Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  † They were never published as such.

  * Taos “is a dismal hole full of third-rate painters and faded pansies,” her husband apprised Wilson.

  * Five years later, Lady Chatterley’s Lover would fall victim to the U.S. Post. In 1953 a Cornell literary magazine had been deemed unsuitable for mailing and confiscated.

  † In the course of these months Straus had, on his lawyers’ advice, also resisted Wilson’s campaign to reissue Hecate. The fates of the two novels were to remain curiously tangled.

  * At times in 1955 it seemed that everyone in New York had read or was reading the manuscript. Which may explain why the August 27, 1955, New Yorker carried a Dorothy Parker short story about another widow, her maiden daughter, that daughter’s suitor, and the romance that blossomed in the suitor’s car. The story has nothing more in common with Nabokov’s—in fact it is almost antithetical to the tale he forged from the same elements—save for one curious detail: It takes its title from the name of its heroine, Lolita. Vladimir noted as much with “a yelp of distress.” White firmly reassured him that his suspicions were unjustified. She further assured him that as his book was to appear soon, and as everyone knows books are long in preparation, at least no one would think he had lifted the title from Parker. Nothing could have been further from his mind.

  † It had been eight years since Nabokov had failed to grasp the merits of Memoirs of Hecate County, into which Wilson had even inserted an allusion to his Russian friend. He told Wilson he thought the work a failed tribute to Fanny Hill; Wilson would say the same of Lolita.

  * Doubtless this was the same fictional publisher who suggested Nabokov salvage The Defense by transforming the chess-playing Luzhin into a demented violinist.

  † He had at least one clue. Ergaz had written that the house she had in mind for the manuscript was one that published works that “one would not dare publish” in England.

  * Girodias’s ability to summon such masterpieces into existence was ingeniously simple. He would presell the volumes to a select clientele, lured with titles and blurbs of his invention, for works like White Thighs, The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe, etc. Once the orders arrived he advanced funds to his authors, who “hastened to turn in manuscripts which more or less fitted the descriptions.”

  * He appears to have felt differently about affixing his name to the novel in 1955 than he had in 1954, when he regularly claimed that he might well change his mind in a year’s time. Aside from his frustration level, the only factor that may have played a role in his decision was Dmitri’s law school application, which would have been pending in the winter/spring of 1954–55. Dmitri disagrees that his application would in any way have influenced his father’s actions.

  † Neither author nor publisher considered three small matters at the time the contract was drafted: that the novel had any commercial potential whatever; that it might ever be published in America; that its film rights were of any value. Girodias braced himself to lose a fortune, convinced the novel was far too beautiful, too subtle, to sell.

  * When the Olympia edition went on display at the Ithaca Public Library, Véra called Alison Bishop in a panic; Morris must have them remove it at once, at least until the book was proved to be great art. As both Bishops were in bed with pneumonia, neither was able to rise to her assistance.

  * John Gordon’s words, in part: “Sheer unrestrained pornography … The entire book is devoted to an ex haustive, uninhibited, and utterly disgusting description of his [Humbert’s] pursuits and successes. It is published in France. Anyone who published or sold it here would certainly go to prison.” A whole echo chamber of ironies surrounded Lolita’s introduction to America, not the least resonant of which sounded with Harvey Breit’s influential voice: He had himself written pornography for a dollar a page.

  † It was Raymond Queneau, future father of Zazie dans le métro, who convinced the firm to do so.

  ‡ On this count the Nabokovs were mistaken. In the eyes of the court, comedy and tragedy made no difference. Literary merit was—or was hoped to be—the only defense.

  § The cabin was perfectly isolated, but the Nabokovs entertained at least one visitor this summer, a washing machine repairman who did nothing to alter Véra’s opinion of those amazing Americans. He told the couple of his visits with the people in the flying saucers, who would not show their hands when they talked. “What language did they speak?” demanded Vladimir.

  * She was not alone in this habit. “How persistently our poet evokes images of winter in the beginning of a poem which he started composing on a balmy summer night!” exclaims Kinbote in Pale Fire.

  † Its publishing history too proved complicated, partly because of Vladimir’s demands, partly on account of the manuscript’s girth. Cornell University Press could not settle on terms that would prove both financially viable and acceptable to the author. The labor of love was published finally by the Bollingen Series which, as Morris Bishop dryly observed, “loves to lose money.”

  * When finally in 1957 he did read the book, Bishop resisted its charms. “Nabokov’s Pnin is a shimmering delight. His Lolita is not,” he concluded.

  † The real-life echoes appear to have enhanced Vladimir’s enjoyment of that acclaim. In October 1957 the Nabokovs had a drink with Colgate College’s Albert Parry, who had been the lone voice in America to place a bet on a distant dark horse named V. Sirin in 1933. By 1957 all had come full circle; his prediction had been amply fulfilled. Are you angry with me about Pnin? Nabokov asked Parry at the time. The Colgate professor looked puzzled. “Oh, well, every Russian who teaches Russian subjects in America sees himself in Pnin and is even quite cross with me,” Vladimir explained. When Parry said he had no such illusions and was not angry, the novelist looked crestfallen.

  † John Cheever won, for The Wapshot Chronicle. Nabokov was one of two St. Petersburg natives on the shortlist; Ayn Rand was also nominated, for Atlas Shrugged.

  * There was huge and sad irony in the fact that Wilson, who had done so much for Nabokov’s publishing history, should now prove inadvertently to be standing in his friend’s way.

  * It bears a dedication to “The memory of my mother,” but cannot precisely be said to be the only work dedicated to someone other than Véra, to whom the English-language edition is dedicated.

  * As “Mrs. Véra Nabokov” she more gently suggested to another student that he would be doing himself a favor by appealing to a different instructor for a reference letter.

  * The Guggenheim letter, reprinted in Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940–1977, is signed “Vladimir Nabokov.” He is almost certainly responsible for its second half, in which he wondered after his eligibility for a third fellowship.

  * Reminded of this later, Minton revised his statement to: “I didn’t lie. I just did not tell them all the details.”

  7

  PAST PERFECT

  We did not expect that, amid the whirling masks, one mask would turn out to be a real face, or at least the place where that face ought to be.

  —NABOKOV, LECTURES ON RUSSIAN LITERATURE

  1

  What possesses a person to start a diary? Véra Nabokov began what amounted to one in a recycled 1951 datebook. She was fifty-six years old; Lolita was a newborn. As with most other demonstrations of self, she came to this one obliquely, if not accidentally; the exercise may well have belonged to the my-husband-started-but-had-to-switch-to-something-else-in-a-hurry school. The datebook began its second life on Tuesday, May 20, 1958. Its first entry is in Vladimir’s hand, though not entirely in his words: “Long distance has always a bracing effect, says Véra. A call from Jason Epstein, Doubleday, at 10 AM asking if [I] would undertake a translation of Tolstoy’s short novels—Hadji-Murad etc. Véra answered I would think it over.” The pages continue in a collaborative fashion, as only the Nabokovs could devise one; it is almost impossible to believe that the two were not sitting next to each other that May Tuesday. The next line is again Vladimir’s: “Véra
went to look for a dress around noon.” In a different hand the paragraph continues: “Véra came back without dress. Shopping in Ithaca a disaster. A NY firm (Best) displayed a mediocre collection in one half of dingy restaurant hired for this purpose. No sales ladies. No trying-on rooms. No attractive dresses.” The addition is Véra’s, in the third person, a character in someone else’s book.

  For the next few pages the couple’s comments alternate, in a desultory fashion. The datebook seems to have migrated between them, as a single pair of eyeglasses later would. Dmitri has called in raptures about an audition (says Véra); Jason Epstein has called in despair (says Vladimir), having missed out on the opportunity to publish Lolita. (“Literally wailed,” reports Vladimir.) What Epstein was publishing was a collection of thirteen stories—Nabokov’s Dozen—a copyright taxonomy for which Véra prepared while her husband sorted Wyoming, Oregon, and New Mexico butterflies. Vladimir reported on the letter he had written Harry Levin about Onegin, then on submission to Cornell University Press. He had alerted Levin that the press might well turn to him for a reading of the three-thousand-page manuscript. Here it is diary as dialogue: “(you forgot to mention the main object of the letter to Harry, which was to ask him for utmost discretion—nay, secrecy!—in handling the MS),” Véra added, interrupting her husband in mid-sentence. She is correct about the intent of the Levin letter, no enormous surprise as she was its author. Writing in the guise of her husband, she had implored: “Should they send you the MS would you do me the very great favor of not showing or mentioning it to anyone at all. Under no circumstances would I want Karpovich or Jakobson, or any other Slavist to glimpse it.”

  Following this bit of in-house conversation Nabokov cedes the pen entirely to his wife, after which the tussles are not with her husband but with the world and her conscience. Nabokov’s first cousin Peter de Peterson was in America on business that May, when he proposed a Memorial Day visit to Ithaca. Air connections being what they were, Véra realized that Peterson would need either to leave Newark at 7:30 A.M. or to arrive in Ithaca at 7:30 P.M. Her anguish on the subject indicates that even in the small matters she had not entirely left the well-ordered universe of prerevolutionary Russia behind. “Query: what is less inhospitable,” she wondered, “to oblige a man to get up at 5 A.M. or to tell him to come here only in time for dinner?” Her remarks fall off here, interrupted on the page by the entries Vladimir had made in the datebook seven years earlier, in the life by the summer departure from Ithaca. The preceding weeks had been devoted less to the diary than to three other volumes. In mid-May Minton had sent on page proofs of Lolita, which Véra had vetted, followed by their author. Together the two also read through the proofs of the story collection, scheduled to be published a month after the novel. Most of all Véra was distracted by the demands of Onegin, out of the house but not entirely off her desk. “The very thought of the proofs appals me: there is so much that will have to be checked on every page, some of it in different languages,” she groaned, having mailed off the two previous bundles.

  Meanwhile the French translator of Lolita—who happened to be Maurice Girodias’s younger brother, thirty-two-year-old Eric Kahane—was in constant touch, primarily with Vladimir. As every translator of Nabokov before or since has discovered, Kahane was involved in a debilitating act of lacemaking. “Some days I barely manage 8 or 10 lines and feel like murdering you. Other times, I get 2 or 3 pages done but am dead to the world the morning after,” he cursed in a letter to the author. Perhaps more than anyone in the spring of 1958, Kahane was attuned to the exquisite richness of the language, the sinuous humor of the lines that the novel’s subject had for the most part obscured. The details were endless, as were the arguments, which provide some sense of what Véra faced on a daily basis. Kahane suggested an original phrasing; Nabokov offered an alternative. “That’s a beautiful word—but it does not exist,” Kahane objected, to which Nabokov countered, “Yes it does,” citing as his source the Grande Larousse of 1895. “It was bloody Alcatraz” is Kahane’s summary of the experience.

  Gallimard had no great expectations for the book, or at least had none when they acquired rights to the novel in 1956. By the time Kahane, holed up with the manuscript in a gardener’s toolshed on the Riviera, began to grasp that he might well be remembered as the worst-remunerated translator in history, by the time the Nabokovs pushed off from Ithaca for Glacier National Park, Véra and Vladimir understood that everything about their lives was to change. On June 28 Vladimir was already able to declare Lolita a commercial success; he did not think he would need to teach anymore. He could not help adding a regret that Véra felt even more keenly, and repeated nearly verbatim: It should all have happened thirty years earlier. Presumably “in the advance light of a great event” she picked up the diary again, in Montana, toward the middle of July. When she did so an early copy of the Putnam’s edition had reached the couple, and Conrad Brenner’s glowing and brilliant appraisal of Vladimir had appeared in The New Republic, “finally giving V. a long-overdue recognition of true greatness,” as Véra saw it. The long essay would prove as prescient as it was astute; Brenner predicted years on the syllabi, but neither a Nobel nor a Pulitzer. From the outset Lolita’s author had two things going against him: “He is wildly and liquidly sophisticated, and he writes as well as any man alive.” Brenner grasped early on that reading Nabokov is essentially a private experience; that the beauty of the work was not in its metaphors but in the magic of its language; that the Russian-American writer defied all categories, formulae, schools (and most critics); that he was a master of the perverse, in support of which claim Brenner cited as evidence The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.*

  Nabokov vowed to write a history of Lolita’s travails—he thought he could squeeze an amusing tale out of it for The New Yorker—to which end Véra’s entries for the latter part of the year would have been a significant help. At some indeterminate time after his wife’s failed shopping expedition, he labeled those pages “Hurricane Lolita.” It is unlikely that Véra kept this record for her husband’s consultation, or for any but her own reasons, however. She seems simply to have realized that events were about to overwhelm them, to have sensed that momentarily their life would undergo a vast and magnificent change, and to have wanted to linger at the vantage point. Twenty-six years earlier her husband had been the toast of the town in émigre Paris; she had not been on hand to witness the commotion, which had proved a false alarm. In the datebook she wrote in English, less guardedly than she would elsewhere. For the first and only time she proves a trustworthy narrator. At the end of the summer she boasted that she had driven Vladimir over 8,000 miles in seven weeks. (Appropriately, the author of Lolita was calling for his mail at AAAs that summer; his first copy of the Putnam’s edition reached him this way, probably in Glacier National Park.) In the diary Véra documented some of those excursions, in northern Montana and southern British Columbia: 248 miles through dismal landscape in search of ferniensis; 120 miles for three nielithea. The delight in her husband’s triumphs is the same, but a hint of impatience catches in her voice with the butterflies. It had not helped that the weather was miserable, with gale-force winds and buckets of hail. Moreover there was a lively disagreement between the two Nabokovs over which direction to head. In a housekeeping cabin just south of the American border the two read War and Peace to each other in midsummer, Vladimir concluding that the novel “is really a very childish piece of writing.” The weather did Tolstoy no favors. Outside the primitive cabin the wind howled through Glacier National Park with such force that Vladimir had trouble hearing his wife read.

  Véra permitted herself the opportunity to describe some of the summer’s accommodations, which seemed only fair; she was the woman who slept in all of Humbert Humbert’s motel rooms. She did full justice to the “horrid dirty little hut” they rented—briefly—in northern Wyoming, at an exhausted Vladimir’s insistence; she would have preferred to forge ahead. Which is what the couple did after their encount
er with the landlord, who—upon hearing that his new guests hailed from upstate New York—declared, “Good enough so long [as] you are not from the Big City. All sorts of folks come from there trying to jew you.” What is wrong with the Jews? the Nabokovs asked their landlord, who was happy to enlighten his guests, advising them that Jews “always try to knife you, get the better of you.” “Well, I am Jewish, and I have no intention of swindling you,” Véra retorted. The landlord fell all over himself with apologies. After a quick inspection of the local restaurant, the Nabokovs fell into the Buick, “abandoning the rent to our righteous host.” Véra allowed her indignation full voice too when writing of the Sheridan, Wyoming, rodeo; she would nearly came to blows with the translator of The Gift when he defended bullfighting. “Is it fun for anyone in the world to see a frightened calf thrown over and roped?” she asked, reserving for this activity the scorn she generally heaped on the Nabokov nonenthusiast. Three days after Lolita’s publication, she set down a full chronology of the first eighteen years in America. She went back to fill in the past, the kind of gesture one makes at a critical juncture, when those years are about to be redeemed, when the future is about to detach itself from what has preceded it, when the need for a new dress announces itself.

  The Nabokovs arranged to return from the Rockies by early August so as to attend what Véra alternately billed as Lolita’s and Vladimir’s coming-out party, a press cocktail Minton had scheduled at the Harvard Club. Véra was impressed by Minton’s nimble handling of the critics in attendance, enough so to wonder if the slower-moving, owlish publisher she had met earlier in the year had been the same person. She and Vladimir—better attuned to such possibilities than most people—speculated that Minton had earlier sent “an older and rather obtuse cousin” to Ithaca. She was equally impressed by her husband’s Harvard Club performance on August 4: This was the occasion on which she observed that he had managed not to skewer a single contemporary. The press was amused less by the names he failed to sully than by those he failed to recognize. In the course of conversation someone mentioned Peyton Place to the professor of literature, who drew a blank. “ ‘What is it?’ he inquired. ‘A novel? Who wrote it?’ ” And of course none of the twenty-five reporters was nearly as interested in what the author of Lolita had managed to read than whom he might have shared it with. The New York Post took pains to observe that he was accompanied to the reception by “his wife, Véra, a slender fair-skinned, white-haired woman in no way reminiscent of Lolita.” At the Harvard Club reception as elsewhere, admirers told Véra that they had not exactly expected the author to show up with his distinguished-looking wife of thirty-three years. “Yes,” Véra replied, smiling, unflappable. “It’s the main reason why I’m here.” At her elbow her husband chuckled, admitting that he had been tempted to hire a child escort for the occasion. But the truth was a potent one: Véra’s existence kept the fiction in its place, reassured readers skittish about Lolita’s subject that Nabokov’s perversities were of a different kind.* Is there a trace of Véra in the novel? No, but her fingerprints are all over it. And some people insisted on searching for her. After Lionel Trilling met the Nabokovs, he told his wife that everything about her gave him the feeling that Véra Nabokov was Lolita.