Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  Véra spent the spring of 1950 typing the manuscript of the memoir, under more than the usual pressure. In April Vladimir was hospitalized for ten days with a grippe followed by intercostal neuralgia. For the month Véra—just out of bed after a bad case of bronchitis—taught his classes for him. She arranged a fall lecture for him at Smith; she solicited Wilson’s advice on the soundness of Harper’s publishing plans. Nabokov profited from his sick leave to put the finishing touches on the manuscript, boasting that Véra was “doing an amazing job replacing me at the university.” The arrangement must have proved a relief to them both. Véra kept a strict eye on her husband, affixing a faux wax seal even to a short missive to Hessen, under which she scrawled “Seen and approved, Véra.” Nabokov had hoped to finish the book no later than April so as to have it out before the Christmas book-buying season; the illness interfered with his schedule, enough so that Harper postponed publication to January 1951, to his great dismay. In the meantime his editor was in dire need of a description of the book in order to write his catalogue copy. Vladimir professed to have neither the time nor the talent to produce a synopsis, but offered to appeal to a friend in possession of both. Véra composed an anonymous two-page description of the manuscript, comparing it with Tolstoy and Proust, and praising, among other virtues, two qualities she admired above all else: the memoir’s originality, and its author’s “absolute lucidity of wording.” With a low chuckle and without revealing the identity of its author, Nabokov wrote that he had toned down the encomium a bit. The manuscript was finished at last in May, which set Véra on an end-of-semester typing marathon. The bulk of the pages went to Harper on June 5.

  Both Nabokovs were well aware that their financial future depended to a great extent on the fortunes of the memoir. To supplement his Cornell income Vladimir had agreed to translate The Brothers Karamazov; the April illness forced him to reconsider. Over the next few years he contemplated a number of similar projects, for financial reasons. In the fall he proposed a piece on the Soviet idea of America in plays and stories to The New Yorker; in January 1951 he attempted to sell to the publisher of the English edition of Madame Bovary his corrections to the translation. Nor was that all. “With one thing and another I have almost completed a small book on the structure of Madame Bovary for students. Would you be interested in publishing it?” he queried a Rinehart editor. A few years later he and Véra narrowly missed translating what they referred to as “The Old Man and the Fish” into Russian, a project to which Nabokov had agreed on the condition that his name not be attached to it. While the search for a memoir title began, Véra offered an innocent piece of advice. Her husband was teaching Eugene Onegin and railing against the existing translation of Pushkin’s verse masterpiece. “Why don’t you translate it yourself?” she suggested, perhaps the six words of encouragement she would most come to regret, culminating as they did a full decade later in five thousand index cards—three 16-inch-long shoeboxes’ worth—each of which she painstakingly typed, several times. By the fall, when Nabokov was busily soliciting loans, the memoir loomed more and more significantly as their financial salvation. Véra appealed to friends: Harper had agreed to send out a number of advance copies of the book, and she and Vladimir wanted that list to be as long as possible. “Could you not send us a list of people you know (and people you don’t) who would be interested in the aforementioned?” she queried Hessen, who dutifully complied. (Harper did not, balking at the long list.) A few weeks later she wrote Katharine White while her husband spent a quiet day composing in bed, between battles with midterm bluebooks. Picking up the baton in one of the few correspondences not normally hers, Véra explained, “He has never had so little time for his writing. In this respect it is probably the worst year of his life.” Her husband’s fatigue could be read between her lines; the typewriter was itself failing. Between February when the “p” disappeared and May, when the “h” succumbed, most of what it produced verged on the half-legible. Over the summer, when the Royal was finally sent off for repair, Véra resorted to handwritten letters.*

  The title for Nabokov’s memoir was longer in coming even than was the manuscript. (Late in July Nabokov sent Harper a last chapter in the form of a review of the book, about which he had mixed feelings. It was not included in the memoir, and was published only in 1999.) Véra put a good deal of energy into the title search over the winter; we can only be grateful that she did not prevail, or the magnificent piece of prose that went out into the world as Conclusive Evidence and metamorphosed into Speak, Memory might have been titled “Fluorescent Tears,” “Roots,” or “The Winding Way.” Against the advice of both the Whites and Wilson, Nabokov settled on Conclusive Evidence. The two buried “v”s had a lovely ring to them; moreover, they struck him as philosophically correct. (It is tempting to think they did so because of Véra. It is equally possible that Nabokov was alluding to his own name and patronymic. When he had first contemplated a memoir, in 1936, the working title for the much-rejected pages was “It Is Me.”) For all the excitement generated by Conclusive Evidence it might just as well have been titled “Fluorescent Tears.”* While most of the reviews were stellar, a few of the loudest voices were dissenting ones. Like most of Nabokov’s work, this volume failed to charm The New York Times’s Orville Prescott, on whom the idea of man as mirage was lost. “He is not interested in characterizing anybody,” cavilled Prescott. “He does not even paint a clear picture of himself.” Sales were flat, not much assisted by the fact that Nicholas Nabokov had published a different kind of musical memoir a few weeks before Conclusive Evidence. Even Vladimir’s editor had had trouble keeping the two Russians straight. There was every reason why Nabokov—pained by the wrong-address compliments he received over the years—should have had a highly developed sense of a second, if not a tertiary, self.†

  Publication month found both the couple distracted by other concerns. “In the course of five days straight, non-stop, Véra and I have from ten in the morning until two in the morning been correcting my students’ compositions,” Vladimir noted in February 1951, when posters advertising Conclusive Evidence decorated Ithaca bookstores. A warm front swept in that month, melting the ice; he studied the shadows of the drops as they fell from the eaves. In his diary he noted Véra’s remark on the thaw: “The icicles are dripping, and what a display of diamonds!” In March she spent ten days typing and retyping and typing again the story into which those New York State stalactites dissolved, “The Vane Sisters,” which Vladimir dictated to her, a story with which he was much pleased, far more pleased than would be The New Yorker, which rejected it. The same month Véra found in a trunk three French translations of her husband’s early stories, which she sent to his Parisian agent. In short she forged ahead.

  In the spring the Nabokovs sold the piano that had made the trip from Wellesley, bade an unemotional good-bye to 802 East Seneca Street, and “lightly laden,” set out for the West in their aging car.

  3

  If ever there was a time when Véra should have discouraged her husband from working on an unsaleable manuscript, it was now. His work, for which new hopes had been raised at every juncture and in turn by three American publishers, had amounted to a series of “dismal financial flops.” The strain was felt most acutely on Seneca Street in 1951. That spring Dmitri was accepted to Harvard with a partial scholarship, news in which Véra delighted but which made her more nervous yet about finances. Even Dmitri was aware of the family’s precarious monetary state at the time. Vladimir felt he had come to the end of the line. Never again would he allow one of his books to be hushed up, as he felt Harper had just taken such perverse delight in doing. Forswearing a guilelessness which few associated with him in the first place, he vowed to be fierce and cunning in the future. The “Vane Sisters” rejection had stung badly, for both financial and artistic reasons. And he had no hope whatever that the book on which he was currently at work would be accepted by any magazine.

  Nothing could have looked less like the
answer to their difficulties than that manuscript, to which he had intermittently turned his attention since the summer of 1947. Almost parenthetically he mentioned it to a publisher for the first time in November 1951. “Moreover, I am engaged in the composition of a novel, which deals with the problems of a very moral middle-aged gentleman who falls very immorally in love with his stepdaughter, a girl of thirteen,” he advised Viking’s Pat Covici. The truly level-headed wife of a man in debt to friends for several thousand dollars might have counseled him to turn his attention to something more saleable; the mother who had balked at the idea of introducing her twelve-year-old son to Mark Twain might have been expected to keep her distance. But all bets were off where art was concerned, or at least where Vladimir’s art was concerned.

  Lolita owes her birth to Nabokov but her life to Véra; she was several times nearly incinerated in Ithaca. The manuscript came close to meeting its demise as early as the fall of 1948, when Vladimir made a trip to the trash barrel behind the Seneca Street house with his pages. Dick Keegan arrived on the scene minutes before Véra, who stepped outside to find her husband had set a fire in the galvanized can next to the back steps and was beginning to feed his papers to it. Appalled, she fished the few sheets she could from the flames. Her husband began to protest. “Get away from there!” Véra commanded, an order Vladimir obeyed as she stomped on the pages she had retrieved. “We are keeping this,” she announced. On at least one other occasion, less dramatic than this bonfire manqué, she was observed filing away pages her husband deemed deficient and later published. She did so again with Lolita: Nabokov remembered Véra’s stopping him several times in 1950 and 1951 when, “beset with technical difficulties and doubts,” he had attempted to incinerate Lolita. As no one had yet considered the manuscript for publication, the dissatisfaction could only have been artistic. She who had traveled to Ithaca a few years earlier alone in the knowledge that they were to be shut out of their house on arrival was for these years alone in the knowledge that her husband was at work on a “time bomb,” a work so inflammatory that he blacked out the research notes—on sexual deviation, on marriage with minors—in his diary. Plenty of manuscripts have burned, among them early drafts of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dead Souls. A three-person brigade intervened to save A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man from the flames; in Pale Fire, Kinbote looks on as John Shade indulges in a little backyard auto-da-fé. That Lolita did not meet with the same fate, in the context and climate in which Nabokov was composing in the early 1950s, is testimony to Véra’s ability to—as her husband had it—keep grim common sense from the door, shoot it dead when it approached. She feared that the memory of the unfinished work would haunt him forever.

  She was by no means complaisant about his plans. When Vladimir announced to colleagues that he was going to write a novel about the love life of a pair of Siamese twins, Véra put her foot down. “No, you’re not!” she exhorted. We have the relatively sedate “Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster” instead. (On Lolita’s loud publication one uncomfortable colleague consoled himself that the damage could have been far worse. Vladimir might have forged ahead with the Siamese twin idea.) Much later Véra staunchly opposed his plan to publish a collection of his favorite Russian poems, in his translations. Moreover she was sensitive to his artistic obligations. Probably in the spring she had written Elena Sikorski, explaining why she was the author of the letter in terms her sister-in-law would immediately understand: “Right now there’s a new short story ‘coming out of him’ and he can’t do anything until he ‘gets it out of his system.’ It’s like a sickness, you know him.” With equal grace she could serve as prod and brake; Field may have best described her when he called her Vladimir’s “intellectual visa checkpoint.” He depended on her good, and uncommon, sense: “My wife, of course, is a wonderful adviser. She’s my first and best reader,” he had told a reporter just after the publication of Bend Sinister. In Berlin, when her husband was about to sacrifice a night’s sleep to a rhymed four-line palindrome, it had been she who had quietly ordered, “Go to sleep, Volodya.” The palindrome remained unfinished. She made it as possible as she could for him to work without making it possible for him to overwork, something that became more and more difficult once the English language began to accommodate itself to his needs. The later letters are full of concern that she could not persuade her husband to take a much needed vacation. At times she sounds on the verge of hiding the pencils.

  She could express this frustration to her sister-in-law, an ocean away. In Ithaca she had no one to whom she could speak openly about these or any other concerns, with the exception of Morris Bishop’s wife, Alison. (That fondness did nothing to preclude her heading off an inquiring biographer fifteen years later with the categorical, “We had no close, really close friends at Cornell.”) She confided her hopes, her qualms, her excitement about the new manuscript to no one, even while her husband boasted regularly to a colleague that he was at work on a new novel that would get him kicked out of America, as—quite differently than he imagined—was to be the case.* Véra was always circumspect, but was so especially about what she was reading in the early 1950s. These were staid times in a provincial place. Over the summer she had even less of an opportunity to share her concerns. Véra and Dmitri by turns drove Vladimir across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas to Telluride, Colorado, a destination they reached on June 30. This was the family vacation Vladimir claimed he had bungled for the sake of his butterflies. At the end of July Dmitri set off on his own; his parents spent the remainder of the summer in perfect isolation, surrounded by wildlife, on a ranch in West Yellowstone, Montana. They returned to a smaller, more comfortable home in Ithaca, at 623 Highland Road. There were no regrets about the move, as the “dreadfully drafty dacha”—their landlord had returned to find Véra had stuffed all the keyholes full of cotton wads—had proved ruinously expensive. Moreover, on Highland Road there were no boarders, a breed Véra generally disliked and with which the Nabokovs had had nearly as much luck as would Charlotte Haze. Véra described three of the East Seneca Street four: “One was a professor and an inveterate drunkard, another was completely crazy (he’s currently in the crazy house), and the police are looking for another of them now. He only stayed a week and passed himself off as something entirely different from what he was.” It was a lineup into which Humbert Humbert could have slipped comfortably.

  The fourth Ithaca winter must have felt more temperate, as the couple knew it would be an abbreviated one. Karpovich had arranged for Vladimir to replace him at Harvard for the spring semester, a move that put Véra near the close friends whom—even to the intruding biographer—she did acknowledge. In addition to the older women who had been Vladimir’s Wellesley colleagues, Cambridge meant Elena Levin, the Karpoviches, the Wilsons, and ultimately a few other couples to whom the Levins introduced them. Even in those highly evolved circles Véra had no confidante, as her husband had in Wilson, no advocate like Katharine White. She was difficult to get to know, unforthcoming about herself, vociferous in her opinions, an off-putting combination. With those she did not like she did not bother with phatic conversation. She had a great deal in common with Elena Levin, eleven years her junior, a brilliant reader and a devoted faculty wife. The Levins’ household gods were the Nabokovs’: Joyce, Proust, Flaubert. Yet even with Elena—whom Véra saw regularly in the spring of 1952, and with whom she corresponded for the rest of her life—there was something less than a meeting of the minds. Repeatedly the Levins discovered what could be called the reverse side of Véra’s obsessive devotion to Vladimir: She could be uncompromising, prickly, blinded by single-mindedness. Véra had for so long steeled herself against the world’s indifference, its occasional hostility, that she seemed unequipped to respond to its welcome; the pride proved not so much a chink in the armor as a kind of armor itself. It left her, in Cambridge company, with no discernible sense of humor, seemingly self-righteous, priggish, proud. “You know, Véra, if you were
n’t Jewish you’d be a Fascist,” one Harvard friend exploded, cringing at her intolerance. Quickly Elena Levin learned she could not invite the Nabokovs with other colleagues. He buffooned, and she was combative, overly eager to remind the assembled guests of her husband’s greatness. Wilson remarked on the same quality later:

  Véra always sides with Volodya, and one seems to feel her bristling with hostility if, in her presence, one argues with him.… She so concentrates on Volodya that she grudges special attention to anyone else.… I always enjoy seeing them—what we have are really intellectual romps, sometimes accompanied by mauling—but I am always afterwards left with a somewhat uncomfortable impression.

  Even allowing for his dim view of the Nabokovs’ marriage—so different in number and nature from his own—there was some truth in Wilson’s statement. Véra had no particular expectations for herself but she had outsized ones for her husband. The vaulting, vicarious ambition isolated her.

  Generally she had little need to confide in anyone other than her husband and, in time, Dmitri. She did not feel it necessary to set her anxieties, her disappointments, to paper; she had no inclination to dwell on these matters. She had been in irregular touch with her sister Sonia, now a United Nations translator in New York, and with her elder sister, Lena, a translator in Sweden, but for the most part those correspondences amounted to catalogues of Dmitri’s and Vladimir’s triumphs. When Lena offered to phone her—the two had not heard each other’s voice since the mid-1930s—Véra discouraged the idea. There was so little one could say in a brief, long-distance conversation. She claimed a long, “newsy” letter would be far preferable, failing to acknowledge that she rarely had the time to write one.* To Anna Feigin she did address her monetary anxieties, as Vladimir had in the Berlin years; nearly until the time of her death, Anna Feigin remained the family’s unlikely financial adviser. She now counseled the Cambridge-based Véra not to worry about their various material setbacks. They had always managed before. Somehow they would again.