Nabokov in America (41 page)

That Polly would display her deep pain to “a perfect stranger” unnerved Véra, a much more reserved quantity. Then Dmitri showed up. He had been at the weekly meeting of his Army unit; the dining party walked around the corner for a look at his latest car, a
’57 MG
⁶
that even his mother admitted was “a little beauty.” Polly Minton asked for a ride in it. Dmitri zoomed off with her, and Minton and the Nabokovs then took a cab to their hotel, where, as Véra noted in diary lines she later crossed through, “we three sat and waited and waited.” Minton, another confessional American, had told them in the cab that in
addition to his showgirl he had been carrying on with the writer of the
Time
article, a woman who had taken the opportunity to score off her rival in przint, calling her a “
superannuated
⁷
 … nymphet [with] a bubbly smile on her face.” “Between his two little harlots,” Véra wrote solemnly, “M[inton] ruined his family life.” He spoke “quite openly” within the cabdriver’s hearing, too. “Amazing Americans!” she concluded.

Dmitri and 1957 MGA

And still they waited. Maybe the joyriders had gotten in an accident. “Finally, they did come.” The Mintons left, then “Dmitri, with a sly smile, informed us that they had driven straight to his home from the restaurant, put the car in the garage, then—he had to get something from his flat, Polly wanted to see his flat (after having seen his car) and so on…”

“And next day,” Véra wrote, “Minton told V., ‘I hear Dmitri gave Polly a good time last night.’ ” Slightly aghast, she concluded, “
I wonder if this sort of thing
⁸
is
normal or typical of today’s America? A bad novel by some O’Hara or Cozens suddenly come to life.”

Clearly, the publicity tornado could carry people away. The excitement of being number one on the bestseller chart and having coinages from your book entering the language—
nymphet
⁹
, for instance—could have odd consequences. Edmund Wilson remarked on the strange “
rampancy
¹⁰
” of
Lolita
, which “evidently struck a deep chord in the great American breast.” Its lurid aspect attracted readers and made many find it revelatory. America
was
lurid; its literature had long been a bearer of sensational news, particularly sensational sexual news. The bestselling novel of the American fifties, Grace Metalious’s
Peyton Place
¹¹
(1956)—a book that Nabokov amusingly claimed never to have heard of—was its steamy twin. Both found sexy secrets behind facades of tame normalcy; both featured a stepfather raping a daughter; both had a
New Hampshire
¹²
setting. There was also murder in both, and rampant lust. Part of the comedy of
Lolita
is that refined Continental Humbert finds himself in such a text, up to his neck in potboiler elements. Not everyone cared that the book was a
parody
.

The interviews, the constant trips to New York, new concerns about foreign editions and how to deal with so much sudden income made it wise, as well as attractive, to set down the burden of teaching. Nabokov requested a year’s leave, and Cornell granted it,
on condition that he find someone
¹³
to take over his courses. On November 16,
Doctor Zhivago
became the number-one bestseller in the
Times
. Pasternak had been awarded the
Nobel Prize
¹⁴
in October, a spur to sales, and
Lolita
was just behind
Zhivago
on the list for the next few months. Another whopping payout came from the sale of paperback rights (
$100,000
¹⁵
) in mid-November, and Véra, trying to vet the complicated movie-sale contract and aware, in a general sense, of looming tax problems, spoke to
law professors
¹⁶
at Cornell and to the contracts specialist at Putnam’s, and in early ’59 she sought counsel at
Paul, Weiss
¹⁷
, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, in Manhattan. The Nabokovs were unnerved not only by an impending change in tax bracket. They had lived through two ruinous inflations, one after the Revolution and another in Weimar Berlin, and Vladimir, in the days just after the movie sale, requested that his publisher pay half his earnings in “
government bonds
¹⁸
or other safe stock” as an inflation hedge.

From inside the tornado they thought of Dmitri. The job of translating
A Hero of Our Time
had not worked out as hoped; even so, when Nabokov had the ear of his publisher, in the fizzy days just before
Lolita
exploded, he brought up the idea of a translation of
Invitation to a Beheading
, stipulating that “
the translator must be
¹⁹
: 1) male, 2)
American-born or English. He must also have a sound and scholarly knowledge of Russian. I do not know anyone who would meet these requirements except my son—but he is unfortunately much too busy.”

By January ’59 Dmitri had become available, and
his father signed
²⁰
an agreement whereby Dmitri collected an immediate advance. “I cannot tell you
how delighted
²¹
I am by this,” Véra wrote her friend Elena Levin in Cambridge. Dmitri had not been well. He had had “permanent little ailments,” Véra wrote in her diary; “he is so big and strong, and his health has been excellent before he entered the military service.
Then he caught that cold
²²
, or flu, or virus or whatever it was and could not get rid of it.” In fact, he had been ailing for a year. In ’62 he was diagnosed with Reiter’s syndrome, an inflammatory polyarthritis often seen in young men following a
venereal infection
²³
. Véra thought he was overworked and approved when he gave up his office job—the
only office job
²⁴
he would ever hold.

January 19, 1959, Nabokov taught his
last class at Cornell
²⁵
, “to which some glamour was added,” he told Minton, by “a reporter-photographer” who snapped pictures throughout. The
attention from the world press
²⁶
was nonstop. In Manhattan in late February, the Nabokovs fielded calls from
Time
,
Life
, the
New York Times
, the London
Daily Mail
and
Daily Express
, and other journals, and Nabokov declined three TV appearances. Véra was writing up to
fifteen letters
²⁷
per day for business.
*
Meetings and bouts with minor illnesses kept them in New York until April 18, and they were being lionized the whole time—Véra recalled this period as “wonderful” and recorded that hundreds of
people showed up
²⁸
to honor them.

Before they took off for the West again, Nabokov settled some business that meant a great deal to him, placing
Eugene Onegin
, the central work of scholarship of his life, with the Bollingen Press of Princeton. Other elements of a writer’s apotheosis rarely seen outside of writers’ dreams now also attended him. The publisher of the upcoming British edition of
Lolita
, George Weidenfeld, met with the Nabokovs during their New York stay and
made promises
²⁹
—almost all of which were eventually kept—to publish new or first English editions of
Bend Sinister
,
Invitation to a Beheading
,
Nikolai Gogol
,
Speak, Memory
,
Laughter in the
Dark
, and
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
, along with either
The Gift
or
The Defense
. Weidenfeld faced a still uncertain censorship environment in England, and publishing worthy, nonpedophilic titles by Nabokov might burnish
Lolita
’s case, but it was his canny sense that his author would now carry all before him—that he was now, on the strength of his groundbreaking novel, one of those writers whose every word would attract readers for many years—that led him to be bold.

The excellent French translation of
Lolita
, from Gallimard, had been completed; Nabokov
checked proofs
³⁰
while in New York. Dmitri’s work on
Beheading
was also looking good. The annoyance of having to do their son’s work for him would not be repeated, at least never on the scale of
A Hero of Our Time
; the fond hope of bringing him aboard the family ark, every Nabokov volume going back to
Mary
(1926) sharing a berth with its approved translation, seemed now
likely of fulfillment
³¹
. All this plus a long western vacation. They took a southerly route out of New York, wanting to get to warm weather as directly as possible. An early stop was Gatlinburg, Tennessee, gateway to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which they had first seen in ’41, on the epochal first trip west. “We drove slowly,” Véra noted of this part of their journey, and the Tennessee highlands were “
full of flowering
³²
dogwood and numberous … bushes and trees which colored the whole mountainsides.”

The Nabokovs said a long farewell to America. They did not know it was farewell, or admit that it was; they were aware of a certain indelicacy in having scored big, only to turn their backs on the country that had refuged them, that, one might argue, had made Nabokov a world writer.
†
In the encounter between his cut-glass sensibility and the strange and multicolored American material had been shaped great books.
Pale Fire
was the last, half-American (conceived in the United States but mostly written abroad; American in settings before taking off for Kinbote’s fantasyland); after that came
Ada
, the magnum opus, clever and relentless and high-handed, full of mechanistic mating in a Hugh Hefnerian dreamscape, full also of antic wordplay, reminiscent of
Finnegans Wake
, which Nabokov had once pronounced “a
cold pudding
³³
of a book, a persistent snore in the next room.”

Véra’s “Amazing Americans!” suggests fondness, and that was a big part of her response to America, also of Vladimir’s. But they were also appalled. The Dmitri project did not relent for years. In America it had always been challenging, with their son’s large appetite for risky experience working against their reasonable desire to see him well placed, to see him make something of a good mind and advantages. Then with Vladimir’s immense success, their arguments against buying this car or that, against running through money that wasn’t his, were undermined—why
not
live a large, playful life?

Véra was also an early alarm-sounder about American turmoil. In May ’58 she recorded, “
Last night a howling mob
³⁴
of Cornell students converged on President Malott’s house. When he came out to speak to them, they pelted him with eggs and rocks.” The reason for the protest was “the projected prohibition of so-called ‘apartment parties,’ which may be unfair but cannot be refuted by mob violence,” Véra warned sternly. “Professor Sale’s youngest son, Kirk”—Kirkpatrick Sale, editor of the student paper and future author on the left—“who was to be graduated in June, [was] suspended as recognized ‘whipper up’ of the student crowds.”

Véra’s reaction can be ascribed to her long memory for Bolshevik street actions. Or she might have found youthful destruction repellent in its own right.
Windows were broken
³⁵
in the Cornell president’s house. Her strict anti-Communism led sometimes to odd ideas, for instance the conviction, shared with her husband, that Boris Pasternak was willingly serving Soviet masters; that the manuscript of
Zhivago
had been cleverly delivered into the hands of (no surprise here)
a
Communist
³⁶
publisher in Italy, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli; that Soviet denunciations of the novel were false, having “the object of increasing foreign sales,” generating foreign exchange that “they would eventually pocket and spend on propaganda abroad,” as Vladimir explained to an interviewer. “Any intelligent Russian would see … that the book is pro-Bolshevist and historically false, if only because it
ignores the Liberal Revolution
³⁷
of spring, 1917,” the takeover attempt by Nabokov’s father’s party.

By the late sixties, from Montreux, Véra’s dislike of noisy students had hardened. She considered them fanatics, and by ’72 she was proud to say, “
We are all for Nixon
³⁸
, emphatically against McGovern whom we find an irresponsible demagogue who deliberately misleads his followers and is doing damage to America… . We are completely disgusted by
The NY Rev. of Books (the ‘radical chic’ medium)” because of its stance against the Vietnam War, which both Nabokovs supported.

Gone from America, they found America frightening. They took at face value young radicals’ estimates of their power—the idea that they could make a revolution, for instance. In the seventies they became friendly with William F. Buckley, who gave them a subscription to his
conservative
³⁹
National Review
, which they read. Other sources led Véra to understand that
America was on the verge
⁴⁰
of a race war, that you took your life in your hands to venture out on the streets of New York, that the wheels had come off the society. At the same time, they detested America bashing and defended U.S. foreign policy. In ’66, when
de Gaulle led France
⁴¹
out of NATO, defying the United States, they canceled a French vacation near Mont Blanc. Insults to the
American flag
⁴²
, by burning it or misquoting its image, enraged them.