Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (33 page)

Bend Sinister
winks at Soviet labor camps and nods to Nazi mythologizingrun rampant.
Hamlet
is distorted into a play in which the villain becomes that “Judeo-Latin Claudius.” Echoing Hitler’s complaints, Fortinbras has been subjugated by the machinations of “Shylocks of high finance” but aims to recover the ancestral lands
stolen by Hamlet’s father.
³⁸
In Nabokov’s rendering, tyranny not only warps worldviews, it can destroy art.

Why does a dictator like the Toad need Krug? Perhaps for the same reason that Lenin and Stalin needed Gorky, for a time at least—as a fig leaf, as someone to bless what was happening or to pretend it was not happening at all. Nabokov’s first novel written in America presented the problem of tyranny as a personal question, a moral dilemma to which his hero responds not by joining any opposition but by
resisting
joining the deluded—by refusing to fall in line or speak the lie.
³⁹

Bend Sinister
landed in the midst of an America trying to make sense of the danger presented by the Soviet Union. Richard Watts, writing for
The New Republic
, reviewed its indictment of familiar totalitarian regimes with mixed feelings, noting the self-indulgent literary acrobatics of a single 211-word sentence yet praising the story as “considerably more than the warmed over Arthur Koestler it occasionally seems on the verge of becoming.”
⁴⁰

The comparison to Koestler reveals how topical the novel appeared in the moment, despite its refracted fantasy setting. Koestler, after being held prisoner under Franco and sentenced to death as a spy during the Spanish Civil War, had shed his revolutionary identity and had become an anti-Communist crusader. As a Hungarian Jew, he had faced an even more desperate flight from Europe than Nabokov. During the war he had been imprisoned as an enemy alien by both the French and the British, sitting in solitary confinement in London even as
Darkness at Noon
, his magnum opus and diatribe against Communist tyranny, was published.
⁴¹
Unlike Nabokov’s public refusal to submit art to ideology, Koestler had dedicated himself to a literature in the service of human freedom, although which ideology to choose had proved a perpetual challenge.

As a literary-political hybrid,
Bend Sinister
was the first book Nabokov had written that overtly belonged as much in the latter camp as the former. Perhaps for that reason, it was also his most uneven. Nabokov deliberately intended the book to be the “vehement
incrimination of a dictatorship” with both Nazi and Communist elements.
⁴²
But his efforts to blend righteous vehemence, bawdy dialogue, his trademark wit, and ornate language with the murder of a child rendered the book clumsy, particularly in comparison to the power of works similarly addressing the horrors of a totalitarian state. Koestler’s latest, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s
We
from two decades earlier, and George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
all worked better as both indictments and as narratives than
Bend Sinister
. At times it was as if Nabokov was too embarrassed to be forthright, or still struggling with how to fuse politics and art.

In his own life, however, Nabokov clearly felt a sense of urgency about events in the political realm. His stridency expanded along with his sense of crisis, revealing itself in a suspicious streak that sometimes let the political trump the personal.

In the last months of the war, Nabokov had deliberately snubbed Marc Slonim, a former friend (and distant cousin of Véra’s) at a party. Nabokov’s rude behavior had baffled his hostess, who had apparently expected her guest to be delighted over finding the Jewish critic, with whom he had been on good terms in Paris, alive and well. Nabokov explained the reason for his dismissal later in a letter to Edmund Wilson, writing that Slonim “gets 250 dollars from the Stalinists per month, which is not much, but he is not worth even that.”
⁴³

While Nabokov had Stalin’s number, he was less astute at unearthing spies. Not only was Marc Slonim not an informer, he was anti-Soviet. But the rumors flying around had a real impact on Slonim, who was on the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. A quarter of the College’s professors came under suspicion after relentless attacks by the American Legion. Tremendous pressure was exerted to fire faculty members who had been marked for persecution as potential Communists. Denunciations continued for years against several universities, culminating in hearings conducted by the Jenner Committee on Capitol Hill, where Slonim was eventually forced to testify. Sarah Lawrence resisted public pressure and refused to fire him.
⁴⁴

Nabokov, who thought he had Slonim’s salary pegged to the dollar, was still in anxiety over his own financial situation. In the postwar period, Nabokov’s anti-Soviet stance was no longer an obstacle to employment. He nonetheless wrote to Wilson to voice his “low spirits” at Wellesley’s offer of $3,000 for ten hours a week of work.
⁴⁵
(He did not note it, but it was less per year than Slonim’s putative salary from the Soviets.)

Despite his reign over exile literature, despite a body of work comprising a dozen novels and novellas, plays, poems, and criticism, as well as years of service at world-class institutions of higher learning and publication in some of the best magazines in America, he was a man approaching fifty still cobbling together year-to-year contracts. Even an earlier bid to head to Hollywood to be a screenwriter had come to nothing.
⁴⁶

Unbeknownst to Nabokov, his chronic problem was about to be solved. Cornell University needed a professor of Russian literature, and search committee chairman Morris Bishop wrote to ask if Nabokov would be interested.
⁴⁷

Nabokov had been hoping to get an offer he could use as a stick to bludgeon Wellesley into offering him a permanent position. But Wellesley declined to make a counter-offer. Eight years into his American adventure, Nabokov left his hodgepodge of part-time work to take the first fulltime job he had held since his three-hour stint at a Berlin bank twenty-six years before.
⁴⁸

Like Sarah Lawrence College, Cornell too had been drawn into the debate over professors seen as Soviet sympathizers. Before the war had even ended, when the U.S. was still allied with the U.S.S.R., New York’s
World-Telegraph
had run an article titled “Cornell Goes Bolshevist.” Professors suspected of affection for post-Revolutionary Russia, a stance that had been lauded during the war, were called on the carpet in due course. University trustees, the Catholic Information Society, and even
Collier
’s magazine named names of Cornell
Reds and their allies, polarizing the campus into those who saw themselves as defenders of intellectual thought and those who saw themselves preventing the Communist infiltration of America.
⁴⁹

Anti-Communist anxieties played out across the political spectrum—from radical leftists who felt that the Revolution had been hijacked to xenophobic fringe groups, who feared U.N. invasion and vaccination conspiracies. But it was Senator Joseph McCarthy who would become the public face of the anti-Communist movement in America, holding hearings in which he made headlines with accusations about spies infiltrating the U.S. government. McCarthy attacked Communist influence wherever he saw (or imagined) it.

Among his targets were Edmund Wilson’s book
The Memoirs of Hecate County
, which he later labeled “pro-Communist pornography.” McCarthy was not the first to attack the book as a political danger. In 1947, titillating excerpts from it had been the focus of a hearing in which a congressman had berated librarians at the State Department for choosing
Hecate County
to promote American culture abroad.
⁵⁰
And even before that, police in New York acted on a complaint from an anti-vice society and seized copies of it in Manhattan. In 1948, the public debates finally took a financial toll on Wilson, when
Hecate County
was declared obscene by the New York Supreme Court and also banned in Boston and Los Angeles.
⁵¹

Despite the documented excesses of the anti-Communist movement—harassment, firings, blacklisting, and the treatment of Wilson—Nabokov was not inclined to publicly criticize McCarthy. Véra, too, when the subject came up, gave no quarter to his opponents, recognizing McCarthy as extremist but refusing to condemn him.
⁵²
After five decades in three countries where Communism had a hand in destabilizing countries that had been around much longer than the U.S., the Nabokovs were already convinced that Bolshevik spies were capable of digging tunnels into the hearts and minds of a naïve America. At a time when the FBI had requested that their field offices generate reports on the presence of Communist agents at major U.S. universities and colleges, Nabokov and Véra stayed quiet
on the topic of academic freedom and befriended Ithaca’s resident G-man.
⁵³

Véra was particularly attentive to potential Communist spies, writing a letter to the
Cornell Daily Sun
attacking Owen Lattimore, whom McCarthy had named as the U.S.S.R.’s top agent in America. Lattimore would eventually be hounded out of his consultancies with the State Department and charged with perjury—though the charges would later be dropped.
⁵⁴

While there was no basis for describing Lattimore as a Soviet agent, it’s not hard to see what might have enraged Véra. In addition to his work on China during the war, he had gone on a mission with the U.S. vice president to the labor camps of Kolyma in Siberia, where both men had admired the pioneering mining projects of the Dalstroy Corporation. Kolyma was home to some the harshest camps of the hundreds that then stretched across the entirety of Soviet territory, and the Dalstroy Corporation, which ran the effort, was nothing more than an arm of the NKVD, a front for Russia’s secret police.

Describing Lattimore’s trip in
The Unquiet Ghost
, Adam Hochschild notes how guard towers were temporarily dismantled and prisoners were kept in their barracks for three days so the visitors would not see them: “The Soviets worked hard to give the Wallace group the impression that they were visiting a cheerful Russian Klondike full of happy gold miners, and they were wildly successful.”

A few years after Lattimore’s 1944 trip, books by former prisoners began to be published in English, detailing the horrific conditions at Kolyma—the starvation and sadism, rapes, and harrowing work. The camp’s prisoners who had witnessed the visit could not understand how the Americans had been so easily duped.
⁵⁵

Against this background of American naïveté, Véra and Vladimir refused to condemn McCarthy. After a childhood amid Tsarist double agents in St. Petersburg, more than a decade in a Berlin teeming with informers, and a postwar landscape in which the Nabokovs’ siblings and cousins all seemed to have ties to intelligence work, it
seemed more than plausible that not just Washington, D.C., but also the residents of Ithaca, New York, should be on guard against spies and traitors. At Cornell, it was rumored that Véra carried a pistol with her on campus for use in the event of Communist incursion.
⁵⁶

Nabokov did not find
Hecate County
Communist, but he did find the sex scenes repellent. Faced with the unappealing array of encounters with which Wilson had provided the protagonist, Nabokov wrote, “I should have as soon tried to open a sardine can with my penis.”
⁵⁷

Wilson by this time counted Nabokov among his closest friends, though the two were as inclined to disagree as much about literature in general as they were each other’s writing. By dismissing
Hecate County
, Nabokov had now roundly criticized two of Wilson’s books while getting a rave blurb from him for
Sebastian Knight
. It is a rare friendship that can stand such an imbalance.

For his part, Wilson’s view of Nabokov’s politics seemed to be narrowing, leaving little room for the niche he had once let his friend occupy. The very first weeks of their friendship, Wilson had identified Nabokov as “neither White Russian nor Communist.”
⁵⁸
But as the years progressed, he increasingly seemed to want to shoehorn Nabokov into a reactionary identity that he had not initially assigned to his friend.

Nabokov struggled not to let the shoe fit. In January 1947 Wilson wrote to Nabokov about meeting his Trinity College roommate, Mikhail Kalashnikov, at a Christmas party. Nabokov responded at length, explaining that Wilson had found another “dead fish” from his past, in this case one who was a fascist, anti-Semitic idiot—they had only roomed together one term. Wilson, he added preemptively, should not say anything about it to their friend Nina Chavchavadze, who was somehow under the misapprehension that Nabokov and Kalashnikov had been close. It was, as Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd would later describe it, hardly an accurate characterization of Nabokov’s two-year friendship with Kalashnikov.
⁵⁹

Along with the refutation of Kalashnikov, Nabokov enclosed a copy of
Bend Sinister
, which was about to be published. Given the opportunity to criticize his friend’s writing in kind, Wilson read the book and went into great detail listing his disappointments. Nabokov doing politics left Wilson cold—especially politics in a world abstracted from the precise reality that Nabokov excelled at depicting. Wilson admired Nabokov, but he found that Nabokov taking on the easy work of demonizing a cardboard cut-out dictator was a poor use of his magic.