Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  It is difficult to say which came first: Véra’s serving as picador to her husband’s matador, or the discomfort some Cornell faculty members felt in the couple’s presence. The synchronized teaching did nothing to endear them. It was so expertly handled it appeared to have been rehearsed. Even those who admired the performance begrudged Nabokov his assistant; Szeftel noted in his journal that Véra was reading her husband’s bluebooks “in another selfless show of devotion.” Resentment of Véra accumulated in equal proportion to the mystique. The faculty—acutely aware that Nabokov had no Ph.D., no graduate students, few seminars, and, by the mid-fifties, enviably high enrollments—chafed at the husband-and-wife routine. When Nabokov was under consideration for a job elsewhere, a former colleague at that institution discouraged the idea. “Don’t bother hiring him; she does all the work,” he warned. Nabokov himself did nothing to check this kind of sniping. He told his students Ph.D. stood for “Department of Philistines.” He treated even his own performances flippantly. When a colleague with whom he was friendly insisted on attending one of his lectures he conceded, “Well all right, if you want to be a masochist about it.” Other Ithaca wives were asked point-blank why they could not be more like Véra, held up as the gold standard. This did nothing to win her friends, had she wanted them. It was felt she had no need for confidantes because she was so close to her husband; her reverence was as objectionable as his irreverence. Well before the advent of Lolita, Nabokov was respected but not universally liked by his colleagues; some faculty members crossed the street to avoid him. Within the department, his course was so much discouraged that one English major concluded there must be something illicit about it. There was reason to perceive slights. In the land of the footnoters, as Bishop had called them, Nabokov was a man apart. Véra was from outer space.

  The cultural divide was considerable. Ithaca, and Cornell, are to a great extent America. The place is scenic and civilized but also remote, tucked inaccessibly behind the Adirondacks. To the Nabokovs the university’s agricultural origins were more apparent than its academic prowess. For all of its distinguished professors, Cornell was a loose-limbed institution with a model forest, a fish hatchery, a pig farm. The rail connection was poor and the air service not much better. As Véra explained to a visiting relative, “Our only airline (The Mohawk) pounces on every pretext to cancel flights—on holidays, weekends, rainy days, etc.”* After all she had lived through, Ithaca’s calm, its parochialism, may have been a relief, but the land of the sterling carving set, the hypersensitive linoleum, also felt unfamiliar. Nabokov reveled in his new medium. His object was to enrich the magic potion of his new language as earlier he had arranged things so as not to dilute his first one. He went out of his way to attract to his flypaper mind every nuance of American life. (To Jean Bruneau, an assistant professor of French Literature, he explained his motives differently. With a glint in his eye, he warned that publication of his new novel would scandalize America in its savage attack on the American language.) At all times the couple were aware of more than a renter’s distance between them and what those around them considered the real world.† They took to showing off some of the artifacts they discovered in the rented stage sets to visitors; they appeared to be playacting at their American life. The exotica was of great use to Nabokov—who could have imagined the Mexican knickknacks, the pink toilet-cover furs?—but less charming to Véra who, in the time-honored immigrant way, could not help but being astonished, and horrified, by Americans. As for American schools, they were all poor, even the most expensive ones.

  Some of the ambivalence showed. When Leo Peltenburg died in 1955, his middle daughter wrote Véra with the news. Acknowledging previous reports from Ithaca, she opined: “I think Vera your husband and your son are glad that they found a new home country in the U.S. As to you I am not so sure.” Much of Véra’s animus was directed not to the man in the street, but to fellow academics, who should have known better. Her litmus test of good taste was recognition of her husband’s genius. So long as the owner of a roadside motel remained more impressed with a published author than did the Harvard professor who failed to hire him, her respect was reserved only for the hotelier. Lena Massalsky was to say that after twenty-six years in Sweden she could not decipher the local mores; Véra had more trouble with the tolerating than with the deciphering. While Vladimir had long noted that the non-Russian could never hope to understand the “lyrical plaintiveness that colors the Russian soul,” someone like Véra could never be expected to appreciate the wide-open expansiveness of the American soul. A middle-aged man’s obsession with a twelve-year-old girl was one thing. What Véra could not comprehend was the publisher’s wife who, at an early encounter, blurted out the details of her messy emotional life, or the publisher who discussed his sentimental travails within a taxi driver’s earshot. She addressed only two words, and an exclamation point, to this subject. “Amazing Americans!” she declared. It all seemed to her like something out of a bad novel—something by John O’Hara, or James Gould Cozzens.

  Some of her strongest feelings were reserved for politics. As early as 1948 she expressed a desire to participate in local politics and wondered how to go about doing so. Was there an office of some kind she could run for, she wondered, outraged by a Town of Ithaca ruling on secondary school education. (She was teaching at the Cascadilla School at the time.) Her husband dissuaded her from getting involved, at least on the local level. “It’s dangerous,” he counseled, as indeed it would have been—for him. She was frustrated that she had not been able to vote in the 1948 elections; she had not lived in Ithaca for the requisite six months. She met with the same trouble in 1952, when the Harvard semester interfered with the residency requirement. Again in 1956 the lack of a permanent address worked against her, as the Nabokovs had spent a sabbatical spring in Cambridge and an itinerant summer. Véra considered these regulations unfair; she was nothing if not exquisitely sensitive to her privileges. Only in 1964, when she was no longer living in America, did she vote in a U.S. election. Vladimir never voted.

  She warmed quickly to political discourse. From the Hampton Road house she fired off a letter to the Cornell Daily Sun on December 12, 1952. An editorial in the previous day’s college paper had rallied to the defense of Professor Owen Lattimore, the prominent China expert whom McCarthy had labeled a top Soviet agent. Lattimore was something of a hero to the intellectual establishment; moreover, in twelve brutal days of testimony earlier in the year, Senator Patrick A. McCarran’s Internal Security Subcommittee had been unable to establish any kind of case against the Johns Hopkins professor. Véra drew the Sun’s attention to Lattimore’s activities from 1944 on, citing chapter and verse. She had read all of his work. To her mind the case against the Sinologist was airtight: He had unquestionably advanced the Soviets’ hold on China. She felt “the two McSenators” were undermining their own efforts by branding “everybody left of Thomas Dewey” as a Communist, but regretted not the sullied reputations, only the fact that the senators’ zealotry allowed the Communists room to hide.* She specified that her communication was intended to set the matter straight, not for publication. (It did not appear in the paper.) The Cold War assumed great—if sometimes awkward—proportions in her mind. In his 1951 diary Nabokov recorded his wife’s prediction: “She also says that if there is a war with Russia, it will start in Alaska. We shall see those awful little maps in newspaper[s], with horribly energetic, blackly curving arrows pointing to Whitehorse, or to Le Pas.” Given what she had lived through, she could be forgiven for too quickly transposing the past on the future. Both Nabokovs read E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web at the end of 1952, when the Korean War was at its height. Afterward Vladimir wrote Katharine White: “We both loved Andy’s book. Véra says she wishes he could find some relative of Charlotte and persuade her to make a nice big web for all of us informing the silly Asians that this is a Terrific and Humble country, and not to be slaughtered and eaten.”

  Her anticommunism was rabid and
instinctive. Milton Cowan believed the source of her disdain (and by extension her husband’s) for the Languages Division to be her misinterpretation of Gordon Fairbanks’s classroom readings. In his course materials for intermediate-level Russian Fairbanks included a copy of the USSR constitution, with which he contrasted Soviet ideals and reality. Where he saw instruction Véra saw only propaganda; in her take-no-prisoners approach, she found the reprinting of the document an affront. (In truth her scorn seems to have been directed at Fairbanks for simpler reasons. When Field noted that Fairbanks spoke little Russian, Véra corrected him. In her opinion Fairbanks did not speak any Russian.) She had no bones to pick with McCarthy’s agenda, found every reason to believe Alger Hiss to be lying. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s most vivid recollection of Véra was an impassioned defense of McCarthy she made at Schlesinger’s Cambridge home, probably during the spring of 1953. To her mind intellectual freedom paled in light of the Communist threat. Her explanation, her support of McCarthy’s overblown tactics, virtually amounted to a plea.

  Even after McCarthy had fallen from favor—even after 1954, when he had been discredited—she continued to believe his overreacting preferable to what she viewed as American complacency. Her fervor on the subject resulted in a spirited exchange with Mark Vishniak, a former law professor, the Secretary General of the Constituent Assembly of 1918, and a Contemporary Annals editor who since 1946 had consulted on Russian affairs for Time. Anna Feigin, then living not far from Vishniak in New York, had written her cousin that the editor had referred to Véra as “a McCarthy fan.” Véra was disturbed by the notion, evidently more by the fact that she was being spoken about in New York than by Vishniak’s assessment of her politics. She wrote that she had laughed to hear herself described as a fan, prattle someone of Vishniak’s stature could not possibly take seriously. But Vishniak could be forgiven his appraisal when Véra continued:

  I suppose that McCarthy is a fairly insignificant figure inflated to enormous proportions by the Bolsheviks and the Bolshevik supporters so that they could hide behind his back. And most importantly I consider that not being wholeheartedly for all sorts of men—of very dubious political probity—who speak out against McCarthy does not further mean that one is for McCarthy. I think as well that Soviet agents, and all manner of Communists, should be fished out from the Government, that this is not always done with sufficient speed or sufficient competence, and that the Hisses are more dangerous than all of the McCarthys and similar cheap demagogues.

  Generally she held that firm measures were the only kind the Communists understood, an attitude that would astound academic friends later. In 1955 her concern remained the source of the rumor, however. “After all,” she wrote Vishniak, “in certain American circles right now to be ‘for McCarthy’ is considered significantly more serious a crime than passing military secrets to Soviet agents.” She worried that the allegation against her had not been as innocent as it seemed.

  Vishniak was as much surprised to hear from Véra as he was by the contents of her letter. He knew her only slightly; the remark had been made in a casual conversation. He felt that she was making a mountain out of a molehill—further proof that he knew Véra Nabokov only slightly. Surely, he suggested in reply, there was some middle ground? She would not, after all, say he was a Bolshevik, and he found McCarthy—whose behavior he considered unconscionable—a major figure. His influence was not to be underestimated. Twenty years her elder, Vishniak had lived through the same events as had Véra. His position was interesting: He reminded her that inconsequential figures often turned out to be just the opposite. He warned against whitewashing the reckless McCarthy, as against labeling all those who opposed him Bolsheviks. Véra was unmoved by the argument—“I continue to consider him [McCarthy] an episodical figure and the real threat to be those horrible agents that have entrenched themselves in various institutions, even in the most secret ones,” she wrote—but was yet more bitter about Vishniak’s refusal to divulge his sources. She had no intention of reconsidering her views, even while she felt she had been slandered.

  What an émigré like Vishniak would have realized but few others did was that for Véra principles, not people, came first. In the McCarthy exchange the two adopted a sort of dueling code. At a certain point Vishniak asked for her formal acknowledgment that the “incident” was now over. Grudgingly and coyly, Véra complied. “Enough: Really was there an incident?” she rejoined. No habit was more to inform the combative next decade than her stubborn, procrustean dedication to principle.* In this respect she outdistanced her husband, for whom personal honor remained always of the greatest importance, but who limited his engagement with the world to the world of literature. For Véra principle informed all. It could even vitiate truth. The Nabokovs believed that the émigré critic Marc Slonim received monthly checks from the Soviets. Véra always denied categorically that she and Slonim were related. (The rest of the family disagreed.) A 1967 vacation to France was canceled when de Gaulle withdrew militarily from NATO. One Ithaca car dealer severely underestimated the wrath of Véra Nabokov crossed. When Véra went to pick up the new Buick she had ordered, probably in 1957, she did so with her check already written. The dealer who announced to his lovely-looking client that a few additional costs had crept into the transaction watched helplessly as she tore her check into small pieces and headed out the door. The Buick Special was purchased elsewhere, at her price.

  2

  Véra spent a certain amount of time researching the gunsmiths of Paris and the history of firearms during the sabbatical spring of 1953. “We spent two months in Cambridge—or rather Widener,” Vladimir reported, speaking for the couple, who were delighted again to be living a stone’s throw from Dmitri’s dormitory. The curling linoleum was exchanged for a hotel room; work on the Onegin commentaries continued, with Véra serving as research assistant. She unearthed details on nineteenth-century firearms and powder-packing methods; to her fell the task of finding out what time the sun rose on the morning of Onegin and Lenski’s duel. (She also attempted a March reunion with the much-loved Tomsky, who journeyed to the Ambassador Hotel by taxi one afternoon. Véra set out tea for his escorts and a dish of cut-up liver for the gutter cat, who promptly vanished under a sofa.) In mid-April, she drove Vladimir at an easy pace to Portal, Arizona. The two rented a tiny cottage in the foothills of the southeastern corner of the state, surrounded by blossoming cacti, sixty miles from civilization. Vladimir made the trip “on the verge of a breakdown,” so debilitated was he from the five-hour days in Widener. He was at work on Lolita, which he was composing so furiously that his hand was cramped by evening.

  Véra’s more vulnerable side was revealed in Arizona that spring. At dusk one May evening the couple were walking near their back porch when Vladimir stopped his wife in her tracks; directly in front of her lay a fat rattlesnake. She had nearly stepped on it. With a length of pipe he dealt the creature a powerful blow; the snake still managed to spit at him when he bent down to make sure it was dead. “St. George-Vladimir is saving his trophy: a seven-piece rattle,” Véra reported, with admiration for her husband’s quick-witted courage. The name stuck for some time. Her affection for the desert did not survive the intruder. “Moreover, Vladimir killed a few days ago a fairsized rattle snake a few feet from our doorstep (we are saving its 7 rattles), and that settled everything so far as I am concerned,” she declared, before the Nabokovs packed and headed twelve hundred miles north, to Oregon. They found refuge in the “mellow academic townlet” of Ashland, in a modest hillside house surrounded by flowers. The destination was not chosen arbitrarily: Dmitri had a summer job at a construction site in the area, the collecting was new to Vladimir, and Humbert needed the additional miles. In this scenic spot Timofey Pavlovich Pnin was born, if he did not exist already.

  Véra spent July and August typing Lolita from her husband’s dictation, as the manuscript neared its final form. She mailed the first chapter of Pnin to The New Yorker on July 26; she collaborated on a
Russian version of Conclusive Evidence, work she later claimed she had no memory of having accomplished. It was a vastly productive summer and a happy one; Véra far preferred the green of Ashland, and the lush garden of roses, to the desert. Dmitri was in residence, which delighted his mother more than did his job. He and his dump truck had already managed to roll over once. When he was rescued from the cab, he was found hanging upside down in the driver’s seat. Surviving their son’s brushes with danger had become a staple of the Nabokovs’ lives; Véra had moaned that she did not think she would ever get used to his mountaineering, and never did. Dmitri would recognize hints of the distress his ascents caused his parents in “Lance,” his father’s last short story. The echoes are fairly loud: In a 1940 letter, Nabokov had referred to his bicycle-riding son as “Lance”; a boisterous, adventure-loving Lance Boke turns up as well in Pnin, having borrowed one of Dmitri’s prep school misdemeanors, as the fictional Lance borrows Dmitri’s sinewy size. Nor did Vladimir venture far for his physical description of Mrs. Boke, she of the feigned cheerfulness, who produces a familiar, blurred effect: that “of melting light on one side of her misty hair.” (There was a price to pay for Dmitri’s having been so hugely brave, as Véra had acknowledged in her notes for Speak, Memory: The much-cossetted child turned out to be a daredevil. The concerns of 1953 only increased when he bought his first MG. They multiplied again, in the early 1960s, when he began to race in a Triumph TR 3A, modified for competition.* By the time he took up offshore racing his mother was beside herself.) Both parents spent the spring and the summer of 1953 worrying ceaselessly about him. After many years Véra took the tribulations in stride, or at least as a given: “A parent’s job is to worry,” she sighed later. But the criteria for her emotional health remained unchanged. “We like it much better here than in Arizona,” she wrote her sister-in-law, from Oregon, “… the main thing is Volodya is writing well.”