When asked in an interview for The Paris Review in 1967 whether he had felt at home during his time in America, Nabokov said he was ‘as American as April in Arizona’. Asked if anything reminded him of the Russia of his youth, he replied, ‘my butterfly hunting, in a loop of time, seemed at once to resume the butterfly chases of my vanished Vyra.’ The ‘fairly wild’ landscapes of north-western America were, he pointed out, ‘surprisingly similar to the Arctic expanses of northern Russia’.
Butterflies reminded him of home and, wherever life took him, he felt comfortable, butterfly net in hand, waiting to catch one of his precious, delicate creatures – rather like catching memories and ideas, and transforming them into characters at his writing desk. ‘My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music,’ he once wrote. ‘My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.’
In a letter to his sister (1945), Nabokov wrote that ‘to know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena — all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it.’
He became utterly hooked on collecting, pinching the delicate, colourful creatures at the thorax, then studying them carefully to find out everything he could about them. There was a price to pay – late in life, Nabokov’s eyesight failed, ruined by all the hours he’d spent looking at tiny genitalia under a microscope in the back room of Harvard’s museum.
[Nabokov at home, 1965] Vladimir Nabokov loved everything to do with butterflies; he read about them, drew them, wrote about them and collected them throughout his life.
[Nabokov’s butterfly cabinet] Nabokov kept his butterfly penis specimens inside little glass vials, packed into cigar boxes.
[Butterfly hunting] Nabokov and his wife Vera spent weekends butterfly hunting.
[Morpho butterfly] Rare genetic mutations produce gynandromorphs like this morpho butterfly, which is male on the left side and female on the right. Nabokov wrote about finding a gynandromorph as a young boy and was pleased that Harvard had one in its collection.
SO ASKED CHARLES DICKENS. He had at least three cats. One was named William, until Dickens realized she was a girl and renamed her Williamina. She had kittens, and he kept one, which became known as the Master’s Cat. It used to snuff out his candle to get his attention. A third cat was called Bob. He helped Dickens open his letters.
Bob wasn’t a spectacularly talented cat; the way he helped was rather odd. When dear Bob passed on in 1862, Georgina Hogarth, who was Dickens’s sister-in-law, had his little paw – which once padded around on the author’s lap, walking all over his writing or whatever he was trying to read, as cats seem to love to do – immortalized as the handle of a letter opener.
She had the strange feline and ivory piece engraved ‘C. D. In Memory of Bob. 1862’ and gave it to Dickens as a gift, to remind him of the love of his cat. He kept it in the library at Gad’s Hill, so that it was at his side as he wrote. It is now in the Berg reading room on the third floor of the New York Public Library in Manhattan. It shares a space with Dickens’s writing desk and chair – the ones he used when travelling – and 13 prompt copies the author had made to help him when doing public readings.
What’s a prompt copy? I’ll let Isaac Gewirtz, the Berg curator explain: ‘Dickens wasn’t only a great writer, he was a fantastic actor: he loved to perform his work, rather than simply read extracts from it. He filleted his novels, pulling out the most dramatic scenes. Then he had two or three copies printed and bound in case he lost one. His main copy he annotated, with stage directions and cues for himself. We have 13 annotated prompt copies here in the Berg.’
How brilliant to be able to see what Dickens’s audiences couldn’t.
One of the most popular of his readings was A Christmas Carol. The library owns the prompt copy he used to perform the story at public readings. He made this particular copy in a unique way.
Over to Isaac: ‘He had a binder remove the leaves from an 1849 copy of his novel and stick them to blank leaves which were then bound together as a new volume. Then he took this new book and read through his text, rewriting and simplifying tricky sentences. He got rid of evocative passages that set the scene in London and cut out descriptions of characters’ emotional states because he could convey those in the tone of his voice.’
He covered the copy with annotations, like a stage manager might annotate a script for a performance. He added cues, such as ‘Tone down to Pathos’ and ‘Up to cheerfulness’, which would remind him of how to play scenes; and he also underlined bits, such as ‘For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself.’ He used postage stamps as Post-it notes, to mark the places he wanted to read from. The corners of the stamps that were stuck on to the page are still there, while the bits that stuck out have fallen off.
His cat Bob, who was immortalized in the letter opener, was named after Bob Cratchit, Scrooge’s assistant in A Christmas Carol. It’s fitting then that Bob’s paw shares a cabinet with the library’s prompt copy of the tale the writer used for years at his wildly popular readings.
Several of these readings took place in America. He made two tours there: the first, in 1842, turned a bit ugly when he criticized American publishers for pirating his works, and when he travelled in the South, saw slavery at first hand for the first time and wrote angry articles against it. When he came back in 1867, all was forgiven. This time, he performed twice in New York, in the cavernous Steinway piano display hall on East 14th Street, and at the largest church in Brooklyn. People lined up in the snow for tickets – some even slept outside to be sure of a spot in the crowd: the queue, by opening time, was a mile long. The lucky people inside heard Dickens read from the book that is now in the library.
Reading it doesn’t give you the perfect idea of what his audiences heard each night – no two performances were the same. Sometimes Dickens would make things up on the spur of the moment, or slam the book shut with a flourish and perform from memory. He knew his stories by heart and could act them perfectly.
So how did the letter opener and prompt copies end up in New York? Well, when Dickens died, he bequeathed his estate to his sister-in-law, the lady who had given him the macabre letter opener. She wrote letters of authenticity for everything.
She sold some things, and passed others on to Dickens’s son. The letter opener and other Dickensian treasures were bought by a publisher in New York called E. P. Dutton; they had a sale, and two brothers – physicians of Jewish Hungarian descent called Albert and Henry Berg – turned up and bought the lot, to add to their glittering collection of American and British literature.
In 1940, the surviving brother, Albert, gave everything to the New York Public Library, and built an Austrian oak-panelled room for researchers. The Berg reading room was the result.
The street that leads to the New York Public Library is lined with quotations. I read them on my way to visit the library, then I walked up the steps to the entrance, which are guarded by