But at least one visit was not made in search of assistance. Nabokov stopped in at composer Sergei Rachmaninoff’s West End Avenue apartment to thank him for the money he had sent to them in France. During the visit, Nabokov announced that he had a teaching job at Stanford, but he may have worn his destitution on his sleeve, as the composer sent him a very out-of-date formal jacket in which Rachmaninoff hoped Nabokov might deliver his lectures. Nabokov could not afford much in the way of pride in the summer of 1940; he nonetheless returned the jacket.13
No immediate prospects existed, but the past could still be generous. In karmic recompense for V. D. Nabokov’s many years supporting literature and the arts (and his son’s own prodigious output), Nabokov received his first small American income from the stateside Russian Literary Fund. After flitting through borrowed rooms, the family managed to sublet quarters briefly from the niece of Countess Panin, whose estate had sheltered the Nabokov family in the Crimea after the Revolution. And the family won a temporary reprieve from their immediate worries with an invitation to spend the summer in Vermont at the country home of Harvard professor and fellow Russian Mikhail Karpovich.14
But echoes of their European exile were not limited to financial distress or dependence on others for shelter. The Nabokovs quickly found that anti-Semitism could rear its head in the New World, too, sometimes coming from familiar sources. Shortly after his arrival in New York, Nabokov was praised for his beautiful Russian by an émigré teacher at Columbia University, who then complained of only hearing Russian spoken by “Yids.” Another time, when the conversation at an émigré party turned anti-Semitic, Nabokov, who was normally reserved in public and not prone to swearing, cursed and walked out.15
2
Their first summer as Americans, Vladimir, Véra, and Dmitri headed north to the country to enjoy butterflies and Russian company in rural New England. And the season of their European escape was replete with gifts.
Nicholas Nabokov, who had made a name for himself in 1930s America with the score for the ballet Union Pacific, mentioned his talented cousin to his Massachusetts neighbor Edmund Wilson. Wilson, whose interest in Russian literature had continued to grow in the wake of his trip to the Soviet Union, was then as prominent as any critic in America. He was friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald, who would die that winter, and had written for Vanity Fair and The New Republic. He had broad connections in magazines and publishing, and was ideally placed to help a newly arrived would-be American writer.
Nicholas had come through for his cousin, but Vladimir, never one to manage mundane details with grace, lost Wilson’s phone number.16 Nabokov sent a note to Wilson instead, and they managed to set a time to meet that October in New York, where the two men hit it off.
From the beginning, they made an odd couple. Nabokov, less prone to emotional displays, carried himself with a gaunt grace only exaggerated by cigarettes and hard times. At just under six feet tall, he weighed in that spring at 124 pounds. Quicker to intimacy, Wilson was a doughy man with little hair, a delicate face, and a sharp gaze. In short order, Wilson began to send commissions for book reviews Nabokov’s way and bridged early connections to The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Through other networking, Nabokov began to write for The New York Times and the Sun.17
While they offered wonderful exposure, these first pieces only made it clear that a freelancer’s income would not do to support a family in New York. Nabokov remained desperate for a job, but he was not willing to settle. It was one thing to turn down, as he had, the position of bicycle delivery boy for Scribner’s, but quite another to turn down Yale University, which offered him a summer job. The position, however, was not in literature, but as an assistant instructor for language classes, and Nabokov did not think the head instructor’s heavily accented Russian was up to snuff.18
He had survived inflation in Germany and destitution in France without surrendering his ambition to live a life of letters. In support of that goal, Véra had been willing to work for an engineering firm and take shorthand at meetings in Germany. She was willing to further her husband’s career in the States, too. Nabokov would hold out for a literary position in America.
Nabokov’s new friendship with Edmund Wilson continued to pay dividends. Wilson—familiarly known as “Bunny”—was delighted to meet an enthusiastic partner for his current obsession with Russian literature. He wrote to others describing Nabokov as a “brilliant fellow” and pondered collaborating with him on a translation and commentary.19
Along with lives devoted to literature, the two men had other things in common. Neither knew how to drive; both relied on the women in their lives to ferry them. Both had physical talents that did not match their frames: Nabokov’s narrow build did not bar him from boxing or soccer, and Wilson—slight in form but a strong swimmer—once startled a friend by doing a somersault in the middle of the Vanity Fair building. But Wilson was a heavy drinker headed toward gout. Having survived two marriages, and well on his way to surviving a third, he had begun a precipitous physical decline.20
Nabokov and Wilson were also contrarians at heart. Neither man liked to be tied to groups, though Wilson’s life tended to unfold in a series of enthusiasms, an ongoing yearning for political justice akin to a religious impulse. (Hemingway wrote about one of Wilson’s books that he wished his friend had just “kept on reporting and not had to save his soul.”21) Wilson, four years older than Nabokov, was much more likely to flirt with literary schools and political movements; yet he often seemed to adopt a cause as a way to more effectively begin quarreling with it. It was true of his romance with Symbolist poetry. It had also been the case with his drinking partners Fitzgerald and Hemingway. And it was true of Stalin.
Wilson had seen the financial collapse of the United States and, across the 1930s, had become intimately acquainted with the country’s moral failings. He had lived through the Great Depression in America and reported on the trial of the Scottsboro boys, a group of young black men repeatedly railroaded by the American justice system. He had traveled to see miners in West Virginia; he had been present when striking union leaders and Communist party members squared off against police officers in Harlan County, Kentucky.22
So it was that after more than a decade of bloodshed under Stalin, whose shortcomings he had come to recognize, Wilson remained a little infatuated with the possibilities offered by revolution. He had been cast into despair by the agonies of post-Depression America but had never had to live through the results of the social change he advocated in Russia. In the eyes of Wilson, and many on the American left, Lenin and Trotsky had delivered Russia from the Tsars, setting the country on the path toward an egalitarian society.23 It was a view Nabokov could not fathom.
Two months after their first meeting, the new friends had dinner with a former student of Nabokov’s whose sister Wilson had met in Moscow. Afterward, Wilson forwarded a copy of his latest book to Nabokov. To the Finland Station chronicled the history and evolution of revolution, from its seeds in the late seventeenth century all the way up to Lenin, whom Wilson described as “one of the most selfless of great men.”24 The book took six years to finish, and culminated with Lenin’s arrival in St. Petersburg in April 1917, ready to lead his country into the future.
Nabokov, who grew up less than two miles from Finland Station and had lived just around the corner or down the street from key events of 1905 and 1917, already had his own opinions on Lenin. He may well have expressed them at their first dinner together, as Wilson had inscribed the book to his new friend “in the hope that this may make him think better of Lenin.”25
Wilson had stopped his book at a dramatic high point, which made for a strong narrative arc. It also allowed him to avoid addressing the first wave of Terror, or the second, or the decades that followed. Wilson himself knew before he had finished it that the book was flawed and out of date, noting in a letter to a friend that he was finishing up his Finland Station project just as the Soviets were about to invade Finland.26
Despite Wilson’s use of overwhelmingly sympathetic sources, Finland Station reveals a surprising amount about Lenin, from how he was sent back to Russia in 1917 to his Jekyll-and-Hyde comment that those who crafted beautiful art made “you want to say stupid nice things,” when it was better to “hit them on the head, without any mercy, though our ideal is not to use force against anyone.”27
Wilson somehow took the latter statement as a testimony to Lenin’s appreciation of the arts but devotion to more practical matters. His notion of helping Nabokov to understand Lenin, however, was more hard-headed than his interpretation of Lenin. Wilson must already have built a solid reservoir of gratitude or affection for their friendship to withstand this overture.
In subsequent months, Nabokov filled out his freelancing schedule as he had in Europe, tutoring students in Russian. Volunteering at the Museum of Natural History, he also wrote his first real articles on Lepidoptera and learned to dissect butterfly genitalia. He began to prepare lectures on literature for the Stanford summer position that had finally materialized. He found a welcome audience for his earlier story “Cloud, Castle, Lake” at The Atlantic, which he had revised to reflect more recent history. The lyrics for the song the poor protagonist is forced to sing with marching German hikers were transformed into a call for murder and destruction. An Atlantic editor wrote to say that they were eager to see more such works of genius from Nabokov. He happily obliged.28
While Nabokov made inroads into literary America, Véra settled Dmitri into school and began looking for work with a selectivity that, for a time, rivaled her husband’s. An offer of a more-than-fulltime job was declined (too many hours), while a portion of the same translation job on a part-time basis was similarly rejected (too little pay). But that winter, she managed to secure a secretarial position with a Free French newspaper, part of France Forever, a stateside campaign allied with Charles de Gaulle funded in part by British intelligence. In an organization committed to denouncing Vichy policies and promoting American entry into the war, Véra had found her place; it was a job she loved.29
3
Just as opportunities began to appear for the Nabokovs, Véra’s sister Sonia arrived in New York on the S.S. Guadeloupe. Sonia had been in Casablanca for several months before getting a translator’s visa, showing up in New York in January 1941.
The Slonim sisters had kept in touch—Sonia listed Véra’s latest West Eighty-seventh Street address as her destination. Ship records stated that she was thirty-two years old and stood five feet six inches, with blond hair and brown eyes, but the rest of Sonia’s public identity lacked the clarity of her physical self. She first appeared in the ship’s register and documents under her middle name, as Sophia. Her marital status has been recorded as single, then written over with a D for divorced and her married name “Berlstein” inserted by hand.
The confusion over Sonia’s name was easily cleared up, but others thought she had more to hide. As the Guadeloupe sailed into New York Harbor, a telegram arrived at the State Department from the ship’s last overseas stop. It was addressed to the U.S. Secretary of State, warning him that Sonia Slonim was suspected of being a German spy. The moment Sonia entered the country, her mail was placed under surveillance.30
Carl Junghans had secured a visa just a few days after Sonia, but having heard that the Germans were trying to extradite him from Casablanca, he had caught an earlier ship to America. After fleeing Germany under false papers, he had acquired a foreigner’s passport in Casablanca. He traveled through Lisbon on the S.S. Carvalho Araujho; his record shows him as stateless. Like Sonia, he had blond hair and brown eyes.31 Unlike Sonia, who intended to become a permanent resident, Junghans had been able to obtain only a six-month work visa.
The United States was still sitting out the war but was worried enough about it to require registration, ethnic identification, and fingerprinting from all non-citizens in America, with hefty prison terms for anyone dabbling in anarchy. Holding facilities for immigrants viewed as high-risk had been established; but unlike Canada, the U.S. concentration-camp system from the First World War sat dormant for the time being.
Which was not to say that the FBI, under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, had been sleeping. Since the beginning of the war, agents had been collecting information and files on aliens deemed suspicious, tracking them to prepare for possible U.S. entry into the war. The U.S. Immigration Service, which had recently been folded into the Department of Justice, was happy to coordinate with law enforcement officials in monitoring incoming refugees and alien visitors who might be of interest. Many were identified and their destinations recorded, in case they needed to be tracked down at a future date.
As a former Communist Nazi filmmaker, Junghans was intriguing to many people. He did not even make it off Ellis Island. Instead, he found his first American home in the dorm rooms and common caféteria with those waiting to be deported: political radicals, criminals, and suspected spies like himself.32 Sonia arrived three weeks later, but found there was nothing she could do. funghans’s deportation order had been filed; his only chance was to appeal and hope that immigration officials would review his case.
Sonia eventually contacted a refugee professor the couple had known in Berlin for help. Nearly four months into Junghans’s detention, he was permitted to leave Ellis Island under a $500 bond, officially free. But the authorities had not forgotten about Carl Junghans.33
Sonia taught French and German at the International School of Languages on Madison Avenue and found an apartment just a few blocks away from Vladimir and Véra. The proximity might not have been welcome; it is hard to imagine that either Vladimir or Véra would have been pleased to see Junghans with Sonia in yet another country. But they may have been spared a face-to-face encounter. The Nabokovs finally left for the Stanford summer teaching position in California not long after Junghans’s release.
By then, Véra had already left her beloved position at France Forever, but Junghans signed on there in her wake, writing for their information agency and doing scripts for the State Department propaganda station WRUL, which broadcast anti-Nazi, anti-Vichy radio programs into occupied France.34 It was the fourth country in which he had produced political propaganda.
Junghans had a brief stint on the anti-Nazi lecture circuit, and wrote about the threat of sabotage from German submarines, while privately telling stories of his close association with Hitler and Goebbels.35 As a filmmaker, however, there was just one place in America he really wanted to go—Hollywood.
But the Nabokovs would beat Sonia and Carl to the West Coast by several months. In May 1941, nearly a year to the day after his arrival in America—Véra, Vladimir, and Dmitri set out across the United States with one of Nabokov’s Russian-language students in her new Pontiac. He had done a series of lectures at Wellesley College that spring and had just learned that they wanted to offer him a one-year post starting that fall, reducing anxiety over mounting bills just in time for their trip west. The family had three weeks in a new car, with stops for reading, walking, and the endless collection of butterflies.
Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona lay open before them—the trip was a coast-to-coast lesson in the topography and sociology of America, one they enjoyed immensely. But whatever dreams they had in the new world, they were still refugees. Asked where he lived by a barber, Dmitri answered that he had no home but lived in “little houses by the road.”36
4
During his first year in America, Nabokov covered more territory in his adopted homeland than he had ever seen in Russia. And in that California summer, the gap between his current life and the people he had left behind expanded far beyond the physical distance dividing them. He had written months before to the Marinel sisters, still in Paris, of the impossibility of navigating the two realities—one in which he lay in a meadow of flowers in America at “the height of luxury, like some millionaire’s coarse dream”; another in which those he loved were still in danger.37
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p; A bleaker reality shadowed every good thing that came the Nabokovs’ way, and news from Europe only got worse. The world was still in shock from the collapse of Western Europe and the quick humiliation of France, haunted by the nation’s surrender at Compiègne, fifty miles outside Paris. The town had previously been the site of Germany’s capitulation at the end of the First World War, but by 1941 Compiègne had become home to a concentration camp.38
During his own stay in France, Nabokov had had little love for its bureaucrats and would later lump together the “rat-whiskered consuls and policemen” of France and Germany.39 He had his own visa nightmares for reference, of course, but that personal, intimate dislike for customs officials preoccupied with the proper papers would soon be borne out by larger events.
Many French policemen turned out to be more than willing to help root out foreigners, particularly foreign Jews, from their communities. After the fall of France, the Vichy government collaborated with the Germans, passing statutes resembling the Nazi Nuremberg Laws that severely restricted the rights of Jews. Officials noted that the French laws were sometimes more restrictive, but Vichy decided in 1941 that where the French law and German law differed, the French law should be used. In truth, whichever law was harsher was often the one that was applied.40 Had the Nabokovs not escaped France, not only Véra but Dmitri Nabokov, too, would likely have been declared Jewish—as he would not have been under the Nazis—a bureaucratic fine point with high-stakes ramifications.
French anti-Semitic measures began with registrations and censuses and moved on to arrests and detentions. Most Jewish prisoners were held at a newly-inaugurated concentration camp installed in apartment buildings in the Paris suburb of Drancy. A modern low-income housing project in the process of being built when it was commandeered, Drancy was so new that its plumbing and sanitation systems were still incomplete.
Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov Page 19