Nabokov in America (5 page)

Véra said years later that the move to America became their
definite plan
⁷
at a certain point in time: just before September 3, 1939, when France and England went to war with Germany. Her biographer questions this, arguing that “
the family’s hold
⁸
on the planet was so tenuous that a gust could have pushed them in any direction.” France was less than promising: work permits were hard to get, and soon it would be overrun with armed Germans. Nabokov’s French was rich and flexible, but his English was deeper, more resourceful, and he might have felt that his sensibility belonged naturally among the ranks of English-language authors. England herself could still find no place for him, though—all doors remained closed.

His first cousin, Nicolas, visited them in Menton. Nicolas was now a professor of music at distant Wells College, in exotic Aurora, New York. He was
faring remarkably
⁹
well in the New World: in 1934, the ballet
Union Pacific
, which he scored to a libretto by Archibald MacLeish, had opened in Philadelphia, in a production of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, and this “first American ballet” soon became an international
hit, the most successful production of the Ballet Russe in the mid-thirties. Some things worked out in America! Nicolas had composed other works, too—his
La Vie de Polichinelle
also opened in ’34, in a Paris Opera production—and he was remarkably well connected for a storm-tossed immigrant, a friend not just of MacLeish and Léonide Massine (choreographer of
Union Pacific
) and Sol Hurok (producer-impresario) but of George Balanchine, Igor Stravinsky, Virgil Thomson, George Gershwin, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and many glittering others.

A charming and handsome tall man, said to be conversant in
twelve languages
¹⁰
, “emotionally extravagant, physically demonstrative, and
always late
¹¹
,” Nicolas had befriended Edmund Wilson, by the late thirties the most influential literary journalist in the United States. What the cousins discussed in Menton has gone unrecorded. But the fact of Nicolas’s ascent cannot have been uninteresting.
*

Vladimir was not salon material, by way of contrast. It was not that he was less charming, and he had no problem accepting favors from influential individuals in his youth—from his
well-known publisher father
¹²
, but also from others. Vladimir was thoroughly an
artist
, however: an artist through and through. He enjoyed rubbing elbows with famous people—with Joyce’s sponsor and the first publisher of
Ulysses
, for instance—and in his years in Berlin and Paris he had met everyone illustrious he cared to, including Joyce himself, who showed up at a reading Nabokov gave in February ’37, and with whom he attended a dinner party in Paris in February ’39. On that evening, the often scintillating, sometimes overwhelmingly mirthful Nabokov failed to shine, and the hostess wondered later if he had been in awe of the great man. When Nabokov read her account, he commented,

I
find it refreshing
¹³
to be accused of bashfulness (after finding so frequently in the gazettes complaints of my “arrogance”); but is
her impression correct? She pictures me as a timid young artist; actually, I was forty, with a sufficiently lucid awareness of what I had already done for Russian letters preventing me from feeling awed in the presence of any living writer.

A writer with sufficiently lucid awareness may spend time in salons, but he does not live there; back in the heatless garret is where he knows himself. The important truth of him, the truth of his gift, is established and ever present in his mind, and the way forward will be through his own agency, unless his talent fails or he loses heart.

Still—and even allowing for a certain condescension toward his younger cousin, who had always been a bit in awe of him—Vladimir could not have been unimpressed. Nicolas had pulled off a great coup, an American-style coup, landing on the rugged far shore and immediately making a big name for himself. An immigrant with nothing but a certain inheritance of cultural capital might take the Americans by storm, it turned out; the “
extraordinary openness
¹⁴
” of Americans was among Nicolas’s first impressions of them, their readiness to “help each other and especially help the newcomer, the immigrant”—and even more especially the immigrant who acted as if he belonged in the game.

Véra said that they decided positively on America, and at the hour of their deciding America decided on them. Stanford had invited
Mark Aldanov
¹⁵
, the popular Russian historical novelist, to teach summer school in 1940 or ’41. Aldanov had no plans then to go to the United States (he considered his
English subpar
¹⁶
), and he suggested getting in touch with V. Sirin, who might be available.

Negotiations took more than a year, finances being the issue; in the end, Professor Henry Lanz, of the Slavic studies group at Stanford, gave over part of his own salary to bring Nabokov to Palo Alto. (He taught
two courses
¹⁷
—a Russian literature survey, a how-to-write-plays course—for a fee of $750, plus accommodations.)

Between Aldanov’s kind tip and the glories of California in summer ’41 were many complicated steps, however, not the least of them getting visa approval. Nabokov, still marooned in France, knew what he now had in hand, though: the magical open sesame, grounds for escape. Altagracia de Jannelli had been gathering affidavits on his behalf in New York, in case such an invitation ever came his way, and she pressed
the publisher of
Laughter in the Dark
to sign a letter that Nabokov himself composed. He requested recommendations from other notables, too—from Mikhail Karpovich, a historian at Harvard, from Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, a renowned painter, and from Alexandra Tolstoy, daughter of the novelist and president of the Tolstoy Foundation, an aid organization in New York. Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin signed and possibly even composed a letter for Nabokov dated April ’39:

Mr. Vladimir Nabokoff (
nom de plume
¹⁸
V. Sirine) is a very well known Russian author whose novels … enjoy a high reputation among Russian intellectuals abroad. He is the son of the late V.D. Nabokoff, the eminent Russian Liberal Member of the first Russian Parliament and Professor of Criminology… . [Sirine] is not only a novelist of quite exceptional talent, but also a profound student of Russian language and literature… . All this, together with his mastery of English and great experience in lecturing would make him a teacher of Russian literature and thought of quite exceptional quality… . I recommend him warmly.

Letters about his worth as an artist went to the American consul in Paris. But other testaments of worth were required as well. To Dobuzhinsky, his former art tutor, he wrote,

Please allow me
¹⁹
now to direct your concern for me in another direction. The difficulty is such that for two years now I have been unable to piece together a move to America… . Since I have no capital, I must present an
affidavit
, to serve as guarantee for the cost of a purchase of tickets. Those friends I have in America have with touching solicitude given proof of my value—but as they are all immigrants themselves they do not command the other sort of value, and rich people I do not know. I thought that you, being already in America, might be able to approach someone with resources … to ask for a large favor, to give me an
affidavit
.

It may be that Dobuzhinsky—although unable to provide funds himself—spoke of Nabokov’s need to others in New York. Countess Tolstoy was also active on his behalf, lobbying Serge Koussevitsky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who wrote a letter but did not offer to pay for steamship tickets. Should the American visas ever come through—and then there were French exit visas, often
requiring bribes—transport for Nabokov and his family would cost around six hundred dollars, an impossible sum for them.
†

Fall of ’39, with France now in the war, the Nabokovs lived extra-precariously,
largely on a loan
²⁰
each month of one thousand francs from the owner of a Paris cinema. Nabokov found a few language students, among them Roman Grynberg, a businessman who would
follow him
²¹
to America and become a close literary friend as well as a source of future loans. The writer Nina Berberova visited them in January ’40 and gave the Nabokovs a chicken, which they promptly ate. The year before, Nabokov had written
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
, his first novel composed in English.
Laughter in the Dark
had sold poorly in translation but had earned an advance about equal to the cost of steamship tickets, and this remembered big payday argued for composing all new work in English. But
Sebastian Knight
failed to find a publisher in the short term, in England or America.

Nabokov’s father—dead over fifteen years—now proceeded to play a hand. Early in his career as a crusading journalist, in 1903, Vladimir’s glamorous, kindly, unflappable, impeccable father had written an editorial protesting a pogrom in Kishinev, a market city seven hundred miles southwest of Moscow. “Nearly
fifty dead, nearly one hundred fifty wounded,” V. D. had written on the front page of
Pravo
, a liberal journal he helped edit. “Something monstrous and bestial has occurred… . In zombie-like disfigurement lay corpses piled atop each other… . One mother found her three sons dead. It is self-evident that these killings accompanied bandit-like attacks on property… . The size of the tragedies is not measurable, four thousand families ruined
²²
.”

Pogroms
had gone out of fashion by 1903. The last great ones had been in 1881 and ’82, following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II; the
next twenty years
²³
in Russia had been a time of such savage repression that many anti-Semites had been mollified, as Jews lost their ability to buy or rent land, to seek higher education, to live in the countryside, to enter the legal and medical professions. V. D. Nabokov, thirty-two years old when he wrote “The Kishinev Bloodbath”—he was a lecturer at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence, also a “junior gentleman of the chamber,” an eminence of the tsar’s court—with this single gesture of disgust self-cashiered, deprived himself of his title at court and of his academic career. His abhorrence of anti-Semitism derived from a critique of state power, partly; officials in Kishinev had facilitated the outrages, and those officials were instruments of the imperial “
regime of oppression
²⁴
and lawlessness” that “lives by it”—lived by a murderous hounding of the Jews.

From this day on, he was an opponent of the tsarist regime in absolute terms. He
expressed his nonchalance
²⁵
about becoming a nonperson by advertising his court uniform for sale in the daily papers. Other prominent Russians also spoke against the pogrom—Tolstoy, Gorky—but V. D. Nabokov’s essay is remarkable for its prescience and its cold fury. Future murderers wishing to bash the skulls of Jewish infants or to cut open the bellies of pregnant Jewish women would understand that “there are
no courts for them
²⁶
”—no protections for the Jews, as the system was itself built upon naming them as pariahs, as a people deserving of annihilation. We hear in this a recognition of the century oncoming—
a forecast
²⁷
of its most murderous hours.

V. D. wrote against another pogrom, in 1906, and in ’13 he reported on the trial of
Mendel Beilis
²⁸
, a Jewish brickyard worker accused of ritual murder. He had numerous Jewish friends, and his friendship was notably without condescension.
‡
After his accidental assassination—the killers had been aiming for another speaker on the stage, who escaped unharmed—his Jewish colleague at
Pravo
and
Rul’
, Iosif
Hessen
²⁹
, played literary angel to his fatherless son, ushering Sirin’s poetry, stories, chess
problems, and sundry other creations into print, and Hessen’s small publishing house, Slovo, brought out the first editions of Sirin’s earliest books.

Spring 1940: the
visas de sortie
came through, there were no more legal impediments (only financial ones). The war was now very near. On May 10, Germany invaded the Low Countries and France; three weeks later, just after the Nabokovs got away, British and French forces would escape annihilation at Dunkirk only by what Winston Churchill called a “miracle,” in small and large boats. How the Nabokovs caught a very big boat, the great ocean liner SS
Champlain
, that carried them to safety in the New World is a matter of some dispute. Credit has sometimes been assigned to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) of New York; the president of HIAS at the time, the lawyer Yakov Frumkin, had personally known V. D. Nabokov and, “
like many
³⁰
 … Russian Jews,” as Brian Boyd puts it, he “was glad to be able to repay the dead man for his bold stands against the Kishinyov pogroms and the Beilis trial.”

Véra’s biographer, Schiff, agrees but also does not agree: her account refrains from mentioning Frumkin or his organization by name. Instead she names the American Committee for Christian Refugees, an agency “committed to
assisting non-Jews
³¹
who had been victims of the Nazis’ racial policies.” The Committee for Christian Refugees gave Vladimir a small amount of money, as did numerous Sirin fans and personal friends of his; Schiff does not dispute, meanwhile, that the heavy lifting, the crucial financial help, was courtesy of “a
Jewish rescue organization
³²
headed by a former associate of Vladimir’s father,” which secured berths for the refugee family on a New York–bound ship. HIAS had chartered the
Champlain
, a French Line vessel of up-to-date art deco appointments, to carry Jewish émigrés to the New World. HIAS also had arranged for the Nabokovs to pay
only half fare
³³
. Nabokov’s own account of the embarkation, in
Speak, Memory
, focuses not on the cost of a cabin or on where the money ultimately came from, but on six-year-old Dmitri walking to the ship between his parents, through a small park above the harbor at Saint-Nazaire, as the “
splendid ship’s funnel
³⁴
” showed among the roofs of the last line of houses. The parents refrain from pointing out this marvel to the boy—let him notice on his own, let him have that fun.