SOURCE: “Nabokov in America,” in The New Criterion, Vol. 16, No. 4, December, 1997, pp. 1–13.

[In the following essay, Lyons surveys Nabokov's American novels.]

The Library of America's recent publication of the American writings of Vladimir Nabokov in three volumes gives occasion for some thoughts about the nature of the writer's achievement. The first volume, called Novels and Memoirs 1941-1951, contains The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), Bend Sinister (1947), and Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1951, revised 1966). The second, called Novels 1955-1962, contains Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), Pale Fire (1962), and, as an appendix, Lolita: A Screenplay (written in 1960, published in 1974). In the third volume, called Novels 1969-1974, are Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins! (1974).¹ The textual advisor and annotator throughout is Brian Boyd, the author of an impressively learned, if sometimes oppressively hagiographical, two-volume critical biography of Nabokov.

Nabokov is often thought of as a writer of exile, prey to the twin passions of émigrés, nostalgia and resentment. But he remembered coolly; it was his father—and his own nascent senses and sensibilities—that he recalled warmly. Indeed, he applied the word “exile” to but a part of his post-Russian life. In Speak, Memory, he writes: “A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life. The twenty years I spent in my native Russia (1899-1919) take care of the thetic arc. Twenty-one years of voluntary exile in England, Germany and France (1919-1940) supply the obvious antithesis. The period spent in my adopted country (1940-1960) forms a synthesis—and a new thesis.” After the new thesis came a new antithesis: a hotel in Montreux, Switzerland, where the writer and his wife, Vera, lived until his death in 1977. His second synthesis (is it strange for Nabokov to be using this Hegelian recipe?) was not of this world. His period of exile, then, was his time in Europe entre deux guerres. America was his second patria; he was not in exile here; he was at home, and he did his best work here in her tongue.

Thus Nabokov was not a Russian Thucydides or Dante—that is, a banished combatant using a very powerful mind to replay and analyze what went wrong. For one thing, he was too young. Soviet Russia would in time produce its epic elegists, but they were to emerge from the fires of the regime. They would come later: Solzhenitsyn, Akhmatova, others. To assess Nabokov's early years and his comprehension of them—indeed, to begin reading Nabokov—there is no better guide than Speak, Memory. The dominant figure of his youth was his father, Vladimir Dmitrievich, a rich reforming noble who lectured in criminal law at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence and edited the liberal law journal Pravo. We take away from Speak, Memory two extraordinary snapshots—or rather moving pictures—of the elder Nabokov in “that strange first decade of our century” when “the old and the new, the liberal touch and the patriarchal one, fatal poverty and fatalistic wealth got fantastically interwoven.” The writer remembers himself, a little boy sitting at the dining room table, on regular occasions seeing (Nabokov uses a frequentative form) through a window his father being tossed in the air by the peasants of the village:

There, for an instant, the figure of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawling in midair, his limbs in a curiously casual attitude, his handsome, imperturbable features turned to the sky. Thrice, to the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly up in this fashion, and the second time he would go higher than the first and then there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute flames in the mist of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin.

Inside this simile, the camera pans down, as it were, from the angels to the corpse in the church below. By a sleight of mind, we are led from the father in triumph to the father in death (for it is somehow his corpse).

At another memorable moment in the memoir, Nabokov glances at his father's death, more openly but still not without elaborate indirection and subterfuge. When the writer was twelve, he learned from schoolfellows that his father had challenged a scurrilous anti-Semitic journalist to a duel. As he is driven home through the snow-muffled streets in an agonizingly slow sleigh, the boy imagines the worst. But at home he finds smiling faces (the cad had apologized):

I saw my mother's serene everyday face, but I could not look at my father. And then it happened: my heart welled in me … and I had no handkerchief, and ten years were to pass before a certain night in 1922, at a public lecture in Berlin, when my father shielded the lecturer (his old friend Milyukov) from the bullets of two Russian Fascists and, while vigorously knocking down one of the assassins, was fatally shot by the other. But no shadow was cast by that future event upon the bright stairs of our St. Petersburg house; the large, cool hand resting on my head did not quaver, and several lines of play in a difficult chess composition were not blended yet on the board.

This is the deepest note in Nabokov: an emotional pudeur, an overmastering shyness in the presence of love that deploys in dazzling permutation the pawns of irony and the rooks of sadness.

Nabokov has been compared to Conrad, another Slav who became a great English writer. But Conrad's idiosyncratic and inspissated style is an elephant in the zoo of language—slow, wise, cynical; Nabokov is a panther, a quicksilver study in words. English was in a way his first language:

I learned to read English before I could read Russian. My first English friends were four simple souls in my grammar—Ben, Dan, Sam and Ned. There used to be a great deal of fuss about their identities and whereabouts—“Who is Ben?” “He is Dan,” “Sam is in bed,” and so on. Although it all remained rather stiff and patchy (the compiler was handicapped by having to employ—for the initial lessons, at least—words of not more than three letters), my imagination somehow managed to obtain the necessary data. Wan-faced, big-limbed, silent nitwits, proud in the possession of certain tools (“Ben has an axe”), they now drift with a slow-motioned slouch across the remotest backdrop of memory. …

Nabokov became a novelist in Russian in the “years of exile” where he led “an odd but by no means unpleasant existence, in material indigence and intellectual luxury, among perfectly important strangers, spectral Germans and Frenchmen in whose more or less illusory cities we, émigrés, happened to dwell.” His Russian work—novels like Mary; King, Queen, Knave; The Defense; Glory; Laughter in the Dark; and The Gift—is much more infused with immediate sensations of the arbitrary cruelties of the century's political systems than his English work. Virtually all of the Russian fiction has been translated, often by Nabokov's son, Dmitri, in collaboration with, or under the eye of, his father; it deserves reading, especially The Defense and The Gift. So in a sense joining Nabokov at The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is like paddling into the Hudson at Poughkeepsie.

But, whether in Europe or in America, Nabokov always exercised a sure and profound judgment about our century's political monstrosities. About Russia, he wrote:

Under the Tsars … despite the fundamentally inept and ferocious character of their rule, a freedom-loving Russian had had incomparably more means of expressing himself, and used to run incomparably less risk in doing so, than under Lenin. Since the reforms of the eighteen-sixties, the country had possessed (though not always adhered to) a legislation of which any Western democracy might have been proud, a vigorous public opinion that held despots at bay, widely read periodicals of all shades of liberal political thought, and what was especially striking, fearless and independent judges. … When revolutionaries did get caught, banishment to Tomsk or Omsk (now Bombsk) was a restful vacation in comparison to the concentration camps that Lenin introduced. Political exiles escaped from Siberia with farcical ease, witness the famous flight of Trotsky—Santa Leo, Santa Claws, Trotsky—merrily riding back in a Yuletide sleigh drawn by reindeer: On, Rocket, on, Stupid, on, Butcher and Blitzen!

From his days as a student in Cambridge in 1920 until the end of his life, he fought, with the contempt of knowledge for ignorance, Western apologists for and prettifiers of Bolshevism. His unsleeping eye for—his tactless voice against—all varieties of such wicked nonsense cost Nabokov, it is very likely, the Nobel Prize. (Losing it, of course, excluded him from Pearl Buck's table and banished him to the kitchen with Tolstoy, Chekhov, James, Conrad, Proust, and Joyce.)

In 1923, in Berlin, Nabokov met and courted Vera Slonim, the great and long and happy love of his life. They wed in 1925. Dmitri, their only child, was born in 1934. If the Nabokov union was as steady as that of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle, Vera was no Nora. She was Vladimir's first and ideal reader, and his inseparable companion (even, famously, in his Cornell classrooms). To her he dedicated all his English writings; some of them are directly addressed to her. In 1940, Nabokov and his Jewish wife took their six-year-old son to St. Nazaire on the coast of Brittany to board the last ship out of France (it was a close call, for the rapid German advance of the preceding weeks had made it impossible for the ship to sail, as intended, from Le Havre or even Cherbourg). Here is the memoir's final sentence:

There, in front of us, where a broken row of houses stood between us and the harbor, and where the eye encountered all sorts of stratagems, such as pale-blue and pink underwear cakewalking on a clothesline, or a lady's bicycle and a striped cat oddly sharing a rudimentary balcony of cast iron, it was most satisfying 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.

This delightful visual puzzle offers insight into the Nabokovian enigma: against a remote context of circumambient malignity (the Nazi invasion of France) there are freshly observed banal particulars (the underwear cakewalking); behind them is a luminous particular that, properly comprehended, is both sign and salvation (the ship); farther back still is the solicitous and tremulous love of parent for child. The prose keeps switching focus between a synesthetic tenderness (life as it should be) and a fastidious cruelty (life as it often is).

Once and for all be it said that Nabokov's amazingly delicate and arrogantly omnivorous perceptiveness operates finally in the interest of the good. Of course, the shy, sly master might object to such a formulation. “Nabokov is a prism. His, or its, sole object is to refract and by refracting, to recreate a world in retrospect. The world itself, the inhabitants of that world, are of no social or historical importance whatever.” So might he, in his monumental disdain for the Social Usefulness of Art, mount what looks like the rhetorical throne of l'art pour l'art, of a programmatic aestheticism. In fact, Nabokov wrote these words (all save the first) in explication not of himself but of his great model, Proust. It seems to have gone virtually unnoticed that Nabokov is, as artist, the child of Proust. He said, “A garden in a concert hall and a picture gallery in the garden—this is one of my definitions of Proust's art.” What could, in its toying with art, artifice, and nature, be more Nabokovian? Proust's immense labor was, declaredly, a search for a technique that might, by linking percepts, annihilate time. As a philosophy, Proust's conceptual scheme may be threadbare; as an ascesis in seeing and feeling, as a discipline in metaphor, in Aristotle's “finding of likenesses,” his scheme is artistic gold. And, significantly, Proust's art is ultimately not a hothouse flower but sides with humanity (think of the Dreyfus theme). Poor Proust condemned himself to an endless, solipsistic, tail-chewing analysis of the impossibility of love and the power of jealousy. The hale Russian spared himself such onanistic miseries; he wrote a score of books in many voices instead of one long book in one voice; he preferred deviously intricate narrative puzzles to intricately deviant analyse des sentiments. Humbert Humbert thinks of calling the last part of his story “Dolores Disparue” in homage to the Albertine Disparue of “another internal combustion martyr.” Nakokov was certainly the superior ventriloquist. But all reservations made and differences granted, Nabokov is unimaginable without Proust (that angel simile, for instance).

Nabokov's first two English-language novels are glum displays of paranoid psychology and paranoid politics. He wrote The Real Life of Sebastian Knight in Paris in December of 1938 and January of 1939. Bend Sinister, he tells us, “was the first novel I wrote in America, and that was a half a dozen years after she and I had adopted each other. The greater part of the book was composed in the middle 'Forties, at a particularly cloudless and vigorous period of life.” The book, however, is a cloudy and Kafkaesque parable of tyranny, interesting only in that the Hitlerite-Stalinoid tyrant's archetypal deed consists of causing the death of the philosopher-hero's child. The innocence of childhood is sacred ground.

If coming to America was the defining movement of Nabokov's life, writing Lolita was its defining artistic act. He had written a prototype of the story (pervert, nymphet, death) in Paris in Russian in 1939, which was posthumously translated and published as The Enchanter. It took a good decade for Lolita to ripen into an American book. Nabokov began writing it in 1950 and finished in December 1953. “I was faced,” he explains in the afterword, “by the task of inventing America.” He had to learn to see and fix America (“Every summer my wife and I go butterfly hunting”) and to hear America (“Lolita was the record of my love affair with the … ‘English language’”—he ought to have said “American language”). Not the least of the enchantments of the book, now forty-five years old, is its merciless capture of the idioms and customs of prosperous postwar America: it was composed in the high noon of middle-class optimism about cultured refinement and progressive education, a time that, in comparison to the reigning preoccupations of today, makes Charlotte Haze look Periclean; it caught youth culture in its pre-rock infancy (Lolita drools over heartthrob crooners like Frank Sinatra and Eddie Fisher). Supposedly set in 1947 and 1948, Lolita feels more like the restless early 1950s, years when pampered youth was just feeling its oats and reveling in jukeboxes, movie magazines, drive-ins, chewing gum—and brewing the tornado to come. Lolita hears it all with near-perfect pitch (near-perfect, since the writer does at one point confuse “candy bar” with “drug store”: “She might visit a candy bar with her girl friends …”).

America is registered throughout with European wit (though not, as Nabokov himself was quick to insist, with Flaubertian contempt). Here is a glimpse of a drive-in:

There was stilt that stream of pate moths siphoned out of the night by my headlights. People were still going to the movies. While searching for night lodgings, I passed a drive-in. In a selenian glow, truly mystical in its contrast with the moonless and massive night, on a gigantic screen slanting away among dark drowsy fields, a thin phantom raised a gun, both he and his arm reduced to tremulous dishwater by the oblique angle of that receding world,—and the next moment a row of trees shout off the gesticulation.

Eyes this urgently metaphoric, metonymic, metamorphic—note “siphoned” and “dishwater”—take a fine Proustian pleasure in things.

Of course, these are the eyes at once of Nabokov and of his puppet Humbert Humbert, that “baboon of genius but a baboon” in his manipulator's words.

Nabokov might have been thinking of Humbert's hirsute and saturnine appearance; what people look like is often what they are in Nabokov. What Humbert is, though, is glaringly dear: he is a madman, a maniac. To use a mad narrator, to have a clever, erudite, sophisticated, pathetic, funny figure attempting to inveigle us into complicity with his designs against the world, to keep the balls of fascination and of revulsion aloft in the bright air: this was the technical task the writer set himself. How amused Nabokov would be by academic preening about “unreliable narrators.” Flaunting his unreliability, Humbert dares us to catch him up, to see around him. Nabokov is indeed not the first writer to interpose a madman between reader and truth; think of Swift's Modest Proposal. There are also the figures of Kafka and of Gogol, the quirky Ukrainian about whom Nabokov wrote a quirky little book in 1942.

Is “mad” or “bad” the better word for Humbert? Humbert, a pedophile in search of the archetypal girl loved and lost in his boyhood, finds his lost love in Dolores Haze, the twelve-year-old daughter of his landlady. He lusts for Lolita, eventually beds her, claims to love her, drives her by his faux-paternal-but-in-fact-Proustianly-sexual possessiveness into the clutches of a sadistic pornographer. By the end, the young woman has slid contentedly from the bourgeois comforts of her youth to working-class near-squalor. She is polite and serene when Humbert visits after an intermission of three years:

Couple of inches taller. Pink-rimmed glasses. New, heaped-up hairdo, new ears. … She was frankly and hugely pregnant. Her head looked smaller (only two seconds had passed really, but let me give them as much wooden duration as life can stand), and her pale-freckled cheeks were hollowed, and her bare shins and arms had lost all their tan, so that the little hairs showed. She wore a brown, sleeveless cotton dress and sloppy felt slippers.

The rape of Lolita—of her youth if not her technical innocence—by the selfishness and wickedness of Humbert and his more evil twin, Quilty, is unequivocally presented as a tragedy, as a sin, as an irreparable loss. If Humbert comes close to redemption, it is in this scene when he feels love for the no-longer-child Lolita. Perverts don't tolerate change and age; Humbert has grown up, although too late. Lolita is the saddest, as well as the funniest, of books.

Lolita gave—and, unlike Ulysses, continues to give—scandal. At first, it was deemed unpublishable by respectable houses such as Viking; New Directions; Farrar, Straus; and Doubleday and had to be brought out by Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press, a Paris outfit that specialized in tony pornography by the likes of Henry Miller and William Burroughs, as well as not-so-tony stuff like Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure and Les Amours de Milord Grosvit (titles cited by Nabokov in his afterword). Only in 1958—with Pnin already published and his Herculean labors on an edition of Eugene Onegin behind him—was the infamous book published in America, by Putnam. By then it had been lauded and laundered by cultural mandarins such as Lionel Trilling, Graham Greene, Harry Levin, and Dorothy Parker. There was a furious denunciation in the daily New York Times by arch-middle-brow Orville Prescott (“dull, dull, dull … fatuous … highbrow pornography”) that served the book well. Things settled down for thirty years or so, during which Lolita gained general acceptance as a masterwork, universally adored and even read.

Then came feminism. One began to hear, “I have problems with Lolita.” A chill surrounded the book in academic circles, like frost on a margarita glass. To teach it was to invite censure; the two books I got into trouble for teaching were Lolita and Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief. Some feminists banned, others revised: Paula Vogel wrote a play—actually, a good play—called How I Learned to Drive that billed itself as an investigation of the Lolita problem from the perspective of a Lolita. A new film version is having trouble finding a U.S. distributor (the Stanley Kubrick movie, made in an ugly England, was, except for James Mason's performance as Humbert, and Shelley Winters's stint as Charlotte Haze, a joyless travesty). More recently, conservative voices, alarmed about child abuse, have joined the clamor against the book. A more serious and responsible conservative critic, Norman Podhoretz, has written that “in aestheticizing the hideous, Nabokov—as I can now clearly see—comes dose to prettifying it.” He calls Lolita “a dangerous book paradoxically made all the more dangerous by its dazzling virtues as a work of art” and says, albeit with seeming reluctance, that “we might have been better off if even a masterpiece like Lolita had never been published.” This might better be directed at Humbert than at his creator. A heavy-handed attempt to respond to Mr. Podhoretz's concerns was made in the TLS by Colin McGinn. Mr. McGinn reminds us that in this fiction the wicked end badly: far from being “a happy and contented paedophile,” Humbert “ends his days in prison, soon to die of coronary thrombosis, alone, defeated, and broken.” But penitent and wretched codas fool no one if the preceding tale has been lubricious or cruel. But Lolita is not even so lewd as daytime TV, and Nabokov is not de Sade (the subject of so many academic courses admiring of his “transgressiveness” and the object of Roger Shattuck's legitimate horror in his recent study Forbidden Knowledge). No celebrant of cruelty, Nabokov is the antithesis of de Sade.

Nabokov did take a risk in Lolita: he endowed a pervert with some of his own arrogance, his own wit, his own eye, his own ear—but not his own heart. And in so doing he was adequately prophylactic against real moral danger. Humbert is from the get-go a guilty creature wretchedly destructive in all his inept obsessions. And Lolita, the object of Humbert's last lust, is (are you listening, feminists?) an unforgettably alive, bratty, funny, trapped, sad young woman—victim and more than victim. “Behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate—dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rages and miserable convolutions,” as Humbert realizes. Who, having read Lolita, is tempted to imitate Humbert? Who does not weep for the destruction of Dolores?

By September 1955, Lolita was topping the bestseller lists. By the end of October, it was displaced by Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. Pasternak won, and was forced to refuse, the Nobel Prize. Nabokov was not amused. He saw, correctly, that Zhivago, while anti-Stalinist, was “also fundamentally antiliberal in glorifying Lenin's overthrow of Russian democracy,” in Brian Boyd's words. Moreover, he considered, perhaps improbably, that the whole saga of Pasternak's and the book's domestic persecution was a Soviet plot, a huge piece of disinformation. His on-again-off-again friend and early sponsor, Edmund Wilson, who had never so much as reviewed a Nabokov novel, waxed dithyrambic about Zhivago. Nabokov's wry reaction: “Delenda est Zhivago!”

Pnin is the satyr play at the Nabokovian drama festival, the palate-cleanser at the banquet. Everyone likes this picaresque account of the hapless and maladroit exiled Russian professor at “Waindell College, a somewhat provincial institution characterized by an artificial lake in the middle of a landscaped campus, by ivied galleries connecting the various halls, by murals displaying recognizable members of the faculty in the act of passing on the torch of knowledge from Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Pasteur to a lot of monstrously built farm boys and farm girls. …” Waindell has resemblances, of course, to Cornell, where Nabokov taught European fiction and Russian literature—and not, as a recent writer had it, creative writing—from 1947 until his resignation, made possible by Lolita royalties, in 1959. (²) (Thomas Pynchon was in one of his classes, but Nabokov claimed not to remember him.) Timofey Pnin is not, his creator insists, an absent-minded professor:

On the contrary, he was perhaps too wary, too persistently on the lookout for diabolical pitfalls, too painfully on the alert lest his erratic surroundings (unpredictable America) inveigle him into some bit of preposterous oversight. It was the world that was absent-minded and it was Pnin whose business it was to set it straight. His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence.

Apart from the endlessly funny portraits of the worthy Pnin (who, incidentally, has a benign rapport with a gifted adolescent) and of a contentious émigré society, Pnin ranks with, if below, Randall Jarrell's wonderful Pictures from an Institution (1954) as a satire of academic life in its decade. Harvard had refused to hire Nabokov as professor of Russian when linguist Roman Jakobson opposed the appointment, saying, “Even if one allows that he is an important writer, are we next to invite an elephant to be professor of zoology?” Here is a bit of Nabokov's revenge:

Nor did Pnin, as a teacher, ever presume to approach the lofty halls of modern scientific linguistics, that ascetic fraternity of phonemes, that temple wherein earnest young people are taught not the language itself, but the method of teaching others to teach that method; which method, like a waterfall splashing from rock to rock, ceases to be a medium of rational navigation but perhaps in some fabulous future may become instrumental in evolving esoteric dialects—Basic Basque and so forth—spoken only by certain esoteric machines.

Pale Fire, which was written in Ithaca in 1960 and 1961, is the by-product of, the funhouse-mirror version of, Nabokov's gigantic Eugene Onegin translationcum-commentary. It consists of poem, itself called “Pale Fire”, and commentary. The poem, 999 lines in run-on rhyming couplets (not heroic couplets, pace Boyd) by the revered and scholarly poet John Shade, is full of wry, awkward, sentimentalized grief at the death by drowning—probably suicide—of the poet's ugly-duckling daughter. The verses have some elegiac plangency (most sweetly, perhaps when the poet addresses his wife of forty years, as in: “I love you when you call me to admire / A jet's pink trail above the sunset fire”) and some satiric trouvailles, but they strike me as on the whole a labored stunt. Brian Boyd is seldom so extravagant as when he claims that “English poetry has few things better to offer than ‘Pale Fire.’” He implies that it puts in the shade poems like Eliot's Four Quartets and Pound's Cantos, works it in no way resembles, although Nabokov did put a parody of Eliot's Ash Wednesday into the mouth of Clare Quilty in Lolita. Rather, the poem Pale Fire reads like a cunning simulacrum of late-eighteenth-century meditative verse by, say, Cowper or Wordsworth. But it's fake antique. One can't be Robert Frost by taking thought.

The commentary turns out to be no commentary, but a disjointed, deranged self-portrait of and by the commentator. He is Shade's neighbor, Charles Kinbote. Kinbote gives us to understand that he is in fact Charles Xavier the Beloved, the exiled, hunted, and winkingly, nudgingly homosexual king of Ruritanian Zembla. According to Kinbote, an assassin sent by the revolutionary regime to kill Charles has by mistake killed Shade, who has left his poem to be explicated, with ludicrous ineptitude and perversely irrelevant intrusiveness, by the mad Kinbote. If Lolita was an epistemological tease (no, Humbert is not Nabokov), Pale Fire offers a kaleidoscope of epistemological possibilities. Is Kinbote really Charles? If so, is he mad? If not, is he mad? Did Shade exist or is the whole text we possess—poem and commentary—a confection of Kinbote's? Or are both poem and commentary the work of Shade, still very much alive? (Boyd plumps, unpersuasively, for the last solution.) Best perhaps to leave something of the onion to be eaten and to take it for what it seems: Shade's poem plus Kinbote-Charles's commentary.

Pale Fire has its pleasures: the formal brio that shuttles us back and forth from poem to mad commentator; the Parody of scholarly omniscience; the rare moments of beauty and feeling. Behind the thing can be glimpsed Nabokov's resentment—or at least fatigue—after a long servitude to Pushkin: Pale Fire, or the Annotator's Revenge. The book has received high praise, notably from Mary McCarthy, who called it “one of the great works of art of this century.” On the contrary, it epitomizes Nabokov's capacity for Alexandrian preciosity, which here is fatally uninformed, unanchored by any substantial moral weight.

If Pale Fire is overestimated, Ada is today rather undervalued. It marked a curious turn in Nabokov's public fortunes. He and the book made the cover of Time—then a big deal—and got some rapt reviews, from Alfred Kazin, for instance. But it repelled some reviewers, among them Philip Toynbee, Morris Dickstein, and the egregious Mary McCarthy. Since then, the book has come to be seen as Nabokov's Finnegans Wake: an impenetrable late work written in a forbiddingly macaronic idiolect. It's actually more like Nabokov's Golden Bowl: a baroque effusion, mandarin in style but suffused with carnality and love. The plot, the whole premise of the book, sounds absurd when summarized: at the start, it is 1884, and we are at the rural manor (dacha, really) of Ardis as two youths—Van Veen, fourteen, and Ada, twelve—discover and consummate their love. Supposedly cousins, they are in fact full brother and sister. They next meet at Ardis in 1888 and, after spasms of jealousy, come together again. Circumstances—Ada's marriage to another, Van's compulsive satyriasis, her career as a movie star, his career as a sort of psychological philosopher, incest taboos—keep our pair apart, except for a few adulterous trysts in 1900, until 1922. He is then fifty-two; she, fifty. They then live happily and faithfully together (for Van, “the ordeal was morally rewarding, physically preposterous”) for forty-five years. They collaborate in the writing of books, including the one we're reading, the record of their love. At the time of writing, Van is ninety-seven and Ada, ninety-five. The book concludes in a mock-blurb for itself:

Ada, an ample and delightful chronicle, whose principal part is staged in a dream-bright America. … On the fabulous country estate of his art-collecting uncle, Daniel Veen, an ardent childhood romance develops in a series of fascinating scenes between Van and pretty Ada, a truly unusual gamine. … That the relationship is not simply dangerous cousinage, but possesses an aspect prohibited by law, is hinted in the very first pages.

In spite of many intricacies of plot and psychology, the story proceeds at a spanking pace.

There is, as well, a science-fiction side to the story: in consequence of some cosmic malfunction known as “the L disaster” (supposedly electricity, but perhaps really Lolita), a world called Antiterra has split off from the earth. We are in Antiterra, where time and history are disorientingly different. On Antiterra, “Russia” is a quaint synonym for “Estoty,” the American province of the USA, which covers the entire Western hemisphere. “Tartary” is the word used to refer to a grim tyranny extending “from Kurland to the Kuriles.” The rest of the civilized world is managed by “the British commonwealth.” In practice, all this elaborate backstory means not too much: the characters interlard their speech with Russian phrases, and amusing paradoxes crop up. It scatters a light dusting of the fantastic upon an already outrageous story. Nabokov liked H. G. Wells. All the play with space and time does, however, figure Nabokov's longing to combine, incestuously to wed, his two homelands into one. History has denied me Russia? Very well, I will make a Russia out of where I am.

But fundamentally Ada is a love story, and a love story very much in the wake of Lolita. It recounts, early on, the deflowering of a twelve-year-old girl, for one thing. Of course, this girl is rapturously involved with her blood brother of fourteen, her intellectual and spiritual twin. It's not so much incest as self-love. They love each other for eighty-three years and live together for forty-five. This is an anti-Lolita, a sunshine romance. Lolita was naturally on his mind: his later life and work were to be as inexorably changed and colored by that book as Philip Roth's were to be by Portnoy's Complaint (another great postwar American novel). The girl's very name pops up everywhere in his later writings: in Pale Fire's poem, we hear that “… Hurricane / Lolita swept from Florida to Maine”; in Ada, Van's aunt has a ranch “near Lolita, Texas” and, in one of her movies, Don Juan's Last Fling, Ada plays “Dolores, a dancing girl.” Without Lolita, Ada would never have been in movies. Nabokov, who wrote a screenplay (unused) for Kubrick and who enjoyed the movie's success, had fallen for film.

The Van-Ada relationship is, up to a point, the antithesis of that of Humbert and Dolores. There is, this time, a hot-blooded and open-eyed mutuality. Theirs is a claustrophobically intense, exclusive union of two precociously brilliant exquisites that lasts from childhood to extreme age. Those who love Van and Ada love precisely their mix of erudition and erotic bliss; they revel in Ada's anatomies of bliss. But this hermetic smugness has put off some readers. Van and Ada resemble in their perfectly attuned and capacious sensibilities—although not in their sexual voracity—the Glass family of J. D. Salinger, a writer whom Nabokov liked. There is in Salinger, too (and perhaps in Henry James) a yearning for transcendence that expresses itself in the conversation of finely vibrating persons. Salinger's mystics famously agonize over their gifts; they worry about that “fat lady” and about Jesus. Nabokov never strikes this note; his exceptional beings uncomplicatedly rejoice in their exceptionalness. Or so it seems. But a case can be made for the writer's having “placed” Van and Ada. Boyd, quoting Nabokov as saying, “I loathe Van Veen,” makes the case, if a bit too earnestly; Boyd is forever fighting against the notion of Nabokov as a sneering and snobbish aesthete (admittedly, it's a necessary fight).

There is another gambit in recent Nabokov criticism worth countering: deconstructionist cant that sees Nabokov the aesthete being subverted by Nabokov the humanist. Michael Wood's The Magician's Doubts (1994) spends much time wrestling with this (illusory) dichotomy. Richard Rorty, in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), claims that “Nabokov's best novels are the ones which exhibit his inability to believe his own general ideas.” According to Rorty, Nabokov's project is to “combine altruism and joy” to concoct a “synthesis of ecstasy and kindness.” But Nabokov, lacking “social hope,” gave up on “the modern liberal idea of working for a future in which cruelty will no longer be institutionalized.” That is, Nabokov scorned utopian projects and considered literature promoting them “topical trash.” Instead of the “social hope” that the professedly anti-metaphysical Rorty exacts, Nabokov is accused of believing in immorality and art, “an inconsistent mixture of Platonic atemporalism and anti-Platonic sensualism.” These ideas, or any others—“such pallid ghosts as ‘human life’ ‘art’ and ‘morality,’” as Rorty calls them—are anathema to the new materialism. And Rorty tries to explain Nabokov's ideas as attempts to escape from his father's shadow, etc.

Such bumbling reductivism only reminds us that Nabokov must not be confused with his characters, be they cruel or kind. In his art, Nabokov exorcises cruelty. In Ada, there is a sweet, tender character whose goodness shames and stains the happy pair: Lucette, the younger half-sister of Ada. She nurses a desolating crush on Van from childhood. When she's twenty-five—four days before an ocean voyage that will prove fatal to her—Van kisses her:

She tasted exactly as Ada at Ardis, in the early afternoon, sweet saliva, salty epithelium, cherries, coffee. He pushes her away. “Why, Van? Why, why, why?” “You know perfectly well why. I love her, not you, and I simply refuse to complicate matters by entering into yet another relationship.” “That's rich,” said Lucette, “you've gone far enough with me on several occasions, even when I was a kid; your refusing to go further is a mere quibble on your part; and besides, besides you've been unfaithful to her with a thousand girls, you dirty cheat!”

These tones of voice—as if Humbert and Lolita were to be transported into a Marivaux comedy—establish an unmistakable distance between writer and characters. Lucette is a smart cookie and, with Ada absent, things go swimmingly for her and Van on that liner (“I'm a brand-new girl now. … A happy new girl. Alone with you on an abandoned ship …”) until they go to a movie. It is Don Juan's Last Fling, and the sight of Ada sends Van off into a Lucette-less erotic reverie. Depressed, Lucette jumps overboard:

Although Lucette had never died before—no, dived before, Violet—from such a height, in such a disorder of shadows and snaking reflections, she went with hardly a splash through the wave that humped to welcome her. That perfect end was spoiled by her instinctively surfacing in an immediate sweep—instead of surrendering under water to her drugged lassitude as she had planned to do on her last night ashore if it ever did come to this. The silly girl had not rehearsed the technique of suicide as, say, free-fall parachutists do every day in the element of another chapter. Owing to the tumultuous swell and her not being sure which way to peer through the spray and the darkness and her own tentaclinging hair—t, a, c, l—she could make out the lights of the liner, an easily imagined many-eyed bulk mightily receding in heartless triumph. Now I've lost my next note.

The imaginative empathy with which Van, the seemingly cool speaker here, recreates the drowning is an exercise in sorrow and remorse. The interruptions (“no, dived before, Violet”; “t, a, c, l”; “Now I've lost my next note”) reveal that at this point in the novel (and not always before) what we are reading are the memoirs of Van. He is dictating them to Violet Knox, “an enchanting English blonde with doll eyes, a velvet carnation, and a tweed-cupped little rump” who has worked for him (chastely) as a typist since 1957. The text itself in its late stages becomes labile, swooning, polyphonic (the influence of Joyce, doubtless). Its penultimate section consists of the preface to Van's successful study, The Texture of Time—a very Proustian project—but this discursive study suddenly becomes a narrative account of the odd way time and space have finally united Van and Ada. In the last part, after a rueful tribute to Lucette, Van and Ada “die, as it were, into the finished book, into Eden or Hades, into the prose of the book or the poetry of the blurb.” The blurb's “poetry” is, as we've seen, mere vulgar hype, but Ada survives its own self-mockery. It's an amazing work of joy, of disappointment, of forgiveness, of writing.

After the anemic and negligible Transparent Things came Nabokov's final novel, Look at the Harlequins! It is an anti-memoir by an anti-Nabokov whose life and works bear a dream-distorted resemblance to those of the real one. The narrator, one Vadim Vadimych N—, is an exiled, much-married, neurotic writer who has published novels in Russian and in English. Among his English titles are Dr. Olga Repnin, A Kingdom by the Sea (one of Lolita's rejected titles), and Ardis. His squalid life has included a tour of American motels—“… all my motels (Mes Moteaux, as Verlaine might have said!), the Lakeviews, the Valley Views, the Mountain Views, the Plumed Serpent Court in New Mexico, the Lolita Lodge in Texas …”—and a sexual infatuation with his daughter Bel when she was twelve and thirteen. So as not to act on this itch, Vadim marries a pretentious philistine and by so doing forever alienates his highly literate, indeed blue-stocking, daughter. In the lurid refractions of Look at the Harlequins!, Nabokov is making fun of what naive readers of his books—of Lolita, especially—imagined his life was like. It's a coy and defensive conceit that wears out its welcome well before the end.

But the end is remarkable. Vadim has always felt himself prey to “madness … lying in wait for me behind this or that alder or boulder since infancy.” His madness has taken the form of a spatio-temporal block that renders him unable to envision—and therefore to execute—his return home from the simplest journey outdoors. A bright and loving woman, known only as You (though we learn that she was a classmate of Bel's), cures him of this synesthetic disorder. Vadim seems at last to be metamorphosing into his dream-world twin, Vladimir, just as You seems very close to Vera. (Illogically, Look at the Harlequins! is dedicated, by Vadim, to Vera.) Full of the will to master reality and of an equal will to surrender to love, the book makes a somehow fitting, if parasitic, coda to a stupendous career.

Like Balanchine, Nabokov is an endlessly playful formalist whose elegant patterns are really shapes of deep and supple feeling. Without being a heedless sensualist, he brought a delight in the body, in all the senses, to rich expression. He took cruelty and pride for his subjects as James and Proust had done. He is certainly a great novelist and his best work—Lolita; Pnin; Ada; Speak, Memory—remains unsurpassed in the last half of this century.

I find very few slips in Boyd's meticulous notes: on 1,700, he identifies what Nabokov calls “Racine's absurd play” as Athelie instead of Athalie; on III, 822, there are two errors about the movie Black Widow. Vadim Vadimych calls it The Black Widow and Boyd does not correct him; worse, Boyd tells us that Van Johnson was in it. Neither Van Johnson nor Van Veen was in it; Van Heflin was; it was directed by Nunnally Johnson. (Nabokov would have adored the small confusion; perhaps, from Antiterra, he caused it.) Peccadillos aside, Boyd has edited one of the best texts in the entire Library of America series.

Notes

1. Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Brian Boyd; Library of America; Volume I: Novels and Memoirs 1941-1951 (710 pages, $35), Volume II: Novels 1955-1962 (904 pages, $35), Volume III: Novels 1969-1974 (824 pages, $35).

2. Nabokov did, at Stanford in the summer of 1941, teach a course called “The Art of Writing,” in which he orated and read no student writing.