BOOKS
147
figure, who lends this book its enduring value. Field succeeds in
making him a lmost physically present, not only through the device of
having him intrude constantly upon the narrative as it proceeds but
also in his skilful recreation of distant and surely hitherto unheard-of
events. Examples are everywhere. Nabokov's beloved father was
gunned down at a meeting of ex iles in Berlin when he sought to protect
the real target of the attack. Field vividly dep icts the event, in itself well
enough known , but he a lso places the distraught son unforgettably at
the scene. He follows , sometimes in great detail, the Nabokov who
criss-crossed America as an indefatigabl e lecturer on literary and
sometimes entomologi cal themes. Nabokov copes with sleepless nights
in Pullman berths, missed connections, the lost cufflink, and an
itinerary that must have been composed by an agent with no map.
In
a
matter of days he goes from Coker College (for white women) in South
Carolina up to Ri chmond (l ecture cancelled) and down to Spelman
College (for black women) in Atlanta, where his lecture on Pushkin's
African ancestry is stormily approved of and where Nabokov is
enchanted by students and faculty , then off
ins Blaue
to pass through
Macalester College in St. Paul , where there were nine hundred in the
audience, perhaps because a local paper had announced him as "a
celebrated Soviet writer and a personal fri end of Joseph Stalin," and
sometime lat er through Dartmouth, where the audience for his lecture,
which someone had forgot to announce, numbered eight. Nabokov
once had a serious case of ptomaine poisoning from having eaten
Virginia ham with spinach and coffee in a Harvard Square establish–
ment (" ... the fateful blue plateful ," writes the incorrigible Andrew).
In Ithaca he was fri ends with an F.B.I. agent. We witness the exact
words with which Roman Jakobson is alleged to have scotched
Nabokov 's appointment at Harvard. We attend his classes at Cornell,
follow th e uneasy fri endship with Edmund Wilson through its spectac–
ular conclusion, move with the almost propertyless Nabokovs from
one rented house to another, and learn , in some detail,
of
his much–
admired work on bUllerfly genitalia. All this we do while being
agreeably aware of Nabokov's constant surveillance of the narrative
from the vantage point of his apartment in the Montreux Palace Hotel.
It
is highly entertaining and satisfying.
CLARENCE BROWN
