'Anticipating Since Morning a Successful Hunt'

The neighbors had several tall ash trees growing in their backyard behind the garage and the trunks were a favorite perch for Polyphemus and especially cecropia moths. These are large insects, beautifully colored, with “eyes” on their wings. To budding lepidopterists they were irresistible. The moths were probably attracted to the sap dripping from the trunks of the ash trees. 

In one of the entomology books I read as a kid I found a recipe for moth bait -- sugar, overripe bananas, pancake syrup and beer, mixed in a bowl and applied to the trunks with a paint brush. Why the beer, I don’t know, but we had plenty of it at home and nobody would miss a bottle.

 

On this date, March 15, in 1922, Vladimir Nabokov published a Russian poem titled in English, “Moths,” in Rul’ (The Rudder), an émigré newspaper in Berlin. As translated by his son Dmitri, it’s seventy-three lines long and it too contains a recipe for moth bait:

 

“For you,

moths, I prepare a lure:

anticipating since morning a successful hunt,

I mix flat beer half and half

with warmed molasses, then add rum.”

 

The speaker will then “smear the damp oak trunk / with sticky gold, and juice drips from the brush, / trickles down into the cracks, gleaming and heady. . . .” He describes the tree as “my accomplice” and observes as five moths “soak up the intoxicating juice, / blissfully unfurling their coiled proboscises.”

 

From childhood, Nabokov was a lepidopterist-in-training, a serious scientist, not a dilettante like me. Looking back, I feel some shame about capturing, killing and mounting so many moths and butterflies – as close as I ever got to hunting. I can rationalize it as scholarship but that’s flimsy and even I don’t buy it. I learned more from observing the living insects in their habitat and from reading than I ever did from pinching their thoraxes. Now I think of the beautiful final paragraph of Nabokov’s Bend Sinister (1947):

 

“Across the lane, two windows only were still alive. In one, the shadow of an arm was combing invisible hair; or perhaps it was a movement of branches; the other was crossed by the slanting black trunk of a poplar. The shredded ray of a streetlamp brought out a bright green section of wet box hedge. I could also distinguish the glint of a special puddle (the one Krug had somehow perceived through the layer of his own life), an oblong puddle invariably acquiring the same form after every shower because of the constant spatulate shape of a depression in the ground. Possibly, something of the kind may be said to occur in regard to the imprint we leave in the intimate texture of space. Twang. A good night for mothing.”

 

Nabokov reports that an editor questioned whether “mothing” was a typo for “nothing.” It was not. Otherwise, the novel would have had a most un-Nabokovian finish.

 

[Go here to read the complete poem, which is published in Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (eds. Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, Beacon Press, 2000).]