'A Blend of Anonymity and Doom'

The cheap hotel ambiance is unreconstructed film noir: “Not tears, not terror, but a / blend of anonymity and doom, / it seemed, that room, to condescend / to imitate a normal room.” The occupant is not Raymond Chandler’s creation but Nabokov’s – wittier yet sadder, the setting less room than parody of a room, pre-echoing Humbert Humbert: “Parody of a hotel corridor. Parody of silence and death.” The poem is “The Room,” published in the May 5, 1950 issue of The New Yorker. The atmosphere of the room is less specifically American than those in Nabokov’s road novel. 

There’s an impersonal gloominess about such places. On the wall, the speaker finds someone has written “‘Alone, unknown, unloved, I die.’” He comments, as if to subvert the pathos: “It had a false quotation air.” On another wall is a painting depicting “the red eruption which / tried to be maples in the fall[.]” The dig at Winston Churchill’s painterly gifts is gentle. “Restricted Rest” means no Jews. In Lolita, the Enchanted Hunters Motel is advertised as being “near churches,” which decrypts as “Gentiles only.” Nabokov and his family were veterans of anonymous rooms in Prague, Berlin, Paris and the U.S. The room might be an émigré’s final resting place. Here are the concluding stanzas:

 

“Perhaps my text is incomplete.

A poet's death is, after all,

a question of technique, a neat

enjambment, a melodic fall.

 

“And here a life had come apart

in darkness, and the room had grown

a ghostly thorax, with a heart

unknown, unloved -- but not alone.”

 

In a March 20, 1950, letter to his New Yorker editor, Katharine White, Nabokov writes that he has corrected two typos in the draft and adds: "I want to tell you again how grateful I am to the New Yorker for their generosity. I hope you can use the poem soon since Mr. Churchill is getting on in years and any accident or sickness that might happen to him would perhaps interfere with the publication of my good-natured dig.”

 

The Nabokov Online Journal informs us that “The Room” is probably the poem written by Nabokov in English that is most often translated into Russian. It also includes a new Russian translation by Andrey Vakhrulin, who says he has paid particular attention to “specifically Nabokovian words and idioms in order to render the poem’s gentle and serious sound.”

 

[Nabokov’s letter to White can be found in Selected Letters 1940-1977 (eds. Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli, 1989).