A man for all seasons

Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita. By Robert Roper.Bloomsbury; 354 pages; $28 and £20.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV never doubted his own talent: “By the age of 14 or 15 I had read or reread all Tolstoy in Russian, all Shakespeare in English and all Flaubert in French—besides hundreds of other books.” From that foundation came a stream of literary criticism, translations, short stories, poetry and fiction—including, of course, “Lolita”, one of the most controversial novels of the 20th century.

Did other authors match this talent? Nabokov mostly thought not: Proust and Pushkin were to be admired, but certainly not Hemingway, Faulkner or Boris Pasternak (whose “Dr Zhivago” was, in Nabokov’s opinion, a Soviet plot to earn foreign exchange). In the end, Nabokov even scorned Edmund Wilson, an American critic and author who had been his friend and literary and social ally for almost all his time in America, from his flight with his Jewish wife from the Nazis in Europe in 1940 to his tax-efficient departure for Switzerland two decades later.

Robert Roper, for whom Nabokov is “the great python of art” with his “bulging repasts” of Russian, French and English literature, balances Nabokov’s arrogance with his sense of fun and eccentricity (no other great writer has been a serious lepidopterist, travelling more than 200,000 miles across America in search of yet more butterflies to catalogue). His insights are not necessarily new—he pays tribute to the biographies by Brian Boyd and Stacy Schiff—but they are perceptive: “He is not like us—us Americans. Not because he reads a lot, and not because he reads in three languages, but because he hears his sources as he writes.” And in that writing, Mr Roper adds, “in general he derogated plot—plottedness was a characteristic of lesser works, he thought.”

Perhaps inevitably, and despite Mr Roper’s conscientious descriptions of the motels of the American West and the butterflies of its high mountains, “Lolita” dominates much of “Nabokov in America”. As this author and others before him have argued, “Lolita” may well be a parody. Martin Amis takes a firmer view: “Of Nabokov’s 19 fictions, no fewer than six wholly or partly concern themselves with the sexuality of prepubescent girls.”

One delight of Mr Roper’s book is his willingness to quote at length from Nabokov’s writings. It is hard not to be impressed anew by Nabokov’s tongue-in-cheek humour, the brilliance of his language and the clever complexity of books such as “Pnin” and “Pale Fire”. A minor annoyance is the occasional pretentiousness. With such literary inspiration, why use words such as “cathexis”, French phrases for no real reason or the horrible “the country that had refuged them”? A writer should pay heed to his subject.