed to be drunk. “How did you get here?” he asked, seeing I was a foreigner and taking photo after photo. He seemed to think that
I
thought the birches and the firs were well-camouflaged missiles. I played the innocent: “By train and bus”—as if I had simply hopped on the wrong ones by accident. We were standing on the bridge across the Oredezh, the river Nabokov had boated on with his first love, the “Tamara” of
Speak, Memory
. The man’s face flushed with anger; he leaned toward me, until vodka drowned out the smells of summer. “What are you doing here?” Mention of Nabokov’s name might have doomed me— oh, I wouldn’t have been thrown into a gulag, but I might have been ejected from the country or at least grilled by the KGB, as had happened to friends much less objectionable than me. I had noticed a police car pass along the highway a few minutes ago and thought my newfound comrade would be shouting for the police again any second now. Then I suddenly realized there was a way out. Nabokov’s grandmother’s manor house, on the other side of the river, had also been burnt down, but there was a plaque commemorating the fact that the estate had once belonged to Kondraty Ryleev. Ryleev, like the other Decembrists, had been accorded sainthood by the Soviets as a sacred precursor to their holy revolution. So I told my interrogator—it was true enough, though a very small crumb of the truth—“I came to see Ryleev’s house.”
“Molodets!”
he cried (something like, “You little hero!”), and he embraced me: “You’re one of us!” I nearly passed out from relief and from the fumes of his home-brew vodka.

That trip to Vyra told me that, despite Nabokov’s quite justified reputation for an extraordinary memory, his own map of the three Nabokov estates in the endpapers of
Speak, Memory
was wrong—as his sister had to concede when I pointed it out. I checked what I could independently of
Speak, Memory
, but for the most part I simply had to rely for that period of his life on Nabokov’s own memoirs and to interpret them for all they were worth. I should add that new material for those early years has turned up since
glasnost’
and then the fall of the Soviet system and appears in the French, German, and Russian editions, but not in the English.

For the next two decades of Nabokov’s life, from 1919 to 1940, the émigré years, the task was even harder. After devoting twelve chapters of
Speak, Memory
to his childhood, Nabokov allowed himself only three chapters for the émigré years. I was on my own. By the beginning of the 1930s many in the Russian emigration sensed that Nabokov already outshone the acknowledged star of émigré writing, Ivan Bunin, soon to receive Russia’s first Nobel Prize for Literature. Throughout the remainder of the decade Nabokov consolidated his position as one of the greatest Russian writers of the century. As German tanks rolled through France in mid-1940, he and his Russian-Jewish wife fled once again. By the time the war ended, the audience and culture Nabokov had written for no longer existed, and its records were either bombed by the Allies (in Berlin), confiscated by the Soviet occupation (in Prague), or destroyed by the Germans—as were many of the papers and a butterfly collection that Nabokov left in Paris with his friend, Ilya Fondaminsky, who was also destroyed.

For this period, I had to search through scores of Russian émigré newspapers and journals where Nabokov’s work was published or his name mentioned in a review or the report of a public reading. A single copy of a newspaper, its acidic pages brittle enough to flake at every touch, might contain the only record of a particular event in Nabokov’s life. For just one of the most precious newspapers, I had to travel to Helsinki, Uppsala, Lund, Prague, East and West Berlin, Munich, Paris, New York, and Palo Alto to find every issue I could.

Nabokov spent the next two decades in the United States, following four careers more or less simultaneously: writer, teacher, scientist, literary scholar. There are thousands who knew him as a teacher at Stanford, Wellesley, Cornell, and Harvard, but most had no idea he had been famous as a Russian writer and would be famous again as an English one, and so took no special notice.

In Nabokov’s first English novel,
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
, V’s search for the past of his half-brother, the novelist Sebastian Knight, becomes a comic nightmare of frustrations, dead ends, and wrong trails because he has no access to the secrets of Sebastian’s life—until a magical character who has escaped from one of Sebastian’s stories suddenly offers him the kinds of clues sober reality would never have provided. At the end of one chapter, V has visited a friend of his brother’s at Cambridge. Just as he leaves his brother’s friend, a sudden voice calls out from the mist: “Sebastian Knight? Who is speaking of Sebastian Knight?” There the chapter ends, and the next begins:

The stranger who uttered these words now approached—Oh, how I sometimes yearn for the easy swing of a well-oiled novel! How comfortable it would have been had the voice belonged to some cheery old don with long downy ear-lobes and that puckering about the eyes which stands for wisdom and humour. . . . A handy character, a welcome passer-by who had also known my hero, but from a different angle. “And now,” he would say, “I am going to tell you the real story of Sebastian Knight’s college years.” And then and there he would have launched on that story. But alas, nothing of the kind really happened. That Voice in the Mist rang out in the dimmest passage of my mind. It was but the echo of some possible truth, a timely reminder: don’t be too certain of learning the past from the lips of the present. Beware of the most honest broker. Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale.