Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  She had not recovered her health on his return, and was in great pain throughout April, when it seemed the California trip might have to be canceled on her account. Nabokov had been pleased with the visit to Wellesley and Wellesley had been no less pleased with him; in mid-May he received an invitation to join the faculty for a one-year appointment, at a salary of three thousand dollars. He was to be “an interdepartmental visitor,” a title that—with its overtones of outer space—seemed perfectly to describe his situation. It was neither a permanent position nor a munificent sum, but the Wellesley offer allowed the Nabokovs to set out for California with the future a little less undecided than it had been. Véra was evidently well enough to pack up the apartment on Eighty-seventh Street and pile into a car—along with the dictionary, the typewriter, Dmitri, three butterfly nets, and Dorothy Leuthold, pupil and chauffeur—for two weeks. It would be another year before her frustration with their state of affairs would seep into her correspondence. Bitterly she remarked in mid-1942, “Yes, Russia is en vogue right now, but as far as a position is concerned, that hasn’t helped my husband yet.” (Vladimir vented the same frustration at the same time but in radically different terms: “Funny—to know Russian better than any living person—in America at least,—and more English than any Russian in America,—and to experience such difficulty in getting a university job. I am getting rather jittery about next year.”) Later she alluded to grave difficulties in getting reestablished. Despite the overt stalwartness, her chagrin with their hand-to-mouth existence, with the familiar set of uncertainties in an unfamiliar world, plainly exacted a toll. In the 1950s she privately attributed her departure from the newspaper position to “illness which resulted from all the migrations and anxieties.”

  2

  She caught some of her first American butterflies that summer, as Leuthold chauffeured the family to California, from motor court to motor court, through Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, a trip Véra hugely enjoyed. Some of this collecting she did in a knee-length black dress with a lace collar, a garment she could hardly have purchased with this kind of expedition in mind. She still looked unwell, her skin more ashen than translucent, her cheeks sunken. On a crystalline morning in early June, on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, both Nabokovs triumphed lepidopterologically, each in his own way. Vladimir set off with Dorothy Leuthold down a mule trail, where after a short walk he netted two specimens of what he recognized to be an undocumented Neonympha. When he returned to the Pontiac, where Véra and Dmitri were attempting to warm themselves, he discovered “that right beside the car Véra had herself caught two specimens, sluggish with the cold, with nothing but her fingers.” Nabokov named his capture after Leuthold; he commemorated his success in “A Discovery,” a poem that appeared in The New Yorker in 1943. Véra’s parallel find went undocumented. A certain competitiveness crept into their collecting, for which the passion was primarily Vladimir’s. “I’ve had wonderful luck. I’ve gotten many things he didn’t get,” Véra interrupted her husband to tell his first biographer. “And I once saw a butterfly that he wanted very much, and he wouldn’t believe me, that I had seen it,” she continued. “Yes, that’s right, that’s right,” agreed Nabokov. “And on the side of the path you saw snakes actually jumping into the air.” She entered into the collecting, which would occupy a fair portion of the remainder of her American summers, with enthusiasm, and spoke of her finds with pride.* (When her husband was not there to pique her modesty, she was more retiring on the subject. After fifty years of collecting she demurred, “I am not a trained lepidopterist. All I know about butterflies I have learned from my husband.”) If anyone was to acknowledge the cost of these expeditions it was not to be Véra. “I bungled my family’s vacation but got what I wanted,” Vladimir reported, after a summer detour to Telluride, Colorado.

  The Nabokovs very quickly took the measure of America, “a cultured country of endless variety,” as Vladimir initially described it. America would be longer in taking theirs. In the first weeks a New York City barber sized up his client in a glance, pronouncing him an Englishman, a recent arrival, and a journalist. Flabbergasted, Nabokov asked how the barber had arrived at his conclusions. “Because you have an English accent, you haven’t yet had time to remove your European shoes, and you have the high forehead and the face of a newspaperman.” “You’re a real Sherlock Holmes,” conceded Vladimir, to which the sleuth with the shears replied, “Who’s Sherlock Holmes?” During the cross-country excursion Véra took Dmitri for a haircut and heard a less assertive investigator west of the Mississippi ask her seven-year-old son where he made his home. “I don’t have a home,” replied the child, who had lived at twenty-one addresses in the previous three years. “Where do you live then?” inquired the astonished barber. “In little houses by the road,” Dmitri replied, a comment by which his mother was charmed. As Dmitri sees, looking back, “It was a real drifter’s life.”

  In Palo Alto the Nabokovs settled into a comfortable Spanish-style bungalow at 230 Sequoia Avenue, a brisk twenty-minute walk from the heart of the lusciously landscaped campus. Véra spent her time with Dmitri, or running the house. She was disappointed not to be able to attend her husband’s lectures, which were enjoying great success despite the modest audience.† Nabokov taught two courses, of which that on Modern Russian Literature proved to be the more labor-intensive; the bulk of the writing he did that summer was a rewriting of Gogol, Pushkin, Lermontov. “My husband is working much and gets rather tired, not so much from the lectures (7 a week) as from preparing for each one: Not finding any decent translations of the Russian classics, he translates them himself for his students.… And so teaching Russian literature is, of course, very exhausting,” Véra explained.* This was the summer when she lamented the state of her English. They attended a great number of parties, which she found “very ‘formal’ (and genteel).” Many evenings were spent in the company of Henry Lanz—the Finn who had offered Aldanov, and Nabokov, the Stanford position—and his chessboard. In the course of the summer the two managed to play 214 games. “He kept score, being a pedant,” added Vladimir, who could not help but note that the presumed nonpedant had prevailed 205 times.† Even after 214 games, he was never to know that Lanz had forfeited his own summer salary in order to bring him to Stanford, just as he was never to know that he was lecturing in Harry Levin’s jacket. No one is so much a character in someone else’s drama as the new immigrant. And at this early stage it was difficult to determine who was starring in whose fiction: America in the Nabokovs’, or the Nabokovs in America’s. Neither had a vaguely accurate idea of the real life of the other. It is easy enough to fathom how Véra was perceived in the false reflection she left behind. One student vividly remembered her serving tea from a gleaming, silver samovar, while explaining the rituals of Russian tea service. When she read of this later she offered only one comment: “I wonder where Véra could have obtained a samovar, large or small.” It was not the first thing a three-time refugee packed.

  In July the happy but not particularly profitable word reached the Nabokovs that James Laughlin, the publisher of New Directions, proposed to buy Sebastian Knight for $150. It was a paltry advance, but for a manuscript that had been written three years earlier and been rejected on two continents innumerable times since, it was a welcome one. Reversing a well-established tradition, Véra arranged to send a third of Laughlin’s advance to Anna Feigin, still in unoccupied France. Over the next years and whenever possible, the Nabokovs dispatched money abroad, to a multitude of addresses. The awareness of old friends and relatives still in Europe—the Marinel sisters, George and Iosef Hessen, Anna Feigin, all of Véra’s and Vladimir’s siblings—held the difficulties of the first American years in check; both Nabokovs mentioned at various junctures their chagrin at having had the good fortune to escape when they had, especially in light of the “Neanderthal hardships” their loved ones were now suffering. There was much scrambling to make ends meet, and much weariness (Vladimir clai
med he was so tired over the summer of 1941 that he could barely detach himself from his lawn chair), but Véra concluded, “Despite this, we’re very happy that we’re able to exist.” Laughlin emerged as the direct beneficiary of their fatigue. By the time the New Directions contract was signed, the agreement included an option for Nabokov’s next three books.

  The task of reviewing the galleys of Sebastian Knight fell to Agnes Perkins, the head of the Department of English Composition at Wellesley, to which the Nabokovs traveled by train in mid-September, arriving with monstrous colds. Vladimir’s English in 1941 was not yet entirely without quirks, quirks which might be termed ungrammatical as easily as they might be termed stunningly original. All of the stories he published that year were stories he had written in Russian and that—with and without assistance—he had rendered into English; he was less an author himself than he was Sirin’s translator. With Sebastian Knight he began to break out of the Sirin chrysalis, although not all of the critics who read the novel on its publication that winter agreed. The New York Times’s Sunday reviewer found the work silly, the author’s English “interesting in a Walt Disney sort of way.” “All of this might sound nice in another language,”* he suggested. Probably Véra took these words more to heart than did the book’s author, who was not so much indifferent to criticism, as he liked to protest, as he was invigorated by it.† He openly admitted that writing in English was a handicap to him. A year after Sebastian was published he moaned that his English was still not on a par with his Russian; even when it was, he had something in mind other than conventionally correct English. No one who had grown up having to render “Cap d’Antibes” into Cyrillic could help playing with words; with satisfaction Nabokov noted that his next book, his highly personal biography of Gogol, sparkled with “a dewy multitude of charming little solecisms.” Those solecisms were not as universally admired as he might have liked. In 1945, Katharine White at The New Yorker expressed concern over his taste for obsolete language; she inferred that he had learned his English directly from the OED. Among the pieces on which she was at work at the time, she described “Double Talk” as “a very long and very badly written but funny and bitter one by Nabokov who does not want me to edit it except for a word or two whereas it has to be turned by me into English and cut and transferred from the past to the present.” (Véra professed great sympathy for White, for having to put up with her husband’s exigencies.) For good reason Harold Ross swore he would cut his own throat if Vladimir Nabokov were to become a professor of English.*

  Ross had a while still to live. Véra settled the Interdepartmental Visitor and Dmitri into a furnished apartment near the Wellesley campus, but Nabokov did not teach English—or for that matter any regular course—in 1941. Other than frequent meals with students and six lectures a year, he had few campus obligations; in their comfortable, clapboard home he felt his family was living in “splendid solitude.” The awkward honeymoon with America continued all the same. He was forcing himself to write in English, a torment he both did and did not want to admit to. He lived with fierce, constant tempation, to which he occasionally succumbed; he wrote some of his most memorable Russian verse at the time. It was a perfectly visceral discomfort. “At night I have belching spells from Anglo-Saxon lentils,” he railed. Meanwhile Véra was making vast efforts of her own: She was daunted by the prodigious industry—she used the word “heroism”—of the American housewife. “I am not a good cook,” she cheerfully admitted (it was not something she had been raised to do) and she had no qualms about saying that she did all in her power to stay out of the kitchen as much as she possibly could. Later she was to be teased about the fact that scrambled eggs constituted half her repertoire; the new arrivals subsisted primarily on deli food, Campbell’s soups, canned vegetables, fruit, and eggs. Throughout much of the Wellesley period this woman who believed that the world of the imagination was the only one that mattered waged a halfhearted war on Massachusetts dustballs. “All of my time is spent on housekeeping (which I can’t stand—I’m a terrible housewife),” she grumbled. “As a housekeeper I’m not bad but disgusting,” she later clarified, rather overstating the case, and at the same time damning America’s multitude of so-called conveniences.* As if further proof were needed of the indecipherable ways of Americans—or, for that matter, of the exoticism of the Nabokovs—Véra and Vladimir left Dmitri with a baby-sitter on the evening of October 31, 1941, while they attended a faculty function. “Why is no one taking you trick-or-treating?” asked the blond Wellesley student on duty, who proceeded to paint the seven-year-old’s face with watercolors and parade him around the neighborhood in the Indian headdress purchased in Santa Fe that summer. His mother was abashed on her return.

  America’s entry into the war in December did little to help the newly published Sebastian Knight, but the Nabokovs’ immediate concern was how to survive once the Wellesley appointment was over. Nine days after Pearl Harbor Vladimir wrote a series of the letters at which he had become such a reluctant master over the previous decade. He was to solicit help from so many parties in these years that he could entirely forget having done so, a periodic cause of unpleasantness later.† The field of Slavic Studies had not yet begun to bloom; with the war and the consequent budget cuts, academic positions became scarcer still. As the Wellesley year wore on and no new prospects emerged, he joked that he would probably soon be commanding a squadron anyway. Several days after his forty-third birthday he announced that he did not find the prospect of being drafted altogether unappealing.

  The real battle was one waged closer to home. Over the course of the Wellesley year—Nabokov’s last public lecture took place in mid-March—he gravitated increasingly toward Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. He had lost no time in finding his way to the MCZ, where by the end of the year he was volunteering twice a week. The butterfly work did not interfere with his academic responsibilities, but as Vladimir—and Véra—were very aware, the science interfered with the writing. Véra knew well the force of her husband’s passion: During a similar period she grumbled, “To talk with him you have to ‘wake’ him not from sleeping, but from butterflies.” The addiction got worse before it got better, which could not have made everyone happy; even the Marinel sisters chided Vladimir for having devoted his first two American years to Lepidoptera. It is impossible to say whether Véra was more concerned with the financial or the artistic repercussions of her husband’s scientific passion: She sounded neither relieved nor regretful to report in midyear that Vladimir had been appointed a Research Fellow at the Museum, a post that would bring in a small sum but claim only half his day. “We’re hoping that he’ll earn a bit extra with literature,” she offered. In a desultory fashion her husband was at work on his biography of Gogol, for Laughlin, and on a new novel.

  “Why is it so difficult to imagine oneself at forty?” one of Nabokov’s eternally youthful characters wonders. To the young Véra and to the older one, Véra at forty, Véra the resident alien, would have seemed a nearfictional creation. Her world had always been predicated on a certain uneasiness, but was now supremely precarious. She who had always had an ear for the subtlety of language was without an ability to express it; the world in which she moved was oblivious to the genius of the man with whom she lived; her child was beginning to prefer Superman to Gogol.* In 1942 she had lived as long in the emigration as she had in Russia; the splendor of Petersburg was a long way off. She had invested all of her energy in a literary career that had already once been deprived of an audience but was now deprived of its very substance. Moreover, its practitioner had developed a new rapport with a microscope. Never someone who would have been good at recognizing herself, she probably least conformed to her own self-image now. If anyone had told her as a young woman that she might one day live in America, she might well have believed him. That she was again contending with blackouts and food and fuel shortages only reinforced her conception of the world and its permanent state of turmoil. Had she heard that in the peculi
ar new alliance between her adopted country and her native one her sympathies would lie entirely with the former she might have been surprised. But at the thought that her datebook for 1943—one she and Vladimir shared, as was their habit—would open with recipes for oatmeal cookies, sugar cookies, and Sand Tartes she would have been incredulous.