by Stacy Schiff
At the same time, events were moving so quickly she barely found time to record them. The novelist Herbert Gold accepted Nabokov’s Cornell position, inheriting with it an annotated copy of Zhivago. The couple made plans to head west, then east to Europe for several months. Vladimir was so weary that Véra began counting the days. His teaching career came to an end—officially he was on a year’s leave—as of February 1, 1959. Henceforth he would devote himself to what he had always done most passionately: writing and collecting. Véra’s second career was just beginning. J. G. Smith sent out her last letter as Nabokov’s secretary, a near-satire of a recommendation letter for a graduate student. Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov negotiated a series of foreign contracts. Véra packed up the family’s worldly possessions—for the forty-three suitcases with which she and her mother and sisters had left Petersburg there were now thirty-four carefully inventoried cartons (chess problems, model airplanes, old reviews, entomological correspondences, stamp collections, Christmas tree decorations, Lolita reviews, pistol), all of them entrusted to storage. In the course of the packing she unearthed a draft of “The Enchanter,” which she triumphantly presented to her husband, who had thought the dried bud from which Lolita had miraculously blossomed to have been lost. The same day he wrote Minton, proposing a translation.* John Updike has written that Nabokov “had ample reason for artistic exhaustion” on his arrival in Ithaca; Véra had ample reason for exhaustion on the departure. In the last weeks at Cornell she whimpered just a little to Sylvia Berkman: “I meant to write you this much sooner but I am simply losing track of things because of the impossible pressure of work. Vladimir refuses to take the least interest in his own business matters, and I do not feel equipped to handle them properly. Besides, I am by no means a Sévigné, and writing ten to fifteen letters in one day leaves me limp.”
On Tuesday, February 24, 1959, the Nabokovs left Cornell for New York. The road from Ithaca was less the “thread of gold” which Pnin follows from Waindell College than a thread of silver; the highways were slick with ice. The sheriff’s office advised a day’s wait, but Véra resolved to battle the frozen roads all the same. They had already once postponed the trip and were eager to leave. Free at last, the couple disappeared—after a bad skid, and an unscheduled overnight near Schenectady—into the frame of the future, leaving behind a model airplane and a butterfly net in the Highland Avenue basement, a Goldwin Smith office full of furniture, but no forwarding address.
4
Nabokov had lost his inherited fortune the Old World way—through revolution—and replaced it the American way—by dint of brains and industry.* The New York stay had been expected to last a few days and to be followed by a restorative trip west—Véra informed Filippa Rolf, the “real Swede” who had lent a hand in the Wahlström & Widstrand fiasco, that butterfly collecting was the best respite for her husband—but innumerable business matters and a case of influenza kept the couple at the overheated Hotel Windermere for nearly two months. On all sides they were assailed, by reporters, publishers, television producers. The first New York morning began with a call from a Cincinnati, Ohio, newspaper. What did Mr. Nabokov think of the fact that the city’s main library had banned Lolita? (Mr. Nabokov felt that if people liked to make fools of themselves they were well within their rights doing so.) The call was followed by those from Time, Life, The New York Times, The Daily Mail, and a string of publishers. On Sunday evening, March 1, the Nabokovs met George Weidenfeld, Lolita’s British publisher, for the first time.† He found Véra frosty at the outset, immensely cordial once he had earned her confidence, which he did only slowly. If they had not already done so, the couple observed now that their every move was being followed. The first call on Monday morning was from a reporter for the London Evening Standard. What had they talked about with Mr. Weidenfeld at their dinner at Le Voisin? Doubtless they had discussed Weidenfeld’s strategy for publishing Lolita without incurring a prison sentence. Without having yet appeared there, Lolita had occasioned a furor in England, as was reported in that week’s issue of Time. British publication was delayed pending the new obscenity bill; if that bill failed to pass, Weidenfeld and his partner Nigel Nicolson, a Member of Parliament, risked convictions. As it was, Weidenfeld found it nearly impossible to have the book manufactured in England, collecting exponentially more letters of regret from printers than Nabokov had from publishers.* Lolita had that March sold nearly a quarter of a million copies in America.
While in New York Véra began to grapple seriously with the tax implications of their new incarnation. At Epstein’s suggestion, she consulted with attorney Joseph Iseman and his colleagues at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; at the same time she drafted a copy of a will. On April 11 her sister Sonia—now a simultaneous interpreter at the United Nations—gave a farewell dinner in her West Side apartment for the Nabokovs. The following evening Anna Feigin did the same. Still it was a few days before the couple managed to leave town, largely because of the flood of mail. Only two months later did Véra discover that a bundle of unacknowledged letters had made their way into a trunk of papers to be filed. She enjoyed the whirlwind all the same, reveling in her husband’s ascension. “We have seen hundreds of people here and have had a wonderful time,” she wrote after the farewell dinners, all the necessary meetings having been concluded, as well as a brilliant Epsteinorchestrated coup: The Bollingen Press, which had once passed on the project, signed up the Onegin translation in March. Only on April 18 did Véra at last ferry Vladimir west, through Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana, two butterfly nets on the backseat, her contracts file in the Buick trunk.
At a leisurely pace they picked their way toward Arizona, Véra keeping up a lively correspondence about translations, jacket changes, contractual terms, as they did so. She profited from a stop in southern Texas to confer with Doubleday about Italian rights in Nabokov’s Dozen, to nudge Lolita’s Dutch publisher about Laughter in the Dark. (The Cornell University stationery still served, but the return address on all of these missives was Putnam’s.) As they headed toward the southwestern corner of the state the weather disintegrated; Véra found the driving treacherous, on one occasion nearly losing control of the wheel. The raging tornadoes and roaring thunderstorms could have served as pathetic fallacy for Lolita’s European fates: For a book that concerned itself solely with art, the novel’s early fortunes were intensely political. In April Gallimard had brought out Eric Kahane’s fine translation, freely sold in a country in which the English edition was considered under partial ban. (The logic was more Cartesian than it appeared: Gallimard was General de Gaulle’s publisher.) Véra grumbled that Madame Ergaz did little to keep her apprised of Lolita’s situation in Paris, but the fault was not entirely the agent’s; the booksellers were not much better informed. Some believed the interdiction still in place. Others quietly sold the novel, which could be found “huddling shamefully” with Frank Harris and Henry Miller in bookshop corners. At the same time the work was banned from importation into Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, where its specter kept the vice squads busy.
But Lolita’s political repercussions made themselves felt most strongly in England, where an unpublished volume had rarely caused such a sensation. In January Weidenfeld & Nicolson arranged for a list of twenty-one eminent writers to sign a letter deploring government prosecution of literature in the Times; it would have been remarkable if as many as half had actually read the book. A Labour-sponsored piece of legislation that might reasonably define obscenity on the page, the Obscene Publications bill had meanwhile been languishing for four years. In essence it established that a work must be judged as a whole—and therefore on its literary merits—not on the basis of potentially objectionable passages read out of context. The debate was reinvigorated by the news of Lolita’s imminent arrival on British shores, with Nicolson arguing eloquently—and against his own deep misgivings—that the book could not corrupt, “because it shows depravity coming to such tragic and unenviable ends.” Nicolson h
ad made himself unpopular with his constituency in his opposition to the British invasion of Suez; his championing of Lolita further eroded confidence in the forty-two-year-old MP.* It hardly mattered how he argued the case; his constituents concluded he was Humbert Humbert in disguise. Nicolson lost his seat in February, eight months before Lolita finally arrived in England.
From Texas Véra wrote Laughlin, who was reissuing The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Gogol, that they planned to continue on to Arizona, where they might well stay “long enough to evolve a mailing address.” By the time they did so, a week later, they were in a pine cabin in Oak Creek Canyon, a red and green oasis twenty miles south of Flagstaff. Véra sounded as enchanted with this canyon as she ever was with any place; by pure chance they had stumbled upon the small resort, above a mountain stream and amid a cool forest of oak, laurel, fir, and pine a few miles from the desert. It was an exquisite landscape, in which, relentlessly, she worked. Morris Bishop felt that the western excursions afforded Véra some well-deserved vacation; this one did not. On May 24 Vladimir reported that his wife was typing his final translation and notes to The Song of Igor’s Campaign, an epic poem that holds a place in Russian literature analogous to that of Beowulf in English literature, and a project he had begun years before. He felt Russia should one day bow at his feet for all he had done for her literature. Véra described the Igor project differently:
My summer so far has not been very restful: I have scores of letters to write in answering the over-voluminous business and fan mail that keeps pursuing us all over the States. V. has just finished a new little book, the translation of the Slovo, that Russian 12th-century epic on which he has been working for almost a year. I vow that this is the last translation I shall agree to let him do as long as I live!
(It would be far from the last, although Véra could have consoled herself that after the five years’ work that remained to be done on Onegin, Nabokov almost exclusively translated Nabokov.) She checked the proofs of the German translation of Lolita, which she thought in many instances substandard. Mostly she found the tale of the nymphchen overly delicate, not gruesome enough. She did not shy from proposing a better word for “haunches.” And a spade very much needed to be called a spade, however unfelicitous that spade might be: “ ‘Liebesdingen’ [matters of love] is a polite and unfortunate euphemism substituted by a continental lady-translator for ‘matters of sex’. Let us remember that Humbert is neither polite, nor a lady: he is very much a male, and moreover a sex maniac.”
She looked east, to the trip to Europe, as her husband had looked west; only on board the steamer where no business mail could be forwarded could she expect any rest. She was working day and night on the correspondence and for Vladimir “on some other matters in which he needs me,” as well as cooking meals, which she always considered a burden. She had at least a little reading time: Probably in Arizona she read Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie, which she could not recommend highly enough, although she would do an interesting dance when formulating that opinion publicly. She deferred always to her husband’s admiration for Robbe-Grillet, while he repeatedly indicated that she had been the one to discover his work. She raved about the 1957 novel, which she found beautifully compact and tragic, but most of all original, “which is, probably, a quality that counts highest with us.” Years later an acquaintance asked Véra if she also wrote. “Oh, she writes all the time,” Vladimir cut in, truthfully, but begging the question.
On June 2 a reporter from Sports Illustrated—perhaps the only publication in America not yet to have run a piece on Lolita or her author—arrived to document Nabokov and his collecting. He endeared himself immediately to Véra by displaying, and making her a gift of, an old photo of her husband he had found in a secondhand bookstore. The next morning Vladimir emerged from the cabin and announced, “It is now 9 o’clock.” The reporter could not help noticing that it was only 8:30, but that “Nabokov keeps moving all clocks and watches within his reach ahead to make Mrs. Nabokov move faster so he can get to his butterflies all the sooner.” Nor could he help noticing that the designated driver failed to rise to the bait, calling her husband to breakfast instead. Later in the morning Véra emerged from a bout of letter-writing to chauffeur her husband and their visitor several miles north. In the afternoon she joined the chase with her own net. “You should see my wife catch butterflies,” Nabokov boasted. “One little movement and they’re in the net.” The following morning an exuberant Vladimir coaxed his wife along again: “Come on, darling, the sun is wasting away!” Imperturbable Véra did nothing to quicken her pace, confiding in the reporter, “He doesn’t know that everyone is wise to him.” She was able to put off her husband for all of twenty-five minutes.
As did much else, the spectacular landscape paled in comparison with that husband’s triumph. Lolita was an explosive success in France and Italy and had done well in Holland; the book was out in Denmark, Spain, Japan, Israel, Poland, Norway, and Argentina; it was about to be released in Portugal, Brazil, Finland, and Germany; Véra was negotiating offers in Greece and Iceland. But what pleased her most was the emergence of a group of young readers who were now taking the trouble—along with publishers everywhere—to hunt down her husband’s early volumes. Her fear of fauna manifested itself as fear for her husband as well. In Texas’s spectacular Big Bend National Park a ranger had cautioned the Nabokovs about rattlesnakes and mountain lions. Véra was displeased by Vladimir’s cavalier response: “V. discounts both statements—which is annoying because he gets careless and may step on a rattler (or, for that matter, on a mountain lion, since he has managed to step on a slumbering bear in Yosemite.)” Nabokov’s philosophy on the subject was clear; he believed God looks after entomologists as he does drunkards. The Browning slumbered quietly a few thousand miles away, in an Ithaca carton.
Apart from two hurried entries made in August and September, Véra ended the diary in Texas, on or just after May 10. The promise and expectation with which she had begun the account had been fulfilled; the novelty of celebrity may have worn off. Poised to begin her second year on the bestseller list, Lolita could clearly fend for herself, at least in America. For all her love of precision Véra was not particularly methodical; she felt no mandate to fill the remaining pages of the book. She may have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work. For whatever reason, about two months before the date on which John Shade picks up his pen to begin his 999 lines of Pale Fire, Véra made the last complete entries in her short-lived journal, her single act of non-ventriloquism. It is impossible to imagine her having begun such an exercise solely on her own account, just as it is impossible to imagine she was composing this narrative for anyone other than her husband and herself. The pages are all the more revealing because she did so. This was Véra as she was, not as she saw herself, a trick Lolita had worked. Even so she continued to efface herself. The diary pages include Vladimir’s cancer scare of 1948 but not Véra’s equally alarming misdiagnosis of 1954. She made no note of the May 15 death in Ithaca of seventy-one-year-old Ilya Feigin, bedridden since the stroke that had paralyzed him several years earlier. She was chagrined not to have been able to help with funeral arrangements, which Anna Feigin had handled alone. As she began the 1958 diary, and over the years that followed, Véra had ample cause to outline the bare facts of her own history for her reparations claim. She proved hopelessly vague, amnesiac, wrong.
5
Appropriately, the 1959 road trip ended in Hollywood. The Nabokovs spent the last week of July in a Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow, at Harris and Kubrick’s invitation. The press swiftly caught up with them; Vladimir spoke not of Lolita but of Invitation to a Beheading, a novel he described as a story of Russia in the year 3000. He was polishing Dmitri’s fine translation, which Putnam’s planned to publish—the idea must have made both Nabokovs chuckle with glee—the day of Khrushchev’s arrival in America. Less chortling went on with Harris and Kubrick. The filmmakers hoped to persuade Vladimir to write the screenplay for their
Lolita, offering him forty thousand dollars to do so. Together the Nabokovs decided to turn down the tempting offer, preferring their freedom to the money. Doubtless it helped that Europe was calling; Vladimir’s foreign publishers were politely but firmly clamoring for his presence. Véra was charged with the task of conveying her husband’s decision to the moviemakers. She explained his reasoning, referring to Harris and Kubrick’s vision: Her husband found the idea of Lolita and Humbert marrying in the end—with a relative’s blessing—so repellent that he could not wrap his mind around it.* The more the matter was discussed, the less able he felt to devise a screen solution that would prove compatible with the work. That August Lolita headed into her second year on the bestseller list in the number twelve position, seven irritating rungs below Zhivago.
In midmonth the Nabokovs began to drift eastward, stopping first in Ithaca, where they called on the Bishops. “Both the Vs looked uncommonly well, brown, western,” observed Morris Bishop, who found them in high spirits even at the end of their long drive, and who refrained from pointing out “in the midst of their cheer that living off Lolita’s earnings is assez mal vu in some countries.” Bishop noted that the couple were traveling separately from, but in tandem with, Dmitri, who planned to pursue his vocal training in Italy, where it was felt that he might most comfortably make the transition from learning to performing. In fact the Nabokovs’ itinerary was more fluid even than Bishop suspected. In early September, Véra met several times in New York with the lawyers at Paul, Weiss. In her role as family Exchequer, she discussed tax implications of the banner year and explained the tangled and highly vexing Olympia stranglehold. She also explored the tax advantage in establishing residence in Europe, where the Nabokovs planned to spend a year, and where she suggested they might well stay considerably longer. She guessed they would settle in France, Italy, or Switzerland. Cornell learned as much soon enough. On September 22 Vladimir submitted a letter of resignation, news of which made its way into the national papers. The same day Véra explained to Bishop that she had long felt the combination of teaching and writing was too much for her husband.† The following day, from a cluttered desk at the Hotel Park Crescent on Riverside Drive, she sighed, with what sounds like qualified relief: “What the future holds, and how everything will settle, we can only guess.” It had been over twenty years since Nabokov had written Altagracia de Jannelli from the south of France—the landscape which was to shape Humbert Humbert—that America’s intellectual future appeared to him blindingly bright, brighter even than her so-called avant-gardists imagined. He had looked forward to finding in America the readers that he knew were waiting for him there. The future had been no less certain, but of an entirely different hue. Again displaced persons, the couple asked Walter Minton if they might borrow the Putnam’s mailing address a little longer.