by Stacy Schiff
But the image of the rattlesnake—news of which made its way into every summer correspondence—clearly burned before her eyes. It unsettled her as armbands and goose-stepping did not. She would always recall that rattler, a herd of cattle, a slumbering bear, with undimmed horror.† Snakes remained for her among the greatest of depredations; she declared later that all would be well in the world if only there were no snakes in the neighborhood, no Khrushchev in the Kremlin. Relatedly, when Dmitri offered his mother an old American revolver the following spring she readily accepted, trading it at the local gun shop for a Browning .38 caliber. Dmitri was not surprised: “She liked guns. She always liked guns.” She had been keen on acquiring a weapon, and was delighted by the opportunity to do so. In December 1955, she applied for a license to carry a pistol. Four members of the Cornell community vouched for her good character and testified to her ability to wield a firearm in a careful and reasonable manner. The Ithaca undersheriff took a full set of fingerprints. While there were generally not many fifty-three-year-old housewives in Tompkins County filing pistol applications, Véra was surely the only one in history to supply as her reason for doing so: “For protection while travelling in isolated parts of the country in the course of entomological research.” The humor of that line may have been lost on her but other implications were not: She indicated that Russia was her country of birth, but stipulated that she had emigrated in 1920. The Browning was a gun she would have had difficulty firing, and which she appears never to have fired. But the automatic that never went off hung heavily over the scenes that followed, especially when it was bound up with Véra’s ubiquitousness, her ferocity, her exoticism, her politics—and the explosion that was about to detonate over Ithaca when the contents of a different shoebox were revealed.
Had she been left to her own devices, Véra probably would have owned the .38 for years without anyone in Ithaca outside the county clerk’s office being any the wiser. But the handgun had a habit of making an appearance, at Vladimir’s urging. Jean-Jacques Demorest dined with the Nabokovs one evening, along with the Literature Department’s chairman, Joseph Mazzeo. After the meal Vladimir suggested that his wife furnish the weapon; perhaps their visitors could be persuaded to fix the thing. Véra made a trip upstairs, producing the instrument from a handbag. It seemed she had not pulled the slide back forcefully enough and a cartridge had jammed. The visitors were dumbfounded, and unable to offer any assistance with the mechanism, with which they were unfamiliar. On this or another occasion—Mazzeo saw the Browning more than once—Véra explained that she had acquired the pistol so as to protect Vladimir from rattlers when he was collecting butterflies, an image that, at both ends of the zoological spectrum, fairly summed up the relationship to many. Nestled in the glove compartment of the car, the Browning traveled across the West with the Nabokovs. Jason Epstein became Pnin’s publisher years later and was also treated to a viewing of the gun. His wife very nearly fainted on the spot. The weapon was produced as an explanation for why Véra—then living in an isolated home a little bit in the Ithaca woods—was not frightened; the effect was much the opposite. Barbara Epstein left with the impression that Véra felt there were Indians outside, that the Nabokovs were at all times under siege. The conclusion was correct although the Browning had little to do with it. But word of it spread on campus, where it was said that Mrs. Nabokov was traveling to class with a handgun, where it was rumored that the couple slept with a pistol under their mattress, in the event the Bolsheviks came for them. (Epstein concluded that Véra carried the weapon—Sibyl Shade should have taken note—to guard against the likely campus assassin. Recalling the setup in the Goldwin Smith classroom, he concluded: “She really had him covered.”) The point was that the accessory required little stretch of the imagination, given Véra’s persona. Elena Levin never saw the weapon but was wholly unsurprised to hear of its existence.
To the 1964 Bollingen Press reception for Eugene Onegin Véra—who had done so much to research the circumstances of Pushkin’s duel—carried a beaded evening bag with a mother-of-pearl handle. Saul Steinberg, whose grasp of images the couple thought unrivaled, attended the festivities, probably at Nabokov’s request. At the end of the party, the three found themselves alone on the Upper East Side street, with Steinberg’s date. “Véra, show him what you have in your handbag,” Vladimir directed, with what Steinberg recognized as immense pride. Véra extracted the Browning. Slightly daintier than the handgun she had carried in Berlin, the weapon would have made a bulge in an evening bag; assuming it was loaded, it would have weighed nearly a pound and a half. To the great artist’s eye the gesture was ripe with symbolism. It seemed as if Véra had been appointed the keeper of her husband’s virtue. Véra would have shuddered at the mention of symbolism, but it was her husband after all who asked his students to list the contents of Anna Karenina’s handbag, critical to an understanding of her character.
3
“You will perhaps be interested to learn that he is finishing a great novel, based on an idea that he believes has never been explored (at least not in the way that he has done so). It is a work of more than 400 pages, the plot of which unfolds rapidly,” Véra advised the French publisher of Gogol in November 1953, noting that her husband had been at work on the volume for nearly four years.* After a series of hints to Viking’s Pat Covici, this was the first overture to an editor on Lolita’s behalf. Since the September return to Ithaca Vladimir had been devoting sixteen-hour days to the manuscript; his academic duties seemed relaxing in comparison. The Russian Conclusive Evidence continued to hang over the Nabokovs’ heads; it had been expected for January but Vladimir—who felt he was writing the book anew—found the project an unending one. (A final draft was submitted to Chekhov Publishing much later. In a charming slip, Véra dated her cover letter April 1, 1854.) On December 6 she sent up a triumphant salvo: “V. asks me to jot that he is finishing the book today,” she announced, to the Hessens. Three days later she requested a personal meeting with Katharine White, for reasons she preferred not to commit to paper.
Lolita made its first trip to New York at the end of December 1953, when Véra carried the manuscript to White’s East Forty-eighth Street doorstep. The bundle bore no return address. Vladimir had hesitated to mail the pages; Véra explained that the author’s name would not be attached to the manuscript, which her husband intended to publish under a pseudonym, soon divulged to be “Humbert Humbert.” She exacted a promise “that his incognito be respected.” Most of all they wanted the thing kept from the office and, in particular, from the very proper William Shawn. From the start both Nabokovs recognized the manuscript as “a time bomb.”* “In an atmosphere of great secrecy,” Vladimir had promised Wilson a glimpse of the pages earlier in the year. If Véra had as strong a taste for anything as she did for literature, it may well have been for complot: The stately middle-aged woman carrying to East Forty-eighth Street the 459 subversive pages of a manuscript that she and her husband alone were convinced was a work of genius—demanding guarantees of secrecy from another distinguished woman generally described as “formidable”—seemed precisely the role for which the years of silence, exile, and cunning had prepared her. (For various reasons White did not read the manuscript until much later. She had five granddaughters; she told Vladimir she would be lying if she did not say she had been disturbed by the book. Furthermore, she didn’t have a thing for psychopaths.)†
What Véra thought of the manuscript burning the hole in that bag is perfectly clear. She had steered her husband away from poetry; she had headed off the Siamese twins. She chastised herself for Eugene Onegin: “I can’t believe I let him take up this project,” she berated herself, as she often would regarding her husband’s translation work, which she felt cost him a few titles of his own. About Lolita she had no such qualms. This did not mean she was unaware of the dangers of her husband’s publishing—and of the public’s misreading—the sexually explicit confessions of a middle-aged European’s obsessive pursuit
of a prepubescent girl.* She presented the matter firmly but delicately to her sister-in-law, to whom a copy was sent on first publication: “In any case don’t judge it until you’ve read it all the way through. It’s not pornography at all but an incredible, most subtle probe to the depths of a horrible maniac and explores the tragic fate of a defenseless young girl. (V. studied the law on the protection of orphans, and there is no law that would have prevented this turn of events.)” A few weeks later, having heard nothing from Geneva, she wrote again. “V is afraid that Lolita has stunned you and that that’s why you’re so silent. Don’t judge it until you reach the end. It’s frightening. But it is a great book.” As much as she claimed to think it ridiculous that the novel might run into publishing difficulties, she understood very well what the book represented to 1950s America. She had heard firsthand of Wilson’s woes with Memoirs of Hecate County, a collection of stories and a novella that had been withdrawn from sale and prosecuted for obscenity in 1946. (That year she professed admiration for that book. “I am very fond of Wilbur!” she had assured Wilson, naming the hero of the volume’s third story. After relations with Wilson soured, she backtracked, insisting that the Wilbur to whom she had referred was the poet Richard Wilbur. She was indeed fond of Richard Wilbur, but she had not yet met him in 1946. Privately she remarked that Hecate County left her indifferent.) As much as she believed in the sanctity of art, she remained entirely the mother who thought her twelve-year-old too young to be exposed to Mark Twain. “But it is a great book,” she reminded her sister-in-law. In her next breath she added, “And hide it from your son.” She had already once warned that Lolita was not a book for children. Elena was not to leave it lying around.
Pat Covici, the first publisher to read the novel, did not think Lolita even a book for adults. At least not for adults unwilling to serve jail sentences; he advised Nabokov strongly against publishing the novel, and felt that bringing it out anonymously was in particular an open invitation for a court case. The manuscript had arrived at his office unsigned; Nabokov had submitted it only after exacting a written promise, “legally binding you and any person connected with your firm, not to divulge the author’s true identity under any circumstances, unless I give a formal authorization for doing so.” Covici’s news reached the Nabokovs on Irving Place, during Véra’s January bluebook blizzard, while Vladimir was at work on the adventures of another middle-aged European boarder, with which he replaced Lolita on the editor’s desk two weeks later. The first and favored child was returned by express mail, with no indication of an author’s name anywhere on the package. The same day Vladimir attempted to interest New Directions in his time bomb, but discovered that Laughlin was out of the country. In March Simon & Schuster’s learned Wallace Brockway paid a call on the couple to discuss a new edition of Anna Karenina, for which Vladimir was to provide the critical apparatus. Nabokov profited from the meeting to discuss another girl who meets an early and tragic demise; in two black springbinders, the manuscript went to Simon & Schuster on a highly confidential basis on March 18.* Vladimir had his hands entirely full throughout the semester (as Véra later put it, he “was up to his chin in Pnin”), when he was simultaneously at work on the Tolstoy annotations.† Initially he had hoped to finish Pnin by June; he was to be off by a year, although Covici offered a contract for the book based on the first chapters. Ten weeks after sending Brockway the manuscript, Véra took the liberty of nudging him—at his home address—about “the novel about H.H. and L.” At the end of June Brockway had to admit that his colleagues could see the book only as sheer pornography. He suggested Barney Rosset’s Grove Press. Nabokov was undeterred, although he had come to realize that an agent might be necessary in placing the novel. He would be willing to surrender a princely 25 percent commission. Probably because Laughlin was still away, the manuscript spent the remainder of the summer in Ithaca, locked in a drawer. Its author made a note to himself, so as to remember where he had stored the keys.
It was Véra who followed up on the idea, presumably at Covici’s suggestion, that the novel stood some chance of publication abroad. On August 6, 1954, from Taos, New Mexico, she wrote to Doussia Ergaz, the resourceful Russian literary agent who had long handled Nabokov’s work in France. To a series of housekeeping matters Véra affixed a last question: “My husband has written a novel of extreme originality, which—because of straightlaced morality—could not be published here. What possibility is there for publication (in English) in Europe?” She begged for a speedy reply, providing the Taos address where she expected to be until the end of the month. The summer had been a disappointing one. Financially the summers were always difficult, and that of 1954 had been especially lean. Pnin would not truly begin to earn his keep until the following year, and Lolita was proving a most uncooperative child. Dmitri had not been much better: He had spent the last part of the spring semester on probation for throwing firecrackers—the occasion was his twentieth birthday—and Véra was even more alarmed that with one year of university left, his plans for the future had not yet begun to cohere. Vladimir was despondent about the whole Lolita “fiasco.” The novel had cost him nearly five years, and was by far his best work in English. Nor were the three Nabokovs finding their accommodations outside Taos, which they had rented by mail, to be as scenic as they had hoped. As Véra wrote the adobe home’s owner later, they had “never found a description to differ so much from reality.” The woman profoundly attuned to the elasticity of words now cursed those very powers:
We expected to find a small house in “three acres of orchard and garden.” We found a house by the road with a narrow and almost impassable strip of kitchen garden in the back. There was no place to walk, or even sit outside, for the patio offered no privacy with the Martinez family constantly circulating back and forth from the side gate. Moreover, if the wind came from the south, the smell of the sewer pervaded the patio and invaded the house.… The “rushing mountain river” proved to be an irrigation ditch. There was dust and sand constantly falling down from the ceiling, there were flies coming in through the doors and the falty [sic] screens, there were mice littering shelves and drawers with their droppings. When we first arrived, we decided to leave at once, then decided to try and stay.
With her sister-in-law she abandoned all euphemisms, describing a yard overrun by chickens, and the objectionable Martinez clan.
Taos failed to charm the Nabokovs as well. The town struck Véra as “a second-rate Greenwich village”;* she was delighted that ten miles separated her from it. Her disappointment, if not Vladimir’s, was much on display from the start. When a friend of the home’s owner attempted to help the Nabokovs settle in, he found Véra chilly and unforthcoming. As the house had no phone, he was obliged to call on the family in person. Véra resisted his overtures, barely enduring the elaborate picnic he had arranged, excusing herself early from a tea to which he invited the visitors. Delighted that this loyal New Yorker reader knew his work, Vladimir proved more receptive to the westerner’s attentions. He asked to meet Frieda Lawrence, an introduction their substitute host said he would be happy to arrange. Véra vetoed the plan: “She’s a dreadful, awful woman and I don’t want to meet her. I don’t want to go, and I don’t want you to go without me” was the reaction. She entirely disapproved of the writer’s famously plate-throwing widow, could not have felt any more fond of her domestic arrangements, and may at the time have been suffering from her own: Early in August, two chipmunks drowned in the cistern from which the Nabokovs’ drinking water was drawn. The animals were discovered only after the entire family had fallen ill.
The unsavory neighbors, the chipmunk corpses, the boomerang manuscript, and the financial strains all paled in light of a single August moment, however, when Véra discovered a hard lump in her breast. On Tuesday, August 10, a doctor at Albuquerque’s Lovelace Clinic diagnosed the growth as cancerous. The next day Véra cabled her sister Sonia in New York, asking her to arrange for immediate surgery, which was done, a family doct
or having agreed to cancel his weekend plans. The three Nabokovs made a precipitate departure from New Mexico, or at least departed as precipitately as they could: A general airline strike loomed. On Thursday Dmitri drove his mother to the Superchief Train, which made a whistle-stop along the highway between Taos and Santa Fe. If she lost her composure she did not do so in front of her family. For his part Vladimir was hysterical. About his own illnesses he was generally cavalier, but the possibility of losing Véra left him panic-stricken. Dmitri never saw his father so much on the edge as he was the following day, when the two raced the train cross-country, “hurtling in pursuit, tires popping, in the family Buick.” Dmitri attempted to distract him with levity: “How can you say that when your mother is dying of cancer?” Vladimir reprimanded him. He was put out of his misery in New York, where the growth had been removed at Mount Sinai Hospital immediately upon Véra’s Saturday arrival. It proved benign.
This was hardly Véra’s first race across a continent with calamitous news ringing in her ears. After the Ukraine, and the crossing of Germany in 1937, and the mad dash to Saint-Nazaire, she could have been forgiven had she developed a railroad phobia, which she did not. When Lisbet Thompson suffered a similar scare in 1961 Véra recommended her favored corrective: a hearty dose of mental discipline. “Keep track of all your symptoms, consult a good specialist, but do not allow those upsetting thoughts to preoccupy you. These thoughts occur to every person alive. But the only way to keep sane and well is to combat them with all the power of will you have,” she counseled her friend. She had concluded as much in the midst of the 1954 misadventure, upon being told with great certainty that she had breast cancer. “One just must train oneself not to indulge these thoughts,” she assured Lisbet. (The only casualty of the repeated misdiagnoses was Véra’s confidence in American medicine, which she concluded to be a brew of improbable reasoning and black magic.) While friends were told of a brush with ill health, Véra’s indisposition was typically described as gallbladder or liver trouble. Without elaboration, she reported that she was recovering quickly. She was well enough by August 23 to write to the New Mexico landlord, from Anna Feigin’s apartment in New York. Gently she suggested that further rent should be forgiven. Despite the circumstances this was a godsend; after the hospital expenses, the Nabokovs were unable even to send their monthly check abroad to Vladimir’s family. They returned to Ithaca “in a pitiful state of destitution and debt.” A few days after they had done so, Doussia Ergaz’s response to Véra’s August 6 letter arrived in Taos. It was some time in catching up with the couple. Ergaz knew just the publisher for Lolita. She would love to see the manuscript in question.