by Stacy Schiff
Véra would never be able (or willing) to camouflage the person who had lived through two major inflations; there would be a dollop of refugee anxiety in much that she did. But those who knew her later were never to glimpse a bewildered—or demoralized—refugee. The poverty, the isolation, the uncertainty, never seemed to matter, not because she was an optimist by nature, which she was not, but because she made certain that the pedestrian concerns never showed. Or as Maria Marinel gushed shortly after the Nabokovs arrived in America, “Véra Evseevna, you will always be twenty years old!… life has not yet managed to soil you. And knowing your life, your troubles, and your sense of responsibility, I find that stunning and beautiful.” The worst indignity for someone like Véra may have been the only one to leave a mark. She must have felt, as had Madame Luzhin before her, at a Berlin dance, “depressed that everyone was looking at these movie people, at the singer and at the consul, and nobody seemed to know that a chess genius was present at the ball, a man whose name had been in millions of newspapers and whose games had already been called immortal.”*
Publicly, she remained stoic about the family’s situation. Her only comments on the bleakness of their prospects went to Goldenweiser, with whom she could be perfectly blunt. “As before, we have no ‘perspectives’ for the fall, except for the perspective from the window of our little flat here,” she sighed as the 1941–42 academic year wound down. The second semester had been difficult for all kinds of reasons: Dmitri had attended three schools, none of them satisfactory, had been sick throughout the winter, and had recently submitted to a tonsillectomy. She herself had persistently been unwell. Vladimir was, with good reason, nervous about the year to come. His literary luck was not all good, as he discovered when “Spring in Fialta” proved, on the first attempts at publication, to belong to “the boomerang variety of manuscript.” The salary he accepted at the MCZ was a third of what the family had lived on at Wellesley. Véra was rattled, and, as she had been in Berlin, often dispirited. “Try to be cheerful when I get back,” Vladimir begged later in the year, “but I love you gloomy too.” He was less fond of what he termed her “little economic wailings.”
The bulk of the summer of 1942 was spent at the Karpoviches’, a vacation Véra enjoyed less than she had the previous stay. Almost certainly the cause was a falling-out with Tatiana Karpovich over how to discipline the boisterous Dmitri. The youngest Nabokov that year composed a story about a mother who “was so kind that when she had to spank her child she gave him some laughing-gas first,” a tale which does a fair job of conveying Véra and Vladimir’s attitude toward parental discipline, one which caused some dismay among their friends. Véra left Vermont early, and alone, to hunt for an apartment in Cambridge. She was under strict instructions to find one with a room in which her husband could work undisturbed, which she did, renting a third-floor apartment in a large brick building on Craigie Circle, a twenty-minute walk from the museum. For one hundred dollars she acquired the furniture of the previous tenant, a professor with execrable taste. The cramped headquarters proved the Nabokovs’ longest-lived American address; with Véra and Dmitri sharing a narrow, twin-bedded room so that Vladimir could write at night in the room next door, they would remain at Craigie Circle until mid-1948. Mary McCarthy was a long time in recovering from the décor when she visited; others remembered only Vladimir’s bed, strewn with index cards. Isabel Stephens, a neighbor and Wellesley colleague, was led to believe that he littered the floor with his cards, which Véra collected and put in order for him. (She did find her day’s typing on the floor when she woke in the morning.) While in Cambridge Véra learned that Anna Feigin had arrived safely in Baltimore, with her brother, Ilya. Both Nabokovs were distraught to find that the Hessens had not sailed on the same ship; they left France finally at the end of the year. “Now this gigantic stone has rolled off of my chest, with its tiny swastika, and it is easier to breathe,” Vladimir wrote, welcoming them.
In the spring Véra had typed her husband’s curriculum vitae and a list of eight topics on which he could speak; financial necessity made him a traveling lecturer that winter. He set off early in October 1942 for two months of speaking engagements that took him from Georgia to Minnesota. This made Véra a de facto curator of Lepidoptera at the MCZ. From the South her husband instructed her which butterflies to pin into the sliding glass cases, and in which order. “Good Girl,” he applauded from the train to Atlanta, “for doing so many trays.” While all in Cambridge appeared on an even keel, his trip was one rich in the Pninian moment with which his life—especially his life apart from Véra—was so rich. He had long vaunted his absentmindedness, his ineptitude, the “dilly-dallying [which] has always been my specialty.”* His encounter with the American South was enhanced by the adventure of the renegade cufflinks (a replacement set materialized out of thin air and was affixed to his overstarched cuffs by a well-meaning female guest, decidedly “not the best-looking of them”); the case of the wrong lecture in the jacket pocket; the case of the mistaken identity. (After a long wait for his ride to campus, he realized that the college had been “expecting a gentleman with Dostoyevsky’s beard, Stalin’s mustache, Chekhov’s pince-nez, and Tolstoy’s tunic,” a gentleman who was no other than himself.)
All of this information was transmitted to Cambridge in daily dispatches, to which Véra responded with equal frequency. Nabokov challenged his wife to determine telepathically which paintings hung on his hotel room wall; he wrote of his delight in their shared life. He hastened to banish any specters of jealousy that might be arising at her end. Lounging on his bed, naked, he assured her that he missed her on all counts. Intermittently he was putting the finishing touches on the Gogol biography—he promised Laughlin that it would take him ten days to dictate the thing to Véra—even while he battled the impulse to write in Russian. From Cambridge Véra sent him a partially completed form he might submit to the Guggenheim Foundation for a fellowship. She suggested that he write Agnes Perkins and Amy Kelly at Wellesley, to remind them how much he would like to return to some kind of position there, an appeal that would bear fruit the following spring. Nabokov’s tour as a traveling salesman in literature proved the couple’s last long separation; they would never again be apart for more than a matter of days.
When he returned to Cambridge on December 12, Vladimir found Véra in Mount Auburn Hospital with pneumonia. She stayed for several weeks, into the new year. To her husband’s relief, Anna Feigin was at the apartment, sleeping on what was euphemistically termed the sunporch. Were it not for his wife’s cousin, Vladimir felt, he and Dmitri would have disappeared completely. As a result of the illness the typing of the Gogol book did not begin until nearly mid-January, however. “She still cannot manage more than five pages per day,” Vladimir wrote Laughlin apologetically of his wife, “but this rate will improve steadily.” Progress on the manuscript was slower than expected, as—doubtless relatedly—was the recovery. More than typing appears to have been at issue: By March only 130 pages were ready, which indicates a certain amount of rewriting. For Véra the scene must have been reminiscent of Invitation to a Beheading, which she had also typed while convalescing, on a different keyboard. There was every reason in the world why Vladimir, congratulating his publisher on his upcoming nuptials, should have written that year of marriage: “It is a very pleasant state as far as my own experience goes.”
We do not know if—frail as she was, well-acquainted with her husband as she was—the woman who “presided as adviser and judge over” Nabokov’s first fictions offered comment on the Gogol pages as she typed. Other early readers did. Neither Karpovich nor Wilson approved entirely of one of the most eccentric biographies ever written, a book that begins with the death and ends with the birth of its subject, visiting every one of its author’s pet peeves along the way. Laughlin asked if Nabokov could not see his way to supplying the plots of Gogol’s works; the author responded not by doing so but by writing Laughlin’s admonishment into the book. In the slim volume Naboko
v takes issue not only with the existing translations but with Roget’s Thesaurus as well; he manages to include a subtle plug for one of his own future works. Is it truly necessary, pleaded Karpovich, for you to grind every one of your personal axes at Gogol’s expense? Wilson thought his Russian friend overindulged in puns; the cleverness threatened to overwhelm the book. Véra had the advantage of knowing her husband better than did either Wilson or Karpovich; he was not capable of holding up a mirror to Gogol that did not include his own reflection as well. Above all the biography amounted to a primer on reading Nabokov. Véra also had some experience of the matters of which he spoke. “Gogol was a strange creature, but genius is always strange,” Nabokov declares of his subject. To Laughlin he explained that the real plots hid always behind the visible plots. Twenty years later Véra advised a friend mystified by a young relative’s behavior: “Artists are unusual people, and their reactions may sometimes appear disappointing. Most of the time the truth is different from the way things look.”
3
The appeals Véra had advised to Professors Kelly and Perkins paid off in the winter of 1943, when Vladimir was invited back to Wellesley to teach two noncredit courses in Russian. (There was sad irony in the fact that his deliverance came courtesy of the pro-Soviet sympathies that began to blossom all over America.) Again his title reflected his irregular status: According to the September 1944 faculty questionnaire that Véra completed for him, he was now “Extracurricular Instructor in Russian.”* In the simple disguise of a language professor he traveled from Cambridge to Wellesley, by wartime car pool, for semiweekly meetings of his courses. The commitment required more of his time than he had anticipated, not because of his enchantment with his students but because of his disenchantment with the teaching tools at hand. He could not help but blaze his own trail. “I invent my own phonetics and rules for I am just created in such a way that I am utterly incapable of taking advantage of the work of others, no matter how substantive that work might be,” he explained. His “real life” was located not at Wellesley, and not even with his literature—he felt as if the person who had been writing in English under his name was but a construct, “as if it’s not myself in fact who composes”—but at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. So disassociated was he from Professor Nabokov that he told a student interviewer he would laugh to hear himself lecture.
“Wars pass, bugs stay,” Vladimir announced that winter, making no question of his priorities, much less where the Wellesley classes fit in the scheme of things. He took the museum work altogether seriously, spreading, pinning, and labeling specimens for the collection, focusing on his favorite “Blues” of the Lycaenidae family, for which he had devised a novel taxonomy. He maintained his reputation as an original even at the highly original MCZ, where he was generally regarded as a gifted amateur, not only because of his lack of a graduate degree. This could not have disturbed the man who had written his mother from the other Cambridge more than twenty years earlier: “I love to play the eccentric.”* He was no less quick to report on his follies than were his colleagues, one of whom noticed that his hallway greetings boomed in inverse proportion to how clearly Vladimir recognized the person he was addressing. In 1944 he acquired an assistant who would become a trusted friend, seventeen-year-old Phyllis Smith, then a Simmons College freshman. Nabokov delighted in sharing with her the tales of his American mishaps, the misunderstandings that seemed to accrue to someone unfamiliar with the local mores. His recurrent question seemed to be “Is this really the way they do things in America?,” the implication, “Do you think this as absurd as we do?” So much of his and Véra’s experience had been that of his characters: breaking out. Now for the first and only time they struggled with getting in.
Despite the butterflies, Nabokov finished writing—and Véra finished typing—the Gogol manuscript in May. That spring Véra began to submit her husband’s work to magazines, as she had done in Europe, a sign that she felt more confident of her English (or of that of her husband, who had just received the first of two Guggenheim Fellowships). She had by this time also assumed her husband’s correspondence with publishers, Laughlin chief among them. Hearing of their interest in the American West, the independently wealthy Laughlin invited the Nabokovs for a summer stay at his ski lodge in Alta, Utah. It proved a restorative vacation, though Véra was disappointed by the weather; a cold wind seemed to howl constantly through the Wasatch Range canyon. (For someone born in St. Petersburg she was uncommonly sensitive to cold. Her husband was sturdier, but quick to conclude that America’s climatic conditions were “not quite normal.”) Nor was she won over by Laughlin or his wife, which may explain why the publisher remembered her primarily for her glacial charms. In Alta as later, Laughlin sensed that Véra feared he might somehow lead her husband astray. Her concern proved misdirected, but well-founded: She was visibly unenthusiastic when Vladimir proposed to their host that they climb to the top of 13,000-foot Lone Peak in search of a rare butterfly. After an eight-hour ascent, the two nearly perished on the way down, as they slipped through a steep snow-field at the edge of a cliff, over which Nabokov nearly lost his publisher. They were due back at the lodge at four; at six Véra called the sheriff’s office, which sent out a car. A sheriff returned with the men several hours later. There were no histrionics on their return. Vladimir seemed more rattled by his wife’s systematically defeating him at Chinese checkers, to which the two devoted a good deal of time over the summer.
Despite himself, Vladimir made a new friend in July, on a mountain road outside of Alta. Leaving his overheated truck behind, a coal-dusted young man hailed Nabokov, who should by 1943 have learned not to judge anyone by his attire. He glowered silently at the truck driver but did not stop. John Downey was unwilling to be shaken off so easily and pursued the lepidopterist with a volley of questions. Pointing to the left and right with his net, Nabokov administered an ambulatory Latin exam before he was willing to believe that the seventeen-year-old shared his highly recondite passion. When Downey passed with flying colors, the older man stopped in his tracks. “Vladimir Nabokov,” he offered, extending his hand. A few years later Downey’s wife and Véra joined their husbands for a collecting trip, just before the erstwhile truck driver began his master’s in entomology. Véra applied a little litmus test of her own. “Tell me, Norine,” she asked Mrs. Downey, over a picnic table near Salt Lake City, “does your husband understand my husband’s work?” “I’m sure he does, because he uses it all the time,” responded Norine Downey, referring to the lepidopterological papers. “That’s good, because many people don’t,” sighed Véra, referring to the fiction.
Mrs. Downey was understandably misled by the question. In Cambridge Nabokov returned to the magic world of his microscope; if Véra disapproved she waited some time to intervene. It had not been long since she had typed a line stating that Gogol had become a great artist when “he really let himself go and pottered happily on the brink of his private abyss.” The letters are studded with wails about the difficulty of changing languages, of keeping the Sirin inside at bay, of the clumsiness of feeling his way in English.* The butterfly work must have been doubly appealing, once as passion, again as refuge: The language of science is beautifully constant. The discipline was an all-consuming one, however. Nabokov later admitted that after the MCZ he was never to touch a microscope, “knowing that if I did, I would drown again in its bright well.” Véra threw out a lifeline just after the New Year. On January 3, 1944, her husband wrote Wilson: “Véra has had a serious conversation with me in regard to my novel. Having sulkily pulled it out from under my butterfly manuscripts I discovered two things, first it was good, and second that the beginning some twenty pages at least could be typed and submitted.” He promised that this would be done quickly and it was: “I, or rather Véra, have-has typed out already ten pages of The Person from Porlock,” he reported days later. By mid-month thirty-seven pages of what was to become Bend Sinister went off to Wilson.
Progress on the no
vel slowed after the initial burst. The teaching schedule interfered, but mostly the butterflies were to blame. Nabokov knew his habit was costing his family, too. “I am devoting too much time to entomology (up to 14 hours per day) and although I am doing in this line something of far-reaching scientific importance I sometimes feel like a drunkard who in his moments of lucidity realizes that he is missing all sorts of wonderful opportunities,” he admitted. On account of his passion he had grossly neglected his finances.† The jovial comments did not fall on deaf ears; a Russian writers’ bureau arranged for several hundred dollars to be advanced him that spring. He talked about retiring from the MCZ, something he would not do until the fall of 1947. Meanwhile a sort of compromise was worked out, one Vladimir described to Hessen on the twenty-first anniversary of meeting Véra: “It’s Sunday today, and as usual on this day, I am staying in bed since I know—and Véra knows—that if I get up I will stealthily make my way to the Museum. It’s particularly pleasant working there on Sundays.” Cambridge friends who remembered Véra waiting on her husband while he sat propped up in bed remarked on her humble devotion. At those times she appears, however, to have had him precisely where she wanted him.
She succeeded less well in keeping the financial anxiety at bay than she did the bill collector. (The rent on Craigie Circle alone was sixty dollars a month, or three-fourths of Nabokov’s museum salary.) Shortly after the move to Cambridge Véra began to give private language lessons, as she did intermittently over the next years. One of her less willing victims was the eleven-year-old daughter of Wellesley professor Isabel Stephens, eager to help the family financially. In 1944 Dmitri was enrolled at the Dexter School, in Brookline, for which he had a partial scholarship; Véra paid off a portion of the private school tuition with secretarial work. That year she took a position in the Department of Romance Languages at Harvard, where she assisted a French and a German professor on a part-time basis. Again the job proved short-lived, either because the permanent secretary returned from leave, as Véra asserted later, or, more likely, as she wrote at the time, because the position “was incompatible with everything else, since V. is busy all day and needs a lot done for him and he needs help with a lot of things.” By 1947, when a Harvard library position was offered her, she would not even pause before responding that she was unqualified for the job. By that time she had found full-time work, at home.