Vera (48 page)

Toward the reporters and the exposure they represented Véra was equally accommodating; by and large she found the journalists delightful. After the first gaggle of interviewers had flown off she began to notice a certain set of familiar themes in their questions: “They all hope to find some ‘scandalous' angle.” She could imagine what they wanted to hear; that Cornell's president, Deane W. Malott, had asked her husband not to set foot on campus un-chaperoned. (She seemed unaware of the fact that that was already the case.) In fact reporters found it difficult to locate any controversy whatsoever on campus, where the book was selling beautifully, where graduate students in the English Department played dumb, where the moral issue was nowhere under hot debate. (Some
tongues did cluck, but neither the Nabokovs nor the reporters heard them.) President Malott received only the odd letter, to which he replied evenly, probably more evenly than Nabokov would have liked.
^*
Véra saw that from the journalist's perspective this would not do: “
They seem disappointed to find Cornell ideally adult and unaffected—although had the situation been different, they would have loved to crusade against censorship!” She knew well that scandal sold books. A decade earlier she had observed that the Boston banning of
Strange Fruit
and
Forever Amber
had worked wonders for both titles.

She did not set down another question no one had bothered to ask until
Lolita
made them do so: Who was Mrs. Nabokov? What was the story behind the silver-haired woman who hung on every word of the man who had written 319 pyrotechnic pages on a cultured European rapist? Visitors drew their own conclusions. The young lawyer who visited to clear up the mess surrounding the unlicensed ballad concluded she was the Department of Recollection. Nabokov conferred with his wife at every step of their discussion. “
Now, didn't we …” he would begin, and softly Véra would answer, “Well, not exactly,” gently correcting his course. A student interviewer learned that Véra filed her husband's random notes in cardboard boxes,
producing them on demand for future use, something that Dick Keegan had observed firsthand. The student concluded she was the Department of Connecting
Things. Mimicry may well have appealed to Véra but misrepresentation did not; it was at this time that she wrote the
New York Post
with “
a correction which is most important to me.” This letter to the editor she requested the paper publish, which it did. She was not at all a Russian aristocrat, but proud to report she was Jewish.
^*

In the course of October the Nabokovs made two weekend trips to New York. On the first occasion Vladimir spoke at
The Herald Tribune's
Book and Author Luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria, along with his fellow bestsellers Agnes de Mille and Fannie Hurst. Before a thousand people he read his poem “An Evening of Russian Poetry,” mentioning
Lolita
not at all. Véra believed the verse was lost on the audience, which for the most part consisted of elderly women. She felt differently about his first television appearance, a CBC interview conducted at the Rockefeller Center studios. She exclaimed over the makeup artist who powdered her husband's head to keep the bald spot from shining; her
excitement over the countdown to air time is palpable. As she sat with Dmitri in the darkened auditorium, she was thrilled to watch her husband as she never had before: in duplicate. He performed simultaneously on the studio screen and on the lighted stage, a tidy plagiarism of Professor Nabokov's supposed living room, one Véra heartily approved. She felt he spoke beautifully—he did so very obviously from index cards—and was especially fond of the definition he had provided when asked to elaborate on “philistines.” They are, he offered, “
ready-made souls in plastic bags.”
^†
She was equally amused by the ingenuity he displayed in pouring his own small flask of brandy into the onstage teacups. It was ten-thirty at night, and liquor was nowhere available. Presumably not only on account of this sacrifice, he was deemed by the CBC an ideal guest.

Véra's one gripe with
Lolita's
reception was something a
New York Post
critic had noted early on: “
Lolita was attacked as a fearsome moppet, a little monster, a shallow, corrupt, libidinous and singularly unattractive brat.” Where the novel's reviewers inclined toward pitying Humbert,
she fixed instead on Lolita's vulnerability, stressing that she had been left alone without a single close relative in the world. Had she mentioned her qualms anywhere but in the diary they might have seemed a calculated defense of a difficult-to-defend
book, which they were not; she expressed a similar frustration later when reviewers missed the pathos of Hazel's suicide in
Pale Fire
. She lamented the treatment of the nymphet to whom she would owe so much:

Lolita
was a novel but Lolita was also a girl. And this one, Mrs. Nabokov thought, should stand at the center of the story to which she lent her name.

F. W. Dupee credited
Lolita
with effecting a volcanic change in America's literary landscape, uniting for once all the brows, high-, middle-, and low-, allowing “
the fading smile of the Eisenhower Age to give way to a terrible grin.” In an involuted game of After You, Alphonse, she even helped
Hecate County
back into print.
^*
She cleared the way for
Lady Chatterley
, and would work a similarly liberating effect in England; she changed the fortunes of several publishing houses.
^†
But
Lolita
, the book and its heroine, changed no
one's life as much as Véra's.
Six days before the novel was published she wrote Goldenweiser, who was preparing her restitution case, that she spent a few hours a day on her husband's work, conducting all of his correspondence, correcting proofs, assisting him with his research. How to value this labor for the Germans she could not begin to say. In September she complained of the new demands of the correspondence. The Japanese had bought the novel; Doubleday had contracted for a book of poems; the British sale of
Lolita
was under discussion; she was correcting the German translation of
Pnin
. By the end of October she
could no longer cope with the mail. Thanksgiving hardly qualified as a reprieve, as the Nabokovs were again in New York for meetings. After the holiday Véra wrote Berkman, “
We are swamped with work. I never imagined so many letters can rain into one mailbox.” She would never have permitted herself the luxury of writing only to announce as much; the purpose of her communication was to ask if Berkman might be interested in taking over Vladimir's classes for the spring term. As it was impossible to imagine his continuing to publicize
Lolita
while teaching, he had applied for a leave of absence. It was granted on the condition that he find a substitute lecturer, no easy feat given his academic range. Véra was particularly concerned that a replacement be found swiftly, as Vladimir had “2 large babies to nurse through publication (Pushkin and a French
Lolita
) and several little ones.” Letters went out in all directions, to much the same circle but with a very different urgency as they had in order to locate the Cornell job in the first place.
Lolita
was in its ninth printing in November, when paperback rights were sold to Fawcett for one hundred thousand dollars.

Two matters in addition to the correspondence fell to Véra: access to her husband, and all details concerning contracts and taxes. More than ever, she greeted visitors at the door and manned the phone. (Several years earlier, a group of Nabokov's students had called him at home with an esoteric question.
They were initially disappointed to fall on Mrs. Nabokov, flabbergasted when she was able to respond to their query without disturbing her husband.) Another caller met with less gratifying results when he telephoned Ithaca in the fall of 1958. The ensuing contretemps revealed much of what was to make Véra notorious in the years to come. When the phone rang at Highland Road on the evening of November 16, the caller “insisted on talking to V. rather than to me, but since he had not given his name to the telephone operator, and I knew not who was calling, I refused to call V. The operator got rude and I lost my temper …,” Véra remembered, blotting out the conclusion of her sentence. “Finally the incognito was cast aside, and then I called V., who had just lain down for a nap.” Unwittingly—and with a great deal of embarrassment—she had been shielding her husband from Walter Minton. She was doing so at Vladimir's instruction and for his good, but her behavior would not be construed as such. No one knew how utterly foolish Véra had felt playing the role of tiger at the gate, for which she had in part herself to blame; she suppressed all sign of regret, as she did the telling six words following the wayward temper. Originally the sentence had read: “The operator got rude and I lost my temper, and felt miserable about it afterwards.”

It was some time before the routine worked flawlessly; the Nabokovs were molting still from professor and assistant to celebrity author and celebrity wife. On the morning of December 7 a caller from Pennsylvania surprised the couple in mid-metamorphosis. A Lehigh College student phoned to ask if Nabokov would sign his copy of
Lolita
. Véra replied that he did not give autographs. That evening she heard a violent knocking on the front door; the student had driven to Ithaca to plead his case in person. His was not even the insistence of a fan; his fraternity had assigned him the task of procuring the autograph. He was adamant. Would Mrs. Nabokov at least sign the book for him? “Of course not, I did not write it,” she replied. Then a revelation occurred. “Suddenly it dawned on me that what he needed was a tangible proof that he had driven to our house and asked for an autograph. And he was almost in tears! I offered to give him a note certifying that Mr. Nabokov gives no autographs. And he was quite consoled, happy and thankful!” she wrote, sounding like the woman who recognized Lolita as the heroine of the piece. And as she was to discover soon enough, her time, like her husband's, had its limits. In January when her sister Lena broke the neardecade of silence, Véra apologized for the tardiness of her reply: “
I am swamped by Volodya's enormous correspondence (of which he refuses to take care himself). I am spending hours at the typewriter every single day, but it is a losing battle and I have no hope to catch up with this avalanche of
mail.” With delight she reported that Dmitri planned to translate
Invitation to a Beheading
into English, for Putnam's.

Lolita
was Nabokov's twelfth novel, and its success struck with a particular poignancy. From the publishers' points of view, the situation was almost too delicious; it is not often that a bestselling author steps up to the plate with a neglected, largely untranslated backlist of small masterpieces. It should all have happened well before, and it nearly had: There had been recognitions of Nabokov's genius, and brushes with fame, and an occasional profit, though never all three at once. Without
Lolita
, Véra held, it might all have taken
another fifty years. In some opinions, without
Lolita
, it might never have happened at all. But in the immediate, new titles, old titles, even
Eugene Onegin
, which in December Nabokov furiously withdrew from Cornell University Press, which he felt was trying
to extort money from him, suddenly became attractive properties. And each of them—along with
Lolita
in her foreign incarnations—required a contract. The Minton call that had caused Véra such anguish had been about the disposition of British rights, which Minton felt should go to George Weidenfeld, who had agreed to defend the book. Véra favored publishing with the Bodley Head, who were offering a lower royalty, but at whose head sat Graham Greene, to whom she felt the couple owed a great debt.
^*
(Given the difficulty of publishing a book like
Lolita
in England, where the law was more strict, the two publishers were essentially vying for the privilege of going to jail for a twelve-year-old girl.) Minton was of the opinion that Greene had made a number of powerful enemies in his early defense of the book, and that that collective animus could undermine his publication. He got through to his author on this call, but it is easy to see why he would do so less often in the future. “
V. got so bored with the abovementioned details,” Véra noted disapprovingly of the Weidenfeld-Greene discussion, “that he agreed to Minton's wishes, just so as to get the thing out of the way.” Henceforth Vladimir discussed contractual terms with Véra, but this was the last negotiation with which he involved himself.