Stalking Nabokov (2 page)
Lately literary critics and scholars tend to avoid a single-author focus, partly because authors have been downgraded as the causes of literary works. That’s a mistake, I think:
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nothing like “The Library of Babel,”
Lolita
, or
Waiting for Godot
would have been written in the mid-twentieth century or at any other time had Borges, Nabokov, and Beckett not lived, even had history otherwise run the same course. Nabokov famously denied the influence of any other writer on him and thought “the climate of thought” an “unbelievably spooky” notion (
SO
128). But for all his insistence on independence he did not suppose writers were self-generated. They owed much, as he knew, to purposes, standards, and tools developed and refined over the ages, and to the boldness of past genius inspiring future risks (see this volume,
chapter 15
, “Nabokov, Pushkin, Shakespeare: Genius, Generosity, and Gratitude in
The Gift
and
Pale Fire”
).
The best criticism, too, is highly individual but also part of highly social processes, and that’s another thread that runs through these pieces. Criticism is cooperative: we want to understand the same works, and we learn from others both specific information and ways of understanding and appreciating. And it is competitive: we want to challenge others whose claims we find wrong, and we want
our
efforts and results to be recognized. In my work on evolution and literature, the one line of research after Nabokov I have so far had time to pursue to something near satisfaction, I have explored the interplay of the individual and the social, the collaborative and the competitive, the original insight or the independent effort and the traditions and institutions that make the insight and effort possible and worthwhile.
Another thread running through
Stalking Nabokov
is the range that specialization can entail. Specialists may become too narrow, but Nabokov himself wonderfully evoked to his literature students the magic of discovery that specialization could allow:
The more things we know the better equipped we are to understand any one thing and it is a burning pity that our lives are not long enough and sufficiently free of annoying obstacles, to study all things with the same care and depth as the one we now devote to some favorite subject or period. And yet there is a semblance of consolation within this dismal state of affairs: in the same way as the whole universe may be completely reciprocated in the structure of an atom, … an intelligent and assiduous student [may] find a small replica of all knowledge in a subject he has chosen for his special research…. and if, upon choosing your subject, you try diligently to find out about it, if you
allow
yourself to be lured into the shaded lanes that lead from the main road you have chosen to the lovely and little known nooks of special knowledge, if you lovingly finger the links of the many chains that connect your subject to the past and the future and if by luck you hit on some scrap of knowledge referring to your subject that has not yet become common knowledge, then you will know the true felicity of the great adventure of learning, and your years in this college will become a valuable start on a road of inestimable happiness.
(
N’sBs
399)
In his eight years as a professional scientist in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Nabokov focused on one family of butterflies, the Plebejinae or Blues, and found it hard to tear himself away from the microscope just as, in the next decade, he found it hard to stop researching Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin
(“but what things I’m finding, what discoveries I’m making”)
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until he had amassed over a thousand pages of annotations. He had different specializations—Lepidoptera, literary scholarship and translation, chess problems, and literary composition—and each required a multitude of approaches: in the case of Lepidoptera, for instance, taxonomy, morphology, ecology (and the botany of food plants), geography, evolution; in his literary art, at various times, subordinate specializations, in the life of Nikolay Chernyshevsky, late-nineteenth-century Russian naturalists’ explorations of Central Asia, pubescent American girls and their culture, Nordic lore, orchids, the philosophy of time. In the same way, a research specialization like mine on Nabokov has required language learning, interpretation, annotation, bibliography, translation, forays into many literatures and into history, geography, philosophy, science, and psychology. It has meant the continued excitement of discovery; travels to five continents; meetings with the Nabokov family and writers, publishers, scientists, scholars, and librarians who worked with or after him; dialogues with readers famous and obscure; documentary filming; naming new butterflies; and even a law trial. And the best antidote to the confines of one kind specialization can be to follow orthogonal lines of specialization: in my case, Shakespeare, partly as a comparison and contrast to Nabokov within literature and as an alternative delight; as a contrast and comparison to Nabokov within twentieth-century thought, the philosopher Karl Popper, with
his
specializations in the philosophy of science, physics, music, and social philosophy and his preference for ideas over words; narrative, from Homer and Genesis to the present, across all modes, from epics to comics; and literature and evolution, which has meant exploring across arts and eras and into biology, anthropology, and many fields of psychology. Readers of
Stalking Nabokov
will see these other specializations from time to time crossing my Nabokov trail and offering glimpses of other vistas.
Brian Boyd
Auckland
December 24, 2009
THE WRITER’S LIFE AND THE LIFE WRITER
In the wake of my Nabokov biographies (
Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years
, 1990,
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years
, 1991), people surfaced with links to Nabokov that I had not traced. Through my work with lepidopterists who had known Nabokov or specialized in the same butterfly families as he had, I learned of John Downey, the expert in the Blues a generation after Nabokov. As a biology student driving a mining truck for his summer job, Downey had met Nabokov collecting butterflies on the slopes of the Wasatch Mountains in 1943, an encounter that inspired him to become a specialist in the Blues himself. Discovering this incident allowed me to reflect on Nabokov as writer and man at a Nabokov Centenary Celebration organized by the PEN American Center, the
New Yorker
, and Vintage Books, on April 15, 1999, at the Town Hall in New York (with Martin Amis, Alfred Appel Jr., Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, and others). That summer, another celebration took place, at the end of a conference at Jesus College, Cambridge, organized by Jane Grayson of the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies at the University of London: a centennial dinner in the Hall of Trinity College, Cambridge, where Nabokov dined in his Trinity years (1919–1922). Asked to deliver the centennial toast, I slightly expanded the New York talk.
I would like us all to fix in our minds a famous image captured by Dmitri Nabokov’s camera: his father in shorts, bare-chested, with butterfly net at the ready, on a Swiss mountainside, underneath an azure sky. I want us to be able to picture just who it is we are toasting—and not to be distracted by another famous figure showing off
his
famous legs.
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We shall return in a moment to the man in shorts.
In a much-quoted passage from
Speak, Memory
Nabokov describes a chess problem he composed in such a way that the relationship between composer and solver serves as an analogy for the relationship between author and reader that he aims for in his fiction: an immediate pleasure for the “naïve” solver (the “thesis” of the problem, in the Hegelian terms he invokes); the “pleasurable torments” awaiting the “would-be sophisticated solver” who realizes there’s more to the problem (the “antithesis”); and the rush of surprise and delight awaiting the “super-sophisticated solver” who reaches the problem’s deepest solution (the “synthesis”) (
SM
290–92). Writing my biography of Nabokov I did not discover in time an incident that I think offers a similar kind of analogy to his literary work, but in terms of butterflies, not chess.
In 1943 a biology student named John Downey was working in his summer vacation in the mountains of Utah. Driving a coal truck one day up the steep Cottonwood Canyon, he found he had to stop every so often to let the engine cool down. After pulling over at a bend, and opening the truck’s hood, he noticed a man in shorts and sneakers with no shirt coming down the road with a net in his hand. As the man passed, Downey called out, “Hullo. Whatcha doing? Collecting insects?” The man gave a sharp glance at this stranger covered in coal dust, said nothing, and continued down the road at the same brisk pace. Downey fell in behind him: “ ‘I’m a collector too!’ This got a millisecond glance, and one raised eyebrow, as he strolled along. ‘I collect
butterflies
.’… This rated…another raised eyebrow, if not a slight nod of the head; but still no sound, nor slowing of his pace.”
“Finally,” Downey recalls,
a nymphalid [butterfly] … flitted across the road. “What’s that?” he asked. I gave him the scientific name as best as I could remember.…His pace didn’t slacken, but an eyebrow stayed higher a little longer this time. Yet another butterfly crossed the road. “What’s that?” says he. I gave him a name, a little less sure of myself, particularly since he had not confirmed the correctness of my first identification. “Hm!” was his only response. A third test specimen crossed his vision, and “What’s that?” I gave him my best idea and to my surprise he stopped, put out his arm, and said, “Hello! I’m Vladimir Nabokov.”
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During the 1940s, while on a research fellowship at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, Nabokov made himself
the
authority on American Blue butterflies. After completing his major monograph, and no longer needing the stack of index cards he had assembled on the Blues, he sent them on to Downey. In fact, his kindness helped Downey settle on his field of specialization: Downey became the American authority on the Blues in the generation after Nabokov, and his student, Kurt Johnson, has now become the American authority on the Blues for a third generation. With colleagues on three other continents, especially Zsolt Bálint of Hungary and Dubi Benyamini of Chile, he honors Nabokov’s pioneer work on the Latin American Blues by naming newly discovered species after his fiction:
humbert
and
lolita
,
luzhin
and
pnin
,
kinbote
and
shade
,
ada
and
hazelea
, and many, many more.
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What strikes me about Nabokov’s encounter with Downey in Cottonwood Canyon is the demands he makes, the conditions he imposes, on this grimy truck driver: You can walk with me, but I will test you a little. If you pass the test, I will let you see who I am, and I will even offer you all that I have found, so that you can go on to make
your
discoveries in turn. As much as the chess problem, the story suggests Nabokov’s demanding but ultimately generous relationship to his readers, which reflects his sense of the demanding but ultimately generous world that life offers us.
That seems to me the key to Nabokov. He was a maximalist: someone who appreciated, as much as anyone has, the riches the world offers, in nature and art, in sensation, emotion, thought, and language, and the
surprise
of these riches, if we animate them with all our attention and imagination. Yet at the same time he felt that all this was not enough, because he could readily imagine a far ampler freedom beyond the limits within which he feels human consciousness is trapped.
He celebrates with unique precision and passion the delights of the visible and tangible world, the tenderness and force of human feelings and relationships, the treasures of memory: the thetic pleasures of life, if you like. He planned to call his first novel
Happiness—
until he realized that might perhaps be just a little too unguarded.
Yet Nabokov also has a deserved reputation for his acid imagination, his savage irony, his trenchant ability to deflate, to register disappointments, humiliations, and horrors. His stories offer endless evidence of the comic, ironic, tragic limitations of human life, and he never lets us forget the absurdity of the very conditions of the human mind: of the solitary confinement of the self, as he defines one central aspect of his work, or of the prison of time, as he defines another.
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At this level Nabokov registers the “antithetic torments” of life and writes books entitled not
Happiness
but
Laughter in the Dark
or
Despair
.