Vera (52 page)

Among the luminaries packed into the round reception hall were two people who were especially eager to present themselves to the author of
Lolita
and who felt they did so this evening. Zinaida Shakhovskoy, Ivan Nabokov's aunt and Vladimir's early champion, was nonplussed when the man she had so often assisted twenty years before looked her straight in the eye and uttered a perfunctory
“Bonjour, Madame
.” (Véra, who witnessed the greeting from a distance, was
equally puzzled.) Shakhovskoy felt the
slight was intentional, whereas it was most likely a symptom of the same distraction Nabokov had manifested on campus when Véra's cues had so often saved him from social disasters. (When producer James Harris had stepped backstage at the Waldorf-Astoria luncheon the previous fall, he introduced himself as “
the man who just bought
Lolita.”
Nabokov showed no sign of distinguishing him from any of the other eighty thousand people who had done so, though Harris alone had purchased the book for $150,000. Blankly Nabokov had replied: “I hope you will enjoy reading it.”) Maurice Girodias also attended the Parisian reception although he had not been officially invited, Gallimard having been caught in the crossfire between their author and
Lolita's
original publisher. As Girodias remembered it, Doussia Ergaz introduced him to Nabokov, who looked up from his coterie of admirers and around for his wife, “
as if responding to a telepathic message.” A few glasses of champagne later, Girodias waded through the crowd to Véra. She had no entourage but needed none to make her point; she offered up the silent treatment to the man standing directly before her. “
I did not exist; I was no more than an epistolary fiction, and I had no business wearing a body and disturbing people in a literary cocktail party given in honor of her husband Vladimir Nabokov,” recalled the spurned publisher, who coaxed an enormous amount of mileage out of these near- and nonencounters. Véra reported that she had
met—and disliked—Girodias on that occasion, but implied that her husband had not.

Both Girodias and Shakhovskoy aired their grievances loudly over the next years. If they could not manage to disconcert Vladimir with their offensives they happily lunged at Véra. It was she who was to spend a decade attempting to extricate her husband from an agreement with a man she only reluctantly admitted existed. She pursued every possible means of annulling the Olympia agreement until 1969, when the third lawyer on the case at last succeeded in separating the parties. For his part, Girodias saw Véra's long, lovely arm everywhere. She was the dragon lady, the decisive partner, “
the anti-nymphet.” When Paul O'Neil's
Life
profile finally ran in 1959, Girodias disputed various passages of the account.
Life
published his objections to their article, along with a long editorial comment, which—according to Girodias—“
although signed with the initials of our mysterious friend ED., seems to carry on its forehead the beautiful aura of Véra Nabokov's distinguished scalp.”

Paris proved only a dress rehearsal for the tempest that enveloped the Nabokovs in London, where
Lolita
had been printed but where its distribution remained in jeopardy. The crucial legislation had finally passed, but the Attorney General had not changed; he had estimated the chances of prosecution
at 99 percent. On all sides
Nigel Nicolson was pressured to abandon his defense of the work; Edward Heath, Chief Whip, implored him to do so for the sake of the Conservative Party.
^*
Before the summer recess, in the House of Commons lobby, the Attorney General had jabbed a finger in Nicolson's chest and warned him that publication would land him directly in jail. Nicolson had been standing at the time with Harold Macmillan, the Prime Minister. The matter constituted a national obsession; Weidenfeld and Nicolson appeared daily in the press, their lives examined for the kind of scurrilous behavior that could be expected of
Lolita
defenders. In October, at Nicolson's suggestion, a few copies of the book were circulated and one was submitted to the Director of Public Prosecutions. If he approved it, the novel would be published officially on November 6. If he did not, Weidenfeld and Nicolson would at least be spared the charge of having distributed licentious matter throughout the British Isles. Twenty thousand copies of
Lolita
meanwhile sat meekly in a warehouse, to be destroyed in the event of prosecution. Into this maelstrom sailed the Nabokovs, landing in Dover on October 28. Two bodyguards whisked them away from the pier in a limousine; the phalanx increased to five at their West End hotel. One frustrated reporter submitted a picture of Vladimir being fitted into the Stafford Hotel elevator that the author of
Lolita
would have appreciated. The security detail frantically rang for the lift, into which they hurried the eminent writer. The journalist caught “
a last glimpse of him peering out through the bars.”

For months Véra had joked that she hoped to spend Christmas in Italy if Vladimir did not end up in Old Bailey first. George Weidenfeld and Nigel Nicolson found that possibility real enough that they spent an uncomfortable first afternoon with the Nabokovs, unable even to mention the title of the book they were about to publish. After what
felt an interminable forty-five minutes of small talk, their author finally broke the ice. He proved less willing to mention the novel when he lectured at Cambridge on censorship on November 4, which he did without once pronouncing the name “Lolita,”
a performance that earned him a standing ovation. The lecture, a magnificent television appearance, and a luncheon with a group of England's prominent opinion-makers were part of Weidenfeld & Nicolson's campaign to establish its author as an impeccably credentialed scholar rather than some kind of demented émigré diarist. It was a great strategic advantage that Professor Nabokov's next book happened to be a two-thousand-page treatise on Pushkin.

With equal parts panache and apprehension, Weidenfeld and Nicolson threw a party for three hundred influential well-wishers at the Ritz on publication eve, Thursday, November 5. They were nervous enough that they billed the event as a party to meet Mr. and Mrs. Nabokov; no books were mentioned. They had
every expectation of being prosecuted in the morning. The excitement ran high at that glittering evening, as Véra reported to Minton,
miffed that he seemed to underestimate how very frightening was the situation at this crucial juncture. If Vladimir was worried he did not indicate as much; he claimed to be enjoying himself tremendously, although a favored cousin was struck by his
shyness in the eye of the storm. At least one reporter noted the distraction that had seemed to plague him in Paris. In the midst of the festivities, observed
Time & Tide's
correspondent, Nabokov “
wore the bemused air of a man who wasn't quite sure what the party was all about.” He confused some of those around him too. In one breath, he lamented that his English was still not on a par with his Russian. To Sir Isaiah Berlin he announced “
in a very loud voice so that everyone turned round, ‘People say that I am a Russian writer. I am not. I am an American writer.' ”

Véra was herself too much besieged by reporters to have come to her husband's social rescue. She told one reporter, “
Your English accents are still beyond me,” by which he assumed she meant that very special bark of the aristocracy. Surely she had no difficulty understanding the news that arrived via an anonymous supporter in the Home Office, who telephoned in the midst of the festivities. Quietly Weidenfeld passed on the message to his partner; Nicolson climbed on a table to announce that the government had decided against prosecution. The cheers could be heard blocks away. As Weidenfeld remembered it, the decision left Véra swabbing tears from her eyes with a
batiste handkerchief. It also left Weidenfeld & Nicolson with a sterling future, and British publishers with ampler legroom. There was now the problem of where to spend Christmas.

The next few days in a brilliantly sunny London disappeared in a mad whirl of appointments. The couple sat for a series of portraits, visited with cousins. Both Nabokovs replenished their wardrobes. But mostly they devoted
themselves to the press. Every reporter in England appeared to interview Vladimir. (
He had no illusions why, telling one journalist that he knew the search was on for the diaries that would prove
Lolita
to be a work of nonfiction.) He had said that if he had foreseen the scandal that it would cause he would have left
Lolita
in his desk drawer. But without that sensation—and in Europe without the danger—the triumphant reception would not have had the intensity it did. Véra knew as much. After the drama she announced, “Lolita is every inch of a
cause célèbre.” She felt that while several individuals were still snapping at the novel's heels, the ground swell of support had been admirable and invigorating. She sounded
all the more excited on account of the heel-snappers, who had no doubt had a hand in selling one hundred thousand books in four weeks. She was, on the other hand, aware that Mondadori lay ahead, and that Vladimir was tired and unable to work. “
I hope we can find the peace he needs for this some day soon,” she added, in a perfectly married locution.

In Rome, in mid-November, she attempted to catch up on her weeks of neglected correspondence. She felt her husband's various publishers would forgive her if they knew what she had had to contend with. Given all the moving about, she explained, “
I have to stuff all the letters into a trunk in the hope of finding them at the next stop, and sometimes I get confused as to which have been answered and which not.” Rome proved disappointingly cold, and not nearly as relaxing for Vladimir as she had hoped; the journalists and photographers had besieged them since their arrival. One had been ejected bodily from the hotel. They visited the tourist sites they could; Véra vowed they would return incognito in the spring. Again the reporters pressed for both Nabokovs; Véra consented to one talk at the hotel, during which she was happy to inform her interviewer how deeply unpleasant she was finding the experience. Vladimir settled gleefully into his chair with a drink; the idea that his wife was under interrogation in his stead seemed to put him in a good mood. The reporter managed to coax a few things out of Mrs. Nabokov. She admitted she was her husband's first reader; that she had saved
Lolita;
that she had been the one to insist on its publication. Otherwise she did her best to turn the tables, interviewing the interviewer as to where they might find a villa. Concluded Vladimir: “
Hasn't this been a pleasant conversation? Isn't it true that my wife is a marvelous person?”

After ten days they moved south, to Sicily in search of sun. They hoped they might settle in Taormina for the winter, but managed to find only thunderstorms, hail, and a brace of reporters. Even Véra was unprepared for the reception in sleepy Taormina, where the local newsstand exhibited framed photos of the couple. (The pictures were unflattering, to boot. And in the text
she was described as a “
platinum blonde.”) Nor was that the only attention. “The local Germans, very numerous and the only tourists here, whisper and stare after us,” she wailed. In search of the ideal proportions of sun and shade, the Nabokovs made the twenty-hour trip north to Genoa, no mean feat given the fact that they had bought a large number of books, which no longer fit into their luggage. “
Decent people fly, but you can't fly with our kind of baggage, even if V. would agree to,” Véra moaned, in part explaining their itinerary, or lack thereof, of the next eighteen years. In her next breath she reported that her husband was the most renowned author in Italy, where his name appeared in the paper daily.

Genoa, and the Hotel Columbia-Excelsior, proved more congenial. Véra found the rose-colored city itself enchanting, with its “
buildings covered in half-erased frescoes and steep staircase-streets.” Much of the northern port was in a state of disrepair from the war, but she felt there were enough gems left for a dozen marvels. One early December evening the Nabokovs ventured up a corkscrew street behind their lodgings, where they found themselves strolling among prostitutes and whispered solicitations from alleyway hotels. Véra was amused to hear the author of
Lolita
suggest they had best turn around; she had thought of doing nothing of the kind. With equal amusement she reported on the state of her Italian, in which a request for news (
“actualités”
) elicited directions to the lavatory (“toletta”). Even the charms of Genoa could not lure her entirely from her desk, however. The Columbia-Excelsior proved the perfect perch from which to report on the commotion of the previous weeks, and from which to direct the search for a house for the winter. The first exercise proved more fruitful. Véra reported as the many triumphs of
Lolita
, whose bestselling claims were matched by pirated editions around the world. She described the critics who suddenly claimed to have been early advocates of Vladimir's work, the old friends who crept out from the woodwork. (
She denounced both breeds.) She summed up the second half of 1959: “
We have travelled thousands of miles, have met lots of people (some of them very nice), have made the acquaintance of various writers, from Graham Greene (entertaining) to Moravia (very much less so), and seen lots of enchanting things. Among them the delightful little old Italian ladies toting large bags of raw fish to feed stray cats, in Rome.” She wondered if the little old ladies were doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, or to earn their way to heaven. The observation sounds as if it was hers, and probably was; Véra was rarely able to overlook a cat, and in Genoa too marveled over the ancient women scurrying up the perfectly vertical staircases with ease. But the impression served double duty. In illustrating his point that the artist's gaze will often settle on the seeming trifle, Vladimir had remarked
to a reporter a few weeks earlier: “
In Rome, for example, the things which seemed to me more vivid are the old ladies who feed stray cats.”