Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  Two matters in addition to the correspondence fell to Véra: access to her husband, and all details concerning contracts and taxes. More than ever, she greeted visitors at the door and manned the phone. (Several years earlier, a group of Nabokov’s students had called him at home with an esoteric question. They were initially disappointed to fall on Mrs. Nabokov, flabbergasted when she was able to respond to their query without disturbing her husband.) Another caller met with less gratifying results when he telephoned Ithaca in the fall of 1958. The ensuing contretemps revealed much of what was to make Véra notorious in the years to come. When the phone rang at Highland Road on the evening of November 16, the caller “insisted on talking to V. rather than to me, but since he had not given his name to the telephone operator, and I knew not who was calling, I refused to call V. The operator got rude and I lost my temper …,” Véra remembered, blotting out the conclusion of her sentence. “Finally the incognito was cast aside, and then I called V., who had just lain down for a nap.” Unwittingly—and with a great deal of embarrassment—she had been shielding her husband from Walter Minton. She was doing so at Vladimir’s instruction and for his good, but her behavior would not be construed as such. No one knew how utterly foolish Véra had felt playing the role of tiger at the gate, for which she had in part herself to blame; she suppressed all sign of regret, as she did the telling six words following the wayward temper. Originally the sentence had read: “The operator got rude and I lost my temper, and felt miserable about it afterwards.”

  It was some time before the routine worked flawlessly; the Nabokovs were molting still from professor and assistant to celebrity author and celebrity wife. On the morning of December 7 a caller from Pennsylvania surprised the couple in mid-metamorphosis. A Lehigh College student phoned to ask if Nabokov would sign his copy of Lolita. Véra replied that he did not give autographs. That evening she heard a violent knocking on the front door; the student had driven to Ithaca to plead his case in person. His was not even the insistence of a fan; his fraternity had assigned him the task of procuring the autograph. He was adamant. Would Mrs. Nabokov at least sign the book for him? “Of course not, I did not write it,” she replied. Then a revelation occurred. “Suddenly it dawned on me that what he needed was a tangible proof that he had driven to our house and asked for an autograph. And he was almost in tears! I offered to give him a note certifying that Mr. Nabokov gives no autographs. And he was quite consoled, happy and thankful!” she wrote, sounding like the woman who recognized Lolita as the heroine of the piece. And as she was to discover soon enough, her time, like her husband’s, had its limits. In January when her sister Lena broke the neardecade of silence, Véra apologized for the tardiness of her reply: “I am swamped by Volodya’s enormous correspondence (of which he refuses to take care himself). I am spending hours at the typewriter every single day, but it is a losing battle and I have no hope to catch up with this avalanche of mail.” With delight she reported that Dmitri planned to translate Invitation to a Beheading into English, for Putnam’s.

  Lolita was Nabokov’s twelfth novel, and its success struck with a particular poignancy. From the publishers’ points of view, the situation was almost too delicious; it is not often that a bestselling author steps up to the plate with a neglected, largely untranslated backlist of small masterpieces. It should all have happened well before, and it nearly had: There had been recognitions of Nabokov’s genius, and brushes with fame, and an occasional profit, though never all three at once. Without Lolita, Véra held, it might all have taken another fifty years. In some opinions, without Lolita, it might never have happened at all. But in the immediate, new titles, old titles, even Eugene Onegin, which in December Nabokov furiously withdrew from Cornell University Press, which he felt was trying to extort money from him, suddenly became attractive properties. And each of them—along with Lolita in her foreign incarnations—required a contract. The Minton call that had caused Véra such anguish had been about the disposition of British rights, which Minton felt should go to George Weidenfeld, who had agreed to defend the book. Véra favored publishing with the Bodley Head, who were offering a lower royalty, but at whose head sat Graham Greene, to whom she felt the couple owed a great debt.* (Given the difficulty of publishing a book like Lolita in England, where the law was more strict, the two publishers were essentially vying for the privilege of going to jail for a twelve-year-old girl.) Minton was of the opinion that Greene had made a number of powerful enemies in his early defense of the book, and that that collective animus could undermine his publication. He got through to his author on this call, but it is easy to see why he would do so less often in the future. “V. got so bored with the abovementioned details,” Véra noted disapprovingly of the Weidenfeld-Greene discussion, “that he agreed to Minton’s wishes, just so as to get the thing out of the way.” Henceforth Vladimir discussed contractual terms with Véra, but this was the last negotiation with which he involved himself.

  As early as the first glimmers of Lolita’s success, Nabokov had realized that he and the U.S. government were to be in business together; these were the years of the 70 percent tax bracket. (He griped openly of the government’s stake in his windfall. When Walter Winchell asked if he had acquired anything new with his Hollywood earnings, the author shrugged. “Yes, a new tax bracket!”) Previously Véra had handled their tax preparation, unsystematically. She had admitted to Marc Szeftel that she did all in her power to compile the return as quickly as possible. Szeftel had suggested that her inattention might well be costing the couple income. “Yes, I know that we are losing money but … it’s so boring!” she had exclaimed. She could not afford this inattention any longer. Money management had always been a treacherous subject for the family; it acquired a wholly different meaning in 1958. Throughout November and December, Véra corresponded with the accountant to whom she had delivered the previous years’ tax returns. If her husband were indeed to take a leave of absence from Cornell, if the couple were to spend an itinerant year, would they have any obligations to the State of New York? It was not easy to impress upon her correspondent how perfectly nomadic they intended to be. On December 16 Véra wrote—in strict confidence—that they might never return to Ithaca, the first hint of an idea they admitted to no one. After 1958 these issues claimed an enormous amount of her time. There was every reason why Nabokov now described his wife to a visiting British journalist as his “business manager, chauffeuse, and assistant butterfly catcher all rolled into one.” He cited her classroom responsibilities as well, although these came to an abrupt end; Véra traded bluebooks for every imaginable form of contract. In the early years Nabokov had complained legitimately that he had more agents than readers. From 1958 on he was to have countless readers, and one very overworked agent.* In the opinion of those in Doussia Ergaz’s office, he could not have asked for a better one.

  In addition to December exams, one last bluebook stood between Véra and the end of academic life. Throughout the year the Nabokovs had been in touch with the Swedish publisher Wahlström & Widstrand, whose translations of Pnin and Lolita were not only poor but seemingly abridged. The publisher had agreed to withdraw the mangled Lolita from the stores but—as Véra had been able to establish with the help of a Swedish fan—had not done so. Vladimir insisted the contracts be canceled before the publisher further tortured his prose; he had been advised against litigation, but both Nabokovs were actively fuming. In a Cornell University bluebook Véra assumed the onerous task of comparing the Swedish Pnin with the original, which she did with a dictionary at her elbow. With its help, and crossbreeding her Russian and her German, she could squeeze most of the meaning from a sentence. (The exercise may have accounted for her later assertion that if she had the time she would learn two things: Swedish and Spanish.) Whole paragraphs were indeed missing from the Walhström edition, in which, more seriously, the political slant of a passage had been subtly modified, its anticommunism tempered.* The feud with the Swedish publisher dragged on throughout the
last months at Cornell and the first of Nabokov’s leave. Lena Massalsky essentially broke her long silence to chastise her younger sister for having placed her husband’s work with Wahlström. It was the worst of Swedish houses, Lena remonstrated, enclosing a host of clippings to bolster her claim. She acknowledged that she had heard a great deal about both Pnin and Lolita but did not allow her sister the satisfaction of saying she had actually read either novel. Which perhaps explains why Véra thanked Lena for the clippings, adding that they were duplicates of those that had been sent on “by a real Swede.” Lena was understandably offended by this turn of phrase; for the record, she assured her sister, her Swedish was perfect, as indeed it was. Whatever do you mean, replied Véra, suddenly tone-deaf to the nuances of the English language.

  The Wahlström matter was resolved over the summer of 1959, with the assistance of a Stockholm lawyer. In the midst of Lolita’s worldwide triumph, the work Nabokov had attempted years before in the East Seneca Street backyard was completed, the flames this time fanned by Véra, six thousand miles away. The Swedes agreed to destroy their stock of both titles; a lawyer served as the Nabokovs’ witness. On July 7, 1959, he followed the last of a convoy of trucks from the Stockholm warehouse to a dump two miles outside the city, where the books and unbound pages were unloaded. “Ignition was made and soon the whole stack took fire,” he reported. “Tins with petrol were thrown at places where the fire wasn’t easily spread. I stayed there for one hour. When I left, the surface of the stack was grey and burnt. I was convinced that no copy in the stack could be sold but it is remarkable how long a time it takes for a heap of books to burn down. It was a beautiful day with a mild wind from the lake, close by. It was indeed dramatic.” Véra pronounced the dispatch “charming.” This book-burning she could countenance. The destruction of her husband’s work was preferable to its bestselling existence in a defective form.

  The pitilessness with which she pursued the Wahlström & Widstrand matter speaks forcefully to the question of whether her notion of self changed with Lolita’s success. Finally America, and the world, had come around to the conviction on which she had predicated her existence since 1923. Another woman might have found this an occasion to soften her stance; thirty-five years as standard-bearer had stiffened Véra into a posture from which she did not easily unbend. Save on the pages of the diary, she did not relax. The world having come finally (and briefly) to pronounce “Nabokov” correctly was, she told friends, a great joy, but the flood of fan mail, the Argentine and Icelandic editions, did not obviate the fact that idiocy, mediocrity, philistinism, and Maurice Girodias still existed. For every discerning Conrad Brenner there was an Orville Prescott; every Jason Epstein had his Swedish counterpart.* The French had banned, unbanned, rebanned Lolita; briefly the Belgians did the same. Various American libraries had refused to stock the novel. The book’s future in England remained uncertain, the German translation was imperfect, pirated editions were rumored to be on sale in Mexico and Uruguay. For every royalty check there were a thousand memories of instability; the lawyers with whom Véra met in 1959 grew used to the influence of anxiety. A gauge of where the validation of her husband’s genius had left Véra can be read in her ardent response to a March fan letter: “We have been running into a number of very young people whose attitude to art is so remarkably adult, detached and penetrating that it warms the cockles of one’s heart. How I detest those quacks and hypocrits [sic] who pretend that real great art can do anything but ennoble a man’s mind!”

  And then there was Doctor Zhivago. Following upon a history as convoluted as Lolita’s, Pasternak’s novel was published four weeks after Nabokov’s. Its author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on October 23, the first Russian to claim the honor since Bunin. Over the months that followed, the two compatriots’ books—both begun in 1948, one published in translation by an author still in the USSR, the other the work of a newly minted American who still contended that his Russian was better than his English—were locked in mortal combat at the top of the bestseller list. Zhivago made its first appearance on the list early in October, when Lolita assumed the number one position; within six weeks Zhivago had overtaken Lolita. The success of a book Véra considered aggressively second-rate only proved further that one should not expect too much of the world. She had read the novel before her husband and pronounced it inferior. Vladimir denounced Pasternak’s work to Wilson, a reading based, to Wilson’s mind, solely on excerpts and, to Roman Grynberg’s mind, solely on Véra’s appraisal. Grynberg urged his friend: “Really do read it! Otherwise you’re making judgments based on the words of dear Véra, who has read a wonderful Russian book in a horrible and hurried translation.”* Vladimir agreed wholeheartedly that the translation should be distinguished from the novel. “It’s a good translation,” he assured a reporter. “It’s the book that’s bad.” He restrained himself as much as possible but still could not resist snorting when told that the waiting list for Zhivago in the Ithaca library was longer than that for Lolita.† (While he did not admire the novel he did admire Pantheon’s efforts on its behalf. “The Zhivago gang is doing its best to prop up the sagging doctor. Should we not do something in regard to our nymphet?” he nudged Minton in May, when the books were numbers one and four respectively on the list.) Véra thought little of the book, and its admirers, for different reasons. “The communists have succeeded in pushing this mediocre concoction into the ‘Nobel prize winners’ club—merely by pretending that it had been ‘smuggled’ out of USSR! A stampede of fools, led by the pro-commie knaves,” she inveighed in the diary. She crossed out the paragraph later, almost as if she regretted having wasted her energy on such a piece of goods, as if its mention marred the pages on Lolita’s conquests. She could not have been embarrassed by the force of her sentiment, about which she was perfectly vocal. Both Nabokovs believed that the Soviet Union approved of the novel and was only putting on a show to the contrary. Véra remained always doctrinaire in her literary standards: If you were a fine writer and your politics were lousy, or questionable (Tsvetaeva), you were a bad writer. If you were a less fine writer, and your politics were laudatory (Solzhenitsyn), you were still a bad writer.

  In light of the winter bestseller lists, on which Lolita hung precariously to Lara’s feet, the Nabokovs’ dismissal of Pasternak looked like sour grapes. Bitterly Véra had observed at the end of October that Lolita was still on the list, everywhere, “although she’ll probably soon be squeezed out by that pitiful and miserable ‘book’ by the lowly Pasternak, whom V. is reluctant to badmouth, so as not to be misunderstood.” There was every indication he was already misunderstood. Two days later Wilson asserted that Vladimir was “behaving rather badly about Pasternak. I have talked to him on the telephone three times lately about other matters and he did nothing but rave about how awful Zhivago was. He wants to be the only Russian novelist in existence. It amuses me to see Zhivago just behind Lolita on the bestseller list, and I am wondering whether Pasternak—as they say about horse-races—may not nose her out.” (It could not have been easy for the author of the doomed Hecate County—the book had been removed from sale after selling fifty thousand copies, Wilson’s first substantial earnings—to watch Lolita sell many thousand more.) Nabokov was aware of how the Zhivago denouncing sounded but could not help himself, except to condemn more generously. “Compared to Pasternak, Mr. Steinbeck is a genius,” he edified a reporter in January. He said as much to friends at a dinner on Highland Road that winter, as a rubber-band-powered butterfly sent by Wilson flapped its way around the room. One wing was labeled “Lolita,” the other “Zhivago.” To his handful of guests, Nabokov protested that his disdain was in no way fueled by professional jealousy.*

  Véra was not mistaken to remain on the alert. While Nabokov had not been pilloried as Bishop had feared, his success proved as objectionable as his choice of subject. Many in Ithaca saw Lolita as a cunning act of currency conversion; even the Highland Road landlord felt Nabokov was thumbing his nose at
America in order to get out of the country. Colleagues quibbled with the novel on artistic grounds. As if to return Véra’s parry, Goethe scholar Eric Blackhall held that the book would have been stronger if limited to its first half. The analyses of Doctor Zhivago—the language of which cannot even invite a comparison with that of Lolita—invited further ill will. With friends like Wilson, Nabokov did not exactly need enemies, but he had them: He had maintained his distance from the Russian community in New York, who now spoke of the two compatriots on the bestseller list as “the saint and the pornographer.” Against these naysayers—and the thousand people who demanded her husband’s time in the last Cornell months—Véra remained on guard. Four decades of virtual anonymity had not been as fatiguing as was bestsellerdom; the diary entries are shot through with concern for poor, exhausted Vladimir. Before a New York trip in the fall she warned the Hessens that they preferred to dine quietly with them and the Grynbergs: “V. is very tired and when there are a lot of people around he wanes,” she explained. At Harvard she had been thought to treat her husband like a work of art that needed to be protected. There was now cause for greater vigilance.