Vera (46 page)

7
PAST PERFECT

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 encounter 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.