Arthur Phillips probes the “seamless circle” of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire

The Tragedy of Arthur
by Arthur Phillips
(Random House, 2011)

Author of the just-published The Tragedy of Arthur, Arthur Phillips joins our continuing series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry with this exploration of what Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire means to him.

In my evolution from avid reader to reader-with-embarrassing-aspirations to novelist, I have noticed a disturbing trend: I no longer read fiction as I once did. I read as much as I ever have, but I’ve become a professional inspector, examining the author’s tools and tricks, asking an admiring “well now, how did he do that?” Sometimes I believe I can see the writer at work: here is where she added material to cover a flimsy joint; here is where he followed an outline; there is where he improvised. At times I believe I can even make out the starting point, that first stitch where the author began to weave outwards, the theme or character or image that first bubbled up for the author’s attention, convincing or commanding her that it was worth sitting down to write for the next two years.

Of course, I still have magical, unauthorial reading experiences, and in the hands of great writers, my thin skin of technical knowledge falls away and I am as exposed and loving a reader as I was as a little kid hoping Sherlock Holmes would kick Professor Moriarty off that cliff. I just read Moby-Dick for the first time (a couple of decades late), and before long I was just another of Melville’s foam-splashed fans, wishing the 672-page work was twice as huge again. Not that I insist on a diet of the dead: George Saunders’ collections of stories, Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline instantly turned me into a happy child, and do so on every re-reading.

And then, in a category all by itself, my white whale, unassailable, irreducible, built according to principles forever hidden from me, there is Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, a perpetual motion machine, a seamless circle, invisible to a technician’s eye.

I can find no starting point. I love almost all of Nabokov’s work, yet I can convince myself I see where some of his other books began, the plot hook or creep. Not Pale Fire.

Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly studies bring together two cultures

Vladimir Nabokov caught his first butterfly in 1906 and his mother, an avid mushroom collector herself, taught him how to pin and spread it. In Speak, Memory he recalls from his childhood:

From the age of seven, everything I felt in connection with a rectangle of framed sunlight was dominated by a single passion. If my first glance of the morning was for the sun, my first thought was for the butterflies it would engender.

For the next seventy years hunting, collecting, and studying butterflies would prove one of the driving passions of Nabokov’s life. He and his wife spent summers in the 1940s driving from New England to Colorado hunting butterflies and Nabokov drew on those trips to create the detailed scenes of motel life in middle America that fills the pages of Lolita. In the stories “Christmas” and “The Aurelian,” in the novels Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift, and Pale Fire, Nabokov explicitly wove his knowledge of lepidopterology into his fiction.

Biographer Brian Boyd captured the interplay of Nabokov’s scientific and literary pursuits in his introduction to Nabokov’s Butterflies:

His love of Lepidoptera drew upon and further sharpened his love of the particular and the habits of detailed observation that gave him such fictional command over the physical world—biologically (birds, flowers, trees), geographically (localities, landscapes, ecologies), socially (manorial Russia, boardinghouse Berlin, motel America), and bodily (gesture, anatomy, sensation). He thought that only the ridiculously unobservant could be pessimists in a world as full of surprising specificity as ours, and he arranged his own art accordingly.

Nabokov’s two worlds came together again this week. Carl Zimmer reported in The New York Times that scientists have found persuasive evidence to support Nabokov’s theory of how the Polyommatus blues, the species he studied most closely, migrated in several waves across the Bering Strait and down into South America. The news has sparked discussions on blogs that would have tickled C. P. Snow, as scientists like John Hawks reflect on their favorite Nabokov stories, and literary bloggers like Erin Overbey and Jeff VanderMeer celebrate Nabokov’s scientific acumen.

Related Reader’s Almanac posts:

• Vladimir Nabokov shares his enthusiasm for Lolita jackets from around the world
• Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita first published in the U.S. 52 years ago

Related LOA works: Vladimir Nabokov: Complete American Novels

Looking back: The most popular Story of the Week selections and Reader’s Almanac posts

The beginning of the year prompts moments of reflection. Looking back on 2010 The Library of America has been heartened by the warm reception readers gave to two of the year’s initiatives. In January LOA launched Story of the Week to a base of thirty thousand subscribers. That number is now approaching seventy thousand and increasing every week.

The swelling numbers may account for the most popular stories occurring in the past five months. What else connects them? We’ll leave that to you, although watching thousands of readers vault a lesser-known gem like "The Little Room" to the #2 spot makes us think "a good yarn” is as good a guess as any.

1. “Hunting the Deceitful Turkey,” Mark Twain – week of November 22
2. “The Little Room,” Madeline Yale Wynne – October 18
3. “The Train,” Flannery O’Connor – October 4
4. “I’ll Be Waiting,” Raymond Chandler – December 6
5. “The Nature of Liberty,” H. L. Mencken  – September 6

In July LOA launched the Reader’s Almanac with daily posts seeking the “enduring” in American literature. The most popular posts often surprised us by spiking traffic five to seven times the average volume. Finding a pattern among them is a bit of a puzzle. Who knew so many readers would find sales data so interesting? Or a decades-old video of ethnographic research? Or an anonymous rejection letter?

1. The Best-Selling Titles in The Library of America’s First Three Decades – January 3, 2011
2. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Dylan: Desolation Angels led to “Desolation Row” – October 21, 2010
3. Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita first published in the U.S. 52 years ago – August 18, 2010
4. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, and How to Sell a Banned Book – September 29, 2010
5. Zora Neale Hurston: Video of her ethnographic work in Florida in 1928 – July 26, 2010

We know that no one would get a greater kick over his appearance on both lists than Mark Twain, this year’s most beguiling best-selling author, but he probably would have expected no less.

Vladimir Nabokov shares his enthusiasm for Lolita jackets from around the world

The good folks at Vintage/Anchor pointed us to the following video on YouTube. Particularly delightful is Nabokov’s quip about the Turkish cover (“I'm not sure who is—who is older!”).



See a previous Reader’s Almanac post about the reception of Lolita upon its publication—and the hostile rejection letters Nabokov initially received.

Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita first published in the U.S. 52 years ago

After what he called “five years of monstrous misgivings and diabolical labors,” Nabokov finished writing Lolita in December 1953 and began submitting it to publishers. “It is overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian. To the public, it will be revolting. It will not sell, and will do immeasurable harm to a growing reputation.... I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.” So went one of the many rejection letters. Five leading publishers—Doubleday; Farrar, Straus; New Directions; Simon & Schuster; and Viking—all turned it down.

That was when Nabokov’s European agent, Doussia Ergaz, recommended Maurice Girodias of the Olympia Press in Paris, publisher of Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, and William S. Burroughs. Nabokov was then teaching Russian Studies at Cornell and feared he would be fired unless the book was published under a pseudonym. Girodias would publish it, but only with Nabokov’s name as author. Nabokov agreed but was wary, as he expressed in a letter in July 1955: “You and I know that Lolita is a serious book with a serious purpose. I hope the public will accept it as such. A succès de scandale would distress me.”

Girodias printed 5,000 copies of Lolita in English in September 1955. It sold mostly to English tourists and did not receive any critical attention until, in an interview with the London Times, Graham Greene named it one of the three best novels of 1955. This prompted John Gordon of the Sunday Express to order a copy and to denounce it as “about the filthiest book I’ve ever read” and “sheer unrestrained pornography.” The ensuing brouhaha (Gordon pointed out that Greene had been sued by Shirley Temple “for having said the little girl made her living out of displaying her thighs for the delectation of middle-aged gentlemen”) made Lolita into an international sensation. Responding to Gordon’s attack in Esquire, Dorothy Parker wrote:

I cannot regard it as pornography, either sheer, unrestrained, or any other kind. It is the engrossing, anguished story of a man, a man of taste and culture, who can love only little girls ... an anguished book, but sometimes wildly funny, as in the saga of his travels across and around the United States with her.... [Nabokov’s] command of the language is absolute, and his Lolita is a fine book, a distinguished book—alright then—a great book.

The New York Public Library “Sessions” pages, edited by Rodney Phillips and Sarah Funke, recount the dramatic story of the American publication:

Though copies of the Girodias edition were making it into the United States, Nabokov still wished for an American edition. Jason Epstein, then an editor at Doubleday, hoped to convince Doubleday's president, Douglas Black, to take the novel, by playing upon Black's desire to refight the court battle he had recently lost over Edmund Wilson’s The Memoirs of Hecate County. In an attempt to gain ground, Epstein arranged for an excerpt (about a third of the novel) to appear in Doubleday's June 1957 Anchor Review, with critical praise from Partisan Review editor F.W. Dupee. The Anchor volume featured Nabokov’s specially written explanation of the genesis of the novel and his defense of it on the grounds of “aesthetic bliss”: “On a Book Entitled Lolita.”

Throughout the summer and into the fall, Nabokov endured delays and denials by Doubleday, Simon & Schuster and even Putnam’s. He settled on the small independent publisher Ivan Obolensky, but when his offer, too, fell through, Putnam’s made good on an earlier proposal, and went into production.

On publication day [August 18], Putnam’s president, Walter Minton, sent a congratulatory telegram:

EVERYBODY TALKING OF LOLITA ON PUBLICATION DAY YESTERDAYS REVIEWS MAGNIFICENT AND NEW YORK TIMES BLAST THIS MORNING PROVIDED NECESSARY FUEL TO FLAME 300 REORDERS THIS MORNING AND BOOK STORES REPORT EXCELLENT DEMAND CONGRATULATIONS ON PUBLICATION DAY.

By the end of the day, 2,600 orders had been received.

The “blast” referred to by Minton was Orville Prescott's pan, although Elizabeth Janeway's review that had appeared the previous day in the Sunday Times was a rave. Lolita would go on to be the first book since Gone With the Wind to sell 100,000 in its first three weeks.

In a 1964 interview for Life Magazine, Jane Howard asked Nabokov, “which of your writings has pleased you most?”

I would say that of all my books Lolita has left me with the most pleasurable afterglow—perhaps because it is the purest of all, the most abstract and carefully contrived. I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.

Related LOA works: Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1955–1962 (includes the screenplay Nabokov wrote for the 1960 Stanley Kubrick film. It differs substantially from the final film.)