by Stacy Schiff
* Mason was Harris and Kubrick’s first choice for Humbert. He had a previous commitment which he was unwilling to cancel, however; the moviemakers pitched the role to Laurence Olivier. Olivier agreed at once, then changed his mind, presumably dissuaded by his agent. Miraculously, Mason called later to ask if the part was still available.
† In Vladimir’s recollection, “She was gloriously pretty, all bosom and rose”—and holding the hand of Yves Montand. Monroe took a liking to Vladimir, inviting the couple to a dinner, which they did not attend.
* Her husband was an equal-opportunity denouncer. Nabokov’s list of prominent mediocrities stretched from Voltaire, Stendhal, and Balzac to Faulkner, Lawrence, Mann, and Bellow by way of James, Dreiser, and Camus, to name but a few.
* The comment is strangely similar to that of a critic. In The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne Booth discusses the “secret communion of the author and reader behind the narrator’s back” in the work of Nabokov.
* Along with Harvard, Véra suggested that Rolf write to Berkeley, Columbia, or Cornell, the last-named “a rather boring, out-of-the-way place, but eager to enroll first-rate graduates.”
* Probably she had heard of the idea from Peter Ustinov, who had made his way to a Montreux Palace suite before the Nabokovs. Ustinov had moved to Switzerland just after Spartacus, Kubrick being partly responsible for both Russians’ exiles.
* The novel had evolved significantly from the one Nabokov had described to Jason Epstein almost exactly four years earlier. What it resembled more closely was an indignant letter he had fired off to the publisher of his Three Poets when the volume appeared in England in 1958 without a mention of him on the jacket. “A Mr. Stefan Schimanski is named as ‘editor’—who the deuce is Mr. Schimanski and what has he been ‘editing’ in my book?” wailed Vladimir, sounding like a resurrected John Shade.
* The experience did not entirely sour him on Hollywood, on which he had had his eye since the early 1930s. In November 1961 the Times announced that he would adapt Swanns Way for the screen. There was talk as well of a Day of the Locust screenplay. The following year he agreed to write an 8,000to 10,000-word treatment for a film to be made by Rowohlt’s brother-in-law. Véra specifically asked Minton not to “frighten away potential producers” who inquired after her husband’s ability to adapt a work in 1962; he discussed offers for various novels, Laughter in the Dark foremost among them. Alfred Hitchcock was immensely eager to collaborate with Nabokov; the two volleyed ideas back and forth for several weeks at the end of 1964. None of these projects ever came to fruition.
† Behind the scenes her former husband continued in the opinions that would put him on a collision course with his old friend. Edmund Wilson correctly guessed that the book was in some part inspired by the Onegin commentary, of which it was a parody, but failed to succumb to Pale Fire’s charm. “I read it with amusement, but it seems to me rather silly,” he professed. Another nonadmirer was Gore Vidal, a National Book Award judge with Harry Levin and Elizabeth Hardwick that year. Loyal as ever, Harry Levin argued loudly for Pale Fire. The prize went to J. F. Powers.
* In a similar incident in or just before 1950, Bishop, calling for Nabokov one winter night, caught a glimpse through the living-room window of Vladimir on bended knee, wringing his hands before a sternlooking Véra. He did not mention the inadvertent indiscretion; Nabokov did not mention a drama that would have reduced him to the supplicant position. It had been a snowy night; footsteps crunch on sidewalks. Vladimir may well have been begging something of Véra—would she please tell him he did not have to attend that dreaded meeting?—although it does not seem likely that he ever had to reduce himself to bended knee to obtain anything from his wife. More probably he was performing for the picture window. They are slippery subjects, these people always so conscious of the pathetic trespasser at the casement. Or perhaps it genuinely happened, as it would for the mature Van in Ada: “An overwhelming tenderness impelled him to kneel suddenly at her feet in dramatic, yet utterly sincere attitudes, puzzling to anyone who might enter with a vacuum cleaner.”
* One person who was particularly disappointed was The New Yorker’s William Maxwell, always very fond of his author’s wife. Regarding the missed ceremony, he wrote the couple that “he had planned to manoeuvre myself into a seat next to Véra at luncheon.” He accepted the award for Nabokov.
* Only once, in a 1964 talk, did he use the word “muse.”
* A similar vision qualifies in Pnin as “one of those dreams that still haunt Russian fugitives, even when a third of a century has elapsed since their escape from the Bolsheviks.”
9
LOOK AT THE MASKS
He stopped and pointed, with the handle of his net, to a butterfly clinging to the underside of a leaf. “Disruptive coloration,” he said, noting white spots on the wings. “A bird comes and wonders for a second. Is it two bugs? Where is the head? Which side is which? In that split second the butterfly is gone. That second saves that individual and that species.”
—ROBERT H. BOYLE ON NABOKOV,
SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, SEPTEMBER 14, 1959
1
Vermeer was her favorite painter; he could have been her patron saint. Véra Nabokov’s life in Montreux had about it all the stilled intensity of the Dutch master’s canvases. The drama was interior; it was private; it was passionate; it was hushed. And to a great extent it consisted—aside from meals and a regular walk with her husband, an evening chess or Scrabble game, more television than was generally acknowledged, a skeletal social life—of the drama of a woman intently alone in a room with a piece of paper.* Moreover, there was a certain correlation between Véra’s deft compositions of the 1960s and Vermeer’s masterly ones of the 1660s. The reverence with which Vermeer could invest any scene was hers. No one would have agreed more quickly that whole worlds balanced on the microscopic detail, that shadows may opt not to follow the laws of nature. She shared the Dutch master’s obsession with perspective, with the crucial angle from which the exterior world approaches the private realm. Had the alpine chough on the balcony pressed his yellow beak to the Nabokov’s sixth-floor windowpanes on a given nonsummer morning, he would have found them breakfasting together; Véra reading the mail to Vladimir; or at work, Véra at the desk in the living room, or in her blue-and-white bedroom. Before lunch the couple walked together; afterward, Vladimir might nap, Véra returned to her desk. Madame Furrer came to cook; as of 1962 Jacqueline Callier spent several afternoons a week typing and filing. Dinner was preceded by the “exchange of impressions”; Vladimir read passages to his wife. After dinner, even with the infrequent guest who was entertained in the suite and not below in the formal dining rooms, Véra excused herself to write a few more letters. It was the impression of most visitors that she worked from the time she woke to the time she went to bed. Her labor alone culminated in a delusional mirror trick worthy of Despair: So wed was she to the desk, and so seldom was Vladimir—who wrote in bed, or standing at his lectern, or in the bath—at his, that word went out via the Montreux tradespeople that Mrs. Nabokov was her husband’s ghostwriter.
Her intention was less to conceal herself than her husband. She was complicit in this sleight of hand, but the engineer rather than the prime architect of it. (As an astute friend put it, Vladimir had more important things to do than to poison himself with business.) “I don’t know why but VN’s literary affairs seem always to be so dreadfully complicated,” Véra asserted, apologetic for having buried an editor in a flurry of contradictory letters. The affairs were complicated and always had been; even Nabokov’s short reviewing histories were fraught. His copyright situations were often nightmarish. The couple’s expectations made matters worse. Their demands were nearly too much for the international publishing community. (Vladimir blithely referred to his “gay tussles with publishers” but could well afford to; Véra was the one who tussled.) The aggravations were often familiar ones. While Nabokov wrangled publicly with Girodias, Véra continued, undaunted, to
explore the legal channels behind the scene. To Louba Schirman, her new Russian-born, Paris-based lawyer for the case, she outlined in late 1964 the long and rocky road with Girodias, whom she remained intent on discarding. She felt he and his lawyers had cleverly “managed to turn the tables on us on two occasions when Olympia was quite obviously at fault.” She did not like to be outwitted; she was furious that they had temporarily dropped their case and intent on the agreement’s being annulled. It was settled at last in April 1967, by which time Véra had been tangling with Girodias almost exactly as long as her father had battled the St. Petersburg authorities on his residency case, but with more satisfactory results.*
Not all of the predicaments were of such long standing. At the end of 1962, George Weidenfeld proposed to Vladimir that he prepare a picture book of European butterflies, to which Vladimir readily consented. Three years later, despite the many hours he had devoted to the project, little had come of it. In September 1965 Véra was charged with conveying to Weidenfeld her husband’s irritation with the volume, which “had remained constantly in his thoughts greatly interfering with his other projects.” He wanted nothing more to do with the nonbook; he also expected payment for the hours he had invested in it. As she finished her peremptory letter, Weidenfeld called from London. Vladimir asked her to explain the matter by phone, and to mail the document, so that the publisher might have his position in writing. To Weidenfeld Véra appealed regularly, as she had in the past appealed to Epstein and Minton, and as her husband had once appealed to Wilson, with all kinds of literary SOS’s. Plaintively she went to him with a most vexing matter in 1968:
Vladimir has been discovered by the Hindus. They shower us with letters pleading for an immediate reply about translating LOLITA or LAUGHTER IN THE DARK into Bengali, Hindi or Malayalam. They publish unauthorized editions of his books. Someone has just finished serializing LAUGHTER in a Malayalam newspaper.… Is it better to sign some kind of paper and keep these editions on a legal basis or wash the hands of them?
She became something of an accidental expert on copyright law.
In large part the appalling (monstrous, disastrous) correspondence stemmed from Vladimir’s thundering international success, as a result of which the work was misread, pirated, appropriated. Copies of Lolita purportedly appeared in Frankfurt with dirty pictures inserted in the book. Véra ran interference with Mexican lawyers, Greek lawyers, Israeli lawyers, Swiss lawyers. The letters to Ergaz sound often like military dispatches; in a paragraph, Véra would veer from the Bengalese to the Lebanese front. She corresponded with the interviewers; she replied to those who sent chess problems; she answered the admirers, the dissertation writers, the autograph seekers, the courageous friends of Soviet admirers, the would-be translators, the critics, the synesthetics. She composed the thousands of letters saying sorry, no, he is much too busy, he doesn’t remember, he would love to write the article but can’t, the book was planned but never written, he never takes a political position, he believes the symbols you have identified are your own. In exchange for her efforts she secured the lasting resentment of those who had written the husband but received a response—very often not the one they hoped for—from the wife. Even Katharine White took the arrangement amiss, concluding that Véra was not only answering her husband’s mail but imitating his butterfly-signatures as well. (White was mistaken.) And, too, Véra performed her share of about-faces on Vladimir’s account. A cookbook compiler was informed that Vladimir had nothing to add to her volume, as his interest in food was limited to its consumption. Something moved him to change his mind, and to set to paper his winning recipe for soft-boiled eggs.* Véra dutifully sent it on. Nabokov poked fun at those writers who left behind prolix correspondences, seemingly without realizing he was one of them, the only difference being that his letters consisted principally of someone else’s words.
Her facility for languages was in many respects a curse. Who else would have been bothered to translate a Dutch review of The Gift for her 1965 scrapbook? To read her husband in Italian was to discover that he was mistranslated in Italian. It was her job to make sure that the pink clouds described by her husband as “flamingoes” did not mutate into Flemish-painted ones, as they did in one French rendering. She did not find these missteps as amusing as she had found those in the Cornell bluebooks. As the early books were translated—and reworked—in English, as the newer titles were published abroad, as the original Russian works were reissued, the proofs rained down from every direction. Nabokov began Ada in February 1965; both Nabokovs felt that anything that took him from the new work qualified as a distraction. Work on the 1969 German Invitation to a Beheading was complicated not only by Véra’s eye trouble that summer, but by her fear that—while her German was strong enough to detect deviations, inaccuracies, infelicities—it was not rich enough for her to suggest alternate phrasings. None of these editions consumed as much time and mental energy as the Russian version of Lolita, a work Nabokov prepared not for Soviet publication but as a defensive check against his future mistranslator. The tennis player who had spent his glory years on a squash court protesting that his tennis was stronger still, he was shocked in the early 1960s to discover that squash was now his game. Véra contributed a great deal to the Russian language manuscripts, as her husband acknowledged. He found her heavy corrections disillusioning.
The couple spent their 1964 Christmas vacation in rainy Italy, coaxing Lolita into Russian. Vladimir’s ear was better, and lustier; Véra’s Russian was by now deeply infiltrated by English and no longer, strictly speaking, Russian, much less Soviet Russian, in the same way that her husband’s English was not English but a divine version thereof. (The modern world posed a difficulty to both Nabokovs in their native language. They struggled valiantly over terms like “glove compartment,” or “hitchhiker,” for which there is a perfectly good Russian word, but had not been when Véra and Vladimir learned their Russian.)* Work continued, intermittently, through the fall of 1965, Nabokov concluding from the exercise that the English language could be trusted to do things the Russian language could not, and that the converse was equally true. The care taken with these reworkings was not underestimated by close and bilingual readers, of which there were a few: When Lolita made her Russian-language debut, Clarence Brown noted that the difference between Nabokov’s recasting of his works into other languages and ordinary translation was “like the little abyss between zero and one.”† When the Library of Congress asked Nabokov if he might render the Gettysburg Address into Russian he practically responded with his own rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” adding that he had always thought Lincoln’s speech a work of art. The result is in Véra’s hand; Vladimir put Ada aside to tackle the most difficult turns of phrase, entrusting the rest of the job to his wife. “Incidentally, not having a Russian typewriter here, I wrote the translation in longhand,” he explained to the library, sending on the page in Véra’s hand. He waived the honorarium but requested translating credit.
Every few months a new Nabokov edition appeared in one major market or another, which meant that every few months a new typo materialized somewhere in the world. (Between the 1962 publication of Pale Fire and the 1974 publication of Look at the Harlequins! a new Nabokov title appeared in America every year but one.) When an unfortunate misprint crept into a British edition of Speak, Memory in 1967 Véra wrote of her husband’s distress: “He says that the criminal printer should be made to set MEA CULPA in italic diamond a thousand and one times.” He could not get over the tenacity of these creatures, sprouting in one edition after another, “like a tenacious ancestral wart.” Both Vladimir and Dmitri remembered Véra’s consoling them on the appearance of these indignities as among her greatest acts of humanity. The misprints were to life in Montreux as the rattlers had been to the American West; Véra wielded only her typewriter in self-defense. At times she appeared to be struggling single-handedly to keep the world from tumbling into a state of “glossological disarray.”
&nb
sp; Generally she held people—herself especially—to the standards of her husband’s literature, standards to which few of us, and even fewer publishers, rise. It was her fervent and unreasonable conviction that books should be accurately translated, properly printed, appropriately jacketed, aggressively marketed, energetically advertised. Was it really too much to ask of the publishers who acquired her husband’s titles that they read the books in question? To her fell the futile job of deciphering royalty statements; she seemed to believe that these should be intelligible and should arrive punctually. Her volumes on this subject are as poignant as they are pointed. In desperation she appealed to George Weidenfeld himself when no one else in his firm could provide satisfaction regarding what she considered his firm’s highly approximate accounting. “My dear George,” she concluded her petition, “would it not be possible for you to get somehow organized in this respect?” Three years later Weidenfeld’s accounting continued to mystify; Véra was still composing treatises on the subject. At last in 1970 she handed on the baton. “It irks me to irk you with this as I am aware that ordinarily you can’t be expected to look into bookkeeping matters but I really don’t know what course to follow since Véra has given up in despair,” pleaded Vladimir. It has been noted that women are accustomed to tending to chores that are repetitive in nature, tasks that are undone almost as soon as they are accomplished. The pursuit of the accurate royalty statement, of the carefully proofread manuscript, were not the Sisyphean labors those who first observed this phenomenon had in mind. But they constituted the dusting and vacuuming of Véra Nabokov’s life.