Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (39 page)

Those brown wigs surely belong to Orthodox Jewish women, who shave and then cover their heads, but their Jewishness is never mentioned explicitly in the novel. In fact, neither the word “Jew” nor the word “Jewish” appears anywhere in the book, the only novel Nabokov wrote in a thirty-two-year stretch for which that statement is true. This would not be particularly remarkable, except that Humbert and other characters manage to find a spectacular number of ways
not
to use these terms. Eva Rosen, a friend of Lolita’s, is described as a “displaced little person from France.” Despite the Anglophilic aspirations of her school, she has a Brooklyn accent. Nabokov leaves unsaid that that accent was so recognizably stigmatized as Jewish in mid-century America that Brooklyn Jews who could afford to do so attended elocution lessons (often in vain) in an attempt to hide it. A stranger who wakes in Humbert’s hotel room having forgotten who he is likewise speaks in “pure Brooklynese.”
²²

Humbert is exquisitely sensitive to the plight of refugees from the war, as well as the blithe American anti-Semitism swirling in its wake. When Lolita’s mother wishes for a “trained servant maid, like the German girl the Talbots spoke of,” it is, of course, the real-world Jewish refugees who so often could only get into the country by becoming domestics, regardless of their skills or education. When Alexandra Tolstoy was desperately trying to obtain visas for the Nabokovs, service as a maid had been the career for which she thought it possible to secure affidavits for the multilingual Véra.
²³

More tellingly, on Humbert’s first visit to The Enchanted Hunters, the hotel where he first rapes Lolita, he notices the hotel manager examining his features and “wrestl(ing) with some dark doubts,” then denying him a room. Only with great difficulty does Humbert change the manager’s mind. He later tries to make a reservation by mail but is quickly rejected again in a reply addressed to Professor Hamburg.
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Humbert also notes that the Enchanted Hunters has “NO DOGS” and “NEAR CHURCHES” stamped on its stationery. “No Dogs” was typically shorthand indicating that Jews and Negroes were also not welcome—although the full phrase “No Dogs, No Coloreds, No Jews” was still used in the United States into and beyond the 1960s.
²⁵
Humbert keenly recalls the dog he had seen in the lobby on his first visit with Lolita, and wonders perhaps if it had been baptized.

In case “No Dogs” proved too subtle, “Near Churches” was a phrase even more directly understood in the era to mean that Jews were not allowed.
²⁶
During the time period that Nabokov worked on
Lolita
—as he looked through listings for summer lodging for butterfly hunting trips with Véra—the same wording appeared in more than a thousand resort ads in
The New York Times
alone.

The words had come into popular use only after more directly discriminatory language had been outlawed. They were so clearly a mark of bigotry that while Nabokov sat in Ithaca working on
Lolita
, the Anti-Defamation League brought an official complaint in the State of New York. A four-month battle raged in New York newspapers, with representatives of Catholic churches claiming that the wording was not intended to be detrimental to Jews and a group of travel agents countering that “the general public understands the ‘code’ implicit in such expressions … and that vacationers need not apply for accommodations if they happen to be Jewish.”
²⁷

The list of oblique nods to American anti-Semitism in
Lolita
is a long one. Lolita’s mother suspects that Humbert has “a certain strange strain” in his family and threatens to commit suicide if she ever finds out that he is not a Christian. When Humbert searches desperately in the town of Coalmont for Lolita after she has sent him a letter, he is refused admission to a store by a “wary” employee before he can even say a word. When Humbert finally tracks down Lolita’s mystery lover, Clare Quilty, at home, he is told to leave, because it is “a Gentile’s house.”
²⁸

Where his initial gestures had been too subtle in the novel, Nabokov would later underline his more opaque Semitic references. Humbert at one point in the novel feels sorry for Lolita’s classmate
Irving Flashman. “Poor Irving,” Nabokov later told Lolita’s annotator. “He is the only Jew among all those Gentiles.” When an acquaintance of Humbert’s complains about the high numbers of Italian tradesmen in their small town, he adds that at least “we are still spared—.” The man’s wife, realizing where he is going, cuts him off before he can finish his sentence. But when Nabokov sat down to translate the book into Russian, he was less coy, leaving no doubt whom the townspeople are spared. The speaker clearly begins to say the word “kikes.”
²⁹

A half-dozen people in the novel have their suspicions about Humbert, but it would be more than a decade before one early commentator would name it, mentioning how others in the novel are confused about Humbert’s heritage.
³⁰
But there was another explanation, one so strange readers missed it entirely—the possibility that Nabokov intended Humbert Humbert to be Jewish.

On their last trip west before
Lolita
’s publication, Vladimir and Véra made an unscheduled stop on the way from Montana to Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains, looking for a cabin to rent for the night. A landlord showed them what was available and wondered where they were from. Expressing relief that they were from upstate New York rather than the city itself, he made a comment about people who “jew” you.

Véra asked what was wrong with Jews, and their host responded that they “always try to knife you, get the better of you.” “Well, I am Jewish,” Véra replied, “and I have no intention of swindling you.” The Nabokovs left precipitously without even asking for their money back.
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No amount of notoriety or accolades was a protection from bigotry, and the prejudice to which Nabokov made Humbert Humbert testify in
Lolita
would continue to play out in the real world long after Nabokov had folded it into his famous, infamous book. Véra wore her identity proudly in the face of it all. Her biographer Stacy Schiff notes that when described as a Russian aristocrat in a
New York Post
story, Véra wrote the paper to clarify that she was “very proud” of her background, “which actually is Jewish.”
³²

Lolita
won her author no accolades for his attention to American anti-Semitism.
Lolita
, in fact, won her author no prizes at all—unlike
Pnin
, which became a finalist for the National Book Award. But what
Lolita
lacked in literary awards it would make up in sales, ensuring continuous media attention for the last half of 1958 and most of the following year. The sale of film rights to James Harris and Stanley Kubrick in September 1958 for $150,000 received almost as much attention as the book itself, with people wondering how on earth it would be possible to make a
movie
of
Lolita.
³³

At that point Nabokov ceased to be a merely a famous author and entered the realm of celebrity. Before winter, the paperback rights sold for $100,000, and Nabokov’s little girl was the subject of television skits by Steve Allen, Milton Berle, and Arthur Godfrey. Groucho Marx had by this time already made Lolita’s acquaintance but would put off reading her “for six years, till she’s eighteen.”
Lolita
would go on to become one of the two bestselling novels of 1959.
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But massive sales would not sway all critics to support
Lolita
. Not content with having savaged it once,
New York Times
critic Orville Prescott would spit on its success again, noting that it proved only that “a new variety of sexual sensationalism is the surest means to literary fame and prosperity.” His fellow critic at the
Times
, Donald Adams, would critique it repeatedly too, in even more personal terms, as “revolting,” using a historical quote to suggest that for all his gifts, Nabokov was “utterly corrupt” and “shines and stinks like rotten mackerel in the moonlight.”
³⁵

Against all odds, critics championed another hefty novel by a Russian author that fall, as Boris Pasternak’s
Doctor Zhivago
was published in English for the first time. Pasternak’s story follows a heroic doctor who lives through the Revolution and both World Wars, trying to find love and meaning in a society that has been stripped of both. It was an arresting production from Pasternak, who started as an inventive poet much admired by Vladimir Nabokov but had chosen a very different path as a writer.

After spending nearly six months in Berlin in the early 1920s when Nabokov was living there, Pasternak had elected to return to the Soviet Union, while his parents had stayed in the West.
³⁶
His style was decidedly un-Soviet, yet Pasternak had somehow remained on good terms with Stalin.

By 1957, however, when
Zhivago
was complete, Stalin was no longer alive. Pasternak had submitted his work to the Soviet Writers’ Union for publication, but it was deemed insufficiently Soviet. He managed to smuggle the full manuscript to an Italian publisher, who had it translated. The book received global acclaim, and subsequent editions in language after language appeared. An English-language version popped up just in time to do battle with
Lolita
on the bestseller lists.
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Nabokov, however, was not a fan of Pasternak’s novel.
Zhivago
was a historical epic critical of the Soviet state and the dull cowardice that cripples lives, but Nabokov found it filled with nostalgia for stereotypes of the Revolution. “Compared to Pasternak,” Nabokov told a reporter, “Mr. Steinbeck is a genius.”
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As Nabokov basked in the acknowledgment that had long been his due, he could not let go of
Zhivago
’s success, talking Wilson’s ear off on the phone about the book’s shortcomings. Véra believed that the whole project, in fact, was a Communist plot, and that she and her husband had seen through the charade that it had somehow been “smuggled” out of Russia in the first place. People who fell for it were simply “pro-Commie” fools.
³⁹

The Nabokovs’ views might have surprised Soviet authorities, who saw the novel as a massive betrayal. They had worked tirelessly to censor
Zhivago
entirely, in and outside Russia. Pasternak’s “nonacceptance of the Socialist Revolution” had become a major embarrassment, but with so much publicity focused on him, it was decided that arresting him would only do more damage.
⁴⁰

Nabokov, however, so sure of his own interpretation, would not relent.
Zhivago
was so clumsy and melodramatic, he felt, perhaps it had been written by Pasternak’s mistress, Olga Ivinskaya, widely recognized as the inspiration for the novel’s heroine.
⁴¹

Ivinskaya did not, in fact, write the book, but the Soviet authorities, like Nabokov, laid it at her feet. She paid a heavy price for that attribution. While Pasternak worked on
Zhivago
, Ivinskaya served three years in a labor camp for her malign influence on him. After the novel’s publication, she would serve another four years.
⁴²

Though
Zhivago
eventually defeated
Lolita
on the bestseller lists, Nabokov had much to celebrate. Some people condemned him, but others had recognized his novel’s greatness. The book was going to be made into a movie. Nabokov’s future unfolded before him. What would he do next? He had staggeringly completed
Lolita, Pnin
, and the largest project he had ever undertaken, a translation of and commentary on Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin
, all while remaining a professor at Cornell.

The dreaded hordes of fathers calling for the head of Professor Nabokov, author of
Lolita
and teacher of what had long been known as the “Dirty Lit” course, never transpired. Morris Bishop never had to make an impassioned stand for a book that he couldn’t even finish. In the midst of all the chaos, Nabokov asked for time off. One Cornell colleague speculated that he would not return, though Véra assured him that Nabokov would not leave.
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Given enough money, however, what Nabokov wanted to do was to write. In the end, his earlier anxieties that
Lolita
’s publication might put an end to his job were entirely correct—if not for the reasons he had feared. It soon became apparent he would give up forever classroom hours spent extolling Tolstoy’s precision and condemning Dostoyevsky for his sentimental stories of lunatics. So celebrated by then that even the October 1959 announcement of his departure from Cornell made American newspapers, Nabokov began to imagine his possible futures, as free to move and live in the world as he had been for decades in his own imagination.

Vladimir and Véra did not have much company on their island of resentment against
Zhivago
. Edmund Wilson called it “a great book”
in his review for
The New Yorker
—and in case readers had not heard him the first time, closed by naming the novel “one of the great events in man’s literary and moral history.”
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