by Stacy Schiff
Dmitri inherited the Buick. As mail drops, Véra suggested to her husband’s correspondents Mondadori, Lolita’s Italian publisher, or her sister-in-law Elena, a UN librarian, at her Geneva address. She was heading toward familiar territory but away from most of what remained of her relatives. Only Lena, with whom the correspondence was now more regular, remained in Europe. The two had not seen each other since 1937; Lena was eager for a reunion, having built an entirely new life in Sweden. She prided herself on the fact that her son, Michaël, spoke not a word of Russian. With a certain incredulity Sonia asked Véra that winter: “Are you planning on visiting Lena (our Lena)?” She was not in touch with their eldest sister, and did not realize Véra was. She wondered if Lena knew that Véra was in Europe, a fact Lena could not have ignored had she wanted to; the amount of press generated by the Nabokovs across the Continent over the next months would be impossible to overestimate. Even aboard the Liberté, Vladimir was surrounded by admirers. The ship’s library boasted an elaborate display of his works. The head of Bobbs-Merrill happened to be sailing as well; he made every effort to cozy up to the author his firm had brought to America and whom another firm was now triumphantly sending forth. The captain interrogated the celebrated passenger about his choice of subject, although he had not read the sensational novel. In between answering his questions, Vladimir fashioned a structure, in miniature, of what would at last become Pale Fire.
The Nabokovs had expected to spend a few days in France before heading off to meet Elena Sikorski but found to their consternation that Paris was “undergoing a new occupation,” as Véra put it. With the Salon d’Auto in full swing, there was not a hotel room to be found. They took the night train to Geneva, inadvertently retaliating for the ill-fated Gallimard meeting of 1937: Nabokov’s French publisher waited in vain at his office for his bestselling author. In Geneva, one of the few cities in which Lolita could be purchased in three languages, the couple settled into a lakefront apartment at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage, a far cry from Riverside Drive’s Hotel Park Crescent. With satisfaction Véra noted that the novel was prominently displayed in every bookshop window. An emotional reunion with Elena Sikorski on October 7—her brother was so much larger, and yet so much the same—was followed by a series of editorial meetings. The Nabokovs met Ledig Rowohlt and his French-born, Oxford-educated wife, Jane, for the first time now; Véra felt it was “friendship at first sight.” George Weidenfeld paid a visit, as did representatives of Nabokov’s other publishers, and a small herd of reporters. Perhaps because the Geneva address was known only to a few, the pace of Véra’s correspondence slowed here. She wrote Epstein about editorial matters, she conferred with Doussia Ergaz’s office about arrangements in Paris, where Gallimard expected the Nabokovs on the twenty-first. She had other worries as well: She was in dire need of evening wear, something of which there appeared to be a great dearth in Geneva.
It was very much the calm before the storm. On the return to Paris two weeks later every one of the couple’s moves was documented. The press was waiting at the station, vying for the attention of the “most controversial writer since D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller.” The Nabokovs did their best to be polite while they and their ten suitcases piled into a car for the Hotel Continental, where Ergaz had at last and with some difficulty found them a room, a frantic search Vladimir later contorted into a dulcet memory. His datebook for the sixteen days that followed is more crowded than it would ever be again; in the course of the first day, four interviewers called at the hotel. Eric Kahane, the novel’s nimble translator, stopped by as well. All eyes were on Vladimir but the headlines were about someone else altogether; the real news appeared to be that Mr. Nabokov was not escorting a luscious twelve-year-old around Paris. “Madame Nabokov is 38 Years Older than the Nymphet Lolita,” screeched one front-page headline. Véra was observed to be “blonde, distinguished, discreet,” a statement which was two-thirds true, a fairly good average where the Nabokovs and the press were concerned. (She was forty-five years older than Lolita.) In a mink stole and a light-gray suit, she looked every bit the proper Continental wife. Had she wanted to remain outside the limelight she would not have been able to; if you were truly interested in camouflage, traveling with the author of Lolita was the wrong place to be in 1959.
She enjoyed herself immensely. In every account of the Paris-London whirlwind she speaks of how the crush of admirers tired Vladimir, but concludes ebulliently that the adventure was “great fun.” Sonia Slonim was not far off when she guessed that the European return must have felt like a brilliant ball. When Parisian reporters could not lure Vladimir to the phone to pose the questions they were burning to ask, they clamored for Véra, who expertly deflected their queries. In a headline two days after their arrival, she was quoted as saying her husband had never known Lolita. She denied having edited, or so much as offered an opinion on, the novel. “When a masterpiece like Lolita enters the world, the only problem is finding a publisher,” she parried, although she did take credit for having submitted the novel for publication in Paris. She ducked the assault of leading (and absurd) questions deftly. Did it shock her to be the wife of a scandalous author, she was asked, to which she replied that the opinion of those who saw a scandal in Lolita counted not an iota with her. Only the opinion of those who saw a masterpiece did. During most of the scheduled talks she sat at her husband’s side, occasionally interjecting a comment. When Nabokov told one of the first interviewers that—like Flaubert writing of the death of Emma Bovary—he had cried when composing Lolita’s last scene with Humbert, Véra added her usual plea for the heroine’s humanity: “She cries every night, and the critics are deaf to her sobs.” Afterward Madame Ergaz thanked the Nabokovs—both Nabokovs—for all their hard work in Paris.* Everyone had been charmed by the simplicity with which they had acquitted themselves of a punishing task, and above all by their cordial treatment of all concerned.
On Friday evening, October 23, the Parisian literary world gathered in the sanctum sanctorum of French publishing, the gilded Gallimard salon on the rue Sébastien-Bottin. The Nabokovs arrived by taxi; Vladimir disappeared quickly into the crowd of well-wishers, which was immense. (In an interesting turn of phrase, Véra observed that “Everybody and his wife was invited.”) The journalists tore her husband away from each other; they jockeyed for position; they hung on his every word. Véra’s pleasure in the sight is nearly palpable. In photographs she looks radiant, vibrant, a poised, porcelain beauty. The shopping had decidedly proved successful: She appeared at Gallimard resplendent in a black moiré dress, a tasteful mink stole, a double strand of pearls. The rain of questions fell on her, too. She profited from the attention to settle a score of her own, telling an amusing Khrushchev anecdote. Natalie and Nicholas Nabokov’s son Ivan, a Parisian editor, was in attendance; he found his cousin ill at ease, overwhelmed. Ivan did not see Véra at her husband’s side but felt she would have come in very handy indeed. Knowing too well how her brother’s distraction manifested itself at such public moments, Elena Sikorski, who remained in Geneva, offered, “he was a little lost in that kind of scene.”
Among the luminaries packed into the round reception hall were two people who were especially eager to present themselves to the author of Lolita and who felt they did so this evening. Zinaida Shakhovskoy, Ivan Nabokov’s aunt and Vladimir’s early champion, was nonplussed when the man she had so often assisted twenty years before looked her straight in the eye and uttered a perfunctory “Bonjour, Madame.” (Véra, who witnessed the greeting from a distance, was equally puzzled.) Shakhovskoy felt the slight was intentional, whereas it was most likely a symptom of the same distraction Nabokov had manifested on campus when Véra’s cues had so often saved him from social disasters. (When producer James Harris had stepped backstage at the Waldorf-Astoria luncheon the previous fall, he introduced himself as “the man who just bought Lolita.” Nabokov showed no sign of distinguishing him from any of the other eighty thousand people who had done so, though Harris alone ha
d purchased the book for $150,000. Blankly Nabokov had replied: “I hope you will enjoy reading it.”) Maurice Girodias also attended the Parisian reception although he had not been officially invited, Gallimard having been caught in the crossfire between their author and Lolita’s original publisher. As Girodias remembered it, Doussia Ergaz introduced him to Nabokov, who looked up from his coterie of admirers and around for his wife, “as if responding to a telepathic message.” A few glasses of champagne later, Girodias waded through the crowd to Véra. She had no entourage but needed none to make her point; she offered up the silent treatment to the man standing directly before her. “I did not exist; I was no more than an epistolary fiction, and I had no business wearing a body and disturbing people in a literary cocktail party given in honor of her husband Vladimir Nabokov,” recalled the spurned publisher, who coaxed an enormous amount of mileage out of these near- and nonencounters. Véra reported that she had met—and disliked—Girodias on that occasion, but implied that her husband had not.
Both Girodias and Shakhovskoy aired their grievances loudly over the next years. If they could not manage to disconcert Vladimir with their offensives they happily lunged at Véra. It was she who was to spend a decade attempting to extricate her husband from an agreement with a man she only reluctantly admitted existed. She pursued every possible means of annulling the Olympia agreement until 1969, when the third lawyer on the case at last succeeded in separating the parties. For his part, Girodias saw Véra’s long, lovely arm everywhere. She was the dragon lady, the decisive partner, “the anti-nymphet.” When Paul O’Neil’s Life profile finally ran in 1959, Girodias disputed various passages of the account. Life published his objections to their article, along with a long editorial comment, which—according to Girodias—“although signed with the initials of our mysterious friend ED., seems to carry on its forehead the beautiful aura of Véra Nabokov’s distinguished scalp.”
Paris proved only a dress rehearsal for the tempest that enveloped the Nabokovs in London, where Lolita had been printed but where its distribution remained in jeopardy. The crucial legislation had finally passed, but the Attorney General had not changed; he had estimated the chances of prosecution at 99 percent. On all sides Nigel Nicolson was pressured to abandon his defense of the work; Edward Heath, Chief Whip, implored him to do so for the sake of the Conservative Party.* Before the summer recess, in the House of Commons lobby, the Attorney General had jabbed a finger in Nicolson’s chest and warned him that publication would land him directly in jail. Nicolson had been standing at the time with Harold Macmillan, the Prime Minister. The matter constituted a national obsession; Weidenfeld and Nicolson appeared daily in the press, their lives examined for the kind of scurrilous behavior that could be expected of Lolita defenders. In October, at Nicolson’s suggestion, a few copies of the book were circulated and one was submitted to the Director of Public Prosecutions. If he approved it, the novel would be published officially on November 6. If he did not, Weidenfeld and Nicolson would at least be spared the charge of having distributed licentious matter throughout the British Isles. Twenty thousand copies of Lolita meanwhile sat meekly in a warehouse, to be destroyed in the event of prosecution. Into this maelstrom sailed the Nabokovs, landing in Dover on October 28. Two bodyguards whisked them away from the pier in a limousine; the phalanx increased to five at their West End hotel. One frustrated reporter submitted a picture of Vladimir being fitted into the Stafford Hotel elevator that the author of Lolita would have appreciated. The security detail frantically rang for the lift, into which they hurried the eminent writer. The journalist caught “a last glimpse of him peering out through the bars.”
For months Véra had joked that she hoped to spend Christmas in Italy if Vladimir did not end up in Old Bailey first. George Weidenfeld and Nigel Nicolson found that possibility real enough that they spent an uncomfortable first afternoon with the Nabokovs, unable even to mention the title of the book they were about to publish. After what felt an interminable forty-five minutes of small talk, their author finally broke the ice. He proved less willing to mention the novel when he lectured at Cambridge on censorship on November 4, which he did without once pronouncing the name “Lolita,” a performance that earned him a standing ovation. The lecture, a magnificent television appearance, and a luncheon with a group of England’s prominent opinion-makers were part of Weidenfeld & Nicolson’s campaign to establish its author as an impeccably credentialed scholar rather than some kind of demented émigré diarist. It was a great strategic advantage that Professor Nabokov’s next book happened to be a two-thousand-page treatise on Pushkin.
With equal parts panache and apprehension, Weidenfeld and Nicolson threw a party for three hundred influential well-wishers at the Ritz on publication eve, Thursday, November 5. They were nervous enough that they billed the event as a party to meet Mr. and Mrs. Nabokov; no books were mentioned. They had every expectation of being prosecuted in the morning. The excitement ran high at that glittering evening, as Véra reported to Minton, miffed that he seemed to underestimate how very frightening was the situation at this crucial juncture. If Vladimir was worried he did not indicate as much; he claimed to be enjoying himself tremendously, although a favored cousin was struck by his shyness in the eye of the storm. At least one reporter noted the distraction that had seemed to plague him in Paris. In the midst of the festivities, observed Time & Tide’s correspondent, Nabokov “wore the bemused air of a man who wasn’t quite sure what the party was all about.” He confused some of those around him too. In one breath, he lamented that his English was still not on a par with his Russian. To Sir Isaiah Berlin he announced “in a very loud voice so that everyone turned round, ‘People say that I am a Russian writer. I am not. I am an American writer.’ ”
Véra was herself too much besieged by reporters to have come to her husband’s social rescue. She told one reporter, “Your English accents are still beyond me,” by which he assumed she meant that very special bark of the aristocracy. Surely she had no difficulty understanding the news that arrived via an anonymous supporter in the Home Office, who telephoned in the midst of the festivities. Quietly Weidenfeld passed on the message to his partner; Nicolson climbed on a table to announce that the government had decided against prosecution. The cheers could be heard blocks away. As Weidenfeld remembered it, the decision left Véra swabbing tears from her eyes with a batiste handkerchief. It also left Weidenfeld & Nicolson with a sterling future, and British publishers with ampler legroom. There was now the problem of where to spend Christmas.
The next few days in a brilliantly sunny London disappeared in a mad whirl of appointments. The couple sat for a series of portraits, visited with cousins. Both Nabokovs replenished their wardrobes. But mostly they devoted themselves to the press. Every reporter in England appeared to interview Vladimir. (He had no illusions why, telling one journalist that he knew the search was on for the diaries that would prove Lolita to be a work of nonfiction.) He had said that if he had foreseen the scandal that it would cause he would have left Lolita in his desk drawer. But without that sensation—and in Europe without the danger—the triumphant reception would not have had the intensity it did. Véra knew as much. After the drama she announced, “Lolita is every inch of a cause célèbre.” She felt that while several individuals were still snapping at the novel’s heels, the ground swell of support had been admirable and invigorating. She sounded all the more excited on account of the heel-snappers, who had no doubt had a hand in selling one hundred thousand books in four weeks. She was, on the other hand, aware that Mondadori lay ahead, and that Vladimir was tired and unable to work. “I hope we can find the peace he needs for this some day soon,” she added, in a perfectly married locution.
In Rome, in mid-November, she attempted to catch up on her weeks of neglected correspondence. She felt her husband’s various publishers would forgive her if they knew what she had had to contend with. Given all the moving about, she explained, “I have to stuff all the letters into a
trunk in the hope of finding them at the next stop, and sometimes I get confused as to which have been answered and which not.” Rome proved disappointingly cold, and not nearly as relaxing for Vladimir as she had hoped; the journalists and photographers had besieged them since their arrival. One had been ejected bodily from the hotel. They visited the tourist sites they could; Véra vowed they would return incognito in the spring. Again the reporters pressed for both Nabokovs; Véra consented to one talk at the hotel, during which she was happy to inform her interviewer how deeply unpleasant she was finding the experience. Vladimir settled gleefully into his chair with a drink; the idea that his wife was under interrogation in his stead seemed to put him in a good mood. The reporter managed to coax a few things out of Mrs. Nabokov. She admitted she was her husband’s first reader; that she had saved Lolita; that she had been the one to insist on its publication. Otherwise she did her best to turn the tables, interviewing the interviewer as to where they might find a villa. Concluded Vladimir: “Hasn’t this been a pleasant conversation? Isn’t it true that my wife is a marvelous person?”
