Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  This was the long letter that had begun with the report of Dmitri’s graduation, a missive from which she at first appeared to have exempted herself. It is not the first instance of Véra distancing herself from the enterprise at home, but it is the first that hints at some kind of personal accomplishment. The words “value of my own” rustle loudly on the page, and with a certain poignancy. They prove but a glimmer. Within days she was subsumed by the typing of Pnin, and by the move to the small cottage she had found for the fall semester. She spent the first week on Hanshaw Road alone, as Vladimir was hospitalized with a severe attack of lumbago, a misadventure that nearly resulted in a chapter called “Pnin at the Hospital.”

  Girodias published Lolita in September, nearly before his author realized he had done so; Véra and Vladimir held the book’s two volumes in their hands for the first time on October 8, 1955. The novel’s early days were quiet ones. Both Nabokovs were more distracted by the fortunes of Pnin, not being so much cosseted in New York, where Pat Covici was finding the manuscript a collection of sketches and not a full-fledged novel. “My Poor Pnin” proved more deserving of his original title than its author intended; after months of deliberation, Covici rejected the book. (The editor to whom Nabokov had first mentioned Lolita and who had been the first to contract for Pnin, Covici published neither novel in the end.) A measure of Vladimir’s desperation can be read in the fact that he turned next to Harper, whose publication of Conclusive Evidence he had so much maligned. Pnin would remain homeless until mid-1956, when Epstein finally made an offer for the book, no less concerned about its marketing than Covici had been. Speaking for his Doubleday colleagues, Epstein allowed: “As one of us has said, it’s the kind of book that the customer will have to read in advance before taking it home with him.” If Vladimir was discouraged about Pnin’s fate, as he should have been, if Véra had qualms about Lolita—and it is impossible to think she could not have, when Bishop had estimated that there was a better than average chance her husband would be fired, and they were financially stable for the first time in thirty years—then Graham Greene delivered the Nabokovs a Christmas present at the end of 1955 disproportionate to any they had or would ever receive. Asked by the (London) Sunday Times to name the three best books of 1955, he included an English-language novel of which no one had heard, available neither in America nor in Great Britain, but that could be purchased, in a two-volume, light-green edition, in Paris.

  The forces Greene set in motion in London were some time in making themselves felt in America. For the spring sabbatical Elena Levin had found a quiet, first-floor apartment with kitchenette for the Nabokovs at the Continental Hotel in Cambridge, where they arrived on February 3, 1956, after a valiant battle with icy roads. They settled in for a three-month stay, spent primarily at Widener. It was at the Continental that they read, in Harvey Breit’s February 26 Times Book Review column, that a work called Lolita—“a long French novel about nymphets,” author unnamed—was causing a minor scandal in London. Having been named by one paper a best book of 1955, it was denounced in another as one of the filthiest. (The Nabokovs’ real debt was less to Greene than to The Sunday Express’s conservative editor in chief, John Gordon, who led the countercharge.* Together Greene and Gordon worked their combinational magic.) Two weeks later Breit elaborated on the mysterious French work, revealing the name of its author, and quoting Harry Levin’s uncredited assessment of the book a sort of cross between Daisy Miller and The Possessed. Gallimard promptly acquired French translation rights.†

  From the room at the Continental Véra responded to an immediate volley of publishers’ queries. Gently she assured the editors at Indiana University Press that while her husband applauded their spirit of adventure, this was not a book for them; there was a reason she had sent it to a Paris agent in the first place. She composed in part or in whole a reassuring letter to the devoted Pat Covici, who worried for Vladimir’s reputation: Lolita could in no way be said to be “lewd and libertine.” The novel was a tragedy, and the tragic and the obscene were mutually exclusive.‡ At the beginning of May, the couple set off by way of the Grand Canyon for Utah, where they had rented a lovely cottage amid five acres of sage and cedar with a glorious view of Mount Carmel, accommodations that proved as satisfactory as those in Arizona had proved unsatisfactory.§ Here Véra, or Vladimir, or—as Véra was once half-seriously to refer to them later, “V & V Inc.”—finished the Lermontov translation. Nabokov continued with his Onegin commentaries, which he hoped to complete by Christmas. Mount Carmel was lovely until late June, when a snake attempted to pay Véra a visit, from a windowsill. Shortly afterward she drove Vladimir north, collecting along the way.

  In Ithaca the Nabokovs settled into a new house, at 425 Hanshaw Road. Véra braced herself for the familiar academic drill. “Another busy year. Another dreadful Ithaca winter,” she moaned, well before the snow had begun to fall. “The winters here are dreadful, cold, dark, icy, complicated by driving over icy steep hill streets. We have no garage this year and shall probably have to shovel out our car to drive to college in the morning for the best part of two or three months.”* Despite the academic duties, despite Pushkin, Vladimir was attempting work on a new novel. He was exhausted by his efforts; Véra sounds exhausted by him. “Since he is working all day and all night and has completely tortured himself I am looking forward to the end of this book. Although I do know that having finished one thing he immediately moves to the next,” she wrote her sister-in-law in a letter that began with the assurance that Vladimir had been planning to write her for some time. Two months later he claimed to be on the brink of doing so, though when Véra reminded him of his promise she met inevitably with the same response: “Yes, of course, but today I am too tired.” She suggested Elena blame Onegin. She herself did, and yet knew this to be her own fault. A year later, when Onegin was still not finished, she grumbled that she was beginning to hate Pushkin, who had for so long kept her husband from a new book. The Master stood quite literally in Nabokov’s way; by April 1957, when Véra had begun to type out Canto One of the annotated translation, the manuscript had grown to waist height.† In Paris, Lolita had been banned at the request of the British Home Office, who did not want copies of the filthy green volume floating across the Channel. So long as her husband’s position was not threatened Véra did not shy from controversy. The woman who was capable of holding up her end of a nine-year silence noted with satisfaction that the novel was creating “a lovely row in the French press.”

  For every one of his friends who weighed in with misgivings about Lolita in the course of 1956, there was a publisher somewhere in the world who wrote to express interest. Between vetting Pnin proofs and co-proctoring her husband’s exams, Véra fielded these queries. Late in the summer, the Danes commissioned the book. At the same time Jason Epstein arranged for The Anchor Review to carry a long excerpt from the novel, a move calculated to pave the way toward U.S. publication. Véra drove Vladimir to New York in mid-October to confer with the magazine’s editors, at the Epsteins’ apartment. At the meeting Nabokov was asked how he happened to know so much about little girls; Véra explained that her husband had sat on the Ithaca buses with a notepad and listened carefully. He had also haunted playgrounds, until his doing so had become awkward. There were otherwise no little girls in his life. The second matter of business the Nabokovs had hoped to conduct in New York—a contribution to a Festschrift being prepared for Aldanov—went unattended. In a lovely instance of the Old World falling prey to the New, the Buick was towed, and the half day meant for Aldanov was devoted instead to recovering the car.

  As much as Lolita’s various misfortunes claimed Véra’s time throughout the winter, her attention was diverted by the domestic front. (In a neat carbonic tribute to the double life, a sheet of paper survives on which she inadvertently superimposed a letter about Pnin’s motion picture rights on one to an Ithaca lawyer who seemed to feel the Nabokovs had not paid a dishwasher repair bill at their new address.) She a
rranged for Anna Feigin’s brother Ilya, partially paralyzed after a stroke, to move to an Ithaca nursing home, where she might look after him; within the Slonim family as well she paid the price of the capable. By ambulance her cousin traveled to Ithaca’s Oak Hill Manor, where Véra visited him regularly until his death. For some reason the second Hanshaw Road home—larger than the Nabokovs had liked, but modern and comfortable—had proved unsuitable; in February 1957 Véra packed the family up again. She may well have shared in the strain she described on her husband’s part, as the winter was particularly brutal. “I wonder if you New-York-Citiers can imagine the amount of snow we are having?” she queried Epstein before the move. Perhaps because of the allocation of labor, she did not find midwinter Ithaca as scenic as her husband. Nabokov saw the junipers as “albino camels.” Véra heard only a symphony of complaining car engines, of whining tires up and down the street.

  Mercifully the new house had a garage, but one fixture at the Highland Road address proved less welcome. Under some duress the Nabokovs had agreed to care for their landlords’ Siamese cat, to whom Vladimir spoke in Russian. All began swimmingly. By the end of the first month of cohabitation he was disgusted by the animal, who would not offer him a moment’s peace. Bandit seemed willing enough to believe Véra was Mrs. Sharp but could not fathom why the new Mr. Sharp would not allow him in his study. The animal was unrelenting, and pressed his case by offering up home trophies, with which he played mouse-tennis against the office door. Véra’s distress can be imagined; the Royal York’s plumbing was nothing compared with this. She wrote the Sharps in Africa but found the mails distressingly slow. “Do you think this letter will reach Léopoldville by air mail in two weeks?” she asked one of Nabokov’s seminar students hopefully, having explained the Bandit-induced anguish. (The cat, like his Pale Fire counterpart, was farmed out, to friends of the home’s owners.) At their new rental at 880 Highland Road Véra and Vladimir entertained Ivan Obolensky, the first American publisher to come calling about Lolita. He arrived on March 4, days before Pnin was published to rave reviews, Nabokov’s first success in America.

  Pnin’s publication provided a reprieve from the Lolita-defending in which the couple had been engaged since friends had begun to read—and in Wilson’s and Bishop’s cases, failed to finish—the book. The consensus was that he had settled on a most distasteful subject; the book seemed a monstrous frivolity. Bishop intentionally avoided the novel, which allowed him, if asked, to shrug it off as a peccadillo, as something his friend and esteemed colleague had done in far-off Paris and of no consequence to the university. He believed nothing of the kind and fretted over the subject, as deeply worried for his friends as he was disapproving of the book. “I would not like to have to defend him in that,” he confided in Szeftel, anticipating a scandal. “Would you?”* Szeftel was one colleague who had read the book. He was not shocked, but did think the publication of a volume on such a “salacious topic” could lead to trouble at a coeducational institution. We know less of what Szeftel thought on reading Pnin, the bumbling hero of which was rumored to have been—and has recently been demonstrated to have been—based on him, a claim Nabokov did not always deny. Even Mrs. Szeftel had noted the resemblance to her husband on reading Pnin’s adventures in The New Yorker. The borrowed biography in no way interfered with the success of the novel, which went into its second printing two weeks after publication.† It was among the ten finalists for the 1958 National Book Award.‡

  By the end of the spring of 1957, Lolita had publishers in Italy, France, and Germany. Obolensky was not alone in pursuing American rights in the novel for his own firm; Epstein was doing all he could to convince Doubleday to publish the book, especially as his author kept him apprised of every one of Obolensky’s moves. Nor did Vladimir desist from a little strategic nudging: “Lolita is young, and I am old,” he reminded his editor. At Doubleday Epstein had his work cut out for him. The firm’s head was Douglas Black, who had sunk a small fortune into the failed defense of Hecate County. As editor in chief and Lolita-supporter Ken McCormick remembered it, the Doubleday lawyers’ 1957 reasoning went like this: Having robbed a bank once and been prosecuted for it, the firm should do its best not to be caught standing around on the corner while a second crime was in progress. They would only receive a stiffer sentence for Lolita, construed as a second offense.* At Simon & Schuster, senior editor Maria Leiper thought the novel brilliant and wrote a delirious report. She suggested Brockway read behind her. She was startled when he confessed he had already read the novel, which he had not much liked. Her colleagues were universally horror-struck; the head of the editorial department deemed the book “repulsive.” A Harper & Row imprint distinguished itself by shunning Lolita not on legal or ethical but on artistic grounds. Most of these editors read copies of the novel that had been imported discreetly in the bottoms of suitcases, in the great Ulysses—Lady Chatterley tradition. (Anaïs Nin claimed she had made a tidy profit reselling copies of Lolita in America at a considerable markup.) At Random House William Styron made an eloquent case for the novel, which he was tempted to publish privately; Hiram Haydn, Styron’s editor and the firm’s newly named editor in chief, could only sputter in response. Surely Styron knew he had an adolescent daughter? The loathsome book would be published over his dead body. In reading the novel Haydn was “revolted to the point of nausea,” so entirely did Humbert and Nabokov merge in his mind. Lambasted by his peers, he held his ground even as the novel raced up the bestseller list a year later. All of this wrangling went on very much behind the scenes. But even at his birth poor Pnin’s virtues were shadowed by that of his nubile cousin. Time reviewed Pnin glowingly, but devoted nearly as much space to the sotto voce scandal the novel’s author had occasioned in Europe with another book.

  Véra planted flowers that spring in the Highland Road yard, for the first time in her life. This was the yard in which pheasants left their Pale Fire tracks, from which the Nabokovs’ laughter rang out over the neighborhood as they played twilight games of horseshoes. The pieces had finally begun to fall into place. At this pivotal moment one additional piece of the past, too, fell into place. That summer, most of which was spent typing Onegin, for which Dmitri was preparing the index, Véra learned from Anna Feigin that she could file a restitutions claim in Berlin. “Well then, if that is indeed the case, then forcing the Germans to pay could only be pleasurable,” she wrote Goldenweiser, who offered to represent her. Her case was presented on the grounds that on the arrival in New York she did not have enough English to secure a job in America. She filed her claim as the greatest English-language novel written by a non-native-speaker climbed the bestseller list.

  5

  Speaking for her husband in 1952, Véra had written a Houghton Mifflin editor: “The question of mimicry is one that has passionately interested him all his life and one of his pet projects has always been the compilation of a work that would comprise all known examples of mimicry in the animal kingdom.” She warned that the results could be massive, though if a truly serious work on the subject was what Houghton had in mind, “Vladimir is your man.” Vladimir never tackled the subject; Véra instead wrote the book on mimicry, though never between hard covers. The word “copyist” takes on new meaning in the Nabokovs’ correspondence, especially as that correspondence evolved in the 1950s. In August 1951 Véra wrote an editor at the newly founded Chekhov Publishing House about The Gift (Dar), a Russian-language edition of which the house was considering. The draft is in her hand, but Vladimir’s voice. Nabokov then recopied the document, which he signed and sent. Answering this missive was simpler than would be answering some of those that followed. With the novel under submission, the couple began to relay each other in the correspondence. In October a Chekhov editor found herself thanking Vladimir for his wife’s letter. The arrangement entailed a certain degree of contortionism on all sides. The same month Véra composed a letter for Vladimir inquiring after “a letter my wife wrote in my behalf this fall.”

&nbs
p; She amiably embraced these awkward poses, at which, by nature, or by force of practice, she was expert. Chekhov accepted The Gift; seventeen years after it had been written, the novel was published in Russian.* The Chekhov staff needed a summary of the book, something Vladimir had his usual aversion to composing. In the guise of an impartial reader, Véra wrote of Fyodor and Zina’s “nightly roamings on the spellbound moonlit streets … full of magic and poetry.” She submitted the unsigned précis to Chekhov with the line, “I have finally managed to get one of the ‘good’ readers to make a synopsis of DAR.” It was an appropriate ruse for a work in which her husband described nature’s cunning and seemingly frivolous use of disguise, in which he discoursed “about those magic masks of mimicry; about the enormous moth which in a state of repose assumes the image of a snake looking at you.”

  In the early 1950s those letters to which Véra did lend her signature as well as her voice went out from “Véra Nabokov” or from a more neutral “V. Nabokov.” As Véra Nabokov she might write, for example, to ask if a publisher might consider adding a reprint edition of Bend Sinister to its list. As the paper piled up over the Cornell years she searched for a formula that would serve all of her epistolary purposes. By 1956, when she had begun a testy exchange with Maurice Girodias about perceived violations of the Lolita contract, she settled on a signature that seemed to correspond to her identity, or nonidentity. From these years, and just in time, emerged “Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov,” who in her formal Old World script would sign “Véra Nabokov” above her married name, which she typed, in parentheses, as if to mute the potency of the alias. The formula allowed her to speak for Vladimir without clumsy explanation and without a circuitous round of excuses. In and just after 1957, when further camouflage was in order, she wrote as “J. G. Smith,” a fictional Cornell secretary who shared her handwriting and her cadences, and who could be even more terse than Véra. It was J. G. Smith who composed waspish letters of non-recommendation on Professor Nabokov’s behalf. He had only the vaguest memory of the candidate in question, whose grasp of the Russian language “is as sketchy as that of any average college graduate who studied ‘linguistics.’ ”*