R.H.Boyle: So far as I know, Nabokov did not drive a car and had no interest in learning how to do so.  Vera did all the driving while he wrote or made notes, if he cared to,  on index cards in the passenger seat..  No photograph I have ever seen  has him in the driver's seat, and one I took in Sedona, Ariz., shows him with a bag of groceries about to get into the passenger seat.  In short, it appears that the account of him getting ready to drive after a winter storm in Ithaca  is, well, a snow job.

 

JM: There is a photograph with VN happily facing the camera, looking out of a car's window - but I didn't find the reproduction in my archives. The one that appears in Jane Grayson's Vladimir Nabokov (Illustrated Lives) shows him with his back to the viewer, in the passenger seat, composing Lolita "on the road" (for Life magazine, 1958).

 

How can we find the picture you took with VN holding a bag of groceries: is it published in a book, is it shareable?