'They Fluttered Around Like Blue Snowflakes'

As a former newspaper reporter I regularly read three hard-copy newspapers: The Leader, a neighborhood weekly here in Houston; the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal; and County Highway. That’s down from thirty years ago when I read seven or eight papers every day (like a reporter: quickly, scanning for items of professional or personal interest). I don’t read newspapers online and haven’t read the New York Times much in several decades. 

County Highway started publishing last year and I subscribed from the start. It’s a print-only magazine in the form of a broadsheet newspaper that doesn’t stain your fingers with ink and arrives in the mail four times a year. Its slogan, “America’s Only Newspaper,” is provocative and almost true. You can’t read it online and the editors make no attempt to be timely. They’re not in the breaking-news business. Rather, they specialize in American idiosyncrasy, usually without being cute about it. There’s often an element of nostalgia in their story selection but it seldom descends into patronizing folksiness, and you’ll find no progressive self-aggrandizement. It’s not Yankee magazine or The Nation, and I read most of most issues.

 

The fourth issue of County Highway arrived this week with two stories involving writers on the front page. One, by co-founder and editor-at-large Walter Kirn, is about a chemically enhanced talk he once gave on Hemingway. The other, by Robert Michael Pyle, is devoted to Nabokov – not a subject I expected to see on the front page of a newspaper. Pyle, like Nabokov, is a lepidopterist. I know him best as co-editor with Brian Boyd of Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (2000), with new translations by the novelist’s son Dmitri. It’s a grand book (820 pages), excellent for bedtime reading, and includes lists assembled by Pyle of all the butterflies described by Nabokov and those named after him.

 

Pyle makes a case for Nabokov’s standing as a lepidopterist, which isn’t news to the novelist’s longtime admirers. Pyle doesn’t spare the Linnean nomenclature and detail. He recounts Nabokov's study in the early 1950s of the Karner Blue butterfly, named for a village in suburban Albany, N.Y. As a reporter for the Albany newspaper, I often wrote about the insect’s habitat, the Albany Pine Bush, and visited the butterflies named by Nabokov -- Lycaeides melissa samuelis – flitting among the blue lupines. Pyle quotes a favorite passage from Pnin (1957):

 

“A score of small butterflies, all of one kind, were settled on a damp patch of sand, their wings erect and closed, showing their pale undersides with dark dots and tiny orange-rimmed peacock spots along the hindwing margins; one of Pnin’s shed rubbers disturbed some of them and, revealing the celestial hue of their upper surface, they fluttered around like blue snowflakes before settling again.”

 

Two-thirds of a page in County Highway is given over to Philippe Halsman’s photo of Nabokov “lepping” in Switzerland in 1966, while at work on Ada (1969). Pyle closes with an extended account of Nabokov’s hunt for butterflies in the mountains of Colorado in 1951. In a letter written to Edmund Wilson that September, he describes hiking to 10,000 feet and seeing the village of Telluride below: “[A]ll you hear are the voices of children playing in the streets – delightful!” Nabokov was then working on Lolita, and the sounds of children rising from the valley is transformed into Humbert Humbert’s “climacteric,” as Pyle calls it, the novel’s fifth-to-last paragraph:

 

“Reader! What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.”

 

Finally, Humbert “acknowledges the enormity of his crime, the nature of his monstrosity,” as Pyle phrases it. Of that passage he writes: “This paragraph is the most heartbreaking thing I’ve read, and ties only with Darwin’s final paragraph in The Origin of Species as the most beautiful and affecting passage I know in the language.”

 

A stylistic tic that lends County Highway a pleasingly old-fashioned look is the use of multiple decks of headlines over articles. Pyle’s Nabokov piece has five in various sizes and fonts, starting with a boldface “NABOKOV’S BUTTERFLIES” and concluding with “He wrote great novels, too.” Pyle is a fine lepidopterist and not a bad critic.

 

[Concerning the conjunction of Hemingway and Nabokov on the front page of County Highway, the latter once said of the former: “As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ’forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”]