Edmund Wilson wrote to Nabokov on January 14 th 1946: 'I hear from people who have seen you that you are becoming stout, optimistic and genial -in other words, Americanized.' The rumour was true: Nabokov's relocation to America in the 1940s seemed to act in conspiracy with the swelling of his gut, such that by the time he achieved international fame as an anglophone American writer, his silhouette was permanently voluptuous. I will propose in this article that Nabokov's discomfort at his expansion is linked to his ambivalence about becoming American. When Wilson accused him of becoming Americanly stout in 1946, he squirmed: 'Thanks for your remarks (though I did not understand the one about my "americanization.") It is my argument here that, in the middle years of the twentieth century, Nabokov underwent what Lauren Berlant has described in an essay on American obesity as a 'crisis of choosing and antiwill', and that this crisis reverberates through his accounts of food and fatness.Edmund Wilson wrote to Nabokov on January 14 th 1946, six years after the Russianborn anglophone writer had moved to America, to relay a rumour: 'I hear from people who have seen you that you are becoming stout, optimistic and genial -in other words, Americanized.' 1 Affecting bemusement, Nabokov replied on February 1 st : 'Thanks for your remarks (though I did not understand the one about my "americanization").' 2 In this article, I will follow Wilson's example in attempting to marry Nabokov's 'stout[ness]' with his 'Americaniz[ation]', while also acknowledging Nabokov's radical opposition to their union. I want to propose that what Nabokov referred to as his 'tremendous fat[ness]' in another letter to Wilson brought into focus his worry not only about becoming fat and becoming American, but about the miserable dietary determinism whereby one seemed to entail the other. 3 In Memoirs of Hecate Country -which Nabokov claimed to have read 'in one gulp' ('d'un trait') in 1946 4 -Wilson writes of the ability of 'Russian émigré intellectuals' to 'act[…] the part of guest […] brilliantly', 5 and I will venture here that Nabokov's 'brilliant' imitation of a happy guest in mid-century America was fraudulent. In protesting to Wilson: 'I did not understand the [remark] about my "americanization", Nabokov reveals his distaste for a form of identity expressed as flab.Nabokov once joked that his gut was American. In an interview of January 1964 for Playboy, he writes that, in the 1940s, 'my weight went up from my usual 140[lb] to a monumental and cheerful 200 [lb]', and that as a result, 'I am one-third American.' 6 He went on to say at the time that this 'good American flesh ke[pt] me warm and safe', 7 and perhaps it seemed to him then, snug in the luxurious Montreaux Palace Hotel in Switzerland with the Alps wrapped around him, that fatness (for he remained 'stout') meant security. But in the 1940s themselves, he was 'profoundly ambivalent about his adopted nation' -as Will Norman puts it in an influential essay 8 -and this 'ambivalence' often an...
