Vera

by Stacy Schiff

  Until that point, the best thing of all, Rolf noted, had been when Véra called her husband, “not by raising her voice, but by making it broader, warmer, deeper: ‘Volodya,’ with a very thick ‘l.’ ” She was otherwise undemonstrative, but then her entire life constituted a demonstration. Vladimir’s equivalent of this verbal caress was a simple and perpetual “Darling.” There was no question of who was being solicitous of whom. At the same time, Véra was not a woman in any danger of being taken for granted. They were in the market for a car that January, when Véra developed a weakness for Alfa Romeos. As the three walked along the Promenade one evening, she vanished abruptly from between her two poets. She had darted across the boulevard, through multiple lanes of traffic, for a closer look at a red Alfa Romeo. Vladimir was faint with horror. He paled, then turned green, as his wife blithely recrossed against the light. As Rolf observed, Véra returned “to our sidewalk in a fine mood, having risked her life, in her little black suit and high-heeled shoes, very innocent and merry, out of a froth of passing cars. She sure knew how to keep her man alive.” Rolf had never seen anyone suffer as Vladimir had in that moment. Most poignant of all was the bulk of stiff, smudged index cards loosely held together by a rubber band, the top card bearing the words “To Véra” in its upper right-hand corner.

  On January 25, the Nabokovs walked Rolf to her hotel, continuing their conversation about female authors and proposing alternate openings to their works, allusions Rolf felt were carefully served up so as not to go over her head. With great respect Vladimir hummed the American national anthem. When asked to supply the words he offered, “Véra will do that. Véra!” At his request, Véra sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” for the visitor, fitting her gloves to her hands as she did so. Nabokov had allowed their guest to win at chess. She wrote home immediately upon leaving the couple, near midnight: “Maybe they were themselves. I don’t know.” It is difficult to believe that at that precise moment, strolling through the deserted winter streets of Nice just after eleven—discouraged by the news that Kubrick had filmed a Charlotte-Humbert bed scene not in Vladimir’s script and by the fact that the kitchen help was still irregular, Nabokov a little stuck with Pale Fire, Véra preoccupied by the sore throat Dmitri complained of in Milan—they were anyone else. They were much more concerned with who Rolf was, or could be, and dispatched her with all kinds of pressing advice. She was far too talented to remain in a country with a limited readership. She had an obligation to what they repeatedly termed her “genius.” They insisted she go to America in the fall, recommending her as a special student in Comparative Literature at Harvard. And when they heard that Rolf was involved in a lesbian relationship they made their disapproval known, strongly advising her to reconsider the friendship. They protested that they did not normally lavish this kind of attention on an acolyte. Nor—Véra seconded this one—did Vladimir ever autograph his books, as he did several times for Rolf in the course of her stay. Her head spinning from the Polonian assault, loaded down with beautifully signed copies of the work, granted carte blanche to write about the visit, Rolf left Nice on January 27.

  There was no question that the visit had been exhausting for Véra. At the end of it she described the Swedish visitor to Dmitri: “And what a Swede! 1) a lesbian, 2) she leads such a tense inner life that just standing next to her is exhausting. Two weeks! Uff!” Nor was there any question that Rolf had failed to pick up on the occasional hint to make herself scarce. The Nabokovs had tried to send her off in the Cologne journalist’s taxi, but she had declined. On another afternoon she had stopped by uninvited and clearly half welcome. Seven days into the stay Véra grumbled that Rolf was sweet and talented, but that a fortnight was a bit much: “We save ourselves by taking her to the cinema.” From America Anna Feigin wrote apprehensively: “Have you yet broken free from the fantastic lady? Volodya does like that type, after all.” Véra calmed these concerns. There was no hint that the visit would have calamitous consequences, however. It coincided with a burst of inspiration on the part of Vladimir, who had found the composition of Pale Fire’s verse excruciatingly difficult. Véra wrote cordially and helpfully to Rolf throughout the year, assisting her with the Harvard application and enlisting her as a translator.* Between the two Swedes in her life there was no contest: She energetically defended Rolf to Lena when her sister protested she had never heard of Véra’s talented new friend. She let on nothing of her fatigue. The trouble would begin only when, in America, very much under the Nabokovs’ spell, Rolf began to read between the lines of their conversations for meanings no author had intended.

  3

  Initially Véra had been disappointed by Nice, mostly for its having joined the modern world. Just after Rolf’s departure she wrote Michaël Scammell, the British doctoral student to whom the bulk of the translation of The Gift had been entrusted, who asked if the ghost of Henry James still lurked nearby:

  Alas, no shades of Victorian England, or any other Shades, walk the Promenade nowadays. The “Vespas” keep shooting back and forth noisily, and on Sunday afternoons the bottlenecks in the traffic immobilize long queues of car[s] the way they do on Fifth Avenue. On weekday mornings, before going to their respective offices, les Français moyens walk their dogs along the wide sidewalks, and this is supposed to be a mark of “standing” (which is the French variety of the American “status”).

  All the same Vladimir was writing furiously, and the Riviera proved sunny and warm; in mid-February, the Nabokovs extended their lease to April, having—despite the elegiac taxi drivers—rented a Peugeot 403. The Peugeot represented Véra’s first encounter with a standard transmission; in this sense she was a full-fledged American. On the afternoon of its acquisition she wrote Rolf: “I have been limping around for about an hour today, alone, before I dared drive my husband to the tennis courts. Drive it, I will; but if we buy a car, it will be something more substantial and, at least, without clutch—I hope.” She still lusted after an Alfa Romeo Giulietta and inquired if it, or any other Italian car, was available as an automatic. (The automotive gene proved dominant. Dmitri was that winter zipping around Milan in the Triumph TR3 he had acquired in the fall and would modify for racing, a habit his mother thought expensive and an unfortunate distraction from his singing. Privately she spoke of her distress—“We’re always in a panic until he informs us that he’s whole”—while publicly she boasted of the mantel of trophies.) She soon discovered another unhappy feature of the Peugeot: It looked like every other car on the Riviera. She could identify it only by its license plate.

  February passed in a happy blur of work. Vladimir finished Pale Fire’s poem in midmonth—“It is a fantastically beautiful thing,” he assured Minton—and was finding the prose section far easier to compose. Véra complained he was working too hard but was not setting a much better example herself. She was buried in mail, which she avoided as long as she could “out of sheer distaste.” She managed some reading late that winter, not all of it as rewarding as she had hoped. Ledig Rowohlt, Vladimir’s German publisher, had sent on the work of Robert Musil, for whom he expected Nabokov to share his admiration. Véra found Musil ponderous in the extreme, because of which Vladimir never read him. Proust fared better. “I cannot even begin to tell you how much pleasure we both derive from the mere presence of LA RECHERCHE in our dwelling,” Véra thanked her husband’s Gallimard editor, but this before she had begun the Maurois-edited volume, into which she was appalled to see that a great number of slips and misprints had crept. She could not help it; hers was the kind of eye to which typos positively leapt. Michaël Scammell was the beneficiary of her perspicacity with his Gift translation, as he would be later with The Defense. The proofs of the latter constitute a neat summary of the life. Véra penciled a number of suggested rewordings in the typescript’s margins, many of which Vladimir incorporated into the text. The comments were then erased. The manuscript is labeled, “Translation by Michaël Scammell, corrected by The Author,” in Véra’s hand.

  Lat
e in March the Nabokovs took a break, driving to Geneva for an Easter visit with Vladimir’s brother and sister and their families. Véra described these reunions as perfectly chaotic—“They all talk at the same time and just as loudly”—but clearly enjoyed them. They stayed in Geneva longer than expected, originally so as to celebrate Elena’s March 31 birthday. The next day Véra fell in the street and tore a ligament in her foot, a misadventure she described as “the stupidest accident you can imagine.” The couple had to be chauffered back to Nice, in their own car. The foot bothered Véra throughout April, when she packed their personal effects into two trunks, to be stored in France, and into May, when she drove her husband to Stresa, a lovely, lakeside resort in northern Italy. By mid-June she experienced only a slight discomfort after a long walk. She proved as stoic over these months, and the next years, with the inept royalty departments, the geographically challenged rights people, the nonreading jacket designers. It was well worth the trouble. As she was dismantling the Nice apartment, the April 7, 1961, Times Literary Supplement arrived on the Riviera. In Véra’s paraphrasing, a British review “flatly declared V. to be the most talented English writer, adding that they doubted he had any ‘peers,’ and congratulated itself and English literature for his having made the switch from Russian to English.” Vladimir was as indifferent to praise as he was to abuse in the press. “I am not when it is about him,” she noted parenthetically, as close as she could come to sounding self-congratulatory.

  The summer itinerary was dictated by Vladimir’s collecting needs, by Dmitri’s performing schedule, peripherally by the search for a place to settle for the winter. Stresa was enchanting—although, Véra had to admit, they had arrived positively exhilarated after attending five stellar performances of Dmitri’s, in La Bohème and in act-length extracts from Lucia di Lammermoor. They had had a marvelous time. Their luggage overwhelmed their one small room, but Vladimir was writing happily, in their quarters and in the hotel garden, dictating his pages to Véra. At a point when her husband’s various European editors left her almost no time for her personal correspondence, she managed to answer Rolf’s frequent missives discursively, recalling with pleasure the fine time they had had together in Nice. The weather took a turn for the worse, which, as Véra was always quick to observe, was bad for the butterflies and good for the book. The Stresa cold and rain suited her plans as well, or at least insofar as she was able to admit:

  I, too, have been working—at a job for which I am entirely unqualified but which I had to take on: V.’s poems, both Russian and English, are being translated into Italian; both translators (neither of them entirely familiar with the languages of the originals) keep sending queries and drafts; and here I was poring over dictionaries, checking every word and eradicating blunders. Fortunately I have mastered the rudiments of the Italian grammar (a complicated thing), but what a weary job! On top of my (actually: V’s) voluminous correspondence it took all my time.

  The woman whose request for a newspaper had yielded directions to “la toletta” eighteen months earlier checked every word of the translation, providing numerous suggestions. She hoped she had eliminated all the bad blunders. (She had learned her Italian from the newspaper, which she scanned without difficulty within a matter of months, and from the Italian poets, whose work she read and reread.) But even she had her limits. No, she wrote her husband’s Bombay publisher, she did not have the time to vet the Hindi translation of Lolita.

  As the work expanded the disclaimers multiplied. Véra never tired of protesting that she was inadequate to the task—an artless translator, a hit-ormiss mathematician, a poor reader of legal language, slow-witted, absentminded, without imagination—just as she—who conducted a quadrilingual correspondence—despaired that she was an ungifted letter-writer. To those around her there was no question that she enjoyed the work, even in a lakeside resort in northern Italy; her sister-in-law felt that she positively lived for it. A degree of modesty was at issue, as was a certain utilitarianism. The professions of inadequacy allowed her to appear a draftee. And they allowed her to make mistakes. She carried out the Italian translation over her customary protests: “I deeply regret that my complete ignorance of Italian prevents me from being of any help to you in your work,” she recused herself, in French, early on in the project. To her letter she attached two pages of queries. The job required a command of four languages—and a grasp of what her husband meant in the first place. After several months of painstaking corrections, she wrote again to say she regretted she did not know Italian. (She similarly quailed when one of the Italian translators referred to something she had said in her rendition. She had not provided a translation, had only offered a kind of working gloss.) The protests proved disarming as well. “We are very dumb,” the Nabokovs cautioned their lawyers. Véra protested that she was inept in contractual matters. So much was the opposite the case that when it was suggested later that an agreement might be annulled on the basis that Véra had been unfairly exploited, the idea was rejected by her own counsel. She was too notorious as a savvy negotiator.

  The disclaimers came from always holding herself to a higher standard, as much a function of her upbringing as of her marriage. Next to Nabokov most people appear ungifted on the page; even in the letters she composed for him, Véra made no effort to make her prose compete with her husband’s. (When she did allow herself to wax poetic in a letter to an editor, he posed the obvious question: Had she ever considered writing herself? She did not deign to answer.) She knew she could not compete; to try to do so would have been insulting, and inefficient. The higher standard traveled everywhere. “Sumptuous, my foot!” she exclaimed on reading a newspaper description of the Nice apartment. She who had spent so long in Berlin boardinghouses could not have understood that to some eyes, the eight-room apartment with views over the Mediterranean—even with the cracked portraits, the imitation Louis XV furniture—would have looked sumptuous indeed. Nor was Véra the first woman to relax into the comfortable, casual camouflage of ineptitude. The rain of excuses allowed her to shrink from ambition, made it possible to muddle her very clear sense of self. It was protective coloring of a kind; it did nothing to infringe on her husband’s talent. Véra was perfectly capable of self-aggrandizement—the letters to Lena are ample proof—but it did not come naturally, and in her line of work it hardly served her purposes.

  Vladimir’s search for a special butterfly took all three Nabokovs to Champex, in southern Switzerland, from which Véra twice drove her husband up the majestic road clinging to the edge of the mountainside, to the Simplon Pass, to continue his hunting. She was less enamored even of the Lepontine Alps than of the work on her desk; she was deep in the Proust, but dearly hoping that Vladimir would capture all of the specimens he needed quickly so that they could move on, to some place both less desolate and touristed, to a more comfortable hotel, or at least one with hot water in the bathrooms. In Simplon-Kulm she prepared letters of recommendation for Filippa Rolf, addressed to Harvard and Cornell, which went out over Vladimir’s signature. In August she was able to warm up on the shores of Lake Léman, where the Nabokovs settled in at a Montreux hotel, renting a furnished apartment at the Montreux Palace for the six months beginning October 1. From her balcony, Véra wrote Elena Levin, sounding relaxed and happy: “In front of me is a lake of silk, and there is a small flock of sparrows scrambling about my feet, which we feed breakfast, and which have become wholly domesticated and impudent.” (She also warned Elena that the brilliant Rolf—whom she had recommended in sparkling terms, and who matriculated at Harvard in the fall—was not “indifferent to girls.”) Her childhood memories had guided them to this mild resort town on the shore of Lake Léman, as she happily told reporters. She did not add that when she had visited the area at the age of twelve her family had stayed at the nearby Hotel Excelsior. The Montreux Palace was considered nouveau riche.

  The Palace has been called an Edwardian heap so many times it seems churlish to insult it further; it is a stately
old dean of hotels, a confection of mile-long hallways, glittering chandeliers, and gilded salons. Its position on the lake is glorious, allowing for a fairy-tale view of the snow-capped mountains beyond; the air in Montreux is clear, the light silvery-soft, the sunsets spectacular. The Nabokovs’ immediate plans remained fluid—they were hoping to be summoned to London momentarily for a preview of Kubrick’s work—but they had begun to toy with the idea of establishing permanent residency in Switzerland, an idea Véra grew more fond of as the fall wore on. She offered up the Montreux address at first as an interim one, and then only at the urging of the Geneva post office, which by September had exhausted itself forwarding the couple’s mail in a multitude of directions. She could not resist disclosing that their wanderings had very much hindered Vladimir’s work, but had all been his idea. By the end of the year Montreux had begun to make sense for all kinds of reasons. The suit against Girodias continued, and the Nabokovs liked the idea of being near the French courts, which were expected to render a decision in February or March. Vladimir hoped to attend—and his publishers very much hoped he might attend—the European premieres of Kubrick’s film. Montreux was close to Dmitri, and to Elena Sikorski; as an additional lure, the Nabokovs discovered that establishing residency in a Swiss canton would save tax dollars. It was haunted by the right ghosts: Tolstoy and Chekhov had visited; Dead Souls was begun nearby. But the primary reason remained the one that had dictated nearly every one of the couple’s moves since 1925. Montreux was the first place they had found where noise did not interfere with Vladimir’s work. “In the 4 months we spent here he has been able to complete a portion of his new book it would have taken him double the time elsewhere,” Véra noted approvingly. In mid-November the couple applied for residency permits. To the lawyer arranging the papers Véra submitted her husband’s résumé, drafting an explanation for the Swiss stay that proved an accomplished fiction in itself: He would like to settle in Montreux as he intended to work less and less, and establish a peaceful retirement.