Vera (51 page)

Apart from two hurried entries made in August and September, Véra ended the diary in Texas, on or just after May 10. The promise and expectation with which she had begun the account had been fulfilled; the novelty of celebrity may have worn off. Poised to begin her second year on the bestseller
list,
Lolita
could clearly fend for herself, at least in America. For all her love of precision Véra was not particularly methodical; she felt no mandate to fill the remaining pages of the book. She may have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work. For whatever reason, about two months before the date on which John Shade picks up his pen to begin his 999 lines of
Pale Fire
, Véra made the last complete entries in her short-lived journal, her single act of non-ventriloquism. It is impossible to imagine her having begun such an exercise solely on her own account, just as it is impossible to imagine she was composing this narrative for anyone other than her husband and herself. The pages are all the more revealing because she did so. This was Véra as she was, not as she saw herself, a trick
Lolita
had worked. Even so she continued to efface herself. The diary pages include Vladimir's cancer scare of 1948 but not Véra's equally alarming misdiagnosis of 1954. She made no note of the May 15 death in Ithaca of seventy-one-year-old Ilya Feigin, bedridden since the stroke that had paralyzed him several years earlier. She was chagrined not to have been able to help with funeral arrangements, which Anna Feigin had handled alone. As she began the 1958 diary, and over the years that followed, Véra had ample cause to outline the bare facts of her own history for her reparations claim. She proved hopelessly vague, amnesiac, wrong.

Appropriately, the 1959 road trip ended in Hollywood. The Nabokovs spent the last week of July in a Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow, at Harris and Kubrick's invitation. The press swiftly caught up with them; Vladimir spoke not of
Lolita
but of
Invitation to a Beheading
, a novel he described as a story of Russia
in the year 3000. He was polishing Dmitri's fine translation, which Putnam's planned to publish—the idea must have made both Nabokovs chuckle with glee—the day of Khrushchev's arrival in America. Less chortling went on with Harris and Kubrick. The filmmakers hoped to persuade Vladimir to write the screenplay for their
Lolita
, offering him forty thousand dollars to do so. Together the Nabokovs decided to turn down the tempting offer, preferring their freedom to the money. Doubtless it helped that Europe was calling; Vladimir's foreign publishers were politely but firmly clamoring for his presence. Véra was charged with the task of conveying her husband's decision to the moviemakers. She explained his reasoning, referring to Harris and Kubrick's vision: Her husband found the idea of Lolita and Humbert marrying in the end—with a relative's blessing—so repellent
that he could not wrap his mind around it.
^*
The more the matter was discussed, the less able he felt to devise a screen solution that would prove compatible with the work. That August
Lolita
headed into her second year on the bestseller list in the number twelve position, seven irritating rungs below
Zhivago
.

In midmonth the Nabokovs began to drift eastward, stopping first in Ithaca, where they called on the Bishops. “
Both the Vs looked uncommonly well, brown, western,” observed Morris Bishop, who found them in high spirits even at the end of their long drive, and who refrained from pointing out “in the midst of their cheer that living off Lolita's earnings is assez mal vu in some countries.” Bishop noted that the couple were traveling separately from, but in tandem with, Dmitri, who planned to pursue his vocal training in Italy, where it was felt that he might most comfortably make the transition from learning to performing. In fact the Nabokovs' itinerary was more fluid even than Bishop suspected. In early September, Véra met several times in New York with the lawyers at Paul, Weiss. In her role as family Exchequer, she discussed tax implications of the banner year and explained the tangled and highly vexing Olympia stranglehold. She also explored the tax advantage in establishing residence in Europe, where the Nabokovs planned to spend a year, and where she
suggested they might well stay considerably longer. She guessed they would settle in France, Italy, or Switzerland. Cornell learned as much soon enough. On September 22 Vladimir submitted a letter of resignation, news of which made its way into the national papers. The same day Véra explained to Bishop that she had long felt the combination of teaching and writing was too much for her husband.
^†
The following day, from a cluttered desk at the Hotel Park Crescent on Riverside Drive, she sighed, with what sounds like qualified relief: “
What the future holds, and how everything will settle, we can only guess.” It had been over twenty years since Nabokov had written Altagracia de Jannelli from the south of France—the landscape which was to shape Humbert Humbert—that America's intellectual future appeared to him blindingly bright, brighter even than her so-called avant-gardists imagined. He had looked forward to finding in America the readers that he knew were waiting for him there.
The future had been no less certain, but of an entirely different hue. Again displaced persons, the couple asked Walter Minton if they might borrow the Putnam's mailing address a little longer.

Dmitri inherited the Buick. As mail drops, Véra suggested to her husband's correspondents Mondadori,
Lolita's
Italian publisher, or her sister-in-law Elena, a UN librarian, at her Geneva address. She was heading toward familiar territory but away from most of what remained of her relatives. Only Lena, with whom the correspondence was now more regular, remained in Europe. The two had not seen each other since 1937; Lena was eager for a reunion, having built an entirely new life in Sweden. She
prided herself on the fact that her son, Michaël, spoke not a word of Russian. With a certain incredulity Sonia asked Véra that winter: “
Are you planning on visiting Lena (our Lena)?” She was not in touch with their eldest sister, and did not realize Véra was. She wondered if Lena knew that Véra was in Europe, a fact Lena could not have ignored had she wanted to; the amount of press generated by the Nabokovs across the Continent over the next months would be impossible to overestimate. Even aboard the
Liberté
, Vladimir was surrounded by admirers. The ship's library boasted an elaborate display of his works. The head of Bobbs-Merrill happened to be sailing as well; he made every effort to cozy up to the author his firm had brought to America and whom another firm was now triumphantly sending forth. The captain interrogated the celebrated passenger about his choice of subject, although he had not read the sensational novel. In between answering his questions, Vladimir fashioned a structure, in miniature, of what would at last become
Pale Fire
.

The Nabokovs had expected to spend a few days in France before heading off to meet Elena Sikorski but found to their consternation that Paris was “
undergoing a new occupation,” as Véra put it. With the Salon d'Auto in full swing, there was not a hotel room to be found. They took the night train to Geneva, inadvertently retaliating for the ill-fated
Gallimard meeting of 1937: Nabokov's French publisher waited in vain at his office for his bestselling author. In Geneva, one of the few cities in which
Lolita
could be purchased in three languages, the couple settled into a lakefront apartment at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage, a far cry from Riverside Drive's Hotel Park Crescent. With satisfaction Véra noted that the novel was prominently displayed in every bookshop window. An emotional reunion with Elena Sikorski on October 7—her brother was so much
larger
, and yet so much the same—was followed by a series of editorial meetings. The Nabokovs met Ledig Rowohlt and his French-born, Oxford-educated wife, Jane, for the first time now; Véra felt it was “
friendship at first sight.” George Weidenfeld paid a visit, as did representatives of Nabokov's other publishers, and a small herd of reporters.
Perhaps because the Geneva address was known only to a few, the pace of Véra's correspondence slowed here. She wrote Epstein about editorial matters, she conferred with Doussia Ergaz's office about arrangements in Paris, where Gallimard expected the Nabokovs on the twenty-first. She had other worries as well: She was in
dire need of evening wear, something of which there appeared to be a great dearth in Geneva.

It was very much the calm before the storm. On the return to Paris two weeks later every one of the couple's moves was documented. The press was waiting at the station, vying for the attention of the “
most controversial writer since D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller.” The Nabokovs did their best to be polite while they and their ten suitcases piled into a car for the Hotel Continental, where Ergaz had at last and with some difficulty found them a room, a frantic search Vladimir later contorted into a dulcet memory. His datebook for the sixteen days that followed is more crowded than it would ever be again; in the course of the first day, four interviewers called at the hotel. Eric Kahane, the novel's nimble translator, stopped by as well. All eyes were on Vladimir but the headlines were about someone else altogether; the real news appeared to be that Mr. Nabokov was not escorting a luscious twelve-year-old around Paris. “
Madame Nabokov is 38 Years Older than the Nymphet Lolita,” screeched one front-page headline. Véra was observed to be “blonde, distinguished, discreet,” a statement which was two-thirds true, a fairly good average where the Nabokovs and the press were concerned. (She was forty-five years older than Lolita.) In a mink stole and a light-gray suit, she looked every bit the proper Continental wife. Had she wanted to remain outside the limelight she would not have been able to; if you were truly interested in camouflage, traveling with the author of
Lolita
was the wrong place to be in 1959.

She enjoyed herself immensely. In every account of the Paris-London whirlwind she speaks of how the crush of admirers tired Vladimir, but concludes ebulliently that the adventure was “great fun.” Sonia Slonim was not far off when she guessed that the European return must have felt like a brilliant ball. When Parisian reporters could not lure Vladimir to the phone to pose the questions they were burning to ask, they clamored for Véra, who expertly deflected their queries. In a headline two days after their arrival, she was quoted as saying her husband had never known Lolita. She denied having edited, or so much as offered an opinion on, the novel. “
When a masterpiece like
Lolita
enters the world, the only problem is finding a publisher,” she parried, although she did take credit for having submitted the novel for publication in Paris. She ducked the assault of leading (and absurd) questions
deftly. Did it shock her to be the wife of a scandalous author, she was asked, to which she replied that the opinion of those who saw a scandal in
Lolita
counted not an iota with her. Only the opinion of those who saw a masterpiece did. During most of the scheduled talks she sat at her husband's side, occasionally interjecting a comment. When Nabokov told one of the first interviewers that—like Flaubert writing of the death of Emma Bovary—he had cried when composing Lolita's last scene with Humbert, Véra added her usual plea for the heroine's humanity: “
She cries every night, and the critics are deaf to her sobs.” Afterward Madame Ergaz thanked the Nabokovs—both Nabokovs—for all their hard work in Paris.
^*
Everyone had been charmed by the simplicity with which they had acquitted themselves of a punishing task, and above all by their cordial treatment of all concerned.

On Friday evening, October 23, the Parisian literary world gathered in the sanctum sanctorum of French publishing, the gilded Gallimard salon on the rue Sébastien-Bottin. The Nabokovs arrived by taxi; Vladimir disappeared quickly into the crowd of well-wishers, which was immense. (In an interesting turn of phrase, Véra observed that “
Everybody and his wife was invited.”) The journalists tore her husband away from each other; they jockeyed for position; they hung on his every word.
Véra's pleasure in the sight is nearly palpable. In photographs she looks radiant, vibrant, a poised, porcelain beauty. The shopping had decidedly proved successful: She appeared at Gallimard resplendent in a black moiré dress, a tasteful mink stole, a double strand of pearls. The rain of questions fell on her, too. She profited from the attention to settle a score of her own, telling an
amusing Khrushchev anecdote. Natalie and Nicholas Nabokov's son Ivan, a Parisian editor, was in attendance; he found his cousin
ill at ease, overwhelmed. Ivan did not see Véra at her husband's side but felt she would have come in very handy indeed. Knowing too well how her brother's distraction manifested itself at such public moments, Elena Sikorski, who remained in Geneva, offered, “he was a little lost in that kind of scene.”