by Robert Roper
8 splendid mind and literary sense: Leving, 3. Nikki Smith, literary agent and representative, with Peter Skolnik, of the Nabokov estate from 1987 to 2008, says that Véra operated as N.’s “agent-of-origin” from the early days, from about 1930 on. An agent of origin parcels out an author’s work to publishers and to subagents, Altagracia de Jannelli being one of the subagents. Leving, 4.
9 “The air was keen”: Pnin, 190, 191.
10 eight thousand miles: Boyd 2, 363.
11 quick sketch of everything: Berg, page-a-day.
12 they denominate periods: Berg.
13 “Ford-Keyser” … ’38 Buick: D.N., “Close Calls,” 307, 310. Dmitri called the Buick “stately.”
14 Dmitri the madcap: Berg. Dmitri’s job was as a translator at International House, Columbia University, according to Dmitri’s friend Sandy Levine. Dmitri “met a lot of girls that way.” Interview with Sandy Levine, June 3, 2012. According to Boyd, the job was at the Current Digest of the Soviet Press, presumably as a translator. Boyd 2, 362. Dmitri’s apartment was at 636 West End Avenue, no. 8; phone, Lyceum 5–0516.
15 reserve unit that met: Interviews with Sandy Levine and with Brett Schlesinger, November 27, 2012. The reserve meetings in New York City were at 529 West Forty-seventh Street.
16 Song of Igor’s: Diment, Pniniad, 40. In Sept. ’58 N. was polishing his translation, in May ’59 Véra was typing it, and in ’60 it was published.
17 “he’s going to be famous”: Interview with Schlesinger.
18 preservation of some old: Berg.
19 sun emerging: Berg, page-a-day.
20 advance copy: Ibid. The diary indicates that the copy caught up with them in Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta. Boyd 2, 363, says it was delivered in Babb, Montana. Schiff, 228, guesses Glacier National Park.
21 “true greatness”: Berg. The New Republic editorial was in an issue that also included a vicious pan of Lolita.
22 “begun to melt”: Berg, page-a-day.
23 “engrossed in a big rodeo”: Ibid. Véra’s account seems to inform (of course it does not) the rodeo in a small Nevada town in John Huston’s The Misfits (1961).
24 “excellent publisher”: Ibid. Earlier the Nabokovs thought Minton a bumbler. Boyd 2, 364; Schiff, 229.
25 “EVERYBODY TALKING”: SL, 257. Times reviewer Orville Prescott was shocked: “To describe such a perversion with the pervert’s enthusiasm without being disgusting is impossible. If Mr. Nabokov tried to do so he failed.” “Books of the Times,” New York Times, October 18, 1958.
26 6,777 reorders: SL, 258.
27 Times bestseller list: Schiff, 230. Lolita was number 1 from September 28 till November 9, 1958. From November 16 till March 8, 1959, it was number 2 behind Doctor Zhivago. It fell to number 3, behind Zhivago and Leon Uris’s Exodus, on March 8. Hawes Publications, http://www.hawes.com/1958/1958.htm and http://www.hawes.com/1959/1959.htm.
28 black moiré: Schiff, 255.
29 under restriction: There were no such restrictions in the United States. N. was proud of his country of citizenship for never banning it. “America is the most mature country in the world now in this respect,” he told the New Haven Register. Boyd 2, 367. In France, following publication of the Olympia Press edition in 1955, the state imposed a ban, only to lift it in January 1958. Boyd 2, 364. The ban was in response to a request by the British government; copies of Lolita had been making their way across the Channel. de Grazia, 260. In May 1958, a new ban was instituted in France, under which sales to those under eighteen were forbidden, as were bookshop displays. Boyd 2, 364. A British edition of Lolita became possible only with passage of the liberalizing Obscene Publications Act of 1959. de Grazia, 266.
30 “magnificently outrageous”: Dupee, “ ‘Lolita’ in America,” 30.
31 “prodigy”: Ibid.
32 “all the brows”: Ibid., 35.
33 “the luck”: Ibid.
34 a postwar turn: Ibid., 31.
35 “Into this situation”: Ibid., 30, 31.
36 mordant person: McCarthy, “F.W. Dupee”; McCarthy, “On F. W. Dupee.”
37 “the fading smile”: Dupee, 35.
38 “Humbert can be heard”: Ibid.
39 “too shocking”: Ibid., 31. Dupee welcomed Lolita as the first sign of what would become the 1960s turn. He enjoyed seeing American normalcy subjected to humorously disrespectful analysis. In his introduction to a long, expurgated selection from Lolita in The Anchor Review, he wrote, “The book’s general effect is profoundly mischievous… . The images of life that Lolita gives back are ghastly but recognizable.” Dupee quoted poet John Hollander as saying that the novel “flames with a tremendous perversity of an unexpected kind,” yet had “no clinical, sociological or mythic seriousness.” Dupee disagreed about the lack of seriousness. He tried to show how Humbert’s situations were “our” situations in fifties America. “The supreme laugh may be on the reviewers for failing to see how much of everyone’s reality lurks in its fantastic shadow play.” In an article in Encounter, Dupee said that Nabokov sounded “most like a know-nothing native writer” when, in his afterword to Lolita, he denied the reality of his American portrait.
40 just read in the Times: Schiff, 232.
41 phenomenal sum: $150,000 in ’58 equaled about $1.2 million dollars in 2014. DaveManuel.com, http://www.davemanuel.com/inflation-calculator.php.
42 Véra’s account was “important”: Berg. The word important appears in N.’s hand on a graph-paper-lined three-by-five card inside the page-a-day diary. The note reads, “My diary notes, summer 1951, while writing ‘Lo’ and, more important, Véra’s diary kept during the first months following the publication of ‘Lo’ in America.”
43 Inquiries: Berg, page-a-day.
44 “ought to have happened”: SL, 259.
45 team from Life: Boyd 2, 366.
46 The book’s having first gone to France: In the prolonged process, Lolita had time to gather encomiums from Greene and other respected figures. Lolita’s unprosecuted publication in the United States cleared the way not only for a reissue of Memoirs of Hecate County but also for the successful defense and first legal publication of Lady Chatterley in the UK. Schiff, 236.
47 “could not believe”: Berg.
48 Dean Martin’s show: Ibid.
49 “Milton Berle … Groucho Marx”: Boyd 2, 374.
50 first TV appearance: Berg.
51 obvious Soviet ploy: Boyd 2, 372. Published just days after Lolita, Doctor Zhivago supplanted it at the head of the Times bestseller list, and the books would be 1 and 2 into the new year. What N. had against Dr. Schweitzer was his work with Bertrand Russell on SANE, his do-gooding, his windy theology.
52 he asks Trilling: “Vladimir Nabokov Discusses ‘Lolita’ Part 1 of 2,” YouTube video, posted by JiffySpook’s Channel, March 13, 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ldpj_5JNFoA.
53 “there is an underlying tone”: Ibid.
54 he quotes himself: Dieter Zimmer, “Vladimir Nabokov: The Interviews,” http://www.d-e-zimmer.de/HTML/NABinterviews.htm. One hundred twenty-five interviews are known, fifteen or so from the Lolita publication period.
55 half-reclines on the sofa: See DBDV, 300n1, for N.’s affinity for sofas and couches. He says, “I like to eat and drink in a recumbent position (preferably on a couch) and in silence.”
56 “a young girl, someone”: “Vladimir Nabokov Discusses ‘Lolita’ Part 2 of 2,” YouTube video, posted by JiffySpook’s Channel, March 13, 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-wcB4RPasE.
57 hard to gainsay: Ibid., especially minutes 1:33 and 1:45.
58 when Dr. Strangelove: “Dr. Strangelove and the Bomb,” YouTube video, posted by vilixiliv, November 6, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mUCLHzWiJo.
59 beautiful, boyish smile: His smile recalls that of the actor Montgomery Clift after his car accident.
Chapter Seventeen
1 Café Chambord: The restaurant was at 803 Third Avenue, between Forty-ninth and Fifti
eth. It was a hangout of theatrical folk, Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, and Margaret Sullavan among them.
2 Minton’s wife: Also present were a couple named Thaller; he was the “second in command” at Putnam’s, Véra believed. Berg, page-a-day.
3 Latin Quarter showgirl: “Books: The Lolita Case,” Time, November 17, 1958.
4 “for that was when Walter”: Berg, page-a-day.
5 even more baroque: The finder’s fee was $20,000. Schiff, 237n. The fee was equal to 10 percent of the author’s royalties for the first year of publication plus 10 percent of the publisher’s share of subsidiary rights for two years. Ibid., 236n.
6 ’57 MG: Berg, page-a-day.
7 “superannuated”: Time, “The Lolita Case.”
8 “I wonder if this sort of thing”: Berg.
9 nymphet: This coinage was mentioned during N.’s TV interview with Trilling.
10 “rampancy”: DBDV, 363.
11 Peyton Place: Schiff, 229.
12 New Hampshire: Ramsdale and Beardsley in the novel seem to be fictionalized New Hampshire locations.
13 on condition that he find someone: He asked Berkman, who was unavailable, then hired novelist Herb Gold, who had been recommended by a former colleague at Wellesley. Boyd 2, 376.
14 Nobel Prize: Pasternak was forced to decline the prize. Ibid., 372.
15 $100,000: Ibid., 374.
16 law professors: Berg, page-a-day, November 16, 1958.
17 Paul, Weiss: Schiff, 247.
18 “government bonds”: SL, 262.
19 “the translator must be”: Ibid., 258.
20 his father signed: Ibid., 276. Dmitri went to work on the translation in late ’58 and brought home a first installment on Christmas to show his father, who liked it and urged Dmitri to give up his New York job to concentrate on translating. Boyd 2, 377.
21 “how delighted”: Houghton, letter of February 12, 1959.
22 “Then he caught that cold”: Berg.
23 venereal infection: Barth and Segal, 1. N. wrote Dmitri a letter on January 16, 1961, that included this: “I have interrupted my literary labors to compose this instructive little jingle: In Italy, for his own good / A wolf must wear a Riding Hood. / Please, bear this in mind.” SL, 324.
24 only office job: Interview with Brett Schlesinger, November 27, 2012.
25 last class at Cornell: SL, 276.
26 attention from the world press: Schiff, 246; Boyd 2, 380. N. also declined invitations from David Susskind and Mike Wallace: Berg.
27 fifteen letters: Berg.
28 people showed up: Schiff, 247.
29 made promises: Boyd 2, 381. Weidenfeld was half of the new firm of Weidenfeld and Nicolson, his partner being Nigel Nicolson, son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. Boyd 2, 378.
30 checked proofs: Boyd 2, 381.
31 likely of fulfillment: Dmitri quickly learned Italian, in pursuit of his operatic studies, and he made translations of his father’s works into that language, too.
32 “full of flowering”: Berg, page-a-day.
33 cold pudding: SO, 71. He also wrote Transparent Things (1972) and Look at the Harlequins! (1974).
34 “Last night a howling mob”: Berg, page-a-day. Sale was reinstated in time to graduate the next month. Sale’s friend and sometime roommate Richard Fariña wrote of the incident in his novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966). Sale’s wife, Faith Sale, became an editor at G.P. Putnam’s Sons. The Enchanter (1986) was one of the books she edited for Putnam’s. Berg.
35 windows were broken: Berg, page-a-day.
36 a Communist publisher: Boyd 2, 372; SO, 205.
37 “ignores the Liberal Revolution”: SO, 206. The Nabokovs also believed progressive education to be a “Communist plot to destroy the American educational system.” Houghton, Véra to Elena Levin, August 19, 1969.
38 “We are all for Nixon”: Houghton, Véra to Elena Levin, July 27, 1972. In March ’68, Véra wrote Alison Bishop, “Nothing could be worse than this war, but we honestly do not see what the President … can do about it. Leave the country and the entire Far East to the Communists? … This is a life and death struggle against Communism, not just a little war somewhere.” Berg.
39 conservative National Review: Berg, N.’s notes to Field, February 20 and March 10, 1973. Jack Kerouac was also a reader of National Review.
40 America was on the verge: Schiff, 338.
41 de Gaulle led France: Schiff, 335.
42 American flag: Ibid., 338.
43 actor-producer John Houseman: Born Jacques Haussmann in 1904, of an Alsatian Jewish father and a Welsh-Irish mother; educated at Clifton College, Bristol, England, which made special accommodations to welcome Jewish boys. “John Houseman,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Houseman.
44 remnants of Russian pronunciation: See “75 at 75: Brian Boyd on Vladimir Nabokov,” recorded April 5, 1964, posted July 18, 2013, http://92yondemand.org/75-at-75-brian-boyd-on-vladimir-nabokov.
45 “I have already accumulated”: SL, 508. The documents N. refers to were stored in Ithaca and brought to Montreux in ’69 so that biographer Field could look at them.
46 “An average émigré”: Berg, notes for a second vol. of Speak, Memory.
47 even some primitive Americans: Zweig, 225; McGill, 173–74.
48 dubious Doctor Zhivago: SL, 264. N. called it, in a letter to Dwight Macdonald, “that trashy, melodramatic, false and inept book, which neither landscaping nor politics can save from my wastepaper basket.”
49 two long articles: Wilson, “Doctor Life and His Guardian Angel,” New Yorker, November 15, 1958, 213–38, and “Legend and Symbol in ‘Doctor Zhivago,”’ Encounter, June 9, 1959, 5–15.
50 epic novel that said no: In January ’59, on stationery of the Congrès pour la Liberté de la Culture, a CIA-funded arts organization of which he was secretary-general, Nicolas Nabokov wrote, “my Polish friends who publish what is generally agreed to be the only good Polish magazine in existence, would very much like to have your and the NEW YORKER’s permission to print a Polish translation of your NEW YORKER article on Pasternak… . The name of the magazine is KULTURA. It is printed [in Paris] and clandestinely read by all the Polish intelligentsia in Poland.” Beinecke.
51 “the English and American translations”: Wilson, “Legend and Symbol.” Doctor Zhivago bears a distant resemblance to Pale Fire, being about a poet yearning for a conclusive illumination and containing substantial amounts of that fictional poet’s verse.
52 “very much in the manner”: Ibid.
53 “behaving rather badly”: Schiff, 243–44.
54 “Stendhal is a complete fraud”: Wilson, Letters, 578.
55 “cruel little ironies”: Ibid.
56 rejected the path: Pitzer, 17.
57 “symbolico-social”: SL, 293.
58 “As you know by now”: DBDV, 362.
59 thirty-three weeks: Hawes Publications, http://www.hawes.com/1956/1956.htm.
60 two immensely popular articles: “On First Reading Genesis,” May 15, 1954, and “The Scrolls from the Dead Sea,” May 14, 1955. “On First Reading Genesis” was reprinted in thousands of copies.
61 Wilson’s expository style: Dabney, 351.
62 Apologies: Peter Nabokov, second son of Nicolas, was a student at Columbia, with an interest in American Indians and anthrolopogy. He met Wilson at a party given by Nicolas in January ’61 and wrote him, after Apologies was published, asking for advice about a career that would combine fieldwork with authorship. Peter pursued such a career with marked success. Beinecke.
63 “the man who gave me the most pleasure”: Dabney, 353.
64 never wrote at length: A careful student of the correspondence has observed that the two men missed like ships in the night, were silent in response to signals of affection from each other. Kopper, 58. N. was especially reserved when responding. Both men might have been embarrassed by their feelings. Nabokov, while missing some of Wilson’s cues, was oft
en truly warm and embracing. Wilson came to feel that there was something of the arrogant rich man in Nabokov, a bully streak. Their letters came to be full of apologies for missed opportunities to meet in person.
65 “This production though in certain ways valuable”: Wilson, “Strange Case,” New York Review of Books, July 15, 1965.
66 “Nabokov … took up a good deal of space”: Ibid. Arndt, in a letter responding to N.’s mauling, was gentlemanly yet noted “the fine sparkle of pure venom behind the sacerdotal … solicitude for textural integrity.” Beinecke. Arndt shared the Bollingen Translation Prize for his Onegin in ’62.
67 “number of earnest simpletons”: SO, 247.
68 “A patient confidant”: Ibid., 82.
69 “utter disgust”: Ibid., 80.
70 “musty method of human-interest”: Ibid., 88. N. might have been aware of Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” essay of ’64. Sontag introduced him at his reading at the 92 Street Y that year.
71 “stubby pencil”: Ibid.
72 “rather dry, rather dull”: Ibid., 81.
73 The essay is sorrowful: The Wilson papers at Yale have much more material on Pasternak than on Nabokov: thirteen folders vs. two, some of the thirteen packed to bursting. The notes Wilson did write evince distaste: “hatred of the middle class” in Despair and Camera Obscura, “sordid bourgeois horror of post-war Germany,” “morbid and murderous undercurrent, much as you [find] in German films of the period,” “the taint of a touch of merde, sexual perversity, petty and pricking sadism,” “a certain amount of old-fashioned Petersburg foppery and fantasy.” He tries to get at the heart of N. by careful titration of a sample of his story materials, especially in the Berlin period. In a psychoanalytical way, he seems to feel, this will reveal N.’s hidden essence—that he is cruel, sadistic, likes a touch of filth, etc. The truth of a psychoanalytical approach is taken for granted. Wilson is anxious not to be duped, and he is troubled by what he sees as N.’s nastiness toward his characters. The notes were written at the end of Wilson’s life, and for whatever reasons, N.’s works did not open a door in him, provoke in him a release of Wilsonian sensitivity and wisdom. Of Pale Fire he said, “I read it with amusement, but it seems to me rather silly.” Bakh, letter to Grynberg, May 20, 1962.