If you’re looking for an escape from reality these days, I have some good news: John Banville has a new book out. The Drowning is one of Banville’s whodunnit crime novels (a series begun under the pseudonym Benjamin Black), not one of his more high-brow literary tomes that have earned him the moniker of “the next Nabokov.”
Which reminds me: A few weeks ago I was reading reviews of Thomas Pynchon, who has been described at various points over the years as, yes, the next Nabokov. And just last week, a review of Sally Rooney’s new novel Intermezzo (reviewed in America here) noted that Rooney “inhabits some previously uninhabited space halfway between Hemingway and Nabokov.”
That’s a lot of Nabokov love. (For the record, Nabokov loathed Hemingway’s writing, dismissing it as “something about bells, balls and bulls.”) But it is also a sign of the enormous influence the three-time exile has had on English-language literature, not to mention Russian and French literature. Even our meanest literary critics—Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens—had kind words for the master.
Once upon a time, the Nabokov book everyone read was Lolita, but I’m not sure that book, the chronicle of a pedophile’s seduction of an underage victim, hasn’t long since been canceled. It was required reading when I was in high school (okay, maybe that does seem a bit weird in retrospect) and is ranked fourth on Modern Library’s list of the 100 best 20th-century novels.
It’s not his only novel on that list: Pale Fire comes in at #53. And his memoir, Speak, Memory, is #8 on the nonfiction list. I read the latter in my M.F.A. program—my thesis advisor, Michael Scammell, had translated two of Nabokov’s books into English, The Gift and The Defense (he also corrected my pronunciation: It’s Na-BO-kov, not the way Sting sings it), and Scammell considered Speak, Memory to be essential reading for any writer of nonfiction.
Vladimir (“rhyming with ‘redeemer,’” he once told an interviewer) Nabokov was born in Russia in 1899. His aristocratic family sought refuge in Crimea after the Russian Revolution, eventually fleeing to Western Europe during the Russian Civil War. Nabokov, who had learned English as a child, was accepted to the University of Cambridge in 1918. He studied Slavic and Romance languages (and zoology, a lifetime interest), graduating in 1922 and moving to Berlin with his family.
Nabokov’s first novel in 1926 was in Russian, as were the next nine. In Berlin, he became known in the Russian expatriate community as a poet more than a novelist. He moved to France in 1937, then fled again for the United States when Germany invaded France in 1940. He would live in the United States for the next 21 years, teaching Russian, Russian literature and European literature at Wellesley College and Cornell University from 1941 to 1959 (among his students at Cornell was—reputedly—the aforementioned Thomas Pynchon).
Nabokov’s first novel he wrote in English was The Real Life of Sebastian Knight in 1941, followed by Bend Sinister six years later.
Nabokov completed Lolita in 1953, but couldn’t find an English-language publisher; the novel was finally published in 1955 by Paris-based Olympia Press. Lolita encountered widespread condemnation—“the filthiest book I have ever read,” wrote John Gordon of the London Sunday Express—and was banned in both Great Britain and France for a time, but also had its fans: Graham Greene called it one of the best books of the year.
Finally published in the United States in 1958, Lolita became an immediate best-seller, and has sold over 50 million copies since. America never reviewed the book, though longtime film reviewer Moira Walsh did take on the film adaptation in 1962. She didn’t hate it, writing that “[t]he movie, in its own bitter fashion, is witty and amusing for the first half,” and noting for readers that both Nabokov and director Stanley Kubrick were aiming for a satirical takedown, not a celebration, of the notorious narrator Humbert Humbert.
Lolita was joined over the next 20 years by poetry, short stories, literary criticism, the memoir Speak, Memory and the novels Pnin, Pale Fire, Ada, Transparent Things and Look at the Harlequins! A fragmentary posthumous novel, The Original of Laura, was published in 2009 by Nabokov’s son Dmitri. Many of his Russian novels have also been translated into English over the years. He was a seven-time finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.
Nabokov’s novels were routinely reviewed in America, almost always favorably. “Nabokov is a remarkable writer with a strong sense of his own importance in the history of English letters,” wrote Doris Grumbach (yes, that Doris Grumbach) in a 1968 America review of King, Queen, Knave. “The more remarkable thing about him is that he may well be right in his estimate.”
Nabokov, made wealthy by Lolita, retired from teaching in 1959 and moved to Switzerland, where he died in 1977. In addition to his literary legend, he also developed a reputation for particularly pointed barbs aimed at cultural touchstones and other authors, including Thomas Mann, Jane Austen, Sigmund Freud, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Camus, William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot and the aforementioned Hemingway.
He was quoted in a New York Times obituary as having once said “I don’t fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to analysts, or take part in any demonstrations. I’m a mild old gentleman, very kind.”
A curious side note: When America announced the George W. Hunt, S.J., Prize for Excellence in Journalism, Arts & Letters in 2015, Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin objected to the criteria for selection, which included that the winner be of “sound moral character and reputation,” with no previously published works that are “manifestly atheistic or morally offensive.” Art, Ulin argued, is “most effective when it surprises us, leading to affinities, empathies, we might not otherwise allow,” and America’s restrictions would have excluded authors like Flannery O’Connor and Nabokov. He used Lolita as his example:
Perhaps the most famous contemporary example of this is Humbert Humbert, the pedophilic narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Lolita,’ who literally seduces us with his voice. It is only when we look up from the page that we realize with whom we’ve identified — and the shock is in our recognition of his terrible humanity, which renders him as (yes) a lot like us.
Is Nabokov’s novel morally offensive? Patently, it is not. We live in a universe of treacherous choices, of corruption and degradation on both the individual and the collective level. To pretend otherwise is the true moral offense, to write as if it were possible to reduce the nuance, the ambiguity, of experience to stark shades of black and white.
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Our poetry selection for this week is “Imitations of Eternity,” by Brooke Stanish. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
- The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
- What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
- Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
- Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
