Stalking Nabokov (15 page)

Nabokov ends his autobiography with the image of himself and his wife walking their son through a park in St. Nazaire, the port where they boarded the
Champlain
in May 1940 to escape to the United States. They know that Dmitri is about to glimpse the ship, to feel “the blissful shock, the enchantment and glee . . . [of] discovering ahead the ungenuinely gigantic, the unrealistically real prototype of the various toy vessels he had doddled about in his bath . . . to make out, among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship’s funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture—Find What the Sailor Has Hidden—that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen” (
SM
309–10). Nabokov sets that ship and the America it implies in this key position at the book’s close as the solution of a much larger puzzle, his long experience of exile.

America solved another problem, realized another dream, in allowing him a chance to discover new species and to become not just an informed amateur but a scientist who could make a lasting contribution to lepidopterology. He began to write his autobiography in 1947, just after completing the first draft of his major lepidopterological monograph. No wonder he makes America shine through, ahead of time, here and there in
Speak, Memory
, never more riddlingly or triumphantly than at the end of his chapter on butterflies. In Europe, and in his first two entomological publications, he had been merely a talented collector. After arriving in New York, he turned into a scientist at the same time as—and partly because—he stopped writing in Russian.

In the fall of 1940, Nabokov approached the American Museum of Natural History and asked to be allowed to check the status of his Moulinet catches (almost everything else in his European collection, the third he had lost to history, he had been forced to leave behind in Paris as German tanks advanced). Although he was unfamiliar with microscopes and dissection, he learnt as he went along. Two years earlier, in Paris, he had written his first novel in English, setting much of it in the England he knew from Cambridge days. Then he had still hoped to find an academic or publishing job in Great Britain, but nothing turned up. Now in the United States he did not yet consider himself ready to begin writing fiction for an American audience, but he felt he had to renounce writing fiction in Russian if he was to develop as an American novelist. Meanwhile he spent the winter of 1940–41 preparing the lectures he would give at Stanford that summer and anywhere else that might hire him as a Russian lecturer. But he happily took time off to work for nothing at the AMNH. This resulted in another short paper in the issue of the
Journal of the New York Entomological Society
that published his description of the Moulinet butterfly, which he now named
Lysandra cormion
.

He had supported his family over his first winter in America partly by giving Russian tuition to several women associated with Columbia University. One, Dorothy Leuthold, offered to drive the Nabokovs across the continent to Stanford. Delighted, Nabokov collected all along the way. On June 7, 1941, he discovered a butterfly he recognized as new, and he would name it in Leuthold’s honor
Neonympha dorothea
(subsequent work has reclassified it as a subspecies,
Cyllopsis pertepida dorothea
, of a species that had not been known to extend from Mexico into the United States). Here, on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, he realized his dream of discovery even more vividly than he had in Moulinet.

After the summer, Nabokov returned east to a one-year engagement as visiting lecturer in comparative literature at Wellesley College, near Boston. From October 1941 he began to work, unpaid, setting in order the butterfly collections of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. By the middle of 1942 he had written his first major paper, on the genus
Neonympha
, and was appointed to a one-year position as research fellow at the MCZ, an appointment that would be extended, a year at a time, until he left Cambridge for Cornell in 1948.

During these six years he became the MCZ’s de facto curator of Lepidoptera and one of the authorities on South and especially North American polyommatine butterflies, the Blues. He wrote four key papers. In the fifteen-page “Nearctic Forms of
Lycaeides Hüb[ner]
,” completed over the winter and spring of 1943, he established principles still used in analyzing the genitalia of the Blues. Between the fall of 1943 and the fall of 1944 he completed a thirty-fivepage paper on the morphology of the genus
Lycaeides
that drew on the collection he had built up at the MCZ, now the most representative series of American
Lycaeides
anywhere; here for the first time he developed the technique of describing wing markings by counting scale rows under the microscope. His sixty-page paper on the Blues of Central and South America, “Notes on Neotropical Plebejinae” (written 1944–45), constituted what taxonomists call a “first revision”—a comprehensive reconsideration—of what he called the subfamily Plebejinae and is now known as the tribe Polyommatini. His final and longest paper, the ninety-page monograph on the Nearctic members of the genus
Lycaeides
, took him from 1945 to 1948, since during this time he also wrote most of
Bend Sinister
and added a course in Russian literature to his two Russian-language courses at Wellesley. His paper, in the words of another entomologist, “entirely rearranged the classification of this genus.”
⁵

The long paper on Neotropical Plebejinae stands out from the rest for several reasons. Nabokov often dreamed of chasing tropical butterflies, but he never had the opportunity. He did, on the other hand, collect zealously in North America. Why, then, did he choose to write a paper on
South
American Blues? For the simple reason that he had already mastered North American Blues and wished to compare the northern groups, as he now understood their relationships, with their southern counterparts. A colleague he greatly respected, Paul Grey, felt a similar impulse with fritillaries, and borrowed all of the AMNH’s specimens of South American fritillaries to see how they compared under the microscope with the North American species he knew so well. “He came to a grinding halt, however,” notes Kurt Johnson, “when he saw how complex the southern stuff was. Nabokov saw how complex the southern stuff was and chose to do a seminal (generic) nomenclature for it.”
⁶

Nabokov’s work on North American
Lycaeides
transformed the understanding of a particularly difficult genus and has proved extremely durable, but there are many scientists who have undertaken such intrageneric revisions within the well-known Nearctic and Palearctic butterfly fauna. Nabokov’s work on South American Blues, though, constitutes the first revision of a whole tribe of butterflies. As such, it took him to the frontiers of lepidopterological knowledge and would prove “seminal” even if the seeds took another half-century to sprout in the recent work of Zsolt Bálint, Kurt Johnson, Dubi Benyamini, and their colleagues.

Nabokov worked as a laboratory scientist in the 1940s in a way he would never do again. Why did he feel driven to spend up to fourteen hours a day at the microscope? Chiefly because he could not stop. He found it bliss to be able to make far-reaching discoveries that he had in one sense long dreamed about and in another hardly anticipated since his earlier work had been so confined to collecting. He was piecing together a whole new world. Those who have worked at the microscope with butterfly genitalia are inclined to say, “Show me a butterfly and I can’t tell you what it is, but show me the genitalia and I’ll identify anything you have.” Nabokov learnt to enjoy the deceptiveness and the difficulty of genitalic identification almost as much as the thrill of exploration and the triumph of discovery.

He also had few demands from the job that provided his basic income, teaching Russian language at Wellesley, until the fall term of 1946 when he was able to add his first literature course. For once his science could advance because his art retreated. Although he began writing
Bend Sinister
, his first American novel, in 1941, he found it agony to renounce his Russian prose. Rather than suffer the throes of writing a full-length work of fiction in a language other than Russian—although he was also writing stories and a critical book on Gogol in English—he could return to entomology, where his working language had always been English and his sense of mastery, far from being diminished, was now vastly expanded.

At the end of
Bend Sinister
he pictures himself as both author of the novel we are reading and as lepidopterist. “Twang,” the book ends, “A good night for mothing,” as another moth hits the wire screen over his window and he closes down his hero’s painful life. In the season the novel was published, its author, now an
Atlantic Monthly
and
New Yorker
regular, was photographed by
Time
and
Vogue
at his desk in room 402 of the MCZ. That year, 1947, he began to write his autobiography and to build into it an explicit celebration of his life as a lepidopterist and its pattern of a dream fulfilled, if not in the Europe where the story began then in the America that
Speak, Memory
foreshadows.

Although he had been eager to explore the fauna of as many states as he could from the moment he arrived in the United States, Nabokov had no car and little money during his first eight years in the country and had to depend on the offers of others. His friend Mikhail Karpovich of Harvard invited him to his summer home in Vermont in 1940 and 1942; Dorothy Leuthold drove him across the country in 1941; a whistle-stop lecture tour by train in late 1942 took him through much of the South; James Laughlin, his publisher, let him have low-cost accommodation at his alpine lodge above Sandy, Utah, in 1943, where he caught a number of previously unknown species of moths for his colleague James McDunnough, who in gratitude named one of them
Eupithecia nabokovi
. Not until 1947 did the advance for
Bend Sinister
again provide enough money to allow the family to travel west by train, to Estes Park, Colorado, where they were able to stay until September only because of the
New Yorker’
s enthusiastic response to the first installment of Nabokov’s autobiography.

That year things began to change. Late in the fall he was offered a permanent position at Cornell. After taking it up for the fall term of 1948, he would now have no leisure for serious entomological work but would need, and could afford, a car. Never a driver himself, he was chauffeured west by Véra every summer between 1949 and 1959 except for the three years (1950, 1955, 1957) when work pressure ruled it out. The motels they stayed at would provide material for
Lolita
, which he began writing in 1950, and his success at discovering the first known female of
Lycaeides sublivens
above Telluride, Colorado, in the summer of 1951, led him to commemorate the locale in the celebrated “final” scene in the novel, Humbert’s vision from a mountain road of the mining town below, its tranquility broken only by the sounds of children at play.
⁷

Even before
Lolita
made him famous, the image of Nabokov as lepidopterist was becoming well known. His autobiography, with its evocation of the onset of his “obsession,” was extremely popular in its
New Yorker
instar, and when
Pnin
began to appear there, too, in serial form, he had a character point out a score of small blue butterflies—actually the rare northeastern subspecies of
Lycaeides melissa
, identified and named
samuelis
by Nabokov from museum specimens and encountered by him in the wild in upstate New York in June 1950—and remark “Pity Vladimir Vladimirovich is not here. He would have told us all about these enchanting insects.” Nabokov wrily has Pnin reply: “I have always had the impression that his entomology was merely a pose.”
⁸

In the wake of his autobiography,
Life
approached Nabokov for a photo essay on his butterfly hunting; he was asked to review butterfly books for the
New York Times
as well as to send along what he could to the much more modest
Lepidopterists’ News
; he was even approached by Edmund Wilson’s daughter, Rosalind, to write a book on mimicry for Houghton Mifflin. In all cases he was happy to oblige, although in the first and last instances the very scale of his enthusiasm frightened the proposals away. But apart from the short pieces in the
Times
and the
News
he published nothing more on butterflies throughout the 1950s. His research interests had shifted to his enormous project of translating and annotating Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin
. Arising out of the needs of his Russian literature students, and serving also as a means of establishing his academic credentials, this project, like his butterfly work in the 1940s, drew him deeper and deeper as the sheer excitement of discovery intensified. The whole effort took seven years (1950–57) and produced four five-hundred-page volumes before he was through.

When
Lolita
caught the attention of America in 1958, Nabokov had just finished his work on
Eugene Onegin
and now had the first opportunity in many seasons to spread the thousands of butterflies he had caught in his summer hunts since 1952. As he did so, he hit on the idea for a new story, “The Admirable Anglewing,” his first purely entomological tale since “The Aurelian” in 1930 and the last short story he ever worked on. Although abandoned at the pupal stage, despite several years of on-and-off work, it was published for the first time in
Nabokov’s Butterflies
and offers remarkable glimpses of Nabokov at both writing desk and laboratory bench.

Lolita
allowed Nabokov to take leave from Cornell early in 1959, a leave that soon solidified into retirement. The novel’s triumph also prompted Doubleday to issue his
Poems
, with a butterfly on the cover and title page in honor of both the poem “A Discovery” and his image as lepidopterist, more widespread than ever now that his afterword to
Lolita
(“Every summer my wife and I go butterfly hunting . . .”) appeared in every copy of the novel. He was horrified at the designer’s sketches, “as meaningless in the present case as would be a picture of a tuna fish on the jacket of
Moby Dick”
(
SL
285). When he travelled west for the summer, reporter Robert H. Boyle was sent by
Time-Life
to cover Nabokov the lepidopterist for
Sports Illustrated
. His write-up provides the best minute-by-minute account we have of Nabokov the man and certainly of Nabokov the collector.