Vera (42 page)

This was hardly Véra's first race across a continent with calamitous news ringing in her ears. After the Ukraine, and the crossing of Germany in 1937, and the mad dash to Saint-Nazaire, she could have been forgiven had she developed a railroad phobia, which she did not. When Lisbet Thompson suffered a similar scare in 1961 Véra recommended her favored corrective: a hearty dose of mental discipline. “Keep track of all your symptoms, consult a good specialist, but do not allow those upsetting thoughts to preoccupy you. These thoughts occur to every person alive. But the only way to keep sane
and well is to combat them with all the power of will you have,” she counseled her friend. She had concluded as much in the midst of the 1954 misadventure, upon being told with great certainty that she had breast cancer. “One just
must
train oneself not to indulge these thoughts,” she assured Lisbet. (The only casualty of the repeated misdiagnoses was Véra's confidence in American medicine, which she concluded to be a brew of improbable reasoning and
black magic.) While friends were told of a brush with ill health, Véra's indisposition was typically described as gallbladder or
liver trouble. Without elaboration, she reported that she was recovering quickly. She was well enough by August 23 to write to the New Mexico landlord, from Anna Feigin's apartment in New York. Gently she suggested that further rent should be forgiven. Despite the circumstances this was a godsend; after the hospital expenses, the Nabokovs were unable even to send their monthly check abroad to Vladimir's family. They returned to Ithaca “
in a pitiful state of destitution and debt.” A few days after they had done so, Doussia Ergaz's response to Véra's August 6 letter arrived in Taos. It was some time in catching up with the couple. Ergaz knew just the publisher for
Lolita
. She would love to see the manuscript in question.

On October 1
Lolita
made a fourth trip to New York, with an unsigned letter; Laughlin read the novel promptly and just as promptly rejected it. He too advised against publication, which he deemed an act of self-destruction for both author and publisher. Undaunted, Nabokov directed Laughlin to forward the manuscript to
Roger Straus at Farrar, Straus & Young, taking care to avoid using the postal service—the first line of censorship, as the Comstock Act had made it a crime to distribute obscenity by the mails—in doing so.
^*
Straus was longer with the novel, but reluctantly concluded on November 11 that the work could not be introduced to America without a court battle, which he did not believe could be won.
^†
Moreover no publisher “
in his right mind” would consider doing so for an anonymous author. Nabokov had no intention of attaching his name even to a proposed excerpt, allowing only that he might feel differently in a year's time.

It was Véra who replied to Straus's letter. The rejection was less troubling than was the fact that the publisher had mentioned that Vladimir might have heard of Straus's reading “from various of our mutual friends.” This line set off alarm bells in Ithaca. Who exactly did Straus have in mind?
queried Véra.
He admitted that he had discussed the manuscript with Edmund and Elena Wilson, as well as with Mary McCarthy and her husband Bowden Broadwater.
^*
This news seemed to mollify Véra, though those friends' reactions would not have. With the exception of Elena Wilson, who shared her high opinion of the work, the consensus was that its author had lost his mind. “
The poor darling had clearly flipped,” was the reaction at the McCarthy-Broadwater household. At Wilson's suggestion, Jason Epstein asked to see the manuscript. He did not add that Wilson had already offered him a preview of sorts, or how Wilson had billed the two black springbinders. “
It's repulsive,” Nabokov's early and most energetic American advocate had advised Epstein, words he toned down only slightly when writing the author himself.
^†
In truth the book temporarily soured him on Nabokov: “
Did you read his
Lolita
by the way? Thought it was so repulsive that it rather put me off him,” Wilson griped the following year. (Elena Levin suspected he found the novel particularly tasteless for the same reason White had resisted it: Wilson had a very young daughter. Harry and Elena Levin had no such problems with the novel, which they found admirable and hugely erotic. They did however come to understand their friend's sudden, earlier interest in their prepubescent daughter, whom Vladimir had taken to interviewing exhaustively.) Early in December Nabokov mailed Epstein the manuscript, exacting the usual promises about incognitos.

At the end of 1954, one year after Pat Covici had done so, Epstein read and rejected
Lolita
for Doubleday. The report he submitted to the firm's editor in chief is a masterpiece of good sense. Epstein too found Humbert's obsession, and Nabokov's exhaustive, intimate account of it, repulsive; in its plot the book was strained at best. But he recognized the author's pursuit of conscience behind Humbert's self-destruction. “
That the passion should be such a sordid one is the mark of the author's perversity—and he is a remarkably perverse man—but it doesn't deprive the novel of the merits that it does have,” he wrote, voting against the work on the grounds of “its outlandish
perverseness,” but advocating a few more readings. “Without suggesting any qualitative comparisons, it would be fair to say that he has, in effect, written
Swann's Way
as if he had been James Joyce,” Epstein concluded, the first to recognize what Véra and Elena Wilson alone believed. Viking, Simon & Schuster, New Directions, Farrar, Straus, and Doubleday were then “
the four American publishers, W, X, Y, Z”—they should of course have been “the five American publishers, V, W, X, Y, Z”—whom Nabokov was to describe as having seen the book early on. None of them appears in any shape or form to have suggested the author transform his twelve-year-old into a boy, or Humbert into a farmer, as
Nabokov later claimed.
^*
But none of them offered to publish the thing either.

“
If only everything would fall into place soon,” Véra griped in January 1955, bemoaning sons and their careless studies, financial difficulties that were that winter as acute as they were chronic, and her own health. She had been unwell for an entire year with one thing or another, and was bored of it. She made no mention of the rejection letters that had been piling up in her files, or of the week she had spent teaching in her husband's stead. (Her attitude toward the rejections is clear from her advice to Sylvia Berkman, who had trouble placing a short story at the time. Véra counseled patience and the long view: “
Just think of all the rejections received by people who got tremendously famous later on so that the same publishers who had kept snubbing them before clamored for MSS.,” she wrote, choosing as an example Sinclair Lewis, whose work her husband had been deriding for years.) Ultimately things did fall into place, although the interim months proved draining. In February
Lolita
sailed off across the ocean. Vladimir had no illusions about where he was sending the manuscript. “
I suppose it will be finally published by some shady firm with a Viennese-Dream name—eg ‘Silo,' ” he predicted.
^†
Nor was there any delay about sending
Lolita
off. The manuscript returned from Doubleday and went to Doussia Ergaz within the week, which suggests that the couple had by now decisively voted to abandon
hopes for American publication and determined to try their luck abroad. Generally their correspondence fell off dramatically at this time.
Even the Karpoviches wondered about them.

The year was in large part consumed by
Pnin
, although so many projects littered the Stewart Avenue apartment that Nabokov had every reason to apply for a sabbatical. (He was granted leave for the spring 1956 semester only.) This was the winter that the “Old Man and the Fish” translation had been expected, a project that was almost certainly to have been Véra's. Nabokov had written Chekhov Publishing in the first person plural to indicate that the novel was awaited, and earlier had proposed: “
I do have a firs-trate translator for you, and that is my wife, Véra Nabokov. She has translated a good deal for me during our thirty years' association, and I can highly recommend her.” With a new book under way it was unlikely he would have agreed to translate anything, much less Hemingway. While the project never materialized, Nabokov did convince Jason Epstein to commission a translation of Mikhail Lermontov's
A Hero of Our Time
, a work on which Véra would collaborate. All the Stewart Avenue industry bore fruit toward springtime:
The New Yorker
bought “Pnin's Day,” which ran in April, the week of Vladimir's fifty-sixth birthday, and the same week that Doussia Ergaz reported that she had read and loved
Lolita
. She planned the following day to share it with the publisher of
Histoire d'O
.

The agent of providence assumed an unlikely form. Maurice Girodias, the colorful publisher of
The Whip Angels, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
, and a host of other classics, took to
Lolita
immediately.
^*
“
I felt I had the obvious, immediate duty to publish the book,” he remembered, far more impressed by the novel than he had been by Ergaz's delicate description of it, which had left him expecting scholarly pomposity or, worse, something “frighteningly respectable.” His
second and third readers were equally awed. Girodias's only condition—even before reading the manuscript—was that its author attach his name to the work. “
If the publisher were to propose very favorable terms, I would be tempted to permit the book to be published under my name,” Vladimir conceded, warning Doussia Ergaz that cuts in the novel were, however, out of the question. He must have felt tired of being asked to sign the thing, and more comfortable doing so for a publisher an ocean away.
He knew well how distant those writers' reputations remained.
^*
An advance of four hundred thousand francs, or about a thousand dollars, was agreed upon, to which Vladimir telegraphed his assent. The sum was twice as much as Girodias had previously paid for a book. Ergaz drew up a simple twelve-clause agreement granting Girodias world English-language rights, which Vladimir signed before an Ithaca notary on June 20.
^†
These constituted the two pages Véra most often parsed in the next decade; she must have known them by heart. Girodias's Olympia Press immediately set about preparing the edition so as to take advantage of the fall tourist trade. After the long wait,
Lolita
was rushed into print.

Shortly after agreeing to the Paris publication, the Nabokovs shared the good news with Morris Bishop, who admitted to feeling more unsettled than celebratory. Bishop was as capable as the next Jaguar-driving polymath of composing a dirty limerick, but was all the same alarmed by Vladimir's report. “
I queried him on the scabrous subject,” he confided in his wife. “It is about a man who loves little girls, a subject which (rightly I think) is absolutely taboo in this country. He says there is not an indecent word in it, and it is really a tragic and terrible story. Well, I hope it doesn't make a real scandal.” His admonitions were not what either Nabokov wanted to hear. Their delight that this misfit of a child had finally found a home must have commingled with their concern; it may explain why Bishop felt his friend defended the novel as one would
one's idiot child. Vladimir knew the work to be provocative well aside from its subject matter—he sent excerpted pages to twenty-two-year-old Dmitri, boasting, “
It's full of pepper and gun powder”—but this time around more was at stake: America, and Cornell, represented refuges for which the Nabokovs had fought long and hard. Véra
shared her fears with Alison Bishop, who found her beside herself with worry. Her husband was fifty-six years old. How would he find another job? She later denied having harbored any such apprehensions, with the
same vehemence that she would deny that her husband had attempted to publish the novel under a pseudonym, an act that seemed as incriminating in retrospect
as not having done so felt criminal at the time. On both these points Véra did protest too much.
^*
Furthermore, her sentiments were almost inevitably aligned with those of her husband, who expressed concern with what might happen after publication at Cornell, where one could be dismissed for “
moral turpitude.” As a result, he conceded Girodias use of his name but made great efforts to ensure that Cornell's not be revealed. One of the great ironies of
Lolita's
publication was the extent to which its author went to protect the academic position from which the novel was at long last to liberate him.

The second triumph of 1955 was Dmitri's graduation from Harvard. The ceremony itself was a source of great pleasure, with the caps and gowns, the celebratory lunch afterward on the lawn. As Véra reported to Berkman after the June festivities: “
He was happy, V. was happy, and ‘cum laude' was an unexpected blessing.” To his parents' initial dismay, Dmitri had expressed an interest in pursuing an operatic career. As much as they had proved expert at scrambling financially, they wished no such insecurity on their son; the tribulations of an artistic career were too vivid to them both. While soliciting friends' opinions about Dmitri's passion for singing, they strongly urged him to consider law school, to which he was accepted. There were other plans for him as well. As early as January 1955, Vladimir was flogging his son the translator on Covici, as he would later on Epstein, as he had earlier flogged Véra on the Chekhov editors. (This was a very special offer, Vladimir informed Covici, as he did not customarily check others' work for free.) The Lermontov translation was entrusted to Dmitri. This left Véra with an additional responsibility over the summer, when “for Pnin's sake” the couple remained in Ithaca, despite the “
nostalgic longing” she felt for the West every spring. She labored to impress her considerable work ethic on her son.