Nabokov in America: On the Road to “Lolita”

Omnia Nabokova in tres partes divisa est.

There were three distinct, fertile periods of creative endeavor in Vladimir Nabokov’s storied life. When the forty-year-old novelist arrived in the United States in 1940, he had a distinguished publishing career behind him in Europe but was largely unknown to American readers. Born in pre-Revolutionary St. Petersburg, Nabokov had become the best-known writer of the Russian emigration, which flocked to cities like Paris and Berlin after the Bolshevik coup of 1917. He realized that this was a modest accomplishment, and even before he brought his family to America, he began writing in English. His Anglophile father had read to him in English, the language of his beloved Dickens, before he taught Vladimir Russian.

Nabokov spent the last third of his life in his splendid, self-imposed isolation at the Montreux Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland. Novelist Robert Roper’s new book, Nabokov in America, narrates the second and, Roper argues, happiest and most productive, period of the novelist’s life, the twenty years in America, his adopted home. “He did love America,” Roper writes. “America was a place in which to breathe more easily, but . . . he did not become complacent artistically.”

“There is beauty and magic all over Nabokov’s body of work,” Roper concludes, “but the claim to greatness rests most solidly on the American books.”

He’s right. The American books, which represent less than half of Nabokov’s total output, would be the envy of any successful writer. They include Bend Sinister; the critical study Nikolai Gogol; the 1,895-page work of lunatic genius, Eugene Onegin, a translation and endless commentary; as well as Pnin. Nabokov wrote his two greatest books in America: Speak, Memory (1951) and Lolita (1958).

Roper, who lives in California, has retraced almost all of Nabokov’s legendary motel-hopping vacations in the West and Southwest, always chasing his grand passion — butterflies. Roper notes that Nabokov had twice before broached the subject of man-girl love, in his Russian novel The Gift, and in the 1939 novella “The Enchanter.” But Lolita, he argues, was an only-in-America production:

These years of Lolita were also the years of some of his most extensive, most joyous wanderings in the West. . . . The American context was determinative. It fed meaning and amplitude into fancy’s brew. The dead scrap he had brought from Europe lived on, revived copiously, in America.

Just as important, Roper thinks Nabokov discovered Humbert Humbert in America, in the person of Henry Lanz, a language professor and chess player whom Nabokov met during a sojourn at Stanford. Lanz was a man of many perversions who confided to his chess partner that he was also a “fountainist” who liked to watch little girls urinate. Nabokov denied that Lanz was Humbert, but then again, Nabokov denied all kinds of things. He was the man who famously called “reality” “one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes.”

Roper does not genuflect before the Nabokov mystique, which has dulled the judgment of many critics. “Lolita continues to work like an Oklahoma tornado,” he writes, but he rightly observes that many other works lack the kinetic power of that manic bestseller. “Some of us can make it through life without rereading Ada,” he says, adding that “maybe Look at the Harlequins, Transparent Things . . . are less than compelling.” They are.

Roper calls Dmitri Nabokov, Véra and Vladimir’s only child, their “American son,” a very astute observation. Born in France, Dmitri became thoroughly Americanized at a string of New England private schools and eventually at Harvard. Dmitri served in the army and in later life claimed he had been working for the CIA, in effect out-Americaning the Americans.

“Like real Americans,” Roper writes, the Nabokovs denominated their life stages by the cars they owned: an Oldsmobile, a 1957 Buick, a Model A Ford, and so on. But in the end, Roper thinks the Nabokovs sated themselves on the Land of the Free. They loved America, but simultaneously “they were also appalled” — by the license of their American son’s behavior and by the wild student romps of the 1960s, which horrified both Véra and Vladimir.

Nabokov owed a great deal to America, but given the choice, he chose to live closer to his son, who had settled in Europe, and closer to Russia, which he hoped might abandon Soviet power in his lifetime. He returned to America only twice after 1959; once to attend the film premiere of Lolita and once to promote his Onegin translation.

During that second visit, he made a triumphal return appearance at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. Nabokov began his talk by reading a short poem, “which I composed in Wyoming, one of my favorites states” —  he paused for effect  — “of existence.”