Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  Even if she had not stepped out from the wings by 1958, her days of living more or less incognito in upstate New York were over. It was important to photograph the author, but especially crucial to include Véra in the frame, the flesh-and-blood—and mercifully middle-aged—woman behind the man behind the man who liked little girls. Once again, “mask” proved the key word. Within the first week back in Ithaca Véra fielded calls from The New York Times Book Review, from Time, from various book club editors, from Minton. A large and not terribly flattering photo of both Nabokovs appeared in the Post, along with a full-page interview with Vladimir. Publication day found Lolita’s author “serenely indifferent,” as Véra repeatedly described him in the blinding light of his success. He was spreading his vast collection of American butterflies at a rate of fifty or so a day, focusing so intently on his winged nymphets it was difficult for his wife to get his attention. She felt she was living with a deaf man; at such times he neither saw nor heard. It took Véra three days to find the time to record the news of publication Monday: There had been three hundred reorders in the morning, a thousand by midafternoon, fourteen hundred by the time Minton finally dispatched his telegram of congratulations to Ithaca, twenty-six hundred more the following day. Even Orville Prescott’s lambasting the book in the Times—he found it repellent “highbrow pornography”—had assisted sales. In Véra’s view Prescott’s attack was one of “vicious spite,” revenge for what he considered the impossible recall her husband had demonstrated in Speak, Memory.

  Published on August 18, 1958, Lolita began to ascend the bestseller list two weeks later. By early September, eighty thousand copies of the novel were in print. (As the Nabokovs were only too aware, this amounted to all of Vladimir’s previous print runs in Russian and English combined.) At the end of the month, the book was number one on the New York Times list. Véra was terrifically pleased with Minton, who she felt had published a difficult book “in a subtle and flawlessly tactful way.” “Flawlessly tactful” amounted in large part to one thing in the Nabokov household: full-page ads. Minton had begun to publicize the book extensively, to Véra’s delight; henceforth it would be her job to remind editors that her husband thought they should consider ads, big ads, lots of ads. The Nabokovs had too often heard the dull thud fine fiction makes when it lands, which was not what they heard now. The novel was seized by Canadian customs, banned for a second time in France. Movie scouts, reporters, fans, editors, descended on the couple, as did a number of what Véra termed “crackpots.” “It becomes increasingly difficult to decide who deserves an answer, and who should be ignored,” she noted, the etiquette having changed overnight. She spent her time grappling with admirers like the songwriter who had transformed Lolita into a ballad and was intent on securing rights in the title. He insisted on serenading Véra telephonically with the fruits of his labors. After several such calls she was ready to concede that the composer was a perfect crackpot. He had already calculated that the novel would earn its author a tidy profit, a realization to which Véra came more gradually. Only on October 12 did she write Elena Sikorski, “It will apparently bring Volodya a fairly large sum of money.”

  On September 5 Véra sat upstairs at the brick Colonial on 404 Highland Road writing of Lolita’s triumphs while downstairs Life’s Paul O’Neil conducted the first of several interviews with her husband. A week later Life’s photographer arrived for his two-day blitz.* The journalists found Mrs. Nabokov sophisticated and smart; they were charmed by her, deeply amused by her husband. In his diary, photographer Carl Mydans noted: “They are both delightful people, live together in great respect for each other—happily.” He stubbornly clicked away, shooting pictures of Vladimir in front of his books, with his eleven folders of Pushkin, at the chessboard, battering the punching ball in the basement, writing in bed, in the yard, in the car, catching a butterfly, killing it, boxing it, even “in front of an innocent motel.” He photographed Véra as well, to her dismay: “I don’t like to be photographed (might have enjoyed it if it all had happened some 15 years ago, at least) but it is even more of a nuisance to refuse unless the refusal is accepted at once.” If the photographer insisted, she felt she had no choice but to consent, reluctantly but gracefully. She was furthermore wholly taken with Mydans, a modest man of tremendous energy and single-minded concentration. She found his devotion to his work to be an inspiration: “While he is at it nothing else matters—he will stand in the middle of the highway ignoring the traffic until he has obtained the picture he has already created in his mind’s eye.” It was a skill at which she was an unacknowledged expert, having spent more than thirty-three years doing precisely the same thing.

  2

  Lolita spent the fall on the bestseller list, the first novel since Gone with the Wind to sell a hundred thousand copies within three weeks of publication. (More meaningfully from Véra’s point of view, Lolita was the “first representative of true literature on the ‘List’ ” since Thornton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey, which she considered “a moderately good book.”) Gorgeous full-page ads ran in the major media, into which Minton no longer needed to insert sober endorsements from the academy: In the course of the fall the novel was recognized as a virtuouso performance in The New York Times Book Review, in The Atlantic Monthly, in The New Yorker, by Dorothy Parker in Esquire.* No day passed without Lolita being discussed somewhere in the press.

  Only rarely did the couple miss a mention. When the uncle who had settled his enormous, prerevolutionary fortune on Nabokov had died in 1915, Vladimir had had a curious dream: Uncle Vasya reappeared to announce that he would one day return as Harry and Kuvyrkin, in dream terms a team of circus clowns. Harry and Kuvyrkin materialized now, under the aliases Harris and Kubrick. While the Nabokovs lunched on September 13 with Mydans and the Life caption writer, the telephone rang. It was Morris Bishop, calling with congratulations. When Véra expressed confusion, Bishop read to her from that morning’s Times. The Nabokovs had been buying the paper every day—Vladimir was avidly following a Staten Island murder case, in which an eight-year-old Mormon boy claimed he had butchered his parents with a kitchen knife—but had not yet consulted that Saturday’s edition. It fell to Bishop to notify Véra that movie rights in the novel had been sold to the directing-producing team of Stanley Kubrick and James Harris for $150,000, or about seventeen times Vladimir’s Cornell salary. The couple knew Minton was in negotiations but not that any agreement had been reached. How Véra conveyed Bishop’s news to the three at table, who immediately leapt upon the paper in search of the five-paragraph announcement, is unclear. She noted only that “the news was broken in a way Time”—but of course not she—“would have called ‘dramatic.’ ”

  The film deal made Vladimir popular, or prominent, in a way that was uncomfortable for both Nabokovs. Quickly Véra pointed out that the first half of the money would have to be staggered over several years, for tax reasons; that the second half might never be paid; that the promised 15 percent of producer’s profits could prove chimerical, in which prophecy she was correct. Both Nabokovs were clearly embarrassed to be perceived as recipients of what seemed to all a staggering sum of money. To many on the Cornell campus, even Lolita’s five-dollar cover price was prohibitive. When a colleague observed that Vladimir would surely never have to teach again “having struck oil in Beverly Hills,” Véra countered that they were indeed having a hectic time, but that the colleague was mistaken. Vladimir could not part with Cornell; they planned only to take a year’s leave. She was particularly distressed when the interest in her husband appeared to derive from his Hollywood profits. The secretary of a women’s club at the Ithaca Presbyterian Church phoned days after the announcement to ask if Professor Nabokov might address the group. Véra took the call, conveying his regrets. “Oh, I realize he must be terribly busy now,” the club secretary had responded. The “now” grated harshly on Véra’s nerves. “This is not Lolita’s literary merits. It’s merely the 150 ‘grand’ mentioned by the Times,” she carpe
d. Still, she found some consolation in the secretary’s call, vindication of a kind: “To think that three years ago people like Covici, Laughlin, and also the Bishops, strongly advised V. never to publish Lolita, because, among other things, ‘all the churches, the women’s clubs’ and so forth would ‘crack down on you.’ ”

  In another kind of conspicuousness she took great delight. Lolita instantly made its way into the American vernacular. Véra was particularly cheered by The New York Times Book Review’s “delightful cartoon: Workman inside a manhole, absorbed in a book, tells a passer-by, who appears to be pleading with him: No, no, get your own copy of Lolita.” In some magazines Lolita could be found once in a humorous sketch, again in a Putnam’s ad. (None of these escaped Véra’s notice, certainly not the Martian who demanded, “Take me to your Lolita.” Assiduously she compiled a different sort of Lolita diary, volumes of press clippings, great and small.) The Nabokovs played a good deal of “network roulette” on Highland Road; Véra noted that Lolita was mentioned between segments on “an idiotic Arthur Godfrey show.” A Steve Allen skit featuring Zorro and a Lolita proved more amusing. In November the couple heard Dean Martin claim that he had nothing to do in Las Vegas as he did not gamble, so he had sat in his hotel lobby and read children’s books: Pollyanna, The Bobbsey Twins, Lolita. (Véra misspelled two of the three titles.) One Sunday evening Steve Allen caused a little un-Nabokovian breathlessness in Véra’s voice when a doll-girl turned up in a “scientific skit.” Allen concluded, “We should send this doll to Mr. Nabokov.” Exclaimed Véra: “We both heard it distinctly—but could not believe our ears!” Milton Berle opened his first show of 1959 with: “First of all let me congratulate Lolita: She is thirteen now.” He kept up the patter—outlining the plot of a novel called “Lolita Strikes Back,” the story of an eighty-four-year-old woman who falls deeply in love with a twelve-year-old boy—well into the New Year.

  Toward the reporters and the exposure they represented Véra was equally accommodating; by and large she found the journalists delightful. After the first gaggle of interviewers had flown off she began to notice a certain set of familiar themes in their questions: “They all hope to find some ‘scandalous’ angle.” She could imagine what they wanted to hear; that Cornell’s president, Deane W. Malott, had asked her husband not to set foot on campus un-chaperoned. (She seemed unaware of the fact that that was already the case.) In fact reporters found it difficult to locate any controversy whatsoever on campus, where the book was selling beautifully, where graduate students in the English Department played dumb, where the moral issue was nowhere under hot debate. (Some tongues did cluck, but neither the Nabokovs nor the reporters heard them.) President Malott received only the odd letter, to which he replied evenly, probably more evenly than Nabokov would have liked.* Véra saw that from the journalist’s perspective this would not do: “They seem disappointed to find Cornell ideally adult and unaffected—although had the situation been different, they would have loved to crusade against censorship!” She knew well that scandal sold books. A decade earlier she had observed that the Boston banning of Strange Fruit and Forever Amber had worked wonders for both titles.

  She did not set down another question no one had bothered to ask until Lolita made them do so: Who was Mrs. Nabokov? What was the story behind the silver-haired woman who hung on every word of the man who had written 319 pyrotechnic pages on a cultured European rapist? Visitors drew their own conclusions. The young lawyer who visited to clear up the mess surrounding the unlicensed ballad concluded she was the Department of Recollection. Nabokov conferred with his wife at every step of their discussion. “Now, didn’t we …” he would begin, and softly Véra would answer, “Well, not exactly,” gently correcting his course. A student interviewer learned that Véra filed her husband’s random notes in cardboard boxes, producing them on demand for future use, something that Dick Keegan had observed firsthand. The student concluded she was the Department of Connecting Things. Mimicry may well have appealed to Véra but misrepresentation did not; it was at this time that she wrote the New York Post with “a correction which is most important to me.” This letter to the editor she requested the paper publish, which it did. She was not at all a Russian aristocrat, but proud to report she was Jewish.*

  In the course of October the Nabokovs made two weekend trips to New York. On the first occasion Vladimir spoke at The Herald Tribune’s Book and Author Luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria, along with his fellow bestsellers Agnes de Mille and Fannie Hurst. Before a thousand people he read his poem “An Evening of Russian Poetry,” mentioning Lolita not at all. Véra believed the verse was lost on the audience, which for the most part consisted of elderly women. She felt differently about his first television appearance, a CBC interview conducted at the Rockefeller Center studios. She exclaimed over the makeup artist who powdered her husband’s head to keep the bald spot from shining; her excitement over the countdown to air time is palpable. As she sat with Dmitri in the darkened auditorium, she was thrilled to watch her husband as she never had before: in duplicate. He performed simultaneously on the studio screen and on the lighted stage, a tidy plagiarism of Professor Nabokov’s supposed living room, one Véra heartily approved. She felt he spoke beautifully—he did so very obviously from index cards—and was especially fond of the definition he had provided when asked to elaborate on “philistines.” They are, he offered, “ready-made souls in plastic bags.”† She was equally amused by the ingenuity he displayed in pouring his own small flask of brandy into the onstage teacups. It was ten-thirty at night, and liquor was nowhere available. Presumably not only on account of this sacrifice, he was deemed by the CBC an ideal guest.

  Véra’s one gripe with Lolita’s reception was something a New York Post critic had noted early on: “Lolita was attacked as a fearsome moppet, a little monster, a shallow, corrupt, libidinous and singularly unattractive brat.” Where the novel’s reviewers inclined toward pitying Humbert, she fixed instead on Lolita’s vulnerability, stressing that she had been left alone without a single close relative in the world. Had she mentioned her qualms anywhere but in the diary they might have seemed a calculated defense of a difficult-to-defend book, which they were not; she expressed a similar frustration later when reviewers missed the pathos of Hazel’s suicide in Pale Fire. She lamented the treatment of the nymphet to whom she would owe so much:

  Lolita discussed by the papers from every possible point of view except one: that of its beauty and pathos. Critics prefer to look for moral symbols, justification, condemnation, or explanation of HH’s predicament … I wish, though, somebody would notice the tender description of the child’s helplessness, her pathetic dependence on monstrous HH, and her heartrending courage all along culminating in that squalid but essentially pure and healthy marriage, and her letter, and her dog. And that terrible expression on her face when she had been cheated by HH out of some little pleasure that had been promised. They all miss the fact that “the horrid little brat” Lolita, is essentially very good indeed—or she would not have straightened out after being crushed so terribly, and found a decent life with poor Dick more to her liking than the other kind.

  Lolita was a novel but Lolita was also a girl. And this one, Mrs. Nabokov thought, should stand at the center of the story to which she lent her name.

  3

  F. W. Dupee credited Lolita with effecting a volcanic change in America’s literary landscape, uniting for once all the brows, high-, middle-, and low-, allowing “the fading smile of the Eisenhower Age to give way to a terrible grin.” In an involuted game of After You, Alphonse, she even helped Hecate County back into print.* She cleared the way for Lady Chatterley, and would work a similarly liberating effect in England; she changed the fortunes of several publishing houses.† But Lolita, the book and its heroine, changed no one’s life as much as Véra’s. Six days before the novel was published she wrote Goldenweiser, who was preparing her restitution case, that she spent a few hours a day on her husband’s work, conduct
ing all of his correspondence, correcting proofs, assisting him with his research. How to value this labor for the Germans she could not begin to say. In September she complained of the new demands of the correspondence. The Japanese had bought the novel; Doubleday had contracted for a book of poems; the British sale of Lolita was under discussion; she was correcting the German translation of Pnin. By the end of October she could no longer cope with the mail. Thanksgiving hardly qualified as a reprieve, as the Nabokovs were again in New York for meetings. After the holiday Véra wrote Berkman, “We are swamped with work. I never imagined so many letters can rain into one mailbox.” She would never have permitted herself the luxury of writing only to announce as much; the purpose of her communication was to ask if Berkman might be interested in taking over Vladimir’s classes for the spring term. As it was impossible to imagine his continuing to publicize Lolita while teaching, he had applied for a leave of absence. It was granted on the condition that he find a substitute lecturer, no easy feat given his academic range. Véra was particularly concerned that a replacement be found swiftly, as Vladimir had “2 large babies to nurse through publication (Pushkin and a French Lolita) and several little ones.” Letters went out in all directions, to much the same circle but with a very different urgency as they had in order to locate the Cornell job in the first place. Lolita was in its ninth printing in November, when paperback rights were sold to Fawcett for one hundred thousand dollars.