Visiting Mrs Nabokov

by Amis, Martin

  Esquire, 1988

  VISITING MRS NABOKOV

  He also remembered that the hotel was drab and cheap, and abjectly stood next to another, much better hotel, through the rez-de-chaussée of which you could make out the phantoms of pale tables and underwater waiters . . .

  These lines from the late novella, Transparent Things, came flooding back to me, as I walked from my own dire hostelry (fuming radiators, pot-luck room service, a bed like a hammock) to the sparkling citadel of the Montreux Palace Hotel, where the Nabokovs took up residence in 1961, and where Véra Evseevna Nabokov has now spent the last four years, alone, in the sixth floor of the old wing.

  Why Montreux anyway, I wondered, and why a hotel? When the BBC came to Montreux to record what is now known as 'the last interview', Nabokov remarked: 'I have toyed on and off with the idea of buying a villa. I can imagine the comfortable furniture, the efficient burglar alarms, but I am unable to visualise an adequate staff. Old retainers require time to grow old, and I wonder how much of it there still is at my disposal.' The interviewer, Robert Robinson, said of Montreux that it gives 'a curious feeling of taking a walk in an old photograph'. Strolling through the sun and mist of the lakeside, I thought of the lost and innocuous parklands of an idealised boyhood. The Swiss children are dapper and immaculate on their skates. The Swiss midges, keeping themselves to themselves, are much too civic-minded to swarm or sting.

  The Nabokovs lived in the thick of the twentieth century — a shared life of almost novelettish glamour, peril and pathos: enforced exile from revolutionary Russia (where the young Vladimir was a teenage playboy, poet and millionaire); the hysteria and hyper-inflation of Weimar Germany (Nabokov's father, the great liberal statesman V.D. Nabokov, was assassinated at a political meeting in Berlin); a precarious stay in France as the country fell to the Germans; and then last-minute escape (Véra is Jewish) to the hospitable void of the New World.

  In America Nabokov completed twenty hard years on the literary and academic treadmill. Meanwhile he had the task of reincarnating himself as (broadly speaking) an English novelist rather than a Russian one. Irrevocable prosperity -i.e., freedom — finally arrived in the form of Lolita (1959). Small wonder, then, that the Nabokovs should have chosen to repair to what Humbert Humbert calls 'my lacquered, toy-bright Swiss villages and exhaustively lauded alps' and the suspended playground of Montreux. For all its plotting and incident, the life of Vladimir and Véra Nabokov has had a simple theme, that of dedication. They came to Montreux to put the oeuvre in order, to supervise the translations of earlier work, and to get the last novels safely out of the way.

  Mrs Nabokov awaited me patiently in one of the pillared public rooms of the Montreux Palace Hotel. 'What would you like?' she asked at once. 'Whisky? Gin? You can have anything.' At 11:30 am, I found this a tolerant offer. I chose wine, while Mrs Nabokov requested a 'J & B' — or a 'Chay & Pee' (her English is strongly accented and still slightly tentative). The smiling waiter bantered and soothed; according to legend, Vladimir Nabokov was a compulsive tipper, and his wife clearly remains one of the cossets of the staff. She sipped prudently at her whisky, which she did not entirely finish. She was, I think, simply being convivial. Whenever I tried to pay for anything Mrs Nabokov would firmly interpose. 'No, this is mine — this is my party.'

  She has thick white hair and expressive, ironical eyes. She has been rather ill recently - her hearing is a little weak and she uses a stick; but even now, in her seventies, the deeply responsive face is still suffused with feminine light. It is above all a humorous face. 'V.N.' as she sometimes calls him, used to boast that she had the best sense of humour of any woman he had ever known, and it is easy to appreciate this and other reasons for his pride. A combination of modesty and natural inquisitiveness or warmth makes her a ticklish subject for interview. 'But let's talk about yourself,' she will say. 'Are you married? . . . Do you want children? . . . Do you see your family?'

  At this point, as arranged, we were joined by Dmitri Nabokov, the Nabokovs' only child and a figure of considerable interest himself — racing driver, mountaineer, international opera singer, as well as the accomplished translator of many of his father's novels. Dmitri is at present living near his mother: in the hospital at Lausanne, to be precise, where he is completing a long convalescence after an awesome car crash last year. It was only a few miles up the road that, following a visit to Montreux, Dmitri's powerful car mysteriously 'left the road'. He forced his way from the flaming wreck and was rushed to the hospital, which was providentially only ten minutes away and contains one of the most advanced burn-treatment units in the world. From there Dmitri coolly telephoned his mother, saying that he had had a minor accident and would be over to see her soon. It was some while before Véra found out that her son had been lucky to survive.

  For a time we marvelled at Dmitri's injuries, which are still visible, not to say conspicuous. We talked of the body's remarkable powers of recovery. Staring at Dmitri's scorched fingers, I couldn't help paying tribute to the body's remarkable powers of destructibility in the first place. Halfway through this observation I began to regret having made it. But it seemed to go down well enough. With mock squeam-ishness Véra then asked her son when the 'purple lace' (i.e. the mortified crimson veins) on his arms would disappear. A very Nabokovian formulation. Like his father, Dmitri is tall, balding, athletic, expansive, and innately good-humoured; he defers to his mother with a courtly protectiveness. Mrs Nabokov listened to her son's progress-report with concern and some amusement, and then turned to me. 'Do you drive? ... You drive very carefully, I hope.'

  Dmitri and I now moved through into the dining room, while Véra retired to her suite, promising to join us for coffee. 'I'll see you later then,' I said. 'So long,' said Mrs Nabokov ... Over lunch it soon became clear that Montreux has developed into a kind of clearing-house for the Nabokov light industry. Dmitri is currently translating Transparent Things into Italian; Véra is translating Pale Fire into Russian (for samizdat, of course, as is the fate of V.N.'s translation of Lolita). There is also constant activity in the subsidiary-rights department. For instance, Dmitri is still licking his wounds over the recent Broadway adaptation of Lolita. 'A disaster. Quite a disaster,' as his mother later added.

  Dmitri has an especially delicate problem on his hands at the moment. When Vladimir Nabokov died, on 2 July 1977, a novel lay half finished on his lectern. In Dmitri's opinion The Original of Laura is one of his father's most daring and pellucid performances; yet Nabokov was inflexibly opposed to the novel being published in its incomplete form. It is a terrible dilemma, and one that the surviving Nabokovs have by no means resolved.

  For if there is a greater obligation than the one owed to Vladimir Nabokov, it is the obligation owed to literary history. Dmitri and Véra are profoundly conscious of this, and it is intimately bound up with the tenor of their family pride. I raised the subject of the Nabokov-Wilson Letters and the sad, strange dissolution of a friendship which that correspondence records, all ending in bafflement and anger with Wilson's inexplicable attack on Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin. 'Edmund Wilson,' said Dmitri with a sigh. 'I liked him. He was very good with children. He was cuddly, playful. He could make a mouse out of a handkerchief and make it move for me . . . Then his immense presumption — that he knew Russian!' Or, on the grudging assessment of a recent biographer: Nabokov was 'a good man, oh, in a peculiar way perhaps, and with certain lapses, but a good man none the less'. Dmitri threw his head back, eyes to ceiling, in a gesture of exasperation which I gather was also very typical of his father: 'Astonishing. The presumption . . .'

  Véra, whom we had by now rejoined in the ballroom-sized lounge, proved to be just as adamant on her husband's behalf and in the championship of his memory. 'The editor of the Russian Pale Fire — he did a lot of mischief, and I have refused to accept any of his corrections ... I have vetoed Professor Karlinsky's introduction to the second volume of Lectures on Literature. I wrote to the publishers and said that I
implore them to cancel it. And they did.' A few moments later Mrs Nabokov misheard a remark I made about the first volume of the Lectures, mistaking praise for dispraise. 'What?' she said. And, until I had made myself clear, every atom in her body seemed to tremble with indignation.

  Now Dmitri took his leave; he would catch the train back to the hospital at Lausanne. Before saying goodbye he handed his mother a scroll of clippings. 'A review of the Tribute, from South Carolina . . . Father is mentioned here . . .' This kind of talk, like the Nabokovian indignation, is all of a piece with the nature of the family commitment. It bespeaks great self-belief, but there is no self-importance in it. It is selfless, indeed almost impersonal, in the same way that art is impersonal. It is also, I imagine, very Russian in its timbre.

  *

  Dmitri was gone. Now the sun bore through the tall windows on to Mrs Nabokov's chair and she raised a hand to shield her cheek from its rays. She showed me the copy of the Vladimir Nabokov Research Letter which had been nestling on her lap, pointing to the illustrations of the imaginary butterflies drawn by her husband (reproduced from her personal copies of his books). The cod-Latin names contain various diminutives of her name - verae, verinia, verochka .. .

  They met in 1923, in Berlin. It was surprising that they had not met before. After all, even in St Petersburg the boys of the Tenishev School often fraternised with the girls of the Obolensky. They had worked as extras on the same German films. Véra had innocently attended the readings given by Vladimir on the emigre intellectual circuit in Berlin. 'He talked with great charm,' says Véra. 'He was as a young man extremely beautiful.' In old Russia Véra had had the same kind of multilingual upbringing as Nabokov himself; she was in fact one of his few serious rivals as an English teacher in Berlin. 'But V.N. taught many subjects,' she concedes. 'Languages, tennis, boxing. And prosody, prosody.'

  Véra's father had just co-founded a small publishing firm, Orbis. The young Nabokov was to translate Dostoevsky into English. Véra was working in the office to earn extra money for horseback riding in the Tiergarten. They glimpsed each other, but did not meet properly until later in the year, at a Charity Ball. Nabokov started playing a lot of chess with Véra's father. In a letter to his mother he spoke of his need to settle down. He later said of his father-in-law: 'He understands so well that for me the main thing in life and the sole thing which I am capable of doing is to write.' Véra herself must have understood this pretty well too. They were married in April 1925, and there, really, the visible story ends.

  She has been described as an intensely private person — more private, even, than her husband. She has formidable self-possession, certainly, and would, you feel, be hard on any folly or impertinence on the part of an outsider. As our conversation went on, and remained pretty cautious and general, I felt a mild unease growing in Mrs Nabokov - as if she would inevitably have to repulse some grossly personal query ('Mrs Nabokov, did you ever meet the real Lolita?'). Eventually, she said, 'These questions you will ask. Where are these questions?'

  'Well, there were one or two things,' I said. 'Your husband dedicated all his books to you, every one. That's very unusual, isn't it?'

  'Is it? ... What should I answer? We had a very unusual relationship. But that you knew before you asked. Anything else?'

  'Was he - was he great fun?' I asked helplessly. 'Were there lots of jokes? Did you laugh a lot?'

  'Oh, yes. His humour was delightful. He was delightful,' said Mrs Nabokov. 'But that you knew too.'

  Observer, 1981

  Postscript: Véra Nabokov died in 1991, ten years after the visit recorded here. As Dmitri Nabokov said in his address at her funeral: 'Even in her eighties she helped with the preparation of many editions of her husband's works, wrote an introduction for a Russian edition of his poems, assisted in the compilation of a collection of his letters, [and] dedicated immense effort to the Russian translation of Pale Fire . ..' Every now and then, during that last decade, I exchanged brief letters with her; I sent her photographs of my children, when they came; there was occasionally some bibliographical news to report. I thought of her often. She remained extraordinarily vivid to me. Partly, I suppose, I valued the memory of my visit because it provided a living link with her husband, whom I have always idolised; in her, it seemed, he lived on. But this doesn't quite account for the inordinate desolation I felt when I was confronted by her obituary.

  From Dmitri Nabokov's eulogy (11 April 1991):

  On the eve of a risky hip operation two years ago, my brave and considerate mother asked that I bring her her favourite blue dress, because she might be receiving someone. I had the eerie feeling she wanted that dress for a very different reason. She survived on that occasion. Now, for her last earthly encounter, she was clad in that very dress.

  It was Mother's wish that her ashes be united with those of Father's in the urn at the Clarens cemetery. In a curiously Nabokovian twist of things, there was some difficulty in locating that urn. My instinct was to call Mother, and ask her what to do about it. But there was no Mother to ask.

  V.S. NAIPAUL'S INDIA*

  [*India: A Wounded Civilisation, V.S. Naipaul, Andre Deutsch, 1977]

  Indian motorists are not required to use their lights after dark, though they may flash while swerving if they wish; they are obliged, however (or so it seems), to sound their horns whenever they see anything at all, mobile or stationary, animate or inanimate. English whisky costs £30-odd a bottle in India: a diplomat could support a large servant family with a quarterly gift - which would cost him £1 a time. Indians compose most of their commercial signs in English, and get one vowel wrong in every word (houseboot was the most typically self-defeating). Indian trade-names, in addition, shyly proclaim the modesty of their wares, as if pre-empting any suspicion of excellence: standard, general, rather, decent, boast the shopfronts - you half-expect to see mediocre or not that bad. In the city streets tourists are approached for money three or four times every minute, by the beggar-women and their shrieking babies (they pinch them throughout the interview, to make them cry but also to acknowledge the child's sins in previous lives), by the stranded American hippies in their sawn-off jeans ('Hi. We're trying to do something for the people in jail over here right now. Anything you have — clothes, blankets, medicine . . . Nothing? Okay, great. Bye!'), and by the distracted, semi-Westernised touts (who are not currency-dealing, who have no realistic transaction in mind, who just keep muttering potent phrases like 'twenty rupees . . . nine English pounds . . . one hundred dollars! . . . three rupees . . .'). In the lavatory of New Delhi International Airport you might see two untouchable sweepers fleetingly embrace among the slops. At the other end of the caste scale, brahmin type 1132 (there are over 1,500 kinds of brahmin) might well refuse to speak to brahmin type 1129, let alone touch him. Dogs, chickens and old men sleep on the roads through provincial towns; Indian cows eat what they want and go where they please (Indian cows look as though they think it's a bit of luck, all this about them being sacred). Nearly everything seems to be filthy, mad, ridiculous, or all three. Nearly everyone seems to be in terrible trouble, and not to mind about it that much.

  Responses to India tend towards two extremes. The first response, promoting lack of imagination to intrepidity, takes a heartily sentimental pleasure in the dirt and distress — this is the response, in different ways, of the hippy and of the colonist. The second response involves immediate recognition of one's alarm and neurotic withdrawal: initially, one sees India through the mist of one's utter rejection of it. In An Area of Darkness, published in 1964, V.S. Naipaul passed on the story of the Sikh who, returning to India after several years abroad, sat down among his suitcases on the Bombay docks and wept; he had forgotten what Indian poverty was like. 'It is an Indian story,' Naipaul went on,

  in its arrangement of figure and properties, its melodrama, its pathos. It is Indian above all in its attitude to poverty as something which, thought about from time to time in the midst of other preoccupations, releases the
sweetest of emotions . . . Poverty not as an urge to anger or improving action, but poverty as an inexhaustible source of tears . . . India is the poorest country in the world. Therefore, to see its poverty is to make an observation of no value ...

  In India, the easiest and most necessary thing is to ignore the obvious.

  But to begin with, as Naipaul said, 'the obvious was overwhelming', and An Area of Darkness is a record not so much of Naipaul's attempts to see beyond the obvious (he would do that anyway) but of his efforts not to be overwhelmed by it. In the best and most admirable sense, the book is a labour of dramatic intellectual strain. Suppressed hysteria never leaves the narrative for long, and panic makes faces from its margins; for all the brilliance and humour, the voice of that book is skittish, febrile, wayward ('I was longing for greater and greater decay, more rags and filth, more bones'). Compared to An Area of Darkness, the new memoir is sharply focused, analytical and remote. But it is also angrier and less forgiving, written with a resolute coldness; and in the end it is an intransigently bitter book.

  Inevitably so, Naipaul would claim, for only out of 'an eroded human concern' can any understanding start to come. India: A Wounded Civilisation is the result of a third visit to the country, from August 1975 to October 1976, the time of Mrs Gandhi's Emergency, the time when Indians were first asked to confront the startling fact of their own Independence. With the dismantling of its inherited institutions — and with no foreign conqueror for the first time in a thousand years — India 'is left alone with the blankness of its decayed civilisation'. Naipaul's ancestors migrated from the Gangetic plain 100 years ago, and 100 years 'had been enough to wash me clean of many Indian religious attitudes: without those attitudes the distress of India was - and is — insupportable'. Now, however, those attitudes are under threat for every Indian. The 'futility and limitless pain' of India has not changed, but attitudes to it have. India has begun to see the obvious, and is being duly overwhelmed.