Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  After ten days they moved south, to Sicily in search of sun. They hoped they might settle in Taormina for the winter, but managed to find only thunderstorms, hail, and a brace of reporters. Even Véra was unprepared for the reception in sleepy Taormina, where the local newsstand exhibited framed photos of the couple. (The pictures were unflattering, to boot. And in the text she was described as a “platinum blonde.”) Nor was that the only attention. “The local Germans, very numerous and the only tourists here, whisper and stare after us,” she wailed. In search of the ideal proportions of sun and shade, the Nabokovs made the twenty-hour trip north to Genoa, no mean feat given the fact that they had bought a large number of books, which no longer fit into their luggage. “Decent people fly, but you can’t fly with our kind of baggage, even if V. would agree to,” Véra moaned, in part explaining their itinerary, or lack thereof, of the next eighteen years. In her next breath she reported that her husband was the most renowned author in Italy, where his name appeared in the paper daily.

  Genoa, and the Hotel Columbia-Excelsior, proved more congenial. Véra found the rose-colored city itself enchanting, with its “buildings covered in half-erased frescoes and steep staircase-streets.” Much of the northern port was in a state of disrepair from the war, but she felt there were enough gems left for a dozen marvels. One early December evening the Nabokovs ventured up a corkscrew street behind their lodgings, where they found themselves strolling among prostitutes and whispered solicitations from alleyway hotels. Véra was amused to hear the author of Lolita suggest they had best turn around; she had thought of doing nothing of the kind. With equal amusement she reported on the state of her Italian, in which a request for news (“actualités”) elicited directions to the lavatory (“toletta”). Even the charms of Genoa could not lure her entirely from her desk, however. The Columbia-Excelsior proved the perfect perch from which to report on the commotion of the previous weeks, and from which to direct the search for a house for the winter. The first exercise proved more fruitful. Véra reported as the many triumphs of Lolita, whose bestselling claims were matched by pirated editions around the world. She described the critics who suddenly claimed to have been early advocates of Vladimir’s work, the old friends who crept out from the woodwork. (She denounced both breeds.) She summed up the second half of 1959: “We have travelled thousands of miles, have met lots of people (some of them very nice), have made the acquaintance of various writers, from Graham Greene (entertaining) to Moravia (very much less so), and seen lots of enchanting things. Among them the delightful little old Italian ladies toting large bags of raw fish to feed stray cats, in Rome.” She wondered if the little old ladies were doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, or to earn their way to heaven. The observation sounds as if it was hers, and probably was; Véra was rarely able to overlook a cat, and in Genoa too marveled over the ancient women scurrying up the perfectly vertical staircases with ease. But the impression served double duty. In illustrating his point that the artist’s gaze will often settle on the seeming trifle, Vladimir had remarked to a reporter a few weeks earlier: “In Rome, for example, the things which seemed to me more vivid are the old ladies who feed stray cats.”

  Véra thought she alone, or the two of them together, might push on to Sweden, although she had no intention of doing so before the warm weather. From Genoa she wrote Lena for the first time since the arrival in Europe. Long distance may well have a bracing effect, as Véra had noted before Hurricane Lolita swept in, but proximity can also be jarring. She acknowledged that she would like to make the trip north, possibly with Sonia, who was considering a visit to Europe. “In this connection I have one question to ask you,” she wrote her sister. “Does Michaël know that you are Jewish, and that consequently he is half-Jewish himself?” She set forth her concerns with a certain asperity:

  Can one talk to him frankly about this and all that goes with it? Mind you, my question has nothing to do with your Catholicism, or the religious education you may have given your son. All this is beside the point, and I am not discussing it. The only thing that does interest me is the one I ask. I must admit that if M. does not know who he is there would be no sense in my coming to see you, since for me no relationship would be possible unless based on complete truth and sincerity. Moreover, I have repeatedly told reporters in various countries who I was, and once even wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper in New York to set that paper right, so that it is pretty well known by now that I am 100% Jewish. I have never named you to anyone, and if your feelings in this question differ from mine, we need not meet at all. You must realize that when and if I come to Sweden, I shall probably have to meet reporters (LOLITA is coming out in a new translation, in a paperback edition), and, of course, I shall tell them what I have been telling others, anyway. Please answer my question quite frankly. It is a very important one for me.

  The correspondence had always been ticklish, obliquely so from Véra’s side, more pointedly so from Lena’s. This time Véra lunged toward something close to the heart of the matter. For other reasons the spring reunion never came to pass, but Véra’s battle cry did nothing to enhance the relationship. She alerted Sonia to the position she had taken on their nephew, a position Sonia wholeheartedly approved.

  The Nabokovs had hoped to spend the winter in Italy, ideally near Genoa, but found it next to impossible to rent a home on a short-term basis. As Fawcett distributed two million paperback copies of Lolita, they cast about in Lugano, in Rapallo, in Nervi, and briefly considered a house in Positano. The difficulty may have been greater still in that they were looking for something that existed only in fiction; Vladimir grumbled that there were no villas in Italy that proved equal to those inhabited by the characters in Turgenev and Tolstoy. (It should be said that the couple’s migratory habits were culturally ingrained. Nervi, San Remo, Rapallo, were the prerevolutionary watering holes in Italy, as the shores of Lake Geneva and the Riviera had been the Swiss and French meccas. Not every French city has a boulevard Tsarévitch and a magnificent, onion-domed Orthodox church, as does Nice.) After Lugano, the Nabokovs gave Mondadori the ten days they had promised, putting in a luminous performance at a reception in mid-December. Véra met with her husband’s editors and translators twice the following week; she eased his burden by arranging for him to meet journalists in groups. On Christmas Day, a half hour before leaving for the station, she wrote Arnoldo Mondadori to confirm the agreement she and he had sealed with a handshake. All of her husband’s works, past, present, and future, would be published by his firm. Christmas 1959 found the Nabokovs in San Remo with the newly installed Dmitri. Even his arrival had been written up in the papers; a photographer was planning a visit. Véra was pleased to note that her son took the attention in stride. Mondadori having offered to help Dmitri settle in Milan, Véra devoted much of December to seeing that a second career began to flourish, even while she still cast about for a “quiet nook where V. could go on with his new book.” She set her post-Christmas sights on Menton, on the French Riviera. They were in search of a little kingdom of their own, where—as he had done so successfully for thirty-six years—Vladimir might labor in obscurity, the kind of world out of this world in which his characters so often find bliss.

  * Brenner’s appreciative words were vitiated by a lead editorial in The New Republic, calling the book obscene, and begging to differ from its own reviewer.

  * It was doubtless fortunate for both Nabokovs that the public that sent Lolita sailing to the top of the bestseller lists had not yet read the largely untranslated oeuvre that preceded it, full of her prototypes. Vladimir was by no means Humbert, but he was the author of a fair number of works in which middleaged men fidget under the spells cast by underaged girls.

  * The Life piece did not run until April 13, 1959, in the Nabokovs’ opinion because the family magazine feared offending its readers.

  * Nabokov was one for three with the Times. In his October 26 column in the Book Review, J. Donald Adams pronounced the book u
tterly corrupt and revolting.

  * And without mention of the offending publication’s title. “The book in question was written, of course, not as an academic exercise in connection with professional responsibilities but as a private endeavor. Its author has been on the faculty since 1948 and has done some creditable writing,” Malott reassured one riled citizen.

  * A year later, the Evening Standard would prove that to an Anglo-Saxon all Russians look alike: The British paper reported that Nabokov, like his beautiful wife, came from “the rich pre-revolutionary Jewish upper-class of Russia.”

  † Also interesting is what she did not comment on, presumably because she did not need to. In the course of the program, Lionel Trilling held that all great love affairs, literarily speaking, involve partners separated from each other by social convention. Nabokov hastened to disagree, arguing—in novels as in life—for “passionate love, glamorous love within the terms of normal marriage.” He cited Tolstoy’s Kitty and Levin. Trilling countered that the novel isn’t called Kitty or Levin, it’s called Anna Karenina.

  * In a gingerly fashion, Roger Straus reissued the volume, under a defunct imprint, in 1959. The copies carried a warning: “Not for sale in New York State.”

  † She worked a few soap-operaish effects as well, none of them lost on the diary-keeping Véra, who was not easily shocked, but who was easily amused. Walter Minton had heard of Lolita, but read the novel only when he ran into a Copacabana showgirl named Rosemary Ridgewell at a party given by the New York Mirror’s Lee Mortimer. Ridgewell offered up a copy of the book and, as Minton remembered it, “sat with me one night in her apartment on East 67th Street while I read it.” For having put the book in Minton’s hands she was offered a finder’s fee equivalent to 10 percent of Nabokov’s royalties for the first year, plus 10 percent of the Putnam’s share of subsidiary rights income for two. Nabokov asked about the arrange-ment, concerned primarily that Ridgewell’s fee not be deducted from his royalties. The situation was more baroque yet: Time ran a picture of the striking book scout in its November 17, 1958, issue, along with a description of her as “slithery-blithery onetime Latin Quarter showgirl who wears a gold swizzle stick around her neck and a bubbly smile on her face.” Two weeks later, Mrs. Minton told Véra over dinner that she had learned of her husband’s involvement with Ridgewell only from reading Time. From Minton the same evening Véra learned why the article had assumed the tone it had: He was involved as well with its reporter, who had done her best to portray her rival as a drunken call girl. Véra knew already about the “petite grue,” although she was presumably less interested to hear of Minton’s domestic troubles than to learn from Jason Epstein that Ridgewell was “gunning” for Vladimir. Mostly she pitied Mrs. Minton, so lovely and so clueless in the suburbs with three children, while her husband—as Mrs. Minton so poignantly phrased it—was “broadening” himself in the city. Fortunately, Véra did not know the half of the tale, Act One of which ended in Paris as Rosemary bludgeoned Minton with a whiskey bottle, while Girodias looked on, in a lesbian nightclub. Ridgewell’s scouting efforts probably netted her about $20,000, assuming the commission was paid.

  * Girodias’s interpretation of these events: Suspicious Véra and her husband were persuaded that he had signed a secret agreement with Weidenfeld. In truth Minton was the one lobbying for Weidenfeld, who he felt would defend the book more tenaciously than anyone else in England.

  * Véra handled the agenting alone, except in France, where Doussia Ergaz and her colleague Marie Schebeko represented Nabokov until 1976.

  * Véra later instructed Doubleday not to grant interested publishers Serbian, Croatian, or Macedonian translation rights in Pnin. Given the political considerations, she did not feel that any such translation could be made faithfully.

  * Two weeks after publication The New York Times’s Lewis Nichols compiled an inventory. Of the first nineteen reviewers weighing in on Lolita, eleven had praised the book, five had damned it, three had settled comfortably on the fence.

  * He did read the novel. In August he alerted Epstein, “I am reading DR. ZHIVAGO—dreary, conventional stuff.” How to unravel a friendship in twenty words or fewer: Wilson declared of Pasternak’s work in the November 15 New Yorker: “Doctor Zhivago will, I believe, come to stand as one of the great events in man’s literary and moral history.” He too criticized Max Hayward’s translation, although the two men became friends, in time for Hayward to assist Wilson in his assault on Nabokov’s Onegin.

  † Elsewhere he was happy to be more forthcoming on the subject, speaking of Pasternak’s novel as a “sorry thing, clumsy and melodramatic, with stock situations, rambling robbers and trite coincidences.” Among the insults he hurled at the book was the accusation that Pasternak’s mistress had written the novel for him, the worst that could be said, not because Pasternak might have delegated the responsibility, but because the thing read as if written by a woman.

  * In an equally memorable moment, Dorothy Gilbert, the former student whose eye trouble had resulted in the withering exchange with Véra, found herself in conversation before dinner with Marc Szeftel, on the Nabokovs’ sofa. “Have you read Pnin?” asked one of the oldest assistant professors on campus, the man widely believed to have been the model for the addlepated scholar with the endearingly approximate grasp of the English language. The two agreed it was a wonderful book, Gilbert biting her tongue as she did so.

  * “The Enchanter” would have to wait until 1986, when it appeared in Dmitri’s translation. Véra did not think the story a success.

  * As always, he has the last word in the matter. “ ‘This is the only known case in history when a European pauper ever became his own American uncle,’ ” quips a character in Look at the Harlequins!

  † Weidenfeld felt Véra was a Giacometti drawing come to life. For her part, she thought the British publisher a sort of cross between Edmund Wilson and Winston Churchill, a description that could only have pleased.

  * More than thirty British printers walked away from the job. Even if the novel was not pornographic they believed it was certain to be prosecuted.

  * “A Naughty Girl Smooths the Way for Randy Churchill’s Comeback,” read one hopeful February headline.

  * Concerned about their code-seal, James Harris had run this idea past the head of the MPAA censorship committee, which had already indicated they would have trouble with the project. What if we chose to have Humbert and Lolita marry? asked Harris. He had done his research; he pointed out that this would have been possible in several states. Was it immoral if it was legal? Reluctantly Jeffrey Sherlock agreed that under those circumstances, the committee would have to grant the film its code-seal.

  † An unsurprised and ever-graceful Bishop wrote back, resorting again to the dual-purpose second person: “Dear V & V,… Your drudgery should be a writer’s drudgery.”

  * The novel’s sales increased sixfold during the couple’s Parisian visit.

  * The decision to pursue publication all the same strained a number of relations. Harold Nicolson could not fathom why his son had sacrificed his seat in Commons to a tasteless novel, which he found without literary merit and entirely “corrupting”; he and George Weidenfeld remained permanently estranged as a consequence. By the time the elder Nicolson had begun to write his son about his distaste for Lolita he had doubtless forgotten his own 1951 appraisal of the author of Speak, Memory: “Mr. Nabokov does not strike me as possessing an integrated character. It seems strange to me that a man of his sensibility should have been so bored at Cambridge and so happy in the United States. He is obviously a poor mixer, since he prefers to eat his meals on the sofa and in silence.” For different reasons others shared his distaste. To the list of Lolita’s British detractors could be added Evelyn Waugh, who thought it “smut” (but highly exciting smut); E. M. Forster, who thought the erotic parts “rather a bore”; and Rebecca West, who saw the book as a ploy for attention, and had the ill grace to suggest in the Sunday Times that its author h
ad been deeply influenced by Dostoyevsky.

  8

  AUTRES RIVAGES

  Windows, as well known, have been the solace of first-person literature throughout the ages.

  —NABOKOV, PALE FIRE

  1

  On New Year’s Eve 1959, Véra wrote Stanley Kubrick, whose second attempt to lure Nabokov to Hollywood had reached him in San Remo. Vladimir had just begun to regret having declined Kubrick’s initial offer. Assuming his conditions could be met, Véra explained, her husband would be willing to put his new work aside, for Lolita’s sake. He could be in Hollywood by mid-March.* On New Year’s Day 1960—having been sick through the night, as were Dmitri and Vladimir, from the Hotel Excelsior-Bellevue’s holiday pheasant—she wrote Jean-Jacques Demorest, at Cornell, about a few remnants of their American life. Demorest had inherited Nabokov’s office: What to do with the armchairs, the table, the rug, the skis? “If nobody wants them, give them to the custodian, or the Salvation Army,” she directed, apologizing for the inconvenience. A great deal of jettisoning went on over these months, when the one thing that seemed perpetually to elude the Nabokovs was an address. On January 6, the day after Véra’s fifty-eighth birthday, they settled into a small apartment with an ocean terrace in Menton. Even as they did so they knew that the search for a European “refuge” was likely to be interrupted by the Hollywood trip. “We do not seem to have any permanent address at the present time,” Véra wrote Victor Thaller at Putnam’s, who was compiling material for their 1959 taxes. “My husband suggests that you say ‘vagrant,’ but I think that you might just as well use the one [the address] the Treasury Department has been using up till now: Goldwin Smith Hall.” The Ithaca Post Office forwarded everything to Putnam’s, she reminded the indulgent Thaller. She sounded contrite: “All this is a little fuzzy but it is the best I can suggest.”