Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (40 page)

With insult added to injury, Nabokov mocked Edmund Wilson’s review with vehement contrarianism: Wilson had it backward—it was not a bad translation of a good book but a good translation of a bad book. Moreover, Wilson’s essay was fat with “symbolicosocial criticism and phoney erudition.”
⁴⁵
Furious with his friend, Nabokov told Putnam’s never to ask Wilson to endorse any of his books again.

The growing distance from Wilson was as much about
Lolita
as
Zhivago
. Nabokov had insisted to Wilson that his
Lolita
was a deeply moral work, but his friend had dismissed it, had not even finished it, despite Nabokov’s entreaties, which were as close, perhaps, as the proud Nabokov would ever come to pleading with Wilson.

If Nabokov had really expected Wilson to revisit his saga of Humbert and
Lolita
with a careful critic’s eye and discern something others had missed, he was disappointed. Any subtleties of Humbert’s muddled history were lost in a haze of revulsion: “Nasty subjects may make fine books,” wrote Wilson, “but I don’t feel you have got away with this.”
⁴⁶

As reader after reader bought the book, Nabokov’s Humbert trudged on, writing a literary testament to his personal agony and ecstasy. Lolita suffered his attentions, escaped, and died millions of times across the years in dozens of languages. Folded into the background was Humbert bearing witness to anti-Semitic humiliations of postwar America: Charlotte’s lust for a German refugee maid, the motel exclusions, the
kike
slurs, the small-town anxiety about being overrun by Jews. As Lolita crosses the country with her middle-aged captor, Nabokov traces a shadow map with the coordinates of exclusion and bigotry. He had seen it on three continents, and knew where it could lead.

Humbert confesses early in
Lolita
that he comes from a racial mix, with branches of his family tree winding their way through France,
Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and England. With his “Austrian tailor’s” fingertips, he ticks off three generations of family occupations on his father’s side: wine, jewels, and silk. The choices seem unlikely to be accidental; behind each trade stretches a long history of legal precedents and a people told where to live, kept apart, their prospects restricted by rules.
⁴⁷
And if the suspicions of the night clerk at The Enchanted Hunters are right, Humbert carries his family’s migration to a new level in a new world—America.

If Humbert
is
Jewish, he is a Wandering few for the post-Holocaust era. But in a post-Holocaust world, it may not be possible to believe in anything. Humbert notes that some sins are too extraordinary to be forgiven, yet an existence in which they do not require forgiveness seems a travesty.
⁴⁸

Nabokov once wrote that Humbert’s crimes were enough to damn him to eternity in hell.
⁴⁹
And a Jewish Humbert would appear to defy Nabokov’s monumental sympathy for Jewish suffering—in the wake of the Holocaust, the creation of a pedophile Jew seems monstrous.

Nabokov was toying with something disturbing, but the concept was not born with
Lolita
. The roots of “The Enchanter,” that rough draft of
Lolita
written in wartime France, show Nabokov already working on elements he would later polish. His original pedophile, a Central European jeweler and “traveler” in France, also initially has difficulties getting a hotel room and is suspected for the wrong reasons by the desk clerk who finally checks him in.

Nabokov is fond of trumping what we think we know about a character with new information that rattles our expectations. At one point in
Lolita
, Humbert notes that we assume the kind of stability in life that we get in fictional characters. King Lear will never again join his three daughters in a jolly toast. Madame Bovary will never revive from the arsenic she took.
⁵⁰
But Nabokov is pointing to the fact that Humbert is wrong; he has misjudged a character in the book who has just surprised him. But Nabokov, too, has made a character capable of surprising the reader in a similar way. Nabokov
had learned how to tuck history into the seams of his story in such a way that it becomes visible only on a return trip. The lost, recovered history turns the original tale inside out, offering another narrative. And so Humbert first tells us a story about Lolita, and then tells us a story about ourselves.

As a young man in 1923, Nabokov had started off with
Agasfer
, a hackneyed version of the Wandering Jew, a character who was completely corrupt—a revolutionary, perverse, traitor seeking absolution from an unforgivable sin that had launched his grief and exile. Nabokov would utterly reject that early, inherited character, and after having fallen prey in his youth to ugly stereotypes of the tale, he would reverse the stain of the historical legend by transforming the Wandering Jew into a kind of magical sidekick in the form of the beatific, generous Silbermann in
Sebastian Knight
and, to a lesser degree, the equally munificent parents in “Signs and Symbols.”

Nabokov had learned to craft characters that were ever more complex, and he had returned again and again to the idea of the Wandering Jew.
⁵¹
But after more than a decade of presenting holy Jewish characters to counter the venom of the Third Reich, Nabokov finally heeded his own condemnation of Dostoyevsky’s faith in suffering and humiliation as the path to moral transcendence. Suffering and humiliation, he knew, were just as likely to do irreversible damage.
⁵²

Creating a war refugee fleeing Europe, Nabokov took up the Wandering Jew story in its entirety.
⁵³
Drawing on the myths that had been used as political tools across the centuries, as well as the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
and hateful Nazi propaganda that further amplified and distorted the stereotype, Nabokov also included elements of the well-meant melodrama of 1920s Broadway that had tried to grapple with the Wandering Jew as a social commentator. Pulling it all together to create Humbert, Nabokov spots the reader almost every cliché of the legend: revolutionary politics, an easy income, cosmopolitan intellectualism, sexual perversion, and a truly monstrous sin—in Nabokov’s rendering, not blasphemy against Christ but the relentless, ongoing molestation of a child.

And still Humbert is human—the very thing the Nazi hatemonger Julius Streicher claimed the Jews were not during his Wandering Jew exhibition. What is more, Humbert Humbert can see American anti-Semitic hypocrisy clearly, while those around him (including, no doubt, many of Nabokov’s readers of the 1950s and 1960s) remain blind. Just as the Wandering Jew had done with his Inquisitors in the final scenes of the British productions from Nabokov’s Cambridge years, a captive Humbert Humbert directly addresses the members of his jury and admits his sin—the entire book is ostensibly his statement to those appointed to judge him. But he, too, has more testimony to give. Documenting their corruption, he denies their right to pass judgment.

In
Lolita
’s afterword, Nabokov names the fictional town of Gray Star, where Lolita dies, “the capital town of the book”—an odd choice, because neither Humbert nor the reader ever goes there.
⁵⁴
But “Gray Star,” which means nothing particular in English, is in German, a language Humbert knows,
grauer star
, the name for a blind spot, a cataract, that blank space in vision caused by disease that keeps someone from seeing what is plainly before him. The degree to which a reader condemns Humbert without attending to his story is the degree to which the reader’s incuriosity leads him to be judged in turn, not because Humbert is innocent or pure (he is certainly not), but because Humbert has his own condemnation to offer.

Nabokov adds to the irony of inverting the Wandering Jew story by making the New World as obsessed as the Old—if not as violent—with ferreting out the Jews in its midst. The single-minded vigilance with which Americans try to prevent any Semitic contagion from touching their businesses or communities blinds them to the real tragedy unfolding among them—the immolation of a girl.
⁵⁵
In drafting
Lolita
, Nabokov considered naming his nymphet Juanita Dark, a play on Joan of Arc (or, as he preierred
Joaneta Darc
), another legend built from history in which religious piety cloaking moral blindness abets the destruction of an innocent teenager.

As surely as Humbert’s sins are his own, and unforgivable, it is also true that he has been broken by history. His suffering has not ennobled him; instead, it has driven him mad, just as historic events had destroyed
Despair
’s Hermann decades before, and character after character in Nabokov’s novels and short stories in between. After the death of Annabel Leigh, flight from Europe, visions of the Holocaust, and continued bigotry in America after the war, Humbert’s delusions and crimes are not only the cause of his persecution in the world; they are, in some measure, the result.
⁵⁶

Lolita
has Gray Star. The cruel narrator
of Pnin
first meets the young Timofey with a speck of coal dust in his eye—a speck that, though removed, seems to block his ability to see Pnin clearly in the decades that follow.
⁵⁷

Nabokov would find himself subjected to the same impaired judgments by others. When the complete version of
The Gift
—Nabokov’s story of Russian literary exiles and a genius arising in their midst—was finally published in Russian in 1952, it garnered almost no attention from émigrés. But upon
Lolita
’s arrival in America six years later, a Russian poet placed an advertisement in a leading émigré paper denouncing writers who were traitors to their native tongue.
⁵⁸

It must have seemed at times to Nabokov that he could not win.
The New Yorker
had balked at publishing portions of his work that were openly anti-Soviet. In academic America, he had been seen as a reactionary, with Wellesley friend Isabel Stephens later lamenting that people simply did not understand the degree to which he loathed Stalin and the depth of his passion for Russia.
⁵⁹

Many émigrés, however, did not feel or notice that love in the same degree that Stephens observed it. Nabokov had mocked and chastised their community in
The Gift
, even as he preserved their literary universe. In
Conclusive Evidence
, he seemed to ignore them in favor of tsarist nostalgia. And in
Lolita
, he appeared to have lost his moral compass and any link to Russia at all.

Even his dislike of
Zhivago
could be held against him. Gleb Struve—whose father had served with V. D. Nabokov, and whom Nabokov had known since his years at Cambridge—sent a letter to him asking about a rumor that Nabokov had condemned
Doctor Zhivago
as anti-Semitic. “I wish I knew what idiot could have told you that,” Nabokov replied, adding that he was surprised that the devout Struve was not put off by the novel’s “cheap, churchy-sugary reek.”
⁶⁰

But the impression in the émigré community that Nabokov had somehow ceded his Russian-ness to Jewish concerns or international celebrity was too deep-rooted to be dispelled by one letter, particularly one that seemed to take offense at Orthodox piety. If he had written the book they wanted, immortalizing their Russia, perhaps they could have forgiven the arrogance, the distance, and the success.

The émigrés, however, had their revenge. Just weeks after
Lolita
’s release,
Zhivago
earned its author the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pasternak was the second Russian ever to win—the first being Ivan Bunin, the only other literary rival Nabokov had ever acknowledged. Pasternak, still in the U.S.S.R., telegraphed his acceptance (“Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.”), and then, pressured by the Soviets, wrote five days later, refusing the prize and declining to attend the award ceremony.
⁶¹
The Nobel Committee would hold its ceremony, but Pasternak would not be there. The world could have
Zhivago
, but it could not have Pasternak.

The world, however, could also have Nabokov. With
Lolita
turning into a global sensation, Véra and Vladimir headed west to California for butterfly hunting and negotiations with Stanley Kubrick. The contortions required by censors threatened to undermine the production of any artistically acceptable movie of
Lolita
. As Nabokov weighed possible solutions, Vladimir and Véra left Los Angeles, meeting up with Dmitri in Lake Tahoe before returning to New York. Booking passage on a luxury liner to Europe for the fall, Nabokov
exchanged letters with his sister Elena and brother Kirill, making plans to see them in Europe.

As Nabokov began his fifth decade of exile, many émigrés were settled in the belief that Nabokov had turned his back on his country, and they were not shy about saying so. They had accepted the notion that he did not remember, or did not
want to
remember, and that the story of their vanished Russia would never be told by him.

But as they surrendered Nabokov to the world, the past lingered, biding its time. The Soviet leaders, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Arctic camps, his own shattered family, and all the Russian dead—Nabokov had forgotten nothing.