by Stacy Schiff
Probably much to her regret, the details mattered. She was of the school that recognized the comma as a point of honor. This was not something universally understood. In November 1962, she wrote Minton with the triumphant news that Mondadori were going back to press for their twentieth printing of Lolita. Pale Fire was a bestseller in America. On the other hand, shouldn’t the book charged to VN’s Lolita statement be charged instead against his Pale Fire earnings? A problematic translation immediately qualified as “hopeless” or “a disaster.” One such fiasco was the rendering into French by Elena Sikorski’s son, Vladimir, of Strong Opinions. The “disaster” was redeemed in the course of two weekends’ work. These missteps might have appeared as so many tempests in teapots, but as another keen-eyed miniaturist observed, “If you live in a teapot, a tempest may be a very uncomfortable thing.”
Repeatedly Véra trumpeted her husband’s battle cry: He was supremely indifferent to criticism but cared deeply, fervently, about his publishers’ commitments to his volumes.* Few writers have carped so eloquently, or have had the luxury of doing so symphonically. When Véra deplored Putnam’s thrift during her 1966 visit to New York, Minton reprimanded her, “Véra, this amounts to an author telling his publisher how to publish his works.” She did not disagree with that analysis. Nor did she believe that Minton had knocked himself out advertising Despair. She was convinced that in many cases she herself could sell foreign or subsidiary rights in a work more advantageously than could a publisher’s languid rights department; she spent a great deal of time negotiating for the return of these rights. Only occasionally did she prove the publishers wrong. Nothing more came of Pnin’s television and movie rights in Véra’s hands than in Doubleday’s, though she could easily envision Peter Sellers, or Jacques Tati, in the title role.
She too made mistakes, and was the first to admit as much. (Sometimes she did so in perfect slang: “Oh dear, I think I made a boo-boo,” she informed an associate when in her eighties.) She made no secret of the fact that her files were not in the best of order; Jacqueline Callier did her best with the collections of agreements and statements that had been traveling about in cartons, some on and off for decades. And Véra remained a master at begging indulgence for her husband’s dilatoriness. “I must again apologize to you for my husband’s casual approach to correspondence,” wrote the woman who must have been most mortified to have to do so. He had promised to read his correspondent’s letter as soon as he could. Three months had elapsed in the meantime. Véra extended the customary round of excuses to the publisher who was reissuing Nabokov in Russian, for covert distribution behind the Iron Curtain. (The couple relished the image of the books sailing down from the heavens, each with its own miniature parachute.) Every time she broached the subject of which title the firm might issue next, Vladimir responded, “Yes, of course. But let me think which,” and then failed to make a decision.
As early as 1963 Véra reported that her husband was working at a frantic clip, perennially in the shadow of a new deadline. But no one in the household felt the pressure of time quite as acutely as did she, who in Dmitri’s estimation could not bear for a minute to be wasted. A 1969 reporter engaged the Nabokovs in a conversation about their favorite comic strips, which they read religiously. Vladimir’s favorites were Buzz Sawyer and Rex Morgan, M.D. The couple found Peanuts “coy” and skipped Li’l Abner. Véra professed her admiration for Dennis the Menace, because it had only one frame. The reporter concluded this was because she was so keenly efficient. On a later occasion her husband groused about his interminable voyage on the slow train from Lausanne to Montreux, usually no more than a twenty-minute trip. “That is the difference between you and me. I would wait for the next express train, while you’ll take the local just because it’s there,” Véra interjected.*
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The dance of the pronouns evolved, on the page, from a proficient Ithaca one-step to an adroit international quickstep. It allowed more latitude in needling publishers. I don’t remember if I wrote you that I should like such-and-such, Vladimir could state, genuinely; Véra had been the one to make the demand in the first place. The two voices allowed Nabokov to comport himself—Dr. Jekyll arrived at the same conclusion—as if “man is not truly one, but truly two.” Véra could voice her husband’s strident opinion, adding reasonably that she was sorry he felt so strongly on the subject, but he did. Or she could render a remark twice as cutting, appending her outrage to her husband’s. There was ample reason why Nabokov’s correspondents began to imagine the Russian master hurling thunderbolts down from his aerie on a Swiss mountaintop, when actually he lived in a valley. In 1967 Alfred Appel published a two-part review of Speak, Memory in The New Republic. Véra allowed that if ever Vladimir were to break his rule against thanking critics, Appel’s brilliant essay would surely provide the occasion. “This is cheating a little, as you may notice,” she added parenthetically. Together the Nabokovs were able to work a dynamic that was familiar from the fictions, the unsettling dance of the seemingly omniscient narrator and the character caught in his drama who begs us not to believe a word he says. (It should be said that Nabokov was equally adept at playing both roles himself. Friends had long complained that he winked at his interlocutor on the rare occasion when he spoke the truth.) In 1966 Véra conveyed her husband’s comments to Andrew Field, who two years later became Nabokov’s first biographer: “But he adds that ‘generally speaking’ his ‘memory is poor and faulty.’ (I disagree.)”
With his wife at his side, Nabokov could speak in the first person plural. And because so frequently the correspondence is not with Nabokov but about Nabokov, a whole other being was created in the mid-1960s—a monument called VN, someone who is not even Nabokov. In large part this distant, unapproachable VN was Véra Nabokov’s construct. How else could Nabokov have established his statuesque other self? “VN does not admire the novel in question” sounds different from the same statement expressed in the first person. Vladimir himself delighted in explaining that the living, breathing, breakfasting Nabokov was but the poor relation of the writer, only too happy to refer to himself as “the person I usually impersonate in Montreux.” (Others agreed. When his likeness loomed large at newsstands in 1969, Wilson complained to a mutual friend: “Have you seen Volodya Nabokov on the cover of Newsweek? He looks like some model who had been hired to pose as Volodya Vladimir Nabokov.” Having witnessed the posing over the years, Jason Epstein concluded: “It is a false idea to imagine a real Nabokov.”) The editor replying to Véra’s letter about her eminent husband had little choice but to refer to “VN”—or to stumble over his second-person pronouns. Vladimir might compose a letter in the first person about the proliferation of typos in a British edition; quoting him precisely, Véra conveyed his distress in the third person, essentially allowing the sovereign presence to melt into the background. With her assistance, the real Vladimir Nabokov disappeared into Swiss air; it was as if Thomas Pynchon were to enter the federal witnessprotection program. Vladimir was the person, VN the author. One came to visit VN, as Alfred Appel did in 1970, but one attended to all of Vladimir’s whims, as Véra thanked Appel for doing after the visit.
Initially the disappearing act was devised for efficiency’s sake. By the 1960s, Nabokov risked drowning twice: in the business of publishing, and in the admiration of the fans and scholars. Once again the couple were on the lam. Summer addresses were imparted, confidentially, to the few who needed them. Véra explained that for literature’s sake, they were doing their utmost to go into hiding. When traveling she felt it necessary “to dissimulate our presence from amiable strangers who might be de passage and want to have a look at V.” She groaned that there was no place to hide. Fan mail turned up under the doors to their rooms. The Montreux Palace was mentioned in a 1967 piece; the result was droves of strangers on the doorstep. “It’s just like some miserable Yasnaya Polyana [Tolstoy’s estate] around here,” she sighed. (One reporter agreed. It seemed Nabokov drew more people to Switzerland tha
n the banks and the Alps combined.) She felt that photographers and interviewers tore him away from his work at every juncture. Worse yet, she had to convince him to see them. Or at least those of them he should see; the requests were incessant. “If he had the time he would never be given a chance to stop talking,” Véra grumbled. A steady stream of “strangers and half-strangers” arrived on the doorstep.*
Nabokov delighted in the smoke and mirrors, informing his publishers when they might best reach his wife by phone, drafting “her” letters in the first person. “He made a great show of hiding behind Véra,” remembers a nephew, who observed the routine extended to the most mundane matters. From behind his oversized menu, protectively angled as a shield, Nabokov appealed, “Véra, what am I going to eat?” He had long thought of himself in the third person, or as a collection of splintered selves; Véra’s collusion allowed him to live that way. The arrangement was as convoluted as it was cumbersome. Louba Schirman communicated solely with Véra but understood the decisions to be joint. “She does the arguing, and he does the deciding,” inferred one visitor. A prickly exchange resulted when Véra questioned the agent Swifty Lazar’s ability to extricate Vladimir from a contract, adding that she was inquiring on his behalf. “I think it’s almost amusing that you resort to saying ‘this is what my husband asks’ when you think you’re going to be a little harsh with me. Frankly I love both of you very much and admire you very much so it doesn’t matter which of the Nabokovs have [sic] a complaint,” Lazar rebuked her affectionately. Véra headed straight for the bush. Starchly she informed the agent that she was not in the habit of using her husband’s name when she needed to be harsh: “Far from it. Vladimir detests to go into details and would rather have me do whatever I can without consulting him, but when things take a serious turn, he takes time out to consider a business matter, arrives at a decision, and withdraws again, and then I have nothing to do but carry out his decision.” She fell victim to a kind of Carrollian paradox, laboring with all her might to efface herself, managing only to appear larger as a result. A 1968 letter to George Weidenfeld went out in two parts, the first ostensibly composed by Véra. “From here on, the letter is dictated by Vladimir,” she wrote partway through the jointly signed document. She had typed most but not all of her husband’s contribution, which included the line, “As my husband has no agent who would stand up for him, I must play that role.”
It was no wonder that Véra appeared to have some trouble discerning where she ended and her husband began. “While they keep us informed of the new developments, there are a number of permissions they gave before we put our foot (feet?) down,” she wrote Field uncertainly. Nearly forty years after her husband had defined true love to his sister with the Siamese twin analogy, Véra wrote, “We have runny noses and blow them (in unison) but decided to go out today.” A few years later they had merged more directly: “We have been ill with a cold ever since Christmas,” Véra reported in 1968. By the end of the decade the matter appeared settled: “I ask you to bear in mind that we have a poor mind for legal expressions,” she contended, sounding like a reconfigured (and delusional) hero of “Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster.” Given the speed with which she was writing and the volume of paper that crossed her desk, it comes as no surprise that she blundered occasionally in her correspondence. And given the nature of the beast, it was logical that she should trip most often over the pronouns.* A letter ostensibly written and clearly signed by Vladimir carried this postscript: “Would you please order 10 copies of the Nabokov issue on my husband’s account?” So accustomed was Véra to disassociating herself from her text that she might write of VN: “He has asked his son to work on this.” A payment could be sent to her husband at “his address,” wrote a woman named Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov, who appeared to share that domicile. She almost seemed to forget who she was, although she was not so inconspicuous in the eyes of her correspondents. In a richly Nabokovian double twist of identities, Vladimir complained to Rowohlt. In his previous letter—“signed by my wife”—he had specifically requested his payment for a television adaptation. “Today I receive a check from the Hamburger Sparkasse for $1393.61 made out to my wife’s name. This won’t do,” he admonished, returning the payment.
“It is hard to be happy when one’s husband is a mirage, a peripatetic legerdemain of a man, a deception of all five senses,” Nabokov had written of another conjurer’s less loyal wife. Véra seemed to have no difficulty with the idea. She was happy to sit at VN’s side while he protested that he had no real existence, that he was a mirage, an illusion, a masked performer, a mere shadow of his writing self, a “lone wolf,” a “lone lamb.” She had more difficulty orchestrating her own disappearance. No one who has written so much has ever been as eager to deny responsibility for so many lines. VN declared that his books alone were his identity papers; Véra repudiated the letters she both wrote and signed. She distanced herself even from her own prose style. When Doussia Ergaz took umbrage at two dispatches by which her feelings had been badly hurt, Véra asked the agent if her husband’s frank style of expressing himself in English was perhaps to blame. The prose—as well as the frankness—was hers. And the track-covering continued off the page. The journalist who noted that something had been accomplished after consultation between the two Nabokovs—the observation mirrored the “flurry of confabulation between the Shades” in Pale Fire—was asked by Véra to delete the remark. She found it embarrassing. The same fate befell George Feifer, when he submitted his 1974 Daily Express interview text. From the list of predicate nominatives following his wife’s name Nabokov struck “typist” and “editor,” claiming that she had not typed for him since 1960 nor edited anything, statements that were both untrue. Elsewhere he requested that Feifer change “she says” to “he says,” reattributing to himself a remark his wife had made. It may have been the most profitable appropriation of a partner’s voice since The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas had made its author famous, landing Gertrude Stein on the bestseller lists.
Véra was intent on having it both ways. She raised Being Mrs. Nabokov to a science and an art and then pretended that such a person did not exist. Even her husband realized the futility, and the fallaciousness, of her effort. With Field they discussed Véra’s place in her husband’s story. “Darling, why don’t you say something? Why?” implored Vladimir. “I don’t think I should be represented,” replied the woman whose first literary efforts had been renderings of someone else’s prose. “You can’t help but be represented! We’re too far gone! It’s too late!” exploded her husband, tears of laughter raining down his face. Over the next decade, as the focus on the woman at Nabokov’s side intensified, Véra scurried for cover, comporting herself like a reverse sphinx: This one seemed poised to tear limbs from those who might guess her riddle. This proved true in the smallest instance as well as in the bigger picture. For Rowohlt she checked every word of the German translations made by the highly meticulous Dieter Zimmer. In 1965 Zimmer submitted a draft of a short story; Véra made several corrections in the handling of the guns in the pages. “So I was surprised to learn that you have done quite a bit of pistol shooting,” Zimmer deduced gratefully. Véra did nothing to indulge his curiosity, maintaining that she had altered the text for accuracy’s sake. This was the same woman who had written the Swiss Police Ministry months earlier to inquire about pistol permits for Spain. Her husband intended to collect butterflies in isolated regions, which she had heard could be dangerous. What papers would she need to travel internationally with a firearm?
Vladimir made a sensational discovery in 1965: We do not speak as we write. After a highly amusing, very forthcoming few days with Channel Thirteen’s Robert Hughes, he had this to say about the transcript of their talk:
I am greatly distressed and disgusted by my unprepared answers—by the appalling style, slipshod vocabulary, offensive, embarrassing statements and muddled facts. These answers are dull, flat, repetitive, vulgarly phrased and in every way shockingly dif
ferent from the style of my written prose.… I always knew I was an abominably bad speaker, I now deeply regret my rashness.
In future there would be no “spontaneous rot.” Questions would be written out and submitted in advance, answers composed on paper and revised only with VN’s consent. This elaborate stage management allowed the “real” Nabokov to retreat even further. It also created a good deal of homework in the Nabokov household.* Véra, who sat by her husband’s side through each interview—in most cases she had already played the role of the host, reading through the questions and timing her husband’s answers—had to convince Vladimir to submit to the inquisitions. She found them exhausting herself but knew their value; some version of her husband needed to be presented to the world.
The face Nabokov put on that individual was not necessarily the real one. Nor was the face he put on Véra. He was equally capable of boasting that his wife had the best sense of humor of any woman he had ever met as he was of lamenting that she had none. Was it not a terrible pity that a great clown like himself should be married to someone who never laughed, he asked a journalist? His wife was his memory; his wife was incapable of keeping figures and dates in her head. She did not seem to care; the perfect magician’s assistant, she could be sawed in half with no loss of dignity or composure. She refused only to concede that the magician had an assistant. To admit that he did so was to admit that some kind of sleight of hand was being worked. She was not going to reveal her husband’s tricks. Every artist is a great deceiver, Nabokov reminds us. And Nabokov was a very great artist.
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How, insofar as she recognized her expanded role, did Véra feel about it? She had difficulty admitting to the weight of her responsibilities. Nowhere is the coyness more evident than in her correspondence with Lisbet Thompson, her oldest friend—the two couples had met in Berlin in 1926—and one of the closest. Temperamentally the two women had a good deal in common: A German Jew several years Véra’s elder, Lisbet described herself as a pessimist who had often been proved right. The Thompson marriage fell out along lines similar to the Nabokovs’: Lisbet felt that her husband was perfectly sanguine, and that that essential optimism was the reason he had achieved so much in his life. Hers too had been an itinerant life with a brilliant man. A great favorite of Vladimir’s, Bertrand Thompson was polymathic even by Nabokovian standards. Having earned a law degree before he was old enough to practice in his native California, he started all over again with a Harvard economics degree. He taught at Harvard Business School in its early years, then moved on to an illustrious, international career in consulting. He made a fortune, most of which he lost in 1929; in 1937 the Thompsons were chauffeuring the Nabokovs around the Riviera in their aging Studebaker. Having worked with the French Air Ministry before the fall of France, Thompson returned to the United States, to study biochemistry. By the 1960s, he was conducting cancer research in a Uruguyan lab. Begun on the Nestorstrasse in Berlin, the friendship with the Thompsons had been renewed in Paris, Nice, New York, Palo Alto, Lugano—Vladimir referred to it as “a kind of rich and varicoloured archipelago”—but by the 1960s consisted almost exclusively of letters.