Nabokov in America (54 page)

24
  
lodge was within a half-mile:
Pickering, 15. The Longs Peak Inn was built by the nature writer Enos Mills. Pyle, 50.

25
  
“to the Tahosa Valley”:
Pickering, 7. The Nabokovs ate in the communal dining hall and might have had electricity and indoor plumbing in their cabin. Author’s visit, September 15, 2012.

26
  
with beaver dams:
Pickering, 18.

27
  
kinnikinnick gave way:
Ibid; author’s visit.

28
  
Véra enjoyed:
Schiff, 143. Novelist Edmund White, working for
The Saturday Review
in the early seventies, oversaw a cover story on the occasion of the publication of N.’s
Transparent Things
. White, “How Did One Edit Nabokov?”
City Boy
(New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2009).

29
  
Don Stallings:
Berg.

30
  
“Some new”:
Psyche
49 (September–December 1942).

31
  
“There will not be any fee”:
Berg.

32
  
“a flock of unnamed races”:
Berg, letter of May 13, 1943.

33
  
tutored by Nabokov:
Berg, letter of February 12, 1947.

34
  
ran the idea by:
Berg, letter of May 26, 1943.

35
  
“This giant race”:
Stallings and Turner, “New American.” Stallings was still relying on genitalic identification ten years later. Stallings and Turner, “Four New Species,” 4. N. coined several terms of genitalic morphology, among them
humerulus, alula, bullula, mentum, rostellum, sagum
, and
surculus. NB
, 498.

36
  
“You will find”:
Berg, letter of March 21, 1944.

37
  
“my ideas run along”:
Berg, letter of November 12, 1943.

38
  
“Also received”:
Berg, letter of February 13, 1946.

39
  
teach him the names:
Berg, letter of March 21, 1944.

40
  
“Did some dissecting”:
Berg, letter of April 14, 1944.

41
  
“Uncle Sam”:
Berg, letter of November 12, 1943.

42
  
“D-Day”:
Berg, letter of July 8, 1944. N. registered for the draft on February 16, 1942, soon after Pearl Harbor. In the Registrar’s Report on Vladimir Nabokoff (Serial Number 726, Order Number 10207) he is described as five feet eleven and a half inches tall, one hundred seventy pounds, of ruddy complexion, with an appendix scar. National Archives, National Personnel Records Center.

43
  
dated from this time:
N. claimed to have done some writing of
Lolita
in ’47, but he also wrote Wilson on January 16, 1952, that at Harvard for the semester “I shall have some timespace for certain pleasurable labors that I contemplate—a novel (in English) that I have been palpating in my mind for a couple of years.”
DBDV
, 298.

44
  
Humbert
drives immediately:
Lolita
, 283.

45
  
a promising site:
DBDV
, 294. N. told Wilson that Telluride had “awful roads, but then—endless charm, an old-fashioned, absolutely touristless mining town full of most helpful, charming people—and when you hike from there, which is 9000’, to 10000’, with the town and its tin roofs and self-conscious poplars lying toylike at the flat bottom of a cul-de-sac valley … all you hear are the voices of children playing.” Ibid.

46
  
“absence of her voice”:
Lolita
, 326. N. might have seen the name Telluride at the MCZ when reading of the capture of a type specimen in 1902 by a man named Weeks at “Telluride, San Miguel Mts., S.W. Colorado, alt. 10,000 to 12,000 ft.”
NB
, 425. But N. never mentions Weeks or Telluride in his first two main papers about the genus
Lycaeides
, “The Nearctic Forms of
Lycaeides Hüb
[ner]” and “Notes on the Morphology of the Genus
Lycaeides
.” Stallings’s talk of interesting captures he made there during summer of ’47 might have ignited N.’s desire to go.

47
  
“most delightful”:
Berg.

48
  
“collect my way”:
Boyd 2, 121; “
Erebia Magdalena
,” Butterflies and Moths of North America,
http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/species/Erebia-magdalena
.

49
  
“forget your face”:
Berg, letter of January 8, 1948.

50
  
“sending you”:
Berg, letter of February 23, 1948.

51
  
years:
Boyd 2, 116. N. remained an active collector for the rest of his life, but not a lab worker or theorist.

52
  
still the boy:
N. to sister Elena, August 30, 1950,
NB
, 465.

53
  
eventually to appear:
DBDV
, 219. The Nabokovs’ long stay at Columbine Lodge was possible only because of the sale of “Portrait of My Uncle” and another story to
The New Yorker
. On July 24, 1947, he had written Wilson, “I am rather in a fix at the moment (as always in summer).” Ibid., 217.

54
  
blue of summer:
SM
, 119.

55
  
of Longs Peak:
Ibid., 138–39. N.’s butterflies are biologically true but also totemic, like Hemingway’s trout of “Big Two-Hearted River” and the Irati River in
The Sun Also Rises
.

56
  
superimpose one part:
Ibid., 139.

57
  
a lost country:
NB
, 323.

58
  
vivid memories:
SO
, 22.

59
  
way with slang:
Schiff, 140.

60
  
Brecht, for instance:
Bentley, 17. Brecht was famously derisive of Americans. But “there was an ‘on the other hand’ … to his anti-Americanism. If the Americans … were hopeless, they were also not so hopeless… . They were human, and he liked some of their habits so much he affected them: not shaking hands upon being introduced, for example, or saying ‘so what?,’ an expression that did not exist in German until Brecht first said, ‘so was?”’ Ibid.

61
  
Henry Koster:
“Henry Koster,” IMDb.com,
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0467396/bio
.

62
  
“how well he had known me”:
NB
, 46.

63
  
“uninhibited”:
Ibid., 45.

64
  
Moby-Dick:
Ibid. There are appropriations from Melville in
BS
, which N. was working on at this time.

65
  
native
habitats:
Boyd 2, 82.

66
  
about the trouble:
Ibid.

67
  
“a strange wave”:
DBDV
, 146.

68
  
“complete collapse”:
Ibid., 148.

69
  
“hot music”:
Ibid., 149.

Chapter Ten

1
  
“rather startling”:
Bishop, “Nabokov at Cornell,” 234.

2
  
talked up:
DBDV
, 225.

3
  
leery of hiring:
Boyd 2, 123.

4
  
grant was tapped:
Diment,
Pniniad
, 30–1.

5
  
Widening Stain:
Tom and Edith Schantz, “Morris Bishop,” August 2007, Rue Morgan Press,
http://www.ruemorguepress.com/authors/bishop.html
.

6
  
“pretty worthless”:
SL
, 83; Schiff, 153.

7
  
“a strong appeal”:
Ibid., 82.

8
  
Harvard failed:
Boyd 2, 303. N. had vexed relations with the Harvard structuralist Roman Jakobson, who blackballed his appointment to a position at the university in ’57. Ibid., 698n50. Their cooperation on a three-man translation (plus annotations) of
The Song of Igor’s Campaign
(the third man was Cornell historian Marc Szeftel) came to naught, and N. wrote Jakobson a letter in ’57 that said, in part, “I have come to the conclusion that I cannot collaborate with you… . Frankly, I am unable to stomach your little trips to totalitarian countries.” (Jakobson had traveled to the USSR.) Berg. Before the contretemps surrounding the Harvard appointment, N. had said of his collaborator’s work, “Jakobson’s studies [are] especially brilliant.”
DBDV
, 241.

9
  
struggle was over:
Boyd 2, 129. Wilson frankly admired what N. had done: to have arrived as a penniless immigrant and within a decade to have become a professor at a distinguished university, with an exciting literary career in a new language. Wilson might have found a place for himself in the academy, but he demurred; the “whole thing … is unnatural, embarrassing, disgusting” for a writer, he felt, and at a time of financial difficulty he still “decided to try to hang on with journalism and publishers’ advances.”
Letters
, 401. He was playing in a different league financially from N., on a salary from the
New Yorker
that, at the time of the writing of
Hecate County
, was $10,000 plus $3,000 for expenses. (N. was paid $5,000 a year by Cornell.) Ibid., 404; de Grazia, 211–12; Schiff, 152n. N. began angling for better-paying jobs as soon as he arrived at Cornell, and he constantly asked for advances against his salary. Schiff, 153.

10
  
Never shall I forget:
PF
, 19–20.

11
  
Windows, as well known:
Ibid., 87–88.

12
  
Most faculty:
Appel and Newman, 236.

13
  
a professor’s trim house:
Boyd 2, 219.

14
  
services to her husband:
Véra was more and more called upon to handle N.’s swelling business, personal, and literary correspondence, including the authorship of thousands of letters under his signature: Schiff and Boyd, passim.

15
  
attention-getting part:
Schiff, 151.

16
  
“cocoon
of love”:
Shapiro, 282.

17
  
home for a winter vacation:
Gibian and Parker, 159.

18
  
Each of the houses:
Shapiro, 281–82.

19
  
Evenings passed:
Shapiro, 282.

20
  
same age:
Dmitri was born May 10, 1934; Lolita’s birthday was January 1, 1935.
Lolita
, 69.

21
  
“very very grateful”:
Berg; Boyd 2, 129.

22
  
“I was not always”:
Shapiro, 282.

23
  
“vulgar cad”:
Berg.

24
  
about a third:
Schiff, 152n.

25
  
lived on the perilous border:
D.N., “Close Calls,” 305–6.

26
  
“phoney”:
Lolita
, 202.

27
  
“adjustment”:
Ibid.,187.

28
  
“is obsessed”:
Ibid., 207.

29
  
“low-Mexican”:
Ibid., 209. Urinals had special foul meaning for N. In his notes for “Speak On, Memory,” he wrote, “In an age when literature is supposed to come from one’s favorite public urinal … my formal prose [can please] only the mature reader of yesterday.” Berg.

30
  
sexual hijinks:
D.N., “Close Calls,” 306 and passim.

31
  
“regime”:
Lolita
, 197.

32
  
“rapist”:
Ibid., 198.

33
  
on the right track:
At his parents’ urging, Dmitri applied to Harvard Law School and was accepted, but he never matriculated.

34
  
“little limp Lo!”:
Lolita
, 168.

35
  
“Ladies and gentlemen”:
Ibid., 93.

Chapter Eleven

1
  
“the four D’s”:
Lolita
, 187.

2
  
“gleeful pleasure”:
SO
, 47.

3
  
his best novel:
Ibid. N. insisted that
Lolita
was intensely pleasurable for him to contemplate in retrospect. “On a Book Entitled,” 333–34;
SO
, 47.

4
  
Sex in Nabokov:
There were many more-graphic writers, Henry Miller and D. H. Lawrence being the most noted.

5
  
violet-clad girl:
Enchanter
, 27.

6
  
“scrap”:
Ibid., 16.

7
  
“not pleased”:
Ibid., 12.

8
  
“a beautiful piece”:
Ibid., 16.

9
  
off-putting:
The beginning recalls the difficult
Invitation to a Beheading
and looks forward to
Bend Sinister
, rather than to the reader-inviting
Speak, Memory, Lolita
, and
Pnin
.

10
  
“thin, dry-lipped”:
Enchanter
, 25.

11
  
its simplicity:
Enchanter
plays changes on “Little Red Riding Hood,” while
Lolita
plays with/refers to some sixty other works.