Vera (43 page)

Hers were hardly sentimental letters to a young poet. Véra advised Dmitri immediately to obtain the existing translations, “
which you will need for consultation but not for plagiary.” He could count on invaluable—and free—assistance at their end, with difficult and obsolete phrasings. On his end he should devote as much as an hour and a half to a page, proceeding at a pace of three to four pages a day. He was to work every day, without vacations. “It is very enjoyable work but it is also quite exacting and above all it has to be followed up with the utmost perseverance because there will be a
time limit,” his mother advised. Moreover, as the contract was yet to be signed, she advised total discretion. Did he feel up to the task? If so she could promise that a more ambitious project would follow. “I want a quick reaction
by mail
,” Véra signed off, making it clear that the first dollars of Dmitri's advance were not to be applied to a long-distance call. The severity of her tone may be explained by a letter she had written a few days earlier on the translator's behalf. The admissions secretary at the Harvard Law School had wondered when the school might receive Dmitri's acceptance deposit. The task of explaining that he would be devoting a year to musical training and should thus like to defer the Law School's offer fell to his mother, who apologized for her son's silence. She was preoccupied with his future that summer, and worried too about his grasp of practical matters, in which she felt him sadly deficient; she was aware of how utterly independent she had been at her son's age. Berkman knew how difficult the career decision had been for the Nabokovs, but felt in the end they had done the right thing for all concerned. “
If anyone wants a chance as much as he wanted that one, it does seem that he ought not to be denied,” she reassured the future basso's mother.

The Lermontov project was tackled over the next year behind a thicket of pronouns. Véra grappled with the contract; she devoted some of her summer to the 1839 text, the first major prose novel in Russian, and a work to which Tolstoy's style has been traced. A year later, as the text neared completion, Nabokov mentioned that Dmitri “
has assisted Véra and me very ably in our Lermontov translation.” A month afterward he apprised Levin: “
I have finished (with Dmitri's able assistance) the Lermontov book and sent it to Doubleday.” At the same time Véra described the project thusly: “
Last year Dmitri began a translation for Doubleday, and this summer, in Utah, V. finished it. I had my share, too.” She was not always so modest. At the end of June 1956 she wrote with relief to Elena Levin, in a dazzling display of unparallel pronouns: “
We have just completed a lot of work (translation), which took up all of my time, and finally I have some time for myself.” She had been forthright about the division of labor with Dmitri, to whom she had initially made it clear that the less time he asked of his father, the better he acquitted himself of the task. Earlier in June she had chastised him: “
Instead of taking a good rest, your father and I have been working all this time on the ‘Hero,' and shall be saddled with this job to the end of our vacation. Is this fair?” In the fall of 1957 Vladimir was too busy to offer up suggestions for flap copy, which Véra supplied. Much later Dmitri credited his parents with polishing the Lermontov translation, for which father and son are credited in the published edition. At the end of 1955 Nabokov complained that he was doing three jobs, “
each of which is really made for a whole man.” This
was true—what with
Onegin, Pnin
, Lermontov, and the teaching he could have said four—but the support staff was superb.

A month before
Lolita
was published in Paris Wilson visited the Nabokovs in Ithaca. He had never seen them so cheerful; later he theorized that the difficulties with
Lolita
had had a
stimulating effect on Vladimir. The couple appeared to him to be flourishing, though they were more bound up in Dmitri and his exploits than Wilson might have liked; with horror and pride, Vladimir held forth on the sexual habits of the younger generation. The visit was even more of a success than his hosts would have realized.
Wilson happily confided in a mutual friend afterward that having been thoroughly repelled by
Lolita
, he was delighted to be reminded of how much he liked the novel's author. Dismayed by her loyalty, he was as comfortable as he ever was with Véra. He could not suppress a snideness about her assistance in administering her husband's exams, even while he admired the couple's sacrosanct family relations. The two butted heads openly about the French definition of a word, which rather appropriately happened to be “fastidious.” Véra held that it meant “hard to please,” while Wilson insisted—dictionary citations traveled back and forth over the next weeks—that it meant “tiresome.” (Vladimir sided with his wife.) Fastidious as she was, Véra conceded defeat only grudgingly, although when she read of the argument much later she scrawled “
My mistake” next to the account.

Just before she disappeared again behind the typewriter, she sent up another quiet flare of self-assertion. Perhaps because she was writing to a woman who published, and who had enjoyed a rich academic career, she closed her summer letter to Berkman:

This was the long letter that had begun with the report of Dmitri's graduation, a missive from which she at first appeared to have exempted herself. It is not the first instance of Véra distancing herself from the enterprise at home, but it is the first that hints at some kind of personal accomplishment. The words “value of my own” rustle loudly on the page, and with a certain poignancy. They prove but a glimmer. Within days she was subsumed by the typing of
Pnin
, and by the move to the small cottage she had found for the fall semester. She spent the first week on Hanshaw Road alone, as Vladimir was
hospitalized with a severe attack of lumbago, a misadventure that nearly resulted in a chapter called “Pnin at the Hospital.”

Girodias published
Lolita
in September, nearly before his author realized he had done so; Véra and Vladimir held the book's two volumes in their hands for the first time on October 8, 1955. The novel's early days were quiet ones. Both Nabokovs were more distracted by the fortunes of
Pnin
, not being so much cosseted in New York, where Pat Covici was finding the manuscript a collection of sketches and not a full-fledged novel. “My Poor Pnin” proved more deserving of his original title than its author intended; after months of deliberation, Covici rejected the book. (The editor to whom Nabokov had first mentioned
Lolita
and who had been the first to contract for
Pnin
, Covici published neither novel in the end.) A measure of Vladimir's desperation can be read in the fact that he turned next to Harper, whose publication of
Conclusive Evidence
he had so much maligned.
Pnin
would remain homeless until mid-1956, when Epstein finally made an offer for the book, no less concerned about its marketing than Covici had been. Speaking for his Doubleday colleagues, Epstein allowed: “
As one of us has said, it's the kind of book that the customer will have to read in advance before taking it home with him.” If Vladimir was discouraged about
Pnin's
fate, as he should have been, if Véra had qualms about
Lolita
—and it is impossible to think she could not have, when Bishop had estimated that there was a better than average chance her husband would be fired, and they were financially stable for the first time in thirty years—then Graham Greene delivered the Nabokovs a Christmas present at the end of 1955 disproportionate to any they had or would ever receive. Asked by the (London)
Sunday Times
to name the three best books of 1955, he included an English-language novel of which no one had heard, available neither in America nor in Great Britain, but that could be purchased, in a two-volume, light-green edition, in Paris.

The forces Greene set in motion in London were some time in making themselves felt in America. For the spring sabbatical Elena Levin had found a quiet, first-floor apartment with kitchenette for the Nabokovs at the Continental Hotel in Cambridge, where they arrived on February 3, 1956, after a valiant battle with icy roads. They settled in for a three-month stay, spent primarily at Widener. It was at the Continental that they read, in Harvey Breit's February 26
Times Book Review
column, that a work called
Lolita
—“a long French novel about nymphets,” author unnamed—was causing a minor scandal in London. Having been named by one paper a best book of 1955, it was denounced in another as one of the filthiest. (The Nabokovs' real debt was less to Greene than to
The Sunday Express's
conservative editor in chief,
John Gordon, who led the countercharge.
^*
Together Greene and Gordon worked their combinational magic.) Two weeks later Breit elaborated on the mysterious French work, revealing the name of its author, and quoting Harry Levin's uncredited assessment of the book a sort of cross between
Daisy Miller
and
The Possessed
. Gallimard promptly acquired French translation rights.
^†

From the room at the Continental Véra responded to an immediate volley of publishers' queries. Gently she assured the editors at Indiana University Press that while her husband applauded their spirit of adventure, this was not a book for them; there was a reason she had sent it to a Paris agent in the first place. She composed in part or in whole a reassuring letter to the devoted Pat Covici, who worried for Vladimir's reputation:
Lolita
could in no way be said to be “
lewd and libertine.” The novel was a tragedy, and the tragic and the obscene were mutually exclusive.
^‡
At the beginning of May, the couple set off by way of the Grand Canyon for Utah, where they had rented a
lovely cottage amid five acres of sage and cedar with a glorious view of Mount Carmel, accommodations that proved as satisfactory as those in Arizona had proved unsatisfactory.
^§
Here Véra, or Vladimir, or—as Véra was once half-seriously to refer to them later, “
V & V Inc.”—finished the Lermontov translation. Nabokov continued with his
Onegin
commentaries, which he hoped to complete by Christmas. Mount Carmel was lovely until late June, when a snake attempted to pay Véra a visit, from a windowsill. Shortly afterward she drove Vladimir north, collecting along the way.

In Ithaca the Nabokovs settled into a new house, at 425 Hanshaw Road. Véra braced herself for the familiar academic drill. “
Another busy year. Another
dreadful
Ithaca winter,” she moaned, well before the snow had begun to fall. “The winters here
are
dreadful, cold, dark, icy, complicated by driving over icy steep hill streets. We have no garage this year and shall probably have to shovel out our car to drive to college in the morning for the best part
of two or three months.”
^*
Despite the academic duties, despite Pushkin, Vladimir was attempting work on a new novel. He was exhausted by his efforts; Véra sounds exhausted by him. “
Since he is working all day and all night and has completely tortured himself I am looking forward to the end of this book. Although I do know that having finished one thing he immediately moves to the next,” she wrote her sister-in-law in a letter that began with the assurance that Vladimir had been planning to write her for some time. Two months later he claimed to be on the brink of doing so, though when Véra reminded him of his promise she met inevitably with the same response: “
Yes, of course, but today I am too tired.” She suggested Elena blame
Onegin
. She herself did, and yet knew this to be her own fault. A year later, when
Onegin
was still not finished,
she grumbled that she was beginning to hate Pushkin, who had for so long kept her husband from a new book. The Master stood quite literally in Nabokov's way; by April 1957, when Véra had begun to type out Canto One of the annotated translation, the manuscript had grown to waist height.
^†
In Paris,
Lolita
had been banned at the request of the British Home Office, who did not want copies of the filthy green volume floating across the Channel. So long as her husband's position was not threatened Véra did not shy from controversy. The woman who was capable of holding up her end of a nine-year silence noted with satisfaction that the novel was creating “
a lovely row in the French press.”

For every one of his friends who weighed in with misgivings about
Lolita
in the course of 1956, there was a publisher somewhere in the world who wrote to express interest. Between vetting
Pnin
proofs and co-proctoring her husband's exams, Véra fielded these queries. Late in the summer, the Danes commissioned the book. At the same time Jason Epstein arranged for
The Anchor Review
to carry a long excerpt from the novel, a move calculated to pave the way toward U.S. publication. Véra drove Vladimir to New York in mid-October to confer with the magazine's editors, at the Epsteins' apartment. At the meeting Nabokov was asked how he happened to know so much
about little girls; Véra explained that her husband had sat on the Ithaca buses with a notepad and listened carefully. He had also haunted playgrounds, until his doing so had become awkward. There were otherwise no little girls in his life. The second matter of business the Nabokovs had hoped
to conduct in New York—a contribution to a Festschrift being prepared for Aldanov—went unattended. In a lovely instance of the Old World falling prey to the New, the Buick was towed, and the half day meant for Aldanov was devoted instead to recovering the car.