Casting the First Shadow

By R.Z. Sheppard

Vladimir Nabokov has lived all his adult life as an endangered (and dangerous) species. Woe unto the literary pretender who does not get his facts and grammar straight. Titled men of letters must be particularly careful. Edmund Wilson audaciously questioned Nabokov's Russian and was mauled by return mail. Critic George Steiner was the victim of one of the neatest decapitations in literary history. Responding to a generously appreciative essay, Nabokov wrote that "Mr. Steiner's article ("Extraterritorial") is built on solid abstractions and opaque generalizations. A few specific items can be made out and should be corrected."

To Biographer Andrew Field, Nabokov: His Life in Part must seem like the roughest final exam of his academic life. Field, 39, is a New Jersey-born scholar who now teaches literature at Griffith University in Australia. He has had a working and personal relationship with his subject since the publication of Nabokov: His Life in Art (1967), Field's excellent study of the Russian American's novels and stories.

Alluding discreetly to a few difficult moments, Field allows that his book "does not come with the recommendation of Vladimir Nabokov." There is, after all, the great man's general dislike of biographies, summed up in one word: "Psychoplagiarisms." There is also the autobiography Speak, Memory in which Nabokov has written iridescently of his privileged youth in old Russia and of his stateless years as a penurious emigre in Berlin and Paris.

Yet there did remain a need for a fuller, totally accurate account of his life. As Nabokov told Field, "The first biography, no matter what comes after, casts a certain shadow on the others." It is characteristic of Nabokov's precision and fastidiousness that he would like to arrange those shadows. Says Field: "He was defending his life. I was defending my task and my independence."

Both parties are well served by Nabokov: His Life in Part. The book is a valuable document that provides the sort of details that would have grounded Speak, Memory. Field delves into Nabokov's genealogy: the evidence is circumstantial, but the possibility of noble Tartar ancestors is strong. In his mother's family tree there are Baltic barons and Teutonic knights. There are added highlights to previous glowing portraits of Nabokov's father V.D. Nabokov, an authority on criminal law and a courageous liberal in Russia's first, shortlived Parliament. He was killed in 1922 in Berlin, while preventing an assassination at a political meeting. After all the articles and interviews published about Nabokov, it is no longer news that as a refugee in Weimar Berlin, he began his brilliant literary career while earning his living by teaching English and tennis. But he also supplemented his income as a movie extra and even wrote a film scenario titled The Love of a Dwarf. The unproduced script became the short story The Potato Elf, his first work to appear in the U.S. (Esquire, 1939). Nabokov's literary combativeness has been well chronicled, but he has also been a man who would not sit on his hands if personal honor was offended. He once punched a tipsy German who had insulted the writer's wife Vera.

Many facts about Nabokov's youth and early manhood are little known be cause of what Field sees as the aristocratic artist's need to be inaccessible to others. If, for example, Nabokov had told us that Leo Tolstoy once patted him on the head, it would sound like name dropping. When Field relates the incident, it not only is delightful in itself but also becomes part of a rich cultural context.

Field carefully turns the native and foreign soils that have nurtured his subject: the Cambridge University days when Nabokov devoted most of his time to sports and writing Russian poetry; the vigor of exile literature in prewar Europe; dispersal of emigre energies and talents after the war began. Nabokov's love affair with America, his teaching experiences at Wellesley and Cornell, and his success with Lolita are covered in more detail than most readers may care to absorb. But Nabokov's friendship and celebrated squabble with Edmund Wilson are sensitively yet amusingly rendered.

Field believes that the young relationship in the early '40s was uneasy because both writers were at awkward stages in their careers. Nabokov's European reputation had yet to transplant itself to America. Wilson the literary journalist was just becoming Wilson the critic and man of letters. Furthermore, says Field, Wilson often chose to play the brooding Russian, while Nabokov played the easygoing American. The following conversation is reported to have taken place in 1942 -- Wilson: "Do you believe in God?" Nabokov: "Do you?" Wilson: "What a strange question!" According to Field, the friendship ended in 1954, when Wilson told Nabokov that he strongly disliked Lolita. Nabokov was angered, not because of the criticism (Wilson praised the book in 1971) but because the critic had read only half the manuscript.

Field's book contains -- to use the last words of Ada -- "much, much more." Whether by scheme or coincidence, that novel flew like Zeno's paradoxical arrow. Part 1 took up half the book. Part 2 was half of one remaining half, etc., ad infinitum. Perhaps this was Nabokov's metaphor for the inexhaustible magic of memory. Field, too, stoically accepts the fact that he can never quite reach his target. Yet he still manages to track the flight of genius.

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