`What I remember most about that damp Swiss morning is the vibrancy of new beech leaves. Not long out of their buds, they were the essence of fragility, the very definition of spring green. Beneath the beeches, by the steep path down to the lake, early purple orchids were just now at their peak. Together with last year's leaf copper, the soft leaflets, and fresh mud, they painted the path in colors richer than the wet April day gave any reason to expect. When the fog thinned and the rain came more heavily, the beeches and orchids glowed in the dull damp light. I brachiated downhill like some anxious ape, swinging from beech to smooth wet gray beech.'
This is a thoroughly representative, if restrained, example of Nabokovian prose, displaying as it does many of the Master's characteristics and quirks. There is the ever-present awareness of nature - Nabokov's sensibility in face of the natural world was as exquisitely responsive as a grazed knee - the slightly shy-making diminutives ("soft leaflets"), the weakness for alliteration ("dull damp light", "some anxious ape"), the expertly placed mundaneity (that "fresh mud"), Americanised spelling ("colors", "gray") the arch employment of obscure words ("brachiated" the use of arms as a supplementary means of locomotion: Chambers), and above all, perhaps, the glint throughout of a recording eye that misses nothing, however sunny the disposition of its owner.
Where does the passage come from? The memoir Speak, Memory, perhaps, or one of the late novels, Ada, for instance, or Look at the Harlequins! (how oddly misjudged is that exclamation mark, or "exaggeration mark", as Nabokov himself used to call it)? In fact, it is the opening paragraph of the essay "Between Climb and Cloud: Nabokov among the Lepidopterists", by one of the editors of Nabokov's Butterflies, the nature writer and lepidopterist, Robert Michael Pyle. It just goes to show the truth of the observation that the greatest stylists are the easiest to mimic.
Perhaps the word is unfair; Mr Pyle (in the magical land of Nabokovia all real-life names take on a faintly suspicious hue; one of the leading Nabokov scholars bears the unlikely appellation "Alfred Appel, Jr.") is too fine and self-confident a writer to need to imitate anyone. In the vicinity of Nabokov's work, however, critics, commentators and occasionally book reviewers cannot resist taking on protective colouring. Even his admirably sober biographer, Brian Boyd, displays an iridescent, eyed wing now and then; here is the opening paragraph of his essay that forms the introduction to this volume, "Nabokov, Literature, Lepidoptera": "Let me pin Vladimir Nabokov into place alongside several superficially similar specimens."
Nabokov's Butterflies is an odd affair; the publisher's blurb is unwontedly accurate in describing it as "a unique and unprecedented literary event". No doubt Nabokov - or VN, as he sometimes coyly styled himself - would have approved and appreciated it, and would have greeted any reviewer's querulous query with the same scorn that, in a famous anecdote, he turned on the unfortunate faculty wife who at a college get-together asked him, "But what are butterflies for?" The point about butterflies, as about art, is that they are not for anything; their glory, for Nabokov, is their blissful inutility. Yet the point continues to inflame one's itch to know, as Boyd puts it, "why . . . someone with Nabokov's great gift as a writer [should] be so obsessed with something so peripheral as butterflies are to most readers", or again, with another gaudy stylistic flexing, "Does his passion for papillons indicate that he is insufficiently interested in people?"
To his own questions Boyd provides an answer that has many strands, including Nabokov's uniquely receptive eye for beauty, his obsessive love of the world's minutiae ("I prefer the specific detail to the generalization, images to ideas, obscure facts to clear symbols, and the discovered wild fruit to the synthetic jam"), and his genuine scientific zeal, but he also puts forward, almost in passing, the proposition, one that VN would surely have frowned on, that the discerning and studying of pattern - and pattern is of prime importance in lepidoptery - "allows us some degree of control over the unruliness of life, and in Nabokov that urge to control was powerfully developed . . . "
Well, who could have blamed Nabokov for being the control freak Brian Boyd suggests he was? Born with a whole canteen of silver spoons in his mouth, the young Nabokov was robbed not only of an estate and fortune but of a country, an entire childhood landscape the loss of which haunted him throughout his life, though it also served to make him into one of the most evocative of the great writers, whose conjurings of the past surpass in brilliance, clarity and heartbreaking beauty anything in his much-admired Proust. Everything that he knew and loved in his native Russia was swept away by the October Revolution, and he and his family were driven into exile, where, among other calamities, his adored father was assassinated.
Nabokov young and old prided himself on his emotional resilience and aristocratic poise, but deep within him there crouched always the lost child that he had once been, that extraordinarily precocious little boy with a butterfly net in one hand and a sheaf of poems in the other, whose world is so lovingly recreated in Speak, Memory. Here he is, in an earlier, fictional work, recalling how, as a child, emerging pupa-like from a bout of pneumonia, he was presented by his mother with a precious and life-forming gift; this is Nabokov the artist at his opulent best and at the same time his clotted, well-nigh indecent worst:
. . . I relive in my temples, oppressive and intense to the point of making them buzz, that swarthy winter morning with the lamp's reflection on the lacquered wood of the screen adorned with Chinese birds, when I was in bed recovering from one of the childhood illnesses across whose deserts I kept pursuing my father's caravan, and my mother brought me, with a special play of her features - as if to say, oh, I'm holding something not especially interesting - as she slyly, lovingly replied to the moans of my yearning, to the frenzied groping of my outstretched hands, sharing beforehand all the quiver, all the goose-pimpled nakedness of my soul, the joy that would have bounced me out of my bed had she waited another second, a magnificently solid, boxed, freshly printed, first volume of Butterflies and Moths of the Russian Empire.
NABOKOV was a connoisseur of pleasure, but also of pain, who had gained his expertise in both at first-hand.
From the evidence of Nabokov's Butterflies, it is clear that he was a considerable scientist; indeed, his colleagues in the laboratory regarded him as a great lepidopterist who happened also to write fiction. His specialisation was butterfly and moth genitalia, a perfectly respectable and intricate area of study that nevertheless led inevitably to misunderstandings, suspicions, and the odd dropped brick (Pyle chuckles indulgently over an "old story" of Nabokov at Harvard being called away from his specimens to show a group of visiting alumni around the museum, and growing impatient and saying, "Excuse me, I must go and play with my genitalia." Um). He began serious work in lepidoptery as soon as he arrived in America in 1940, and had soon made a name for himself among the leading savants of this arcane discipline. Much of Nabokov's But- terflies consists of scientific papers and articles which will be hardly comprehensible to the common reader, though there is a peculiarly bracing fascination in skimming through these crowded and, for the layman, wholly resistant pages.
What Boyd and Pyle have set out to do is construct a sort of biography refracted through the lens of science (although, as Boyd points out, one could read a thousand or more pages of Nabokov's fiction and find no hint of his other abiding interest). Hence there are extracts, some brief, some extended, from Speak, Memory, of course, but also from almost all the novels and many of the short stories, from letters, essays, papers, etc, all containing more or less explicit references to lepidoptery. The effect can be bathetic, as in frequent, isolated snippets such as this from a 1930 letter to his wife, Vera: "I went to see Obenberger at the entomological museum again" - gosh - or mindnumbing, as in the 40-page appendix to the early novel The Gift - from which the passage quoted above describing that memorable "swarthy winter morning" is taken - wisely dropped by the author, and translated here for the first time by his son, Dmitri, who also provides Englishings of other bits and scraps, stylishly, but not always happily: Nabokov pere would never have allowed a solecism such as "more perfect", and the meticulous editor in him would have pounced on the unaccountable "poured [read pored] over" in the extract here from the novel Bend Sinister, translated by VN himself in 1947.
Though it has the rather alarming, stony weight of a grave-slab, Nabokov's Butterflies is handsome, and beautifully produced and printed, with wonderful colour prints of Nabokov's drawings, as well as some fascinating if somewhat cloudy black-and-white illustrations. There are countless delights here for those willing to expend a little energy, always required on an expedition into Nabokovia, where, as the old magician himself puts it in a glossing of a phrase from the Bible, "the glory of God is to hide a thing, and the glory of man is to find it".
John Banville is Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times