Johns Hopkins Professor Robert Roper dialogues "Nabokov in America: On The Road to Lolita "

Introduced by San Francisco State Univesrity Professor, Dr. ar Calkins, and marking the 75th year of Vladimir Nabokov's arrival in America, Robert Roper's new book finds its narrative heart in the Nabokov's sojourns with his wife Vera and son Dimitri over twenty years. He went  into the mountainous West and Middle West on  butterfly expeditions. They drove over 200,000 miles.  His first position in America was cataloguing the butterfly collection at Harvard's comparatyive zoological museum and teaching at Wellsley College where he was very popular. .  In his research for the novel, "Lolita", he observed teens, listened to their music, rode busses to overhear their conversations, "to get it right", to put it to his own purposes.  Nabokov saw that in this era in America there was censorship about sexual frankness , but at the same time, such books sold really well.

Having lived in France and Germany and being Russian, Nabokov he said he had to "invent" America; "After all it took me 40 years to invent Russia"  were his words. Before decamping to America, Nabokov had "imagined America" When he first met Vera, who would be his wife, he said to her, "Do you want to go to America with me? " Nabokov liked Herman Melville and Moby Dick; he liked the intertexuality and picked up the music of the prose.  He also liked the vagabond tradition, invented by Walt Whitman, in his Song of the Open Road. Most likely he read Kerouac.  He also did a road trip of more than 200,000 miles, seeing America's hinterlands, on the pretext of collecting butterflies. Nabokov liked to read the naturalists, John Muir and John Burrough's writings.

As a Russian, he was from a aristocratice family, and they took only his moterh's jewels when they went into exile.  They lived in Berlin.  They were viewed as being in "bad shape" when they arrived in America as immigrants.  Nabokov wanted to make his mark in America; he was very gifted and wanted his books to be best sellers.

His brother Nicholas Nabokov a composer, whose biography was published not so long ago, had met Edmun Wilson, the literary journalist, who wrote for The New Republic and The New Yorker, as they  vacationed near one another on the Cape.   Nicholas mentioned his brother's arrival and Wilson opened many doors for him, including "The New Yorker", but they separated, when Nabokov took a very critical position towards Pasternak.  Wilson said what Nabokov said about Pasternak was "unforgiveable".

Roper characterizes Nabokov as an arch modernist who got it "right" about America.  He invented the girl "Lolita" in his lab. He liked Tolstoy, but he put down Thomas Mann and William Faulkner.  Mann was in America at the same time, and wrote "Death in Venice", predicting Proustian modernism.  He went to Hollywood and lived in the Pacific Palisades; he never, as did Nabokov talk to ordinary people.  Nabokov knew many amateur butterfly collectors, for instance, a lawyer in Kansas, with whom he had a friendship.   He taught thousands of students. Ruth Bader Ginsberg took his course; she says that is where she learned to read.  Nabokov had a "healthy" ego, says, Roper, but Nabokov was "self effacing". as well.

In Dr. Strangelove, Peter Sellers satirizes an interview between the great literary scholar, Lionel Trlling and Nabokov.  You can watch it on utube.   Trilling taught at Columbia University; Sellers thought they looked silly, as two intellectuals talking about sex and little girls.  Guess he didn't read "Alice in Wonderland".  

Such were some of the revelations of the book by Ronald Roper, who lives in both Berkeley, California and Baltimore, Maryland.   It was a captivating conversation.

See Books. " Silent Partner", "What Do Nabokov's letters conceal?"  by Judith Thurman, in the   November 16, 2015 (this week)

See NYRB: Stacy Schiff, Letters to Vera by Vladimir Nabokov, and "Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita"   November 19, 2015.  Vol LXII No. 18