April in Arizona: Nabokov’s West
Robert Roper, Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita
Bloomsbury, 368pp, £20.00, ISBN 9780802743633
reviewed by Elsa Court
Vladimir Nabokov enjoyed offering lists of his own personal tastes and dislikes, in fiction, in interviews, and even in private. Admittedly, this habit tested the patience of those who knew him personally, but while the list of his most hated things is entertaining, eclectic and seemingly incidental (‘jazz, [bullfighting], progressive schools, music in supermarkets, swimming pools, brutes, bores’), his personal passions are presented as fewer, more carefully elected and often interconnected. From the moment he moved to the United States in 1940, Nabokov’s interest in his American environment can be linked to the practice of the two most significant passions in his life: the study of butterflies and the writing of literature. His exploration of the American landscape, both physically and culturally, was conducive to the pursuit of these great passions during some of the most fruitful years of his career. His entomological studies required or encouraged him to take long road trips in America during the summers of his teaching years at Wellesley College and Cornell. Robert Roper’s new biography, Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita, suggests that Nabokov applied the same acute sensitivity to the American land as he did to the Lepidoptera he studied there. The habit of systematic observation, an additional by-product of these trips, can be felt in his portrayal of mid-century America in fiction. This is why Lolita (1955) remains famous today, not only as a lurid psychological thriller but as a snapshot of postwar America with an authentic flavour.
Roper’s foray into Nabokov’s personal correspondence often points to examples in which the author personally identifies with his ‘adopted country.’ As with the lists of execrated items, the question at hand appears to be one of affirmative self-definition to overcome the experience of exile. Nabokov once quipped, ‘I am as American as April in Arizona.’ The phrase yields, like an aphorism, to the superfluous pleasure of assonance, but it is not superficial. April was the month of Nabokov’s birth, and Arizona one of the sites of his entomological discoveries. America was part of his personal mythology. In the afterword to Lolita, he cites the town of Portal, Arizona, as one of his summer ‘headquarters,’ a recurrent stop along his yearly butterfly-hunting expeditions. It was there that, after outdoor activities, ‘in the evenings or on cloudy days,’ the writing of his best novel in English so far would be ‘energetically resumed.’
In this passage, Nabokov imagines that the ‘locality labels’ pinned under his collection of American butterflies, ‘specimens deposited at scientific institutions, such as the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard or the Cornell University collection’ would one day become ‘a boon to some twenty-first-century scholar with a taste for recondite biography.’ It is a shame that Roper does not pick up on this prediction himself. Using Nabokov’s butterfly research and his diary entries as primary tools, he may appear to be this 21st-century biographer imagined by Nabokov, tracing the summer ritual of the journey west with precision, emphasising the parallel between entomological discovery and peripheral cultural evaluation. He digs into hitherto overlooked travel notes, and goes on location, embracing, after Nabokov, the trivia collected en route. Roper admits, however, that visiting Nabokov’s motels did not add much to his investigation and that revisiting the novels and the existing scholarly research proved more revealing to his bio-geography of Nabokov’s American period. Nevertheless, photographs of visited motels, cabins and state park vistas are provided, as well as postcard illustrations and a letter to Edmund Wilson written on Colorado Mountain Lodge stationary, giving a flavour of reality to a cross-country road trip fictionalised in Lolita. A map of what Nabokov and his wife Véra would affectionately call ‘their’ west adorns the inside covers of the book like a treasure map, a cropped outline of the United States’ territory stretching from Montana to California, marked with motels and butterflies.
Roper makes it apparent that Nabokov’s letters and diaries, as well as the American novels which frequently echo their material, descend from a tradition of expedition writings which dates back to Tocqueville, Audubon, Lewis and Clark. When it comes to authors of American fiction, the comparison is more problematic. Nabokov didn’t immediately show signs of a keen interest in American literature. While in America, DH Lawrence wrote and published Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), a collection of essays focusing on the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe, amongst others. The first book that Nabokov wrote upon arriving was an eccentric literary biography of Nikolai Gogol, and by the 1950s he was concentrating on a translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Living in America, he did not revise his list of favourite authors (Joyce, Kafka, Tosltoy, Flaubert, Shakespeare) and he would only admit to being enthusiastic about Edmund White, JD Salinger and John Updike towards the end of his life. As a newcomer to America, his passing attention towards classic and modern American writers was energetically dismissive, suggesting, in Roper’s terms, ‘a man in an overgrown field slashing this way and that, willing even to burn it down to clear his path.’
The second volume of Nabokov’s most comprehensive biography to date, Brian Boyd’s The American Years (1991), avoids comparing Nabokov with writers he did not personally claim to care for. Roper’s book is innovative in that it offers to fill in the gaps within the ‘dotted line’ of Nabokov’s reluctant interest in American literature, alluding throughout the book to thematic connections linking his novels to great American precursors. Lolita is indebted, for instance, at least to some symbolic measure, to early captive narratives, in which the white captives are often female. Humbert embraces the whole American continent in ‘Whitmanesque’ fashion, while his spiritual epiphany, at the end of the book, brings him close to Emerson’s reading of natural phenomena as ‘symbols of spiritual facts.’ Moby-Dick (1851) shares with Lolita ‘an immense anxiety about the world,’ and both novels record a failure to apply rhetoric to make sense of the surrounding order. The Scarlet Letter (1850) also seems to be echoed somehow in Nabokov’s most widely read novel in that it also focuses on a ‘lustrous, capricious child’ who is key to the redemption at the heart of the narrative.
Nabokov’s interest in Salinger offers an interesting case in that the former’s ascension to recognition, as Roper points out, paralleled the latter’s. Whilst critics have thus far failed to detect proof of Salinger’s influence on Nabokov in Lolita, for instance, Roper compares both authors’ fascination with youth and innocence and suggests that a ‘moral inversion’ of a passage in Catcher in the Rye (1951) is to be found in the bedroom scene in Lolita at the Enchanted Hunters. This far-fetched interpretation would suggest that Nabokov read Salinger or ‘in some way imbibed his novel’s vapors,’ which is the argument Roper wants to make. Yet there is little doubt that Nabokov read Salinger. Written proof lies, if not in this disputable ‘inversion,’ in Nabokov’s copy of an anthology of New Yorker short stories from 1940-1950. The table of contents shows alphabetical grades, written in pencil by Nabokov in front of each writer’s name. The only two stories to have been attributed an ‘A+’ were Salinger’s ‘Perfect Day for Bananafish’ and Nabokov’s own story, ‘Colette.’ But instead of picking up on such amusing material, Roper chooses to rely on close reading and intuition, speaking, not unconvincingly, about a ‘zeitgeist of the time.’
Roper’s literary connections to Nabokov may appear adventurous and like the thematic echoes of The Catcher in the Rye in Lolita, they are mostly speculative. This does not mean that they are not informative. After all, Roper states in the introduction that his project aims to claim Nabokov back from a specialised scholarship that gets slightly hackneyed for continually ‘fossicking’ hidden references.
While suppositions as to the terra incognita of Nabokov’s secret literary influences alone would hardly be satisfying, Roper maintains a strong grip on the author’s dealings with the material world during an American period of 20 years. Comparing his entomological studies with the copious notes he took on the slang, climate and social geography of the United States, Roper makes the case for the positive evolution of Nabokov’s cognitive receptiveness in his American phase. America, he writes, made Nabokov ‘more scientist, less flaneur.’ Compared to him, émigré contemporaries like Thomas Mann or Berthold Brecht lived in enclaves, isolated among Americans, and lingered at the surface of a fantasised America about which they never wrote. Nabokov immersed himself in ‘real’ America, which also meant making influential friends. It was partly as a result of these friendships that he was able to reach out to what would have been any émigré author’s dream, what Roper calls America’s ‘mythical’ mass audience.
Roper’s foray into Nabokov’s personal correspondence often points to examples in which the author personally identifies with his ‘adopted country.’ As with the lists of execrated items, the question at hand appears to be one of affirmative self-definition to overcome the experience of exile. Nabokov once quipped, ‘I am as American as April in Arizona.’ The phrase yields, like an aphorism, to the superfluous pleasure of assonance, but it is not superficial. April was the month of Nabokov’s birth, and Arizona one of the sites of his entomological discoveries. America was part of his personal mythology. In the afterword to Lolita, he cites the town of Portal, Arizona, as one of his summer ‘headquarters,’ a recurrent stop along his yearly butterfly-hunting expeditions. It was there that, after outdoor activities, ‘in the evenings or on cloudy days,’ the writing of his best novel in English so far would be ‘energetically resumed.’
In this passage, Nabokov imagines that the ‘locality labels’ pinned under his collection of American butterflies, ‘specimens deposited at scientific institutions, such as the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard or the Cornell University collection’ would one day become ‘a boon to some twenty-first-century scholar with a taste for recondite biography.’ It is a shame that Roper does not pick up on this prediction himself. Using Nabokov’s butterfly research and his diary entries as primary tools, he may appear to be this 21st-century biographer imagined by Nabokov, tracing the summer ritual of the journey west with precision, emphasising the parallel between entomological discovery and peripheral cultural evaluation. He digs into hitherto overlooked travel notes, and goes on location, embracing, after Nabokov, the trivia collected en route. Roper admits, however, that visiting Nabokov’s motels did not add much to his investigation and that revisiting the novels and the existing scholarly research proved more revealing to his bio-geography of Nabokov’s American period. Nevertheless, photographs of visited motels, cabins and state park vistas are provided, as well as postcard illustrations and a letter to Edmund Wilson written on Colorado Mountain Lodge stationary, giving a flavour of reality to a cross-country road trip fictionalised in Lolita. A map of what Nabokov and his wife Véra would affectionately call ‘their’ west adorns the inside covers of the book like a treasure map, a cropped outline of the United States’ territory stretching from Montana to California, marked with motels and butterflies.
Roper makes it apparent that Nabokov’s letters and diaries, as well as the American novels which frequently echo their material, descend from a tradition of expedition writings which dates back to Tocqueville, Audubon, Lewis and Clark. When it comes to authors of American fiction, the comparison is more problematic. Nabokov didn’t immediately show signs of a keen interest in American literature. While in America, DH Lawrence wrote and published Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), a collection of essays focusing on the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe, amongst others. The first book that Nabokov wrote upon arriving was an eccentric literary biography of Nikolai Gogol, and by the 1950s he was concentrating on a translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Living in America, he did not revise his list of favourite authors (Joyce, Kafka, Tosltoy, Flaubert, Shakespeare) and he would only admit to being enthusiastic about Edmund White, JD Salinger and John Updike towards the end of his life. As a newcomer to America, his passing attention towards classic and modern American writers was energetically dismissive, suggesting, in Roper’s terms, ‘a man in an overgrown field slashing this way and that, willing even to burn it down to clear his path.’
The second volume of Nabokov’s most comprehensive biography to date, Brian Boyd’s The American Years (1991), avoids comparing Nabokov with writers he did not personally claim to care for. Roper’s book is innovative in that it offers to fill in the gaps within the ‘dotted line’ of Nabokov’s reluctant interest in American literature, alluding throughout the book to thematic connections linking his novels to great American precursors. Lolita is indebted, for instance, at least to some symbolic measure, to early captive narratives, in which the white captives are often female. Humbert embraces the whole American continent in ‘Whitmanesque’ fashion, while his spiritual epiphany, at the end of the book, brings him close to Emerson’s reading of natural phenomena as ‘symbols of spiritual facts.’ Moby-Dick (1851) shares with Lolita ‘an immense anxiety about the world,’ and both novels record a failure to apply rhetoric to make sense of the surrounding order. The Scarlet Letter (1850) also seems to be echoed somehow in Nabokov’s most widely read novel in that it also focuses on a ‘lustrous, capricious child’ who is key to the redemption at the heart of the narrative.
Nabokov’s interest in Salinger offers an interesting case in that the former’s ascension to recognition, as Roper points out, paralleled the latter’s. Whilst critics have thus far failed to detect proof of Salinger’s influence on Nabokov in Lolita, for instance, Roper compares both authors’ fascination with youth and innocence and suggests that a ‘moral inversion’ of a passage in Catcher in the Rye (1951) is to be found in the bedroom scene in Lolita at the Enchanted Hunters. This far-fetched interpretation would suggest that Nabokov read Salinger or ‘in some way imbibed his novel’s vapors,’ which is the argument Roper wants to make. Yet there is little doubt that Nabokov read Salinger. Written proof lies, if not in this disputable ‘inversion,’ in Nabokov’s copy of an anthology of New Yorker short stories from 1940-1950. The table of contents shows alphabetical grades, written in pencil by Nabokov in front of each writer’s name. The only two stories to have been attributed an ‘A+’ were Salinger’s ‘Perfect Day for Bananafish’ and Nabokov’s own story, ‘Colette.’ But instead of picking up on such amusing material, Roper chooses to rely on close reading and intuition, speaking, not unconvincingly, about a ‘zeitgeist of the time.’
Roper’s literary connections to Nabokov may appear adventurous and like the thematic echoes of The Catcher in the Rye in Lolita, they are mostly speculative. This does not mean that they are not informative. After all, Roper states in the introduction that his project aims to claim Nabokov back from a specialised scholarship that gets slightly hackneyed for continually ‘fossicking’ hidden references.
While suppositions as to the terra incognita of Nabokov’s secret literary influences alone would hardly be satisfying, Roper maintains a strong grip on the author’s dealings with the material world during an American period of 20 years. Comparing his entomological studies with the copious notes he took on the slang, climate and social geography of the United States, Roper makes the case for the positive evolution of Nabokov’s cognitive receptiveness in his American phase. America, he writes, made Nabokov ‘more scientist, less flaneur.’ Compared to him, émigré contemporaries like Thomas Mann or Berthold Brecht lived in enclaves, isolated among Americans, and lingered at the surface of a fantasised America about which they never wrote. Nabokov immersed himself in ‘real’ America, which also meant making influential friends. It was partly as a result of these friendships that he was able to reach out to what would have been any émigré author’s dream, what Roper calls America’s ‘mythical’ mass audience.