Nabokov’s junior and an instructor when he was there, remembers how Nabokov once asked him if he had ever watched a certain soap opera on television. Soap operas are of course ultimately comic if not fantastic in the way they characterize life as an uninterrupted series of crises and disasters; but missing the point altogether, suspecting a deadly leg-pull and supposing that with either answer he would lose (one making him a fool, the other a snob), Nabokov’s young colleague had been reduced to a fit of wordless throat-clearing. Recalling it ten years later, he seemed disarmed all over again. On easier terms with Nabokov was Professor M. H. Abrams, who warmly recalls how Nabokov came into a living room where a faculty child was absorbed in a television western. Immediately engaged by the program, Nabokov was soon quaking with laughter over the furiously climactic fight scene. Just such idle moments, if not literally this one, inform the hilarious burlesque of the comparable “obligatory scene” in
Lolita
, the tussle of Humbert and Quilty which leaves them “ panting as the cowman and the sheepman never do after their battle. ”
Even though he had academic tenure at Cornell, the Nabokovs never owned a house, and instead always rented, moving from year to year, a mobility he bestowed on refugee Humbert. “The main reason [for never settling anywhere permanently], the background reason, is, I suppose, that nothing short of a replica of my childhood surroundings would have satisfied me,” says Nabokov. “I would never manage to match my memories correctly—so why trouble with hopeless approximations? Then there are some special considerations: for instance, the question of impetus, the habit of impetus. I propelled myself out of Russia so vigorously, with suchindignant force, that I have been rolling on and on ever since. True, I have lived to become that appetizing thing, a ‘full professor,’ but at heart I have always remained a lean ‘visiting lecturer.’ The few times I said to myself anywhere: ‘Now that’s a nice spot for a permanent home,’ I would immediately hear in my mind the thunder of an avalanche carrying away the hundreds of far places which I would destroy by the very act of settling in one particular nook of the earth. And finally, I don’t much care for furniture, for tables and chairs and lamps and rugs and things—perhaps because in my opulent childhood I was taught to regard with amused contempt any too-earnest attachment to material wealth, which is why I felt no regret and no bitterness when the Revolution abolished that wealth” (
Playboy
interview).
Professor Morris Bishop, Nabokov’s best friend at Cornell, who was responsible for his shift from Wellesley to Ithaca, recalled visiting the Nabokovs just after they had moved into the appallingly vulgar and garish home of an absent professor of Agriculture. “I couldn’t have lived in a place like that,” said Bishop, “but it delighted him. He seemed to relish every awful detail.” Although Bishop didn’t realize it then, Nabokov was learning about Charlotte Haze by renting her house, so to speak, by reading her books and living with her pictures and “wooden thingamabob[s] of commercial Mexican origin.” These annual moves, however dismal their circumstances, constituted a field trip enabling entomologist Nabokov to study the natural habitat of Humbert’s prey. Bishop also remembered that Nabokov read the New York Daily News for its crime stories, 21 and, for an even more concentrated dose of bizarrerie, Father Divine’s newspaper,
New Day
—all of which should recall James Joyce, with whom Nabokov has so much else in common. Joyce regularly read
The Police Gazette
, the shoddy magazine
Titbits
(as does Bloom), and all the Dublin newspapers; attended burlesque shows, knew by heart most of the vulgar and comically obscene songs of the day, and was almost as familiar with the work of the execrable lady lending-library
Lolita
, the tussle of Humbert and Quilty which leaves them “ panting as the cowman and the sheepman never do after their battle. ”
Even though he had academic tenure at Cornell, the Nabokovs never owned a house, and instead always rented, moving from year to year, a mobility he bestowed on refugee Humbert. “The main reason [for never settling anywhere permanently], the background reason, is, I suppose, that nothing short of a replica of my childhood surroundings would have satisfied me,” says Nabokov. “I would never manage to match my memories correctly—so why trouble with hopeless approximations? Then there are some special considerations: for instance, the question of impetus, the habit of impetus. I propelled myself out of Russia so vigorously, with suchindignant force, that I have been rolling on and on ever since. True, I have lived to become that appetizing thing, a ‘full professor,’ but at heart I have always remained a lean ‘visiting lecturer.’ The few times I said to myself anywhere: ‘Now that’s a nice spot for a permanent home,’ I would immediately hear in my mind the thunder of an avalanche carrying away the hundreds of far places which I would destroy by the very act of settling in one particular nook of the earth. And finally, I don’t much care for furniture, for tables and chairs and lamps and rugs and things—perhaps because in my opulent childhood I was taught to regard with amused contempt any too-earnest attachment to material wealth, which is why I felt no regret and no bitterness when the Revolution abolished that wealth” (
Playboy
interview).
Professor Morris Bishop, Nabokov’s best friend at Cornell, who was responsible for his shift from Wellesley to Ithaca, recalled visiting the Nabokovs just after they had moved into the appallingly vulgar and garish home of an absent professor of Agriculture. “I couldn’t have lived in a place like that,” said Bishop, “but it delighted him. He seemed to relish every awful detail.” Although Bishop didn’t realize it then, Nabokov was learning about Charlotte Haze by renting her house, so to speak, by reading her books and living with her pictures and “wooden thingamabob[s] of commercial Mexican origin.” These annual moves, however dismal their circumstances, constituted a field trip enabling entomologist Nabokov to study the natural habitat of Humbert’s prey. Bishop also remembered that Nabokov read the New York Daily News for its crime stories, 21 and, for an even more concentrated dose of bizarrerie, Father Divine’s newspaper,
New Day
—all of which should recall James Joyce, with whom Nabokov has so much else in common. Joyce regularly read
The Police Gazette
, the shoddy magazine
Titbits
(as does Bloom), and all the Dublin newspapers; attended burlesque shows, knew by heart most of the vulgar and comically obscene songs of the day, and was almost as familiar with the work of the execrable lady lending-library
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