The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated (6 page)

Perspicacious “research” aside, it was a remarkable imaginative feat for a European émigré to have re-created America so brilliantly, and in so doing to have become an American writer. Of course, those critics and readers who marvel at Nabokov’s accomplishment may not realize that he physically knows America better than most of them. As he says in
Speak, Memory
, his adventures as a “lepist” carried him through two hundred motel rooms in forty-six states, that is, along all the roads traveled by Humbert and Lolita. Yet of all of Nabokov’s novels,
Lolita
is the most unlikely one for him to have written, given his background and the rarefied nature of his art and avocations. “It was hardly foreseeable,” writes Anthony Burgess, “that so exquisite and scholarly an artist should become America’s greatest literary glory, but now it seems wholly just and inevitable.”
¹⁸
It was even less foreseeable that Nabokov would realize better than any contemporary the hopes expressed by Constance Rourke in
American Humor
(1931) for a literature that would achieve an instinctive alliance between native materials and old world traditions, though the literal alliance in
Lolita
is perhaps more intimate than even Miss Rourke might have wished. But to have known Nabokov at all personally was first to be impressed by his intense and immense curiosity, his uninhibited and imaginative response to everything around him. To paraphrase Henry James’s famous definition of the artist, Nabokov was truly a man on whom nothing
was lost—except that in Nabokov’s instance it was
true
, whereas James and many American literary intellectuals after him have been so selfconscious in their mandarin “seriousness” and consequently so narrow in the range of their responses that they have often overlooked the sometimes extraordinarily uncommon qualities of the commonplace.

Nabokov’s responsiveness is characterized for me by the last evening of my first visit to Montreux in September 1966. During my two hours of conversation with the Nabokovs in their suite after dinner, Nabokov tried to imagine what the history of painting might have been like if photography had been invented in the Middle Ages; spoke about science fiction; asked me if I had noticed what was happening in
Li’l Abner
and then compared it, in learned fashion, with an analogous episode of a dozen years back; noted that a deodorant stick had been found among the many days’ siege provisions which the Texas sniper had with him on the tower; discoursed on a monstrous howler in the translation of Bely’s
St. Petersburg
; showed me a beautifully illustrated book on hummingbirds, and then discussed the birdlife of Lake Geneva; talked admiringly and often wittily of the work of Borges, Updike, Salinger, Genet, Andrei Sinyavsky (“Abram Tertz”), Burgess, and Graham Greene, always making precise critical discriminations; recalled his experiences in Hollywood while working on the screenplay of
Lolita
, and his having met Marilyn Monroe at a party (“A delightful actress. Delightful,” he said. “Which is your favorite Monroe film?”); talked of the Soviet writers he admired, summarizing their stratagems for survival; and defined for me exactly what kind of beetle Kafka’s Gregor Samsa was in
The Metamorphosis
(“It was a domed beetle, a scarab beetle with wing-sheaths, and neither Gregor nor his maker realized that when the room was being made by the maid, and the window was open, he could have flown out and escaped and joined the other happy dung beetles rolling the dung balls on rural paths”). And did I know how a dung beetle laid its eggs? Since I did not, Nabokov rose and imitated the process, bending his head toward his waist as he walked slowly across the room, making a dung-rolling motion with his hands until his head was buried in them and the eggs were laid. When Lenny Bruce’s name somehow came up, both Nabokov and his wife commented on how sad they had been to hear of Bruce’s death; he had been a favorite of theirs. But they disagreed about where it was that they had last seen Bruce; Mrs. Nabokov thought it had been on Jack Paar’s television show, while her husband—the scientist, linguist, and author of fifteen novels, who has written and published in three languages, and whose vast erudition is most clearly
evidenced by the four-volume translation of Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin
, with its two volumes of annotations and one-hundred-page “Note on Prosody”—held out for the Ed Sullivan show.

Not only was nothing lost on Nabokov, but, like the title character in Borges’s story “Funes the Memorious,” he seemed to remember everything. At dinner the first evening of my 1966 visit, we reminisced about Cornell and his courses there, which were extraordinary and thoroughly Nabokovian, even in the smallest ways (witness the “bonus system” employed in examinations, allowing students two extra points per effort whenever they could garnish an answer with a substantial and accurate quotation [“a gem”] drawn from the text in question). Skeptically enough, I asked Nabokov if he remembered my wife, Nina, who had taken his Literature 312 course in 1955, and I mentioned that she had received a grade of 96. Indeed he did, since he had always asked to meet the students who performed well, and he described her accurately (seeing her in person in 1968, he remembered where she had sat in the lecture hall). On the night of my departure I asked Nabokov to inscribe my Olympia Press first edition of
Lolita
. With great rapidity he not only signed and dated it but added two elegant drawings of recently discovered butterflies, one identified as “
Flammea palida
” (“Pale Fire”) and, below it, a considerably smaller species, labeled “Bonus bonus.”
¹⁹
Delighted but in part mystified, I inquired, “Why ‘Bonus bonus’?” Wrinkling his brow and peering over his eyeglasses, a parody of a professor, Nabokov replied in a mock-stentorian voice, “Now your wife has 100!” After four days and some twelve hours of conversation, and within an instant of my seemingly unrelated request, my prideful but passing comment had come leaping out of storage. So too was Nabokov’s memory able to draw on a lifetime of reading—a lifetime in the most literal sense.
²⁰

When asked what he had read as a boy, Nabokov replied: “Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry—English, Russian, and French—than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library. At a later period, in Cambridge,
England, between the ages of twenty and twenty-three, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several—Poe, Verlaine, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orczy, Conan Doyle, and Rupert Brooke—have faded away, have lost the glamour and thrill they held for me. The others remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I am concerned” (
Playboy
interview, 1964, collected in
Strong Opinions
[1973]). The Notes to this edition will demonstrate that Nabokov has managed to invoke in his fiction the most distant of enthusiasms: a detective story read in early youth, a line from Verlaine, a tennis match seen at Wimbledon forty years before. All are clear in his mind, and, recorded in
Lolita
, memory negates time.

When queried about Nabokov, friends and former colleagues at Cornell invariably comment on the seemingly paradoxical manner in which the encyclopedic Nabokov mind could be enthralled by the trivial as well as the serious. One professor, at least twenty years Nabokov’s junior and an instructor when he was there, remembers how Nabokov once asked him if he had ever watched a certain soap opera on television. Soap operas are of course ultimately comic if not fantastic in the way they characterize life as an uninterrupted series of crises and disasters; but missing the point altogether, suspecting a deadly leg-pull and supposing that with either answer he would lose (one making him a fool, the other a snob), Nabokov’s young colleague had been reduced to a fit of wordless throat-clearing. Recalling it ten years later, he seemed disarmed all over again. On easier terms with Nabokov was Professor M. H. Abrams, who warmly recalls how Nabokov came into a living room where a faculty child was absorbed in a television western. Immediately engaged by the program, Nabokov was soon quaking with laughter over the furiously climactic fight scene. Just such idle moments, if not literally this one, inform the hilarious burlesque of the comparable “obligatory scene” in
Lolita
, the tussle of Humbert and Quilty which leaves them “
panting as the cowman and the sheepman never do after their battle.
”

Even though he had academic tenure at Cornell, the Nabokovs never owned a house, and instead always rented, moving from year to year, a mobility he bestowed on refugee Humbert. “The main reason [for never settling anywhere permanently], the background reason, is, I suppose, that nothing short of a replica of my childhood surroundings would have satisfied me,” says Nabokov. “I would never manage to match my memories correctly—so why trouble with hopeless approximations? Then there are some special considerations: for instance, the question of impetus, the habit of impetus. I propelled myself out of Russia so vigorously, with such
indignant force, that I have been rolling on and on ever since. True, I have lived to become that appetizing thing, a ‘full professor,’ but at heart I have always remained a lean ‘visiting lecturer.’ The few times I said to myself anywhere: ‘Now that’s a nice spot for a permanent home,’ I would immediately hear in my mind the thunder of an avalanche carrying away the hundreds of far places which I would destroy by the very act of settling in one particular nook of the earth. And finally, I don’t much care for furniture, for tables and chairs and lamps and rugs and things—perhaps because in my opulent childhood I was taught to regard with amused contempt any too-earnest attachment to material wealth, which is why I felt no regret and no bitterness when the Revolution abolished that wealth” (
Playboy
interview).

Professor Morris Bishop, Nabokov’s best friend at Cornell, who was responsible for his shift from Wellesley to Ithaca, recalled visiting the Nabokovs just after they had moved into the appallingly vulgar and garish home of an absent professor of Agriculture. “I couldn’t have lived in a place like that,” said Bishop, “but it delighted him. He seemed to relish every awful detail.” Although Bishop didn’t realize it then, Nabokov was learning about Charlotte Haze by renting her house, so to speak, by reading her books and living with her pictures and “wooden thingamabob[s] of commercial Mexican origin.” These annual moves, however dismal their circumstances, constituted a field trip enabling entomologist Nabokov to study the natural habitat of Humbert’s prey. Bishop also remembered that Nabokov read the New York Daily News for its crime stories,
²¹
and, for an even more concentrated dose of bizarrerie, Father Divine’s newspaper,
New Day
—all of which should recall James Joyce, with whom Nabokov has so much else in common. Joyce regularly read
The Police Gazette
, the shoddy magazine
Titbits
(as does Bloom), and all the Dublin newspapers; attended burlesque shows, knew by heart most of the vulgar and comically obscene songs of the day, and was almost as familiar with the work of the execrable lady lending-library novelists of the
fin de siècle
as he was with the classics; and when he was living in Trieste and Paris and writing
Ulysses
, relied on his Aunt Josephine to keep him supplied with the necessary sub-literary materials. Of course, Joyce’s art depends far more than Nabokov’s on the vast residue of erudition and trivia which Joyce’s insatiable and equally encyclopedic mind was able to store.

Nabokov is very selective, whereas Joyce collected almost at random
and then ordered in art the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life. That Nabokov does not equal the older writer in this respect surely points to a conscious choice on Nabokov’s part, as his Cornell lectures on
Ulysses
suggest.
²²
In singling out the flaws in what is to him the greatest novel of the century, Nabokov stressed the “needless obscurities baffling to the less-than-brilliant reader,” such as “local idiosyncrasies” and “untraceable references.” Yet Nabokov also practiced the art of assemblage, incorporating in the rich textures of
Bend Sinister, Lolita, Pale Fire
, and
Ada
a most “Joycean” profusion of rags, tags, and oddments, both high and low, culled from books or drawn from “real life.” Whatever the respective scales of their efforts in this direction, Nabokov and Joyce are (with Queneau and Borges) among the few modern fiction writers who have made aesthetic capital out of their learning. Both include in their novels the compendious stuff one associates with the bedside library, the great literary anatomies such as Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy
or Dr. Johnson’s
Dictionary
, or those unclassifiable masterpieces such as
Moby-Dick, Tristram Shandy
, and
Gargantua and Pantagruel
, in which the writer makes fictive use of all kinds of learning, and exercises the anatomist’s penchant for collage effected out of verbal trash and bizarre juxtapositions—for the digression, the catalogue, the puzzle, pun, and parody, the gratuitous bit of lore included for the pleasure it can evoke, and for the quirky detail that does not contribute to the book’s verisimilar design but nevertheless communicates vividly a sense of what it was like to be alive at a given moment in time. A hostile review of Nabokov’s
Eugene Onegin
offered as typical of the Commentary’s absurdities its mention of the fact that France exported to Russia some 150,000 bottles of champagne per annum; but the detail happens to telescope brilliantly the Francophilia of early nineteenth-century Russia and is an excellent example of the anatomist’s imaginative absorption of significant trivia and a justification of his methods. M. H. Abrams recalls how early one Monday morning he met Nabokov entering the Cornell Library, staggering beneath a run of
The Edinburgh Review
, which Nabokov had pored over all weekend in Pushkin’s behalf. “Marvelous
ads!” explained Nabokov, “simply marvelous!” It was this spirit that enabled Nabokov to create in the two volumes of
Onegin
Commentary a marvelous literary anatomy in the tradition of Johnson, Sterne, and Joyce—an insomniac’s delight, a monumental, wildly inclusive, yet somehow elegantly ordered ragbag of humane discourse, in its own right a transcendent work of imagination.