Nabokov in America (19 page)

Humbert-like, Krug attaches to Mariette a sullying categorical term: she is not a nymphet but a
puella
.
§
Though still a child, she is sexually hungry and sophisticated:

“
Good night
³²
,” he said. “Don’t sit up too late.”

“May I sit in your room while you are writing?”

“Certainly not.”

He turned to go but she called him back… . “When I’m alone,” she said, “I sit and do like this, like a cricket. Listen, please.”

“Listen to what?”

“Don’t you hear?”

She sat with parted lips, slightly moving her tightly crossed thighs, producing a tiny sound, soft, labiate, with an alternate crepitation as if she were rubbing the palms of her hands.

Krug forgives himself in advance. He had “
lost his wife
³³
in November,” and it was “quite natural” for a man to want to rid himself of “tension and discomfort.” (Humbert, notoriously, forgives himself in a thousand
ways for what he does to the child Lolita.) At the last instant, Krug does not fall, does not take advantage; then there comes a tap at his door:

He opened
³⁴
… . She was standing there in her nightgown. A slow blink concealed and revealed again the queer stare of her dark opaque eyes. She had a pillow under her arm and an alarm clock in her hand. She sighed deeply.

“Please, let me come in,” she said, the somewhat lemurian features of her small white face puckering up entreatingly. “I am terrified, I simply can’t be alone. I feel something dreadful is about to happen. May I sleep here? Please!”

She crossed the room on tiptoe and with infinite care put the round-faced clock down on the night table. Penetrating her flimsy garment, the light of the lamp brought out her body in peachblow silhouette.

Krug sounds a little like Charlotte Haze, Lolita’s mother, in a famous passage from
Lolita
, when he declares,

“
You know too little
³⁵
or too much… . If too little, then run along, lock yourself up, never come near me because this is going to be a bestial explosion, and you might get badly hurt. I warn you. I am nearly three times your age and a great big sad hog of a man. And I don’t love you.”

She looked down at the agony of his senses. Tittered.

“Oh, you don’t?”

Mea puella, puella mea
. My hot, vulgar, heavenly delicate little
puella
.

Among other foretastes of
Lolita
are scenes in which Mariette and others, including Krug’s eight-year-old son, speak in
American slang
³⁶
. David says, “Uh-uh,” and “Gee whizz,” and Krug imagines emigrating to a country where “his child could be brought up in security … a long long beach dotted with bodies, a sunny honey and her satin Latin—advertisement for some American stuff somewhere seen, somehow remembered.” Eventually, a squad of police agents breaks in, beats up Krug, and takes David away to his death, and these thugs sound as if they have been watching too many movies or are intent on restaging parts of “The Killers”:

“Sure,” said Mac
³⁷
.

“And you won’t catch cold because there is a mink coat in the car.”

Owing to the door of the nursery suddenly opening … David’s voice was heard for a moment: oddly enough, the child, instead of whimpering and crying for help, seemed to be trying to reason with his impossible visitors… .

Krug moved his fingers—the numbness was gradually passing away. As calmly as possible. As calmly as possible, he again appealed to Mariette.

“Does anybody know what he wants of me?” asked Mariette.

“Look,” said Mac to [Krug], “either you do what you’re told or you don’t. And if you don’t, it’s going to hurt like hell, see? Get up!”

Mac has a great jaw and a hand “the size of
a steak for five
³⁸
.” He is a figure out of the funnies, as well as the movies; Bluto in
Popeye
might almost say, as he does, “Aw, for Christ’s sake,” and “Hold it straight, kiddo,” when Mariette fondles his flashlight. These passages offer a brief fantasia on lowbrow American themes. America is where gangsterism found its style, but it is also where, if Krug had pulled off a planned escape, things might have turned out differently for his child:

He saw David
³⁹
a year or two older, sitting on a vividly labelled trunk at the customs house on the pier.

He saw him riding a bicycle in between brilliant forsythia shrubs and thin naked birch trees down a path with a “no bicycles” sign. He saw him on the edge of a swimming pool, lying on his stomach, in wet black shorts, one shoulder blade sharply raised … saw him in one of those fabulous corner stores that have face creams on one side and ice creams on the other, perched … at the bar and craning towards the syrup pumps. He saw him throwing a ball with a special flip of the wrist, unknown in the old country. He saw him as a youth crossing a technicoloured campus.

It will be Lolita, a year or two hence, who will sample fountain drinks in American drugstores as Humbert drives her back and forth across the country. But Lolita, too, will never escape into wider life—will not survive to cross a groomed college campus, will not get beyond the looming doom that Nabokov, in these war and just-postwar years, found implied in the vulnerability of childhood.

*   *   *

Many
of the events of
Lolita
(1955) are set in a fictionalized 1947–48. Among the qualities of the novel that charmed hundreds of thousands of readers, especially American ones, was the comical truth of its settings, which are evoked in a realistic mode. The critic Elizabeth Hardwick observed about the novel, “
It is rather
⁴⁰
in the mood of Marco Polo in China that he meets the (to us) exhausted artifacts of the American scene. Motels, advertisements, chewing-gum … for Nabokov it is all a dawn, alpine freshness.” Mark Twain’s rustic settlements in
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
came to American readers with a similar charge in the 1880s: stereotypical settings—Southern river towns, famously sleepy—came into focus as backdrops to events such as the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud, or the Duke and the Dauphin’s balderdash connivings. That other American novel of aimless travel was also rich, as
Lolita
is, with the flavors of American speech and the savories of place.

Only in ’46 did Nabokov
fully take command
⁴¹
of English. Early in ’47 he wrote Wilson,

I have not had
⁴²
a word from you for ages. How are you? Did you get my new Russian poem? … [
Bend Sinister
] is due to appear in the beginning of June… . They sent me a most absurd blurb… . I have little hope that [it] brings me any money. I am writing two things now 1. a short novel about a man who liked little girls—and it’s going to be called
The Kingdom by the Sea
—and 2. a new type of autobiography—a scientific attempt to unravel and trace back all the tangled threads of one’s personality—and the provisional title is
The Person in Question
.

These became
wonderful, enchanting books
⁴³
, for many readers Nabokov’s best. They were realist in the sense of seeming to be reports of an intelligible world, albeit a world rendered to a degree of detail far from ordinary. Wilson, when he eventually read the manuscript, did not like
Lolita
, but he joined
the chorus of praise
⁴⁴
for the essays that Nabokov began to publish in
The New Yorker
, later to become
Speak, Memory
. Neither the memoir nor the novel is a political fantasy à la
Bend Sinister
, and neither imagines a country that is sort of this way and sort of that.

Neither avoids complicated, allusive writing, but Nabokov’s learnedness is semi-masked in
Lolita
. In
Bend Sinister
, the Shakespearean discourse claims most of a chapter and, though intrinsic to the text,
interrupts; readers wishing the story to forge ahead have to wait.
Lolita
, by contrast, reads easily, without interpolations; Humbert Humbert’s first-person narration goes down very smoothly:

“Look, make
Mother take you and me
⁴⁵
to Our Glass Lake tomorrow.” These were the … words said to me by my twelve-year-old flame in a voluptuous whisper, as we happened to bump into one another on the front porch, I out, she in. The reflection of the afternoon sun, a dazzling white diamond with innumerable iridescent spikes quivered on the round back of a parked car.

As I lay
⁴⁶
in bed, erotically musing before trying to go to sleep, I thought of a final scheme how to profit by the picnic to come. I was aware that mother Haze hated my darling for her being sweet on me. So I planned my lake day with a view to satisfying the mother. To her alone would I talk; but at some appropriate moment I would say I had left my wrist watch or my sunglasses in that glade yonder—and plunge with my nymphet into the wood.

The plot is simple: scholarly pedophile makes off with young girl, who escapes.
Bend Sinister
, two-thirds as long, is a labyrinth of plot compared with
Lolita
’s fablelike, mostly chronological unspooling, although the events of the latter are mysterious in a way unknown to the former. The ease of reading is another seduction. Humbert wins us with artful palaver to a position of suspended distaste for his actions (“
Oh, my Lolita
⁴⁷
, I have only words to play with!”), our ease of entry into his view of things complicitous. We should be sufficiently abhorrent of child sexual enslavement to be reading something more improving, but aren’t.

Speak, Memory
, mandarin in style, is less welcoming to some readers:

School was taught
⁴⁸
from the fifteenth of September to the twenty-fifth of May, with a couple of interruptions: a two-week intersemestral gap—to make place, as it were, for the huge Christmas tree that touched with its star the pale-green ceiling of our prettiest drawing room—and a one-week Easter vacation, during which painted eggs enlivened the breakfast table. Since snow and frost lasted from October well into April, no wonder the mean of my school memories is definitely hiemal.

*   *   *

I see very clearly
⁴⁹
the women of the Korff line, beautiful, lily-and-rose girls, their high, flushed
pommettes
, pale blue eyes and that small beauty spot on one cheek … which my grandmother, my father, three or four of his siblings, some of my twenty-five cousins, my younger sister and my son Dmitri inherited in various stages of intensity.

The book is Proustian—from start to end an excavation of personal memory—but not especially modernist, written in refined, deep- breathing sentences that require attention but do not perplex. Terms like
hiemal
and
pommette
may have sent some
New Yorker
readers to a dictionary, but
Speak, Memory
is the report of a mind awash in clarity, Apollonian, resplendently poised.

Nabokov needed money. Financially “I am
rather dejected
⁵⁰
,” he wrote Wilson upon learning that his Guggenheim would not be renewed for a second year. A
plan to return west
⁵¹
had to be put off for a year, then two, then three. Dmitri had “absolutely nowhere to play out of doors and lives in a neighborhood full of impossible little
hooligans
⁵²
,” and the family made short trips in summer, one to Newfound Lake, New Hampshire, said to be the
cleanest lake
⁵³
in the state today but “
filthy
⁵⁴
” back when Nabokov took his family there. The Nabokovs later told
a story about anti-Semitism
⁵⁵
in New Hampshire, in the wake of the war and reportage of the death camps. In a restaurant with a “Gentiles Only” notice on its menu, Nabokov asked the waitress if she would refuse service to a man and woman and infant son who arrived on a donkey. She had no answer, and they stalked out.

In
other versions of the story
⁵⁶
—which evoke the forthcoming novel and film
Gentleman’s Agreement
(both released in 1947)—the New Testament triad arrives in “an old Ford,” and in one, Véra is absent but Dmitri brings along a friend, and the boys are deeply impressed by Nabokov’s outspokenness. He was psychologically fragile at the time. He had gone to New Hampshire on doctor’s orders; exhausted by work on
Bend Sinister
and on a lepidopteral research paper, he’d
visited a hospital
⁵⁷
complaining of heart trouble, ulcers, kidney stones, and cancer. The doctor pronounced him sound but played out. In letters of early 1946, Nabokov described himself as “impotent,” most amusingly in a note to Wilson about
Memoirs of Hecate County
, recently published and selling briskly, in part because of daring sexual passages:

There are lots of wonderful
⁵⁸
things in it… . You have given your [character’s] copulation-mates such formidable defences … that
the reader (or at least one reader, for I would have been absolutely impotent in your singular little harem) derives no kick from the hero’s love-making. I should have as soon tried to open a sardine can with my penis.

He missed the West, and his feeling of unwellness might have been related to his gaining sixty pounds when he stopped smoking. Beginning in ’47, and with hardly an interruption for the next decade and a half, he did go west, mostly to high mountains, where he tramped himself fit. Newfound Lake seemed to him tame, polluted; at the lodge where they stayed, he was sickened by the
smell of fried clams
⁵⁹
drifting in from a Howard Johnson’s.

Something miraculous happened. In the late forties, the émigré who was finally in command of wise, precise, plastic English took a further step. He undertook the American subject as he saw it. As he later explained to
Playboy
, “
I had to invent America
⁶⁰
… . It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced by a similar task, with a lesser amount of time at my disposal.” America in his version is marked by fanciful touches—curious, resonant place-names in
Lolita
, for instance, such as “Ramsdale,” “Elphinstone,” “Beardsley”—but is not fanciful in a metafictional sense, the sense of an arch author signaling the made-up-ness of his text. (Humbert, narrator not author, allows that he has fictionalized here and there but insists on the desperate reality of events.) For scholarly readers who enjoy fossicking in a text,
Lolita
, like the next two American novels,
Pnin
(1957) and
Pale Fire
(1962), offers a rich field of excavation, concocted out of countless literary sources, but Nabokov carefully preserves an illusion of “this world” for readers who wish to enter his story and be carried away.