Nabokov in America (53 page)

6
  
“has had a serious”:
DBDV
, 132.

7
  
collaborate on “a book”:
Ibid., 121.

8
  
“You may find them”:
Ibid., 118.

9
  
“I am returning”:
Ibid., 119. On November 23, 1943, N. wrote, “It is wonderful that anybody could write about Russian letters as you do.”

10
  
superb journalism:
Wilson also read Prince Mirsky on Pushkin.
DBDV
, 74, 79.

11
  
gestures of respect:
Only with Wilson did N. seriously consider co-writing a book.
DBDV
, 121–22.

12
  
“So I am still looking”:
Ibid., 76.

13
  
“If I had the leisure”:
Ibid., 78.

14
  
“the whole book”:
Ibid., 120. Nabokov and Wilson did in the end author a book together, the posthumous
The Nabokov-Wilson Letters
(1979), later expanded to become
Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya
(2001). In ’66, N. told an interviewer, “The only time I ever collaborated with any writer was when I translated with Edmund Wilson Pushkin’s ‘Mozart and Salieri’ for the
New Republic
.”
SO
, 99.

15
  
“An obscure paper”:
DBDV
, 132, 142.

16
  
“Are you writing”:
DBDV
, 112.

17
  
“eager to see … excellent”:
Ibid., 138.

18
  
written two years later:
BS
, introduction, xi; Boyd 2, 91.

19
  
“programmatic refusal”:
Boyd 2, 106.

20
  
“There
at the door”:
BS
, 22.

21
  
“The main theme”:
Ibid., xiv.

22
  
A secondary character:
Ember is the translator of Krug’s
The Philosophy of Sin
, which makes Krug successful in America—“banned in four states and a best seller in the rest.”
BS
, 26.

23
  
Wilson’s failure:
Sweeney, “Sinistral Details.” The McCarthy novel was
The Company She Keeps
.

24
  
Wilson, when the book:
In ’52, when N. worked a reference to Wilson into a story published in the
New Yorker
, Wilson wrote, “I’m sorry you told me that there was something about me in [the story ‘Lance’], because I have to make it a rule never to read anything in which I am mentioned, for fear it will influence my judgment.”
DBDV
, 303.

25
  
“I had had some doubts”:
Ibid., 209–10.

26
  
“For you, a dictator”:
Ibid., 210.

27
  
“dull thud”:
N., “Introduction,”
BS
, xii.

28
  
“I think, too”:
Ibid.

29
  
reminded him of Thomas:
DBDV
, 210.

30
  
“She was standing”:
BS
, 145.

31
  
“slammed the door”:
Ibid., 158. The play, the lap, and a daughter taken sexually predict
Lolita
, 61–64 and passim.

32
  
“Good night”:
BS
, 174.

33
  
“lost his wife”:
Ibid., 174–5.

34
  
“He opened”:
Ibid., 175.

35
  
“You know too little”:
Ibid., 176–77. Cf.
Lolita
, 71.

36
  
American slang:
BS
, 143, 160.

37
  
“‘Sure,’ said Mac”:
Ibid., 180.

38
  
“a steak for five”:
Ibid., 178.

39
  
“He saw David”:
Ibid., 168.

40
  
“It is rather”:
Hardwick, 20.

41
  
fully take command:
In April ’47, he wrote two friends, the Marinel sisters, “As for Russian prose, I seem to have completely lost the knack.”:
SL
, 74.

42
  
“I have not had”:
DBDV
, 215.

43
  
wonderful, enchanting books:
Updike, 191–92, 202. “To my taste his American novels are his best,” Updike wrote. “In America his almost impossible style encountered … a subject as impossible as itself… . He rediscovered our monstrosity … the eerie arboreal suburbs, the grand emptinesses, the … junk of roadside America … the wistful citizens of a violent society desperately oversold … on love.” About
Speak, Memory
Updike observed, “Nabokov has never written English better than in these reminiscences; never since has he written so sweetly.”
Ada
did not find favor with the American-born novelist: “I confess to a prejudice: fiction is earthbound… . His vision and flair are themselves so supermundane that to apply them to a fairyland is to put icing on icing. There is nothing in the landscapes of
Ada
to rank with the Russian scenery of
Speak, Memory
or the trans-American hegira of Lolita and Humbert Humbert.

44
  
the chorus of praise:
DBDV
, 230.

45
  
“Mother take you and me”:
Lolita
, 47.

46
  
“As
I lay”:
Ibid., 56.

47
  
“Oh, my Lolita”:
Ibid., 33.

48
  
“School was taught”:
SM
, 180.

49
  
“I see very clearly”:
Ibid., 53–54.

50
  
“rather dejected”:
DBDV
, 142.

51
  
plan to return west:
Ibid.

52
  
“hooligans”:
DBDV
, 146.

53
  
cleanest lake:
The Inn on Newfound Lake, home page,
http://www.newfoundlake.com/main.html
.

54
  
“filthy”:
Schiff 134.

55
  
a story about anti-Semitism:
Boyd 2, 107.

56
  
other versions of the story:
Schiff, 134; Appel,
Annotated
, 424.

57
  
he went to a hospital:
DBDV
, 194.

58
  
“There are lots of wonderful”:
Ibid., 188. N. also referred to “impotent me” in a letter on May 25. Ibid., 192. Wilson’s
Memoirs of Hecate County
sold sixty thousand copies in its first year of publication. It then became the subject of an obscenity prosecution and was put under ban. The cost to Wilson in lost royalties was severe. The novel was not republished until ’59, when
Lolita
’s difficult but legally less troubled march to market signaled a promising change in the atmosphere. Wilson’s reversals were not lost on N. But
Hecate County
’s tantalizing early success showed the potential of an artfully written novel that was sex-centered to excite readers. Wilson considered
Hecate County
his best book. De Grazia, 209–10.

59
  
smell of fried clams:
Schiff, 134;
NB
, 397. N. had many pleasurable experiences collecting east of the Mississippi, but on the whole he preferred the West, for its less domesticated, grander, more mountainous landscapes. To a Russian friend, Roman Grynberg, he wrote, “Boring is the spring in Boston with its recalcitrantly green trees and yellow monotonous forsythias in garden plots. Oh, the porous snow in spring.” January 8, 1944, Bakh.

60
  
“I had to invent America”:
SO
, 26. N. spoke often of inventing places, inventing worlds, and this provocative locution, with its Promethean echoes, was in line with the modernist upending of naturalism. But in a less provocative sense, N. was underscoring his performance of a task shouldered by all novelists—all storytellers, for that matter: the investing of a locale with sufficient color and drama to interest and excite readers, leading to a feeling of familiarity and comprehension, as if now the place can be seen as it really is. That an observable reality may not exactly match the lineaments of a fictionalized ground does not much bother most readers; make-believe is allowed, in service to other truths. Faulkner’s comment, in a
Paris Review
interview of 1956, about realizing with
Sartoris
that “my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about,” and his witty signing of the hand-drawn map that he appended to
Absalom! Absalom!
—naming himself “Sole Owner & Proprietor” of fictional Yoknapatawpha County—were gestures not unlike Nabokov’s. See “Sketch Map of the Nabokov Lands in the St. Petersburg Region,” with N.’s trademark freehand butterfly.
SM
, 17.

61
  
“pale porpoise”:
DBDV
, 308.

62
  
conversant with:
Sweeney, “Sinistral,” 65.

63
  
“Keep it Kold”:
N., “The Refrigerator Awakes,”
New Yorker
, June 6, 1942, 20.

64
  
“sharp-sightedness”:
N.,
Poems and Problems
, 145.

65
  
represent his American surroundings:
Flanner, “Goethe,” part I, 34, and part II, 28, 30, 35. Mann did ponder a Hollywood novel but finally did not write it. “Whether the German exiles liked Los Angeles depended on whether they liked nature.” Bahr, quoted in Laskin. Mann often walked his poodle, Niko, in Palisades Park, Santa Monica, before lunch.

66
  
Ayn Rand:
Johnson, “Bedfellows.”

67
  
“I am also old”:
N.,
Stories
, 584.

68
  
“marvelous picnics”:
Kopper, “Correspondence,” 60–61.

Chapter Nine

1
  
Wilson sent him:
DBDV
, 229n1.

2
  
Of a wealthy family … beyond control:
Ibid. Simon Karlinsky, editor of
DBDV
, in his thorough account of this episode, displays the careful and suggestive scholarship that everywhere distinguishes his volume.

3
  
“Many thanks”:
Ibid., 230.

4
  
his entomology friends:
Berg, letters of Harry Clench.

5
  
Remington wrote him:
Berg. N. hoped to answer “critical unsolved problems in butterfly classification.” Remington, “Lepidoptera Studies,” 278.

6
  
Schmoll:
“Hazel Schmoll,” Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame,
http://www.cogreatwomen.org/index.php/item/162-hazel-schmoll
.

7
  
advance of $2,000:
DBDV
, 200.

8
  
book-talk fee:
Boyd 2, 116.

9
  
had been reading entomological:
N. read and wrote French, English, Russian, German, and Latin.

10
  
“Taken by Haberhauer”:
Berg.

11
  
“jam of logs”:
Ibid. The account originally appeared in
National Geographic
, June 1944: 672.

“the summer of 1834”:
Berg.

12
  
“N. Colo.”:
Ibid. “Ecology” appears in a letter to Wilson of November 21, 1948.
DBDV
, 241. “Ecological” appears in that letter and also in lepidopteral notes from ’44.
NB
, 307.

13
  
“On a hot August”:
NB
, 403.

14
  
“is forced open oysterwise”:
Ibid., 322.

15
  
“It may well be”:
Ibid., 422.

16
  
“I had done no collecting”:
Ibid., 126.

17
  
“can be defined as a Polyommatus”:
Berg.

18
  
center of a coterie:
N.’s entomological friends read him carefully. Cyril dos Passos, of the AMNH, said about N.’s “Notes on the Morphology of the Genus
Lycaeides
,” “It is a most interesting paper and I certainly enjoyed reading it… . The article cannot be mastered at one reading and I have promised myself the pleasure of giving it further study.” Berg. Dos Passos also wrote N., on May 31, 1949, “You have doubtless read Munroe’s paper in The Lepidopterists’ News … on the genus concept in RHOPALOCERA, in which he holds up Warren, Grey, yourself, and myself as horrible examples of splitters and returns to the old outworn ideas… .
Warren and I have been having some correspondence on the subject and feel that Munroe should be taken down a peg or two. It is our opinion that you are the person to do this”:
NB
, 447.

19
  
boarded at Columbine Lodge:
AAA
Guide
, 38.

20
  
during his stay:
“As many as four lepidopterists have visited me here to pay their respects and take me to distant collecting grounds.”
DBDV
, 219.

21
  
Tolland Bog:
Remington was conducting research at the University of Colorado’s Science Lodge, near Schmoll’s ranch.
NB
, 49–50.

22
  
feet-on-the-boggy-ground:
Garland Companion, 277–78.

23
  
“We have a most comfortable”:
DBDV
, 218.