Roper, Robert Nabokov in America: On the Road to ‘Lolita (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 337 although one can also flick through its pages for simple and near-endless entertainment, Mel´nichenko’s contribution is to have provided an invaluable sourcebook and user’s guide for generations to come. St Antony’s College, University of Oxford Jonathan Waterlow Roper, Robert. Nabokov in America: On the Road to ‘Lolita’. Bloomsbury, New York and London, 2015. 354 pp. Map. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $28.00: £20.00. Until now there has been no study solely devoted to the twenty years Nabokov spent in the United States. Robert Roper’s Nabokov in America: On the Road to ‘Lolita’, however, promises to remedy this. According to the dust-jacket blurb, ‘On the two-lane highways and in the roadside cafés of the ’40s and ’50s, we come to understand Nabokov’s seductive intimacy with the American mundane’. At the same time, Roper’s book is professed to be ‘a love letter to American literature, tracing Nabokov’s broad and ingenious embrace of it’. If only that were so. Roper does indeed follow the Nabokovs’ many crosscountry excursions in pursuit of butterflies, even revisiting some of the motels and cabins where they stayed on these trips, and there is, also, some reference to contemporary American literature and letters, but Roper’s portrait of Nabokov ‘the American’ fails to convince. Marred throughout by a sense that he has missed his mark, Roper’s portrayal of this Russian émigré who took up American citizenship and declared himself destined to become an American writer is skewed, his attempt to situate him in post-war American culture frustratingly lacking. In the light of this, therefore, Roper’s ultimate contention that ‘something has gone out of American writing with Nabokov’s passing’ (p. 254) rings disappointingly hollow. Of course, to produce a successful, insightful and original biographical work onawriterwhoselifehasalreadybeensowelldocumentedisnoeasytask.Roper makes much use, mainly of the second volume, of Brian Boyd’s authoritative and as yet unsurpassed biography (Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Princeton, NJ, 1991), and Stacey Schiff’s study of Nabokov’s wife (Véra: Mrs Vladimir Nabokov, London, 1999), as well as the two long-published editions of letters, most prominently the correspondence between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. Roper also draws on material from the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, Nabokov’s autobiographical work, Speak, Memory, his writings on butterflies compiled by Boyd and the lepidopterist, Robert Michael Pyle (Boston, MA, 2000), and the interviews published in the collection, Strong Opinions. All this is familiar territory, but Roper brings a certain freshness to his account through his efforts to trace the course of the Nabokovs’ American SEER, 94, 2, APRIL 2016 338 years, literally, by following the routes they took on long vacations (one of the most useful parts of the book is the map printed inside both back and front covers detailing their travels) and by tracking down the people who knew them — friends, acquaintances, colleagues, even school-mates of their son, Dmitri. One glaring omission, and one that is hard to understand, however, is the time Nabokov spent in Los Angeles writing his screenplay for Kubrick’s Lolita. Nabokov found himself living off Sunset Boulevard, mixing writing with Hollywood parties, while still able to hunt his beloved butterflies in the hills behind his rented house. Roper makes no mention of this, even though it was important in many ways, and not merely because to write for film had been an ambition since Nabokov’s early days in émigré Berlin. The absence of this episode is indicative of Roper’s minimal consideration, across his study, of Nabokov’s career as a whole. Although, admittedly, Nabokov’s pre-American work falls outside the scope of Roper’s study, the answers to many of the puzzles of this period, details that occasionally seem to confound Roper, lie in these early years, and are crucial in revealing Nabokov’s purpose as an American writer. Despite his apparent engagement with a range of sources, Roper’s study has a flatness about it. Neither Nabokov nor his America come to life. Instead, the reader is left with a sense of a man obsessed with his own artistry, who made no real...