Nabokov in America (17 page)

Nabokov’s attention to the literary goings-on of this period, especially his awareness of his fellow authors, is what can be expected of an ambitious newcomer aiming to play a hand. Just in a single letter of his Utah summer he gives a sense of wide, continuous reading among writers in the American grain. To Wilson on July 15, a month into the Alta stay, he wrote that he had “
liked very much Mary
³⁵
[McCarthy]’s criticism of [Thornton] Wilder’s play in the
Partisan
.” (The play was
The Skin of Our Teeth
, and McCarthy’s acid review called it an “anachronistic joke, a joke both provincial and self-assertive.”) He had also
read, and lustily hated
³⁶
, Max Eastman’s long narrative poem
Lot’s Wife
, which had just come out as a book. Wilson had mentioned the émigré writer V. S. Yanovsky, and Nabokov, displaying no kindness toward a fellow Slav, one now also writing for the American market, denounced him as “
a he-man
³⁷
 … if you know what I mean.” Furthermore, “He cannot write.”

Returning to Western subjects, he said,

Twenty years ago
³⁸
this place was a Roaring Gulch with golddiggers plugging each other in saloons, but now the Lodge stands in
absolute solitude. I happened to read the other day a remarkably silly but rather charming book about a dentist who murdered his wife—written in the nineties and uncannily like a translation from Maupassant in style. It all ends in the Mohave Desert.

That book was
probably
McTeague
³⁹
, by Frank Norris.

Some of the scene at Alta can be imagined from Nabokov’s letters, from passages in the Gogol book, and from Laughlin’s accounts of having the Nabokovs as touchy guests. The solitude in the canyon came with
marks of desolation
⁴⁰
; the local silver mines having shut down, Nabokov could see “ancient mine dumps” and derelict equipment when he looked through the plateglass windows. Built four years before by a railroad company, with Laughlin coming on later as investor, the lodge was a modest wooden structure sited on a steep slope of the canyon, with a snow-shedding roof and a deck built on piers on the downhill side. Inside, stone fireplaces and guest rooms catered to skiers in winter. Nabokov relished the views. “A
delicate sunset was framed
⁴¹
in a golden gap between gaunt mountains,” he writes in
Nikolai Gogol
. “The remote rims of the gap were eyelashed with firs and … deep in the gap itself, one could distinguish the silhouettes of other, lesser and quite ethereal, mountains.”

He went out on the deck nights. According to Laughlin, he “affixed big lights [inside] the plate glass windows … and collected moths.” (Some of these moths, of the variety
known as pugs
⁴²
, he sent to J. H. McDunnough of the AMNH, who named one of the captures
Eupithecia nabokovi
.) Laughlin was astounded by his energy. He “
wrote every day
⁴³
and hunted butterflies every good day,” Laughlin told
Time
magazine in the sixties. “I never knew what he was writing … he was secretive about that, but I could hear the typewriter going.” (The typewriter would have been operated by Véra; Vladimir wrote almost exclusively
with a pen
⁴⁴
, whose operation was impeded by the altitude.)

When the
weather kept them indoors
⁴⁵
, the Russians played Chinese checkers. Laughlin and his young wife had a pair of cocker spaniel puppies, and these were often underfoot—they were “
a draggle-eared black
⁴⁶
one with an appealing slant in the bluish whites of his eyes and a little white bitch with a pink-dappled face and belly,” Nabokov wrote. They were supposed to stay out on the deck but sneaked in.

Despite the occasional rainstorm, “Never in my life … have I had such good collecting as here,” Nabokov wrote Wilson. “
I climb easily
⁴⁷
to
12000 ft… . I walk from 12 to 18 miles a day, wearing only shorts and tennis shoes.” The canyon was a wildflower paradise. Feeling strong and animated, possibly, by a resentful urge, Nabokov challenged Laughlin, a fine athlete and tireless hiker, to climb with him to the summit of Lone Peak, a serious ascent that gains over six thousand feet from the valley floor in the space of six miles. Modern-day wilderness hikers consider
Lone Peak the most arduous
⁴⁸
high ascent in the Wasatch Range. Two routes to the summit were known in the forties; neither offered water beyond the trailhead, and well-prepared climbers carried full canteens. There is reason to think the two were not well prepared. Nabokov wore “
white shorts and sneakers
⁴⁹
,” Laughlin told the
Time
correspondent, and it was “a very tough mountain and the round trip took … nine exhausting hours.” The climb requires careful route finding and movement over steep granite. A well-researched modern Web guide speaks of “
incredibly steep,” “deeply eroded,” and “very exposed” passages, with a “sheer wall
⁵⁰
” below the summit proper that “requires scrambling” to surmount.

An approach to Lone Peak

The top was all snow, due to heavy precipitation that year. In his report to
Time
, Laughlin recalled that Nabokov on the way down “
lost his footing
⁵¹
and slid five hundred to six hundred feet,” suffering bad friction
burns on his buttocks. Slides on summit snowfields of that length are often fatal. Speaking to a different interviewer twenty years further on and recalling events differently, Laughlin emphasized that the outing had been for a scientific purpose—Nabokov had brought his butterfly net, and he collected near the snowy summit. Then, on the way down,

we [both] lost our
footing and began to slide
⁵²
. We were sliding faster and faster … toward a terrible bunch of rocks, but Nabokov had his butterfly net [which he] managed somehow to hook … onto a piece of rock that was sticking through the snow. I grabbed his foot and held onto him… . If it hadn’t been for that butterfly net …

The climbers were late returning. Véra phoned the county sheriff, who
sent a squad car out
⁵³
, and the deputies found the men as they were exiting the forest, exhausted but intact.
‡

Nabokov’s Utah experience, despite some irritations, filled him with joy. He had made excellent captures and had “
trudged and climbed some 600
⁵⁴
miles in the Wasatch,” he told Wilson. To Mark Aldanov, his novelist friend in New York, he wrote in an ecstatic mode, sounding like a nature mystic:

We
are
living in wild eagle country
⁵⁵
, terribly far from everything, terribly high up… . The grey ripple of aspens amid black firs, bears crossing the roads, mint, Saffron crocus, lupin flowering, Uinta ground squirrels (a kind of suslik) [that] stand upright beside their burrows… . I know you’re no nature lover, but all the same I tell you it’s an incomparable pleasure to clamber up a virtual cliff at 12000 feet and there observe, “in the neighborhood” of Pushkin’s “God,” the life of some wild insect stuck on this summit since the ice ages.

“God” is in quote marks but warrants mention. Nabokov here joins a cavalcade of mountain ascenders who feel themselves in the presence of a “spirit” as they approach a high summit. Americans are not alone in this—the story goes back at least to Moses on Mount Sinai—but Americans have made a practice of it, and John Muir of the Sierra Nevada and Henry Thoreau of Mount Monadnock are only the most famous examples of American mountain pilgrims.

A few years later, when his son was mad for climbing, Nabokov placed him in a program in the Tetons. There Dmitri adventured with the best American mountaineers of his era, some of them charismatic mountain mystics. Nabokov tried to explain to Wilson:

In the meantime
⁵⁶
[Vladimir and Véra were staying in a rented cabin 100 miles away] Dmitri was camping on Jenny Lake … and climbing mountains along their most difficult and dangerous sides. The thing with him is an extraordinarily overwhelming passion. The professional alpinists there are really wonderful people, and the very physical kind of exertion supplied by the mountains somehow is transmuted into a spiritual experience.

Dmitri does not seem to have become mystical. But one of his instructors was probably Willi Unsoeld, the first man to climb the West Ridge of Mount Everest, the most significant ascent by an American in the twentieth century.
§
Unsoeld was hired
⁵⁷
at the climbing school the same
summer Dmitri attended. A religious intellectual who wrote a
well-regarded doctoral thesis
⁵⁸
on Henri Bergson, Unsoeld was preternaturally calm in terrifying situations, a world-class athlete and a proponent of insight gained through physical risk. He died in an avalanche on Mount Rainier.

Another legendary climber with whom Dmitri probably trained that summer was Art Gilkey, a geologist who would die in an American attempt on K2 in 1954. Dmitri’s initiation into the sport thus was courtesy of spiritually minded outdoorsmen who, while advancing the sport technically, climbed with a dual purpose. Their instruction included the idea that mountaineering was a species of quest—getting to the summit brought on godly thoughts, brought intoxication.

*
Nabokov’s final judgment was that Gogol was a trivializer of his monumental talent.

†
An American child under influence of the war, Dmitri was able to “unerringly identify types of aircraft by a distant silhouette … or even by a buzz, and loves to assemble and glue together various models.”

‡
In his communications with Laughlin in future years, Nabokov often took an imperious tone, the tone of someone who has been disrespected. The year after Alta, he wrote, “I want you to do something for me… . I have somehow mislaid samples of plants which I brought from Utah … There are several species of lupine [and] I need the one growing in the haunts of
annetta
 … I would also like to have a few [ant] specimens… . Kill the ants with alcohol or carbona … and put them into a small box with cotton wool. The plants can be mailed in a carton … but try to keep them flat.” Four years on, writing about a reprint deal involving another publisher, he wrote, “Quite independently of whether or not the deal is a profitable one … it is essential for me to keep my records straight, and this I cannot do unless I know the exact text of your contract with the New American Library… . [P]lease give it your attention… . I am at a loss to understand why you have not done it before.” Laughlin had sent along a copy of
The Sheltering Sky
, by Paul Bowles, and Nabokov declared it “an utterly ridiculous performance, devoid of talent. You ought to have had the manuscript checked by a cultured Arab. Thanks all the same for sending me those books. I hope you don’t mind this frank expression of my opinion.”

§
In 1963. His climbing partner was Tom Hornbein. Unsoeld had been part of the expedition that put Jim Whittaker atop Everest by the South Col route, which in ’63 was already familiar to high-altitude mountaineers because of the British first ascent of the mountain ten years earlier. Unsoeld and Hornbein preferred to climb Everest by a new route, an immensely more challenging one, the outcome of their effort entirely in doubt. That they succeeded in good style enlarged the sport.

8.

Back
in Cambridge, Nabokov underwent a
sharp decompression
¹
, trading the western sights that thrilled him for trim lawns, fall foliage, boring leps, and tame hills. He again dove into work at the MCZ. His labors were “immense,” he told Wilson:

Part of my scientific
work on the Blues
²
 … in which I correlate the nearctic [New World] and palaearctic [Old World] representatives, is due to appear in a week or two… . The number of my index cards exceeds a thousand references … I have dissected and drawn the genitalia of 360 specimens and unraveled taxonomic adventures that read like a novel. This has been a wonderful bit of training in the use of our (if I may say so) wise, precise, plastic, beautiful English language.

Somewhat isolated at the MCZ—with no fellow researchers interested in his favorite insect tribe—he reveled in the huge holdings. Nicolas Nabokov had had a similar New World immersion experience ten years before. The composer had agreed to write a ballet, one on “an American subject,” for Léonide Massine, and he had gone in search of materials to aid in this assignment, excited to be creating an indigenous American dance. Up to that point he had known America largely from books and movies, he confessed in his memoirs; America was to Nicolas a land of “
milk shakes and banana
³
splits,” of cars that looked like “funereal monsters,” of “noisy, filthy, dilapidated elevated trains”: an uncultured, foreboding place. Archibald MacLeish took Nicolas to see Gerald Murphy, the Jazz Age celebrity who, besides being a friend of Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, Picasso, Cocteau, and other icons of the Lost Generation, was a collector of musical artifacts. These treasures included “cylinders with recordings made by Thomas Edison” from the turn of the century, some of them containing “
poignantly authentic
⁴
” bits of American music, the music for “ ‘bear steps,’ ‘wolf steps,’ ‘fox trots,’ and … pre–Civil War ‘cakewalks,’ ” Nicolas discovered. “
Not only their tunes
⁵
[but] their harmonies, their rhythms, seemed fresh and real, [and] the manner of playing or singing and the choice of instruments” did also.
*