Vera (44 page)

As much as
Lolita's
various misfortunes claimed Véra's time throughout the winter, her attention was diverted by the domestic front. (In a
neat carbonic tribute to the double life, a sheet of paper survives on which she inadvertently superimposed a letter about
Pnin's
motion picture rights on one to an Ithaca lawyer who seemed to feel the Nabokovs had not paid a dishwasher repair bill at their new address.) She arranged for Anna Feigin's brother Ilya, partially paralyzed after a stroke, to move to an Ithaca nursing home, where she might look after him; within the Slonim family as well she paid the price of the capable. By ambulance her cousin traveled to Ithaca's Oak Hill Manor, where Véra visited him regularly until his death. For some reason the second Hanshaw Road home—larger than the Nabokovs had liked, but modern and comfortable—had proved unsuitable; in February 1957 Véra packed the family up again. She may well have shared in the strain she described on her husband's part, as the winter was particularly brutal. “
I wonder if you New-York-Citiers can imagine the amount of snow we are having?” she queried Epstein before the move. Perhaps because of the allocation of labor, she did not find midwinter Ithaca as scenic as her husband. Nabokov saw the junipers as “
albino camels.”
Véra heard only a symphony of complaining car engines, of whining tires up and down the street.

Mercifully the new house had a garage, but one fixture at the Highland Road address proved less welcome. Under some duress the Nabokovs had agreed to care for their landlords'
Siamese cat, to whom Vladimir spoke in Russian. All began swimmingly. By the end of the first month of cohabitation he was disgusted by the animal, who would not offer him a moment's peace. Bandit seemed willing enough to believe Véra was Mrs. Sharp but could not fathom why the new Mr. Sharp would not allow him in his study. The animal was unrelenting, and pressed his case by offering up home trophies, with which he played mouse-tennis against the office door. Véra's distress can be imagined; the Royal York's plumbing was nothing compared with this. She wrote the Sharps in Africa but found the mails distressingly slow. “Do you think this letter will reach Léopoldville by air mail in two weeks?” she asked one of Nabokov's seminar students hopefully, having explained the Bandit-induced anguish. (The cat, like his
Pale Fire
counterpart, was farmed out, to friends of the home's owners.) At their new rental at 880 Highland Road Véra and Vladimir entertained Ivan Obolensky, the first American
publisher to come calling about
Lolita
. He arrived on March 4, days before
Pnin
was published to rave reviews, Nabokov's first success in America.

Pnin's
publication provided a reprieve from the
Lolita-
defending in which the couple had been engaged since friends had begun to read—and in Wilson's and Bishop's cases, failed to finish—the book. The consensus was that he had settled on a most
distasteful subject; the book seemed a monstrous frivolity. Bishop intentionally avoided the novel, which allowed him, if asked, to shrug it off as a peccadillo, as something his friend and esteemed colleague had done in far-off Paris and of no consequence to the university. He believed nothing of the kind and
fretted over the subject, as deeply worried for his friends as he was disapproving of the book. “
I would not like to have to defend him in that,” he confided in Szeftel, anticipating a scandal. “Would you?”
^*
Szeftel was one colleague who had read the book. He was not shocked, but did think the publication of a volume on such a “salacious topic” could lead to trouble at a coeducational institution. We know less of what Szeftel thought on reading
Pnin
, the bumbling hero of which was rumored to have been—and has recently been demonstrated to have been—based on him, a claim Nabokov did not always deny.
Even Mrs. Szeftel had noted the resemblance to her husband on reading Pnin's adventures in
The New Yorker
. The borrowed biography in no way interfered with the success of the novel, which went into its second printing two weeks after publication.
^†
It was among the ten finalists for the 1958 National Book Award.
^‡

By the end of the spring of 1957,
Lolita
had publishers in Italy, France, and Germany. Obolensky was not alone in pursuing American rights in the novel for his own firm; Epstein was doing all he could to convince Doubleday to publish the book, especially as his author kept him apprised of every one of Obolensky's moves. Nor did Vladimir desist from a little strategic nudging: “
Lolita is young, and I am old,” he reminded his editor. At Doubleday Epstein had his work cut out for him. The firm's head was Douglas Black, who had sunk a small fortune into the failed defense of
Hecate County
.
As editor in chief and
Lolita-
supporter Ken McCormick remembered it, the Doubleday lawyers' 1957 reasoning went like this:
Having robbed a bank once and been prosecuted for it, the firm should do its best not to be caught standing around on the corner while a second crime was in progress. They would only receive a stiffer sentence for
Lolita
, construed as a second offense.
^*
At Simon & Schuster, senior editor Maria Leiper thought the novel brilliant and wrote a delirious report. She suggested Brockway read behind her. She was startled when he confessed he had already read the novel, which he had not much liked. Her colleagues were universally horror-struck; the head of the editorial department deemed the book “repulsive.” A Harper & Row imprint distinguished itself by
shunning
Lolita
not on legal or ethical but on artistic grounds. Most of these editors read copies of the novel that had been imported discreetly in the bottoms of suitcases, in the great
Ulysses—Lady Chatterley
tradition. (Anaïs Nin claimed she had made a tidy profit
reselling copies of
Lolita
in America at a considerable markup.) At Random House William Styron made an eloquent case for the novel, which he was
tempted to publish privately; Hiram Haydn, Styron's editor and the firm's newly named editor in chief, could only sputter in response. Surely Styron knew he had an adolescent daughter? The loathsome book would be published over his dead body. In reading the novel Haydn was “
revolted to the point of nausea,” so entirely did Humbert and Nabokov merge in his mind. Lambasted by his peers, he held his ground even as the novel raced up the bestseller list a year later. All of this wrangling went on very much behind the scenes. But even at his birth poor Pnin's virtues were shadowed by that of his nubile cousin.
Time
reviewed
Pnin
glowingly, but
devoted nearly as much space to the sotto voce scandal the novel's author had occasioned in Europe with another book.

Véra planted flowers that spring in the Highland Road yard, for the first time in her life. This was the yard in which pheasants left their
Pale Fire
tracks, from which the Nabokovs' laughter rang out over the neighborhood as they played
twilight games of horseshoes. The pieces had finally begun to fall into place. At this pivotal moment one additional piece of the past, too, fell into place. That summer, most of which was spent typing
Onegin
, for which Dmitri was preparing the index, Véra learned from Anna Feigin that she could file a restitutions claim in Berlin. “
Well then, if that is indeed the case, then forcing the Germans to pay could only be pleasurable,” she wrote Goldenweiser, who offered to represent her. Her case was presented on the
grounds that on the arrival in New York she did not have enough English to secure a job in America. She filed her claim as the greatest English-language novel written by a non-native-speaker climbed the bestseller list.

Speaking for her husband in 1952, Véra had written a Houghton Mifflin editor: “
The question of mimicry is one that has passionately interested him all his life and one of his pet projects has always been the compilation of a work that would comprise
all
known examples of mimicry in the animal kingdom.” She warned that the results could be massive, though if a truly serious work on the subject was what Houghton had in mind, “Vladimir is your man.” Vladimir never tackled the subject; Véra instead wrote the book on mimicry, though never between hard covers. The word “copyist” takes on new meaning in the Nabokovs' correspondence, especially as that correspondence evolved in the 1950s. In August 1951 Véra wrote an editor at the newly founded Chekhov Publishing House about
The Gift (Dar
), a Russian-language edition of which the house was considering. The draft is in her hand, but Vladimir's voice. Nabokov then recopied the document, which he signed and sent. Answering this missive was simpler than would be answering some of those that followed. With the novel under submission, the couple began to relay each other in the correspondence. In October a Chekhov editor found herself thanking Vladimir for his wife's letter. The arrangement entailed a certain degree of contortionism on all sides. The same month Véra composed a letter for Vladimir inquiring after “a letter my wife wrote in my behalf this fall.”

She amiably embraced these awkward poses, at which, by nature, or by force of practice, she was expert. Chekhov accepted
The Gift;
seventeen years after it had been written, the novel was published in Russian.
^*
The Chekhov staff needed a summary of the book, something Vladimir had his usual aversion to composing. In the guise of an impartial reader, Véra wrote of Fyodor and Zina's “
nightly roamings on the spellbound moonlit streets … full of magic and poetry.” She submitted the unsigned précis to Chekhov with the line, “I have finally managed to get one of the ‘good' readers to make a synopsis of DAR.” It was an appropriate ruse for a work in which her husband
described nature's cunning and seemingly frivolous use of disguise, in which he discoursed “
about those magic masks of mimicry; about the enormous moth which in a state of repose assumes the image of a snake looking at you.”

In the early 1950s those letters to which Véra did lend her signature as well as her voice went out from “Véra Nabokov” or from a more neutral “V. Nabokov.” As Véra Nabokov she might write, for example, to ask if a publisher might consider adding a reprint edition of
Bend Sinister
to its list. As the paper piled up over the Cornell years she searched for a formula that would serve all of her epistolary purposes. By 1956, when she had begun a testy exchange with Maurice Girodias about perceived violations of the
Lolita
contract, she settled on a signature that seemed to correspond to her identity, or nonidentity. From these years, and just in time, emerged “Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov,” who in her formal Old World script would sign “Véra Nabokov” above her married name, which she typed, in parentheses, as if to mute the potency of the alias. The formula allowed her to speak for Vladimir without clumsy explanation and without a circuitous round of excuses. In and just after 1957, when further camouflage was in order, she wrote as “J. G. Smith,” a fictional Cornell secretary who shared her handwriting and her cadences, and who could be even more terse than Véra. It was J. G. Smith who composed waspish letters of non-recommendation on Professor Nabokov's behalf. He had only the vaguest memory of the candidate in question, whose grasp of the Russian language “
is as sketchy as that of any average college graduate who studied ‘linguistics.' ”
^*

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.