Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(11)
Véra has blue eyes and a birdlike profile. Her hair is completely white. They are soon to celebrate a wedding anniversary, “our golden,” Nabokov says. They met in Berlin and married there in 1925, but they might as easily have met in Leningrad. “We went to the same dancing class, didn’t we?” he asks. It has not been an unhappy marriage then? “That is the understatement of the century,” Nabokov smiles.
He is currently at work on the French translation of his novel Ada, which was published in 1969. It is the memoir of a philosopher, Van Veen, who fell in love when he was fourteen with his cousin, Ada, then twelve, who turns out to be his sister, and on and off their lives are entwined into old age, until he is ninety-seven and she ninety-five. “My fattest and most complex book,” he says. It is also his preferred masterpiece, although the public still chooses Lolita. This translation has already taken five years. Vera says that her husband is going over it line by line. “You see some terrible booboos,” he moans. Nabokov knows French and German perfectly and, with his revisions, is content about the translations in these languages. His son, Dmitri, was unfortunately too busy to check the Italian edition; the horrors of the Turkish and Japanese Nabokov does not like to imagine.
He regards himself as an American novelist, and from the comfort of Switzerland professes great love and nostalgia for the United States, where he spent eighteen years, from 1940 to 1958. He prizes his U.S. passport, but here he remains, in the artistic vaults where rest such other international treasures as Chaplin and, when he was alive, Noel Coward, not to mention lesser pieces of bric-a-brac. He sips a gin and tonic. “It’s only an accident that we’re here,” he explains. His wife had been here in 1914 with her family, and when the two of them passed through in 1961, she said, why not stay for a while? They have been here ever since. “I introduced kidding into Montreux,” he says.
Novelists, like dictators, have long reigns. It is remarkable to think of Nabokov’s first book, a collection of love poems, appearing in his native Russia in 1914. Soon after, he and his family were forced to flee as a result of the Bolshevik uprising and the civil war. He took a degree at Cambridge and then settled in the émigré colony in Berlin. He wrote nine novels in Russian, beginning with Mary, in 1926, and including Glory, The Defense, and Laughter in the Dark. He had a certain reputation and a fully developed gift when he left for America in 1940 to lecture at Stanford. The war burst behind him.
Though his first novel written in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, in 1941, went almost unnoticed, and his next, Bend Sinister, made minor ripples, the stunning Speak, Memory, an autobiography of his lost youth, attracted respectful attention. It was during the last part of ten years at Cornell that he cruised the American West during the summers in a 1952 Buick, looking for butterflies, his wife driving and Nabokov beside her making notes as they journeyed through Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, the motels, the drugstores, the small towns. The result was Lolita, which at first was rejected everywhere, like many classics, and had to be published by the Olympia Press in Paris (Nabokov later quarreled with and abandoned his publisher, Maurice Girodias). A tremendous success and later a film directed by Stanley Kubrick, the book made the writer famous. Nabokov coquettishly demurs. “I am not a famous writer,” he says, “Lolita was a famous little girl. You know what it is to be a famous writer in Montreux? An American woman comes up on the street and cries out, ‘Mr. Malamud! I’d know you anywhere.’”
He is a man of celebrated prejudices. He abhors student activists, hippies, confessions, heart-to-heart talks. He never gives autographs. On his list of detested writers are some of the most brilliant who have ever lived: Cervantes, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, and Henry James. His opinions are probably the most conservative, among important writers, of any since Evelyn Waugh’s. “You will die in dreadful pain and complete isolation,” his fellow exile, the Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin, told him. Far from pain these days and beyond isolation, Nabokov is frequently mentioned for that same award. “After all, you’re the secret pride of Russia,” he has written of someone unmistakably like himself. He is far from being cold or uncaring. Outraged at the arrest last year of the writer Maramzin, he sent this as yet unpublished cable to the Soviet writers’ union: “Am appalled to learn that yet another writer martyred just for being a writer. Maramzin’s immediate release indispensable to prevent an atrocious new crime.” The answer was silence.
Last year Nabokov published Look at the Harlequins!, his thirty-seventh book. It is the chronicle of a Russian émigré writer named Vadim Vadimych whose life, though he had four devastating wives, has many aspects that fascinate by their clear similarity to the life of Vladimir Vladimirovich. The typical Nabokovian fare is here in abundance, clever games of words, sly jokes, lofty knowledge, all as written by a “scornful and austere author, whose homework in Paris had never received its due.” It is probably one of the final steps toward a goal that so many lesser writers have striven to achieve: Nabokov has joined the current of history not by rushing to take part in political actions or appearing in the news but by quietly working for decades, a lifetime, until his voice seems as loud as the detested Stalin’s, almost as loud as the lies. Deprived of his own land, of his language, he has conquered something greater. As his aunt in Harlequins! told young Vadim, “Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!” Nabokov has done that. He has won.