Three
From Wellesley to Cornell
The year 1948 was a pivotal one for Vladimir Nabokov. He had spent six years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, teaching literature to Wellesley College undergraduates and, in his spare time, indulging his passion for studying butterflies at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. After eight years in the United States, the tumult and trauma of emigration had receded. English, Nabokov said many times, was the first language he remembered learning, and the lure of America had sustained him as he fled the Russian Revolution for Germany, and then from the Nazis to Paris—a necessary step when married to a woman who was proud and unafraid to be Jewish.
The United States, and particularly the Boston area, proved a generally happy environment for Nabokov, Véra, and their son, Dmitri, who was fourteen years old in 1948. Since they’d found a haven there, Nabokov had worked on a book about Nikolai Gogol, about whom he had decidedly mixed feelings; published a novel, Bend Sinister; and begun the version of his autobiography that would appear as Conclusive Evidence a couple of years later. (He would later rewrite it and publish it under the title Speak, Memory.)
Nabokov had also traveled across America three times, in the summers of 1941, 1943, and 1947. (He would repeat the cross-country trip four more times.) He never drove, entrusting the task to his wife, Véra, or a graduate student. The first time, Dorothy Leuthold, a middle-aged student in his language class, had spirited the Nabokovs from New York City in a brand-new Pontiac (dubbed Pon’ka, the Russian word for “pony”) all the way to Palo Alto, California.
The trio stayed in motor courts and budget hotels and other cheap lodgings that wouldn’t break the bank. The America Nabokov witnessed on these trips was eventually immortalized as the “lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country” that Humbert Humbert comments on in Lolita: “Beyond the tilled plain… there would be a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm, peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dove-gray cloud.” Though his marriage to Véra was once again stable, an affair had nearly derailed it a decade earlier, when she had gone on to Paris before him. Perhaps news of his romantic attentions to at least one Wellesley student had not reached Véra—or if it had, she did not view the dalliance as anything serious.
Nabokov had been ill for much of the first half of 1948. He suffered a litany of lung troubles during the spring that no doctor could adequately diagnose. They thought it might be tuberculosis because of the alarming quantities of blood Nabokov coughed up. It wasn’t. The next guess was cancer. That, too, proved untrue. When doctors put a vulcanized rubber tube down his windpipe under local anesthetic to inspect his ailing lungs, all they found was a single ruptured blood vessel. Nabokov himself figured his body was “ridding itself of the damage caused by thirty years of heavy smoking.” Bedridden, he had enough energy to write, but not to teach, so Véra stood in for him as lecturer.
After these summer trips, Nabokov was always glad to return to Cambridge. Wellesley, his academic and personal refuge, had turned down his multiple entreaties for a full-time professorship. Nor could he find full-time work at Harvard, where he’d made a quixotic bid to turn his butterfly-hunting hobby into a proper profession. But the Nabokovs’ fortunes were about to change thanks to Morris Bishop, a romance literature professor at Cornell who would remain a close friend to both Vladimir and Véra. Bishop lobbied Cornell to appoint Nabokov a professor of Russian literature, and it worked. On July 1, the Nabokovs moved to Ithaca, New York, finding solace in a “quiet summer in green surroundings.” By August, they had rented a large house on 802 East Seneca Street, one far bigger than their “wrinkled-dwarf Cambridge flatlet”—and future inspiration for the house where a man named Humbert Humbert would discover the object of his obsession.
The summer also brought Nabokov a formative book, thanks to the literary critic Edmund Wilson, who sent Nabokov a copy of Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex. He drew attention to one appendix that contained the late-nineteenth-century confession of an unnamed engineer of Ukrainian descent. The man had first had sex at age twelve with another child, found the experience so intoxicating he repeated it, and eventually destroyed his marriage by sleeping with child prostitutes. From there the man went further downhill, to the point where he flashed young girls in public. The confession, as Nabokov related in a later interview, “ends with a feeling of hopelessness, of a life ruined by hunger beyond control.”
Nabokov appreciated Wilson’s gift and wrote him after reading the case histories. “I enjoyed the Russian’s love-life hugely. It is wonderfully funny. As a boy, he seems to have been quite extraordinarily lucky in coming across [willing girls]…. The end is rather bathetic.” Nabokov also directly acknowledged the impact of Ellis to his first biographer. “I was always interested in psychology,” he told Andrew Field. “I knew my Havelock Ellis rather well….”
He was, by this point, five years from finishing the manuscript for Lolita, and a decade from its triumphant American publication. But Nabokov was also nearly twenty years into his efforts to wrestle a thematic compulsion into its final form: the character who became Humbert Humbert.
SKIP PAST THE OFT-QUOTED opening paragraph of Lolita’s first chapter. Chances are, even if you’ve never read the novel, you probably know it by heart, or some version of it. Move directly to paragraph two: “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line.”
In Humbert Humbert’s eyes, the girl named Dolores Haze is a canvas blank enough to project whatever he, and by virtue of his narration, the reader, sees or desires—“But in my arms she was always Lolita.” She is never allowed to be herself. Not in Humbert’s telling.
When the reader meets her, Dolores Haze is just shy of twelve years old, born around the first of the year in 1935, making her two years and three months older than Sally Horner. She is an inch shorter than Sally and, at seventy-eight pounds, a good twenty pounds lighter than her real-life counterpart. There aren’t other facts and figures available for Sally, but Humbert measures every physical aspect of Dolores: twenty-seven-inch chest, twenty-three-inch waist, twenty-nine-inch hips, while her thigh, calf, and neck circumferences were seventeen, eleven, and eleven, respectively.
Dolores’s mother, the former Charlotte Becker, and her father, Harold Haze, were living in Pisky, a town somewhere in the Midwest best known for producing hogs, corn, and coal, when their daughter was born. Conception, however, took place in Veracruz, Mexico, during the Hazes’ honeymoon. Another child followed in 1937, the year of Sally’s birth, but that offspring, a blond-haired boy, died at two. Sometime thereafter—Humbert is vague on details—Harold also perished, leaving Charlotte a widowed single mother. She and Dolores move east to Ramsdale, and set up house at 342 Lawn Street, where both mother and daughter will encounter a man who will alter their lives irrevocably and with monumental consequences.
When he first sees her, Humbert Humbert describes Dolores in poetic terms: “frail, honey-hued shoulders… silky supple bare back… chestnut head of hair” and wearing “a polka-dotted black kerchief tied around her chest” that shields her breasts from Humbert’s “aging ape eyes.”