Nabokov in America

by Robert Roper

  A writer with sufficiently lucid awareness may spend time in salons, but he does not live there; back in the heatless garret is where he knows himself. The important truth of him, the truth of his gift, is established and ever present in his mind, and the way forward will be through his own agency, unless his talent fails or he loses heart.

  Still—and even allowing for a certain condescension toward his younger cousin, who had always been a bit in awe of him—Vladimir could not have been unimpressed. Nicolas had pulled off a great coup, an American-style coup, landing on the rugged far shore and immediately making a big name for himself. An immigrant with nothing but a certain inheritance of cultural capital might take the Americans by storm, it turned out; the “extraordinary openness14” of Americans was among Nicolas’s first impressions of them, their readiness to “help each other and especially help the newcomer, the immigrant”—and even more especially the immigrant who acted as if he belonged in the game.

  Véra said that they decided positively on America, and at the hour of their deciding America decided on them. Stanford had invited Mark Aldanov15, the popular Russian historical novelist, to teach summer school in 1940 or ’41. Aldanov had no plans then to go to the United States (he considered his English subpar16), and he suggested getting in touch with V. Sirin, who might be available.

  Negotiations took more than a year, finances being the issue; in the end, Professor Henry Lanz, of the Slavic studies group at Stanford, gave over part of his own salary to bring Nabokov to Palo Alto. (He taught two courses17—a Russian literature survey, a how-to-write-plays course—for a fee of $750, plus accommodations.)

  Between Aldanov’s kind tip and the glories of California in summer ’41 were many complicated steps, however, not the least of them getting visa approval. Nabokov, still marooned in France, knew what he now had in hand, though: the magical open sesame, grounds for escape. Altagracia de Jannelli had been gathering affidavits on his behalf in New York, in case such an invitation ever came his way, and she pressed the publisher of Laughter in the Dark to sign a letter that Nabokov himself composed. He requested recommendations from other notables, too—from Mikhail Karpovich, a historian at Harvard, from Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, a renowned painter, and from Alexandra Tolstoy, daughter of the novelist and president of the Tolstoy Foundation, an aid organization in New York. Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin signed and possibly even composed a letter for Nabokov dated April ’39:

  Mr. Vladimir Nabokoff (nom de plume18 V. Sirine) is a very well known Russian author whose novels … enjoy a high reputation among Russian intellectuals abroad. He is the son of the late V.D. Nabokoff, the eminent Russian Liberal Member of the first Russian Parliament and Professor of Criminology… . [Sirine] is not only a novelist of quite exceptional talent, but also a profound student of Russian language and literature… . All this, together with his mastery of English and great experience in lecturing would make him a teacher of Russian literature and thought of quite exceptional quality… . I recommend him warmly.

  Letters about his worth as an artist went to the American consul in Paris. But other testaments of worth were required as well. To Dobuzhinsky, his former art tutor, he wrote,

  Please allow me19 now to direct your concern for me in another direction. The difficulty is such that for two years now I have been unable to piece together a move to America… . Since I have no capital, I must present an affidavit, to serve as guarantee for the cost of a purchase of tickets. Those friends I have in America have with touching solicitude given proof of my value—but as they are all immigrants themselves they do not command the other sort of value, and rich people I do not know. I thought that you, being already in America, might be able to approach someone with resources … to ask for a large favor, to give me an affidavit.

  It may be that Dobuzhinsky—although unable to provide funds himself—spoke of Nabokov’s need to others in New York. Countess Tolstoy was also active on his behalf, lobbying Serge Koussevitsky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who wrote a letter but did not offer to pay for steamship tickets. Should the American visas ever come through—and then there were French exit visas, often requiring bribes—transport for Nabokov and his family would cost around six hundred dollars, an impossible sum for them.†

  Fall of ’39, with France now in the war, the Nabokovs lived extra-precariously, largely on a loan20 each month of one thousand francs from the owner of a Paris cinema. Nabokov found a few language students, among them Roman Grynberg, a businessman who would follow him21 to America and become a close literary friend as well as a source of future loans. The writer Nina Berberova visited them in January ’40 and gave the Nabokovs a chicken, which they promptly ate. The year before, Nabokov had written The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, his first novel composed in English. Laughter in the Dark had sold poorly in translation but had earned an advance about equal to the cost of steamship tickets, and this remembered big payday argued for composing all new work in English. But Sebastian Knight failed to find a publisher in the short term, in England or America.

  Nabokov’s father—dead over fifteen years—now proceeded to play a hand. Early in his career as a crusading journalist, in 1903, Vladimir’s glamorous, kindly, unflappable, impeccable father had written an editorial protesting a pogrom in Kishinev, a market city seven hundred miles southwest of Moscow. “Nearly fifty dead, nearly one hundred fifty wounded,” V. D. had written on the front page of Pravo, a liberal journal he helped edit. “Something monstrous and bestial has occurred… . In zombie-like disfigurement lay corpses piled atop each other… . One mother found her three sons dead. It is self-evident that these killings accompanied bandit-like attacks on property… . The size of the tragedies is not measurable, four thousand families ruined22.”

  Pogroms had gone out of fashion by 1903. The last great ones had been in 1881 and ’82, following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II; the next twenty years23 in Russia had been a time of such savage repression that many anti-Semites had been mollified, as Jews lost their ability to buy or rent land, to seek higher education, to live in the countryside, to enter the legal and medical professions. V. D. Nabokov, thirty-two years old when he wrote “The Kishinev Bloodbath”—he was a lecturer at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence, also a “junior gentleman of the chamber,” an eminence of the tsar’s court—with this single gesture of disgust self-cashiered, deprived himself of his title at court and of his academic career. His abhorrence of anti-Semitism derived from a critique of state power, partly; officials in Kishinev had facilitated the outrages, and those officials were instruments of the imperial “regime of oppression24 and lawlessness” that “lives by it”—lived by a murderous hounding of the Jews.

  From this day on, he was an opponent of the tsarist regime in absolute terms. He expressed his nonchalance25 about becoming a nonperson by advertising his court uniform for sale in the daily papers. Other prominent Russians also spoke against the pogrom—Tolstoy, Gorky—but V. D. Nabokov’s essay is remarkable for its prescience and its cold fury. Future murderers wishing to bash the skulls of Jewish infants or to cut open the bellies of pregnant Jewish women would understand that “there are no courts for them26”—no protections for the Jews, as the system was itself built upon naming them as pariahs, as a people deserving of annihilation. We hear in this a recognition of the century oncoming—a forecast27 of its most murderous hours.

  V. D. wrote against another pogrom, in 1906, and in ’13 he reported on the trial of Mendel Beilis28, a Jewish brickyard worker accused of ritual murder. He had numerous Jewish friends, and his friendship was notably without condescension.‡ After his accidental assassination—the killers had been aiming for another speaker on the stage, who escaped unharmed—his Jewish colleague at Pravo and Rul’, Iosif Hessen29, played literary angel to his fatherless son, ushering Sirin’s poetry, stories, chess problems, and sundry other creations into print, and Hessen’s small publishing house, Slovo, brought out the first editions of Sirin’s earliest books
.

  Spring 1940: the visas de sortie came through, there were no more legal impediments (only financial ones). The war was now very near. On May 10, Germany invaded the Low Countries and France; three weeks later, just after the Nabokovs got away, British and French forces would escape annihilation at Dunkirk only by what Winston Churchill called a “miracle,” in small and large boats. How the Nabokovs caught a very big boat, the great ocean liner SS Champlain, that carried them to safety in the New World is a matter of some dispute. Credit has sometimes been assigned to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) of New York; the president of HIAS at the time, the lawyer Yakov Frumkin, had personally known V. D. Nabokov and, “like many30 … Russian Jews,” as Brian Boyd puts it, he “was glad to be able to repay the dead man for his bold stands against the Kishinyov pogroms and the Beilis trial.”

  Véra’s biographer, Schiff, agrees but also does not agree: her account refrains from mentioning Frumkin or his organization by name. Instead she names the American Committee for Christian Refugees, an agency “committed to assisting non-Jews31 who had been victims of the Nazis’ racial policies.” The Committee for Christian Refugees gave Vladimir a small amount of money, as did numerous Sirin fans and personal friends of his; Schiff does not dispute, meanwhile, that the heavy lifting, the crucial financial help, was courtesy of “a Jewish rescue organization32 headed by a former associate of Vladimir’s father,” which secured berths for the refugee family on a New York–bound ship. HIAS had chartered the Champlain, a French Line vessel of up-to-date art deco appointments, to carry Jewish émigrés to the New World. HIAS also had arranged for the Nabokovs to pay only half fare33. Nabokov’s own account of the embarkation, in Speak, Memory, focuses not on the cost of a cabin or on where the money ultimately came from, but on six-year-old Dmitri walking to the ship between his parents, through a small park above the harbor at Saint-Nazaire, as the “splendid ship’s funnel34” showed among the roofs of the last line of houses. The parents refrain from pointing out this marvel to the boy—let him notice on his own, let him have that fun.

  Once aboard, the Nabokovs occupied a “cabin-class” cabin—the Champlain’s version of first class—although they had paid only for third class. Schiff explains that “a benevolent French Lines agent took it upon himself to assign the family to a first-class cabin.” Andrew Field, another biographer, disagrees with this version and explicitly credits Frumkin and HIAS for the pleasant upgrade: Frumkin “not only remembered V.D. Nabokov’s passionate defence of Beilis,” Field writes in VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov, as well as “his scathing attack upon Russian anti-Semitism, but … remembered it well,” i.e., he made sure that V. D. Nabokov’s son and family made the crossing in high style. Nabokov endorses this account: “We were given35 a first-class cabin,” he says in Field’s book, which he meticulously vetted and whose credit to Frumkin he would surely have cut if he disagreed with it. “I had a lovely bath every morning. It was marvelous.”

  SS Champlain

  Proof, at any rate, that Frumkin played the central role can be found in a note Nabokov wrote him in March 1960:

  Your letter36 and clippings came exactly to the thirty-eighth anniversary of the death of my father. I with great interest read your wonderful article [on Jewish restrictions under the tsars]. In a horrible universe where Bolshevism reigns, we are inclined to forget the disgusting and shameful sides of earlier Russian life, and articles such as yours serve as a useful reminder… . PS: I have not forgotten my debt to the organization, which on your initiative helped us move to the United States. Now, finally, I am able to begin to repay this debt. I am attaching for starters $150, which I ask you not to refuse, and to kindly transfer as noted.

  By 1960, Nabokov was splendidly able to repay. Lolita had been a bestseller37 for two years, selling, in its first three weeks alone, more than 100,000 copies—the first novel since Gone with the Wind to do so. He had sold screen rights as well, to Stanley Kubrick and James B. Harris, who hired him to write a screenplay. On the day he mailed Frumkin the $150, he and Véra were living in a villa off Mandeville Canyon Road, in Brentwood—Kubrick and Harris were putting them up while he wrote the script, and he was enjoying a classic writer’s idyl38l, hobnobbing with Hollywood celebs (Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, John Huston, David Selznick) and taking the occasional meeting at Universal City. The $150 seems mean given these circumstances. For that matter, why had it taken him twenty years to start to repay?

  There may have been earlier, anonymous donations; Nabokov was a generous man who provided stipends to needy relatives in Europe for years, but he was also proud, and Véra and he were at pains to portray their time in Berlin and Paris not as a period of “ghastly39 destitution,” as he himself wrote of one bad patch, but rather as a threadbare adventure, starvation always about to arrive but never quite arriving. They had been young and game; others living in the emigration had also been bad off, many much worse off. Meanwhile, he had written works of genius that would last—he believed this fervently, Véra believing it at least as much—his beloved son had been born, many good things had happened for them. To see their escape as the ordeal of pathetic waifs who would otherwise have gone up in smoke was to get it wrong, importantly wrong.

  Véra, if anything more proud, even disputed the chicken40 that Nina Berberova had added to their pot. The matter of being desperate41 did not sit well with her; they had wanted to get out, of course, but to say that they had ever been afraid, or that Vladimir had considered leaving her and Dmitri for a while and coming to America on his own—no, that line of argument would never please her, and in her complicated dealings with biographers and journalists in the coming years, she consistently put a less fretful construction on it all.

  * Soon Nicolas would leave his Russian wife, Natalia, for an American-born former student. His career as a composer of art music would advance not much farther than this, not necessarily because he had few ideas or a shallow talent: another talent would displace the first, that talent for befriending celebrated people that was already much in evidence, and which would take on an ideological cast during the war, when he became an acolyte of George F. Kennan, Charles E. Bohlen, and Isaiah Berlin, shapers of Cold War policy toward the Soviet Union. He served in uniform during the war and by ’51 had become a highly important person himself, general secretary of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA-funded organization that promoted counter-Soviet cultural initiatives all over the world.

  † The difficulty of arranging an exit from Europe, just in its bureaucratic aspect, may be suggested by this account by Stanley M. Rinehart, one of the founders of Holt, Rinehart & Winston, who tried to bring his two English nephews to New York during the London Blitz: “Such was the snarl of combined British and American red tape that [the boys] could have escaped from Sing Sing with less difficulty. I said to my wife … while the arrangements were being made, that it would be simpler to have two more children of our own and it would probably take less time… . [W]e worked with a battery of lawyers, making up affidavits for the American consular office in England. Four Photostats of your income-tax returns for four years back … and of the checks that paid them and of your bank statements for twelve months and of your mortgage payments for two years and a list of your stocks and bonds and four letters from your bank officials and four letters from four prominent American citizens… . Finally the affidavits went off by air mail to England. The postage stamps cost fifteen dollars.” Stanley M. Rinehart, “The Nefugees,” Good Housekeeping, January 1943, 28.

  ‡ Not, however, without elements of high-handedness and presumption. “My father,” Vladimir wrote years later to a scholar studying him, “felt so infinitely superior to any accusation of antisemitism … that out of a kind of self-confidence and contempt for showcase philosemitism he used to make it a point … of being as plainspoken about Jew and Gentile as were his Jewish colleagues.” About the Bolshevik Moisei Uritski, for instance, he wrote, “I recall now his impudent Jewish face and the
repulsive figure… .”

  3.

  In Manhattan, they stayed first with Natalia Nabokov, cousin Nicolas’s ex-wife, who lived at 32 East Sixty-first Street with her young son, Ivan. Natalia had signed an affidavit1 promising to shelter them, and she was “delightful, doing all she can for us,” Véra would recall; she placed them in a flat just across the landing from her own. Soon the new arrivals moved to a sublet on Madison near Ninety-fourth, then in the fall to a tiny place at 35 West Eighty-seventh2, where they stayed until they left for Stanford the following spring.

  New York in May 1940: the country was awakening to the war, the inevitable and unavoidable war, although the debate between isolationists and interventionists was not quite finished, and Charles Lindbergh had not been entirely discredited. (Mrs. Roosevelt, responding to a radio address of Lindbergh’s about which President Roosevelt remained silent, said she thought “the first part of it excellent3 … the last three paragraphs unfortunate”—paragraphs insinuating that the Jews were tricking the country into war, as the Jews always do.) The arrival of the Nabokovs coincided with the surrender of Belgium, with British and French forces being forced into a dangerous “Flanders pocket4.” Churchill warned of “heavy tidings5,” news of the destruction of the Allied army of hundreds of thousands of men sure to come soon.

  No one met the Nabokovs at the dock—there had been a mix-up about times—so they took a taxi to the East Side. The morning was cloudy6. Some thirty thousand refugees from France were arriving in America in this twelve-month period—arriving, most of them, via New York Harbor, sailing in past the Statue of Liberty, with the lower Manhattan skyline backdropping, then looming, then towering. Claude Lévi-Strauss7, who arrived some months after the Nabokovs, registered the “immense disorder” of the skyline, which he found thrilling, and Fernand Léger8, arriving a few years earlier, called the skyline “the most colossal spectacle in the world.” To Nabokov the cityscape looked more colorful than he had expected. In his memory, the morning had a lilac tinge9. Colors were always meaningful to him: he was a synesthete10, someone who transposes sense impressions, the letters of the alphabet, for example, being permanently associated in his mind with distinct colors. (“The long a of the English alphabet … has … the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony… . [In] the blue group, there is steely x, thundercloud z, and huckleberry k… . In the green … alder-leaf f, the unripe apple of p, and pistachio t.”) So much talk of color in his first reactions to Manhattan may signal happiness.