Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  So little need did Véra have of the world that the appointments in the diary she and her husband jointly kept appear to have been with Gogol, Pushkin, Fet, rather than with living persons. These were the subjects of Nabokov’s Harvard lectures, the schedule for which she devised for him. He was teaching three courses: the second half of Karpovich’s Modern Russian Literature course (one student thought Karpovich must be an awfully good friend to assume the soporific first years of the course and leave Nabokov the entire nineteenth century); his own course on Pushkin; and, against his will, a section of Humanities 2, Harvard’s version of Cornell’s European Literature course. Again he had had to be bribed and bullied into the assignment, at least in part because the reading list included Candide and Don Quixote, the latter of which he had neither read in the original nor taught.† He and John H. Finley, Jr., the eminent Greek scholar who taught the first half of the large course, went a few rounds to determine how Nabokov could make peace with the idea. The deaf ear Vladimir turned to these entreaties manifested itself as a blind eye; he could not seem to decipher Finley’s long, handwritten response of July 23, 1951. Dutifully Véra typed out Finley’s letter, so that her husband might reply to it. The classicist ultimately won his case with an assist from Harry Levin, who reminded Nabokov that he could doubtless count on at least an additional thousand dollars were he to take on Humanities 2, an amount that—with a few curricular compromises, all of them titles of Harvard’s choosing—he could probably parlay into fifteen hundred.

  The titles did not much matter. Nabokov’s 1952 section of Humanities 2 began with an announcement along these lines: “There are two great writers in English for whom English was not the native language, the first and the lesser of whom was Joseph Conrad. The second is I.”* The showmanship at times appeared a substitute for scholarship and did not universally charm the Memorial Hall audience. One student found it offensive that Nabokov presented Don Quixote in terms of how he would have written the book—then went on to discuss how he would improve upon it. Another disapproved of the visiting professor’s devoting an entire class to a discussion of whether Anna Karenina should or should not be translated with the final “a” in English. And was it truly necessary for Nabokov’s assistant to spell out Austen’s name on the blackboard? In the Russian Literature course he greatly enjoyed teaching the work of Sirin, revealing only late in the semester that Sirin was he, or that he was Sirin. The section men who graded for him in Humanities 2 found it odd that they saw so little of him. The puns were dreadful.

  Véra heard none of these grumblings and clearly liked what she did hear.† She felt a real—and well-justified—sense of triumph that spring. A little more than a decade after the arrival in America, both Dmitri and Vladimir were Harvard men. This mattered; Véra had consistently described Wellesley and Cornell as being among the finest American universities. She glowingly described her husband’s Humanities 2 lectures. “V. is giving grandiose lectures, in an enormous auditorium,” she exulted, in a letter Vladimir read before it was mailed. “540 registered students … intently listen and applaud after each meeting of the course. (After the lecture on Don Quixote applause; after the lecture on Bleak House, the same; on Tuesday he begins Dead Souls.)”‡ Her husband’s pride was her own, as can be heard in this midwinter report: While Vladimir was growing tired of his lectures, “he is obviously taking great pleasure in the increasing glory and respect which he feels here. (In our boondock Ithaca there simply wasn’t anyone capable of understanding who had joined the ranks of their ‘faculty.’)” She did not even bother to pretend to be speaking for him when she added that she was thrilled to be around people who knew her husband’s work by heart.

  After the first two Cambridge weeks the Nabokovs moved into the congenial clapboard home of May Sarton, tucked away on narrow Maynard Street, ten minutes from campus. With the house came the first in a short series of rented pets, a tiger cat named Tom Jones, rechristened “Tomsky” by the Nabokovs. (In a charming example of her slightly synthetic English, Véra remembered Tomsky as “a gutter cat.”) She took great delight in the antics of the affectionate animal, who took as much delight in her husband. “When V. reads and writes while lying on the sofa he pounces on his stomach, pounds a bit with his paws, and curls up on him,” Véra noted. At the end of the semester, just as the couple were beginning to set their sights on the drive West, Tomsky came home limping. He would not eat; Véra felt his nose, which was hot and dry. In detail she reported to Sarton on their trips to the hospital, first to admit Tomsky, the next day to visit him. He turned out to be suffering from several infected bites. After a three-day hospital stay the animal was discharged. “He was much thinner, very hungry and very clean, the white spots dazzling white, and he was quite recovered from his woes,” Véra announced happily.* The dedication she showed Tomsky was perfectly consistent with her character, but the woman who bent down repeatedly to gauge the temperature of a cat’s nose was not often in evidence. A few students inadvertently found the way to her heart. At the end of Humanities 2 one admiring senior asked her to pass on to Professor Nabokov his compliments on the course. He was rewarded with a most dazzling smile. “But you must, you must tell him yourself,” Véra pleaded. This remained always a direct route to her affection. Later at Cornell, a colleague of Nabokov’s introduced him to a student who had attended every one of his European Literature lectures although he was not enrolled in the course. Beaming, Vladimir led the student directly to Véra, for whom he made him repeat each of his kind words.

  She was more reserved on the subject of her son’s lectures. She took to attending William Langer’s History of European Diplomacy course, a class in which Dmitri was enrolled. The two happily sat together in the large lecture hall, or did whenever possible. Langer was a punctual man; the doors to his classroom closed promptly at the top of the hour. On several occasions mother and son regarded each other forlornly through the window of a locked door. It is unclear whether Véra attended the course because its subject intrigued her—Langer’s expertise was in Russian and Middle Eastern studies, two areas about which she felt passionately—or because Dmitri’s absenteeism worried her. In any event, Langer’s were the only lectures outside the Literature Department she appears to have heard. At Cornell she attended a vast number of courses, but they were without exception taught by the same professor, the one whose letters she typed, edited, and wrote, on the letterhead of a nonexistent department.*

  4

  In a later attempt to urge his own meticulousness on an editor, Nabokov referred to “the double-dotted ‘i’.” Nothing could have better described the arrangement that began in Goldwin Smith Hall late in the 1940s and continued there for nearly a decade. As early as the second Cornell semester, throughout the Harvard interlude, and until the departure from academia in 1958, he arrived for class with his assistant in tow. The assistant trailed a few steps behind him on campus; often she appeared at Goldwin Smith Hall on his arm. She carried his briefcase, and opened any doors that stood in his way. In the classroom she placed his notes on the lectern. She helped him off with his coat before half-removing her own. In the European Literature course, she sat either in the front row of the lecture hall or, more often, in a chair on the dais, to the professor’s left. Her eyes rarely left him.† If he dropped a piece of chalk she retrieved it; if he needed a page number or a quotation she provided it. Otherwise she had no speaking role during the lecture. After class she erased the blackboard. She lingered at the podium while Nabokov answered questions. When he forgot his glasses she was dispatched on a search-and-rescue mission: The professor labored uncomfortably from memory until her return.‡ She rarely missed a class, although she did occasionally teach one, and she often proctored exams alone. All administrative affairs were delegated to her. The man who spoke so often of his own isolation was one of the most accompanied loners of all time; at Cornell especially he was in the constant company of his assistant.

  In the classroom the act was a perfect
ly synchronized one. Nabokov might near a certain quotation and the assistant, as if animated by some kind of “brain-bridge,” would rise from her seat to offer the appropriate notes, to extend the appropriate page, to sketch the appropriate diagram. Promptly she responded to his cues. “My assistant will now move the blackboard to the other side of the room,” the professor would command. “My assistant will now pass out the bluebooks.” “Perhaps my assistant could find the page for me.” “My assistant will now draw an oval-faced woman”—this was Emma Bovary—“on the board.” And the assistant—whom Nabokov addressed as “Darling” outside of the classroom—would do so. The stage directions do not figure in the published lectures. (The routine was a little different in the Russian Literature classes, in which the assistant audibly served as prompter and aide-mémoire, and committed sophisticated diagrams—scanning matrixes for Tyutchev—to the board.) A smile played visibly on her lips when he discussed Anna Karenina’s skating outfit, attire he described as having been made of “rubberized tweed.” A smile must have played on her lips too when he announced that he had read Anna Karenina for the first time at the age of six, but that his wife had done so at the age of three.* We do not know how, if at all, she reacted when he discussed Anna and Vronski’s dreaming in unison, about which he observed, “This monogrammatic interconnection of two individual brain-patterns is not unknown in so-called real life.” Occasionally the assistant rerouted an errant lecture; she might cut off an off-color aside with a glance, or prompt a line with a nod. For the most part she sat straight-faced and straight-backed in her chair, a huge, unexplained, and intimidating presence. And despite her attempts to remain faceless, a face was now fitted to her by a decade’s worth of Russian Literature and European Literature students. Even before the most spellbinding lecturer, a roomful of red-blooded undergraduates is sure to engage in a game of Find-What-the-Sailor-Has-Hidden. Her identity was by no means obvious. One gifted student was shocked when—having written an essay so stellar it precipitated an invitation to his professor’s home—the mask dropped, and he found himself being introduced to “Mrs. Nabokov.” Revolution and migration had already dissolved several identities. In the Cornell classroom a new one constituted itself, seemingly without any active participation on Véra’s part.

  These were the most public years of the Nabokovs’ lives; Véra could not have failed to realize that her presence in the classroom would be as much remarked upon as her husband’s shredding Dostoyevsky in front of two hundred undergraduates, his trampling Freud, his dismissal of that great realist writer “Upton Lewis,” his suggestion that the Rinehart translation of Madame Bovary was so bad the job must have been done by the arch-philistine Homais himself. For the most part the tirades proved the stuff of enchantment; the slurs were savored long after the course was forgotten. The corrections to the translations proved more memorable than the books. Much that took place in the room was unforgettable. It was “quite a performance on her part as well,” remembered a graduate student who sat in on the European Literature course in 1958. The assistant was deemed as legendary, as mesmerizing a presence as Professor Nabokov.* “Everybody was fascinated by her,” recalled Alison Bishop. And yet no one agreed on exactly what to make of her. One student winced at Professor Nabokov’s treatment of his flunky, which struck her as downright exploitative. A group of Cornellians thought her so severe they referred to her as the Gray Eagle. Another class dubbed her the Countess. She was radiant, regal, elegance personified, a head-turner, “the most beautiful middle-aged woman I have ever set eyes on.” She was a waif, dowdy, half-starved, the Wicked Witch of the West. She was German. She was a princess. She was a ballerina. Whoever she was, she was “mnemogenic”—as Nabokov had written of Clare in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight—“subtly endowed with the gift of being remembered.”

  What was Véra Nabokov doing in her husband’s classroom, lecture after lecture? Nabokov had no graduate degree but was by inclination a master of specificity; the naturalist-professor instructed his students to dissect literature with a scientist’s care. Which is precisely what they did in explicating the scene before them:

  Mrs. Nabokov was there to remind us we were in the presence of greatness, and should not abuse that privilege with our inattention.

  Nabokov had a heart condition, and she was at hand with a phial of medicine to jump up at a moment’s notice.

  That wasn’t his wife, that was his mother.

  She was there because Nabokov was allergic to chalk dust, and because he didn’t like his handwriting.

  To shoo away the coeds.

  Because she was his encyclopedia, if ever he forgot anything.

  Because he had no idea what was going to come out of his mouth—and no memory of it after it did—so she had to write it all down so that he would remember what to ask on the exams.

  He was blind, and she was the Seeing Eye dog, which explained why they always arrived arm in arm.

  She was intended as living proof that he had a fan club.

  She graded his performance, in order to review it with him in the evenings.

  We all knew that she was a ventriloquist.

  She had a gun in her purse, and was there to defend him.

  No one was certain who marked the exams; a few students admitted that they made a practice of smiling at Mrs. Nabokov in the hope that their geniality might register in their grades. Initially she waded through the bluebooks before her husband. Later she alone graded the examinations, unbeknownst to the 1958 senior who could not refrain from adding a panegyric to the professor’s luminous assistant to the back of his bluebook. (It was returned without comment.) By 1951 she was remunerated for her efforts. To his department chairman Nabokov wrote just before 1953 fall midterms: “I estimate that I shall need at least $70 to pay my assistant for grading the papers since there are 231 students in 311 [Masters of European Literature] and 36 in 325 [Russian Literature in Translation].”* He anticipated that an additional $90 would be necessary in January, for finals. It was a little coy not to have named names, or perhaps it was not coy in the least, as Véra wrote this letter herself.

  As the reputation of the European Literature course grew, so did its enrollment. By the spring of 1954 Professor Nabokov—or someone in his household—was requesting that “my assistant, Mrs. V. Nabokov,” be credited with 130 hours’ work. That was a brutal amount of time to spend deciphering the handwritings of anxious undergraduates. Véra must have been relieved when, toward the end of the decade, the university provided a teaching assistant for the course. She herself was terrifically exacting, but not an ogre of a grader. Henry Steck, a graduate student in the Department of Government, took on the job in 1958. He spent five days reviewing some two hundred bluebooks, which he evaluated according to a rigorous scale. After reading each exam several times, he delivered the bundle to Professor Nabokov’s office, hoping finally to have a word with the great man. Mrs. Nabokov met him at the door, standing like a sentinel between Steck and her husband. She took the exams, immediately raised all the grades to the eighties, and sent Steck on his way. Another assistant met with a warmer welcome. When she graded for the course in 1957, M. Travis Lane was asked to compile a collection of student bloopers, which she was invited to share with the Nabokovs at their home, over a glass of sherry. She remembered Véra’s emitting a musical laugh, as well she must have when she learned that her husband the stickler had met his match in a humorist. To the question: “What was the pattern of Anna Karenina’s wallpaper?” one luminary had replied, “little railroad trains.”

  Even when she was not acting the sentinel at the door, Véra allowed her husband to speak in the first person plural, which seemed so much more naturally to accommodate his pronouncements. She reserved the same right for herself. The impressive student to whom a not very impressive exam was returned was told: “We thought you would do better than that. We had confidence in you.” A student suffering from an eye problem returned her bluebook to Professor Nabokov’s office w
ith an apologetic, “I have written with some difficulty.” Witheringly Véra replied, “And it looks as if we will read it with some difficulty.” An aspiring novelist slipped his manuscript to the professor, who read a few pages and agreed to discuss the text. Véra was the one to do so, from the far end of her husband’s office. As she spoke, remembered Steve Katz, sunk low in Nabokov’s armchair, “he leaned over me like the tallest dentist in the world, and occasionally supported her presentation by a word or phrase.”

  Nabokov was a mesmerizing lecturer, but part of the charm was in the tart condescension, the well-honed insult. The students who noted this were clear-eyed. He was simply pitching “way, way over our crew-cut heads,” concluded one. Nabokov provided a perfect summation of his attitude toward academe in an October 1956 letter to Hessen: “I write you while proctoring exams, the empty heads are bowed down. I see it is impossible to write; they keep asking me questions.” Before him two hundred students squirmed in midterm agony as they racked their brains for wallpaper patterns. Certain things clearly felt beneath his dignity, as was suggested by Véra’s habit of proctoring exams and keeping office hours. He grumbled that he did not see why Sirin should have to lecture on Joyce, a complaint to which only one other person in Ithaca, New York, would have been sympathetic. Nabokov and his assistant both felt he should be on the syllabus and not behind the podium, a sense that set them apart from the Cornell colleagues. “I am too little of an academic professor to teach subjects that I dislike,” Nabokov proclaimed, which may explain why Véra prepared much of his Dostoyevsky talk for him. She wrote its first draft, at the very least. She was the one who explained how Dostoyevsky, working under constant stress and in a hurry, hired and then married his stenographer, “a woman full of devotion and practical sense. With her help he met his deadlines and gradually extricated himself from the financial mess he had been in.” Much of the repertoire consisted of the pieces on which Véra had worked at Wellesley; the libretto of the Ithaca years is more clearly discernible, if only because she neglected to throw out the draft pages, in which her sizable contribution can be read. Some of her lines are embedded in the Joyce lecture as well, for which she did the library work. Only to this extent was she her husband’s ventriloquist.