Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  On October 1 Lolita made a fourth trip to New York, with an unsigned letter; Laughlin read the novel promptly and just as promptly rejected it. He too advised against publication, which he deemed an act of self-destruction for both author and publisher. Undaunted, Nabokov directed Laughlin to forward the manuscript to Roger Straus at Farrar, Straus & Young, taking care to avoid using the postal service—the first line of censorship, as the Comstock Act had made it a crime to distribute obscenity by the mails—in doing so.* Straus was longer with the novel, but reluctantly concluded on November 11 that the work could not be introduced to America without a court battle, which he did not believe could be won.† Moreover no publisher “in his right mind” would consider doing so for an anonymous author. Nabokov had no intention of attaching his name even to a proposed excerpt, allowing only that he might feel differently in a year’s time.

  It was Véra who replied to Straus’s letter. The rejection was less troubling than was the fact that the publisher had mentioned that Vladimir might have heard of Straus’s reading “from various of our mutual friends.” This line set off alarm bells in Ithaca. Who exactly did Straus have in mind? queried Véra. He admitted that he had discussed the manuscript with Edmund and Elena Wilson, as well as with Mary McCarthy and her husband Bowden Broadwater.* This news seemed to mollify Véra, though those friends’ reactions would not have. With the exception of Elena Wilson, who shared her high opinion of the work, the consensus was that its author had lost his mind. “The poor darling had clearly flipped,” was the reaction at the McCarthy-Broadwater household. At Wilson’s suggestion, Jason Epstein asked to see the manuscript. He did not add that Wilson had already offered him a preview of sorts, or how Wilson had billed the two black springbinders. “It’s repulsive,” Nabokov’s early and most energetic American advocate had advised Epstein, words he toned down only slightly when writing the author himself.† In truth the book temporarily soured him on Nabokov: “Did you read his Lolita by the way? Thought it was so repulsive that it rather put me off him,” Wilson griped the following year. (Elena Levin suspected he found the novel particularly tasteless for the same reason White had resisted it: Wilson had a very young daughter. Harry and Elena Levin had no such problems with the novel, which they found admirable and hugely erotic. They did however come to understand their friend’s sudden, earlier interest in their prepubescent daughter, whom Vladimir had taken to interviewing exhaustively.) Early in December Nabokov mailed Epstein the manuscript, exacting the usual promises about incognitos.

  At the end of 1954, one year after Pat Covici had done so, Epstein read and rejected Lolita for Doubleday. The report he submitted to the firm’s editor in chief is a masterpiece of good sense. Epstein too found Humbert’s obsession, and Nabokov’s exhaustive, intimate account of it, repulsive; in its plot the book was strained at best. But he recognized the author’s pursuit of conscience behind Humbert’s self-destruction. “That the passion should be such a sordid one is the mark of the author’s perversity—and he is a remarkably perverse man—but it doesn’t deprive the novel of the merits that it does have,” he wrote, voting against the work on the grounds of “its outlandish perverseness,” but advocating a few more readings. “Without suggesting any qualitative comparisons, it would be fair to say that he has, in effect, written Swann’s Way as if he had been James Joyce,” Epstein concluded, the first to recognize what Véra and Elena Wilson alone believed. Viking, Simon & Schuster, New Directions, Farrar, Straus, and Doubleday were then “the four American publishers, W, X, Y, Z”—they should of course have been “the five American publishers, V, W, X, Y, Z”—whom Nabokov was to describe as having seen the book early on. None of them appears in any shape or form to have suggested the author transform his twelve-year-old into a boy, or Humbert into a farmer, as Nabokov later claimed.* But none of them offered to publish the thing either.

  4

  “If only everything would fall into place soon,” Véra griped in January 1955, bemoaning sons and their careless studies, financial difficulties that were that winter as acute as they were chronic, and her own health. She had been unwell for an entire year with one thing or another, and was bored of it. She made no mention of the rejection letters that had been piling up in her files, or of the week she had spent teaching in her husband’s stead. (Her attitude toward the rejections is clear from her advice to Sylvia Berkman, who had trouble placing a short story at the time. Véra counseled patience and the long view: “Just think of all the rejections received by people who got tremendously famous later on so that the same publishers who had kept snubbing them before clamored for MSS.,” she wrote, choosing as an example Sinclair Lewis, whose work her husband had been deriding for years.) Ultimately things did fall into place, although the interim months proved draining. In February Lolita sailed off across the ocean. Vladimir had no illusions about where he was sending the manuscript. “I suppose it will be finally published by some shady firm with a Viennese-Dream name—eg ‘Silo,’ ” he predicted.† Nor was there any delay about sending Lolita off. The manuscript returned from Doubleday and went to Doussia Ergaz within the week, which suggests that the couple had by now decisively voted to abandon hopes for American publication and determined to try their luck abroad. Generally their correspondence fell off dramatically at this time. Even the Karpoviches wondered about them.

  The year was in large part consumed by Pnin, although so many projects littered the Stewart Avenue apartment that Nabokov had every reason to apply for a sabbatical. (He was granted leave for the spring 1956 semester only.) This was the winter that the “Old Man and the Fish” translation had been expected, a project that was almost certainly to have been Véra’s. Nabokov had written Chekhov Publishing in the first person plural to indicate that the novel was awaited, and earlier had proposed: “I do have a firs-trate translator for you, and that is my wife, Véra Nabokov. She has translated a good deal for me during our thirty years’ association, and I can highly recommend her.” With a new book under way it was unlikely he would have agreed to translate anything, much less Hemingway. While the project never materialized, Nabokov did convince Jason Epstein to commission a translation of Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, a work on which Véra would collaborate. All the Stewart Avenue industry bore fruit toward springtime: The New Yorker bought “Pnin’s Day,” which ran in April, the week of Vladimir’s fifty-sixth birthday, and the same week that Doussia Ergaz reported that she had read and loved Lolita. She planned the following day to share it with the publisher of Histoire d’O.

  The agent of providence assumed an unlikely form. Maurice Girodias, the colorful publisher of The Whip Angels, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, and a host of other classics, took to Lolita immediately.* “I felt I had the obvious, immediate duty to publish the book,” he remembered, far more impressed by the novel than he had been by Ergaz’s delicate description of it, which had left him expecting scholarly pomposity or, worse, something “frighteningly respectable.” His second and third readers were equally awed. Girodias’s only condition—even before reading the manuscript—was that its author attach his name to the work. “If the publisher were to propose very favorable terms, I would be tempted to permit the book to be published under my name,” Vladimir conceded, warning Doussia Ergaz that cuts in the novel were, however, out of the question. He must have felt tired of being asked to sign the thing, and more comfortable doing so for a publisher an ocean away. He knew well how distant those writers’ reputations remained.* An advance of four hundred thousand francs, or about a thousand dollars, was agreed upon, to which Vladimir telegraphed his assent. The sum was twice as much as Girodias had previously paid for a book. Ergaz drew up a simple twelve-clause agreement granting Girodias world English-language rights, which Vladimir signed before an Ithaca notary on June 20.† These constituted the two pages Véra most often parsed in the next decade; she must have known them by heart. Girodias’s Olympia Press immediately set about preparing the edition so as to take advantage o
f the fall tourist trade. After the long wait, Lolita was rushed into print.

  Shortly after agreeing to the Paris publication, the Nabokovs shared the good news with Morris Bishop, who admitted to feeling more unsettled than celebratory. Bishop was as capable as the next Jaguar-driving polymath of composing a dirty limerick, but was all the same alarmed by Vladimir’s report. “I queried him on the scabrous subject,” he confided in his wife. “It is about a man who loves little girls, a subject which (rightly I think) is absolutely taboo in this country. He says there is not an indecent word in it, and it is really a tragic and terrible story. Well, I hope it doesn’t make a real scandal.” His admonitions were not what either Nabokov wanted to hear. Their delight that this misfit of a child had finally found a home must have commingled with their concern; it may explain why Bishop felt his friend defended the novel as one would one’s idiot child. Vladimir knew the work to be provocative well aside from its subject matter—he sent excerpted pages to twenty-two-year-old Dmitri, boasting, “It’s full of pepper and gun powder”—but this time around more was at stake: America, and Cornell, represented refuges for which the Nabokovs had fought long and hard. Véra shared her fears with Alison Bishop, who found her beside herself with worry. Her husband was fifty-six years old. How would he find another job? She later denied having harbored any such apprehensions, with the same vehemence that she would deny that her husband had attempted to publish the novel under a pseudonym, an act that seemed as incriminating in retrospect as not having done so felt criminal at the time. On both these points Véra did protest too much.* Furthermore, her sentiments were almost inevitably aligned with those of her husband, who expressed concern with what might happen after publication at Cornell, where one could be dismissed for “moral turpitude.” As a result, he conceded Girodias use of his name but made great efforts to ensure that Cornell’s not be revealed. One of the great ironies of Lolita’s publication was the extent to which its author went to protect the academic position from which the novel was at long last to liberate him.

  The second triumph of 1955 was Dmitri’s graduation from Harvard. The ceremony itself was a source of great pleasure, with the caps and gowns, the celebratory lunch afterward on the lawn. As Véra reported to Berkman after the June festivities: “He was happy, V. was happy, and ‘cum laude’ was an unexpected blessing.” To his parents’ initial dismay, Dmitri had expressed an interest in pursuing an operatic career. As much as they had proved expert at scrambling financially, they wished no such insecurity on their son; the tribulations of an artistic career were too vivid to them both. While soliciting friends’ opinions about Dmitri’s passion for singing, they strongly urged him to consider law school, to which he was accepted. There were other plans for him as well. As early as January 1955, Vladimir was flogging his son the translator on Covici, as he would later on Epstein, as he had earlier flogged Véra on the Chekhov editors. (This was a very special offer, Vladimir informed Covici, as he did not customarily check others’ work for free.) The Lermontov translation was entrusted to Dmitri. This left Véra with an additional responsibility over the summer, when “for Pnin’s sake” the couple remained in Ithaca, despite the “nostalgic longing” she felt for the West every spring. She labored to impress her considerable work ethic on her son.

  Hers were hardly sentimental letters to a young poet. Véra advised Dmitri immediately to obtain the existing translations, “which you will need for consultation but not for plagiary.” He could count on invaluable—and free—assistance at their end, with difficult and obsolete phrasings. On his end he should devote as much as an hour and a half to a page, proceeding at a pace of three to four pages a day. He was to work every day, without vacations. “It is very enjoyable work but it is also quite exacting and above all it has to be followed up with the utmost perseverance because there will be a time limit,” his mother advised. Moreover, as the contract was yet to be signed, she advised total discretion. Did he feel up to the task? If so she could promise that a more ambitious project would follow. “I want a quick reaction by mail,” Véra signed off, making it clear that the first dollars of Dmitri’s advance were not to be applied to a long-distance call. The severity of her tone may be explained by a letter she had written a few days earlier on the translator’s behalf. The admissions secretary at the Harvard Law School had wondered when the school might receive Dmitri’s acceptance deposit. The task of explaining that he would be devoting a year to musical training and should thus like to defer the Law School’s offer fell to his mother, who apologized for her son’s silence. She was preoccupied with his future that summer, and worried too about his grasp of practical matters, in which she felt him sadly deficient; she was aware of how utterly independent she had been at her son’s age. Berkman knew how difficult the career decision had been for the Nabokovs, but felt in the end they had done the right thing for all concerned. “If anyone wants a chance as much as he wanted that one, it does seem that he ought not to be denied,” she reassured the future basso’s mother.

  The Lermontov project was tackled over the next year behind a thicket of pronouns. Véra grappled with the contract; she devoted some of her summer to the 1839 text, the first major prose novel in Russian, and a work to which Tolstoy’s style has been traced. A year later, as the text neared completion, Nabokov mentioned that Dmitri “has assisted Véra and me very ably in our Lermontov translation.” A month afterward he apprised Levin: “I have finished (with Dmitri’s able assistance) the Lermontov book and sent it to Doubleday.” At the same time Véra described the project thusly: “Last year Dmitri began a translation for Doubleday, and this summer, in Utah, V. finished it. I had my share, too.” She was not always so modest. At the end of June 1956 she wrote with relief to Elena Levin, in a dazzling display of unparallel pronouns: “We have just completed a lot of work (translation), which took up all of my time, and finally I have some time for myself.” She had been forthright about the division of labor with Dmitri, to whom she had initially made it clear that the less time he asked of his father, the better he acquitted himself of the task. Earlier in June she had chastised him: “Instead of taking a good rest, your father and I have been working all this time on the ‘Hero,’ and shall be saddled with this job to the end of our vacation. Is this fair?” In the fall of 1957 Vladimir was too busy to offer up suggestions for flap copy, which Véra supplied. Much later Dmitri credited his parents with polishing the Lermontov translation, for which father and son are credited in the published edition. At the end of 1955 Nabokov complained that he was doing three jobs, “each of which is really made for a whole man.” This was true—what with Onegin, Pnin, Lermontov, and the teaching he could have said four—but the support staff was superb.

  A month before Lolita was published in Paris Wilson visited the Nabokovs in Ithaca. He had never seen them so cheerful; later he theorized that the difficulties with Lolita had had a stimulating effect on Vladimir. The couple appeared to him to be flourishing, though they were more bound up in Dmitri and his exploits than Wilson might have liked; with horror and pride, Vladimir held forth on the sexual habits of the younger generation. The visit was even more of a success than his hosts would have realized. Wilson happily confided in a mutual friend afterward that having been thoroughly repelled by Lolita, he was delighted to be reminded of how much he liked the novel’s author. Dismayed by her loyalty, he was as comfortable as he ever was with Véra. He could not suppress a snideness about her assistance in administering her husband’s exams, even while he admired the couple’s sacrosanct family relations. The two butted heads openly about the French definition of a word, which rather appropriately happened to be “fastidious.” Véra held that it meant “hard to please,” while Wilson insisted—dictionary citations traveled back and forth over the next weeks—that it meant “tiresome.” (Vladimir sided with his wife.) Fastidious as she was, Véra conceded defeat only grudgingly, although when she read of the argument much later she scrawled “My mistake” next to the account.r />
  Just before she disappeared again behind the typewriter, she sent up another quiet flare of self-assertion. Perhaps because she was writing to a woman who published, and who had enjoyed a rich academic career, she closed her summer letter to Berkman:

  The only thing to report about myself is that I hate humid heat, that our apartment is pretty hot in hot weather (we shall have a house in August), and that though I am not doing anything of value of my own, I am kept busy by my men, at this time Vladimir especially (all his letters and much other paper work).