Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  Parking was never her strong suit. Early in the 1948 fall semester the couple moved from their summer lodgings to a handsome home with a beautifully groomed lawn on East Seneca Street. In the newly refurbished attic apartment lived a law student and his young wife, who may have had some idea of Mrs. Nabokov’s confidence behind the wheel when Véra asked if Gert Croghan might accompany her on a Boston trip. This did not prepare Harold Croghan for the sight that greeted him when he looked out his third-floor window one sunny afternoon that winter. The house stood on a steep double lot at the corner of Quarry and Seneca streets; Véra had managed to maneuver the Plymouth into an awkward position on the hill, essentially blocking all four corners of the intersection. He watched the curious scene for a few minutes before making his way downstairs. “Why don’t you call the police?” he suggested, refusing Véra’s invitation to take the wheel. Twenty-four-year-old Croghan had been a Marine platoon commander; he did not habitually shy from a challenge. Neither did he think it within even his powers to liberate the Plymouth from its position. “It would have taken a helicopter,” he remembers. The lateral parking device Véra had invented in Berlin would have come in handy now; this was one predicament she seems to have anticipated. A neighbor on East Seneca Street recalls Véra pulling up at the foot of the hill, which could be terrifyingly slippery in winter. In his estimation, “It looked like an uneasy truce between her and the car.”

  Generally however, she drove too well, which is to say with a liberal interpretation of the speed limit. “And pray, find me a Russian who does not care for fast driving?” Gogol reminds us, not to be contradicted by Véra Nabokov. At least one Massachusetts policeman observed as much when Véra chauffeured her husband to Boston for extensive dental work at the end of the 1950 spring semester. Vladimir quipped that they returned to Ithaca “minus my teeth and the Massachusetts part of her license.” “She did not stop when a policeman in a car signaled to her and then he followed us for ten minutes and finally, at 70 miles per hour, crowded us to the curb,” he elaborated to Wilson, who probably had an easier time than the officer believing why this distinguished-looking white-haired woman had led a high-speed chase to a screeching conclusion: She had not understood the policeman wanted her to stop. This was one thing Burton Jacoby had not thought to teach her. She was a supremely law-abiding citizen in general—Dmitri’s leisurely approach to his traffic violations would disturb her greatly—but the speed limit did prove immoderately low. Her husband enjoyed teasing her about this. He was always happy to pronounce his wife a demon driver.

  Did she enjoy the driving, or was she again the victim of her own competence? Regularly she solicited advice about cars from friends; she engaged in a fair amount of automotive window-shopping. For one very brief moment she cast herself as a car salesman, attempting to assist Dmitri in selling an Italian specialty car to one of her husband’s publishers. “Iso-Rivolta is not a sports car but a very elegant sedan. It has a marvelous American motor in combination with a beautiful Italian carrosserie, and the smoothest run I have ever seen,” she wrote glowingly. In her seventies, she asserted proudly that she was the family driver. A visitor found that in her eighties she lit up when he mentioned the cross-country excursions. “I loved driving the car,” she told him, a smile spreading across her face. Her husband boasted that in the course of the Cornell years his wife had driven him more than 150,000 miles, all over North America; in one letter she became “my heroic wife who drove me through the floods and storms of Kansas” for the sake of a butterfly specimen. Véra took a slightly different view of this heroism, or at least did when writing to an old friend in 1962: “I have upwards of 200,000 miles under my belt, but each time I get behind the wheel I hand my soul over to God.”

  She genuinely did enjoy the drama of the open road, the visual thrill of the moving landscape, the moments of high adventure. Vladimir recorded a number of her casual roadside comments in his diary, offering a sense of what it was like to be in a car with Véra: “My Oldsmobile gobbles up the miles like a fakir does fire. Oh look over there, that tree is squatting on all fours.” “The little flames of the autos are like one candle lighting another in the dusk.” “Oh, the sunlight! I can see the ignition key reflected in the window again,” she exulted, an observation that found its way directly into Lolita. (For that novel she compiled an inventory of services to which a car submits at a tune-up, with which to send Humbert and Lolita back on the road, from Beardsley.) With zest she described having picked their way west amid thunderstorms and tornadoes, “and a few ‘dust devils’ which are unpleasant little tourbillons of sand which are supposed occasionally to ‘flip a few cars over.’ ” She recalled an “apocaliptic [sic] traffic jam” in Houston. The two-week drive to Mount Carmel, Utah, proved particularly rich in adventure. “The most exciting thing was when this young hooligan fired a cobblestone into our windshield. We were sprayed with glass dust, and the hole as the size of a fist, but the cobblestone fortunately hit below eye level and fell to my feet. The state trooper took a photo of the cobblestone, the broken windshield and of Volodya sitting behind the glass but said there was nothing he could do, because the offender was a minor,” she reported animatedly, after an unscheduled stop in Missouri, where a new windshield was installed. Her capacity for dramatics could be aroused by these physical adventures where it was more often dampened elsewhere. Having dropped Dmitri off in New Hampshire after the 1950 Thanksgiving vacation, the Nabokovs drove most of the way toward Ithaca without incident. They then headed “through the grey wall of a storm, sometimes hydroplaning or fishtailing because it was so slippery,” Vladimir wrote the Hessens. “There was a moment when I said to Véra, ‘You’re going to drive off into the ditch,’ and she didn’t reply.” In the margin Véra took issue not with the backseat driving but with her husband’s choice of words. “It wasn’t a ditch,” she clarified, “but a terrible ravine.”

  The chauffeuring around Ithaca was less theatrical, at least to the Nabokovs. To nearly everyone else it offered some degree of spectacle. At first grudgingly and soon with good humor, Dick Keegan provided much of Nabokov’s transportation for the first academic year. Véra was busy settling into the Seneca Street house, a four-bedroom home she and Vladimir found uncomfortably large, even with the series of boarders they took in. For two trimesters of the 1948–49 academic year, she also taught high school French at the Cascadilla School, a private school on the edge of campus. Keegan understood that Véra might not have proved as willing as was he to transport Vladimir to the liquor store; on several occasions she cornered her husband’s driver to ask if he had taken him to buy cigarettes, which, indeed, Keegan had. Nabokov was still chain-smoking, intermittently. Véra took over at the wheel after the spring of 1949, when Keegan had graduated, when she was more confident of her abilities, and when the couple rented a series of homes farther afield than East Seneca Street. The chauffeuring put her on campus more than she had been before. And so the archetypal symbol of independence—in succession a Plymouth, an Oldsmobile, a used Buick Special, a new Buick—was to involve her more closely yet in her husband’s work. Rarely was Vladimir seen on campus without Véra; rarely was Véra sighted at the grocery store without Vladimir. “Inseparable, self-sufficient, they form a multitude of two,” a former student and future critic remembered. The attention-getting part was the distribution of labor. More than a few heads turned when, in the supermarket parking lot, Véra set her bagged groceries down in the snow while she shuffled for her keys, then loaded the trunk. In the car her husband sat immobile, oblivious. A similar routine was observed during a move, when Nabokov made his way into a new home carrying a chess set and a small lamp. Véra followed with two bulky suitcases. The intrepid Russian woman with the queenly carriage and the halo of white hair who made heads turn all over campus soon developed a reputation for waiting on her husband hand and foot.

  Generally it was a flawless performance. A student who escaped a few minutes’ of a heavy snowstorm by cutting through Gold
win Smith Hall, where Nabokov kept his office and usually lectured, noted one occasion on which it was not. Inside the doors at one end of the building stood Vladimir, tapping his foot. At the other end of the north-south corridor, at the far set of doors, stood a patient Véra, a pair of her husband’s galoshes in hand. On a snowy day outside of Pale Fire’s Parthenocissus Hall the poet John Shade waits for Mrs. Shade to fetch him. “Wives, Mr. Shade, are forgetful,” Kinbote reminds Shade, luring him into his car. This one was not: Véra rarely kept her husband waiting, if only for the good reason that she was customarily with him in the first place. And when he got home it was she who kept track of his responsibilities. Keegan admired her ability to order the details of both of their lives. “Did you grade the papers you got last Tuesday?” she asked her husband on one occasion, after Keegan had delivered him from campus. Nabokov admitted that he had not. “Well, I did some of them for you,” Véra conceded. On a similar occasion she asserted, “Vladimir sometimes forgets things, but we’re like a good rugby team. We don’t have much practice, so we just use brute strength.”

  A fair amount of brute strength was required on her part during the early Cornell years. The initial months were happy ones: Ithaca was gorgeous, lush and green, home even to an occasional butterfly of interest. Véra was a walker; she strolled happily through Collegetown, to Stewart Park; she admired Ithaca’s crystalline gorges and waterfalls. Dmitri settled in quickly at Holderness, a relief to his mother. Nabokov’s enrollments were low and his schedule far from exhausting. “This is a genuine tranquil professorship, and not some preposterous Harvard + Wellesley combination,” he announced, a touch prematurely. The Nabokovs fell into the welcoming arms of Morris Bishop and his wife, Alison, who became their only close friends at Cornell. To his sister Vladimir explained the decision to send Dmitri away to school (the “hooligan element” elsewhere, and the language instruction): “We miss him, and Véra and I live quietly and very, very happily.” He was able to work throughout the winter, finishing the seventh installment of his memoir early in February. One semester later the demands of academic life and of the university began to grate, especially as they appeared disproportionate to the financial rewards. Nabokov had been at Cornell for five months when he wrote the head of the Literature Division that he could not make do on his present salary, an appeal he repeated to a higher authority several months later.* As he lobbied strenuously for a raise he wrote an émigré friend in New York that teaching was, of course, his last priority. He made no secret of this on campus. Véra did a fair amount of goading, not about his work but about his university commitments. She urged her husband to attend the faculty receptions she would later deny he had ever attended. “You must go,” she advised, insisting when he balked.† On one occasion when he decided his personal honor stood between him and a holiday reception, she went instead. Probably this was Christmas 1951. Marc Szeftel was surprised to find Mrs. Nabokov at the home of a professor whose department’s policies were not to her husband’s (or her) liking. “Everything has its limits,” she explained. It could not have escaped her notice that her husband now held the kind of position for which he had been vying since 1936. She knew it far beneath his abilities, but she also knew it to be necessary.

  They dealt with his chafing at the job—and his sense of its slim rewards—differently. Nabokov availed himself of every opportunity to find a better position elsewhere. Before the first Ithaca year was out, he received a fan letter from the wife of a Baltimore professor, who had admired his New Yorker pieces. “I envy you for basking in the mellow climate of Johns Hopkins. The elements here are rough and raw. Is there a Russian department at your college?” replied Vladimir, masquerading as Véra. By 1950 he was sending out confidential feelers to friends at Harvard and Stanford. He made repeated assaults on his superiors, on one occasion rehearsing his arguments in his diary. The distributor of paychecks braced himself for Nabokov’s weekly requests for advances on his salary, an unorthodox request in the academic context. At the same time attempts to involve him further in the development of the curriculum proved futile. When the dean to whom he carried his salary protests inquired if he might assist Szeftel in developing Cornell’s Russian Studies program his initial response was quick and blunt: “I want to warn you that I am a hopelessly poor organizer with no practical sense whatsoever so that my participation in any committee would be, I am afraid, pretty worthless. I am moreover ridiculously absent-minded and unless I am doing some research work of my own, my mind is apt to wander in a most annoying (to others) fashion.” He—or Véra—toned down the response before sending it on to the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, but the protests of helplessness kept him as far from academic committees as they did from the steering wheel of a car.

  He made equally energetic efforts to have Véra hired as an instructor of Russian. These came to naught, officially because enrollments were too low to justify additions to the staff, unofficially because Véra’s Russian “was deemed ‘too literary’ and not ‘contemporary enough.’ ” She enjoyed only a brief career as a language instructor. Cornell’s language teachers at the time were largely drill instructors, meant to impress set phrases on their students’ memories. Véra had no respect for the system or its practitioners; she griped to the Russian-born Szeftel of the prominent linguist with whom she worked, “You just wait, Fairbanks … will transform Russian in such a way that soon you and I will cease to understand it!” Some on campus, including Milton Cowan, the head of Cornell’s languages empire, credited Véra with having poisoned her husband’s mind against the Division of Modern Languages and linguistics in general, a hostility that makes itself felt in Pnin. She did not need to poison Vladimir’s mind, already poisoned against Cornell’s approach, but she did voice her dissatisfaction. She may have been quite out-spoken about this. In the first few years in Ithaca she worked in both the German and French Departments, a career on which she offered no comment save to say that she left the German post after several weeks, and that “the French gave her notice.” When she groused later about Cornell language instruction she employed virtually the same words as does a character in Pnin, who may have been taking his words out of her mouth. Both noted that the university “used whoever was at hand to teach languages provided they kept one lesson ahead of the students.”

  She had her work cut out for her propping up the reluctant professor. It could be argued that a man accustomed to a valet has an even greater need for a wife; one friend of the couple, commenting on Vladimir’s immense charm, noted that he had a very intimate way of approaching women, as if to enchant them entirely so as to be able to ask if they might do his laundry. In Véra he had found someone who did not begrudge him the mileage he wrung out of his real and learned helplessness, the special dispensations he was accorded for claiming his hands—the same hands that could nimbly manipulate a butterfly specimen under a microscope—were “limp fools.” She rose to the challenges, as relieved to be obscured in the act of doing so as she was delighted to be of service. Her husband detached himself from various responsibilities; she assumed the responsibilities, but dismissed herself. It snows with conviction in south-central New York State, enough so that a good half hour could be required to liberate a car on a midwinter morning. Or so Nabokov complained, offering up the inconvenience as a primary reason for leaving Cornell. Doing so three times a week had become too difficult for him. Véra was at once more precise—and more diffident—when Boyd described the finger-freezing ordeals. “Nabokov never scraped snow,” she corrected him, omitting to volunteer who, precisely, had. The stupefied neighbors reported it had been she.

  One thing she did not do on East Seneca Street was clean house. She finally got her cleaning woman, in the form of a gentle, boyishly good-looking junior who lived in the basement apartment next door, a barberry hedge away. On his landlady’s recommendation, Robert Ruebman was hired for the job, at eighty-five cents an hour. On Tuesday afternoons the eighteen-year-old English major dusted and vacuu
med and cleaned bathrooms, a routine that was interrupted by the snack Véra provided for him. Along with the open-faced ham sandwich, the milk and cookies, she offered occasional advertisements for her husband’s courses. She did not feel he could afford to miss them. Ruebman would mow the lawn, polish the car, seal the floorboards, clean the boarder’s room, cash a check at the Triangle Bookstore. Véra appears to have been very fond of him; he found her crisp but delightful, if, instinctively, as foreign as did the rest of the neighbors. Spontaneously, and for no particular reason, he asked in German if he could do anything else on his way out one afternoon. “Sonst noch was?” Véra repeated, and laughed, and said “No.”

  At Cornell generally she dealt with her husband’s hesitations as she had with the driving. “If he had office hours, he kept them secret,” recalled one student. The few who delved further into the mystery found Véra, or both Nabokovs, at the office. His mind was still on the unfinished page. So was hers, but the concern manifested itself differently. Increasingly the marriage evolved into a tale of two marriages, a port for him, a career for her. Her capability was matched only by his capacity for ignoring everything that did not concern his own work. In early 1950 it was more than broadly hinted to Nabokov that his requests for a salary adjustment might fall on more sympathetic ears if he would consent to teach the European Literature class he had wriggled out of earlier. Against his will and with Véra’s help, he braced himself for the course for which he would be best remembered, Literature 311–312, which he began teaching in September 1950. Still he railed against his wages, complaining that he earned less than a constable or the chief of a fire brigade.* His enchantment with Cornell hardly increased when he learned that, for a constable’s wages, he was teaching in a fictitious department. After two years in Ithaca and having adorned his letterhead appropriately, he discovered that he could not be chairman of the Russian Department for the simple reason that that department was a figment of his imagination. (Cornell was under the impression—one the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences stiffly shared with Nabokov in May 1950—that they had in their employ an associate professor of Russian, a member of the Literature Division.) Partially because of this little contretemps, in the spring of 1951 he was transferred for administrative purposes to the Department of Romance Literature, headed by the ebullient, highly cultivated Morris Bishop. He taught no courses in the department, where he was essentially parked because there was no place for him elsewhere, and because Bishop was delighted to have him. Afterward faculty decisions concerning Nabokov were taken with “a touch of almost amused generosity.” In short the cossetting continued, which is another way of saying that the petulance paid off.* The citizens of Ithaca could only have been relieved he was not driving on their streets.† The faculty could only have been relieved to have seen little of him at their meetings. After sitting in on a visiting scholar’s French Literature course in 1949, he could barely contain his obloquy. He assured Keegan and his classmate Joyce Brothers that they had earned their degrees simply by enduring Professor Wolfe’s lectures. At the end of the semester he marched into the dean’s office and insisted that all the grades be raised by 30 points. On further thought, everyone in the course should receive a 100—minus five points for having been so dim-witted as to have sat through the class for an entire semester.