Craig Raine fondles Vladimir Nabokov

Craig Raine

• Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years by Brian Boyd
  Chatto, 783 pp, £25.00, January 1992, ISBN 0 7011 3701 0

Nabokov ‘had a flypaper feel for words’, according to Alison Bishop, who knew him at Cornell when she was a child. He might, therefore, have relished his biographer coming mildly unstuck in the course of this otherwise tenacious, intricately argued, judicious account of Nabokov’s life in the States, and, post-Lolita, in Montreux. Disposing of Andrew Field, his predecessor in the field, Brian Boyd cites his insolent, perfunctory response to one of Nabokov’s factual corrections. Told an event had taken place in July and not on ‘a wet autumnal day’, Field emended the phrase to ‘a wet autumnal day in July’ – a covert imputation and rebuke of pedantry, not without a certain Nabokovian brilliance. The brilliance is unconsciously acknowledged by Boyd some forty pages later when his own phrase, ‘a wretched autumnlike spring’, revisits the trope.