Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (32 page)

If Nabokov had hoped to leave anti-Semitism behind as a European relic, he must have been sorely disappointed, and not just with the encounter in the Pullman coach. Contemplating a trip to New Hampshire in the summer of 1945, he began to decode the foreign language of U.S. property listings. He had learned that “modern comfort” translated into rooms that could offer a toilet but no bathtub. And nastier than exaggerations of amenities, he noticed, were the blatant refusals to serve Jews. He wrote to Wilson, mockingly dismissing places requesting only “Christian clientèle.”
²²

New Hampshire would disappoint him in person the following year, when he saw signs barring Jewish patrons. Dmitri and Véra would later tell of one visit to a diner during which Nabokov, infuriated by a similar note on the menu, asked the manager “what would happen if little old bearded Jesus Christ drove up, in an old Ford, with his mother (black scarf, Polish accent)?” Would they serve a young couple who had tied a donkey up outside and come in to eat with their baby boy? The nativity references to the indisputably Jewish holy family momentarily baffled the summertime staff, forcing Nabokov to clarify as he stormed out.
²³

Nabokov had touched on American anti-Semitism in “Double Talk.” But in that story, it is principally the immigrants—the German doctor and the White Russian colonel—who are malicious, while their American audience plays the role of enthusiastic dupes. Nabokov’s travels, however, revealed home-grown prejudice.

He had learned from his father the obligation to expose bigotry when it took root in a beloved country. And so he was already observing anti-Semitism on a new continent, testing the local strain for variations. It was a genus he knew well, but he had yet to classify the species. Taking events in and biding his time, he would soon find a way to use almost everything he had seen.

As the U.S. and U.S.S.R. settled into opposing camps, Nabokov’s family members shifted from wartime activities to peace; but for most of them, work remained political in nature. After a stint at the Department of Justice during the war and work as an analyst for the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in 1945, Nicholas Nabokov headed to Germany as a negotiations coordinator and cultural advisor. Sonia Slonim had stayed at
La Voix de France
for two years, then remained in New York doing freelance translation for the U.N. But the lack of steady work drove her to look outside the city, so she moved to northern Virginia, where she signed on with the U.S. Army as a cryptographer.
²⁴

Her relationship with Junghans haunted her. A
pro forma
background check by military intelligence for a security clearance inspired an anonymous letter about her, with a laundry list of allegations. The note offered that she had “worked for several foreign governments AT THE SAME TIME (sic),” that money “talks with her,” that she was indiscreet, a showoff, and a “very sleek” blackmailer. In case agents had missed the point of the letter, it further noted that she was of “questionable morality.” A six-month internal investigation uncovered the 1941 telegram sent to the secretary of state accusing her of being a German spy. Army Intelligence got the FBI involved in a full-blown loyalty investigation.

The FBI inquiry dragged on for more than a year and, due in part to Slonim’s long romance with Junghans, expanded into France and Germany. She had a reputation for being anti-Nazi, but she had been involved with a Nazi propagandist. She was reputed to be
anti-Soviet, but Junghans was also believed to have been a Communist. Several of the men she had worked for during the war in New York and Hollywood were themselves being investigated as Communist sympathizers. Her claim to have worked with French intelligence—a claim she did not make to agents, but which was relayed to them by her acquaintances—would only have reinforced the letter accusing her of opportunism. As part of the process, Massachusetts agents looked into the reliability of Vladimir and Véra Nabokov, whom investigators found not at all suspicious.

No concrete evidence of wrongdoing on Sonia’s part ever appeared, but her associations were problematic. American anti-Semitism reared its head in her paperwork; particular attention was paid to who was and was not Jewish in the circles she frequented (often mistakenly identifying who was and who wasn’t in the process). One informant even insisted—not just incorrectly but nonsensically—that she had changed her original family name from Levin to Slonim, as a way to hide her Jewishness.
²⁵

There were so many conflicting reports about Sonia, it was impossible to determine her loyalty. In the end, no final decision was made. The process dragged on, and Slonim eventually left her Army post for work at the United Nations in 1949 before the investigation was complete.

Nabokov, too, briefly felt the tug of postwar geopolitics—as well as his own financial precariousness—and made moves toward heading up the programming for the State Department’s new Russian radio effort on the Voice of America. Edmund Wilson wrote him a stellar recommendation for the job, and he appeared to pass his background check, only to find out that Nicholas Nabokov, whom he had asked to be one of his references, had acquired the job for himself. Nabokov had Wilson as a reference, but Nicholas had three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Archibald MacLeish, former Ambassador to the Soviet Union George Bohlen, and George Kennan, who had become the influential director of State Department’s policy planning staff.
²⁶

Nicholas beat out Vladimir for the job but, like Sonia Slonim, soon found himself under scrutiny. After eight months, Nicholas applied for a new job that required a new security clearance, only to find that the first years of the Cold War had redefined the meaning of loyalty to America. In the 1948 review of his application, Nicholas’s life was dissected to a much more disconcerting degree than Sonia’s had been. His psychiatric hospitalizations, his diagnosis as a manic-depressive, his divorces, his enmity with several former friends and co-workers, and his involvement with female students at multiple U.S. colleges were all investigated and appear to have been confirmed. Rumors of drug addiction, venereal disease, admiration for Stalin, membership in the French Communist Party, and efforts to move back to the Soviet Union in the 1930s were unsubstantiated. (Confidential informants notoriously swung for the fences in the wildness of their statements.)

But in the cavalcade of real or imagined offenses, only one matter seems to have truly troubled the FBI: they wanted to know if Nicholas Nabokov was homosexual. They had heard about his association with ballet queen Diaghilev in Paris, and with other friends who were known to be “perverts.” Could they establish definitively that he was
not?
As they interviewed co-worker after co-worker, former roommates, employers, and ex-wives, this was the question they came to focus on. They visited Sergei’s former roommate Pavel Tchelitchew, to ask him what he knew about Nicholas. From the report, it is impossible to know whether the agent realized that Tchelitchew himself was gay. An informant with experience interviewing more than five hundred applicants suspected of being gay weighed in—the topic seemed to be his expertise—and he believed that Nicholas was, in fact, homosexual.
²⁷

The Department was torn—Nicholas’s services were very much wanted, but the issue of his sexuality could not be resolved with enough clarity. The question was put to Nicholas himself by a State Department employee. Later George Kennan, then in the process of constructing postwar U.S. covert operations overseas, brought it up to Nicholas, too.

Nicholas seemed frightened and annoyed by the relentlessness of the investigators. They had it wrong, Nicholas told Kennan. Of course he knew homosexuals—he had worked in the
ballet
in Paris—but he was not one. Perhaps they had heard stories that confused him with a relative in Paris, Sergei Nabokov, who had also socialized with Diaghilev and Jean Cocteau. It was not he but Sergei who was homosexual. According to Kennan, Nicholas acknowledged that Sergei’s sexual activities had certainly brought shame on the Nabokov family name, but that shame should not be laid at Nicholas’s feet.
²⁸

A year into the investigation, Kennan wrote Nicholas with profound regrets, saying that it looked as if the matter could not be cleared up to the investigators’ satisfaction. Though Kennan was embarrassed by the government’s response, he suggested that it would probably be best to formally withdraw the application—which Nicholas did.
²⁹

Other postwar transitions would prove less rocky. Princess Lena Slonim Massalsky settled in Sweden, where she found work as a translator.
³⁰
Zinaida Shakhovskoy, Nicholas’s former sister-in-law, who had been a longtime supporter of Nabokov’s writing, was celebrated for her work with the French resistance. Shakhovskoy went on to cover the Nuremberg Trials and, like Edmund Wilson, traveled to Greece to report on the violence that exploded in the aftermath of the Second World War.
³¹

Even Nicholas Nabokov would land on his feet, declaring at the June 1950 Congress for Cultural Freedom in Germany that moving forward, “we must build an organization for war.” Academy Award-winning actor and veteran Robert Montgomery, also in attendance, sounded the same drumbeat, arguing that, “No artist who has the right to bear that title can be neutral in the battles of our time.”
³²

The call for democratic counterpropaganda against the Soviet cultural onslaught seemed eminently justified when Soviet-occupied North Korea invaded American-occupied South Korea the day before the conference began. Which helped make it even simpler to execute what had been in the planning for some months—the establishment
of the Congress for Cultural Freedom as a permanent entity. In short order, Nicholas Nabokov was elected Secretary-General of the newest anti-Communist propaganda effort.
³³

With the exception of his lone bid for a job at the Voice of America, Vladimir Nabokov staked a path on a road that would keep him far from the activism in which so many in his life engaged. Politics, albeit in a refracted form, nonetheless managed to dominate the first novel he wrote in America.

Started mid-war and finished a year and a month after the last German forces made their unconditional surrender,
Bend Sinister
tells of the fate of independent philosopher Adam Krug under the tyranny of a ruler nicknamed the Toad. The story takes place in an alternate world—albeit one filled with reflections of Nabokov’s own.

The Toad’s political philosophy, Ekwilism, promotes a conformist erasure of identity. Krug is prodded to demonstrate that intellectuals are “happy and proud to march with the masses.” Presiding over a government in which viciousness vies with dim-wittedness, the Toad wants Krug to support his reign and give it intellectual legitimacy. But the Toad’s need to triumph over Krug goes deeper. In passing, we learn that Krug, who has other moral failings, was a classmate of the Toad as a child, and bullied him every day at school for five years. The comic, sadistic, homosexual villain of
Bend Sinister
is in part a product of the childhood cruelty of its hero.
³⁴

After trying unsuccessfully to cajole and intimidate Krug into joining him, the Toad arrests the philosopher and his young son. Krug is ready to comply to save his son, but officials, who are too incompetent even to brutalize with accuracy, confuse Krug’s son with another child and end up killing him by accident.

The horror of the death is too much for the father to bear, leading the narrator to have mercy on Krug and give him the gift of insanity, allowing him to see that he is a character in a story. Hostages are gathered from among Krug’s acquaintances and friends, and they
explain that they will be shot if Krug does not do the bidding of the Toad. Krug, however, is too mad to understand what is happening. Delusional, he believes he has returned to the apex of his childhood power, when he caught and humiliated his classmate at will. He runs to tackle the Toad and is shot, even as the world seems to reveal itself as illusion. The perspective of the story then pulls away from Krug to give us a view of a narrator very much like Vladimir Nabokov, catching moths in a net by his window at night.

In his earlier novel
Invitation to a Beheading
, Nabokov had weighed in more abstractly and with more hope. Cincinnatus seemed to be executed but simultaneously triumphed over his executioners, whereas the narrator of
Bend Sinister
frankly admits that the immortality he has given to Krug is only “a play on words.” Between
Invitation
and
Bend Sinister
lay the Soviet purges and the Holocaust, making faith in art and the power of an individual mind in the face of tyranny that much harder to maintain.

Near the beginning of the book, Krug is forced to shuttle back and forth over a river between two guard stations for lack of correct papers, echoing the experiences of countless refugees. Later, in prison, he hears fellow inmates practicing their English grammar (“My aunt has a visa, Uncle Saul wants to see Uncle Samuel. The child is bold.”)
³⁵
—mirroring the Jewish immigrants in the background of “Vasily Shishkov.”
³⁶

Nabokov’s foreword directly links the world of
Bend Sinister
with the totalitarian states that he had lived in, those “worlds of tyranny and torture, of Fascists and Bolshevists, of Philistine thinkers and jack-booted baboons.” Using snippets of Lenin’s speeches and the Soviet constitution, he also nodded to the “gobs of Nazist pseudoefficiency” he had imported to build his nightmare world.
³⁷