Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  Vladimir’s editors routinely located the Nabokovs by reading of them in the paper; often enough they received mail from one publisher at another publisher’s offices. They were on the one hand immovable and on the other unrooted, just as the work that had liberated them from Ithaca was so savagely, pitch-perfectly American and so fiercely exotic. August 1961, when Véra had expected to be packing for a New York winter, found the couple in Montreux, Switzerland, at the Hotel Belmont. The woman who had changed flat tires by the side of the road in the dead of an upstate New York night, who had driven through hailstorms and dodged tornadoes, had become so accustomed to staying put in the evenings that she found it an adventure to go out for dinner that month, when she drove the twenty miles from Villars to Montreux in the dark. “We would like to get settled, go out as little as possible, and devote our lives to V.’s and Dmitri’s work,” she announced. At the same time she luxuriated in the idea that, at least in his reputation, her husband’s hold on the planet was an aterrestrial one. Quite literally, he was at large. “A really spectacular achievement on the part of the international mail service was when they delivered to my husband in Montreux a letter that had been addressed to ‘Vladimir Nabokov, New Orleans’—one of the few big American cities which we never visited,” she marveled, a few years after the couple had taken their lawyers’ advice and established a base in Montreux.

  2

  For the most part visitors to Nice were discouraged, save—as Vladimir described them—for the thoughtful and intelligent ones whose presence proved a tonic after a full day’s work. Relatives, even those living nearby, were dissuaded from calling. Just after Christmas, he advised a cousin that he had come to the Riviera expressly to write without interruption. He went nowhere and saw no one. Four days later, Véra replied to Filippa Rolf, whom she had cordially invited to visit in a Christmas card. The Swedish poet had proposed a mid-January trip, assuring Véra, “I hope you know I am eminently and supernaturally able to take care of myself.” Véra assured her that even with Vladimir’s schedule, an hour or two a day could surely be found for socializing. They had only just begun to realize that Nice was not quite as isolated as they had expected it to be. “Gallimard is about to release Autres Rivages (Conclusive Evidence, alias Speak, Memory) and reporters are descending on Vladimir from Paris, Cologne, Israel etc.,” she noted, sounding pleased, especially as the intrusions were not preventing her husband from writing assiduously. She invited Rolf for dinner on Saturday evening, January 14.

  A measure of the couple’s social isolation in Nice could be taken in their hot-potato handling of an invitation that arrived, at George Weidenfeld’s urging, from the eccentric Daisy Fellowes, a Weidenfeld author living amidst her leopard-skin prints in a baronial villa in Roquebrune. She invited the Nabokovs to dine in mid-month; Vladimir, not recognizing her name and concluding her cable was from a brash stranger, had opted to ignore it. (Fellowes had attended Weidenfeld’s Lolita party, but so had every one in London.) Véra did not think this would be right and telephoned; a very awkward conversation—and a long and charming lunch—ensued. Véra felt dreadful about the near-gaffe, confessing it immediately to Weidenfeld. That winter afternoon they lunched with a British newspaper magnate, Prince Pierre Grimaldi, and Marcel Pagnol, whose work they did not know, but who evidently fared better than had John Wayne; the Nabokovs pronounced the French novelist charming. It was the taxi driver who carried them to Roquebrune who won their hearts, however. He had so beautifully recounted the story of his dead wife that both passengers found themselves on the verge of tears in the backseat. Handing over carfare at the end of the trip struck them as entirely the wrong gesture.

  On January 13 Filippa Rolf settled in Nice for a fortnight, unaware that hers was a longer stay than the Nabokovs had anticipated. She telephoned the couple the following morning. Hearing that she had arrived the previous afternoon, Véra exclaimed, “But you missed half a day!” She expected Rolf for lunch in an hour. However imposed upon they may have felt, the Nabokovs were perfectly gracious to their thirty-six-year-old visitor, who revealed herself to be a brilliant, widely read poet and a superbly talented linguist, comfortable in fifteen languages. This emissary from a northern land had an advantage over the about-to-be-invented Charles Kinbote: There was no pulling down of shades before her. Rolf was no less sensitive to the subtexts, as is clear in her description of the first meeting with Véra. Having met her at the door, Vladimir seated the newly arrived guest in a living-room armchair, where he began to interrogate her. What was blue wine made of? he demanded. Rolf was interrupted midway through her response when:

  Here something happened to the sun—vanquished the rain and drizzle, and we must have got up and pirouetted around, for when I came to, I am standing with my back towards the study wall, where there is a fireplace surmounted by a mantelpiece and mirror I now clearly remember, and I am facing at some distance a woman of great beauty, tall and skinny, who is standing freely in the middle of the floor, in a rectangle of sunlight. A moment of speechlessness on my part. She says, “How do you do?” so clearly and slowly that it literally means “How do you go about living? I am curious to know.”

  As soon as a few preliminary tests were administered—What was the riddle of the blue wine? (Juniper berries, Rolf accurately replied) Did Rolf know Mrs. Nabokov was Jewish? Did she dream in color? Did she see patterns in stained ceilings and wall coverings? (She wasn’t a complete idiot, the young woman assured Vladimir)—as soon as it was established that Rolf was a devoted and discerning reader of Nabokov, all formalities were abandoned. (Véra had made discreet inquiries about the visitor before her arrival. She was reassured that the statuesque chestnut-haired Swede hailed from a fine family. She may or may not have been told what she learned during the visit: that Rolf’s childhood had been an unhappy one, that she had lost her father and was estranged from her aristocratic mother.) As Rolf described it in her first letter home, after a few witticisms, and an occasional declaration of love, “Véra positively melted, so now we are not so terribly high society any more.” The couple relaxed; both Nabokovs felt free to gossip. Vladimir managed as much instruction to a young poet as he could muster. Their primary lesson for Rolf was strictness, the same lesson Véra was attempting to impress upon Dmitri at the time. To the artistic lessons she added a few surprising ones in comportment. When Rolf expressed her chagrin at not being able to treat her hosts to anything, Véra stopped her short: “You just don’t do that sort of thing when there is a man around.” The woman who had written Rolf that she admired Robbe-Grillet because of his intense originality revealed herself to be a hidebound traditionalist in matters of social convention. Men kiss the hands of married women only. One does not comment on a gentleman’s attire. Nor did one wear bright yellow shoes to dinner at the Negresco, especially with a dark suit and a pince-nez, as the author of a most original masterpiece attempted to do that January. He was sent back to the bedroom, from which he sheepishly emerged in standard-issue black footwear.

  Presumably not only out of a sense of decorum, the Nabokovs persuaded Filippa Rolf to stay from four that afternoon until after midnight, at which time they escorted her home, through the narrow streets of Nice. She protested that she was a seasoned traveler, entirely capable of making the trip herself. “It is not a matter of how old you are,” Véra objected, “it is a matter of how old you look.” (Rolf always looked exceedingly young for her age.) And for the next two weeks Véra looked like nothing other than the perfectly obliging hostess, especially to someone who felt she had come to the Riviera for an afternoon tea and instead remained in the near-constant company of her hosts for two weeks, Véra peeling her after-dinner fruit for her. Neither Nabokov communicated any irritation to their visitor, whom they prevailed upon to move to a less modest hotel close to their apartment, doubtless because they knew they would never allow themselves to let Rolf walk home alone and wanted to spare themselves the nightly jaunts across Nice. Eyeing the potted plants in front of the
establishment, Véra revealed another reason for her affection for the Hotel Marina. “Do you know why I like this hotel? Because it has those palm trees. They are just like toys, you see, those little feet they are standing on, exactly like toys.”

  Rolf had published three volumes of verse with Sweden’s most prestigious publisher; both Nabokovs immediately took a parental interest in her career, urging her to trade Swedish poetry for English prose. By the end of the stay Véra would be slamming a fist into the table to make her point that Rolf must move to America for the sake of her talent. The existence of this striking, quirky, beautifully spoken Swede forced her to confront head-on the idea that women could write, did write, and had written; if only by virtue of her age and her intelligence, Rolf appears at the outset to have reminded Véra of herself. From her remarks it is easy to see why Véra had abandoned any literary aspirations of her own, had chosen to speak to the world through another’s genius. She was a tough grader. She professed antipathy for Austen. She thought Colette not a writer at all. She detested George Eliot. She could not shake her sense that Mary McCarthy was the incarnation of evil; she was convinced that Virginia Woolf was wholly insane. Emily Brontë and Katherine Mansfield passed the test, though not with flying colors. Natalie Sarraute was a nonentity.* The depths of Véra’s passion for those works she admired—both Nabokovs were particularly smitten with Salinger’s Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters at the time—astonished Rolf even more. On the poets in particular the three were unexpectedly agreed. They chattered energetically about the merits of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Browning. At her husband’s request and with perfect elocution, Véra read Browning’s “Memorabilia.” Rolf was struck by a quality Nabokov had fixed on years before: “I had not known that every word in a poem could be given its entire burden of meaning, its full value,” she concluded, feeling dizzy, indulged, exalted, anointed, as if in the company of “royalty of the spirit.” Rolf spoke of her admiration for a scene in Lolita; Véra proceeded to quote the passage from memory. Merrily she volunteered that she knew all the books by heart. Cornell friends had long before discovered that if they picked out a phrase from a novel, Véra could recite the paragraph that followed. At least one of Vladimir’s publishers was convinced that she knew her husband’s lines better than did their author.

  For the rest of January, Rolf saw the couple nearly every day, often for six to eight hours at a stretch. Until the biographers came to call, by which time the Nabokovs had made an art form of their dealings with the world, she spent more concentrated time with them than anyone outside the family. She arrived when the celebrity was still fresh, the answers unrehearsed, the protective, mythologizing camouflage not yet in place. She discovered what Véra had long known—that Vladimir did not like to be alone with interviewers—and she was a shadow in the background when the French, the German, and the Israeli journalists arrived. She discovered what Vladimir had long known—that Véra would sooner offend every person in a movie theater than tamely sit through a newsreel on bullfighting. (“Why do they have to show this rubbish?” she cried aloud, attempting unsuccessfully to whistle through her fingers.) She heard about Dmitri, soon to make his debut “as a real artist,” as Véra put it, in La Bohème. He was ready for a major performance after only a year’s training, although the preparation had been expected to take twice as long. As was natural for a young poet, the more so one whose parents had largely disappeared, Rolf fell quite deeply in love with the couple, who alternately asked after her work and whether she had anything to be ironed. What impressed itself upon her most, and what would preoccupy her later, was the electric current, the brain-bridge, that ran between the Nabokovs, who appeared so agile at catching the sound and shape of the other’s approaching thought. So great was the proximity that she told Véra she knew it was she who wrote the books. Véra disavowed all contribution.

  Initially Rolf was struck by Véra’s fresh-cheeked, straight-spined beauty, “that of the little girl in the bow of a boat with the wind in her hair.” She made for a fine decoration in an armchair. But little about either Nabokov was at rest. Rolf felt like a tennis ball in the air, being bashed back and forth between them, “for they were heavily in love with each other, and I didn’t truly exist except as a toy making their mutual communicative game possible.” She noted that they reveled in the exercise, especially as “the ball sometimes watches.” Her English was excellent, but Rolf found herself exhausted by these strenuous workouts. She felt that the Nabokovs had in common a refusal to grow up; she was not the first to observe that this may be precisely what constitutes genius. “Their combined speed is that of lightning multiplied by proximity,” she marveled, noting the swift, assured movements, the small intimacies: the two reciting a poem by Chénier in unison, Vladimir elaborating on Véra’s elaboration on Vladimir’s anecdote, Vladimir catching Véra’s hand for a moment as she passed him a candy in the movie theater. The subject of a debate was quickly forgotten but the image of husband and wife volleying back and forth from their respective Louis XV armchairs, across the fake Aubusson, was not. The triumphant Nabokov was not allowed to rest on his laurels. “Poets are never mad—everybody else is,” he declared one evening, to be challenged by Véra, in a clearly modulated, musical voice, “And Coleridge?” There was something balletic about their manner, from the condemnation of the work of St. John Perse to the clearing of the dinner plates. (Rolf’s stay coincided with the cook’s sickness.) Arguably Rolf described the couple in action better than anyone. “They are mating like butterflies behind any bush right in the middle of the conversation, and they separate so quickly that one doesn’t notice until later,” she wrote home.* It was hardly the portrait of a sedate, middle-aged marriage.

  Toward the end of her stay Rolf asked her hostess if she was familiar with The Marriage of Figaro. She had heard strains of the opera in Véra’s voice since her arrival; she saw a great deal of the long-suffering Countess, her serenity and shrewdness, in Véra. There was nothing on the order of martyrdom, just the poignant price of constancy, the fervent, lofty sighs of “Dove sono.” Véra did make Vladimir behave, in several respects. When she suggested which of his novels he might most easily adapt to the screen, he conceded “with a little despairing moan, like a boy who doesn’t want to eat his porridge, but will anyway, open and soft as a mussel before her.” And the care someone like Vladimir needed was staggering. (Véra acknowledged as much herself in March, when she hoped to travel to Mantua to hear Dmitri sing, “but we discovered that it would take three days for me to fly to Milan, then go to Mantua, then back to Milan and Nice—and I could not leave V. for so long.”) This was not only true in the practical arena. On Sunday the fifteenth the Nabokovs invited their visitor to the deserted Hotel Negresco for a hot chocolate. Vladimir was working well, and had put in a good day’s work. Véra looked astonishing in a brown suit and fur cape, which, she explained, had been a Lolita gift from her husband. Together the three set off along the Promenade for the hotel. On the way they met a disheveled old Russian, who embraced Vladimir warmly and kept him for a few minutes. Afterward Vladimir wailed. He had been to school in Petersburg with the man forty-five years earlier and found the encounter deeply unsettling. Véra rebuked him sharply: “You’ll meet him once every month. It’s no tragedy!” On Wednesday the Onegin proofs arrived; Vladimir was all aflutter. “Now what do you suggest?” he quizzed Véra, midway through Pale Fire’s verse. “Do you think I should finish the poem first and read this later?” He did not want the proofs to accumulate. “Finish your poem!” Véra commanded, carrying the tea tray to the kitchen, while in the living room Vladimir offered Rolf a smell of the proofs. They reeked deliciously of printer’s ink.

  With the unfinished poem in the house, Rolf felt awed, as if in the presence of a newborn babe. (She was not far off: Véra had begun to refer to those lines as the book’s soul.) Toward the end of the first week, after teas, dinners, movies, after Véra had shared her scrapbooks and spoken candidly about their finances, Vladim
ir wondered if Rolf would like him to read from the work. He had been complaining that he was trying to make the thing obscure, a difficult task as he was by nature so eminently lucid. Véra and Rolf sat together on the couch as Vladimir, from his armchair, recited the first two cantos of Pale Fire, his voice swelling “like a happy church organ.” Was it moving? he asked when he had finished. It was very much meant to be. The three were nearly drunk on his poetry; Véra’s face was wet afterward, glistening with sweat and tears. Out into the street they spilled after discussing the work, Rolf singing, Vladimir shouting, “What a delightful evening, what a perfectly wonderful evening!”