by Stacy Schiff
Two days after the 1964 Bollingen reception the Nabokovs sailed home. Véra was ill on the boat, in bed most of the day on her return. A long series of tests and diets depleted what remained of her energy; she spent much of May in a diagnostic clinic, where it was determined her problem was not parasites, as she had suspected, and where she was operated on early in June. Her physician, who billed the surgery as exploratory, took the liberty of performing a hysterectomy without prior permission. Véra was livid, but no less discreet for her anger. She told everyone—Anna Feigin and Sonia included—that the doctors had found nothing of interest, settling finally on an appendectomy. In this respect she was fortunate there was no medical personnel in the family. “Don’t you dare work,” Sonia ordered from New York, but from the Geneva clinic, in longhand, Véra managed a steady stream of correspondence. Sonia could not understand why neither Dmitri nor Vladimir had written her before the operation; as Véra observed with only a trace of resentment later, “When I am ill nobody writes any letters in this house.” She spent the summer recovering. It had all been, she announced finally, inaccurately, “Much ado about (practically) nothing.”
After the 1964 trip, a coda to a prior life, Nabokov never again set foot in America. Nor would the author of Pnin and Lolita ever again set a novel in America, or at least in a recognizable America. An America trip was planned for the spring of 1969—“What we won’t do for Ada’s sake,” grumbled Véra—but ill health intervened again. The lens of her left eye detached slightly, putting pressure on the retina. She spent a week of April flat on her back in a Geneva clinic, miserable not only about her condition, for which complete immobility was prescribed, but about the canceled trip. (Vladimir was to be honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in which he had refused membership years before.) “It was unpleasant,” she admitted, with the understatement she always reserved for such matters, “because there were constant lightning flashes in my eye.” From the clinic she apologized for not having been able to prevail upon her husband to make the trip without her. She felt terrible about having spoiled the visit for everyone, herself. included.* The recovery was protracted, not much hurried by the fact that Véra was back at her typewriter by mid-May. She spent the summer correcting the German translation of Invitation to a Beheading for Rowohlt’s August deadline, which she met, although the eye bothered her throughout. Vladimir reported on Véra’s condition to the publisher eagerly awaiting a visit from him—Ada was the first new novel since Pale Fire—concluding, “And of course I would never dream of going alone.” Dmitri typed the letter, which very well could have been phrased, “And of course I would never dream of leaving Véra,” but was not. Nor would Véra have expected it to be.
The protestations that they intended to return to America grew no quieter; editors were asked to specify in their press materials that their author was traveling, not living, in Europe. Véra requested that an interviewer revise his text accordingly. “He does not intend to perpetuate his stay in Europe and would not like it to appear that he does,” she wrote, speaking for their mutual subject. The temporary address remained in force for the rest of their lives; the Montreux Palace lent a whole new meaning to “émigré literature.” It was a luxurious address, though as those few who ascended from the palatial salons below to the Nabokovs’ sixth-floor quarters observed, the rabbit warren of rooms in the old wing resembled nothing so much as a Berlin boardinghouse, if one with a glorious view of Lake Léman. All looked as if it could be packed in a minute. The effect was something of a mixed metaphor, that of passing from the operatic set of a Visconti film up five flights into the Victorian quarters of Sherlock Holmes. The metaphor was muddled further by the couple’s habits: In their luxury hotel, along working-class hours, the Nabokovs essentially lived the bohemian life Vladimir had craved since 1924, when he claimed to need nothing more than a spot of sunshine on the floor, a bottle of ink, and Véra.
Véra spoke more often than did her husband of acquiring a home but—short of some tours of inspection, including one of a small Swiss château—did very little about it. At the end of 1963 the Nabokovs purchased a thousand-square-meter parcel of land, forty minutes from Montreux; they planned to build a small chalet on the village property, but never did so. All the same they continually cast about—in Italy, on the Riviera, in Corsica—for villas. As late as 1970, Véra considered a property in the south of France. She could never seem to find something that was both large enough to entice her and modest enough to feel manageable. Nabokov continued to tease his publishers—to his lists of dislikes could be added that bane of all authors: editorial thrift—that he would be happy to accept an advance in the form of a modest villa in the south of Spain. Hotel life had its attractions however, especially when the party who would customarily have occupied herself with wallpapers and gardens was too busy to do so. As Anna Feigin regularly reminded Véra, why did she need the burden of a house when she had a job that claimed twenty-four hours of her day?
The comforts of European life were much closer to Véra’s heart than was America; she understood Europe better, and doubtless Europe understood her. But Lolita, and the experience leading up to the novel, had made of the Nabokovs English-language Europeans. They spoke Russian when together, but Vladimir finally, by 1962, was ready to admit that his English was his stronger tongue. He felt that his written French—the language in which he lived in Montreux—had become “rusty and unwieldy.” English was also the language Véra claimed to write most rapidly; it was the language in which she answered her Russian correspondents. On paper she felt more at ease, more precise, in English than in French, although at times it seemed as if no language was exact enough for Véra Nabokov. (She allowed Jacqueline Callier to correct her French, whereas Callier was allowed no such liberties with her English, even when it was ungrammatical.) She conducted the Ergaz correspondence—throughout the 1960s she wrote the French agent an average of three times a week—in a piquant mixture of tongues, moving from French to English to French in the course of one sentence, sometimes by way of Russian. (“We have hit a snag avec ce contrat.… C’est un slip-up très embêtant” was but the tip of the trilingual iceberg.) English always won out when a delicate matter, or delicate feelings, were at issue. Vladimir maintained too that he preferred life in an English-speaking country. As late as 1973 he protested that America was his favorite country, that he was counting on seeing California the following year. It was his intellectual home; he felt happier there than anywhere else. (Véra ministered to the bruised feelings. It would be inexact, she assured a Swiss reporter, to say that her husband felt well only in the United States, as he was happy in Switzerland. But he felt wholly at home only in the United States.)
Without ever having admitted they had done so, then, they settled in Montreux, wandering farther afield when the tourists alighted in summer and the butterflies flew elsewhere. June and July generally found them lakeor mountain-side, in Switzerland or Italy, exiled from their exile. The shores of Lake Léman proved the perfect ones for the émigré thrice buffeted by history; the country does not rush to claim its new arrivals. For the ultimate nonjoiner, for the Russian-born American writer who felt enough wrapped in flags, it must have been a relief to set up shop under a rubric that corresponded so beautifully to his own sense of aesthetics: foreigner not exercising a gainful occupation. The Montreux Palace afforded Vladimir a luxury the villas the couple regularly considered did not. The condition of permanent transience, the address in the professionally neutral country, allowed him to melt into his prose, to amount to nothing more than the sum of his style.
5
When business required that Vladimir or his representative put in an appearance in New York, Véra made the trip. She did so in 1966, 1967, and 1968, focusing exclusively on the matters at hand. Much as she loved New York, she turned down all invitations to the theater, the opera, the ballet so that she could concentrate fully on her husband’s affairs. “I was five days in New York recently but what
is 5 days if one has to attend to 1,000,000 business matters?” she grumbled in 1967. She begged friends’ indulgence, limiting her social engagements to those with immediate family. Vladimir’s publishers and lawyers saw the most of her. In his mind Vladimir saw her too: “I have been imagining the entire time how you are winging in your new black boots across the sky over the ocean, after a stopover in foggy Paris. I love you, my angel in a mink coat!” he wrote her the day after the 1967 departure. (In her absence he was entrusted to the care of his sister, who referred to her stint at the Palace as “baby-sitting.”) He missed Véra unbearably, as he made clear in letters as tender, perhaps more tender than those he had composed in his twenties. “I was dealt a hellish blow by your departure,” he proclaimed when she left for eight days in 1967. The returns were a cause for elation. For a man who spent many of the Montreux years writing on time and space, it was entirely appropriate that when Véra traveled to New York he should convert her appointments to Swiss time, synchronizing their calendars.
The renewed correspondence was a delight at both ends. Véra kept these missives in her top desk drawer until her death; after one separation, her husband lamented that their reunion would put an end to his letter-writing spree. It posed its problems, too. Vladimir discovered that he had forgotten how to write in ink, in Russian, on anything other than an index card. Doubtless his gratitude to the person who had made that obliviousness possible had something to do with the depth of his devotion. At the end of an aerogramme he scribbled a frustrated postscript: “I don’t know how this thing is supposed to fold.” Throughout the 1960s he continued as well to write to Véra in the form of little Russian poems, all of them dedicated to her, most of them signed “V. Sirin.” Her desk drawer was littered with these. In December 1964 he dedicated to Véra a five-line composition in which the poet addresses his muse. It ends, “Oh, you mustn’t cry so …” Véra scribbled her response on the card, one that speaks to so much of the borrowing and lending that went on in Montreux, as earlier: “I wouldn’t even think of crying. But for the sake of such a rhyme, you can say as much.” As it happened, the letter to her husband’s Italian publisher contending that all the previous translators of Eugene Onegin had erred in hewing to rhyme at the expense of meaning went out the next day.
With Onegin’s publication, Vladimir acknowledged Véra’s enormous help; he attested that she had slaved alongside him on the scholarly work for twelve years. Such pronouncements could not have been easy for a man who exploded when asked by the Bollingen editors to include a formulaic acknowledgment to the poem’s previous translators. Do I have to say this? he roared. “To whom am I grateful? ‘Grateful’ is a big word.” He was never to go half the distance of the deeply reverential J. S. Mill, who credited the woman who was his wife for seven years and his love for much longer as being a full collaborator, “the inspirer of my best thoughts.” But in his more relaxed moments he came close. Véra earned a promotion in 1965, when her husband described her more expansively: “She is my collaborator. We work together in the warmest and most candid friendship.” And beginning with the interviews of the mid-1960s, he routinely referred to her as his first, his best, his only reader, the person for whom he wrote.* The love, or the closeness, or the mutual respect, was more palpable even than it had been at Cornell, where Dick Keegan had noted that Vladimir lit up instantly in Véra’s presence, where Carl Mydans had observed that the couple lived happily in great respect for each other. Saul Steinberg saw an almost insistent physical contact between the two, Vladimir reaching regularly for his wife’s sleeve: “I felt he was in constant touch with her, either through looks, or with his fingers, or watching for her reaction.” He felt Véra was to Vladimir as the earth to Antaeus. The attachment intensified with time. Even the family members who believed Svetlana Siewert to have been the great love of Vladimir’s life had to admit that the couple whom Hurricane Lolita had gusted to Montreux in the 1960s were not only inseparable but deeply in love. In 1973, Véra checked into a Geneva hospital with two slipped discs. A few months shy of the fiftieth anniversary of their first meeting, Vladimir noted in his diary: “The feeling of distress, désarroi, utter panic and dreadful presentiment every time that Véra is away in the hospital, is one of the greatest torments of my life.”
The fear of separation manifested itself earlier, in his dream life. “It has been suggested by doctors that we sometimes pooled our minds when we dreamed,” proclaims the narrator of “Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster.” Save for one very large, common vision, the Nabokovs went their separate way in dreamland, in their separate beds, in what were in Montreux adjoining rooms. For a few months of 1964, however, Vladimir kept a dream journal, partly to support his conviction that we dream prognostically, that the morning’s headlines can confirm the previous evening’s reveries. Each morning he did his best to retrieve the half-buried images, which often eluded him. On one such occasion he borrowed Véra’s metaphor, citing his difficulty: “Tried in vain to pull one of them out by the end of the thread.” He enlisted Véra in the project as well, although while he categorized his own dreams (professional, precognitive, erotic, catastrophic, tales of Russia; some of the classifying went into Ada), he stopped short of categorizing hers. The past proved a not so foreign country in Véra’s unconscious life. Thanks to her husband’s notes, we know that she dreamed regularly of escape; of bordercrossing; of bribing authorities (in one scenario she did so on Dmitri’s behalf, so as to assume the blame); of the floorboards separating underfoot; of being released from a (Portuguese) prison, barefoot, a baby Dmitri in her arms, in the midst of what appeared to be the Inquisition. On November 20, 1964, the Nabokovs had “matching” dreams of the Revolution, with shooting all around.*
The dreamlife proved constant in other ways. Also in November Vladimir dreamed he was lying on a couch, slowly dictating—without cards, and spontaneously—a continuation of The Gift in which Fyodor speaks of having fulfilled his ambitions. He was conscious as he did so of impressing Véra. He knew it would “please and surprise” her that he was for once able to compose orally with such eloquence. Exactly forty years earlier he had recorded a dream in which he sat at a piano, Véra at his side, turning the pages of the score. Of the less enchanting visions, a running feature in the calamities category was losing Véra—to another man, in the chaos of travel, into thin air. From these disasters he woke limp with relief. (It seems only fair to note that—at least in 1964—Véra did not suffer the corresponding nightmare of losing her husband.) At two in the morning on December 6, 1964, Nabokov visualized that loss in the dimension closest to his heart: “Awoke with a pang. An abstract, terrible accident sliced apart our life’s monogram, instantly separating us. A nightmare blazon, Vé and Vn with profiles in opposite directions.” The previous day he had written the poem to Véra for which she gave him license to distort the truth for the sake of a rhyme. He blamed the fright on the previous evening’s dinner, which had been wild boar. The experiment in “reverse memory” came to an end just after the New Year, but four years later Vladimir recorded a variation on one of the notebook’s themes in his diary. “Dream of the hotel in flames. I saved Véra, my glasses, the Ada typescript, my dentures, my passport—in that order!”
For many years he had been a national treasure in search of a nation; Véra was a little bit the country in which he lived. She, and Dmitri, allowed Nabokov what the world had tried to cheat him of: stability, privacy, an atmosphere of Old World taste and original humor, of strong opinion and exquisite, uncorrupted Russian. And it was Véra, more than anyone, who permitted her husband to dissolve into an abstract entity, to live at a full remove from himself. “Perfection,” the 1932 short story in which Nabokov executes a perfect half gainer of perspectival shift, was one of her favorites. So the change in perspective colored the Montreux years. Having done all she could to put her husband on the map, she now conspired in his disappearance.
* One difference between having accepted Kubrick’s invitation in D
ecember and not in August was an additional $35,000, or nearly double the original offer.
* There was some irony in Lena’s argument. It would seem that anti-Semitism had accounted for at least some of the difficulties the Russian emigration had caused her, a factor she never recognized, as if her 1930 conversion had inoculated her against that particular disease. Although she had worked in Berlin as a Jesuit resistant, she had nearly been deported as a “Polish Jew.”
* Minton had an additional reason to dissuade Véra from pursuing the Girodias matter. “Always at the back of my mind,” he admitted, “was the fact that at some point somebody would establish that their copyright was invalid because too many copies of the original Olympia edition had been imported.” Nabokov had been paid royalties on one thousand imported copies but suspected that closer to four to five thousand had been sold in the United States.