by Stacy Schiff
Signatures aside, there was little question as to who stood behind Véra’s words. On occasions when her letter failed to achieve the desired effect, Vladimir weighed in, referring back to “my letter, signed by my wife.” Véra did not object to these assertions. One can hear her, though, attempting to convince her husband that a word from him—one she would if necessary compose—was required. The protracted history of securing Lolita a Paris publication was recast by Vladimir in the first person (“On August 6 of that year, from Taos, New Mexico, I wrote Madame Ergaz.… I now asked her to find somebody in Europe who would publish Lolita … and next spring I got in touch with Madame Ergaz again …”), when nearly the entire correspondence had been conducted by Véra, who knew well that the natural end of mimicry is concealment. She herself made no secret of her role, telling reporters later she had been the one to pursue European publication. But on paper she made the same claims as her husband, referring even to her own letters as his. As sometimes they were, having been composed by him, with a request that they go out over her name.
It was one thing to enjoy complete freedom in their epistolary pas de deux, quite another to admit to it. Véra’s grumbling that the business matters fell to her did not prevent her from writing crossly to a correspondent who suggested she was speaking for her husband: “Allow me to clear up one misunderstanding: I am certainly not ‘protecting’ my husband. He always makes his own decisions.” After some trouble between Gallimard and Girodias, Vladimir drafted a letter to the Gallimard editor: “I have no way of judging if a rumor that reaches me from Paris is true or false. My wife does not make herself the ‘echo’ of anything; she merely is kind enough to jot down my queries and apprehensions.” In the happy days with Andrew Field, Véra was disappointed to hear that her letter had inadvertently offended. The biographer needed to bear in mind that she simply typed what her husband dictated, word for word. (In truth, Nabokov did very little dictating after Lolita.) To one steely letter she affixed a disclaimer: “Personally I would appreciate your explaining to the gentleman that I never answer my husband’s letters otherwise than he asks me to do.” For his part Nabokov never disclaimed Véra’s words, though he did at times ask her to add something to a letter she had mailed off earlier in the day, occasioning a second, or third, communication on the same afternoon.
Véra took little pride in the correspondence, which had already, in advance of Lolita, threatened to overwhelm her. In one of the dozens of letters to Elena Sikorski in which Véra apologized for her authorship, she begs that Vladimir be forgiven: “He simply does not know how to write sloppily and in a rush.” The implication was that she did. The happy valiance with which she appeared to conduct the business affairs was in truth not so simple for her. She felt that her English was second-rate, that she was “a bad letter-writer,” that she was ill at ease in business, that she had trouble reading contracts, that her arithmetic was lame. In some of these protests a certain pragmatic disguise was in use. She was comfortable with the masquerade; the routine worked best if the expectations of her were low.
Similarly she shrank from the idea that she was the protective and adoring wife, a slavish follower of all people surnamed Nabokov. She railed against the assertion that she was “fiercely protective of her man.” She assured agent Swifty Lazar that Ada was a remarkable, a sensational, book, an evaluation that had nothing to do with her being the author’s wife. When a Rutgers professor asked Nabokov to name the great untranslated titles of European fiction, Véra replied. Professor William Lamont pursued the matter, enclosing a preliminary list of his selections. Véra weighed in about Bely and Bulgakov before adding, “And, as you can well imagine, I consider Zashchita Luzhina [The Defense] by Nabokov as one of the best novels ever written in Russian.” When Lamont acknowledged that at her suggestion he had put “your talented boy friend’s novel on the list” she could barely contain her fury. (The phrase “boy friend” had not helped.) Lamont had asked her candid opinion, which she had supplied. “In doing so, I acted as a person well at home in Russian literature, by no means as a ‘loyal and devoted wife.’ ” She invited Lamont to ignore her suggestions completely, so intent was she on not being thought—despite all the assistance, the impersonations, the assumptions of his responsibilities—her husband’s flack.
With intimates there was no smokescreen about the smokescreens. In October 1956 Véra advised Sylvia Berkman, “V. was asked to suggest a candidate for [a Guggenheim] and I think I composed a very adequate letter listing your high qualifications. V. signed the letter, of course, and [the] reaction was enthusiastic.” (There was no question as to who the active force was. “Let us push now,” Véra added.)* She was always embarrassed to have to hold up her husband’s end of the Sikorski correspondence, all the more so when she was asked to impart harsh words. “I’m sorry for this unpleasant letter. Be angry with Volodya for it,” she begged her sister-in-law. As it was, Vladimir had expressed himself far more severely, “but I refuse to repeat it.” With friends the dual, or delegated, authorship made itself felt clearly. Letters came addressed to all sorts of entities: “Dear VVs, Dear VerVolodya, Dear Author and Mrs. Nabokov.” “Dear V. & V.,” wrote the ever-astute Morris Bishop in 1959, “How happy is the English language in its second person plural! I need not specify if I speak to one or both of you; you blend or separate at will!” The language was as useful as it was happy. With two voices at their disposal the Nabokovs could work all kinds of effects. They could badger more tenaciously. Véra could render Vladimir more distant, his judgments more divine. “My husband asks me to say that he thinks ULYSSES by far the greatest English novel of the century but detests FINNEGANS WAKE,” she enlightened one scholar. Some of the greatest advantages of this tango, or tangle, of pronouns would be realized only in the decades to come, when the arrangement would be refined to high art. In the 1950s, the mimetic disguise was largely a matter of convenience. For reasons of efficiency, Véra fronted for Vladimir, the man behind whom she had walked on campus for a decade.
By the time it was necessary to write Maurice Girodias—and Doussia Ergaz about Girodias—“Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov” was firmly in the saddle. The relationship with Girodias began to sour almost upon the book’s publication. “Véra Nabokov” began to reason with Ergaz in November of 1956 about why the Olympia contract should be considered null and void; over the next years “Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov” wrote and signed a plump anthology of missives explaining which clause of the agreement Girodias was presently in violation of. The essential problem was not so much what was in the agreement as what was not. Girodias had bought world English-language rights in the novel; the Nabokovs were willing to fight for some share of the American rights, which they had plainly signed away. By the time U.S. publication began to look like a possibility, by the time Simon & Schuster and Random House were considering the novel, relations with Olympia had curdled. The novel had been banned in France; Nabokov had opted not to join Olympia in its litigation. Not unreasonably, Girodias felt that given his early advocacy of an unpopular cause, he deserved something for his efforts. Nabokov felt that given his publisher’s dilatoriness, his casual accounting procedures—and probably too the fact that The Whip Angels and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure made for compromising company—Girodias was overreaching himself. He wanted only to end their association. The situation was complicated by the ad interim copyright under which the novel was protected. If more than 1,500 copies of the book were imported into the United States, or if more than five years were to elapse without the book’s being published in America, its copyright protection lapsed. The deadline was September 1960. Agreeing on a U.S. publisher for Lolita became not so much a luxury as a necessity. And agreeing on terms with Girodias was the first—and as it turned out the most difficult—of the mythic labors involved in publishing it.
The division of responsibility in arranging for Lolita’s American life, while not entirely neat, was nonetheless interesting. The letters to Lolita’s American suitors—Iva
n Obolensky, Epstein, ultimately Putnam’s Walter Minton—were composed and signed by Vladimir. The threatening, cajoling, demanding letters—those warning about “the sacred figure” of 1,500 copies, that the publisher who added the book to his list would have to be one with the resources to take the litigation as far as the Supreme Court—were composed and signed by Véra. When a particularly firm hand was called for with Girodias, Vladimir stepped in; when a housekeeping matter arose, Véra stepped in. As the paper accumulated the lines blurred, and with them, in a perfectly Nabokovian way, the identities on the page. Increasingly, letters opened like this 1957 one to Epstein: “Vladimir started this letter but had to switch to something else in a hurry, and asked me to continue on my own.” The epistolary two-step served everyone’s purposes. It also gave way to an off-putting confusion about authorship. The correspondent was left to fashion a response that would mollify, tantalize, charm two parties, a game that involved some subtle guesswork as well as some delicate phrasing. Many of the hallmarks of Nabokov’s fiction—the doppelgängers, the impersonators, the Siamese twins, the mirror images, the distorted mirror images, the reflections in the windowpane, the parodies of self—manifested themselves in the routine the couple developed for dealing with the world, a routine that could leave a correspondent feeling as the books can: humbled by one knotty, magnificent inside joke.
Only on the telephone did Véra’s flutey, lightly accented voice ring loud and clear—and unaccompanied. Whenever possible Vladimir shunned that instrument, delegating the foggy realm of “space spooks” to his wife. He found long-distance calls particularly abhorrent. He informed an editor that while he enjoyed their telephonic visits, he instantly forgot half of what the editor said and seven-eighths of what he himself said. Especially as his words became more sought after and the need to choose them carefully that much greater, the solution was to entrust all space-spook scuffling to Véra. “V hates the telephone—so I had to call,” she noted flatly, when the first Lolita-related query arrived from Hollywood. Later, when Vladimir wanted information on the film of the novel, he asked Stanley Kubrick if he would mind terribly talking to him by phone through Véra. He promised he would remain at her side throughout the conversation. When William Maxwell telephoned the Nabokovs in Switzerland from The New Yorker’s offices, Véra was put in charge of explaining to him that her husband’s “communicatory neurosis” had prevented him from taking the call. The same neurosis would not interfere with his dictating to his wife a letter about the publication of Eugene Onegin, which she wrote out longhand, from a hospital room thirty-five miles away.
Increasingly Véra began to step out from behind the typewriter. She was by now perfectly at ease on the page in English, though her English was always a little stiff, and Russian remained the language she spoke with her husband. All of the publishers who attempted to pry Lolita’s American rights from Girodias’s clutches discovered that Vladimir conferred with her on every detail. She was active in the negotiating; just after Christmas 1957, Minton announced that he was “making one last appeal to M. Gerodias [sic], along the lines that Mrs. Nabokov suggested.” (This did not prove the winning strategy, which Minton has described as having been far simpler: “I just lied my head off to both of them.”* Girodias was insisting on half the proceeds; Nabokov was insisting on a 10 percent royalty. Minton offered a 17½ percent royalty and simply failed to reveal to either party the other’s share.) He would conclude that Véra was to blame for most of the difficulties with Girodias. “She is a lovely lady of a very actively suspicious turn of mind which just complements her husband’s,” he warned the Parisian publisher, when the disposition of British rights in the book created additional friction. (Girodias had already concluded that Véra was a force to be reckoned with, and that the couple lived in a state of complete osmosis.) It was true that Véra had begun, even semiprivately, to refer to the French publisher as Girodias the Gangster. It is also true that what looked dubious from one angle was instinctively sound from another. But Nabokov’s wife was not Caesar’s: She was never above suspicion. Ivan Obolensky was persuaded that Véra had single-handedly botched his negotiation.
Slowly she had been coaxed out of the wings—by the pressure of work, by her devotion, by the demands of an exceptional novel. Inadvertently, “Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov” had made a name for herself. Not that this spelled an end to the counterfeit letters, which she continued to issue, the disguise becoming more and more artful. Even in the late 1950s something more variegated yet could be produced. The correspondence with Dmitri—over these years to consist largely of one long, heartfelt plea to spend less, drive more slowly, translate more quickly, and above all spend less—fell to Véra. On one occasion she yielded her pen to, or forced it upon, Vladimir, who dispensed the habitual wisdoms. “Mama is angry and doesn’t want to write,” he explained at the end of the missive, typed by the person who had not wanted to set words to paper. This was Véra affording herself a great luxury, which she rarely did. In February 1958, as the Nabokovs settled into their last Ithaca house, as Minton cabled Girodias that he had reached an agreement with all parties, as the French Minister of the Interior lifted its ban on the novel, as the Lermontov translation appeared in Ithaca bookstores, she who had for so long been hovering “beneath the word, above the syllable” was now very much in evidence. She was just as often misunderstood—Obolensky was as certain she was French as some Cornellians had been that she was a German princess—but she was at least now the shadowy figure in the foreground. She had emerged just in time for the arrival of Hurricane Lolita, which would have flushed her out anyway.
* As the scholar Carl Proffer has pointed out, “Spousal censorship in Russia is at least as old as Dostoyevsky’s second wife.” She did a fine job on his diary, stopping just short of the ink Bulgakov’s wife strategically spilled on her husband’s more compromising pages.
* As with much concerning the couple, this made for a baroque arrangement. When a journalist noted that Véra occasionally censored her husband’s conversation—the journalist felt she was very much understating the case—Vladimir, who had approval of the text, censored out the description of his wife censoring him, thereby effectively censoring her censoring.
* Lena still did not know the fate of the husband whom she had left, but whom she valiantly defended, and who had disappeared during the war. Véra expressed no curiosity about him whatever. For reasons that are unclear but probably had to do with rumors swirling in Berlin, she seems to have shared Sonia’s low opinion of Massalsky.
* The schedules nearly prove the undoing of Gradus in Pale Fire, to whom they seem the work of a practical joker.
† Their permanent address at Cornell was Goldwin Smith Hall. Partly to distinguish himself from the linguists on campus, whose headquarters were elsewhere, Nabokov went so far as to call himself a Goldwin Smith man. For once his scholarship failed him. He would hardly have done so had he known that Goldwin Smith, a British historian who had taught at Cornell between 1868 and 1871 and left the school his fortune, had written some wholly unsavory things about Russian Jews, especially about the “prosperous usurers” of the Pale.
* Four days after Véra wrote her letter, Lattimore was indicted on seven counts of perjury. The charges were later dismissed. Véra’s enthusiasms, if ever she spoke of them, could not have endeared her to Edmund Wilson, whose Memoirs of Hecate County McCarthy had attacked as pro-Communist.
* The Russian word printsipialnost has been defined as “a mental habit of referring every matter, however small, concrete, or trivial, to lofty and abstract principles.”
* The Triumph was replaced by a custom-tailored Alfa Romeo TZ, in which Dmitri raced successfully in 1964 and 1965. He also twice flew off competitive tracks at top speed in the car, sustaining only minor injuries.
† In the spring of 1949, contemplating a trip to Teton National Park, Nabokov had written to a fellow lepidopterist: “My wife has some timorous questions about grizzlies.” The colleague responded th
at Véra had nothing to fear from bears, but should know how to comport herself in the presence of a moose. (Give it a wide berth.)
* According to Nabokov’s diary, it had been begun exactly five years earlier.
* The situation was a delicate one. Nabokov had an obligation to show the magazine the work, which he knew they could not publish but which he needed for them to refuse—secretly if possible—before he could submit it elsewhere.
† “Would we like our sons to marry Emma Rouault, Becky Sharp, or La belle dame sans merci?” Vladimir retorted.
* Cursing the public’s naïve inability to distinguish author from protagonist, she acknowledged that the conflation could result in some “unpleasantness.” She thought this naivete a particularly American trait. In Sweden her sister railed against her new countrymen for the same reason. Carl Proffer made the same observation about the Russian mind, secure in its conviction that “reality always lies just under the surface of fiction.” Even Nadezhda Mandelstam would assure Proffer that “in her mind there was no doubt that the man who wrote Lolita could not have done so unless he had in his soul those same disgraceful feelings for little girls.”
* Brockway seemed the perfect reader. He was something of the in-house pundit at Simon & Schuster but worked primarily out-of-house, as a freelance editor, and would therefore have been less likely to share the manuscript with the wrong readers. He proved very discreet indeed.
