Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  After 1955 she did own a pistol, but it lived in a shoebox, not in her purse. And at least as far as can be ascertained, it never went to class.

  * The two facts are related. Véra’s having assumed the role she did in Ithaca allowed her husband the time to write as he had not done since the first years of their marriage.

  * Nor did this prevent him from entering into a spirited exchange with Wilson as to where the accent falls in the word “automobile,” metrically speaking.

  * Again this summer the Nabokovs were unwitting characters in someone else’s drama. Having spent part of August at a Jackson Hole, Wyoming, guest ranch that was under government surveillance, they made a walk-on role in FBI reports as “an elderly man and his wife, both of whom spoke with a pronounced accent.” Discreet inquiries were made, in Wyoming and at Cornell, where FBI agents were assured that Nabokov’s reputation was excellent, that the family did not qualify as subversives.

  * In one of his periodic assaults on his administrators, he complained in particular of the amount Seneca Street was costing him. The rent was in the vicinity of $150 a month; Nabokov was earning $5000, or after deductions, about $4200 a year. Neither Véra nor Vladimir was spendthrift, but Dmitri’s tuition claimed one third of their income, and the couple never lived on anything resembling a budget. The only expense that might have been considered an extravagance was the summer trip west, an annual rite during the Cornell years.

  † He did not overextend himself fitting in at such affairs. On one occasion he turned to a visiting professor to whom he had not been introduced and asked, “Will you tell me why in the United States they bury their universities in forests?” He liked to regale friends with his story of an encounter with a plump new addition to the faculty who introduced herself with, “I am the new professor of ice-cream making.”

  * Again Véra fought truth with fact. When Field wrote that Vladimir felt “he worked for the wages of a provincial peasant,” Véra riposted, “N. did not know how much a peasant earns, especially a ‘provincial peasant.’ ” This too was certainly true.

  * To Katharine White after a short editorial tug-of-war Nabokov summed up his mnemonic talents, not the conventional ones for a university professor: “As you have probably noticed I often make mistakes when recalling names, titles of books, numbers; but I very seldom err when recollecting colors.”

  † When his student showed more interest in dreaming up names for new models of cars—Wouldn’t “Avatar” be lovely?—Dick Keegan conceded defeat. “It’s a good thing you don’t drive; you’d end up in a ditch,” he informed his pupil. “Touche, Mr. Keegan,” replied Nabokov. Dmitri seconded the motion years later. “I wouldn’t want to see him driving in the mountains, or worse, in the center of Milan, in a moment of artistic inspiration,” he warned an Italian journalist.

  * In this she had a soul mate in Mrs. Thomas Carlyle. Having spent a Sisyphean day silencing the world for her husband’s sake, Jane Carlyle continued to do so in her dreams.

  * As is clear from his Lolita screenplay, it was his belief that houses are struck by lightning and burn to the ground, a conviction that, given his past, was perhaps not unreasonable. Hotels proved no less combustible in his imagination once he had settled in one.

  * Nabokov’s editor for the 1947 Bend Sinister, Allen Tate, had left Henry Holt and Company in early 1948, having fought valiantly for the novel and—before leaving—having confidentially advised Nabokov on what terms, if any at all, he should sell Holt his next book.

  † As Nabokov recounted the skirmishes in part, The New Yorker had a habit of eliminating a favored word or two of his prose, because they were a “family magazine,” or because the magazine “pessimistically thought that an unusual term might bother some of its less brainy readers. In the latter case, Mr. Nabokov did not always give in, and this resulted in some spirited fights.” This was aside from what he quaintly referred to as “the question of the corrected grammar.” It was also well after an early tussle that had so disturbed him—the manuscript in question became “Portrait of My Uncle”—that he claimed he was tempted to give up writing. At one such juncture he howled that he would prefer not to be published in the magazine at all to appearing in “so carefully mutilated” a form.

  * Nabokov would doubtless not have entered into a contract had he learned as much. He was told he was denied the award because he was not exactly a “beginning” writer, for whom the fellowship had been established.

  * He had used the device before, in several variations. Zina is evoked several times before her appearance in The Gift, even included in a plural “we” well before we know who inhabits that pronoun with our narrator.

  † In 1966 Alfred Appel pointed out this inconsistency to Nabokov, who shrugged it off. The offstage address was not yet part of the text when the pages appeared, in their early form, in a June 1948 New Yorker.

  * To great narrative effect another of Nabokov’s women hides under her married name. Mrs. Richard F. Schiller dies on page four of Lolita, though hundreds of pages have to turn before the first-time reader understands why he should have retained that information.

  † She was hardly the first woman to do so. Madame Chateaubriand performed the same service for her husband, who reworked her memories as his own. Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals have been called an offering to her brother.

  * These did not always meet with satisfactory results. For her sister-in-law she had copied out Vladimir’s recent poems, “but the author found that they were illegible, so it’s better that I not send them, rather, I’ll bang them out on the typewriter when it’s fixed.”

  * So quiet was the publication that in speaking to the couple years later, Cass Canfield lamented that Harper had not had a chance to publish the memoir. “But you did,” protested the Nabokovs.

  † Well aware of his sentiments, Harry Levin added a line to his congratulatory note on the publication of Conclusive Evidence: “Incidentally, I glanced at your cousin’s book, and found it somewhat inconclusive.”

  * In 1951 or 1952 he had told Marc Szeftel, who had heard from mutual friends about “The Enchanter,” that he was at work on an American version of that manuscript. Earlier he had promised Szeftel a glimpse of the novella, with the warning, “Remember, it is not for kids!” He never made good on the promise.

  * Lena had taken the opposite position in proposing to call. “I would like to call you one of these days. It’s expensive, but I would like to indulge myself, since one can say more by phone in two minutes than one can in 50 letters.”

  † He had read Cervantes in three languages, but never in Spanish. He was doubtless further handicapped by the fact that he would not be able to savage the novel’s translator.

  * His students were more puzzled than impressed. Thornton Wilder, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author, had taught the course the previous spring. He had made no such claims.

  † Generally Nabokov’s lectures were better received at Cornell than at Harvard, where the campus culture was more formal.

  ‡ Nabokov had been told to expect an enrollment of 400, which in his memory grew to 600. Attendance may have been higher, but the official enrollment at mid-semester was 387.

  * The evidence suggests that the Nabokovs were more careful with Tomsky than with Sarton’s dishes. Generally the couple were not regarded as model tenants.

  * After a while Véra began to cross out the “Department of Russian Literature” when using the letterhead. Vladimir was more likely to let it stand, sometimes with a little marginal snort: “Now without Russian.” The fictional department lived on through the stationery well into the 1950s.

  † In the Russian Literature courses, which were smaller, she sat facing Nabokov, often in the front row, sometimes in the last.

  ‡ Holding the glasses aloft she made a dramatic entrance into the lecture hall: “Oh, yes, yes, yes,” exulted Nabokov, smiling, and thanking her profusely.

  * In some courses the ages got younger a
s the semester progressed. Was anyone out there listening?

  * One alumnus-turned-critic teased her later, when PBS planned a series with Christopher Plummer delivering Nabokov’s lectures. “But who is going to play you? If realism is to be achieved, someone must play ‘the assistant,’ ” contended Alfred Appel, to whom Vanessa Redgrave seemed the obvious choice.

  * This did not prevent Nabokov from complaining that he had 270 students, and therefore 270 bluebooks to grade.

  * One writer skewered by Hippius was the sixteen-year-old poet Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, whose romantic verse Hippius memorably deconstructed before his classmates.

  † The literature-loving English majors occasionally proved more immune to his charm. To several of the brightest he appeared superficial, as was perhaps to be expected of a professor who savored Tolstoy’s lawn tennis game. Many were discouraged from taking his course, considered a class for dilettantes within the department.

  * When much was at stake, he could cozy up to a light switch. In Alfred Appel’s fond recollection, on a midwinter afternoon when the heads had begun bobbing the amphitheater lights burst on—for Pushkin, for Gogol, for Chekhov—the bright spots in the Russian literary firmament. The dramatic release of the window shade was of course reserved for Tolstoy.

  * That the students were unaware of this was a tribute to his delivery. Neither an architecture student who audited the course twice, nor a particularly attentive pre-med, nor a favored art student noticed. This despite Nabokov’s confident assertion that the alert students knew full well he was reading.

  * Did he dress in the dark? Where did he shop? Such were the mysteries probed by one student whose attention to detail on the page was much applauded by her professor.

  † Nabokov’s apparel stood in distinct contrast to the pipe-and-English-tweeds look generally favored by the humanities faculty. From the first he had cut a rumpled figure, liberally interpreting Cornell’s predominately tie-and-jacket dress code.

  6

  NABOKOV 102

  The Doppelgänger subject is a frighful bore.

  —NABOKOV, STRONG OPINIONS

  1

  For the silent partner, she could have a very loud voice. Elena Levin laughs when asked if Vladimir deferred to his wife in conversation. “No one ever had to defer to Véra, in conversation or otherwise,” she contends. Outside the classroom Professor Nabokov’s assistant was quick to assert herself. Wilson found Véra rerouting him to an argument about poetry “with a certain deadliness”; when she spoke directly to the world she could do so with near-brutal force. The Cornell faculty—and especially the occasional Cornell landlord—were among the first to discover as much. The fall 1952 semester was spent in a newly constructed glass-fronted home at 106 Hampton Road, a house about which Véra had a semester’s worth of questions. Mercifully, there were no fleas, but what to do about the intrusive moonlight? (Professor and Mrs. Wiegandt, having only barely moved in themselves, suggested she hang curtains, or at least sheets.) Herbert Wiegandt had a few complaints of his own, which he straightforwardly presented to Vladimir in a February 10, 1953, letter, after the Nabokovs had decamped to Cambridge. Most of all he was concerned with damage that had been done to the newly laid kitchen linoleum, and with a missing carving set. By return mail he had his explanation. “We never used your silver. We know nothing about that carving set. We did not wash the tiles in your downstairs bathroom with any hard or other solution,” riposted Véra, as Vladimir, adding: “And we did nothing to encourage the ‘curling’ of your linoleum.”

  What passed for conversation with most academics and their wives could, depending on the Company, amount with the Nabokovs to provocation. In the spring of 1958 Professor and Mrs. William Moulton invited the couple with Eric Blackhall, a visiting professor of German Literature, and a college dean, for cocktails. Véra kicked off the afternoon by delivering a virulent attack on the Wilhelm Busch album lying on a table in the Moultons’ living room, in her opinion a prime example of German cruelty. Ultimately Jenni Moulton managed to salvage the conversation, and to lead the new professor toward Véra on the davenport. She asked after his field. “Goethe,” replied Blackhall. “I consider Faust one of the shallowest plays ever written,” declared Véra, as much to the visitor’s astonishment as to her husband’s manifest delight. She seemed to enjoy disconcerting people. She asked a twenty-eight-year-old assistant professor how he could possibly stand those new French authors and, for that matter, how he could teach them. Indictment struck the young scholar as her modus operandi. It is impossible to say if she had learned this gauntlet-flinging from her husband, who greeted colleagues with salvos like these, delivered for the delectation of French scholar Jean-Jacques Demorest: “To your knowledge, did Stendhal ever pen a decent sentence?” “Does anyone worth reading in France still believe that that fellow Dostoevski could write?” “Do you think your country will ever again beget authors as perfect as Bossuet and Chateaubriand?” Véra knew her eristic assaults greatly amused her husband, who smiled benevolently upon them, as he did whenever an interlocutor unwittingly stumbled on the ambushes of his wife’s pet peeves. She could “irritate the intelligent and puzzle the nincompoops” as well as he. (She was actually far harder on the intelligent than on the nincompoops.) And the Nabokovs could do so in concert. Not only was Auden emphatically denounced at one side of the room by Véra and later, in the same terms, by Vladimir, but the couple had a synchronized go as well at Jane Austen, whose importance, they argued from opposite ends of a dinner table, had been ridiculously inflated. Any number of nineteenth-century French writers could be counted as her equal. And this at the home of the head of Cornell’s Creative Writing program.

  By the early 1950s Véra’s understanding of academic life, her sense of her husband’s caprices were ingrained enough that—while she seems never to have voluntarily spoken for him—she did not hesitate to edit or silence him. He depended on her for this service.* As much as she admired, and shared, her husband’s sinewy convictions, she evinced periodic discomfort at their airing. On one such occasion she expressed relief that he had enjoyed himself in a public forum, “and therefore was amusing, brilliant and—thank God—did not say what he thinks of some famous contemporaries.” The attacks were clearly a form of amusement to both Nabokovs, a means by which to spice up life in “udder-conscious and udderly boring Cornell,” a place they felt overly tame. But Véra more carefully observed the limits.* She counseled a little mercy when her husband was too stern with an aspiring writer in his office. He administered a home botany exam to a young relative, who failed it miserably. “You know, Mitya doesn’t know anything,” Vladimir shrugged, in the great-nephew’s presence. “Don’t pay attention to him, he’s an old crank,” Véra assured the humiliated teenager. And she toned down her husband’s ebullience, which could be as robust as her indignation, enough so to drown out even her strong voice. Clare’s plucking at the sleeve of Sebastian Knight in a helpless effort to control his laughter in a London theater prefigures the same scene at Cornell. The critic Alfred Appel recalled an Ithaca viewing of Beat the Devil, at which half the audience was laughing at the movie, the other half laughing at Nabokov laughing. Véra “murmured ‘Volodya!’ a few times, but then gave up, as it became clear that two comic fields had been established in the theater.”

  Both Nabokovs were quick to seize on the perceived slight. One colleague felt that Vladimir “teetered always on the thin edge of unendurable insult.” Insecurity is in part the immigrant’s lot, the price of deciphering a new culture; Véra had had a head start in this respect. Woe to the correspondent who hinted that she had perhaps mixed up her tsars. “I am sorry to disappoint you, but I am a Russian woman, and quite sure of the sequence of Russian Tsars and the dates of their reign,” came the tart response. “I am equally well informed regarding my husband’s family and its antecedents,” she added, correcting her correspondent’s version of Russian history, which she found deficient. No one could fire off an “Incide
ntally” with quite the force of Véra, who accomplished with these killer adverbs what her husband could with a pair of heart-stopping—“(picnic, lightning)”—parentheses. The inchoate sense of grievance, the grudge-holding, was something of a Slonim family trait. In the summer of 1950, Véra’s older sister proposed sending some well-bred Swedish friends on a visit to Ithaca. Véra responded that she and Vladimir were insanely busy, that they had no time even to see their own acquaintances. Additionally she asked that Lena refrain from sending her presents of any kind; the Nabokovs were straining to keep their possessions to a minimum, on account of the frequent moves. This she said directly, no more or less so than she did anything else. She suspected that Lena needed to “show off her family” and attempted to fob off the Swedes on Sonia, then in New York. Lena countered that she was only trying to do her friends a favor. She was well past the point in life where she needed to display her family; her sister’s phrase proved that she knew nothing of her existence, or its hardships. And she had no interest whatever in speaking with Sonia, who had insulted Lena’s husband in 1932.* Véra and Lena did not speak—or communicate—for the next nine years.