Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (45 page)

As his social circle diminished, his politics became more rigid: a blanket yes to Vietnam and no to student radicals. Living in relative isolation with Véra probably did nothing to soften the stances he had taken—she was even more strident than he was—and headlines
about the social upheaval in 1960s America were enough to rattle both Nabokovs.

In such a high-stakes game, Véra had become an advocate of hangings and life sentences, but when it came to the death penalty, Nabokov held fast to his father’s position against it.
²
After the Kennedy assassination, Nabokov watched footage of the shooting and the newsreels of the just-captured Lee Harvey Oswald. Not yet twentyfive, a small figure in an old undershirt, Oswald was marched in to meet the press near midnight with a cut on his forehead and swelling over one eye. He seemed confused in his answers and quietly asked for legal assistance. (“How did you hurt your eye?” “A policeman hit me.”
³
) Dmitri Nabokov recalled later that his father’s sympathy in the moment was all for Oswald, fearing that the police had beaten an innocent man.
⁴

Despite his strong personal convictions, Nabokov would not lift a finger in the world of public policy. When the California Committee Against Capital Punishment asked for his help in 1960, he acknowledged that he supported their goal without reservation but would not contribute an article saying so. He had, he told them, already written “a whole book on the subject.”
⁵

In his eyes his books
were
his political statements, in every sense of the word. Though Nabokov could not help but notice America’s vulgarity after seeing it up close, and could not resist threading its book clubs, chewing gum, and prejudice into his stories, this was the treatment he had given almost everything he loved. But he found overt America-bashing distasteful and offensive. When it came to political systems, Nabokov had seen the competition, knew which horse he wanted to win, and was not going to do anything to trip it up.

In the spring of 1964, Nabokov returned to America for a month to promote
Eugene Onegin
. After waiting longer than
Lolita
to see the light of day, the critical edition had finally made it into print through the auspices of a private foundation. While stateside, the Nabokovs headed to Cornell to pull some materials from storage in
Ithaca. Old friends there found Nabokov more imperious than he had been in their fonder recollections, and noted that Véra looked more regal than ever.
⁶

Nabokov had visited New York City briefly two years before for the premiere of Kubrick’s
Lolita
, but the country to which he returned had changed in his absence. Federal troops had been sent to quell the riots that followed the forced desegregation of the University of Mississippi. Thirty-seven-year-old civil rights leader Medgar Evers had been assassinated by a reactionary the summer before. An African Cornell exchange student had been viciously beaten in Alabama that September, forcing the State Department to make an international apology to Ghana. Two weeks after Nabokov departed Ithaca for the last time, an assistant dean there launched a team-taught seminar on “The Negro Revolt” and what it would mean for America.
⁷

Racism against black Americans appalled Nabokov, who had touted Pushkin’s interracial background as early as 1942 at Spelman College as an argument against segregation.
⁸
And in his curious personal mix of conservative and liberal politics, Nabokov found an unlikely kindred spirit in President Lyndon Johnson, whose commitment to war in Vietnam and support for civil rights mixed a perfectly Nabokovian cocktail.

When Johnson had his appendix removed in the fall of 1965 and flashed his scar to reporters (an action entirely outside the possible universe for Véra, who had undergone the same procedure the year before), Nabokov sent the recovering president a telegram wishing him well and praising the “ADMIRABLE WORK YOU ARE ACCOMPLISHING.”
⁹
Johnson had backed the Civil Rights Act the year before and the Voting Rights Act that March, both of which surely pleased Nabokov. And the sustained aerial bombardment of North Vietnam that had begun the same month (and would continue for three years) likely met with equal approval in Montreux, even as it drove tens of thousands of protesters into the streets from Berkeley to New York just days after Nabokov’s telegram arrived.

Véra reserved a particular fury for the student demonstrators, wishing their universities would deal more harshly with them, believing that naïve Americans had failed to heed the warnings about Communists who had managed to infiltrate and destroy the U.S. educational system. Nabokov family friend William Buckley, running that month as a dark-horse candidate for mayor of New York City, was also unimpressed. Referring to the protesters as mincing slobs strutting their effeminate resentment, Buckley suggested they were the kind of people who “would have deserted little Anne Frank, if her tormentors had been Communists rather than Nazis.”
¹⁰

While Buckley shared the Nabokovs’ views on Communism, Vladimir and Véra remained on friendly terms with several people who were less supportive of American foreign policy. Edmund Wilson, it turned out, had not even paid income tax during the 1940s and the first half of the fifties. At the urging of his wife Elena, he had tried to settle up with the IRS in 1955, but the check had bounced. He ended up in court in 1958, and the ruling against him led to liens on his royalties and the small trust fund he had inherited from his mother.
¹¹

Wilson had his revenge by writing a book about the experience,
The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest
, in which he explained that he had not begun his personal tax holiday on principle, but after looking into the IRS and its machinations, he had been deeply disturbed by its labyrinthine nature, and was going to make as little money as possible in the coming years in order to starve the agency and the U.S. imperialism he saw as funded from its coffers.

Wilson nonetheless found himself embraced by the Kennedy administration. When he was personally chosen by Kennedy for the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, the IRS had sent a sixteen-page memo to the White House in protest, noting that he was in the process of writing a diatribe on income tax and the defense budget that denounced both the IRS and U.S. budgetary policy. President Kennedy had refused to retract his choice, answering, “This is not an award for good conduct but for literary merit.”
¹²

Wilson had not minded Kennedy’s affection, but he did not share Vladimir Nabokov’s high opinion of Lyndon Johnson. Reluctant to see the U.S. enter even the fight against Hitler, Wilson thought U.S. involvement in Vietnam a disgrace. When he was invited by the Johnsons to a summer arts festival, he responded with a rudeness that shocked staffers and infuriated the president. As the White House festival disintegrated into a public shellacking of the president by assorted esteemed thinkers and artists, Johnson fumed that his intellectual opponents were “sonsofbitches” and “close to traitors.” He swore to have nothing else to do with them.
¹³

In the first months of Johnson’s administration, Wilson made his way to Montreux to visit Nabokov. He and Elena stayed three days, having dinner with Véra and Vladimir, and throwing a celebratory lunch for Nabokov on the second day. Wilson’s wife Elena, who had come from aristocracy herself, felt Vladimir was living “like a prince of the old regime.” The Nabokovs’ quarters were modest enough, but Wilson, whose financial troubles had not abated, was put off by the opulence of the Palace Hotel.
¹⁴

The two men had not seen each other for seven years. Wilson complained to a friend in the interim that Nabokov had made “a great grievance” of his dislike for
Lolita
, though his embrace of
Doctor Zhivago
had no doubt added to the strain on the friendship. During their years apart, they had continued to write to each other, but less often. In his growing isolation in Montreux, Nabokov more than once had made overtures to an increasingly silent Wilson, at times sounding plaintive (“You have quite forgotten me”).
¹⁵

Perhaps it was this longing for the closeness of their early friendship that led Nabokov to discard the wariness he had developed over the years with regard to Wilson’s literary opinions. After dithering, he had hesitantly given permission for prepublication proofs of his
Onegin
to be sent to Wilson in the months before the latter’s visit to Montreux—a decision which had surely provoked anxiety on both sides.
¹⁶

But for three days in Montreux, their friendship reverted to its delightful state in the echoing, empty Palace Hotel, largely bereft of visitors in the offseason. The two men took up their “conversational fireworks” and arguments over razors as if Lenin,
Lolita, Zhivago
, and the slow death of their twenty-four-year correspondence did not exist.
¹⁷

Among Nabokov’s most recent books, Wilson had disliked
Lolita
but admired
Pnin
, calling it “very good.” At the time of his arrival in Montreux, the record is not clear on whether he had even read
Pale Fire
, because he never weighed in on it. If he did not, it is a literary tragedy. Nabokov had threaded their shared language and arguments through his mad Zemblan tale as if creating a special dialogue that Wilson alone might understand.

A key discussion of shaving, A. E. Housman, and literary inspiration in
Pale Fire
plays directly off portions of Wilson’s
The Triple Thinkers
, which Nabokov had read and critiqued. Wilson had suggested elsewhere that T. S. Eliot’s verses stick in one’s head; Nabokov replied to Wilson that they did not lodge in
his
—and so
Pale Fire
delivers a girl struggling with Eliot’s most obscure words (
grimpen, semipiternal). The
lunatic Kinbote is seen by students in the book as “constantly quoting Housman,” whom Nabokov admired but Wilson had criticized as sterile.
¹⁸

John Shade, the very decent poet Nabokov created for
Pale Fire
, is a quintessentially American writer whose work lives in the shadow of Robert Frost. Nabokov, who expressed affection for his invented poet, had himself done readings with Frost, once being in the unenviable position of opening for him in Boston. But Wilson despised Frost, and across his career had accumulated a Nabokov-worthy list of insults against the man, calling him “third-rate,” “a dreadful old fraud,” and “one of the most relentless self-promoters in the history of American literature.”
¹⁹

Pale Fire
includes reversed words (
spider, redips)
taken from one of Wilson’s poems, “The Pickerel Pond,” which also makes a passing reference to Nova Zembla.
²⁰
After reading that poem, Nabokov had
sent Wilson several examples of his own in a similar rhyme scheme—including
red wop
and
powder, T.S. Eliot
and
toilest
—each of which Nabokov borrowed back and folded, with
spider
and
redips
, into the pages
of Pale Fire.
²¹

Mocked by the uncaring townspeople in the novel, Kinbote is desperately trying to spin the fantasy of the lovely and beautiful Zembla, behind which Nova Zembla lurks. Along with the nods to Kinbote’s horrors—which seem to be part and parcel of the early camps under Lenin that Wilson was reluctant to acknowledge—Nabokov had privately folded their literary exchanges into
Pale Fire
, as if baiting Wilson to pay attention, to do the very historical approach favored by him. But Wilson never bit.

He had not, in fact, bitten on the aspects of Nabokov’s work he might have best understood for more than twenty years. Returning to Nabokov’s 1941 poem “The Refrigerator Awakes,” written after a stay at Wilson’s house at the beginning of their friendship, it is not hard to peek behind the tale of a dedicated suburban refrigerator and find something darker. The poem, explicitly a desperate attempt to make sure a story will be told, was a first shot across the bow with Wilson, who then, as later, somehow missed or mistook the most important elements of the story at hand: the dead bodies in the ice, a “trembling white heart,” the torture house, the mention of Nova Zembla, and the agony of the burden of preserving it all.
²²

Instead of
Pale Fire
, Edmund Wilson turned his critical faculties on
Eugene Onegin
for a 1965 essay in the July issue of
The New York Review of Books
. In the first sentence, Wilson declares Nabokov’s project “something of a disappointment,” and vows not to let his friendship interfere with what he intends to say. The subsequent 6,000-plus words proceed to set off depth charge after depth charge. Nabokov “seeks to torture both the reader and himself.” The “lack of common sense” throughout the project led Wilson to interpret Nabokov as trying and failing to integrate his Russian and English selves.

Hating Freud, Nabokov viewed Wilson’s psychologizing with equal contempt. But he had been just as biting the year before in an essay on someone else’s translation
of Onegin
(“something must be done … to defend the helpless dead poet”
²³
), and Wilson explicitly used his friend’s venom as an excuse to turn Nabokov’s method on Nabokov himself. He upped the ante by bringing in personal matters—mentioning Nabokov’s limited knowledge of Latin and quoting from their letters.
²⁴