Nabokov in America (55 page)

12
  
“But what struck”:
Hecate County
, 250–1.

13
  
“I remember”:
Hecate County
, quoted in de Grazia, 214.

14
  
forbidden
terms:
Dabney, 326. Wilson mentions Miller occasionally in his correspondence:
Letters
, 537, 663. That N. also read Miller, or hastily sampled him, can be deduced from his comment to his sister that “Miller is talentless obscenity.”
NB
, 464.

15
  
an American take:
de Grazia, 239. Edel edited Wilson’s journals of four decades (twenties through fifties).

16
  
“avalanche of erotic”:
Edel,
The Twenties
, quoted in de Grazia, 239. John Updike was a percipient admirer of Wilson’s erotic writing and named “The Princess with the Golden Hair,” the central story in
Hecate County
, “my first and to this day most vivid glimpse of sex through the window of fiction.” Updike,
Hugging
, 196.

17
  
“subordinate clause”:
Enchanter
, 29.

18
  
“Already his gaze”:
Ibid., 88–89.

19
  
“All my previous books”:
SL
, 96.

20
  
“Now let’s sit down”:
Enchanter
, 45.

21
  
“Please, try”:
Ibid., 52–53.

22
  
“immobilized fraction”:
Lolita
, 46.

23
  
“soot-black lashes”:
Ibid.

24
  
“plaid shirt”:
Ibid., 43.

25
  
“knew I could kiss”:
Ibid., 51.

26
  
“first cloth coat”:
Ibid., 198–99.

27
  
“perversions”:
Ibid., 3.

28
  
“ ‘aphrodisiac’ ”:
Ibid., 4.

29
  
“great work of art”:
Ibid., 5. In a private journal, in ’58, Véra wrote, “I wish, though, somebody would notice the tender description of the child’s helplessness, her pathetic dependence on monstrous HH, and her heartrending courage all along… . They all miss the fact that … Lolita, is essentially good … or she would not have straightened out after being crushed so terribly and found a decent life with poor Dick.” Berg. N. wrote a similar self-review of
Speak, Memory
that in the end he decided not to place in the published book, but which appeared twenty years after his death in the
New Yorker. NB
, 456–58. Though in “On a Book Entitled” N. says, “I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction and, despite John Ray’s assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow,” in ’56 he wrote Wilson, “When you do read LOLITA, please mark that it is a highly moral affair.”
DBDV
, 331.

30
  
“some interesting”:
Lolita
, 11.

31
  
indites one:
N. mentions John Cleland’s
Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
in “On a Book Entitled,” and from Wilson he received a copy of
Histoire d’O
, which the two men chuckled over like naughty schoolboys, according to Véra.

32
  
“the one of perfect liberty”:
Harris, vi.

33
  
“Next moment”:
Lolita
, 61.

34
  
“state of excitement”:
Ibid., 61.

35
  
“Talking fast”:
Ibid., 62.

36
  
“plane of being”:
Ibid., 63.

37
  
“in the pungent”:
Ibid., 63.

38
  
“I was a radiant”:
Ibid., 63–64.

39
  
“it’s nothing”:
Ibid., 64.

40
  
“a euphoria”:
Ibid.

41
  
composition:
Berg, notes for “Speak On, Memory”; Boyd 2, 226.

42
  
“Once or twice”:
Lolita
, 330.

43
  
real attempts:
Schiff, 166–67, for 1948; Boyd 2, 170, for 1950.

44
  
“are keeping”:
Schiff, 167.

45
  
cards he composed on:
Boyd 2, 169. The method of composing on index cards was borrowed from his lepidopteral work, where he routinely made notations on four-by-six-inch cards. Normally he destroyed early manuscript versions of his works, but in ’58 the Library of Congress began offering tax concessions in return for donations of his papers, and thereafter he saved his manuscripts. Boyd 2, 367.

46
  
“interruptions”:
Lolita
, 330.

47
  
“some forty years”:
Ibid.

48
  
“optimistic”:
“The Female of
Lycaeides argyrognomon sublivens
,”
NB
, 481.“Sky island” is a term that originated in the early forties and was brought into currency over the next twenty-five years. “Sky Island,”
Wikipedia
,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_island
.

49
  
brought from Europe:
Berg. It was brought unwittingly. N. thought his sole copy had been destroyed, but in ’59, according to a letter he wrote to publisher Walter Minton, he found it again, and in ’86 it appeared in a translation by Dmitri. Berg. This account is thrown into doubt, however, by a letter Wilson wrote on November 30, 1954, giving his response to
Lolita
, which he had just read in manuscript: “Now about your novel: I like it less than anything else of yours I have read. The short story that it grew out of was interesting, but I don’t think the subject can stand this very extended treatment.”
DBDV
, 320. Unless there is a story by N. that scholars have somehow overlooked, the short one Wilson refers to is likely to be
The Enchanter
or part of it.

50
  
Wilson was a new recruit:
Wilson was already explicit in what he wrote in his journals but not yet in his fiction.

51
  
“trying to be an American”:
Lolita
, 333.

52
  
“little money”:
SL
, 122.

53
  
To reach:
“I am sick of having my books muffled up in silence,” he wrote Wilson in June ’51.
DBDV
, 292.

54
  
“in the matter of”:
DBDV
, 289. Twain, like N., resisted those who sought morals or ideas in his novels; see his “NOTICE” after the title page of
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
. N. knew well who Twain was and where he had come from; in Hannibal, Missouri, he observed “the brown and the blue struggling for ascendancy in the Mississippi.” Berg, journal for ’51.

55
  
first American bestseller:
Castiglia,
Bound and Determined
, 1.

56
  
thirty editions:
Sturma, “Aliens and Indians,” 318.

57
  
seven hundred:
Ibid.

58
  
“enthusiastic review”:
Sayre, “Abridging,” 488.

59
  
“artlessness”:
Wolff, 411.

60
  
“moose”:
Ibid., 422.

61
  
reached its height:
DBDV
, 311. N. rejoiced in his work at the Widener Library at Harvard, tracking down every literary allusion in
Eugene Onegin
.

62
  
Pushkin had done:
Wolff, 410–11. Pushkin considered Chateaubriand’s and James Fenimore Cooper’s novels about America “brilliant works.” Ibid., 411. Mayne Reid counted among his entranced readers Frank Harris and Theodore Roosevelt.

63
  
what
tale to tell:
N.’s model for the theme of an intensely jealous man and a sweet cheat who is a deceptive captive is most likely Proust. Field,
VN
, 328–29.

64
  
found him smart:
Boyd 2, 141. N. spent time particularly with Ransom, and they made several live radio broadcasts together while in Salt Lake. Field,
Life in Part
, 272.

65
  
Buxbaum:
Interview with Richard Buxbaum, August 14, 2013. At the time of the interview, Buxbaum was the Jackson H. Ralston Professor of International Law (emeritus) at the University of California, Berkeley.

66
  
resembling the route:
Zimmer,
http://dezimmer.net/LolitaUSA/Trip2.htm
.

67
  
“ah, that first whiff”:
Lolita, 222.

68
  
nonfictional travelers:
Interview with Buxbaum. Buxbaum noticed the separate beds because his own parents slept in one.

69
  
“We wish you”:
Lolita
, 223.

70
  
“a woman’s hair”:
Ibid.

71
  
“commercial fashion”:
Ibid. Such big motels were appearing—a few, though they were not yet the fashion.

72
  
“beautiful bones”:
Interview with Buxbaum.

73
  
conferred with Klots:
NB
, 447.

74
  
“meet ten bears”:
Boyd 2, 142. Klots was the future author of
Field Guide to the Butterflies of North America, East of the Great Plains
.

75
  
South of the Tetons:
Berg, “Notes for a second volume (twenty years in America) of Speak, Memory.”

76
  
an adventure:
Boyd 2, 142. The author, aged sixty-six, in a perhaps ill-advised attempt to understand that adventure, undertook the trek to the base of Disappointment Peak, which gains three thousand feet in five miles. The weather became stormy. His solo climb of the rocks ended with the arrival of purple clouds and lightning. Half an hour later, after an undignified retreat, he found himself bathed in warm sunlight, the sky beautifully clear; he did not return to the rocks, but enjoyed a day of cautious hiking in the heart of the Tetons, legendary summits all around.

77
  
“lost many pounds”:
DBDV
, 254.

78
  
“soft-bosomed”:
Ibid.

79
  
go where they wanted:
the Nabokovs became American citizens in ’45.

80
  
“amazing white Impala”:
Schiff, 268. A ’54 Buick Special bought new cost between $2,200 and $3,163. Theirs was a two-door sedan, the smallest model. The Special was Buick’s bestselling car. “1954 Buick Special—Classic Car Price Guide,” Hagerty,
http://www.hagerty.com/price-guide/1954-Buick-Special
.

81
  
is a staging:
Steve Coates, “His Father’s Siren, Still Singing,”
New York Times
, May 4, 2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/weekinreview/04nabokov.html
.

Chapter Twelve

1
  
researches were extensive:
Humbert Humbert on occasion reports what must have been N.’s own research experience—for example, that he never figured out Humbert’s legal status vis-à-vis his stepdaughter, although he consulted “many books on marriage, rape, adoption and so on.”
Lolita
, 181–82. In the Library of
Congress are ninety-four four-by-six cards with research notes for
Lolita
. N. reminds himself to look up certain words in a dictionary or thesaurus—not all his immense vocabulary, as some have feared, was immediately available to him.

2
  
enema tip:
LOC.

3
  
girlish slang:
LOC; Boyd 2, 211. N.’s slang collection informs
Lolita
’s “furious harangues” when she uses such expressions as “swell chance,” “I’d be a sap,” “Stinker,” and “I despise you.”
Lolita
, 181.

4
  
scene with Miss Pratt:
Boyd 2, 211.

5
  
“hawk-faced” to “blue-green eyes”:
Dolinin, 11.

6
  
“detention home”:
Lolita
, 159.

7
  
“impaired the morals”:
Ibid.

8
  
journal for ’51:
Berg. Also known as the page-a-day diary.

9
  
“paradox of pictorial”:
Lolita
, 160–61.

10
  
“line of spaced trees”:
Ibid., 161. The passage continues, “and a passing glimpse of some mummy-necked farmer.” A diary note for June 30 reads, “farmer with a mumy’s [
sic
] neck, furrowed and tanned … grim El Greco horizon.” Berg.

11
  
arrives at existence:
N. was in this sense antipositivist or Kantian.

12
  
“I myself learned”:
Lolita
, 160. This process parallels one of learning to see Lolita with loving eyes, not only via a sexually devouring gaze.

13
  
“a series of wiggles”:
Ibid., 162. See, regarding Humbert’s travels and for many other matters Nabokov-related, Dieter Zimmer’s indispensable website, at
http://dezimmer.net/index.htm
.

14
  
“sobs in the night”:
Ibid., 186.

15
  
“when we sat reading”:
Ibid., 184.

16
  
“trains would cry”:
Ibid., 154.

17
  
“dreadful giant Christmas trees”:
Ibid., 162. The trees echo a diary entry for June 28, 1951, “yesternight highbrow trucks like dreadful huge Christmas trees in the darkness.” Berg. These notes from the ’51 western trip went directly into
Lolita
so often that it raises the question: Did N. save this notebook so that scholars of the future could learn from it something of his compositional process; or was it saved because it happened to have many unwritten-upon pages, on which Véra, in ’58, could jot an account of the events surrounding the American publication of
Lolita
? See chapters 15 and 16 of this book.