Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, by Brian Boyd

...A friend of the present reviewer's who knew Nabokov well (and whose name appears in the acknowledgments of both of Boyd's volumes) tells a story about an afternoon he spent with the novelist in the latter's final years...

...Irina, a resident of Paris, was an attractive, 31-year-old blonde with classically regular features and a cultivated mind...

...Nabokov's rapturous enjoyment of Irina was not, however, unalloyed, for the unease and guilt he felt about deceiving Vera brought on a serious attack of psoriasis, the "indescribable torments" of which almost drove him to the brink of suicide...

...We cannot gauge Vera's answer because we are not vouchsafed it, but in the introduction to the book Boyd gives us his...

...Small wonder, then, that the youth soon became a devotee of high-risk mountain climbing and an ardent competitor in racing-car rallies, and that he dreamed of owning an airplane...

...Vera arrived and joined her husband and little boy...

...But while The American Years is alive with evocative examples of Nabokov's successes as an undergraduate teacher at Wellesley and Cornell, instances of a father taking the time to teach his blindly loyal son something are all but non-existent...

...He told her that he hadn't stopped loving her, but that he was attached to his wife...

...The American Years tells any number of richly circumstantial stories in gracefully crafted prose, but only rarely does Boyd turn them about till every facet has caught the light...

...What was the connection between these two events...

...Upon reaching the port of St...

...That these dramatizations were also exercises in self-concealment was entirely consistent with his personal penchant for denial...

...Although Vera learned of the affair through an anonymous letter, Nabokov vehemently denied that there was any truth in the charge...

...She refused...

...Thus we are told that during his first years in America he occasionally had lunch in Boston with the editor of the Atlantic, Edward Weeks, at the downstairs cafe at the Ritz...

...While denying to Vera that he was doing so, he continued writing to Irina...

...Although he did set the story down in Russian, it remained unpublished and he came to deem it unsatisfactory...

...In failing to do so, it inadvertently undercuts Boyd's handling of the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question of Nabokov criticism...

...7b suffer and make suffer: The whipsawing sado-masochism in Nabokov's personality was never more fully exposed than it was in the Guadinini affair, and in the three-cornered story he dreamed up two years later about a deceitful man and the woman he marries so as to be able to stalk her young daughter he found the basic structure for the most haunting of his many dramatizations of his inner life...

...That is almost 'I love you' in Russian," he explained...

...On a summer night in Cannes, he at last confessed to Vera that he was in love with another woman...

...Furthermore, the longer Field labored, the more careless his work became, so that by the mid-1970s Nabokov and his wife were communicating with him only through lawyers...

...Except for the night his father was murdered in Berlin, this was the worst moment in his life...

...And although he was willing to acknowledge that "about twice a week I havea good long nightmare" filled with "kaleidoscopic arrangements of broken impressions" and "fragments of day thoughts," he defiantly added that his dreams were "utterly lacking [in] any possible Freudian implication or explication...

...For at no point does the author paint a darker and more complex portrait of the artist than the artist himself would have sanctioned...

...BOOK REVIEWS At the end of May 1940, three weeks before the German tanks rolled into Paris, 41-year-old Vladimir Nabokov, his wife Vera, and their six-year-old son Dmitri were at last able to flee France and sail for New York...

...rr he American Years does not sustainn the parent-child morality play with which it begins...

...For Nabokov wanted to convince the world that he was a man who cherished the harmony of family love above all else, and who saw a reflection in that love of the essential kindliness of life...

...Lolita was a product of Nabokov's imagination...

...College girls, he said, had heavy calves...

...Not only that, but it is far and away his finest work...

...Despite Boyd's salute to Pale Fire as the most perfect novel, in terms of sheer beauty of form, that has ever been written, not to mention his further insistence that "Signs and Symbols" is one of the greatest short stories in any language and that Speak Memory is the most artistic of all autobiographies, Nabokov, like Mark Wain, is the author of but one masterpiece...

...Nabokov was likewise notorious for his savage put-downs of major imaginative writers...

...The statement is vintage Boyd: scrupulously detailed and wonderfully naive...

...On the first day of his elementary Russian course one year, Nabokov found on his desk a yellow vase with blue flowers...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991 37...

...By expressing contempt for the author of Crime and Punishment, the author of Lolita distanced himself from a literary kinship that he did not wish to admit...

...Another charming story...

...He went to the blackboard, wrote "yellow blue vase," and asked the students what it said...

...Of course not...

...In despair, she announced she wanted to join him...

...Ahead lay another forty years of serenely happy marriage...

...But while Boyd understands the sublimated sex feelings that led the girls to place the vase of flowers on the desk,he can't detect their masculine counterpart at play in Nabokov's superb response...

...in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs—the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate—the little demon among the wholesome children...

...The fact that Brian Boyd, in the opening paragraphs of Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, recapitulates the episode—and endorses its symbolism—without a qualifying comment of any kind about the extent of its correspondence to the daily realities of Nabokov's record as a parent is a prophecy, unfortunately, of his intellectual posture in the rest of the narrative...

...T. S. Eliot's poetry was "tedious nonsense" and Henry James's short stories were "miserable stuff...

...Within the same age limits the number of true nymphets is strikingly inferior to that of provisionally plain, or just nice, or "cute," or even "sweet" and "attractive," ordinary, plumpish, formless, cold-skinned, essentially human little girls, with tummies and pigtails, who may or may not turn into adults of great beauty...

...Yellow blue vase," of course...

...only through flirtations with death, he seems to have concluded, could he focus his parents' undistracted attention upon his activities...

...His remorse and self-hatred thereupon intensified, but he could not bring himself to break with Irina...

...She told him to go to her...

...Her ever-audacious mother persuaded her to ignore his wishes...

...Knowing of the passion she had conceived for Nabokov, her mother invited him to join them at dinner...

...As the captain of the Liberte kept asking Vera during a cocktail-hour conversation in the middle of the Atlantic in 1959, what had prompted her husband to write a novel about a middle-aged sex pervert who marries a woman he doesn't love in order to get at her 12-year-old daughter...

...For these courtesies he expected that Field would interview no one but himself and a few designated friends...

...Biographical light from a different angle is thrown across Lolita by the affair with Irina Guadinini...

...Nabokov had a dreadful time with an earlier biographer, Andrew Field...

...You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide...

...The age range of Wellesley undergraduates—and of Cornell coeds—would have turned off Humbert, of course...

...Vladimir Nabokov, after all, believed in the essential kindliness of life...

...In half a dozen ways, Boyd makes clear that American girls were crazy about Nabokov...

...The stratagem worked...

...One of his students at Wellesley later confessed about herself and her classmates that "we were madly in love with him"—and why shouldn't they have been...

...But if Lolita's first-person narrator is not to be confused with his creaVLADIMIR NABOKOV: THE AMERICAN YEARS Brian Boyd/Princeton University Press/757 pp...

...The parents did take the boy along with them, Boyd shows us, on the summertime trips to the Rockies on which Nabokov, net in hand, pursued his passion for butterflies...

...He told her not to...

...Just as he lied about the letter Vera received about his affair with Irina, so he hated, feared, and decried the mask-stripping analyses of psychiatrists, Freud's above all...

...Chacun, however, a son...

...When the family left for lunch, Irina was still keeping her vigil...

...Nabokov's ideas about family love were so intense—we are told—that he was inspired to test them against their "apparent inversion or negation...

...The sadomasochism in Dostoevsky's work points to an explanation of this extraordinary judgment...

...But the idea was still part of his mental baggage [in May 1940] as he stepped down toward the Atlantic with his son...

...As he typically remarked to Edmund Wilson, Dostoevsky "is a third-rate writer and his fame incomprehensible...

...Vera Nabokov, the vigilant keeper of the flame of her late husband's reputation and the executrix of his every wish, knew what she was doing when she "condoned" Boyd's researches and granted him free access to the Nabokov Papers, both in the Library of Congress and in Montreux...

...Otherwise, we who are in the know, we lone voyagers, we nympholepts, would have long gone insane...

...After enunciating the phrase, ya lyublyu vas, he added, "That is probably the most important phrase I will teach you...

...As he was walking to the beach one morning with three-year-old Dmitri, Irina came up to him...

...Furthermore, says the biographer, one of the "chief reasons" for Nabokov's acceptance of an invitation to teach at Harvard for a term was that Dmitri would then be finishing his freshman year there, and he assures us that Dmitri's subsequent pursuit of a singing career in Europe influenced his parents' decision to leave the United States and settle in Switzerland...

...Between the ages of nine and fourteen, Humbert rhetorically asks, are all girl children nymphets...

...In Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, published last year, Boyd acknowledges the affair with Guadinini, but rounds off his account of it by emphasizing the enduring strength of the Nabokovs' marriage: Nabokov resolutely put the past behind him, and he and Vera soon found their old footing...

...Of all his literary hatreds, however, only one amounted to an obsession...

...A decade later, the novelist would conclude the chronicle of his early life, Speak Memory, with this charming—and selfmythologizing—episode...

...Please leave the beach, he said...

...Nabokov never saw her again...

...Weeks recalled that Nabokov would come in in a shabby tweed coat, trousers bulging at the knee, but be quite the most distinguished man in the room, with his perfectly beautiful hazel eyes, his fine brown hair, the Ran, the spark...

...In the teeth of his hatred of "ibm-peeping" investigators, as well of his distaste for the "vulgarity of 'human interest,' " he had cooperated with Field, writing him long letters and permitting him to examine at least a portion of his sealed papers in the Library of Congress...

...While they were sitting together on the sunlit terrace of an Alpine hotel, Nabokov kept nudging his visitor's arm and winking at him, in elaborate appreciation of the post-nymphet lovelies flitting about the grounds of the establishment like so many butterflies...

...In return," says Boyd, I let her see all I wrote and took note of her painstaking comments on matters of style, fact and interpretation in every part of my text and at several stages of its composition...

...Instead, the young man repaid him by ferreting out the story of his 1937 affair with Irina Guadinini, a skeleton that Nabokov had dearly wanted to keep locked in the family closet...

...The American Years expands upon that affirmation, but never addresses the question of whether the tightly meshed unity of the V's left Dmitri feeling like an outsider in his own family...

...Nazaire, the three of them set out on foot for the waterfront, and as they drew near to their destination the parents kept looking down at the little boy between them, in fond anticipation of his enchanted, gleeful reaction to the first glimpse of their ship's splendid funnel through a gap in a broken row of houses...

...35 Kenneth S. Lynn 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991 tor, any more than Huckleberry Finn's ought to be with his, Humbert Humbert surely bears more of a relationship to the life of Vladimir Nabokov than Boyd's "inversion" formulation allows...

...Our occasionally lively, even Bette, disagreements have never impinged a jot on my freedom to write what I construe the evidence requires...

...He just had to walk into the room and the girls looked around—the clothes didn't make any difference...

...lb those who saw Vladimir and Vera at close range, they seemed like young lovers even in their sixties and seventies...

...A normal man given a group photograph of school girls or girl scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them...

...In the latter connection it is of further significance that whereas "other Cornell professors sent their children to local public schools," the fluently multi-lingual Nabokov shipped Dmitri off to the Holderness School in Plymouth, New Hampshire, because he wanted him "exposed to foreign languages...

...Not now," he cried...

...Diatribes about "that Viennese quack" occurred so frequently in his lecture courses that a girl in his European literature class at Cornell fmally got up in disgust and left the room, much to his astonishment...

...In Brian Boyd, by contrast, the novelist has acquired a biographer whose books almost surely would have pleased him, Kenneth S. Lynn is the author of Hemingway, among other works: had he lived to read them, even though they rest on hundreds of interviews...

...Could a passage of such discriminative nicety have been achieved by Nabokov had he not had an intense interest in female sexuality...

...In 1939, Boyd goes on to say, he had imagined the tale of a man who marries a woman only to become the stepfather to the younger daughter he really craves...

...Only two years after the affair began, blossomed, and died, Nabokov composed the urversion of his masterpiece, i.e., the story he wrote in Russian but did not publish...