Nabokov in America (50 page)

Chapter Three

1
    
Natalia had signed an affidavit:
Interview with Ivan Nabokov, April 25, 2013. Serge Koussevitzky’s name was also on the emigration documents, according to Ivan. Mikhail Karpovich also “stood surety” for N. Boyd 2, 14.

2
    
Madison … West Eighty-seventh:
Véra’s notes, Berg. Natalia secured a scholarship to the nearby Walt Whitman School for Dmitri, who entered first grade in fall ’40 and was soon promoted to second grade, despite having no English to begin with.

3
    
“the first part of it excellent”:
New York Times
, May 1, 1940, 1.

4
    
“Flanders pocket”:
New York Times
, May 28, 1940, 1.

5
    
“heavy tidings”:
New York Times
, May 29, 1940, 1.

6
    
morning was cloudy:
New York Times
, May 28, 1940, 1. The page one weather notice reads, “Mostly cloudy, with scattered showers and little change in temperatures today and tomorrow.” An article on the 1940 season of the New York World’s Fair noted that it had been “hounded by rain and unfavorable weather” for over two weeks: Ibid., 25. thirty thousand: Goldstein,
Helluva Town
, 92. The time period of the thirty thousand arrivals from France is summer ’40 to spring ’41.

7
    
Lévi-Strauss:
Ibid., 97.

8
    
Léger:
Ibid., 100.

9
    
lilac tinge:
Boyd 2, 11.

10
    
synesthete:
SM
, 34–35.

11
    
“I simply loved”:
NB
, 120; Boyd 1, 259.

12
    
influenced the direction:
Boyd, “Nabokov, Literature, Lepidoptera,” in
NB
, 24–25.

13
    
Comstock was:
Zimmer,
http://www.d-e-zimmer.de/eGuide/Biographies.htm
.

14
    
this was a method:
NB
, 41.

15
    
Andrey Avinoff:
Hellman,
New Yorker
, August 21, 1948, 32–47; Boyd 2, 16. Avinoff’s
New Yorker
profile notes that “He became an American citizen a few years after settling down here [in 1917]; he had begun to feel at home in this country rather quickly, partly because many American butterflies, such as the red admiral, the mourning cloak, the painted lady, and certain varieties of cabbages, skippers, yellow swallowtails, and fritillaries, have identical counterparts in Russia.”

16
    
Avinoff was another devotee:
Hellman, 36; “Andrey Avinoff,”
Wikipedia
,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Avinoff
.

17
    
“I have hunted”:
SM
, 125–26.

18
    
“Frankly”:
SO
, 46–47.

19
    
“untrammeled, rich”:
Lolita
, 335.

20
    
“should not ignore”:
SO
, 40.

21
    
“extensive and elaborate”:
SM
, 135.

22
    
drawn to the newer ones:
SM
, 122.

23
    
“Spring was in full tilt”:
Hamsun,
Pan
, 19–20.

24
    
“Sphinx moths”:
Ibid., 32–33.

25
    
“it was many years”:
SM
, 127.

26
    
“On the other side”:
Ibid., 138.

27
    
“soaking, ice-cold”:
Ibid., 121.

28
    
“wound he cannot”:
Boyd 1, 8.

29
    
“Already it was warmer”:
Faulkner, “The Bear,” 57.

30
    
“gained absolute control”:
SM
, 123.

31
    
“landscape lives twice”:
SO
, 40.

32
    
scene out of:
Schiff, 109. N. said of Turgenev that he wrote a “weak blond prose.”
DBDV
, 59.

33
    
put him in touch:
Nicolas Nabokov to Edmund Wilson, August 1941, Beinecke.

34
    
“My cousin Nicholas”:
DBDV
, 33.

35
    
those for whom he acted:
Meyers, 248–50.

36
    
his favorite:
Ibid., 166.

37
    
“That was awfully sweet”:
Nicolas Nabokov to Edmund Wilson, February 8, 1944, Beinecke.

38
    
“It occurred to me”:
Nicolas Nabokov to Edmund Wilson, December 7, 1947.

39
    
“I hope (so much)”:
Nicolas Nabokov to Edmund Wilson, December 1950.

40
    
“The seven years”:
LOC. The review never appeared in the
New Republic. DBDV
, 46.

41
    
“in the hope”:
Pitzer, 169.

42
    
noted in a letter:
Meyers, 223.

43
    
“There are today”:
Wilson, “An Appeal to Progressives,”
New Republic
, January 14, 1931.

44
    
“a rending”:
Wilson,
Shores of Light
, 496, 498.

45
    
his reportage:
Packer,
New Yorker
, April 29, 1913, 70.

46
    
reported
his earnings:
Dabney, 173–74.

47
    
“kept telling us”:
Wilson,
Shores
, 499.

48
    
“more and more impressed”:
Ibid.

49
    
“dingy”:
Wilson,
Red, Black, Blond, and Olive
, 167.

50
    
“prairies and wild rivers”:
Dabney, 206.

Chapter Four

1
    
“one hundred lectures”:
SO
, 5.

2
    
his 1922 translation:
Boyd 2, 25;
SO
, 286–87.

3
    
“a purring success”:
DBDV
, 47; Boyd 2, 26.

4
    
from all the migrations:
Véra
, 115.

5
    
sciatica:
Ibid., 113.

6
    
system of numbered:
Skidmore,
Restless Americans
, 9.

7
    
3,600 Jews:

http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/nazioccupation/frenchjews.html
.

8
    
“For almost 25”:
DBDV
, 53.

9
    
called it Pon’ka:
Zimmer,
http://www.d-e-zimmer.de/HTML/whereabouts.htm
.

The Nabokovs called Dorothy “Dasha.” Véra’s Diary 1958–59, Berg.

10
    
Nabokov compiled:
LOC.

11
    
Nabokovs stayed:
Boyd 2, 140; interview with Richard Buxbaum, August 14, 2013.

12
    
located near rail stations:
Belasco, 46.

13
    
motor courts common:
Jakle, 45; Belasco, 138.

14
    
two staff scientists:
Interview with David Grimaldi, January 5, 2013; Suzanne Rab Green, e-mail to author, May 22, 2013.

15
    
close reader:
Lolita
describes two periods of extended travel by car, and for his travels in fictional 1947–48 Humbert Humbert relies extensively on the three-volume AAA
Travel Guide
, in particular the “Western” volume. Humbert calls it “the Tour Book of the Automobile Association” and uses it to find accommodations and as a source of roadside diversions to amuse a young girl.
Lolita
, 153, 162, 163, 164, 166. Through continuous use the
Travel Guide
becomes “an atrociously crippled tour book” without a cover, “almost a symbol of my torn and tattered past,” Humbert says. See also Zimmer,
http://www.d-e-zimmer.de/LolitaUSA/Trip1.htm
.

16
    
“During our”:
DBDV
, 52.

17
    
“Beyond the tilled”:
Lolita
, 161.

18
    
too much staring blue:
Dirig, p. 6 of 7.

19
    
paint Dmitri’s face:
Schiff, 120.

20
    
“No, I am … houses by the road”:
Berg.

21
    
“odd attachment”:
Ibid.

22
    
“am driving off”:
DBDV
, 51.

23
    
“celebrated American dentist”:
Boyd 1, 84.

24
    
wettest year:
“Texas Annual Rainfall,” Texas Weather,
http://web2.airmail.net/danb1/annualrainfall.htm
.

25
    
took specimens:
Green, e-mail to author.

26
    
“lovely”:
Berg.

27
    
huddled in the car:
Boyd 1, 29.

28
    
slushy mule track:
N. to Comstock, February 20, 1942, Berg.

29
    
working for the Atchison:
Colter’s direct employer was the Fred Harvey Company.

30
    
Colter’s mix:
Gerke, “Bright Angel Cabins”; “Bright Angel Lodge,”
Wikipedia
,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_Angel_Lodge
.

31
    
rustic style:
“National Park Service Rustic,”
Wikipedia
,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Park_Service_rustic
.

32
    
Hopi House:
“Hopi House,”
Wikipedia
,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_House
. N.’s travels in the West and Southwest did not provoke in him a marked interest in Native Americans. Unlike D. H. Lawrence, to take an example of another foreign writer who also traveled west, N. did not sense a “crisis of consciousness” in civilized modern man, a severing from primordial “blood knowledge.” For N., nothing was wrong with modern man in the aggregate—nothing that had not always been wrong—and besides, little of use could be said about man in the aggregate. Specific individuals might be cruel, evil, sociopathic—it had ever been thus. There is no historical irony in Nabokov.

33
    
among his captures:
N. to Comstock, February 20, 1942, Berg; Boyd 2, 28–29.

34
    
consummation long wished:
SM
, 136. The specimen was not of a new species but of a subspecies of an insect that had not formerly been known to range north of Mexico. The subspecies is now called
Cyllopsis pertepida dorothea: NB
, 9.

35
    
“I found it”:
N., “On Discovering a Butterfly,”
New Yorker
, May 15, 1943, 26.

36
    
further stops:
Green, e-mail to author, January 7, 2013.

Chapter Five

1
    
pseudo-pueblos:
Adkins. Southwest Indian dwellings graced the St. Louis World’s Fair (1904), the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915), the Chicago World’s Fair (1933–34), and the Golden Gate International Exposition (1939–40).

2
    
“Ivestigate and you will”:
Agee, “Roadside,” 174.

3
    
“A good cave”:
Ibid.

4
    
Humbert, seeking distractions:
Lolita
, 160.

5
    
“slow suffusion”:
Lolita
, 161.

6
    
butterflies at his feet:
N. to Dobuzhinski, July 25, 1941, Bakh.

7
    
comfortable deck chair:
DBDV
, 52.

8
    
swimsuit:
Boyd 2, 33.

9
    
cactus-green Buick:
Perret, 87.

10
    
“girls are quite attractive”:
O’Brien, 114. JFK’s book developed out of his undergraduate thesis at Harvard. Two professional writers, both associates of his father, helped turn the thesis into a marketable book, but the student paper already presents a sophisticated argument about the disadvantages of democracies at times of impending war, and as the son of a notoriously isolationist father, who made impolitic and defeatist statements to reporters (“If you can find out why the British are standing up against the Nazis you’re a better man than I am”), young Kennedy wished to assert a different position while remaining a loyal son. O’Brien, 103–9. The debate over intervention dominated the season of N.’s arrival in the States; it
intensified with Dunkirk and the defeat of France (Paris taken June 14, 1940) and persisted until nearly the end of ’41.

11
    
fury of effort:
Boyd 2, 29.

12
    
a froth:
Ibid.; Field,
Life and Art
, 209.

13
    
“I assign myself”:
Bakh. Pushkin had called translations “the post-horses of civilization.” Boyd 2, 32.

14
    
Laughlin offered:
Boyd 2, 33. The advance paid was $150. Laughlin acquired
Sebastian Knight
on the recommendation of hired reader Delmore Schwartz. Schwartz was also an astute appreciator of Wilson’s prose; see “The Writing of Edmund Wilson,”
Accent
2 (Spring 1942): 177–86.