Vera (49 page)

As early as the first glimmers of
Lolita's
success, Nabokov had realized that he and the U.S. government were to be in business together; these were the years of the 70 percent tax bracket. (He griped openly of the government's stake in his windfall. When Walter Winchell asked if he had acquired anything new with his Hollywood earnings, the author shrugged. “
Yes, a new tax bracket!”) Previously Véra had handled their tax preparation, unsystematically.
She had admitted to Marc Szeftel that she did all in her power to compile the return as quickly as possible. Szeftel had suggested that her inattention might well be costing the couple income. “
Yes, I know that we are losing money but … it's so boring!” she had exclaimed. She could not afford this inattention any longer. Money management had always been a treacherous subject for the family; it acquired a wholly different meaning in 1958. Throughout November and December, Véra corresponded with the accountant to whom she had delivered the previous years' tax returns. If her husband were indeed to take a leave of absence from Cornell, if the couple were to spend an itinerant year, would they have any obligations to the State of New York? It was not easy to impress upon her correspondent how perfectly nomadic they intended to be. On December 16 Véra wrote—in strict confidence—that they might never return to Ithaca, the first hint of an idea they admitted to no one. After 1958 these issues claimed an enormous amount of her time. There was every reason why Nabokov now described his wife to a visiting British journalist as his “
business manager, chauffeuse, and assistant butterfly catcher all rolled into one.” He cited her classroom responsibilities as well, although these came to an abrupt end; Véra traded bluebooks for every imaginable form of contract. In the early years Nabokov had complained legitimately that he had more agents than readers. From 1958 on he was to have countless readers, and one very overworked agent.
^*
In the opinion of those in Doussia Ergaz's office, he
could not have asked for a better one.

In addition to December exams, one last bluebook stood between Véra and the end of academic life. Throughout the year the Nabokovs had been in touch with the Swedish publisher Wahlström & Widstrand, whose translations of
Pnin
and
Lolita
were not only poor but seemingly abridged. The publisher had agreed to withdraw the mangled
Lolita
from the stores but—as Véra had been able to establish with the help of a Swedish fan—had not done so. Vladimir insisted the contracts be canceled before the publisher further tortured his prose; he had been advised against litigation, but both Nabokovs were actively fuming. In a Cornell University bluebook Véra assumed the onerous task of comparing the Swedish
Pnin
with the original, which she did with a dictionary at her elbow. With its help, and
crossbreeding her Russian and her German, she could squeeze most of the meaning from a sentence. (The exercise may have accounted for her later assertion that if she had the time she would
learn two things: Swedish and Spanish.) Whole paragraphs were indeed missing from the Walhström edition, in
which, more seriously, the political slant of a passage had been subtly modified, its anticommunism tempered.
^*
The feud with the Swedish publisher dragged on throughout the last months at Cornell and the first of Nabokov's leave. Lena Massalsky essentially broke her long silence to chastise her younger sister for having placed her husband's work with Wahlström. It was the worst of Swedish houses, Lena remonstrated, enclosing a host of clippings to bolster her claim. She acknowledged that she had heard a great deal about both
Pnin
and
Lolita
but did not allow her sister the satisfaction of saying she had actually
read
either novel. Which perhaps explains why Véra thanked Lena for the clippings, adding that they were duplicates of those that had been sent on “
by a real Swede.” Lena was understandably offended by this turn of phrase; for the record, she assured her sister, her Swedish was perfect, as indeed it was. Whatever do you mean, replied Véra, suddenly tone-deaf to the nuances of the English language.

The Wahlström matter was resolved over the summer of 1959, with the assistance of a Stockholm lawyer. In the midst of
Lolita's
worldwide triumph, the work Nabokov had attempted years before in the East Seneca Street backyard was completed, the flames this time fanned by Véra, six thousand miles away. The Swedes agreed to destroy their stock of both titles; a lawyer served as the Nabokovs' witness. On July 7, 1959, he followed the last of a convoy of trucks from the Stockholm warehouse to a dump two miles outside the city, where the books and unbound pages were unloaded. “
Ignition was made and soon the whole stack took fire,” he reported. “Tins with petrol were thrown at places where the fire wasn't easily spread. I stayed there for one hour. When I left, the surface of the stack was grey and burnt. I was convinced that no copy in the stack could be sold but it is remarkable how long a time it takes for a heap of books to burn down. It was a beautiful day with a mild wind from the lake, close by. It was indeed dramatic.” Véra pronounced the dispatch “
charming.” This book-burning she could countenance. The destruction of her husband's work was preferable to its bestselling existence in a defective form.

The pitilessness with which she pursued the Wahlström & Widstrand matter speaks forcefully to the question of whether her notion of self changed with
Lolita's
success. Finally America, and the world, had come around to the conviction on which she had predicated her existence since 1923. Another woman might have found this an occasion to soften her stance;
thirty-five years as standard-bearer had stiffened Véra into a posture from which she did not easily unbend. Save on the pages of the diary, she did not relax. The world having come finally (and briefly) to pronounce “Nabokov” correctly was, she told friends,
a great joy, but the flood of fan mail, the Argentine and Icelandic editions, did not obviate the fact that idiocy, mediocrity, philistinism, and Maurice Girodias still existed. For every discerning Conrad Brenner there was an Orville Prescott; every Jason Epstein had his Swedish counterpart.
^*
The French had banned, unbanned, rebanned
Lolita;
briefly the Belgians did the same. Various American libraries had refused to stock the novel. The book's future in England remained uncertain, the German translation was imperfect, pirated editions were rumored to be on sale in Mexico and Uruguay. For every royalty check there were a thousand memories of instability; the lawyers with whom Véra met in 1959 grew used to the influence of anxiety. A gauge of where the validation of her husband's genius had left Véra can be read in her ardent response to a March fan letter: “
We have been running into a number of very young people whose attitude to art is so remarkably adult, detached and penetrating that it warms the cockles of one's heart. How I detest those quacks and hypocrits [sic] who pretend that real great art can do anything but ennoble a man's mind!”

And then there was
Doctor Zhivago
. Following upon a history as convoluted as
Lolita's
, Pasternak's novel was published four weeks after Nabokov's. Its author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on October 23, the first Russian to claim the honor since Bunin. Over the months that followed, the two compatriots' books—both begun in 1948, one published in translation by an author still in the USSR, the other the work of a newly minted American who still contended that his Russian was better than his English—were locked in mortal combat at the top of the bestseller list.
Zhivago
made its first appearance on the list early in October, when
Lolita
assumed the number one position; within six weeks
Zhivago
had overtaken
Lolita
. The success of a book Véra considered aggressively second-rate only proved further that one should not expect too much of the world. She had read the novel before her husband and pronounced it inferior. Vladimir denounced Pasternak's work to Wilson, a reading based,
to Wilson's mind, solely on excerpts and, to Roman Grynberg's mind, solely on Véra's appraisal. Grynberg urged his friend: “
Really do read it! Otherwise you're making judgments based on the words of dear Véra, who has read a wonderful Russian book in a horrible
and hurried translation.”
^*
Vladimir agreed wholeheartedly that the translation should be distinguished from the novel. “
It's a good translation,” he assured a reporter. “It's the book that's bad.” He restrained himself as much as possible but still could not resist snorting when told that the waiting list for
Zhivago
in the Ithaca library was longer than that for
Lolita
.
^†
(While he did not admire the novel he did admire Pantheon's efforts on its behalf. “
The Zhivago gang is doing its best to prop up the sagging doctor. Should we not do something in regard to our nymphet?” he nudged Minton in May, when the books were numbers one and four respectively on the list.) Véra thought little of the book, and its admirers, for different reasons. “
The communists have succeeded in pushing this mediocre concoction into the ‘Nobel prize winners' club—merely by pretending that it had been ‘smuggled' out of USSR! A stampede of fools, led by the pro-commie knaves,” she inveighed in the diary. She crossed out the paragraph later, almost as if she regretted having wasted her energy on such a piece of goods, as if its mention marred the pages on
Lolita's
conquests. She could not have been embarrassed by the force of her sentiment, about which she was perfectly vocal. Both Nabokovs believed that the Soviet Union approved of the novel and was only putting on a show to the contrary. Véra remained always doctrinaire in her literary standards: If you were a fine writer and your politics were lousy, or questionable (Tsvetaeva), you were a bad writer. If you were a less fine writer, and your politics were laudatory (Solzhenitsyn), you were still a bad writer.

In light of the winter bestseller lists, on which Lolita hung precariously to Lara's feet, the Nabokovs' dismissal of Pasternak looked like sour grapes. Bitterly Véra had observed at the end of October that
Lolita
was still on the list, everywhere, “
although she'll probably soon be squeezed out by that pitiful and miserable ‘book' by the lowly Pasternak, whom V. is reluctant to badmouth, so as not to be misunderstood.” There was every indication he was already misunderstood. Two days later Wilson asserted that Vladimir was “
behaving rather badly about Pasternak. I have talked to him on the telephone three times lately about other matters and he did nothing but rave
about how awful
Zhivago
was. He wants to be the only Russian novelist in existence. It amuses me to see
Zhivago
just behind Lolita on the bestseller list, and I am wondering whether Pasternak—as they say about horse-races—may not nose her out.” (It could not have been easy for the author of the doomed
Hecate County
—the book had been removed from sale after selling fifty thousand copies, Wilson's first substantial earnings—to watch
Lolita
sell many thousand more.) Nabokov was aware of how the
Zhivago
denouncing sounded but could not help himself, except to condemn more generously. “
Compared to Pasternak, Mr. Steinbeck is a genius,” he edified a reporter in January. He said as much to friends at a dinner on Highland Road that winter, as a rubber-band-powered butterfly sent by Wilson flapped its way around the room. One wing was labeled “Lolita,” the other “Zhivago.” To his handful of guests, Nabokov protested that his disdain was in no way fueled by professional jealousy.
^*

Véra was not mistaken to remain on the alert. While Nabokov had not been pilloried as Bishop had feared, his success proved as objectionable as his choice of subject. Many in Ithaca saw
Lolita
as a cunning act of currency conversion; even the Highland Road landlord
felt Nabokov was thumbing his nose at America in order to get out of the country. Colleagues quibbled with the novel on artistic grounds. As if to return Véra's parry, Goethe scholar Eric Blackhall held that the book would have been stronger if limited to its first half. The analyses of
Doctor Zhivago
—the language of which cannot even invite a comparison with that of
Lolita
—invited further ill will. With friends like Wilson, Nabokov did not exactly need enemies, but he had them: He had maintained his distance from the Russian community in New York, who now spoke of the two compatriots on the bestseller list as “
the saint and the pornographer.” Against these naysayers—and the thousand people who demanded her husband's time in the last Cornell months—Véra remained on guard. Four decades of virtual anonymity had not been as fatiguing as was bestsellerdom; the diary entries are shot through with concern for poor, exhausted Vladimir. Before a New York trip in the fall she warned the Hessens that they preferred to dine quietly with them and the Grynbergs: “
V. is very tired and when there are a lot of people around he wanes,” she explained. At
Harvard she had been thought to treat her husband like a
work of art that needed to be protected. There was now cause for greater vigilance.

At the same time, events were moving so quickly she barely found time to record them. The novelist Herbert Gold accepted Nabokov's Cornell position, inheriting with it an annotated copy of
Zhivago
. The couple made plans to head west, then east to Europe for several months. Vladimir was so weary that Véra began counting the days. His teaching career came to an end—officially he was on a year's leave—as of February 1, 1959. Henceforth he would devote himself to what he had always done most passionately: writing and collecting. Véra's second career was just beginning. J. G. Smith sent out her last letter as Nabokov's secretary, a near-satire of a recommendation letter for a graduate student. Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov negotiated a series of foreign contracts. Véra packed up the family's worldly possessions—for the forty-three suitcases with which she and her mother and sisters had left Petersburg there were now thirty-four carefully inventoried cartons (chess problems, model airplanes, old reviews, entomological correspondences, stamp collections, Christmas tree decorations,
Lolita
reviews, pistol), all of them entrusted to storage. In the course of the packing she unearthed a draft of “The Enchanter,” which she triumphantly presented to her husband, who had thought the dried bud from which
Lolita
had miraculously blossomed to have been lost. The same day he wrote Minton, proposing a translation.
^*
John Updike has written that Nabokov “
had ample reason for artistic exhaustion” on his arrival in Ithaca; Véra had ample reason for exhaustion on the departure. In the last weeks at Cornell she whimpered just a little to Sylvia Berkman: “
I meant to write you this much sooner but I am simply losing track of things because of the impossible pressure of work. Vladimir refuses to take the least interest in his own business matters, and I do not feel equipped to handle them properly. Besides, I am by no means a Sévigné, and writing ten to fifteen letters in one day leaves me limp.”