Nabokov in America (15 page)

Nabokov’s own face, exhibiting a twisted grin, hovers above the tableau. “The
scene is unpleasant
⁶¹
and has a human appeal which I deplore,” he declares—and here is Point One in “Nabokovian Aesthetics for Americans”: the idea that claims on fellow feeling are reprehensible,
those shameless pluckings of the chords of compassion that literary writers have too long indulged in.
The book develops
⁶²
in short form the argument presented at whopping length in
The Gift
: how the dangerous bacillus of social compassion came to infect Russian literature, leading to its near extinction. Angels of reform in the Russian intelligentsia became dictators of taste—if you were not writing against tsarist repression, then you did not deserve to be read—became, inevitably, proto-commissars, precursors of the Soviet beasts who
really
knew how to deal with writers who didn’t behave. Nabokov arrived at his hatred of thought policing through experience of the twentieth century, but in the phrase “human appeal which I deplore” there is a glimpse of an arrogant prodigy, a youthful reader of the Russian Futurists and Acmeists, disgusted by old-lady poetry of the heart-tugging sort.

Gogol exhibits a “queer genius,” Nabokov goes on, and here is Point Two of his program: great, immortal artists are all
sui generis
. They may appear in suggestive pairings, like Pushkin and Gogol (who both enjoyed fame in the 1830s), but they are not exemplars of “movements” or “developments” in the history of culture. Real writers are inherently “
strange; it is only your
⁶³
healthy second-rater who seems to the grateful reader to be a wise old friend, nicely developing the reader’s own notions of life.” Nabokov is tipping us to something about himself. We will find him daring, he believes; we will also find him a bit cold. The forthright talk of “second-raters” and “geniuses,” of “the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced”—this discourse was already old-fashioned in 1942. Writers were discussed more often in terms of schools they could be assimilated to, or were hardly identified as human subjects at all, by critics shy of speculating about their intentions. Nabokov lays claim to the old categories, and by subtle inference to the mantle of genius. Here he is being modernist as well as old-fashioned: Joyce and Eliot, Proust, Pound, Stein, Woolf, Faulkner—these were writers who believed in the old idea, the notion of the towering, unexampled masterwork, the literary product that could stun an entire civilization.
‖
Each suspected that he or she had written such works. The decline from this position to gentle mockery of the whole idea, to recognition of the special privilege enjoyed by certain categories of author or work, to an ironical sense of how any creation is full of shameless gleanings from other cultural
artifacts: this was all off in the future, though not too far off. Nabokov might have been the last true, outspoken believer. His assertiveness about geniushood and how you, if you imagine yourself a writer like him, are laughably deluded, betrays unease, an awareness that the ground was shifting beneath his feet. Gogol, in any event, was such a genius. Gogol, with but a wave of his magic wand—maybe of his big nose—had called the Russian novel into being.

Struggling with the languages, he consoled himself with science-speak. No one at Harvard had anything like his knowledge of the Blues, the tribe of butterflies that he had decided to make his specialty, following William Comstock’s example. But here was more of the same bounty, the plenitude of needful work and glaring niches to fill, that marked his relation to Russian literature in America. To Wilson he wrote, “It is
amusing to think
⁶⁴
that I managed to get into Harvard with a butterfly as my sole backer.” The
first scientific papers
⁶⁵
he wrote, using museum specimens for taxonomic context, show him in a process of education like the one with Wilson—hoping to learn the ropes, he relies freely on his American friends, on Comstock and another researcher at the AMNH, Charles Duncan Michener, in particular. “If my paper seems all right to you will you please pass it on,” he wrote Comstock after an exhaustive back-and-forth about his first research, “to whatever journal or Proceedings you think would publish it.” Later, using the same tone he used with Wilson, he wrote, “I
am taking advantage
⁶⁶
of your kindness but it is your own fault if I have grown accustomed to it.”

His science writing was confident—proto-Nabokovian. The first notes he ever made about butterflies, when he was a boy in Russia, had been in English; he admired the British journal
The Entomologist
and learned scientific terms from it, and
English was thereafter
⁶⁷
his language of science. What gave him joy in chasing and writing about bugs is a large question, tantamount to the question of what gave him joy in life, but part of it was surely to have the chance to write to an extreme degree of detail in a style developed over centuries by cognoscenti who, by their command of a style, signaled fellowship with one another. One representative sample of his own science prose, from “Some new or little-known Nearctic
Neonympha
(Lepidoptera: Satyridae),” published in ’43 in the Harvard-connected journal
Psyche
:

A broad cinereous
⁶⁸
border heavily stippled with purplish black transverse striae, merged with the cinereous underside of the fringe and limited inwardly by the arches of the second discal and subterminal lines, occupies the whole outer third (excepting a vineleaf-shaped, as viewed from base, fulvous brown spot between second discal and subterminal lines …), thus completely enclosing the ocelli and other markings to be mentioned.

He is here describing a butterfly’s secondary wings. Eventually he
developed a system
⁶⁹
for the complete mapping of an insect’s wing markings, scale by colored scale. He had been working on
his butterfly prose
⁷⁰
since boyhood, and now he was a near adept, on his way to becoming a master. Imitation or parody had provided him, as with his literary prose, with a basis for launching into matters full of significance for him, in this case, into knotty problems in lepidopteral systematics and evolutionary theory.

*
Wilson had himself been the beneficiary of Guggenheim largesse, in 1935, when he visited the Soviet Union. From 1930–31, he served on the foundation’s literary committee, where he became friends with Henry Allen Moe, Guggenheim head for forty years and, in Wilson’s opinion, “the only man connected with a foundation I’ve ever known who didn’t get fat and go to sleep on the job.” After serving on the literary committee, Wilson was of the opinion that “the whole thing would be better run if—in the literary department, at any rate—Moe were able to make all the decisions himself.” Moe and Wilson remained friends, and Wilson’s occasional letters in support of fellow writers carried weight.

†
We see here an innocent early stage in the two writers’ involvement with translating Pushkin. Nabokov freely acknowledges Wilson’s competence and is happy to offer him a stake in the enterprise. The bloody fight of twenty-five years hence would be premised, from Nabokov’s point of view, on Wilson’s utter incompetence as a reader and translator of Pushkin.

‡
Nabokov does not ridicule Garnett directly in his book, although his chapter on
Dead Souls
begins with this unequivocal assertion: “The old translations of ‘Dead Souls’ into English are absolutely worthless and should be expelled from all public and university libraries.”

§
He continued to write poetry in Russian well into his seventh decade. Notable examples, collected in his compilation
Poems and Problems
(1970), are “To Prince S.M. Kachurin” and “From the Gray North.”

‖
From among this group of writers Nabokov recognized only Proust and Joyce as authentic masters.

7.

Because
of Vladimir’s hard work as a volunteer, Nathan Banks approved an appointment for him as a research fellow at the MCZ for 1942–43, at the slim salary of one thousand dollars. Véra contributed to the family finances, giving language lessons and working off and on as a Harvard secretary, but she had “
married a genius
¹
,” a friend of hers remembered her thinking, and she saw herself as his support, seeing to it “that he had every opportunity” to write. Their insecure position prompted her to take several wise managerial steps. She made sure he wrote charmingly to two professors at Wellesley who had liked him, to say that he hoped to be invited back again, and she typed up his CV with a list of topics he could speak on, sending that to an organization that put together lecture tours. The agency booked him at a number of colleges in the South and the Midwest, and
he set off in October
²
’42 by train, interrupting his work on the Gogol book to do so.

Chichikov’s travels in
Dead Souls
found an echo, although without infernal overtones. In Springfield, Illinois, where he was taken on a tour of Lincoln’s home and grave, he met a character straight out of the Gogol story “Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt,” a man whose passion in life was flagpoles. (The character Shponka dreams of flagpoles.) The Illinois man was “a
creepily silent melancholic
³
of somewhat clerical cast,” Vladimir wrote Véra, “with a small stock of automatic questions… . He livened up and flashed his eyes one single time … having noticed that the flagpole by the Lincoln mausoleum had been replaced by a new, taller one.” The letters from this second American exploration are intimate but also large. Something about America invites alert vagabonding, along with attempts to embrace the country entire: Audubon’s letters and
journals, Whitman’s reports from the open road (mostly fictional), the five thousand journal pages of Lewis and Clark, Tocqueville’s reports on 1830s frontier settlements—these are but a few of the antecedents to the chatty, imaginative letters that Nabokov sent Véra. From Valdosta, Georgia, he wrote on October 14,

Arrived here, on
⁴
the Florida border, yesterday around 7
P.M.
and leave for Tennessee on Monday… . The college has booked a beautiful room for me as well as paid for all my meals, so that … I won’t be spending anything before I go. They gave me a car as well, but I only look at it, not daring to drive it. The college [Georgia State College for Women], with a charming campus among pines and palms, is a mile out of town. It is very Southern here. I took a walk down the only big street, in the velvet of the twilight and the azure of the neon lamps, and came back, overcome by a big Southern yawn.

Wherever possible he hunted insects. From Hartsville, South Carolina, he wrote,

After lunch
⁵
the college biologist drove me in her car to … the coppices by the lake, where I took some remarkable hesperids and various kinds of pierids. It is hard to convey the bliss of roaming through this strange bluish grass, between blossoming bushes (one bush here is full of bright berries, as if colored in a cheap Easter purple—an utterly shocking chemical hue …) [A]fter “The Tragedy of Tragedy” [one of his talks], I went collecting again… . A Presbyterian minister, Smyth, turned up, a passionate butterfly collector and son of the famous lepidopterologist Smyth, about whom I know a lot.

Not only an enormous country: one full of butterfly men. Though anxious about how his talks would be received and recognizing the futility of the venture—profiting little because he was forced to pay for his own travel—and wishing he was home so he could write or go to the MCZ, Vladimir, a still young man with a good digestion, strikes a tone reminiscent of Mark Twain’s in
Roughing It
,
or Whitman’s when
⁶
he wrote about the fascinations of Manhattan’s Broadway. “Couldn’t sleep at all,” Nabokov tells us early on,

since at the numerous stations
⁷
the wild jolts and thunderings of the train cars’ copulations … allowed no rest. By day, lovely landscapes skimmed past—huge trees in a profusion of forms—with their somehow oil-painted shade and iridescent greenery reminding me … of Caucasian valleys… . When I got off in Florence [South Carolina], I was immediately surprised by the heat and the sun, and the gaiety of the shadows—like what one feels upon reaching the Riviera from Paris.

He realized—probably not while he wrote, but again, who knows—that he had the
makings of another book
⁸
. Comical interludes (waiting for a ride to a college, he overhears someone in a hotel lobby wondering why the Russian professor hasn’t shown up. “But I am the Russian professor!” Nabokov exclaims); revelatory encounters with Southern racialism (“In the evenings, those who have children rarely go out because … they have no one to leave the kids with; Negro servants never sleep over in the whites’ homes—it is not allowed—and they cannot have white servants because they cannot work with blacks”); further romps in the sun-shot,
weirdly foliaged
⁹
Southern wilds, chasing insects: the trip aroused and provoked him, led him to think and understand, made him want to write.

The tone resembles that of the letters he wrote in ’37. But he is conducting no clandestine affair this time, and the self-pleased tone of the glamorous young writer toasted by
le tout Paris
has been dialed back. He still admires himself a lot and reports evoking extravagant regard in others, but he
shows himself as a bumbler, too
¹⁰
, as someone who chats up the professors at a college and then reaches into his pocket for his lecture notes and finds nothing. (“It came out very smoothly” anyway.) He meets
iconic African Americans
¹¹
, among them W. E. B. Du Bois, and writes from Spelman College that he is at “a black Wellesley” presided over by a formidable woman with a wart beside her nose, someone who requires him to attend chapel with four hundred students in the morning. As he later told interviewers, who hoped to pin down exactly what kind of reactionary or paleo-liberal or reactionary paleo-liberal he was,
racial segregation
¹²
disgusted him. “To the west, cotton plantations,” he wrote from South Carolina,