Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  Her job expanded in 1945, when Wellesley suggested that Nabokov teach a course in Russian literature in translation. From the Stanford summer he knew how much preparation this would entail; he had no trouble resisting the offer. Véra prevailed upon him to accept it, promising to write the lectures herself. Sparing her husband the necessity of looking up dates or biographical details, which she knew he found tedious, she compiled a concise history of Russian literature. Together the two rewrote some thirty lectures, which Nabokov delivered twice a week at Wellesley; these proved part of the repertoire for nearly fifteen years, ultimately part of the published repertoire. At the top of a talk on romanticism, Véra queried: “Volodia, would it be too involved to say … that, while during the Middle Ages every facet of human nature was dulled and all the contents of it kept frozen like a Bird’s Eye peach, it took roughly speaking four centuries to defreeze it?” She wrote a great number of pages on the Russian poets, all subsumed in Vladimir’s lectures. “A little tartly,” she acknowledged that her husband had reworked the lectures so many times that not a word of her original texts remained.

  Finances kept the Nabokovs close to Cambridge between 1943 and the summer of 1947, when they were able again to head west, to Colorado. During those years Vladimir pursued a number of avenues to supplement—or replace—his Wellesley wages. He asked to be sent on a second lecturing tour at the end of the 1944 academic year; he flirted with film work. Véra made his Hollywood ambitions perfectly clear in a 1947 letter to an agent interested in the rights to Bend Sinister: “My husband wishes me to add, however, that, being a novelist and not a picture man, he is more interested in the financial side of a possible sale than in the quality of a possible picture.” Nabokov continued to hope that Harvard might notice his presence in their backyard and exploded with frustration when they did not; Wellesley car-poolers remembered him fulminating about this injustice from the backseat. (Both he and Véra were vocal about their disdain for the Slavists at Harvard and Yale, which did nothing to improve his chances at either institution.) In 1946 he was briefly considered for a vacancy at the head of Vassar’s Russian program, but was rejected, allegedly on the grounds that he was a prima donna. He energetically pursued the possibility of heading up a Russian unit for the newly created Voice of America, a position his cousin Nicholas mentioned initially, and ultimately took for himself.* Nothing came of any of these opportunities, although Vladimir was put under contract at The New Yorker in June of 1944. That summer found the family vacationing in Wellesley, taking their meals at a private home near campus. Rationing only accentuated the deprivations they already felt. A Wellesley physics professor who joined them at mealtimes remembered Vladimir’s ill humor—he was decidedly not where he wanted to be in August, when Bend Sinister failed to convince an early reader—but mostly the professor remembered Véra’s unease. She seemed poised to anticipate her husband’s displeasure. Certainly she knew how to tone down his attacks. In a letter that went out over her name, Véra alerted a magazine editor to her husband’s low, and frank, opinion of Soviet poets. After a fair amount of vitriol was spilled, she stepped out from behind the typewriter: “I think he would have used milder expressions if he were not down with the flu.” This was wishful thinking, as other letters on the subject attest. More often she did not temper her husband’s remarks, and the thunderbolts sailed.†

  She had already begun to serve as his emissary. At the end of 1943, she had traveled to New York for the day; Vladimir had sent her to see Wilson, with whom she discussed her husband’s fraying relationship with Laughlin.*By early 1945, she had begun to teach in her husband’s stead at Wellesley when he was not well enough to do so. A less endearing habit was Vladimir’s tendency to slough off other people’s enthusiasms on his wife. If someone began to effuse about a new novel or play, Nabokov sidestepped their accounts with a cursory, “Tell it to Véra.” He did not feel he needed to be burdened with other people’s impressions. In an arrangement that evidently suited both partners in the marriage and clearly amused at least one, Véra began to lend her husband something more valuable than a willing ear. In May of 1944 Nabokov visited Cornell University for the first time, not yet aware that his American odyssey was to end in Ithaca, New York. From the train home he wrote George and Sonia Hessen. He was alone, but the letter bears a postscript, ostensibly from Véra. In his wife’s hand Nabokov had added: “Véra sends you both sincere regards. (I have long been imitating Véra’s handwriting!)”

  After a burst of enthusiasm, Knopf rejected the new novel in 1945. By that year Véra had assumed Vladimir’s correspondence with the interested editor, beginning her first letter as she would countless others, “My husband has turned over to me your letter for an answer.” The missive reporting that she would send on the novel’s first chapters before the end of the week is signed “Mrs. V. Nabokov”—but in Vladimir’s hand. This reverse mitosis was not always perfectly neat; occasionally the two tripped over each other on the page. Véra wrote a foreign agent about a contract her husband had signed and had asked her to return; Vladimir accidentally signed the letter himself. She had by now found an English-language voice, but seemed still reluctant to step out from the wings. The self-effacement was extreme enough to be telling—and to be recounting a very different story. In the fall of 1946 Edmund Wilson was in Cambridge and took the Nabokovs to dinner, after which the three paid the Levins a visit. Wilson reported on the evening to Elena Thornton, about to become his fourth wife: “Véra is wonderful with Volodya: she writes all his lectures, types his manuscripts, and handles all his publishing arrangements. She also echoes all his opinions—something which would end by making me rather uncomfortable but which seems to suit Nabokov perfectly.”

  Why would a strong-willed, independent-minded woman now in comfortable command of the English language—she soon noticed that Anglicisms were creeping into her French—second all of her husband’s opinions? She did so only more passionately as the years went by; in the late 1950s a colleague spoke with Véra at a crowded faculty party about Auden, then crossed the room to hear Vladimir expound the same (dim) views, in precisely the same terms. In no course that Nabokov taught did Dostoyevsky ever earn a grade above a C minus; he fared no better with Véra. The only person who argued more violently than Nabokov for the novel for art’s sake was his wife. Most of the time Véra believed simply that he was right. She had lived with his arguments for a long time; the two had similar tastes from the beginning. (She could disagree, vociferously, but only with company before whom it was safe to do so. Véra detested the work of George Eliot, which her husband defended on a private occasion. “Now why did I marry you?” wailed Véra. He was no more indulgent than she when their judgments failed to coincide. “Good Heavens, how could you like that?” he would cry.) With Wilson there was a certain amount of circling the wagons. Wilson was as tenacious a debator as Nabokov, happy to agree provisionally, only to reopen the discussion hours later; early on Nabokov compared him affectionately to the psoriasis on his elbow. Véra was no less obstinate. In some cases the beliefs were initially hers, seconded by her husband. Nabokov would dismiss Doctor Zhivago, applaud the works of Robbe-Grillet, register perfect indifference to Robert Musil, based on his wife’s evaluations. Her heightened sense of dignity had some bearing as well on the undivided front. So too did her confidence in her husband’s genius. When Wilson found he could not muster for Bend Sinister the enthusiasm he had felt for Nabokov’s earlier work, it was to Véra he apologized. He hoped she would forgive him. If anything, she made a stronger case for her husband than he did himself. So convinced was Nabokov of his enormous talent he did a less than enticing job promoting it. He insisted he was squeamish about selling himself, incapable of arranging his own affairs. This was not entirely true, but it was a convenient case to make. Véra, who had as much conviction but a different stake, willingly stepped in.

  The Nabokovs’ views—strong opinions in Vladimir’s case, nearly religious convictions in Véra’s—were not
the prevailing ones in America, or in Cambridge, in the early 1940s. At Wellesley Nabokov could not find a kind word for the art produced by the Soviet state, America’s ally at the time; he was asked to tone down his remarks. He made no secret of his belief that one ought to learn Russian not to understand what Stalin thought of war but what Tolstoy did. He evinced no enthusiasm for “Uncle Joe,” no sympathy for America’s allies on the Eastern Front. Neither Nabokov hesitated to express unfashionable views about the USSR, which shocked people; Vladimir and Edmund Wilson fought like cocks on the subject.* A degree of subtlety was required to understand that the Nabokovs’ disdain had nothing to do with sterling silver samovars and everything to do with art and freedom; that subtlety was not in great supply in the 1940s, when the couple were as often as not cast as White Russians. It was difficult for an American—it was difficult even for Wilson—to fathom that a Russian could be neither for the Soviets nor for the Tsar.

  For good but not always comprehensible reasons, the Nabokovs took the unpopular stand after the war that helping Germany back to its feet should not constitute an American priority. In December 1945, Dmitri’s school made a collection of used clothing to be sent to German children. Vladimir explained why his son would not be allowed to participate in the clothing drive: “When I have to choose between giving for a Greek, Czech, French, Belgian, Chinese, Dutch, Norwegian, Russian, Jewish or German child, I shall not choose the latter one,” he proclaimed, in a statement that shows every sign of having been drafted by Véra. At no time could forgiveness be counted as one of her fortes, and it certainly was not as word of the fates of family and friends left in Europe began to filter back to Cambridge. That news had a vast effect on the totalitarian hell depicted in Bend, a novel that Nabokov described as being related in tone to Invitation, though “even more catastrophic and ebullient.” Into its skewed world he had folded many of the nightmarish frustrations, and much of the pain, of the previous decade. He hoped to portray in the book the defiant vigor of the free mind even in the midst of oppression; as if to pry open the cage, the author—a representative of divine power—subtly intervenes at the end of the novel. Unlike Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister is permeated with a sense of vulnerability, of the fragility of life and love. Ilya Fondaminsky and Sergei Nabokov had perished; Véra’s sister Sonia had made a harrowing, last-minute escape from France via North Africa; Vladimir’s younger brother, Kirill Nabokov, had been arrested but had talked himself free; friends had spent years in labor camps. Nabokov swore that if his hate for the Germans could increase it would, but that it had already reached its limit. Véra went further: “I don’t understand for the life of me why everyone is suddenly in a rush to help the ‘poor’ Germans, without whom Europe supposedly can’t survive: Oh, it would, and how!”*

  None of the reports from Europe lessened Vladimir’s deep-seated revulsion for anti-Semitism, a prejudice to which he was more sensitive than his wife. Véra took the slurs in stride, or at least on a rational level; Vladimir was always ready to call a duel. He had a sophisticated radar for the faintest glimmer of prejudice, as much out of deference to the ideals of his liberal father as to his Jewish wife. Since the arrival in America he had been fascinated by the hotels that advertised “restricted colonies” or “exclusive clientele” in the pages of The New Yorker. No manifestation of anti-Semitism was too small to irk him. He leveled charges of racism even against Alexandra Tolstoy, to whom he and his family owed so much. The miserable summer of 1946, spent in Bristol, New Hampshire, to which the Nabokovs traveled by taxi, was memorable for one such episode. The accommodations were not promising; the lake was filthy, the resort backed on to a highway, the butterflies were poor. Fried-clam fumes from the local Howard Johnson’s wafted across the area. After sitting down in a local restaurant the Nabokovs noticed a sign, “We welcome strictly Christian clientele.” Vladimir wasted no time. “And what would happen if little old bearded Jesus Christ drove up, in an old Ford, with his mother (black scarf, Polish accent)? That, and other questions, so intrigued me that I took apart the restaurant’s manager, leaving him and those present in an indescribable tizzy,” he recounted afterward. He had just finished Bend Sinister and was said by his doctors to be suffering from nervous exhaustion as a result; it is doubtful that the reaction would have been different at a more tranquil time.

  Véra did no such jostling on her own behalf; her elbows were reserved for her husband. These were years when she more often hid behind him than he behind her, a configuration that gradually reversed itself. During the Wellesley years she was a picture of good-natured grace, or at least was to those who saw her. The Nabokovs socialized little during these years, counting among their friends Amy Kelly and Agnes Perkins, both older women.* Those who knew Véra well—Phyllis Smith, Vladimir’s much-liked assistant at the museum; Isabel Stephens, his car-pool colleague; Sylvia Berkman, who helped him to smooth his prose—assumed her to be terribly lonely. Lonely she may have been but sentimental she was not: “We had a few close ties with 2 or 3 old ladies at Wellesley—dead now” was how she later described some of these intimates. She felt that their work precluded any social life in Cambridge.

  According to a little investigation the FBI conducted in 1948, the Nabokovs had virtually no contact with their neighbors, though there was endless Craigie Circle speculation about them.* For his sister in Geneva, Vladimir drew a picture of the morning routine in Cambridge in the fall of 1945, much of it centered on getting Dmitri out the door for his 8:40 bus: “Véra and I watch through the window … and see him striding toward the corner, a lanky, little boy, in a grey uniform with a reddish jockey’s cap and a green bag (for books) slung over his shoulder.” At 9:30 he headed off himself, with his Véra-supplied thermos of milk and his two sandwiches. Sylvia Berkman was invited in for dinner from time to time on the Wellesley afternoons, and sensed Véra was very grateful for the company. “She had so little companionship” was how she, the closest of the Wellesley friends, phrased it. Isabel Stephens assumed she must be downright miserable. Elena Levin, arguably the friend with the most in common with Véra during the American years, saw things differently. “She was much too busy—and much too proud—to be lonely. She would have been happy to have been on a desert island with Vladimir.”

  Certainly her time was much in demand. In 1945 she made some inquiries into printing The Gift privately; it is telling that neither she nor Vladimir thought of her translating the novel in the 1940s. She could not yet “slice, chop, twist, volley, smash, kill, drive, half-volley, lob and place perfectly every word,” as her husband described the ideal translator’s abilities. When an editor like Edward Weeks of The Atlantic called, he spoke with Véra about which poems her husband should like to publish. After the war, when the French agent who had handled Nabokov’s works in Paris visited Cambridge, it fell to Véra to present her with the Gogol book and talk up the collection of short stories that followed. For a translator-friend in Italy she painstakingly recopied Vladimir’s plays, all drafts save one having been lost in the war. Nicholas Nabokov hired his cousin to translate a piece of Pushkin’s he had set to music; Véra reviewed the voice part with Vladimir, who fit his work to Nicholas’s composition. When Vladimir needed the word for the black accordion-like partitions that separate train cars, he called the Stephenses. They were of no help. He called Berkman, who was equally mystified. In the end Véra headed off to Harvard’s Widener Library, where she consulted every available book on railroads. She could find no word for the partitions, which appear in Speak, Memory as “intervestibular connecting curtains.” By January 1946 she was, against her will, in charge of Vladimir’s correspondence. In this she brought upon herself the curse of the conscientious; her husband’s dilatoriness weighed not on his mind but on hers. To this she combined the curse of the capable. Hundreds of letters went out beginning with apologies. The choice was either a letter from her or no letter at all. By 1949 she felt that there were not enough hours in a day for the correspondence. She was
at the time walking the Dutch translator through the hidden meanings in Bend Sinister, levels of meaning which—she could have been describing herself—were not to enter his text, but which he would need to penetrate in order to do the novel justice.*

  Not all of the editorial help went to her husband. In 1950 Harvard University Press published Amy Kelly’s scholarly biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine, which went on to become a surprise bestseller. Véra is thanked in the acknowledgments. She managed always to read copiously, mostly fiction in the 1940s. More often than not she was disappointed, returning her books to the Cambridge public library without finishing them. To a friend in Italy she strongly recommended F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work, especially Tender Is the Night, The Great Gatsby, and The Crack-Up. (Wilson was very likely responsible for fostering this taste, although he was less successful introducing Véra to Faulkner, whose work was lost on her.) She was a great fan of Evelyn Waugh, whose novels she thought splendid, especially A Handful of Dust, Scoop, and Vile Bodies. She spoke highly of Laura Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement, although she noted disapprovingly that the work, which was generating much excitement, was un roman à thèse. Assiduously she reviewed Dmitri’s schoolwork, helping him with his Latin, coaching him on both sides of the Roosevelt/Dewey debate, reading him Gogol and Poe. Both Nabokovs consulted with Wilson about reading lists for Dmitri, who Wilson thought would be much enamored of Twain. Véra’s reaction to the idea shocked Wilson in 1946, and would have shocked him all the more were he to have remembered it a decade later. “She won’t let her 14-year-old son [Dmitri was 12] read Tom Sawyer, because she thinks it is an immoral book that teaches bad behavior and suggests to little boys the idea of taking an interest in little girls too young,” he marveled.