Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (65 page)

18
“
dull, dull, dull” and “repulsive
”: Prescott, Orville, “Books of the Times,” NYT, August 18, 1958, 17; “
nothing more than plain pornography
”: quoted in Lewis Nichols’s “In and Out of Books,” NYT, August 31, 1958, BR8.

19
followed suit: “‘Lolita’
Shunned in Newark,” NYT, October 8, 1958, 19;
roiled the staff
: “Library Bans
‘Lolita,’”
NYT, September 19, 1958, 23.

20
Berkman, Sylvia, “Smothered Voices: Nabokov’s Dozen,” NYT, September 21, 1958, BR5.

21
ANL, 32, 262, and 254.

22
thirty-two-year stretch
: If you take the most conservative tack and include “The Enchanter,” which is actually a novella. “The Enchanter” was finished in 1939, and
Transparent Things
in 1972.

for which that statement is true
: It is also true that in two stories written during the same period, Nabokov created characters who appear to be Jewish but are not labeled as such directly. In “Time and Ebb,” the narrator mentions the “indescribable tortures being inflicted by a degenerate nation on the race to which I belong.” In “Signs and Symbols,” the family’s Aunt Rosa is put to death by the Germans; it is her story and their earlier roots in Minsk, and other names in the story—Isaac, Rebecca—that serve as clues and make the identity of the family apparent.

in an attempt to hide it
: In
Femininity
(1985), Susan Brownmiller mentions that Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn particularly made use of elocution lessons for their daughters when they could, in an effort to improve their prospects (108).

When Nabokov wrote
Lolita
, Brooklynese was a clear social marker, and one that could be used to discriminate. In
Underground to Palestine
(1946), I. F. Stone noted the “thick Brooklynese” of the American Jews when he sailed on an American-manned boat which set out to deliver displaced European Jews to Israel as part of an illegal convoy (116). C. K. Thomas of Cornell University, writing in
American Speech
on Jewish dialect in 1932, noted that his Jewish students’ “speech is distinctly inferior, and this inferiority raised the question whether there might be a clearly defined dialect which is characteristic of New York Jews.” He further noted the number of these students who had been sent to elocution schools that had become “popular among the higher class Jewish families of New York.” “Jewish Dialect and New York Dialect,”
American Speech
, vol. 7, no. 5, June 1932, 321.

23
“
trained servant maid
”: ANL, 82;
service as a maid
: Schiff, 103.

24
ANL, 261.

25
stamped on its stationery
: ANL, 261;
typically shorthand
: Kendal, Diana Eliza beth,
Members Only: Elite Clubs and the Process of Exclusion
(2008), 59.

26
Alfred Appel would be the first Nabokov reader to publicly note the hidden meaning of “near churches” in the novel.

27
official complaint in the State of New York
: “State Ban Asked against Ad ‘Bias,’” NYT, December 21, 1952, 52;
if they happen to be Jewish
: “Discrimination by Hotels Seen,” NYT, March 17, 1953, 28.

28
“
a certain strange strain
”: ANL, 75.
Lolita
’s progressive schoolmistress also inquires about Humbert’s religion, only to be told to mind her own business (194);
refused admission to a store
: ANL, 268; “
a Gentile’s house
”: ANL, 297. In another wink from Nabokov, Quilty seems to think Humbert is German or “Australian” (297), likely a fumbling attempt on Quilty’s part to refer to him as Austrian. This slip becomes relevant again later, when Nabokov writes
Look at the Harlequins!
(see Chapter 14, section 2, of this book).

29
the only Jew
: ANL 363 (note 3 from page 53 of the novel);
the word “kikes
”: Shrayer, Maxim D., “Evreiskie voprosy v zhizni i tvorchestve Nabokova,”
Weiner Slawistischer Almanach
43 (1999), 112.

30
a half-dozen people
: Two hotel clerks (years apart) at The Enchanted Hunters, Clare Quilty, Jean Farlow, the headmistress
of Lolita
’s school, and Charlotte Haze.

31
BBAY, 363.

32
Schiff, 26.

33
“How did they ever make a movie of
Lolita?
” was the tag line for the film’s posters and the theme of the movie’s trailer.

34
sold for $100,000
: Schiff, 237;
television skits
: BBAY, 373; Schiff, 233; “
for six years, till she’s eighteen
”: BBAY, 376;
bestselling novels of 1959
: Prescott, Orville, “A Critic’s Holiday Toast,” November 29, 1959, NYT, BR3. The other was Léon Uris’s
Exodus
, also published the year before.

35
“
new variety of sexual sensationalism
”: Prescott, Orville, “Books of the Times,” October 23, 1959, 27; “
rotten mackerel in the moonlight
”: Adams, J. Donald, “Speaking of Books,” NYT, October 26, 1958, BR2. “Yet (Nabokov) writes, in
Lolita
, of nothing of consequence, save as leprosy, let us say, is of consequence. Here is admirable art expended on human trivia. Mr. Nabokov rightly insists that his book is not pornographic. I found it revolting, nevertheless, and was reminded of John Randolph’s excoriation of Edward Livingston: ‘He is a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. He shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight.’”

36
Nabokov was not an admirer of such reverse emigration. Though he was not immune to the longing to return home, he could not imagine the existence of a true artist in the Soviet Union. Somehow, however, Pasternak skirted dictates and expectations, and the authorities tolerated a style and indepen dence from him that doomed other writers during the purges. In an effort to find a middle ground, he had pared his poetry down and written patriotic poems during the war, moving on to the relative safety of translation when his original work met with too much disapproval. It was rumored again and again that Stalin exempted him from the savagery of camps and trials. Barnes,
Boris Pasternak
, vol. 1, 304–13.

37
When someone proposed Nabokov as a candidate to translate the
Zhivago
poems, Pasternak objected. Barnes, vol. 2, 432n.

38
Schiff, 244.

39
Ibid., 243.

40
Shrayer, Maxim D.,
An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature
, 593.

41
Schiff, 243, n2.

42
“Olga Ivinskaya, 83: Pasternak Muse for
‘Zhivago,’”
NYT obituary, September 13, 1995.

43
Schiff, 233.

44
Wilson, Edmund, “Doctor Life and His Guardian Angel,”
New Yorker
, November 15, 1958, 216 and 238.

45
BBAY, 386.

46
NWL, 320.

47
wine, jewels, and silk
: ANL, 9; All were not just professions permitted for centuries to European Jewry but fields where they were concentrated.

48
Humbert at one point seeks to lose “a Protestant’s drab atheism” (his mother was the granddaughter of two English parsons) and turn to the Roman Catholic Church (282).

49
See Nabokov’s foreword to the English-language translation of
Despair
. He explained that Humbert would be allowed out one evening a year to walk a green lane in Paradise—a parallel escape to that offered to Judas after his death, who was allowed to return to earth and wander in the polar regions as relief from Hell each Christmas Eve because he had once given his cloak to a leper. See Matthew Arnold’s poem “Saint Brandan.”

50
ANL, 265.

51
Olga Skonechnaya has looked at Nabokov’s use of the Wandering Jew in his Russian and French work, linking
Agasfer, The Gift
, and his essay “Pouchkine ou le vrai et le vraisembable,” all of which retell or refract the Wandering Jew story in ways large or small.

In addition to the representative Silbermann character in
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
, the Wandering Jew is more explicitly mentioned as a stock character in a book read by the protagonist in
Invitation to a Beheading
. In
King, Queen, Knave
, the inventor of automannequins is newly arrived in Germany, a “nondescript stranger with a cosmopolitan name,” and the narrator mentions that he might be Czech, Jewish, Bavarian, or Irish.

There are, of course, classic narrative reasons to use roving protagonists who act out taboo and forbidden behaviors. And a wandering, anguished figure clearly evokes a kind of distorted, winking self-portrait of Nabokov himself. But he is also explicitly looking at the meaning of the Wandering Jew figure across the length of his career, simultaneously attending to Jewish culture and suffering as he does so. Nabokov was not the only person to try to invert the traditional Wandering Jew character.
Jewish-Russian exile Marc Chagall adopted the same character and strove to reclaim it through art, as have other later artists, including R. B. Kitaj. Nabokov did not care for Chagall’s later work, though he expressed admiration for his early “Jew in Green,” a portrait of a battered Wandering Jew-type character painted before the Revolution. See SO, 170 and Richard Cohen’s “
The Wandering Jew
: from Medieval Legend to Modern Metaphor” in
The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times
(2008).

52
In
Lectures on Russian Literature
, Nabokov claimed Dostoyevsky mistakenly thought that “physical suffering and humiliation improve the moral man” (115). In Nabokov’s description, Dostoyevsky had refused to believe that prison in Siberia had damaged him, insisting that that nothing had been lost, and he had survived as “a better man.”

53
If Humbert is Jewish, it is no accident that he is Swiss. During the war, the Swiss government deliberately and publicly revoked any responsibility to protect its own Jewish citizens in France. By 1942, stories of Swiss Jews interned in France circulated, and newspaper articles noted how the Swiss had ceded any demands that their Jewish citizens be afforded any special treatment distinguishing them from other foreign Jews. A Jewish Humbert still in France could have faced the same fate as Raisa Blokh—whom Nabokov had mocked so cruelly and who was turned back at the border—and ended up in Drancy or Gurs.

54
ANL, 316. From Nabokov’s afterword to the novel “On a Book Entitled
Lolita.
”

55
Juanita Dark
: ANL, 312.

56
Nabokov once told Alfred Appel that “Humbert identifies with the persecuted.” ANL, 363.

57
Pnin
, 174. Michael Maar discusses the speck of coal dust in terms of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” in
Speak, Nabokov
(19).

58
AFLP, 250.

59
Nabokov’s heart, Stephens suggested, was with the Russian people, not just the “liberal gentry” that had nourished him. Letter from Isabel Stephens to Barbara Breasted, February 25, 1971, 3, Faculty files, Wellesley.

60
On closer inspection, given Nabokov’s sensitivity to Jewish historical persecution, it might seem more surprising if he had
not
found sections of
Zhivago
disappointing. Pasternak, part Jewish by birth, wholly identified as a Russian and with the Russian Orthodox Church. In his most celebrated novel, he put words in the mouth of a Jewish character criticizing Jewish intellectual leaders’ thinking as “facile,” seeming to fall prey to the auto matic conflation of the Revolution and Jews that dominated worldwide. Pasternak mentions the suffering of the Jews multiple times, but permits a character an extended monologue to argue that for all the tragedies and persecution Jews have faced across the millennia, they had refused the miracle that Christ had delivered in their midst. They had not assimilated;
they had not converted; they had
chosen
their martyrdom. For all his own efforts to draw a hard line between the protagonist and the author
of Lolita
, it is hard to imagine Nabokov swallowing this passage without choking. Yet Pasternak was himself vilified—part of the campaign against him after
Zhivago
came out was framed in frankly anti-Semitic terms. For more on this issue with Pasternak, and a comparison with Solzhenitsyn and Dostoyevsky, see John Bayley’s introduction to the Everyman’s Library hardcover of
Doctor Zhivago
and Maxim D. Shrayer’s
Anthology of Jewish-Russian literature
.

61
telegraphed his acceptance
: Barnes,
Boris Pasternak: 1928–1960, A Literary Biography
, vol. 2, 342;
declining to attend
: Barnes, vol. 2, 346.

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