Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (26 page)

On the forms, Nabokov listed himself as an author and Véra as a housewife. Immigrants also had to answer a standard battery of questions about polygamous tendencies, physical defects, and mental health problems, and were required to assert repeatedly that they were not anarchists and had no intent to overthrow the government. The United States was not at war, but was very much worried about Communists and revolutionaries entering the country.
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After they finished with immigration, the Nabokovs’ luggage still had to clear customs, but Véra could not find the key to their trunk. Waiting for a locksmith, Nabokov asked where to find a newspaper, and was given
The New York Times
by a porter. With the persuasion of an iron bar, the lock yielded to the locksmith, who promptly relocked it by mistake. When the trunk had finally been opened for good, customs officials remarked on the dead butterflies Nabokov had packed, and began to spar with the boxing gloves they found inside.
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Vladimir Nabokov was on his way to becoming an American.

Friends and family, however, remained at the mercy of history. The Marinel sisters, who had helped their tutor leave France, were very much on the Nabokovs’ minds. Véra’s cousin Anna Feigin had not initially planned to leave, but she would soon be headed to Nice with her own thoughts of America. For the time being, Ivan Bunin, Ilya Fondaminsky, and Sergei Nabokov intended to remain in Europe. The Hessens were still there, too, though Mark Aldanov, to whom Nabokov owed his deliverance, was likely already rethinking the wisdom of staying in Paris. Some of them would find a way to escape.

Back in Paris, Véra’s sister Sonia had stayed on with Carl Junghans, but the city held out less than a month after Vladimir and Véra’s departure. By the time German tanks clanked over the bridges of the Seine and down the silent Champs-Élysées on June 14, Carl and Sonia had left just ahead of the victors. They headed south, making their way to Casablanca, a temporary haven for many fleeing the German advance.
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Other refugees would soon set sail under more distressing conditions. In the face of blistering military setbacks, Britain had
become obsessed with the threat of invasion and worry over Nazi spies hiding on its territory. Enemy aliens had already been required to register when war had broken out. And just one week before Nabokov’s boat sailed from St. Nazaire—Churchill’s second full day as Prime Minister—the order was given to arrest all the refugees.
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Weeks of dramatic debate followed. Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Angell denounced the arrests.
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The majority of enemy aliens were known to be harmless, he noted, and many had already been persecuted by the Nazis. But the invasion of France stoked fears, and arrests continued. Amid a blaze of media coverage, aliens from all walks of life were sent to British concentration camps.

Inmates included the future Nobelist Max Perutz, celebrated Jewish conductor Peter Gellhorn, who had fled the Nazis five years before, and even the son and grandson of Sigmund Freud. By the time Nabokov set foot in America, more than eleven thousand civilians had been interned, including thousands of refugee women, many of whom had been working in England as maids.
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A significant percentage of these prisoners were Jewish, but in the midst of paranoia and war, confusion reigned over exactly which prisoners were which. At Huyton near Liverpool, a camp adjutant reviewed the arrival of men he thought were captured German soldiers but who were really civilian refugees. Noting the distinctive clothing of his new charges, he was reported to say, “I never knew so many Jews were Nazis.”
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With fear of invasion high, the British began to move the prisoners off the continent to places where they could be of no assistance to Germany. And so almost a month to the day after Nabokov departed France, ships left England carrying an ill-matched cargo. Civilian refugees, including some Jews who had once been prisoners in German concentration camps, found themselves berthed in the same quarters as Nazi officers and soldiers, sailing together to North America for internment. Anxiety over a handful of deaths in the crossing and occasional suicide attempts on arrival amplified the prisoners’ lingering confusion over their long-term fate. They would
soon be scattered across Canada from New Brunswick to Alberta, held in old concentration camps and prisons or housed in new facilities still under construction as they arrived.
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Compared to the Canadian welcome the refugees got, the Nabokovs’ arrival in America had been a delight. Schedules had gone awry—they were not met by Nathalie Nabokov, the ex-wife of cousin Nicholas, but the family took a taxi to her apartment.
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They had somewhere to go; they knew people who could give them the names of others who might help them. Gifted with unfettered liberty (so long, apparently, as they did not promote anarchy), Vladimir and Véra made their way into Manhattan with a $100 bill and hope for better prospects.

For all the thrill of arrival on a new continent, Nabokov’s routine in the first few weeks must have seemed dispiritingly familiar.
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Living in a succession of temporary quarters, he once again tried to sell himself and his literary talents—the thing in which he had the most confidence in the world—to a public ignorant of their value.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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) 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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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