Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  Among the fairy-tale history and the Edgar Allan Poe references, Appel identified “the anti-Semitism theme” running through Lolita. It was to Appel that Nabokov mentioned Humbert’s pity for Lolita’s classmate, who was Jewish.14 Appel also pointed out ideas echoed or amplified in Lolita that were bound up with earlier or later works. Trying to explain the novel, he invoked lines from Nabokov’s 1923 version of the Wandering Jew story, but Appel assumed that the many people in Lolita who believe Humbert is Jewish were mistaken.15

  Nabokov seemed delighted to have Appel annotating his work—he referred to him with glee in a conversation with a visiting translator as “my pedant.… Every writer should have one.”16 Across their relationship, he repaid Appel’s diligent work with treasures, in the form of friendship and the interview in which Nabokov identified the location of Pale Fire’s crown jewels.

  In his hunt for an authorized biographer, Appel would have been a natural choice for Nabokov, but he did not read Russian. And so Nabokov turned to Andrew Field. Field had gotten his master’s at Columbia University and then had been part of a Harvard exchange program with Moscow University. During Nabokov’s final visit to America in 1964, Field had approached him to give him a book acquired during his stay in the Soviet Union—a collection of essays on criminal law written by Nabokov’s father.17

  A gift of something so rare could only have warmed Nabokov’s heart, and he reviewed carefully the draft manuscript of a book Field was preparing on Nabokov’s writing. Nabokov invited Field to do a bibliography of his work, and in 1968 Field asked if he might write an actual biography of Nabokov, a question that was answered in the affirmative.18

  In addition to being a known quantity, Field may have seemed appealing for other reasons as well. He had by then written about pre-Revolutionary Russian literature and Soviet fiction for several years. He also had an understanding of the circumstances of Soviet life that most young and literary Americans did not. Traveling from Moscow with his wife in 1964, Field had gotten into a disagreement with guards on the Soviet-Polish border. An ostensible problem with his visa escalated into confrontation, and he was arrested. The matter turned into an international incident—the State Department had called a press conference about the young American held captive by the Polish authorities. Field spent ten days in jail before being released on bond. Two weeks after his release, he stood trial on charges of assaulting an officer. Field was convicted and given an eight-month sentence, but the sentence was suspended. He had to wait two more weeks before being given permission to depart Poland. The compelling story made for articles day after day in the first weeks of February, totaling more than a half-dozen wire reports from the Associated Press and United Press International on his detention.19

  In subsequent years, Field’s experience gave him a kind of authority in writing about the work of some Soviet authors whose work had been carried to the West. When two dissident writers were put on trial in the Soviet Union in 1966, a trial transcript was smuggled out and published abroad.20 In statements under interrogation, one of the defendants had quoted Field’s statements about his work. Field himself in turn had been invited by The New York Times to review the published transcript of the dissidents’ trial. For these reasons and others, Nabokov may well have thought that he had found a kindred spirit, a hardworking scholar devoted to his work who understood something of the dangers of Soviet life, not to mention anxiety over identity papers and visas.

  Field’s visits to Montreux started even before he had taken on the role of authorized biographer. He talked to Nabokov’s friends and relations, asking questions in an attempt to address angles that Speak, Memory had not. Nabokov in conversation could be playfully revelatory, but at times he remained enigmatic.

  On the topic of the Holocaust, it was clear that Nabokov had more to say—despite the encroaching infirmities of age, he informed Field that he was in no way done with writing about what had happened. One day, he declared, he would even visit Germany—something he had said he would never do—in order to see for himself the places in which atrocities had been committed: “I will go to those German camps and look at those places and write a terrible indictment.” Field noted that he had never heard Nabokov speak so emotionally about anything.21

  With regard to Sergei, however, Nabokov did not venture very far from the material included in Speak, Memory, except to note how very fastidious his brother had been, and that he had been friends with Jean Cocteau, who had once called Sergei’s apartment with a warning that his line was tapped.22

  Nabokov had defied history, and when writing his own story he emphasized that narrative arc. Recounting his family’s shipboard flight from Russia in his autobiography, Nabokov had described the old-world gallantry of playing chess with his father as the Bolsheviks fired on the vessel. Nabokov had not mentioned the Cartier staff calling the police on him in Paris in 1919; he did not discuss the lice or the dog biscuits from the crossing that his sister Elena described to Field.

  Nabokov did not mind portraying himself in an occasionally unpleasant light, even as “precious”—but the identity of the victim, the displaced person, the man humiliated by history, was one he utterly rejected. Like his father writing a legal article on the topic of solitary confinement while actually serving a sentence in solitary, Nabokov’s persona was built around having triumphed despite history’s betrayals. He would never display his wounds publicly. Asked by Field about the details Elena had provided on their flight from Russia after the Revolution, Nabokov acknowledged that they were all probably true but “wince(d) at such obvious refugee clichés.”23

  In his first years of conversation with Field, Nabokov seems to have felt regret for savaging the work of a poet who later died in the Holocaust, and even about the brisk trade in insults that had inspired him decades before to turn the name of critic Georgy Adamovich into Sodomovich. Field would later note that Nabokov apparently felt better about it by 1973, when he insulted Adamovich again.24

  But Nabokov did not want his own style of criticism turned on him. Discussing with Field the deconstruction he had done on the reputation of revolutionary icon Chernyshevsky in The Gift, he realized the danger he was in, then paused and pointedly told Field that the biography they were working on “musn’t be written this way.”25

  But Field showed every sign of disregarding Nabokov’s injunction. He, too, seems to have been interested in looking beyond the legend crafted for history, humanizing the man, and not taking him at his word. The relationship that had developed between Field and the Nabokovs across several years began to cool. Nabokov claimed to Field that he was listening to nonsense from others; Field protested that he had talked, in many cases, to the people to whom Nabokov had sent him. Field occasionally sailed off into strange places—for instance, that V. D. Nabokov “might have been the illegitimate son of Tsar Alexander II.” Nabokov began to feel misunderstood by Field, who could also be wobbly on dates.26

  When Nabokov eventually reviewed Field’s manuscript, his disappointment was profound. The biographer he himself had chosen had not written the story he had hoped would be told. He began marking up the manuscript, correcting items, cutting quotes, asking for changes, and denying statements that had been made about him.

  As if in response, for his next novel, Look at the Harlequins!, Nabokov turned to yet another mad narrator and the conflicting biographies that can exist for one person. Not surprisingly, the narrator Nabokov chose was a man very much like him—Vadim Vadimovich, a Russian exile and writer.

  Fragments of the narrator’s life are fed back to him in strange form—others seem to know a good deal of information about someone they take him to be but whom he does not recognize as himself. But rather than making the supporting characters completely off-base in their descriptions about the narrator, Nabokov often gives them ammunition from his own life.

  Vadim Vadimovich sees himself as distinct from the person that the characters in the book believe him to be, but those characters, with
striking consistency, know our Nabokov. A bookstore owner recalls that the narrator attended operas with his brother and father, an illustrious member of the First Duma with an Anglophilic manner of speaking. But the mentally ill Vadim Vadimovich is spared the painful memories that Nabokov had about his own father—he maintains that the brother, the father, the opera, the Duma, none of it had anything to do with him. His father, he explains, died six months before his birth.27

  The novel touches on bits of Nabokov’s plots and themes, pointing to a scattershot series of possibilities readers had missed in previous books, and showing that earlier hints he had dropped still preoccupied him decades later. In a nod to Lolita, the Russian narrator is accused of betraying his genius and his country to write obscene stories about a little girl raped by a man who, he notes, tucked in among other things, may be “some Austrian Jew.”28 Twenty years on, Nabokov was still directing readers to details in Lolita that had not been explored.

  On the same page, readers learn from the same character that two other people in the book—a couple living in the Soviet Union—were separated for years when one of them was sentenced to labor camps and psychiatric treatment for his “mystical mania.”29 The lovers, still wildly infatuated with each other, are reunited in the end, when the patient is “cured” and released. No one recognized this brief subplot in a late and minor Nabokov novel as an echo of an earlier storyline and a way to untangle the shattered wonderworld that is Ada.

  The self-referential madness of the narrator crashes again and again against the rocks of Nabokov’s preoccupations from his own life and century. The gentle Jewish-Russian bookseller, with his tender memories of our Nabokov’s father, later dies trying to escape “in bloodstained underwear from the ‘experimental hospital’ of a Nazi concentration camp.”30 Near the close of the book, the narrator survives a clandestine re-entry into the Soviet Union, a quest another Nabokov character had embarked on four decades earlier.

  If Nabokov meant these roundabout references as clues to the things readers had not yet found in his work, why did he conceal material that was important to him so deeply in the first place? If he was bearing witness to the atrocities of his century, what could be gained from this stealth method?

  During his years as a professor, Nabokov himself had spoken on how to approach works of genius:

  Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain—the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed—then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.31

  In Nabokov’s universe, art which does not challenge, which does not draw blood, is not art. Out of the relics of tragedy, he created literature which calls on readers to examine not just history but also their own assumptions in their own place and time. But only by diving deep into the heart of his books, only by earning their secrets, is it possible to understand the most profound aspects of what he had expressed.

  Near the end, perhaps because he did not know if some connections would ever be made, Nabokov let some tricks tumble out of his sleeves. But still he waited for readers to meet him halfway—he did not strip his art entirely of its deceptions. He repudiated the story Field had created from his life, but he did not have long left to fashion whatever he had left to say himself. Look at the Harlequins! was the last novel he would finish before his death.

  3

  An endless authorial loop of reflection and masks is appropriate as a final novel for Nabokov’s last years. Field noted later that Nabokov seemed occasionally to get lost in the many versions of himself he had created for his life and his books, to a degree that he may have ended up unsure whether or not any given statement was made in earnest. This was particularly apparent in Nabokov’s tendency to describe Edmund Wilson as a very old friend, “in certain ways my closest.”32 He used the same line repeatedly in a stylized bit of theater after which he would eye the recipient of the comment knowingly.

  But for all the façade behind which he alternately hid and revealed himself, Nabokov seems to have missed the friendship with Wilson deeply. Years after his dream of a reunion, at a point when both friends had become very old men recording lists of illnesses in their journals, Nabokov wrote to Wilson after hearing he was sick. Saying that he had reread the whole of their long correspondence, Nabokov noted “the warmth of your many kindnesses, the various thrills of our friendship, the constant excitement of art and intellectual discovery.” He wanted his friend to know that he did not bear a grudge, and no longer held Wilson’s “incomprehensible incomprehension of Pushkin’s and Nabokov’s Onegin” against him.33

  Wilson responded immediately with a note saying he would correct his own Onegin mistakes and point out more of Nabokov’s errors in a forthcoming volume on his Russian articles. He related that he had, in fact, had a stroke and now had trouble using his right hand. Warning Nabokov of another volume coming out which would revisit his 1957 trip to the Nabokovs’ home in Ithaca, Wilson hoped it would not further crimp relations between them. Despite the warmth of Nabokov’s letter and Wilson’s polite reply, after mailing his letter back to Nabokov, Wilson shared his feelings about Nabokov in a letter to a friend, writing about how “it always makes (Nabokov) cheerful to think that his friends are in bad shape.”34

  Upstate, Wilson’s account of his trip to Ithaca, came out later in 1971. The book provided vivid details with much interpretation by Wilson. Nabokov, he suggested, had triumphed despite “miseries, horrors, and handicaps” that “would have degraded or broken many.” He described drinking and exchanging erotic and pornographic literature with Nabokov during his visit. He wrote that Véra seemed to begrudge attention to anyone but her husband, and suggested that Nabokov had suffered humiliation due to some unfathomable combination of not being accepted by the real Russian nobility and because of his father’s assassination. Wilson also observed, perhaps more acutely, that Nabokov “has his characters at his mercy and at the same time subjects them to torments and identifies himself with them.”35

  Infuriated by Wilson’s description of the visit, Nabokov wrote to the editor of The New York Times Book Review suggesting that if he had known Wilson’s thoughts at the time, he would have thrown him out of the house. The torments Wilson claimed Nabokov had suffered were “mostly figments of (Wilson’s) warped fancy.” Wilson had not lived Nabokov’s life (true enough) and had never read Nabokov’s autobiography (not true). Nabokov explained that Speak, Memory had detailed one long happy exile starting almost from birth—an interesting description of a book containing a line about “the things and beings” he loved most being “turned to ashes or shot through the heart.” In the interest of compassion, Nabokov noted that he would like to disregard statements made by an ailing “former friend,” but Wilson’s insults were a matter of “personal honor.”36

  Mutual friends once again took sides. Nabokov had his partisans, but so, too, did Wilson. Katharine White, Nabokov’s former editor at The New Yorker, wrote to Wilson wondering what had happened to the Nabokov they had once known. Tut-tutting the idea of Nabokov’s honor being sullied, she described her sadness at seeing “how an overwhelming ego like his and world-wide success can change a man’s personality so shockingly.”37

  The following spring Nabokov wrote again to the editor of the Book Review commenting on the feud, but Wilson had fallen into a precipitous decline. Early in May he had another stroke, and made his way back to his childhood home, where the Nabokovs had visited him in 1955. In his last days he sneaked off to a theater to watch The Godfather. With an oxygen tank and a phone for emergencies, he stayed focused on his next projects—more of his diaries awaiting publication, planned
revised editions, and new writing.38 Sitting in his pajamas with his back to the corner and a view through the sheer curtains, he worked with his papers and pills laid out on a long table, his wispy hair splayed into a crown of feathers. By mid-June, he was dead.

  But Wilson was not through with Nabokov. In A Window on Russia, which came out that fall, Wilson took on the writings of Vladimir Nabokov as a whole for the first time. There is not much to the entry in terms of insight. He finds Bend Sinister sadomasochistic and admits his inability to finish Ada, but interestingly contrasts “one of Solzhenitsyn’s camps from which there can be no escape” with Nabokov allowing a character to escape prison and death.39

  In another posthumous book, the revised edition of To the Finland Station published that August, Wilson finally gave ground on the history that had been the first bone of contention with Nabokov. “I have … been charged with having given a much too amiable picture of Lenin,” he says in the new introduction, “and I believe that this criticism has been made not without some justification.”40 He makes some excuses as to why the original version of the book had unfolded as it had, but then proceeds to acknowledge in a few pages the much more complicated character of Lenin.

  It was not to Nabokov’s advantage to spar with Wilson’s ghost. A lukewarm survey of Nabokov’s writing could not touch him; he had trumped Wilson in the literary pantheon. But two years later, discussing a collaborative plan to publish the Wilson-Nabokov letters, he wrote Elena Wilson saying, “I need not tell you what agony it was rereading the exchanges belonging to the early radiant era of our correspondence.”41

  Despite their many differences, the two men had not always disagreed. Even in their final private exchange, they had come to consensus on the matter of a celebrated author whom both found personally remarkable but uninspiring from a literary standpoint: Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In his last letter addressed to the Montreux Palace, Wilson wrote that perhaps these shortcomings were not surprising: “after all he has nothing to tell but his story of illness and imprisonment.”42