Vera (47 page)

The Nabokovs arranged to return from the Rockies by early August so as to attend what Véra alternately billed as
Lolita's
and Vladimir's
coming-out party, a press cocktail Minton had scheduled at the Harvard Club. Véra was impressed by Minton's nimble handling of the critics in attendance, enough so to wonder if the slower-moving, owlish publisher she had met earlier in the year had been the same person. She and Vladimir—better attuned to such possibilities than most people—speculated that Minton had earlier sent “an older and rather obtuse cousin” to Ithaca. She was equally impressed by her husband's Harvard Club performance on August 4: This was the occasion on which she observed that he had managed not to skewer a single contemporary. The press was amused less by the names he failed to sully than by those he failed to recognize. In the course of conversation someone mentioned
Peyton Place
to the professor of literature, who drew a blank. “ ‘
What is it?' he inquired. ‘A novel? Who wrote it?' ” And of course none of the twenty-five reporters was nearly as interested in what the author of
Lolita
had managed to read than whom he might have shared it with. The
New York Post
took pains to observe that he was accompanied to the reception by “his wife, Véra, a slender fair-skinned, white-haired woman in no way reminiscent of Lolita.” At the Harvard Club reception as elsewhere, admirers told Véra that they had not exactly expected the author to show up with his distinguished-looking wife of thirty-three years. “Yes,” Véra replied, smiling, unflappable. “It's the main reason why I'm here.” At her elbow her husband chuckled, admitting that he had been tempted to hire a child escort for the occasion. But the truth was a potent one: Véra's existence kept the fiction in its place, reassured readers skittish about
Lolita's
subject that Nabokov's
perversities were of a different kind.
^*
Is there a trace of Véra in the novel? No, but her fingerprints are all over it. And some people insisted on searching for her. After
Lionel Trilling met the Nabokovs, he told his wife that everything about her gave him the feeling that Véra Nabokov was Lolita.

Even if she had not stepped out from the wings by 1958, her days of living more or less incognito in upstate New York were over. It was important to photograph the author, but especially crucial to include Véra in the frame, the flesh-and-blood—and mercifully middle-aged—woman behind the man behind the man who liked little girls. Once again, “mask” proved the key word. Within the first week back in Ithaca Véra fielded calls from
The New York Times Book Review
, from
Time
, from various book club editors, from Minton. A large and not terribly flattering photo of both Nabokovs appeared in the
Post
, along with a full-page interview with Vladimir. Publication day found
Lolita's
author “
serenely indifferent,” as Véra repeatedly described him in the blinding light of his success. He was spreading his vast collection of American butterflies at a rate of fifty or so a day, focusing so intently on his winged nymphets it was difficult for his wife to get his attention. She felt she was living with a deaf man; at such times he neither saw nor heard. It took Véra three days to find the time to record the news of publication Monday: There had been three hundred reorders in the morning, a thousand by midafternoon, fourteen hundred by the time Minton finally dispatched his telegram of congratulations to Ithaca, twenty-six hundred more the following day. Even Orville Prescott's lambasting the book in the
Times
—he found it repellent “
highbrow pornography”—had assisted sales. In Véra's view Prescott's attack was one of “
vicious spite,” revenge for what he considered the impossible recall her husband had demonstrated in
Speak, Memory
.

Published on August 18, 1958,
Lolita
began to ascend the bestseller list two weeks later. By early September, eighty thousand copies of the novel were in print. (As the Nabokovs were only too aware, this amounted to all of Vladimir's previous print runs in Russian and English combined.) At the end of the month, the book was number one on the
New York Times
list. Véra was terrifically pleased with Minton, who she felt had published a difficult book “
in a subtle and flawlessly tactful way.” “Flawlessly tactful” amounted in large part to one thing in the Nabokov household: full-page ads. Minton had begun to publicize the book extensively, to Véra's delight; henceforth it
would be her job to remind editors that her husband thought they should consider ads, big ads, lots of ads. The Nabokovs had too often heard the dull thud fine fiction makes when it lands, which was not what they heard now. The novel was seized by Canadian customs, banned for a second time in France. Movie scouts, reporters, fans, editors, descended on the couple, as did a number of what Véra termed “crackpots.” “It becomes increasingly difficult to decide who deserves an answer, and who should be ignored,” she noted, the etiquette having changed overnight. She spent her time grappling with admirers like the songwriter who had transformed
Lolita
into a ballad and was intent on securing rights in the title. He insisted on serenading Véra telephonically with the fruits of his labors. After several such calls she was ready to concede that the composer was a perfect crackpot. He had already calculated that the novel would earn its author a tidy profit, a realization to which Véra came more gradually. Only on October 12 did she write Elena Sikorski, “
It will apparently bring Volodya a fairly large sum of money.”

On September 5 Véra sat upstairs at the brick Colonial on 404 Highland Road writing of
Lolita's
triumphs while downstairs
Life's
Paul O'Neil conducted the first of several interviews with her husband. A week later
Life's
photographer arrived for his two-day blitz.
^*
The journalists found Mrs. Nabokov sophisticated and smart; they were charmed by her, deeply amused by her husband. In his diary, photographer Carl Mydans noted: “
They are both delightful people, live together in great respect for each other—happily.” He stubbornly clicked away, shooting pictures of Vladimir
in front of his books, with his eleven folders of Pushkin, at the chessboard, battering the punching ball in the basement, writing in bed, in the yard, in the car, catching a butterfly, killing it, boxing it, even “in front of an innocent motel.” He photographed Véra as well, to her dismay: “I don't like to be photographed (might have enjoyed it if it all had happened some 15 years ago, at least) but it is even more of a nuisance to refuse unless the refusal is accepted at once.” If the photographer insisted, she felt she had no choice but to consent, reluctantly but gracefully. She was furthermore wholly taken with Mydans, a modest man of tremendous energy and single-minded concentration. She found his devotion to his work to be an inspiration: “While he is at it nothing else matters—he will stand in the middle of the highway ignoring the traffic until he has obtained the picture he has already created in his mind's eye.” It was a skill at which she was an unacknowledged expert, having spent more than thirty-three years doing precisely the same thing.

Lolita
spent the fall on the bestseller list, the first novel since
Gone with the Wind
to sell a hundred thousand copies within three weeks of publication. (More meaningfully from Véra's point of view,
Lolita
was the “first representative of true literature on the ‘List' ” since Thornton Wilder's
Bridge of San Luis Rey
, which she considered “a moderately good book.”) Gorgeous full-page ads ran in the major media, into which Minton no longer needed to insert sober endorsements from the academy: In the course of the fall the novel was recognized as a virtuouso performance in
The New York Times Book Review
, in
The Atlantic Monthly
, in
The New Yorker
, by Dorothy Parker in
Esquire.
^*
No day passed without
Lolita
being discussed somewhere in the press.

Only rarely did the couple miss a mention. When the uncle who had settled his enormous, prerevolutionary fortune on Nabokov had died in 1915, Vladimir had had a curious dream: Uncle Vasya reappeared to announce that he would one day return as Harry and Kuvyrkin, in dream terms a team of circus clowns. Harry and Kuvyrkin materialized now, under the aliases Harris and Kubrick. While the Nabokovs lunched on September 13 with Mydans and the
Life
caption writer, the telephone rang. It was Morris Bishop, calling with congratulations. When Véra expressed confusion, Bishop read to her from that morning's
Times
. The Nabokovs had been buying the paper every day—Vladimir was avidly following a Staten Island murder case, in which an eight-year-old
Mormon boy claimed he had butchered his parents with a kitchen knife—but had not yet consulted that Saturday's edition. It fell to Bishop to notify Véra that movie rights in the novel had been sold to the directing-producing team of Stanley Kubrick and James Harris for $150,000, or about seventeen times Vladimir's Cornell salary. The couple knew Minton was in negotiations but not that any agreement had been reached. How Véra conveyed Bishop's news to the three at table, who immediately leapt upon the paper in search of the five-paragraph announcement, is unclear. She noted only that “the news was broken in a way
Time
”—but of course not she—“would have called ‘dramatic.' ”

The film deal made Vladimir popular, or prominent, in a way that was uncomfortable for both Nabokovs. Quickly Véra pointed out that the first half of the money would have to be staggered over several years, for tax reasons; that the second half might never be paid; that the promised 15 percent
of producer's profits could prove chimerical, in which prophecy she was correct. Both Nabokovs were clearly embarrassed to be perceived as recipients of what seemed to all a staggering sum of money. To many on the Cornell campus, even
Lolita's
five-dollar cover price was prohibitive. When a colleague observed that Vladimir would surely never have to teach again “having struck oil in Beverly Hills,” Véra countered that they were indeed having a hectic time, but that the colleague was mistaken. Vladimir could not part with Cornell; they planned only to take a year's leave. She was particularly distressed when the interest in her husband appeared to derive from his Hollywood profits. The secretary of a women's club at the Ithaca Presbyterian Church phoned days after the announcement to ask if Professor Nabokov might address the group. Véra took the call, conveying his regrets. “Oh, I realize he must be terribly busy
now,”
the club secretary had responded. The “now” grated harshly on Véra's nerves. “This is not Lolita's literary merits. It's merely the 150 ‘grand' mentioned by the
Times,”
she carped. Still, she found some consolation in the secretary's call, vindication of a kind: “To think that three years ago people like Covici, Laughlin, and also the Bishops, strongly advised V.
never
to publish Lolita, because, among other things, ‘all the churches, the women's clubs' and so forth would ‘crack down on you.' ”

In another kind of conspicuousness she took great delight.
Lolita
instantly made its way into the American vernacular. Véra was particularly cheered by
The New York Times Book Review's
“delightful cartoon: Workman inside a manhole, absorbed in a book, tells a passer-by, who appears to be pleading with him: No, no, get your own copy of Lolita.” In some magazines
Lolita
could be found once in a humorous sketch, again in a Putnam's ad. (None of these escaped Véra's notice, certainly not the Martian who demanded, “Take me to your Lolita.” Assiduously she compiled a different sort of
Lolita
diary, volumes of press clippings, great and small.) The Nabokovs played a good deal of “network roulette” on Highland Road; Véra noted that
Lolita
was mentioned between segments on “an idiotic Arthur Godfrey show.” A Steve Allen skit featuring Zorro and a Lolita proved more amusing. In November the couple heard Dean Martin claim that he had nothing to do in Las Vegas as he did not gamble, so he had sat in his hotel lobby and read children's books:
Pollyanna, The Bobbsey Twins, Lolita
. (Véra misspelled two of the three titles.) One Sunday evening Steve Allen caused a little un-Nabokovian breathlessness in Véra's voice when a doll-girl turned up in a “scientific skit.” Allen concluded, “We should send this doll to Mr. Nabokov.” Exclaimed Véra: “We both heard it distinctly—but could not believe our ears!” Milton Berle opened his first show of 1959 with: “First of all
let me congratulate Lolita: She is thirteen now.” He kept up the patter—outlining the plot of a novel called “Lolita Strikes Back,” the story of an eighty-four-year-old woman who falls deeply in love with a twelve-year-old boy—well into the New Year.