Stalking Nabokov (16 page)

In the fall of 1959, Nabokov left with his wife for what they thought would be a short visit to Europe, primarily to be nearer their son, Dmitri, who was training as an opera singer in Milan. As it happened, apart from seven unexpected months in Hollywood in 1960 to write the
Lolita
screenplay and, of course, to re-sample Californian butterflies, they would never again live in the United States. After two decades away, Nabokov found Europe unappealing and overrun with cars, but once he had his first successful butterfly hunting there (he spent four hours chasing
Callophrys avis
Chapman in the south of France on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History), and especially once he had his first taste of collecting in the High Alps in 1962, he settled comfortably back into a part of the world that he had never felt to be a proper home during the émigré years, when he could so rarely afford to pursue his passion.

In early 1948, just as he was putting the last touches to his longest lepidopterological monograph, Nabokov had suggested to Cyril dos Passos and Paul Grey that the three of them write a guide to the butterflies of North America. With his teaching at Cornell about to start and the
Onegin
project it spawned not far off, Nabokov would in fact have almost no time to pursue Lepidoptera research for the next fifteen years, let alone something on this scale. But in the early 1960s, after finishing
Pale Fire
, Nabokov found that his next novel—still tentatively entitled
The Texture of Time
and a long way from the
Ada
it would become—posed problems he could not yet solve. With no financial worries, no teaching duties, and for once no pressure from his muse, he was free to think of other projects.

His English publisher, George Weidenfeld, whose publishing firm had been virtually
made
by the staggering success of
Lolita
, agreed at the end of 1962 to publish his complete catalogue of the
Butterflies of Europe
, covering all species and significant subspecies. From late 1963 through to late 1964, Nabokov worked hard on what would have been his lepidopterological magnum opus. Like
Eugene Onegin
, it continued to expand as he worked on it, to the point where Weidenfeld became daunted by its size and could not guarantee publication even if it became a multinational, multilingual venture. Unable to settle to a new novel while the uncertainty persisted, Nabokov regretfully called off the project late in 1965. Had he been able to complete it, it would have been a work of natural history without parallel in the way it fused art and science in both its layout and its text. Left unfinished, and now obsolete, it can never be published in the form Nabokov envisaged, but his plans and the samples of the text included in
Nabokov’s Butterflies
offer some hint of its magic.

As the
Butterflies of Europe
moved back,
Ada
could advance. A first flash of inspiration in December 1965, apparently unconnected to the
Texture of Time
project, and another in February 1966, which established the connection, soon had Nabokov writing at a rapid rate. Occupying a place within his English works like that of
The Gift
within his Russian oeuvre,
Ada
was long in gestation, large in scale, and voracious in curiosity, except that this time, everything was lighter, more playful, more disruptive. In
The Gift
Nabokov represented his sense of dislocation between Russia and Berlin almost literally, with meticulous realism; in
Ada
the dislocation of two worlds, Europe and America, becomes the disjunction between Terra and Antiterra, marked by disconcertingly or delightfully detailed distortions of our everyday world. As if he had reflected in the crazy mirror of the imagination his short-lived hopes of coauthoring a
Butterflies of North America
and his recent plans for the
Butterflies of Europe
, Nabokov places Ada on an Old World estate somewhere in New England and then makes her a precocious naturalist, an ardent lepidopterist, whose world of Antiterra he stocks with invented but possible species belonging to real genera.

By the mid-1960s, Nabokov had begun to contemplate another project,
Butterflies in Art
. Ever since 1942, when Florence Read, president of Spelman College in Atlanta, had given him a reproduction of a Theban wall fresco in honor of his love of butterflies, he had considered one day using the representation of butterflies in art to test whether evolutionary changes had been recorded within the span of human history. In his travels around Italy and its museums in the early 1960s, the idea had returned, and in 1965 he began a more systematic search. Although he deeply cherished as an ideal the fusing of art and science, this project, too, failed to materialize, even if he never quite abandoned it. But it, too, permeated
Ada
, where Nabokov straddles the boundaries of art and life, art and nature, by making Ada a flower painter and Lucette a student of art history who stumbles on some of her own creator’s discoveries about butterflies in art.

In the 1970s, and in his own seventies, Nabokov still collected butterflies every summer, still hoped to complete
Butterflies in Art
, and still dreamed of writing a
Speak on, Memory
or
Speak, America
, which would devote a chapter to his researches at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. Instead of continuing his autobiography, however, he ended his career with a savagely inverted fictional autobiography,
Look at the Harlequins!
, whose hero, a novelist called Vadim Vadymich, is a reduced shadow of himself:

I spent what remained of the summer exploring the incredibly lyrical Rocky Mountain states, getting drunk on whiffs of Oriental Russia in the sagebrush zone and on the Northern Russian fragrances so faithfully reproduced above timberline by certain small bogs along trickles of sky between the snowbank and the orchid. And yet—was that all? What form of mysterious pursuit caused me to get my feet wet like a child, to pant up a talus, to stare every dandelion in the face, to start at every colored mote passing just beyond my field of vision? What was the dream sensation of having come empty-handed—without what? A gun? A wand?

(
LATH
155–56)

In 1975, at seventy-six, he was still working assiduously, starting at six o’clock every morning, to revamp the French translation of
Ada
, still chasing butterflies in the Alps. That summer, sapped of strength by the rush to transpose
Ada
, he had a serious fall down a steep slope at Davos. His butterfly net slipped still further, lodging on the branch of a fir, as he said, “like Ovid’s lyre” (
SL
552).

That image seems a perfect emblem of the link between literature and Lepidoptera that lasted to the end. For after this fall, Nabokov was never the same. He spent much of the next two years in hospital, in the summer of 1976 reading with delight, when his delirium lifted, the new Doubleday
Butterflies of North America
and mentally rereading, as it were, the still unwritten text of his own next novel,
The Original of Laura
. But a year later, as another summer approached and he sank toward his death,
Laura
remained largely unwritten, and in his last recorded words, he told his son tearfully that he knew “a certain butterfly was already on the wing; and his eyes told me he no longer hoped that he would live to pursue it again.”
⁹

How fitting, then, that Dmitri Nabokov should have compensated for these twin plans his father’s death cut short by translating from Russian into English his father’s most intense amalgam of literature and Lepidoptera, his afterword to
The Gift
, itself cut short by his switch from Russian to English and from Europe to America at the midpoint of his life.

I have retold Nabokov’s life as a dance in which science suavely partners art. But it would be perfectly possible to read a thousand pages of his best fiction—
The Defense
,
Invitation to a Beheading
,
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
,
Lolita
without its afterword,
Pale Fire
, and
Transparent Things—
and another five hundred pages of his short stories and not even realize he was a lepidopterist. What, then, can his passion for butterflies explain in his art? How did it reflect or affect his mind, his thinking, his writing?

From as far back as we can see, Nabokov had a love of both detail and design, of precise and unpredictable particulars and intricate, often concealed patterns. Aware of how little most people know about nature, of how much effort it took to master all he had learned about the butterflies of the world, and of how much more there always was to discover even about the Blues he specialized in, he disliked the impulse to impose easy meaning—a generalization, an allegorization, a handy quick-stick label—on a complex and recalcitrant reality. “As an artist and a scholar,” he once proclaimed, “I prefer the specific detail to the generalization, images to ideas, obscure facts to clear symbols, and the discovered wild fruit to the synthetic jam” (
SO
7).
¹⁰

But if he rejected anything that quashed the live independence of things, he nevertheless, like any scientist, delighted in the patterns that ordered their relationship. Pattern has its purely aesthetic side, of course, and Nabokov is celebrated for his mastery of phonic and fictive design. But understanding pattern also allows us some degree of control over the unruliness of life, and in Nabokov that urge to control was powerfully developed: witness his refusal to submit to interviews unless he could have questions in advance, write out his answers, and check the final text; his insistence that his characters were his “galley slaves” (
SO
95); his famous comparison of the relationship between author and reader to that between chess problemist and problem solver (
SM
290); and his command of form at all levels, from phrase to finished fiction. Not for him the world as a big, booming, buzzing confusion. The world is there to be teased out by the inquiring mind, as in his fiction it is there to be shaped by the imaginative one.

Nabokov nevertheless had a strong sense of the limits of human knowledge: He thought that no matter how much we can find out, there is always more behind things—beyond our human sense of space and time, beyond the limits of personality and mortality, beyond our ignorance of ultimate origins and ends—that consciousness as we know it seems unable to penetrate. He had a lifelong urge to probe “the beyond,” which Véra Nabokov has gone so far as to call—a slight overstatement in my judgment—“the main theme” of his work.
¹¹
This impulse may have derived from his mother’s unconventional religious sense, even before he could be aware of the antipositivism in the air in the Europe and especially in the Russia of his childhood (Bergson, Blok, Bely). But his passion for butterflies attests to and surely helped develop his respect for
this
world, no matter how strong his curiosity about what might lie beyond it. As he wrote rather gnomically in his last novel: “
This
was the simple solution, that the brook and the boughs and the beauty of the Beyond all began with the initial of Being” (
LATH
16).

His love of Lepidoptera drew upon and sharpened further his love of the particular and the habits of detailed observation that gave him such fictional command over the physical world—biologically (birds, flowers, trees), geographically (localities, landscapes, ecologies), socially (manorial Russia, boardinghouse Berlin, motel America), and bodily (gesture, anatomy, sensation). He thought that only the ridiculously unobservant could be pessimists in a world as full of surprising specificity as ours, and he arranged his own art accordingly.

Still deeper than the pleasures of immediate observation were the delights of discovery. As a child exploring on his own his parents’ butterfly books, he preferred the small type to the main text, the obscure to the obvious, the thrill of finding for himself what was not common knowledge. That impulse became a positive addiction when he peered into the microscope in Harvard’s laboratories in the 1940s or prowled the stacks of its libraries while compiling his
Onegin
commentary in the 1950s. His fiction had always invited readers to discover things for themselves, but from the time he began
Bend Sinister
in 1941, he encouraged his readers more and more to become researchers in increasingly intricate labyrinths of internal and external references and relationships.

Nabokov’s science gave him a sense of the endless elusiveness of reality that should not be confused with modern or postmodern epistemological nihilism. Dissecting and deciphering the genitalic structure of lycaenids, or counting scale rows on their wings, he realized that the further we inquire, the more we can discover, yet the more we find that we do not know, not because truth is an illusion or a matter of mere convention but because the world is infinitely detailed, complex and deceptive, “an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms” (
SO
11).