Vera (50 page)

On Tuesday, February 24, 1959, the Nabokovs left Cornell for New York. The road from Ithaca was less the “thread of gold” which Pnin follows from Waindell College than a thread of silver; the highways were slick with ice. The sheriff's office advised a day's wait, but Véra resolved to battle the frozen roads all the same. They had already once postponed the trip and were eager to leave. Free at last, the couple disappeared—after a bad skid, and an unscheduled overnight near Schenectady—into the frame of the future,
leaving behind a model airplane and a butterfly net in the Highland Avenue basement, a Goldwin Smith office full of furniture, but
no forwarding address.

Nabokov had lost his inherited fortune the Old World way—through revolution—and replaced it the American way—by dint of brains and industry.
^*
The New York stay had been expected to last a few days and to be followed by a restorative trip west—Véra informed Filippa Rolf, the “real Swede” who had lent a hand in the Wahlström & Widstrand fiasco, that butterfly collecting was the
best respite for her husband—but innumerable business matters and a case of influenza kept the couple at the overheated Hotel Windermere for nearly two months. On all sides they were assailed, by reporters, publishers, television producers. The first New York morning began with a call from a Cincinnati, Ohio, newspaper. What did Mr. Nabokov think of the fact that the city's main library had banned
Lolita?
(Mr. Nabokov felt that if people liked to make fools of themselves they were well within their rights doing so.) The call was followed by those from
Time, Life, The New York Times, The Daily Mail
, and a string of publishers.
On Sunday evening, March 1, the Nabokovs met George Weidenfeld,
Lolita's
British publisher, for the first time.
^†
He found Véra frosty at the outset, immensely cordial once he had earned her confidence, which he did only slowly. If they had not already done so, the couple observed now that their every move was being followed. The first call on Monday morning was from a reporter for the London
Evening Standard
. What had they talked about with Mr. Weidenfeld at their dinner at Le Voisin? Doubtless they had discussed Weidenfeld's strategy for publishing
Lolita
without incurring a prison sentence. Without having yet appeared there,
Lolita
had occasioned a furor in England, as was reported in that week's issue of
Time
. British publication was delayed pending the new obscenity bill; if that bill failed to pass, Weidenfeld and his partner Nigel Nicolson, a Member of Parliament, risked convictions. As it was, Weidenfeld found it nearly impossible to have the book manufactured
in England, collecting exponentially more letters of regret from printers than Nabokov had from publishers.
^*
Lolita
had that March sold nearly a quarter of a million copies in America.

While in New York Véra began to grapple seriously with the tax implications of their new incarnation. At Epstein's suggestion, she consulted with attorney Joseph Iseman and his colleagues at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; at the same time she drafted a copy of a will. On April 11 her sister Sonia—now a simultaneous interpreter at the United Nations—gave a farewell dinner in her West Side apartment for the Nabokovs. The following evening Anna Feigin did the same. Still it was a few days before the couple managed to leave town, largely because of the flood of mail. Only two months later did Véra discover that a bundle of unacknowledged letters had made their way into a trunk of papers to be filed. She enjoyed the whirlwind all the same, reveling in her husband's ascension. “
We have seen hundreds of people here and have had a wonderful time,” she wrote after the farewell dinners, all the necessary meetings having been concluded, as well as a brilliant Epsteinorchestrated coup: The Bollingen Press, which had once passed on the project, signed up the
Onegin
translation in March. Only on April 18 did Véra at last ferry Vladimir west, through Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana, two butterfly nets on the backseat, her contracts file in the Buick trunk.

At a leisurely pace they picked their way toward Arizona, Véra keeping up a lively correspondence about translations, jacket changes, contractual terms, as they did so. She profited from a stop in southern Texas to confer with Doubleday about Italian rights in
Nabokov's Dozen
, to nudge
Lolita's
Dutch publisher about
Laughter in the Dark
. (The Cornell University stationery still served, but the return address on all of these missives was Putnam's.) As they headed toward the southwestern corner of the state the weather disintegrated; Véra found the driving treacherous, on one occasion nearly losing control of the wheel. The raging tornadoes and roaring thunderstorms could have served as pathetic fallacy for
Lolita's
European fates: For a book that concerned itself solely with art, the novel's early fortunes were intensely political. In April Gallimard had brought out Eric Kahane's fine translation, freely sold in a country in which the English edition was considered under partial ban. (The logic was more Cartesian than it appeared: Gallimard was General de Gaulle's publisher.) Véra grumbled that Madame Ergaz did little to keep her apprised of
Lolita's
situation in Paris, but the fault was not entirely the agent's; the booksellers were not much better
informed. Some believed the interdiction still in place. Others quietly sold the novel, which could be found “
huddling shamefully” with Frank Harris and Henry Miller in bookshop corners. At the same time the work was banned from importation into Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, where its specter kept the vice squads busy.

But
Lolita's
political repercussions made themselves felt most strongly in England, where an unpublished volume had rarely caused such a sensation. In January Weidenfeld & Nicolson arranged for a list of twenty-one eminent writers to
sign a letter deploring government prosecution of literature in the
Times;
it would have been remarkable if as many as half had actually read the book. A Labour-sponsored piece of legislation that might reasonably define obscenity on the page, the Obscene Publications bill had meanwhile been languishing for four years. In essence it established that a work must be judged as a whole—and therefore on its literary merits—not on the basis of potentially objectionable passages read out of context. The debate was reinvigorated by the news of
Lolita's
imminent arrival on British shores, with Nicolson arguing eloquently—and against his own deep misgivings—that the book could not corrupt, “
because it shows depravity coming to such tragic and unenviable ends.” Nicolson had made himself unpopular with his constituency in his opposition to the British invasion of Suez; his championing of
Lolita
further eroded confidence in the forty-two-year-old MP.
^*
It hardly mattered how he argued the case; his constituents concluded he was Humbert
Humbert in disguise. Nicolson lost his seat in February, eight months before
Lolita
finally arrived in England.

From Texas Véra wrote Laughlin, who was reissuing
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
and
Gogol
, that they planned to continue on to Arizona, where they might well stay “
long enough to evolve a mailing address.” By the time they did so, a week later, they were in a pine cabin in Oak Creek Canyon, a red and green oasis twenty miles south of Flagstaff. Véra sounded as enchanted with this canyon as she ever was with any place; by pure chance they had stumbled upon the small resort, above a mountain stream and amid a cool forest of oak, laurel, fir, and pine a few miles from the desert. It was an exquisite landscape, in which, relentlessly, she worked. Morris Bishop felt that the western excursions afforded Véra some well-deserved vacation; this one did not. On May 24 Vladimir reported that his wife was typing his final
translation and notes to
The Song of Igor's Campaign
, an epic poem that holds a place in Russian literature analogous to that of
Beowulf
in English literature, and a project he had begun years before. He
felt Russia should one day bow at his feet for all he had done for her literature. Véra described the
Igor
project differently:

(It would be far from the last, although Véra could have consoled herself that after the five years' work that remained to be done on
Onegin
, Nabokov almost exclusively translated Nabokov.) She checked the proofs of the German translation of
Lolita
, which she thought in many instances substandard. Mostly she found the tale of the
nymphchen
overly delicate, not gruesome enough. She did not shy from proposing a better word for “haunches.” And a spade very much needed to be called a spade, however unfelicitous that spade might be: “ ‘
Liebesdingen
' [matters of love] is a polite and unfortunate euphemism substituted by a continental lady-translator for ‘matters of sex'. Let us remember that Humbert is neither polite, nor a lady: he is very much a male, and moreover a sex maniac.”

She looked east, to the trip to Europe, as her husband had looked west; only on board the steamer where no business mail could be forwarded could she expect any rest. She was working day and night on the correspondence and for Vladimir “on some other matters in which he
needs me,” as well as cooking meals, which she always considered a burden. She had at least a little reading time: Probably in Arizona she read Robbe-Grillet's
La Jalousie
, which she could not recommend highly enough, although she would do an interesting dance when formulating that opinion publicly. She deferred always to her husband's admiration for Robbe-Grillet, while he repeatedly indicated that she had been the one to discover his work. She raved about the 1957 novel, which she found beautifully compact and tragic, but most of all original, “
which is, probably, a quality that counts highest with us.” Years later an acquaintance asked Véra if she also wrote. “
Oh, she writes all the time,” Vladimir cut in, truthfully, but begging the question.

On June 2 a reporter from
Sports Illustrated
—perhaps the only publication
in America not yet to have run a piece on
Lolita
or her author—arrived to document Nabokov and his collecting. He endeared himself immediately to Véra by displaying, and making her a gift of, an old photo of her husband he had found in a secondhand bookstore. The next morning Vladimir emerged from the cabin and announced, “It is now 9 o'clock.” The reporter could not help noticing that it was only 8:30, but that “Nabokov keeps moving all clocks and watches within his reach ahead to make Mrs. Nabokov move faster so he can get to his butterflies all the sooner.” Nor could he help noticing that the designated driver failed to rise to the bait, calling her husband to breakfast instead. Later in the morning Véra emerged from a bout of letter-writing to chauffeur her husband and their visitor several miles north. In the afternoon she joined the chase with her own net. “You should see my wife catch butterflies,” Nabokov boasted. “One little movement and they're in the net.” The following morning an exuberant Vladimir coaxed his wife along again: “Come on, darling, the sun is wasting away!” Imperturbable Véra did nothing to quicken her pace, confiding in the reporter, “He doesn't know that everyone is wise to him.” She was able to put off her husband for all of twenty-five minutes.

As did much else, the spectacular landscape paled in comparison with that husband's triumph.
Lolita
was an explosive success in France and Italy and had done well in Holland; the book was out in Denmark, Spain, Japan, Israel, Poland, Norway, and Argentina; it was about to be released in Portugal, Brazil, Finland, and Germany; Véra was negotiating offers in Greece and Iceland. But
what pleased her most was the emergence of a group of young readers who were now taking the trouble—along with publishers everywhere—to hunt down her husband's early volumes. Her fear of fauna manifested itself as fear for her husband as well. In Texas's spectacular Big Bend National Park a ranger had cautioned the Nabokovs about rattlesnakes and mountain lions. Véra was displeased by Vladimir's cavalier response: “
V. discounts both statements—which is annoying because he gets careless and may step on a rattler (or, for that matter, on a mountain lion, since he
has
managed to step on a slumbering bear in Yosemite.)” Nabokov's philosophy on the subject was clear; he believed God looks after entomologists as he does drunkards. The Browning slumbered quietly a few thousand miles away, in an Ithaca carton.