Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  “The horrible packing process is beginning,” Vladimir moaned in mid-June. “Don’t know whether we will take our furniture with us, or whether we will burn it,” he added, perfectly enunciating the couple’s relationship to the material world. (Apart from the upright piano on which Véra played simple arrangements of arias for Dmitri, the unloved furniture remained in Cambridge.) Vladimir attempted to assist with the process but proved so useless he was chased from the house by an exasperated Véra, who rang Sylvia Berkman at about ten in the morning and asked if she might entrust her husband to her. “I will never get this place cleaned out if he stays here,” she sighed. Vladimir turned up at Berkman’s address with a carton of butterflies, which he hoped she might store for him, as she did. Having solved this worrisome problem to his satisfaction, he called Véra. He called her again about fifteen minutes later, “to see how she was getting on”; after another fifteen minutes he called again, to ask if she needed help. Finally Véra asked that her husband be kept from the telephone. He was entrusted to Berkman’s sofa, where he sat talking, confiding that he divided literature into two familiar categories: “the books I wish I had written, and the books I have written.” Before the departure—fate curiously mimicking itself, or The Gift—Véra realized that she had misplaced the key to the Ithaca house. “Do you think I should tell Vladimir about it?” she pressed Berkman, in a state of some agitation. Berkman counseled her against doing so; it would do no good for Vladimir to worry for ten hours about something he could not remedy. Véra held on to her uncomfortable secret. Once again she was heading toward a door that she alone believed—with reason—to be closed. None of her disquiet showed. Apart from the incident at the Port of New York, Dmitri Nabokov does not remember his mother ever having been bewildered. We never know what will happen beyond the skyline of the last page of The Gift, how Zina and Fyodor will grasp the happiness for which Fyodor has for so many pages been priming himself, to which a missing set of keys bars his way. We do know how Vladimir and Véra Nabokov arrived in Ithaca, the secure post on which they had so long set their sights. Breaking and entering, they eased into 957 East State Street as they might have in a fictional version: by locating an open window, through which one of them climbed.

  * Dmitri provided an additional cause for concern. Raised tri- and quadrilingually, Vladimir and Véra had done all they could in the emigration to shelter their son from French and German for the sake of his Russian. He arrived in America speaking no English.

  * The blazer had never looked better. “Everything looked elegant on him,” remembers Elena Levin, who was meeting someone she had regarded as a master since the publication of Mary. The Atlantic’s Edward Weeks made a similar observation: “He just had to walk into the room and the girls looked around—the clothes didn’t make any difference.”

  * He was not yet his own translator: “Cloud, Castle, Lake” was rendered into English by Peter Pertzov, whom Altagracia de Jannelli had located years earlier.

  * Of a collecting trip in Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest in 1952, Nabokov reported: “On a slope near Togwotee Pass at timberline I had the pleasure of discovering a strain of C. meadi with albinic females. The species was anything but common there, but of the dozen females or so seen or caught as many as three were albinic. Of these my wife and I took two, hers a dull white similar to hecla ‘pallida’, mine slightly tinged with peach.” Véra’s version of the story was a little different. “I also caught a white female of Colias meadi, which nobody seems to have taken before me, and the existence of which most lepidopterists doubted or denied. My husband also took a whitish female, but mine is all white,” she advised friends.

  † Only a handful of students registered for Nabokov’s courses, although a number of interested faculty and auditors from the community attended as well.

  * Translation was never a subject on which Nabokov minced words—or liked to see words minced. Of the available edition of Gogol’s “The Overcoat” he declared: “The existing translation is vileness and an embarrassment.” His work on Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tyutchev did not go unacknowledged; much of it was published in 1944 as Three Russian Poets.

  † This was not everyone’s recollection. Cyril Bryner, Emeritus Professor of Slavonic Studies and a young teacher in the department in 1941, remembered that “Nabokov lost as many as he won, and was not a happy loser.”

  * Such snipes were to persist long after 1941. So foreign was Nabokov’s English to the tried-and-true stuff that Vita Sackville-West would sniff of Lolita: “I don’t know what language it was originally written in.… it is not even bad American and certainly is not good English.”

  † The novel, published officially on December 12, 1941, went out with a long endorsement from Wilson comparing Nabokov with Proust, Max Beerbohm, Virginia Woolf, Kafka, and Gogol—and yet terming him a true original. Kay Boyle, in The New Republic, welcomed the book more warmly than had the Times, pronouncing it “a delight to read.”

  * The general feeling at The New Yorker was that Nabokov had learned his English from reading a dictionary. After the publication of Lolita, he delighted in telling an interviewer that his English came to him direct from Webster’s.

  * In this torture she was far from alone. When Isabel Stephens, a Wellesley Education professor who was the Nabokovs’ neighbor in Cambridge, filled out her 1946 faculty questionnaire, she listed three occupations under “Special projects carried on outside of the department”: “Marketing, washing, ironing.” Under “Interesting plans for the future,” Stephens wrote: “Hoping to get a cleaning woman two days a week.”

  † Having been peremptorily denied a meeting with Nabokov twenty-eight years later, one potential benefactor indignantly produced Vladimir’s letter of December 16, 1941, so as to refresh his “phenomenal memory.”

  * Briefly her husband caught the fever too, composing a poem, now lost, on the Man of Steel’s wedding night.

  * The phenomenon had a literary parallel, articulated by Nabokov: “Vinteuil is accepted by everybody in this provincial town of Combray as a vague crank dabbling in music, and neither Swann nor the boy Marcel realizes that in reality the music is tremendously famous in Paris.… As already remarked, Proust is intensely interested in the various masks under which the same person appears to various other persons.” And, too, Ada will prickle at “the insufficiency of her brother’s fame.”

  * “Then again, only humans are capable of absentmindedness,” we are reminded in The Enchanter.

  * Only in the fall of 1944, when a department would be formed of which Nabokov was chairman and sole member, would he be known officially as “Lecturer in Russian.”

  * As with most things, Nabokov’s definition was his own. “An eccentric,” he wrote, “is a person whose mind and senses are excited by things that the average citizen does not even notice.” By this definition he was married to an eccentric and the father of one as well.

  * “The urge to write is sometimes terrific, but as I cannot do it in Russian I do not do it at all,” Nabokov grumbled in November 1945. Only in 1946 did he report that he had begun to feel “acclimated” to the English language.

  † He knew that the scientific work made him unpopular for other reasons. “I have long since grown accustomed to the repulsive, slippery smile that runs across the faces of my Russian friends in New York when the conversation turns to entomology. In their conceptions, any fool who has written a ‘work’ on history or economics is a ‘scholar,’ ” he griped.

  * Confusion between the cousins continued. The rumor around the VOA office was that the personnel office had intended to offer the post to Vladimir and hired the wrong Nabokov. The FBI could not keep the two Russians straight. Nicholas’s photo ran even with Vladimir’s obituary.

  † To Philip Vaudrin, at Oxford University Press in 1947: “Since you are asking me what I think of these translations, I believe that what you want is my frank opinion. Here it is. These translations are absolutely terrible. I cannot imagine how a
firm of your standing could have been induced to publish such trash. They are caricatures of the originals, couched in execrable English, with all the cliches typical of graphomania. Moreover, the author does not always understand the sense of the Russian lines. Last but not least, his choice of pieces is in the worst taste.” The book in question was an anthology of poetry, The Wagon of Life, Sir Cecil Kisch, translator.

  * Even after this encounter Wilson got Véra’s name wrong, sending love to “Sonya.” Probably he was thinking of the wife of their mutual friend, Roman Grynberg.

  * Having heard enough sympathy for the Bolsheviks, Nabokov divided the Russian emigration into five easy categories: (1) those still crying over the lost furniture, (2) the anti-Semites, (3) idiots, (4) philistines and profiteers, (5) decent and freedom-loving people, or what remained of the tattered Russian intelligentsia.

  * To Colonel Joseph I. Greene, who was arranging for a German translation of Bend Sinister in 1948 as part of an educational program, she wrote that she hoped the book might prove instructive but confided her belief that “knowing the Germans as we do, we cannot help entertaining some doubts as to their susceptibility to re-education.”

  * Kelly had been fascinated by Vladimir from the start. “She treated him like royalty,” recalled a student in Kelly’s 1941 dorm, who had reason to remember him: The Claflin Hall girls had not been allowed to be seated at dinner until Nabokov arrived at the faculty table, which he generally did less than promptly.

  * The FBI also found no reason to believe them anything other than perfectly loyal Americans.

  * The actual words were: “I hope this helps. It is only meant, of course, to help you penetrate the actual words of the passage and find an equivalent for them. Otherwise it is all my own and my husband would not want it, I think, to enter your text.”

  * Original even in his less alluring moments, Nabokov wrote Wilson, “Incidentally I vomited into the telephone which I think has never been done before.” The account of the hospital stay constitutes in itself a small masterpiece.

  * Generally the body count in Nabokov’s classrooms was high. He took pleasure in slaughtering Gorki and Hemingway at Wellesley; he wrote later of killing off Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina. Occasionally a student proved a casualty, as was the case with one 1944 Wellesley freshman. On hearing her name on the first day of class Nabokov began jumping about the room, waving his arms madly. “Do you have any idea what that means?” he asked, scrawling it on the board, analyzing its composite pieces, making buzzing circles in the air, and thoroughly humiliating the student in the process. “I think he forgot there was a person there,” remembered the Wellesley alumna, who never went back to class. Her name means “mosquito” in Russian.

  * Images that Peebles thought born of the campus romance indeed appeared later, but also preceded it. A similar cloak-wrapping turns up in a 1934 poem, “How I Love You.”

  * She was correct to a degree. Mrs. Horton later recollected that Nabokov refused to offer an introduction to modern Russian literature and drama, which he wrote off as Bolshevik nonsense. Other members of the faculty felt this material deserved a place in the curriculum. There is evidence as well that Nabokov rather frightened the dean with whom he had the most frequent dealings, who did not know what to make of him. Which was not unusual; he made some of the most eminent people in his field uncomfortable. He acknowledged as much in Ada, in which another V.V. notes that plodding academic administrations tend to prefer “the safe drabness of an academic mediocrity to the suspect sparkle of a V.V.”

  † Believer in overt destiny though Nabokov was, Cornell had to knock a few times before attracting his attention. The offer was not his first from the university. In November 1943 he had been asked “to help prepare Army Trainees by instructing them on various themes in Russian history,” an idea he found unappealing. Various foreglimmers had preceded this, in 1939, 1941, and 1942. He had read at Cornell in May of 1944.

  ‡ One person who was not so alarmed was Wilson, who wrote a mutual friend of Vladimir’s illness: “I did not take it so seriously at that time as he wanted us to believe because I know him to be a hypochondriac.”

  5

  NABOKOV 101

  One thing is essential: Whenever talented people approach art with the sole idea of serving it sincerely to the utmost measure of their ability, the result is always gratfying.

  —NABOKOV, LECTURES ON RUSSIAN LITERATURE

  1

  Nearly all of the characters for which Nabokov is best remembered—Lolita and Humbert, Pnin, Shade and Kinbote, the Vladimir Nabokov of Speak, Memory—were born or partially bred in Ithaca. The same is true of the character he was to create for and with his wife, and by which she was in large part to be remembered.* She would return the compliment later, constructing a persona who was neither Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, nor V. Sirin, nor Professor Nabokov, nor the author of Lolita, but “VN,” a monument unto itself, the supreme designation in a lifetime of anagrammatic Pseudonyms. The real life of Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov—or someone who conducted her correspondence as Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov, a formula Véra arrived at only gradually—begins on the other side of that obliging window on East State Street. It began as do all American lives, with driving lessons.

  Within days of the arrival in Ithaca, Véra found her way to Burton Jacoby, a colorful and enterprising mechanic at the W. T. Pritchard Garage. Jacoby offered driving instruction, a sideline that allowed him an occasional commission on the sale of a car. By mid-July Véra was the proud owner of a beige 1940 Plymouth, a four-door sedan that was by all accounts nearing the end of its useful life when she purchased it, on the installment plan. Behind the wheel she proved a quick study: Jacoby found her an outstanding pupil, “always so kind and gracious.” He was not alone in commending her new talent; Vladimir announced in September that Véra had bought a car and learned to drive in a remarkably short time. Self-interest may have brightened his admiration: Cornell’s sumptuous campus sits at the top of a steep hill, cut through with gorges and streams and waterfalls. Its scenery is spectacular, but the grade can be steep. On their arrival in hilly Ithaca it had been decided that a car would be a necessity, despite the excellent public buses. “One of us had better learn to drive,” went the thinking; Vladimir appears to have been relieved that it was not he. Véra knew her husband’s peccadilloes as well as his capabilities—when he provided an address it was almost guaranteed to be an approximate or an obsolete one—and she continued to worry about his health through the fall. She had looked into driving instruction in New York; she appears to have been eager to take the wheel.

  Over the course of the first year in Ithaca, Véra nonetheless encouraged Vladimir in a few halfhearted attempts to master this American sport. “It’s not very hard,” she assured him. Practically speaking they would both need to drive if they were to head west on a long trip together. The task of teaching Nabokov fell to one of his students, a highly articulate senior named Dick Keegan, whom he immediately befriended, either for his own considerable charms or for those of his gray Dodge coupe. Keegan discovered that driving was not difficult for Nabokov. It was virtually impossible for him. He had very little interest in focusing on the road; he insisted that he was terrified of sliding behind the wheel. He distrusted cars, unsurprising in a man who claimed to be intimidated by electrical pencil sharpeners but odd all the same for the author of the most original road novel ever written. Keegan noticed that even in the passenger seat his student professor had a tendency to forget he had requested a destination as soon as he was delivered to it. This did not prevent Nabokov from announcing annually, long after the move from Ithaca, that this year, at last, he planned to learn to drive. He never did.*

  By choice and by default, Véra became the designated driver. For a variety of reasons the task was not simple. As Nabokov described it just after the beginning of the fall semester, Véra “carts around her non-driving but advice-giving husband.” He wondered mischievously why she resented his sitting
at her side, offering up various suggestions at street corners; he seemed only dimly aware that marriages have foundered on less. Having spent a disappointing year at St. Mark’s, fourteen-year-old Dmitri was enrolled in the Holderness School for the fall of 1948. As a new driver, Véra felt uneasy making the four-hundred-mile trip to and from Plymouth, New Hampshire, alone. She also felt uneasy leaving Dmitri, whose absences weighed heavily on both parents. Burton Jacoby accompanied her so as to share the driving; Vladimir stayed home. For the next few summers intermittently successful attempts were made to recruit a friend or a student to join the family on its western excursions. Accustomed to advertisements for himself, Nabokov’s students grew accustomed to his advertisements for a pinch-hitting driver. In June 1949, at the end of his junior year, Richard Buxbaum accompanied the family to Salt Lake City, where Vladimir had been invited to lecture at a writers’ conference. The trip got off to a terrifying start. In western New York State Véra drove into the dead-man’s lane in the middle of the highway to pass, but found herself facing a truck carrying a combine, the chute of which extended into the lane. Buxbaum reflexively reached for the steering wheel; the vehicles missed each other by a matter of inches. Chilled, Véra pulled over. She suggested quietly that it might be better if Buxbaum drove.*