by Stacy Schiff
Véra’s life was made no more agreeable when Vladimir determined to give up his four-pack-a-day cigarette habit in the summer of 1945. On few subjects was he as comic—or as nostalgic—as on this one. In his suffering he took to following a colleague around the museum so as to inhale his scent; he came as close as he could to embracing the man, who smelled divine. He waxed rhapsodic on the glories of his former habit, as he was still doing thirty years later. And yet he would not allow himself to touch the packet of Old Golds he kept in the bedside table in case of emergency. “We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender,” he vowed, but he felt wretched, especially when, at virtually the same time, Harold Ross was so bold as to edit him at The New Yorker. “Nothing like it has ever happened to me in my life,” he growled to Wilson, who managed to call off the pencils but could do nothing about the nicotine withdrawal. Nabokov’s personal calvary coincided with a case of chicken pox for Dmitri; Véra must have been beside herself. She had had a dress rehearsal for this double torture the previous summer, when Vladimir had been hospitalized with a serious case of food poisoning in Cambridge while she was in New York with Dmitri, whose appendix was being removed. Acknowledging a certain protectiveness on his wife’s part, Nabokov had appealed to Wilson to alert Véra without allowing her to rush back to Cambridge. He knew the unanswered telephone would torment her.*
The arrangement—Véra serving as Vladimir’s first lieutenant, as Sylvia Berkman described it—was not without its lapses. Nabokov traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, in March of 1947 to deliver a talk to a woman’s club there. (He still could not afford to turn down extracurricular work, although he did not sell himself short either. Véra had begun to alert editors soliciting reviews that their rates were unacceptable to her husband. “In fact he does not remember having ever been offered anything so absurd as $5 for a review,” she castigated one such offender.) In Providence Vladimir did Pnin one better; he delivered the wrong lecture. Mrs. Pnin assumed responsibility for the misunderstanding: “I am afraid, I am the one to blame: at the time we made the original arrangement I was sick and omitted writing down your selection of the subject,” Véra explained to the club’s president, who registered a sharp complaint. (The subject had been chosen by Vladimir and clearly indicated in the club’s letter confirming the talk.) Her husband would be willing to return to Providence to deliver the expected lecture at no charge. Still, prompted either by an inner sense of justice or by an external voice, Véra could not help adding: “He also thinks that to some extent you got even with him by misspelling his name on your program.”
She had clearly already acquainted herself with an area with which she would become expert, with what her husband termed in Bend Sinister the “devices of shadography.” Hers was not a visible role, but it was a vast one. As if in acknowledgment, she began to swell to New World proportions. America had a curious, Carrollian effect on both Nabokovs: Within weeks of his last cigarette, Vladimir had gained forty pounds. The Wellesley girls were astounded by the transformation. By December 1945 the 124-pound émigré weighed in at just under 200 pounds, a mark he soon exceeded. Véra noted he somehow even grew taller in the process. As she reported disapprovingly: “Volodya is always bumping into the furniture because he cannot remember his new dimensions. He claims that ‘his belly is all in bruises.’ ” He was clearly a very good deal heavier than she would have liked. She too grew to new dimensions, though not yet to her full stature. On July 12, 1945, two months after the Germans surrendered and a month before the Japanese were to do so, the couple submitted to their American citizenship tests in Boston. They had dutifully memorized the Bill of Rights; Amy Kelly and Mikhail Karpovich went along as witnesses. It was easy enough to explain how blond, 106-pound Véra Nabokoff became on her naturalization certificate gray, 120-pound Véra Nabokov. For once something was gained in translation as well: On her Parisian papers she had been 5 feet 6 inches tall. By some quirk of calculation she was 5 foot 10 by the time the American formalities were over. Meanwhile Dmitri grew and grew, and at twelve was just under six feet tall. (With good reason, Nabokov remembered Craigie Circle as the “shrunken dwarf apartment.”) “When he and Véra walk along the street she seems tiny,” Vladimir observed. At the same time she began to loom larger and larger. She must have felt like Alice, attempting to introduce herself to the Caterpillar: “At least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.” There was every reason in the world why Amy Kelly should fervently congratulate the couple on having been “literally born again to a new life of happiness and prosperity.”
4
Nabokov had been brought to Wellesley to serve in a “generally inspirational capacity.” That he did, but not entirely as the administration had intended. “I spent most of my time studying French, Russian, and Mr. Nabokov,” remembered one student. “I know I always used to put on mascara when I went to his class,” recalled a second. He was as much a subject of fascination to the college girls as were the MCZ specimens to him; in 1945 you could make quite an impression in Wellesley, Massachusetts, by kissing hands. “We were all madly in love with him,” a third alumna reported. For many of the girls he was the first European; he tallied perfectly with the romantic conception of the Continental, bohemian artist. Best of all, he seemed fragile, in dire need of being taken care of. For all of his charm and erudition he appeared—and often was—lost. The college paper reported that the first meeting of the fall 1946 Russian Literature class was delayed by ten minutes, while the students waited eagerly for their professor to arrive. At last “they noticed a face peering through the window frantically demanding, ‘Where does one get in this place?’ ” If the girls were not yet entirely aware of how heterodox were their professor’s opinions, they recognized immediately that there was something unorthodox about his person. “He was the only man I’d seen in my life who wore pastel shirts, pink shirts,” observed a student. He made a practice of annihilating translators.* He announced that he had heard from another faculty member that it was time to give exams. Could he trouble the class to memorize a poem, as proof of their effort? Merrily he informed an attractive blonde he intended to use her in a book one day. He seemed terrifically miscast as a Russian instructor; he talked openly about the fact that he was not a good teacher. Everything about him spoke of another world, a distant realm of Old World sophistication and erudition, a world—far from the seas of Peter Pan collars and saddle shoes and bobby sox—that occasionally followed him to class. One day in a classroom under the eaves at Green Hall a butterfly flew in the open window. Nabokov stopped short, nimbly caught the creature by the wings between his thumb and index finger, mumbled its Latin name, then, slouching his way toward the window, set the insect free and returned to the lesson.
Few of the girls believed his heart to be in the rudiments of Russian grammar. A few knew better where it was. A great number of his students watched him adoringly; nearly as many noticed that his attention was reserved for the best-looking girls in the class. If he was not outright flirtatious he was uncommonly attentive. “Ah, Miss Rogers, I see something new has been added,” he commented when the mascara-wearer, a perceived favorite, returned from spring vacation with an engagement ring on her hand. “He definitely flirted, but always with the dumbbells,” remembered one alumna, who was as aware as others of the eyes sliding past her. Inevitably overtures were made. “I took a course in Russian, and I got sidetracked on a course on Vladimir Nabokov,” recalled Katherine Reese Peebles, a junior who interviewed the new professor for the school paper in 1943 and who was as well placed as anyone to testify: “He did like young girls. Just not little girls.” That fall the two began taking long walks across campus together, hand in hand, exchanging kisses. A Memphis-born belle with an exuberant mind and an irreverent streak, Peebles was well versed in the art of flirtation; the inherent beauty of a wartime blackout was not lost on her. “I was a perceptive young woman, and men were my study. I liked this one b
ecause I couldn’t read him,” she recalls of the mutual seduction. Nabokov quickly discovered that his student knew Alice in Wonderland cold; the two began reciting passages to each other as they traipsed around campus, “stumbling and bumbling” through the winter dark, traveling the longest possible distance between cups of coffee, at the student union and in town. The relationship entailed a fair amount of kissing and fondling; campus affairs were at the time as difficult to consummate spatially as they would have been socially. There was no question that Nabokov was eager to make more of this one, which Peebles happily encouraged, to her friends’ consternation. Since Stanford, those who knew him had commented that Nabokov poked around campus like an “avid eavesdropping anthropologist”; Peebles caught him seizing on her American slang, snapping up the unfamiliar terms. She also saw shadows of the winter of 1943 in his later fiction. Nabokov wrapped his long, padded overcoat around the two of them as they stumbled across campus together; the image would find its way into Look at the Harlequins! much later.* Matters came to a conclusion late in the winter, when Nabokov’s avidity began to make Peebles skittish. After class one day she commented on the half heartedness with which her professor erased the blackboard. At least one layer of Cyrillic always shone through the next. “Then can you read this?” Nabokov asked, scrawling three words on the board and just as quickly erasing them. He had written “I love you,” in Russian. Peebles dropped the course, and the professor.
Later overtures met with less enthusiastic responses, not for any lack of persistence on Nabokov’s part. A student who sculpted a bust of him and at whom he made a number of passes deflected his attentions with news of her boyfriend. At the same time she felt great affection for him, charmed by his apparent helplessness. Nabokov remained playful and was not angry to have been rebuffed. Others found him highly flirtatious but in their innocence made little of his attentions. Once while walking into Green Hall he suggested to a student that they sit in the main reception area so as to study a set of murals commemorating “America the Beautiful” together. “Do you realize how wonderful this is?” Nabokov rhapsodized, ostensibly over the art. He and his student were seated close together on a narrow couch; the enthusiasm seemed genuine at the time, a transparent ploy in retrospect. Only a few of the girls knew their professor to be married. Those who had set eyes on Véra thought her stunning, “with long, thick, glossy white hair falling almost to her shoulders and very smooth, radiant pink-white skin.” In the mid-1940s, Nabokov gave a reading of his poetry, at which Véra sat in the middle of the front row. One student remembered the debut of an act to be perfected later: “I could see the back of the head of her to whom his love poems were addressed—and from time to time between poems I could hear the shuffle of papers and the sounds of their two voices as he bent forward to discuss something briefly.”
Véra surely noticed the general swooning; any woman would have been sensitive to her husband’s appreciation of it. Nothing in her behavior indicated that she knew anything further. Certainly she would have been under the impression that Vladimir found the Wellesley girls callow, sheltered, uneducated, as, among other things, he did. “I have given my damsels exercises to do, and they sit having bowed their fair, blonde, dark (and absolutely empty) little heads ever so low, and they write,” he declared, from the classroom. (They were not unaware of this. One alumna fondly noted Nabokov’s “gentle dismay” toward the lot of them, “a bemused acceptance of what fate had dealt him: American college girls.”) Doubtless Véra did not need to wait for the September 1947 Mademoiselle, in which her husband was profiled, identified as the sort of professor “who is more than a clichéd campus crush.” Confronted with accounts of his misdemeanors of the Wellesley years later she categorically denied all. She was more vested in clearing his name than in sparing her feelings. At the same time she knew well that her husband enjoyed women. His letters are too frequently punctuated with reassurances of his love to believe she did not experience jealousy, even where there was no cause. Some of those bulletins were written at this time, when he left Massachusetts to lecture elsewhere. She liked to believe that his willpower was as great as her own, which it was not; the last dalliance was not that with Irina Guadanini in 1937 any more than the last cigarette was that of 1945. And obscuring the truth with the literal worked well for someone as compulsively candid as Véra. Nabokov was vocal in his admiration for Katherine Peebles’s lithe, long-legged body. Boldly he had informed her, “I like small-breasted women.” In a more innocuous context Andrew Field repeated that comment in his 1984 biography, where some forty years after the fact it fell before Véra’s eyes. She did not quibble with the circumstances that might have led her husband to unleash the remark. In her outrage she went the baby-out-with-the-bathwater route. “I like small-breasted women!” Nabokov declares to a dinner table of students in Field’s book. “No, never!” Véra remonstrated in the margin. “Impossible for a Russian.”
The enchantment the Wellesley girls felt for the exotic professor of Russian was not equaled by the administration. Nabokov had long felt he was underpaid; moreover, he worried about the security of his position, a year-to-year appointment. In October 1947, months after Bend Sinister was published to tepid reviews, he traveled to Cornell to discuss an opening there. Véra substituted for him in Wellesley. On his return he wrote Wellesley’s president to ask if she might be able to predict whether a permanent appointment might appear anywhere in his future. The answer was not encouraging, for reasons Véra gathered to be political; she concluded that her husband’s frank anticommunism cost him a permanent appointment.* Having received and accepted an offer to join the Cornell faculty as associate professor of Russian Literature, Nabokov submitted his Wellesley resignation on November 30, 1947.† He felt that it would be “quite a wrench” to leave and was in fact very reluctant to do so, but in the end the strain was in greater part Véra’s. Early in the winter Vladimir began coughing up blood, an illness that was misdiagnosed first as tuberculosis, then as cancer. Her anxiety was immeasurable, especially in light of the new appointment. The couple entreated friends to be discreet, terrified that the Cornell position might slip from their grasp.‡ Throughout the ordeal Véra commuted to Wellesley on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, by bus and trolley, to teach her husband’s three courses. “I didn’t receive any money for it, but my work there saved his [Vladimir’s] salary,” she reported later of his final semester, three months of which were entirely hers. There were hints that the Wellesley administration looked askance at this arrangement, but they had no reason to object to the substitution. Véra was a better teacher of language than her husband, more organized, less invested in originality. “She made me disciplined, which he never did,” was one student’s recollection. Véra read Vladimir’s lectures carefully, with attention to her audience. There was every reason in the world why she should write the Marinels that what with all the illnesses, with Dmitri’s spring vacation from the Dexter School, and with all else—curiously she did not mention the Wellesley routine—“my head is spinning.” She fell behind in her correspondence, begging the indulgence of a foreign agent, to whom she explained that she “had been compelled to put aside all those things that could wait and some of those that could not.” Her husband spent much of his last Wellesley semester in bed, with what proved a tenacious case of bronchitis. His mood was not improved by the realization that there would be no western butterfly expeditions that summer because of the move to Ithaca.
Bed was of course one of Nabokov’s preferred studios. Despite or because of the convalescence, these proved prolific months. He had been toying again with an autobiography, a project he had described to a Doubleday editor in 1946 as an unusual one: “It will be a sequence of short essay-like bits, which suddenly gathering momentum will form something weird and dynamic: innocent-looking ingredients of a quite unexpected brew.” The provisional title was “The Person in Question.” The first of these “essay-like bits” to be composed directly in English appeared in
The New Yorker in January 1948; the Wellesley administration doubtless chafed at the enthusiastic response to them. Nor were the pieces of what would become Speak, Memory Nabokov’s only project in the last Wellesley year. He had submitted the first completed chapter of the memoir from Estes Park, Colorado, in the course of a trip Véra hugely enjoyed, despite the fact that she had been irritated not to be able to find a copy of the Saturday Review anywhere in the region. Also in Estes Park her husband was busily at work on “a short novel about a man who liked little girls.”
Over these months a little tug-of-war went on with the Cornell administrators, eager to put their new recruit to the greatest possible use. Speaking for the search committee, the Russian historian Marc Szeftel attempted—as had others before him—to lasso Nabokov into teaching a survey course in literature. He did so in vain. (Although it had been part of the original employment proposal, Nabokov would nearly have to be blackmailed into teaching it later.) He proved equally unavailable when asked to assist with the preparation of Russian-language teaching materials before the fall semester. Instead he attempted to direct a little lassoing of his own: “Possibly my wife, who is also a teacher of Russian, can be of help to you,” he suggested to Milton Cowan, the director of Cornell’s Division of Modern Languages, in a letter Véra edited, tempering her husband’s fierce reaction to what would have amounted to a lucrative few hours’ work. Vladimir made a series of efforts to find a Russian position for her at the university. Whether Véra wanted a job is unclear; generally she had an enormous capacity but no great ambition for work. If she took a job they made more money, and if their finances were healthier Vladimir could write more, and if Vladimir could write more, they were both happier. Meanwhile at Cornell others were making more far-fetched claims for Véra’s talents. The housing situation in Ithaca was tight; with difficulty, Morris Bishop, who had been partly responsible for the Cornell appointment, located a spacious, simple home on an acre of land for his new colleague. He testified to its owners that “scrubbing was Mrs. Nabokov’s joy.” Privately he suggested to his new friends that they find a cleaning lady.